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
The CRU graph. Note that it is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees -- thus showing ZERO warming
30 September, 2022
How Government Restrictions on Domestic Drilling Drive Up Gas Prices
The term “mineral estate” refers to the ownership of minerals, including oil and natural gas, under the Earth’s surface. The federal mineral estate contains 2.46 billion acres made up of 1.76 billion acres in the Outer Continental Shelf (the ocean floors off America’s coasts) and 700 million onshore subsurface acres.
The state and private land mineral estate is around 1.5 billion acres by comparison. Even though the federal estate is almost 1 billion acres larger than the state and private mineral estate, most of our oil and natural gas comes from private and state lands. For perspective, one billion acres is about six times the size of Texas.
The United States simply doesn’t allow the energy potential from this vast federal estate to be unleashed. Historically, oil from federal lands (onshore and offshore) was consistently under 20% of total U.S. production until the late 1990s. Then, production percentages increased (primarily offshore) to over 30% in the early 2000s and reached a high point in 2009, coincident with declining production on non-federal lands in Alaska and other states.
But the numbers have come back down. According to the Department of Interior and the Energy Information Administration, federal offshore oil production was only about 15% of total U.S. oil production in 2020 and federal onshore production was only about 8%.
These low numbers are expected to get much worse for American consumers because of President Joe Biden’s moratorium that has essentially stopped most new leasing on lands and waters owned by U.S. taxpayers. They will also decline because of the increasing fees, rentals, and royalties—plus regulations—that he has imposed on oil and gas producers through executive actions and that Congress has imposed through the so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
The fact is, trying to produce energy from federal lands is unnecessarily hard, which is why the standout states that have led to the energy revolution—Texas, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania—have low federal land ownership of 1.4%, 4.2%, and 2.5%, respectively.
The impacts of who owns and manages lands are astounding. For example, from 2009 through 2013, oil production from state and private lands increased 61%, but on lands controlled by the federal government, oil production dropped 6%.
States and private landowners aren’t required by distant landlords and “green” interest groups based in Washington or Manhattan to entertain every last objection their lawyers can conjure up to stop investment projects. Instead, they negotiate the terms and conditions of leases, reclamation, and environmental protection with the knowledge that it is their land, their water, and their air that will be affected.
Apparently, states and landowners agree that mutually beneficial contracts are superior to the federal government’s Byzantine rules and regulations and all their second-guessing, armchair quarterbacking, and denials through delays.
Permitting
Another way government impacts gas prices is through the permitting of pipelines necessary to transport energy in the most efficient, economic, and environmentally sound way. America has, literally, millions of miles of energy pipelines, out of sight and out of danger from surface accidents.
While not connected to the price of gasoline at the pump, it is worth noting that the natural gas system alone has over 3 million miles. Petroleum and petroleum product pipelines account for about another 225,000 miles. The permitting of these pipelines keeps surface transportation incidents with trucks and trains to a minimum, reduces environmental impacts, and is the most economic means of transport.
Denying construction permits simply forces products onto already burdened surface transportation systems, as is the case with Biden’s cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline cross-border permit on his first day in office. The pipeline would have allowed nearly 1 million barrels per day of Canadian and North Dakota oil to economically be transported to refiners in the Gulf Coast, which would have induced Canada to invest more in the development of its enormous oil sands reserves.
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney stated his province could provide 1 million barrels per day of additional oil to the U.S. within two years if a pipeline were allowed to be built.
Instead of draining our Strategic Petroleum Reserve of 1 million barrels per day of emergency supplies, as the Biden administration has been doing in an attempt to temporarily reduce gas prices, a pipeline would be a strategic investment with one of our closest allies and would benefit both sides of the border. It would also ensure decades of additional safe and secure energy supplies equal to 5% of our current oil use.
Signals From the Government
Often those who oppose the use of oil and gas—and who also recognize that the more of both we produce in North America, the lower their prices will be—will argue that each individual project won’t make a difference or that they will be too long in coming. That’s simply nonsense and is proven wrong by historical facts and the evidence.
In July 2008, prior to the horizontal drilling/hydraulic fracturing revolution that more than doubled U.S. oil production and gave us energy self-sufficiency in 2019, oil was approaching $150 per barrel under President George W. Bush. On July 14, 2008, Bush announced the repeal of a decades-old moratorium on drilling on most of the Outer Continental Shelf first put in place by his father.
Even though any oil leased, discovered, and produced wouldn’t come to market until 10 years in the future, owing to rigorous federal laws and regulations, the price of oil dropped $9.36 immediately upon his announcement, to $136 per barrel.
By the way, none of those areas that were opened for leasing have been leased to date and are still on hold pending actions by the federal government to lease them.
Oil and natural gas are purchased in markets that look to signals from the government about which way the pendulum is swinging in its attitude about future supplies. If the government wants more oil production and takes steps to make it happen domestically, prices will fall. If, on the other hand, the government seeks to regulate, legislate, and increase costs on the domestic production of energy, prices will rise.
Conclusion
The federal government plays a huge hand in the price families and businesses pay for their energy, including what they pay at the pump.
When it comes to energy, more energy means lower prices. Imagine if the federal government embraced increased energy production on the massive federal estate and a larger pipeline system that could more quickly, efficiently, and economically transport it to refineries and its final destinations in an environmentally friendly way. The benefits in terms of lower prices would be massive.
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Energy crisis pushes German industry to the brink
German businesses are growing concerned that without an energy price cap, a wave of insolvencies could wash over the country in coming weeks and disrupt the supply chains serving Germany’s largest industrial sectors.
Starved of the abundant Russian energy that long fired the nation’s industrial engine, German businesses have already been curtailing production and halting investments. Business and consumer confidence is tumbling, approaching the lows reached during the 2008 global financial crisis. Germany’s government is now drawing up plans to cap the price of electricity and gas, officials said this week, acting in case a similar proposal by the European Union isn’t enacted swiftly.
Long Europe’s growth engine and its manufacturing nerve center, Germany’s economy has become one of the most vulnerable on the continent. It is likely to grow by just 1.2% this year and shrink by 0.7% next year, by far the worst performance among major industrial economies, according to a forecast published this week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based think tank. Economists at Deutsche Bank expect a 3.5% contraction next year, driven by shrinking private consumption, investment and net exports.
Four heavyweight German think tanks slashed their growth forecasts for the German economy on Thursday, blaming the energy crisis. They now expect an economic contraction of 0.4% next year, after forecasting growth of 3.1% last spring, according to a twice-yearly report prepared for the federal government. While gas shortages should ease somewhat over time, prices are likely to remain well above the precrisis level, the report warned. “This means a permanent loss of prosperity for Germany.”
More than half of German small and midsize companies now worry that the energy crisis could put them out of business, up from 42% last month, according to a survey published Thursday by the Federal Association of Medium-Sized Businesses, a trade group. “The situation is growing more threatening from day to day,” said the group’s chairman, Markus Jerger.
After initially resisting the decision, Germany’s government is now drawing up plans to cap the price of electricity and gas, officials said this week. Business lobbies have warned that an insolvency wave could be just weeks away and that it could start a chain reaction of business failures. Volkswagen AG, Germany’s flagship car maker, said last week it was concerned about its supply chain because of possible gas shortages this winter.
“I’m very worried... Affordable energy is the foundation of the entire German industry,” says Max Jankowsky, chief executive of GL Giesserei Loessnitz GmbH, a 173-year-old foundry in the east German state of Saxony.
The company sits at the heart of Germany’s large auto industry, which employs around 800,000 people and exports about three-quarters of what it produces. Its clients include BMW AG, Daimler AG and Volkswagen.
Mr. Jankowsky used to pay 100 euros, equivalent to $96, each time he switched on his gas-powered industrial furnace which melts metal to produce the machines that mold car bodies. Today, it costs Mr. Jankowsky about €3,000 each time, a 30-fold increase. To save money, he now turns on the furnace twice a week instead of three times.
Mr. Jankowsky expects his annual electricity bill to increase by €2 million next year, an enormous burden for a family-run firm with €20 million in annual sales. After his previous contract ran out, he started buying gas on the spot market, paying vastly higher prices.
“Next year will be decisive. Supply chains could be reoriented toward countries with cheaper energy,” Mr. Jankowsky says. His customers are currently accepting large price increases, but he expects demand to decline next year.
Even so, he is skeptical of the German government’s plans to subsidize energy use, which he worries will keep prices high while burdening future generations.
“The economy needs to work without subsidies, we always complained about those in China,” he says. He wants the government to produce a road map for guaranteeing supplies of affordable energy. “I don’t see a concept in the federal government,” he says.
One in 10 German auto companies have reduced production as a result of high energy costs, and another third are considering doing so, according to a survey this month by the German Association of the Automotive Industry, a trade group. More than half of companies have canceled or postponed planned investments and nearly a quarter want to shift investments overseas, the trade group says.
Output in Germany’s manufacturing industry is likely to decline by 2.5% this year and by roughly 5% next year, according to Deutsche Bank analysts. Exports, a cornerstone of the country’s recent prosperity, are languishing below prepandemic levels after adjusting for inflation.
With energy prices likely to remain structurally high, only some of the German production facilities priced out of the market are likely to come back on stream, the analysts said. That is likely to reduce the country’s long-term growth potential, which is already under pressure from an aging workforce.
“The current energy-cost and thus inflation crisis is not only a cyclical phenomenon but has a major structural component as well, requiring significant government intervention to prevent serious medium- and long-term damage to Germany’s economic prospects,” says Timo Klein, an economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence.
In addition to sparking an energy crisis, Russia’s war in Ukraine has shaken confidence in a German export model that has prospered by forging deep links with autocratic regimes with fast-growing economies, especially China.
Government officials are now concerned that Germany’s economic dependence on China—it is the country’s largest trade partner and the biggest single market for many German companies—would translate into an even bigger shock for the German economy should Beijing close ranks with Moscow against the West.
“If I see the disruption of the global economy caused by the war of two economic dwarfs, Russia and Ukraine, I am afraid what a [tussle] between China and Taiwan and the U.S…. would cause to the global economy,” says Oliver Betz, managing director of systec Automotive GmbH, an auto supplier based near Munich.
Mr. Betz has roughly 160 staff in China and makes about half of his annual global sales there—about 250 million yuan, equivalent to $35 million. He says he wouldn’t invest in another company in China due to heightened geopolitical risks. Instead he is trying to expand in new markets including India and the U.S. He thinks the transition will be difficult because the markets are very different.
“It will take a long time to substantially replace our Chinese business,” Mr. Betz says.
For now, German unemployment remains low, but that could change as high inflation erodes household spending, economists say. The nation’s unemployment rate edged up to 5.5% in August, largely due to an influx of Ukrainian refugees, according to the federal labor agency. German businesses are likely to furlough some two million staff over the coming months as the economy shrinks, according to Deutsche Bank.
Borrowing costs are rising as the European Central Bank aggressively raises interest rates to combat high inflation.
Even so, Germany’s inflation rate is likely to decline only slightly next year, to 7.6%, still more than double the expected rate in the U.S., according to the OECD.
Thilmann Brot GmbH, which operates 20 bakeries in western Germany, filed for insolvency in mid-September. The family business was unable to pass on increased energy and raw-material costs as customers switched to cheaper alternatives, according to Jens Lieser, the company’s provisional insolvency administrator.
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British Labour’s Green Energy Plan Is To Double Down On More Unreliables
The key policy unveiled by Labour is to replace one unrealistic objective with another. Boris Johnson’s aim to have a carbon-free energy grid by 2035 has been brought forward to 2030 by Sir Keir Starmer.
This is to be achieved by quadrupling offshore wind farms, doubling the number on land, and tripling the production of solar power, all within six years, assuming an election in 2024 that Labour wins.
Sir Keir said this would deliver a new era of economic growth and permanently lower energy bills by turning the UK into a green “superpower”.
Countries like China and India have committed to net zero but not for decades – arguing their economies are at different stages from the West.
America has lowered its emissions [thanks to natural gas] and is working on many of the new ‘green’ technologies, but has a target of 2050.
For as long as the biggest emitters are still pumping out CO2, the UK’s contribution is minuscule.
Sir Keir said the aim was to make the UK self-sufficient in electricity by the end of the decade but this is simply not possible.
We will need to continue importing gas for electricity long after 2030 because renewables will not produce enough energy, not least on windless, cloudy days.
Moreover, the way the energy market is currently constructed, electricity from renewables is priced at the same high level as gas.
This needs to change.
Labour’s plan is essentially to make the country more dependent on imported gas, not less, certainly in the medium term.
Using our own resources, including shale, is a better approach.
https://principia-scientific.com/labours-green-energy-plan-is-to-double-down-on-more-unreliables/
************************************************Europeans increasingly burning trees for energy
European consumers and businesses are increasingly turning to biomass energy sources, including wood-derived fuels for heating and cooling, as the energy crisis continues to wreak havoc across the continent.
The shift to biomass energy, which already accounts for the majority of renewable energy generated in the European Union (EU), has come as the Ukraine crisis disrupts energy supplies and alternate forms of energy production fall short, according to Bioenergy Europe, a leading industry group based in Belgium.
The group said Europe's biomass energy is largely sourced domestically while fossil fuels and green energy technologies are mainly imported.
Amid the crisis, Europeans have been forced to take drastic measures to conserve energy and keep bills low while governments have imposed rationing rules and introduced relief programs.
"During this period of increasing uncertainty due to the war in Ukraine and the ongoing crisis which highlights the EU’s reliance on foreign fossil fuels, bioenergy stands as a clear counterpoint," Maija Lepistö, a spokesperson for Bioenergy Europe, told FOX Business. "Over 96% of the biomass used for bioenergy is being produced domestically within the EU and the rest coming from trusted streams."
Prior to the current crisis, biomass energy accounted for 57.4% of total renewable energy production and nearly 12% of total energy consumed in the EU. Forestry products — such as logging residues, wood-processing residues, fuel wood and wood pellets — are the bloc's main source of biomass for energy, according to the EU's Joint Research Center.
Lepistö said more consumers are turning to biomass energy thanks to it being a "local and affordable" alternative to traditional sources of energy.
"The current energy crisis in Europe has not placed the supply of biomass raw material at risk," she told FOX Business. "Unlike fossil fuels with their high import rates and other renewables supplying their technology from outside the EU, biomass has the benefit of being locally sourced, produced and dispatched as well as supply of the necessary equipment."
"Just as with other markets, the ongoing war is affecting the bioenergy sector," she added. "However, the EU’s internal market can continue supplying bioenergy to the end users, and more businesses and citizens are turning to this renewable, local and affordable solution, which has more potential to grow and (reinforce) the EU’s green goals."
In 2021, the EU consumed a whopping 23.1 million metric tons (MMT) of wood pellets, a year-over-year increase that can be attributed to increased German residential use and an uptick of co-firing of wood with coal in power plants in the Netherlands, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) report.
The report said demand in 2022 is projected to increase by another 1.2 MMT in 2022 due to even greater expansion in residential markets and increasing prices of fossil fuels.
Overall, the vast majority of biomass energy power generation in the EU is generated by the industrial sector at combined heat and power plants, Lepistö added. The remainder produces electricity and transportation fuels.
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29 September, 2022
Climate Hysteria: A Mass Delusion to Demonize Carbon Dioxide
Climate hysterics like to throw around the world “denier” to castigate those who don’t get with the green agenda. The term is deliberately intended to echo the phrase “Holocaust denier” to those anti-Semites who like to insist that the Holocaust never happened. While the comparison is obscene, it’s certainly true that the Holocaust, like the climate agenda, have something in common: They both reflect a blind fanaticism untethered to actual facts.
Climate hysterics demonize carbon dioxide (CO2) much as Hitler stereotyped Jews. They then demonize their critics as “Holocaust deniers” because the psychological link is to demonize critics of the anthropogenic theory as if they were Jew-haters. However, the term “climate deniers” outside the context of Holocaust denial makes no sense. No rational person would deny that this planet has an atmosphere, weather, and climate. But honestly, it is climate hysterics who hate their critics, seeing them as “evil,” greedy, hydrocarbon-burning capitalists willing to make Earth’s climate unbearably hot and dangerous for all living things.
The Holocaust was a past, documented event. In contrast, the contention that the world might end because we burn hydrocarbon fuels that emit CO2 is a theory based on debatable simulations of future climate possibilities. The hard reality is that radical leftists, like Hitler’s “National Socialist” Nazis, will kill tens of millions to assuage their fears. Using the “denier” language to tar those who do not take a knee to concede to this global warming, climate change irrational fear is a monumental, inexcusable insult to the memory of the six million Jews pointlessly murdered in the insane racial hysteria of the Shoah.
The demonization of CO2 depends on the asserted certainty that burning hydrocarbon fuels that emit CO2, a greenhouse gas that is a trace molecule, present in approximately 0.04 percent of the atmosphere, will generate existential climate change catastrophes. The decarbonization movement would be dead in the water except for the existential fear climate hysterics manufacture over supposed adverse anthropogenic CO2 consequences touted as making Earth uninhabitable for humans.
Ironically, Nazis and climate hysterics understand that the success of prejudicial stereotyping depends on the availability of a charismatic demagogue, a Hitler, capable of triggering irrational fear of the perceived evil subgroup. In other words, the psychology of prejudicial stereotyping depends upon the availability of an Al Gore or Greta Thunberg willing to create permanent fear over myriad existential climate disasters that may never happen.
As astrophysicist and geoscientist Willie Soon has pointed out repeatedly, climate hysterics are “true believers,” impervious to experiential refutation. On August 19, 2022, in a speech delivered to the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness at their annual convention, Dr. Soon showed extensive evidence that the United Nations’ predictions of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming have been wrong for the past 50 years.
U.N. predictions that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming will cause sea levels to rise, wiping nations off the face of the earth, are nothing but fearmongering. But, as Dr. Soon documented, when U.N. predictions fail to materialize, the U.N. merely extends the inevitable happening of the future climate change catastrophe to an anticipated date in the future.
Lowering the Holocaust to the level of a climate debate irreparably demeans what was the most heinous genocidal catastrophe ever perpetrated by human beings against fellow human beings. Having said that, there is a homicidal reality to the neo-Marxist Green New Deal mass delusion, something apparent in today as EU governments, deprived of Russian gas, scramble to forestall the real, existential threat of businesses shutting down and citizens freezing in a long, cold European winter.
In his classic 1954 treatise, The Nature of Prejudice, Harvard psychologist Gordon W. Allport described the psychology of prejudicial stereotyping behind Hitler’s genocidal mania demonizing Jews. That same theory explains why the green movement is intolerant today. The psychology of stereotyping creates generalizations; that is, “overcategorizations,” that become prejudices when ideological convictions “are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.”
Allport defined ethnic prejudice as follows:
Ethnic prejudice is an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization. It may be felt or expressed. It may be directed toward a group as a whole, or toward an individual because he is a member of that group.
Allport further noted that “intense prejudicial antipathies” are likely to result in “vigorously hostile action.” Allport elaborated “extermination” as the most extreme prejudicial form of violent actions in terms of the Holocaust.
Extermination. Lynchings, pogroms, massacres, and the Hitlerian program of genocide mark the ultimate degree of violent expression of prejudice.
Another very important book to emerge regarding the madness of the Nazi era was Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book, The True Believer. In it, he explained that blind adherence to doctrinal ideology is key to the fanaticism necessary to create a successful social or political movement. Thus, wrote Hoffer, active mass movements strive “to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world.”
Hoffer further pointed out that the facts on which a true believer bases his conclusions “must not be derived from his [i.e., a true believer’s] experience or observation.” For true believers, Hoffer insisted, “the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine, and there is no truth nor certitude outside it.” “To rely on the evidence of the senses and of reason is heresy and treason. It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible. What we know as blind faith is sustained by innumerable unbeliefs.”
Hoffer concluded his comments on the importance of ideology (which he calls doctrine) for true believers by commenting in that the fanatical communist refuses to believe any unfavorable report or evidence about Russia. This kind of militant refuses to see “with his own eyes the cruel misery inside the Soviet promised land.”
The same holds true for progressives who transform a supposedly scientific argument about CO2 emissions into their political fight against capitalism. The Green New Deal movement insists we must move entirely to solar energy and wind power because these are not hydrocarbon fuels. The Green New Deal assumes that eliminating the use of hydrocarbon fuels, the energy that fuels capitalism, by moving to the less powerful and less reliable solar energy and wind power is essential to a future committed to social justice.
In a similar vein, in 1965, Herbert Marcuse of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School published an essay entitled “Repressive Tolerance.” In that essay, Marcuse argued for “liberating tolerance,” a redefinition of “tolerance” that requires the censoring of policies, attitudes, opinions, etc., that are designed to reinforce the dominant repressive and alienating nature of advanced industrial societies like the United States. More simply, Marcuse explained that “liberating tolerance” would mean “intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.” Marcuse left no doubt that his argument for liberating tolerance was central to his goal of negating capitalism to destroy advanced industrial society.
There’s an irony to all this: On the one hand, it’s obscene for climate fanatics to tar their opponents as “deniers” in the same the term is used for people to deny the Holocaust. The first is a well-document historic event, while the second is a highly speculative theory based upon inadequate computer models made to predict future complex climate events. However, the common denominator is that both the Holocaust and the climate movement arise from the same form of rigid, fact-free fanaticism common to all true believers.
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As war on gas pipelines escalates, Britain faces national security crisis
As Gazprom warned that the last remaining gas supply to western Europe is at risk of shutdown and gas pipelines are being blown up, Net Zero Watch has written to Liz Truss and Sir Kir Starmer, calling on both leaders to declare an energy emergency, on national security grounds.
In a letter to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, Net Zero Watch director Dr Benny Peiser has warned that the sabotage of three Nord Stream gas pipelines in the last 24 hours has brutally revealed how Britain’s energy system and its entire economic and societal stability is exposed to grave external threats.
Dr Peiser writes:
"There is now a serious and growing risk to Britain’s national security due to the extreme vulnerability of the gas pipeline from Norway which provides a third of UK gas supplies.
It is vital that you understand that a similar attack on the Norwegian gas pipeline would, on its own, completely cripple the UK economy. This extreme vulnerability must be fixed as a matter of national priority, and must take precedence over all other considerations.
From a national security perspective, the urgent need is for immediate policy changes that significantly and swiftly increase reliable domestic sources of energy, which means gas and coal, without which the grid and the economy cannot function. I set out below key steps that must be taken.
It is also vital that you understand that no responsible government and opposition can accept this national security risk without taking swift and effect action.”
Emergency agenda
Unconventional gas
All obstacles to the development of unconventional fossil fuel resources in the UK must be removed.
In particular:
* Replace the current traffic light system, based on seismicity, with BS5228-2, the ground-acceleration standard applied to other industries.
* Fossil fuel extraction to be categorised as Nationally Significant Infrastructure under the terms of the Planning Act. This should include projects in Scotland.
* Planning applications for shale wells must cover drilling pads rather than individual wells.
* Get coalbed methane and coal seam gasification projects going again, overruling Holyrood if necessary
Other
* Suspend the Climate Change Act
* Suspend pollution controls on thermal power, thus allowing dual-fuel use of gas-fired plant and the development of ultrasupercritical coal-fired power stations.
* Several coal and nuclear stations to close in next few years. Critical risk that these are not maintained in the meantime. Give them long-term agreements to ensure they remain on the grid and are maintained.
Contact
Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Net Zero Watch
e: benny.peiser@netzerowatch.com
m: 07553 361717
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Liz Truss will fail without a credible energy plan
Net Zero Watch has said that negative market reactions to the Government’s mini-budget show that domestic and international investors are highly sceptical about what appears to be half-baked policy proposals.
Investors can see that hardly anything is being done to address the underlying reasons for Britain’s economic and energy cost crisis.
Tax cuts in conjunction with astronomical and indeterminate handouts to energy suppliers announced by the Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng last week have alarmed financiers because they shift the energy cost burden onto the UK’s debt mountain and future generations. As a result, the pound has crashed against the dollar and market reactions have been highly critical.
Net Zero Watch director, Dr Benny Peiser has warned that the country faces years of inflation and in all likelihood a major economic depression unless the government announces radical energy policy reforms:
"The economy looks likely to tank and suffer for years to come because the Government refuses to abandon its suicidal Net Zero targets which are effectively preventing solutions to the catastrophic energy crisis."
Net Zero Watch recently published a plan to rapidly reduce the energy cost burden and put the economy back on a stable footing, but Dr Peiser has warned that time for action is running short.
"Unless the Government introduces a credible plan to bring down the cost of energy significantly and in the short term there is simply no chance for any economic growth plans. Liz Truss and her ministers have to chose between saving the economy and saving Net Zero. There simply isn’t a third way.'
Gordon Hughes and Andrew Montford: Fixing the energy price crisis (pdf)
Contact
Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Net Zero Watch
e: benny.peiser@netzerowatch.com
m: 07553 361717
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Australia: A major overhaul of Queensland’s energy sector will involve construction of the ‘world’s biggest’ pumped hydro project
This is nonsense. For pumped hydro you need TWO dams, at astronomical cost. Where is the money going to come from? Will it reduce the funding for hospitals, police and pensioners? Realistic cost estimates and realistic statements about how other spending will be affected are needed. There is no sign of either.
When there are so many other needs for funding (ambulancees, housing etc.) already crying out, this proposal is verging on criminal. And for what? To replace s perfectly good electricity supply that we have already. It will buy a few votes from Greenies, that is all
A major overhaul of Queensland’s energy sector will cost $62bn over 13 years and involve construction of the “world’s biggest” pumped hydroelectric power plant project, ending the “reliance” on coal in the state’s publicly owned power plants by 2035.
The goals of the Queensland Energy Plan include hitting a new, higher renewable energy target of 70 per cent by 2032, though the state’s emissions reductions target of 30 per cent below 2005 baseline levels will not change.
The targets will be legislated.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk released the state’s long-awaited 10-year Queensland Energy Plan at her annual state of the state address on Wednesday afternoon, saying the “race was now on” to secure “clean energy supply chains”.
“We must invest now, not just for our climate,” she said. “We must address this issue at the same time we focus on new job opportunities to bring everyone along with the clean energy industrial revolution at our doorstep.”
Ms Palaszczuk confirmed Queensland’s plan was to get 70 per cent of its energy needs from renewable sources by 2032, and 80 per cent by 2035.
Natural renewable resources are energy sources with an endless supply so they can be continuously replenished. Some examples of renewable resources include the wind, sun, geothermal heat and water.
Part of the plan will include building two new pumped hydroelectric plants — one west of Mackay and the other at Borumba Dam by 2035.
There will be a new “SuperGrid” built to connect solar, wind, battery and hydrogen generators across the state.
“The super grid brings together all of the elements in the electricity system with the poles and wires that provide Queenslanders with clean, reliable and affordable power for generations,” Ms Palaszczuk said.
“That super grid delivers around 1500 kilometres of transmission lines from Brisbane up to North Queensland and out west to Hughenden.”
Publicly owned coal fired power plants, which make up the majority of the state’s coal fired assets, would be “converted” to clean energy hubs from 2027. And their “reliance” on coal would be stopped by 2035.
Ms Palaszczuk said this would be “done in a measured way”. “We won’t convert coal power stations until there is replacement firmed generation,” she said. “We will keep our coal fired power stations as back up capacity until replacement pumped hydro energy storage is operational. “We will be able to turn the stations back on if something goes wrong.”
The state will also build a “hydrogen gas ready turbine”.
The energy plan will cost an estimated $62bn between now and 2035, with the funds to be spread across state and federal governments and the private sector.
“By 2035 Queensland … will have no regular reliance on coal and be at 80 per cent renewable energy,” Ms Palaszczuk said. “That’s because we will have more pumped hydro energy storage than the rest of Australia combined. “Today is about being bold with an energy and jobs plan that has tangible aims and palpable outcomes.”
The latest data shows Queensland’s energy mix in 2021/22 was 21.4 per cent renewable, up from 19.6 per cent between August 2020 and July 2021.
The state government has been ramping up its energy-related announcements in the last week, with Ms Palaszczuk travelling out to South Burnett on Monday to reveal a $780m commitment to building Australia’s largest publicly owned wind farm. The Tarong West Wind Farm in the South Burnett would create enough electricity to power up to 230,000 homes.
At a press conference this morning, Energy Minister Mick de Brenni said it would power “the size of the Gold Coast”, and would be the “equivalent of taking 230,000 cars off the road”.
He said existing cattle farmers located near the wind farm would be able to operate as usual.
The project will include up to 150 turbines and generate 500MW, with 200 jobs created during the construction phase and 15 ongoing roles when the farm up and running.
Earlier, the Greens said Queensland risked being “laughed out of the room” over its climate policies, with the party urging the Palaszczuk government to accelerate the closure of coal-fired stations and adopt a transition plan for the workforce.
Greens MP Michael Berkman said Queensland risked breaching its Paris Agreement unless it includes the closure of the state’s power stations by 2030.
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28 September, 2022
European electricity grid hurtling towards disaster, Swiss commodities expert warns
A new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation shows that the European electricity grid is hurtling towards disaster, with its constituent nations closing reliable nuclear and fossil-fuelled power stations and hoping that interconnectors will make up the deficit.
According to the paper’s author, Alexander Stahel, a Swiss-based commodities expert, the European grid has relied on French and German power surpluses for many years. However, with nuclear power in both countries being wound down and likely to soon become net power importers, and with fierce international competition for scarce gas supplies, the whole continent is now left hoping for Scandinavian hydro power and occasional surpluses of UK wind to save them.
According to Stahel, the numbers just don’t add up, and he warns that restrictions on fossil fuel investment are making things dramatically worse.
“Fossil fuels are currently vital for keeping the lights on, but we are undermining the industry’s viability. It needs US$300 billion of re-investment every year, for oil and gas alone, just to maintain current production levels.
"However, convinced by policymakers that investments in production will become ‘stranded’, it is not even investing half this amount.”
Stahel says that Europe must simply accept that its decarbonisation targets are not achievable.
Alexander Stahel: “The Crisis of the European Energy System” (pdf)
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Adverse Energy Taxes in the Inflation Reduction Act
The process of political meddling in energy markets is endless, an eternal truth that will not prove different for the energy provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act. Most public attention has been directed at the massive subsidies and favoritism directed at unconventional electricity — wind and solar power in particular — and electric vehicles, rather than the tax provisions, less prominent but deeply problematic.
Both sets of policies expand the effort to increase the use of uncompetitive energy expensive, unreliable, and environmentally destructive in place of conventional energyproven, reliable, efficient, and with environmental effects that have been addressed effectively by decades of regulation authorized by past legislation. Such a forced turn toward uncompetitive energy will continue to engender huge adverse effects with few benefits, a reality that policymakers in Europe, California, and elsewhere now have been forced to confront.
The tax provisions of the IRA have received less attention, but are likely to prove equally perverse. First, there is a reinstatement of the Hazardous Substance Superfund Financing tax (section 13601) on crude oil and petroleum products, the previous imposition of which ended in 1995. Put aside the fact that it is not the fossil energy producers or their customers who are responsible for pollution and cleanup problems at the Superfund sites; nor are they to blame for the massive mismanagement of the program over four decades. This tax — 16.4 cents per barrel — will cost energy producers about $1.2 billion per year, an outcome not consistent with the need to expand the availability of reliable energy.
Second, the IRA imposes two new taxes on methane emissions from crude oil and natural gas production. Section 60113 imposes per-metric ton fees ($900 in 2024, rising to $1500 in 2026) for methane emissions exceeding 0.2 percent of natural gas sold from a facility or 10 metric tons of methane per million barrels of oil produced. Section 50263 imposes the (new, higher) royalty rate for natural gas produced from future leases on federal land or the outer continental shelf on all such gas, even that lost because of necessary venting or flaring, with a few exceptions.
Put aside the reality that fossil producers have powerful incentives to minimize losses of natural gas that otherwise could be sold. The central justification for the tax on methane emissions is “climate” policy. U.S. methane emissions are 11 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (on a CO2 equivalent basis). Were all U.S. methane emissions — not merely those from oil and gas production — reduced to zero, the global temperature reduction by 2100, using the Environmental Protection Agency climate model, would be 0.015 degrees C, an effect that would not be measurable in that the standard deviation of the surface temperature record is 0.11 degrees C.
Accordingly, the taxes on methane emissions cannot satisfy any plausible benefit/cost test. They are little more than a money grab, with little economic or environmental justification. Moreover, they create perverse political incentives: More methane emissions yield more revenue for the federal government, and so provide a disincentive to reform permitting and other policies so as to facilitate the improvement and modernization of the energy infrastructure, and thus reduce emissions.
Finally, section 50262 increases the royalty rate for oil and gas leases on federal lands and the OCS from 12.5 percent to 16.67 percent, increases the oil and gas minimum acceptable bid from $2 per acre to $10 per acre, and increases fossil fuel rental rates for reinstated oil and gas leases to 20 percent rather than 16.67 percent.
Notwithstanding Beltway rhetoric about “ensur[ing a] fair return for the American taxpayer,” these cost increases will have the opposite effect, by reducing the amount that the fossil producers will be willing to bid initially for the leases. This means that the net effect of the increase in the royalty rate and the obvious attendant decline in the initial bids is a shift of risk from the fossil producers onto the taxpayers, because the initial bids are certain, while the future royalty payments will be determined by future fossil energy prices and other conditions that are subject to substantial uncertainty.
Moreover, the royalty payments are analogous to an excise tax on fossil energy production, while the initial bid is analogous to a lump-sum tax that does not affect production decisions once the bidder obtains a lease. Accordingly, the combination of the increase in the royalty rate and the decline in the initial bids will have the effect of reducing fossil production from the leases that actually are granted, an outcome inconsistent with the goals of a rational energy policy and with the interests of taxpayers.
There simply is no rationale for these tax provisions that can withstand scrutiny. They will reduce the production of conventional energy, which is reliable, concentrated per unit of weight, and complementary with efficient capital investment. They will increase energy costs and reduce economic growth and national wealth, even as they yield no benefits in terms of environmental improvement. Let us hope that a future Congress is led to repeal them.
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Experts question environmental and economic value of wind power
“The biggest failure of wind energy, oddly enough, is environmental.”
Wind farms continue to pop up like mushrooms across Michigan’s landscape, and with them, plenty of backlash from energy, economic and environmental public policy experts.
Michigan ranks 15th for total wind generation nationwide, according to a 2021 study released by Commodity.com, which was updated last May. The study reports wind provides 8% of the total electricity consumed by the nation’s homes, government entities and businesses, while contributing 7% to Michigan’s electricity grid.
While proponents tout the environmental benefits of wind over other energy sources, it typically takes 18 months after its full installation before a turbine truly can be said to “have paid off its carbon debt,” according to Kevon Martis, a certified land use planner and zoning administrator for Lenawee County’s Deerfield Township.
Martis explained to The Center Square that the manufacturing and transportation of turbines to their destination typically requires overseas shipping to U.S. ports, followed by over-the-road transport requiring several diesel-fueled 18-wheel semi-trucks per turbine.
“The biggest failure of wind energy, oddly enough, is environmental,” Martis told The Center Square. “Not only do low-energy density devices like wind turbines have an outsized impact on the landscape due to the sheer mass of the machines and the quantity required, wind energy is a very expensive means of CO2 avoidance,” he said.
Martis referenced a study conducted by grid operator MISO “with respect to the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, which showed that wind energy reduces CO2 emissions at a cost of $237/ton while the Obama administration itself only valued the social cost of carbon at roughly $40/ton.”
He also referenced a paper released by the center-left Brookings Institute showing wind energy and solar are not the low-cost means of avoiding CO2.
“Replacing coal with natural gas and nuclear is far cheaper,” Martis said. “So it leaves a serious policy question: If you have $1 billion of ratepayer money to play with, do you want to avoid one unit of CO2 with wind or six or eight units by fuel switching from coal to natural gas or building nuclear power? In fact, the reason the U.S. leads the Western world in CO2 reduction in the electricity sector is precisely because of fuel switching rather than renewable energy development.”
A study released this week reveals that wind turbines pose their own set of reliability and economic problems.
“The High Cost of 100 Percent Carbon-Free Electricity by 2040” details issues related to the complete adoption of carbon-free, renewable energy provided by wind and solar technologies.
The Minnesota-based Center for the American Experiment study was authored by CAE’s Policy Fellow Isaac Orr, Policy Analyst Mitchell Rolling, and Economist John Phelan. Although the study is specifically focused on Minnesota, Orr told The Center Square its conclusions also apply to other states such as Michigan that have adopted carbon-free energy mandates. Michigan-based Consumers Energy, for example, is proposing to generate 63% of all the state’s electricity from renewable sources by 2040.
“Our report found that attempting to power the state of Minnesota using primarily wind, solar, and battery storage would cost a staggering $313 billion through 2050 and cause blackouts in two of the three years we investigated,” Orr said. “Prices would rise, reliability would fall; in essence, it would be the worst of both worlds. This proposal is gambling with the electric grid, which is an incredibly irresponsible thing to do.”
The CAE writers also conclude the state’s renewable mandates would result in the loss of 79,000 jobs and reduce Minnesota’s state gross domestic product by more than $13 billion annually.
“Renewable advocates often claim that wind and solar are the cheapest forms of energy, but our analysis found the true cost of meeting electricity demand with wind and solar was $272 per megawatt hour (MWh) and $472/MWh, respectively, when the cost of battery storage and overbuilding and curtailment costs were factored in,” Orr said. “This means wind turbines and solar panels are much more expensive than the power plants they replace.”
The additional costs of transmission, property taxes, load balancing and other embedded costs would drive wind-generated energy above $270 per MWh, according to the report.
“One of the key failures of the push to so-called green energy is a refusal to accurately account for any associated negatives of using wind or solar,” Mackinac Center for Public Policy Environmental Policy Director Jason Hayes told The Center Square. “While renewable energy advocates strive to track even the most minuscule costs associated with fossil fuels or nuclear energy, they appear to happily ignore many of their benefits, such as being a reliable and affordable source of electricity and transportation fuels.”
Hayes said renewable advocates focus on “claims of reduced emissions from wind and solar, while ignoring or downplaying the growing string of human rights and supply chain issues associated with transition minerals, or how they are eating up ever more acres of land,” he said. “Having a full accounting for the emissions associated with wind and solar is every bit as important as accounting for the emissions from fossil fuels. That full accounting would likely change more than a few minds on the actual value of renewables.”
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Tyrannical pseudo-science
As if we haven’t had enough of politicians in our faces in the Peoples Republic of Victoria in the last two and a half years, we now have Dr Monique Ryan in the Federal Parliament courtesy of the Woke and bespoke voters of Kooyong. Dr Ryan is a neurologist and says she is a woman of science; therefore (presumably) she cannot be questioned on her views on Climate Change, after all, she is a scientist and the science is settled
I live outside Melbourne on the edge of the western plains in a tiny town called Toolern Vale, where there are more horses and rabbits than humans. We are 70km from Ballarat and the westerly wind in winter blowing from Ballarat is infinitely colder than any mother-in-law’s kiss. We are very much aware of, and exposed to, climate change, but out here we call it the weather.
I have had a gutful of being hammered with the new climate religion which appears to have little basis in science. Its adherents are a group of virtue-signalling, privileged elites who, in their delirium and zealotry, use selective climate data and extreme language to spread the word via propaganda and are brainwashing our young, infecting our Parliament, and slowly destroying our prosperity.
At present I am paying at least four times the amount I should for electricity despite having a bank of solar panels. In the near future, I can look forward to a completely random electricity supply which will interrupt my ability to earn an income and put me in third-world living conditions. My taxes are propping up the renewables market thereby deliberately sabotaging the supply of essential fossil fuels.
Chris Bowen is hell-bent on forcing me to sell my V8 ute, replacing it with a not-fit-for-purpose EV and, to top it off, wind turbine transmission lines are coming through my neighbour’s property. I hear our Prime Minister thinks the changing climate is a threat to the ‘survival of our way of life’; well Prime Minister, it is not the weather that threatens my way of life, it is your bizarre, delusional, religion-based reaction to it.
News from the UK and Europe informs us that their citizens are soon to enter the winter from hell – not because of the weather per se, but because of a shortage of baseload power and the available power they do have is astronomically expensive. Many people will be unable to afford both food and heating and people will die. Already governments are telling their citizens how they can use the available power.
Is Dr Ryan aware of this situation? If so, does she think the science differs in the southern hemisphere, or that we live in a parallel universe?
Not being a woman of science, I will put it in layman’s terms. Let’s say you walk into a pub and sit down at the bar; the bloke next to you orders a drink, he takes a swig of it and falls to the floor – dead. Would you turn to the barmaid and say I’ll have what he’s having, but make it a double? That is what Dr Ryan wants you to do; despite having already seen the first season of the blockbuster series European Dream – No Electricity, No Industry, No Future, she appears to want us to follow the UK and Europe over the edge of a cliff.
Make no mistake, this is not about saving anything – this is about an entire class of privileged zealots in wealthy seats forcing their religious beliefs onto us. If you question them and ask for a reliable energy source, you’ll be cast out and called a heretic. If you object to following UK/Europe into third-world chaos and misery you’ll be told the science is settled.
In the spirit of science Dr Ryan, I propose an experiment.
The electorate of Kooyong goes off the grid. Wind turbine transmission lines will be run along the Yarra River in Kew and Hawthorn. Solar farms will be built in the parks and golf courses of Balwyn, Canterbury, Deepdene, Hawthorn, Mont Albert, Camberwell, Glen Iris, Kew, and Surrey Hills. The electorate is to function solely on wind and solar-generated power. Limited battery storage will be permitted – baseline domestic batteries, the type the government would install in public housing. In my electorate of Hawk – I volunteer to go off the grid, no renewables, no batteries and I will have a small modular reactor installed in my back paddock.
It’s about time Dr Ryan and the rest of these self-righteous, puffed-up toffs made a real sacrifice on the altar of Climate Change. Money means nothing to the virtue-signalling green electorates, so they should feel some Climate Change piousness by turning their green spaces into wastelands of solar panels and transmission lines; they should live with the result of relying on 100 percent renewables.
Dr Ryan, charity starts at home, lead by example; get out of my face and out of my environment.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/get-your-science-out-of-my-face/
***************************************27 September, 2022
The revenge of the material economy
America’s narrow escape last week from a major rail-worker strike brought home an important truth: people who make and ship real things – let’s call them material workers – now hold the whip hand over our supposedly ‘post-industrial’ economy. Firms trading non-tangibles – currency, bits and bots – may still hoard the most cash. But when it comes to eating, staying warm and, for many, making a living, the material economy is what matters most.
Yet the material economy has been hugely constrained in recent years – and deliberately so. This has become all too apparent since the war in Ukraine. Back in the pandemic era, thanks to the recurring lockdowns, the biggest winners were the tech giants and their supporters in Wall Street. Now Silicon Valley, suffering from the worst IPO market in 20 years, resembles something akin to a psychiatric ward, while Goldman Sachs is contemplating mass layoffs. Today, many green-energy projects and ESG funds (that is, funds rated as environmentally sustainable) are languishing, despite benefitting from massive government subsidies and relentless public-relations campaigns in recent years. Meanwhile, oil companies, once demonised by climate-obsessed politicians and activists, are now enjoying bumper profits, as are some commodity firms.
The conflict between the material economy and the economy based in ephemera – such as the creative industries, tech and financial services – is likely to define the coming political conflicts both within countries and between them. The laptop elites, led by Silicon Valley, the City of London and Wall Street, generally favour constraining producers of fuel, food and manufactured goods. In contrast, the masses, who produce and transport those goods, are now starting to realise that they still have the power to demand better futures for themselves and their families. Like railway workers, they can threaten to shut things down and win much higher pay.
The prospect of union organisation is spreading even to companies like Amazon and Starbucks. But there could be a backlash to this from employers. If wages rise too quickly, we could end up with a lot of union members without jobs, as the economy weakens and automation, spurred by rising labour costs, kicks in. Already, as California plans to force huge raises for fast-food workers, some fast-food giants are now backing ventures that aim to replace workers with robots.
The biggest threat to the material economy is likely to be the green agenda. Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the global energy crisis, problems with often unreliable and expensive renewable energy were accelerating the deindustrialisation of the UK and much of the EU – including Germany, which had long been an industrial powerhouse. Energy rationing could be on the horizon in Europe this winter. Globally, energy-price inflation threatens to drive far more bankruptcies than the 2008 financial crisis. And food inflation, which in some countries has been driven by green agricultural policies, has led the percentage of people worldwide experiencing food insecurity to double since 2019.
Good material jobs cannot easily co-exist with Net Zero policies, which are aimed at wiping out fossil fuels in the near term. Trillions of dollars have been spent on global power generated by green energy over the past 20 years, but the percentage of fossil fuels has barely declined. The bulk of greenhouse-gas reductions in recent years has come from switching from coal to natural gas. Yet the negative consequences of trying to eliminate fossil fuels and nuclear power have been profound, both for companies and consumers. Thanks to Germany’s much vaunted ‘energy transition’, German consumers had to endure the highest electricity prices in the world, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In uber-green California, residents pay up to 80 per cent above the US national average for electricity.
The elites’ turn against the material economy has been going on for at least half a century. It surfaced prominently in the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, which argued that natural resources were diminishing rapidly and so the world needed to transition to a less materially based economy with slower growth. This mentality has persisted and even grown, even though many green assertions dating back to that period – including warnings of mass starvation in much of the world – turned out to be exaggerated or plain wrong.
The green script has changed slightly over the years in response. It used to warn that scarcity was on its way unless we made radical changes, whereas now it calls for us to create scarcity deliberately. Today, no one talks about ‘peak oil’. Instead, you hear calls to keep fossil fuels in the ground, where they cannot be used.
Another difference between the 1970s and now is that the impetus for Net Zero policies comes not only from green activists and politicians, but also from the financial regime imposed by ‘woke’ capitalists, who have gone to great efforts to deprive fossil fuels of investment.
There are, of course, winners from these new fixations, including makers of electric vehicles (EVs), whose growth will further tax already stressed electric grids in many countries. These policies have made Tesla CEO Elon Musk, at least for now, the richest man in the world. But for the rest of humanity, high energy prices and related inflation are profoundly destabilising and will stoke class divisions. Potential losers include people working in energy, truck drivers, factory workers and logistics workers. A move to ban fracking in the US – which vice-president Kamala Harris has supported – would by itself cost several million jobs, according to a report by the US Chamber of Commerce.
The material-ephemeral divide is already reordering politics in the high-income world. The generally anti-fossil-fuel policies of US president Joe Biden have won the support of barely a third of Americans according to one recent survey, as he continues to use the weight of the entire federal bureaucracy to slow down fossil-fuel investment and development.
The division between the real-world workers and the laptop elite has sparked a resurgence of radical politics on both extremes. We see the rise of far-left politics in France, the United States and throughout Latin America. At the same time, many small-business owners and material workers have rallied to right-wing movements, such as the Sweden Democrats or Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France. Italy could be next to shift to the far right. In the United States, Trumpism, particularly in its now ugly post-election phase, finds its base largely in states that rely on manufacturing, energy production and food production, like Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Indiana, Ohio and Iowa.
In Europe, where real incomes are falling almost everywhere, draconian green policies can no longer be pushed without opposition. When Emmanuel Macron’s government raised green taxes on diesel in 2018, only a few years after the Paris climate agreement was signed, we saw the rise of the gilets jaunes movement. This anti-green unrest is not confined to France. In June 2021, Swiss voters rejected a key referendum to curb CO2 emissions on car and air travel, with most of the support coming from the countryside.
Now, as the energy and economic crises deepen, unrest is spreading throughout Europe, including in usually stable countries like Norway and the Netherlands. A key battleground has been agriculture – the most basic of industries. Farming has become a major target for green zealots, aided by uber-rich environmentalists like Bill Gates. They seek to limit farmers’ use of chemical fertilisers and to force farmers to cull their herds. Dutch farmers are protesting their government’s restrictions on emissions and fertiliser use, which are threatening farms that have been in operation for generations. Recently, the Dutch farmers have been joined by their Spanish, Polish and Italian counterparts.
One can only imagine what might happen if the US or Australian governments – all now dominated by ultra-greens – were to start imposing similar restrictions on their own massive resource-driven economies. I would not like to be the federal agent telling a Montana cattle farmer or an outback sheep operation that their herds must be culled for the good of the planet, or telling a farmer in Iowa that he can’t use fertilisers to boost his output.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/09/23/the-revenge-of-the-material-economy/
*************************************************North Sea licences to be sped up in race for more oil and gas
Regulators are preparing to slash red tape in the North Sea in a bid to speed up the development of oil and gas wells, as part of Liz Truss’ dash for new energy supplies.
The North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) is considering cutting the application period for its upcoming new licensing round to a minimum of 90 days, compared to typical rounds of roughly 120 days.
Companies hoping to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea must apply for a licence, with 100 new areas of sea set to be put up for bidding. Securing a licence does not necessarily mean a company can or will drill there.
The North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) is also trying to identify areas that can be developed quickly as they have known reserves and are close to existing pipes and rigs, which it will try to licence ahead of others.
Insiders cite the “urgency” of getting new supplies online amid a renewed focus on energy supplies across Whitehall.
Russia’s war on Ukraine continues to cause turmoil across energy markets, underlining the importance of securing future fuel supplies.
Cuts to Russian gas flows to Europe have pushed up gas prices for months, forcing the Government to step in and subsidise energy bills for households and businesses at an estimated cost of £60bn over the next six months.
New oil and gas discoveries generally take five or more years to get into production, though that is coming down. Speeding up the licensing process may make a limited difference on its own, but comes on top of other plans in Whitehall to cut bureaucracy. It also aims to send a signal to investors about the Government’s commitment to the basin.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Business Secretary, on Wednesday confirmed the UK's first North Sea licensing round since 2020 as he lifted the ban on fracking for gas.
One hundred new licences are set to be issued, thought to include prospects west of Shetland and northern North Sea. Whether they will all get taken up and developed is not clear.
Investment in the basin has fallen considerably over recent years, from about £16bn in 2014 to an expected £4bn this year. Supermajor oil companies have turned to newer prospects elsewhere in the world, while investors have also shifted away from the sector in favour of greener energy.
“Some people think the round will be oversubscribed; some think it will be undersubscribed,” said an industry source. “There may be a lot of companies taking protection acreage – just because you take a licence doesn’t mean you are committing to developing anything. I’m not sure it’s going to be very indicative of anything.”
On Friday, the Treasury named five North Sea fields in development among around 140 infrastructure projects it expects to benefit from cuts to red tape, as part of its new plan for growth. They include the controversial Cambo oil field west of Shetland.
Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng said on Friday: “The time it takes to get consent for nationally significant projects is getting slower, not quicker, while our international competitors forge ahead. We have to end this.
“We will streamline a whole host of assessments, appraisals, consultations, endless duplications, and regulations.”
Industry sources say they are encouraged by the Government’s recognition of the need for domestic oil and gas supplies, even as the UK moves towards a lower carbon economy in the push to net zero emissions.
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Environmentalism Is a Fundamentalist Religion
Today's climate activists resemble nothing so much as a religious movement, with carbon the new devil's spawn. The green movement is increasingly wedded to a kind of carbon fundamentalism that is not only not realistic but will reduce living standards in the West and around the world. And as with other kinds of religious fundamentalism, the climate hysteria is often overwrought and obviously so; a decade ago, the same activists predicted a planetary disaster by 2020 if the U.S. and China did not reduce their emissions by 80 percent—which of course never happened.
This approach is a losing one that reduces the effectiveness of the green lobby. What's needed to combat climate change is a pragmatic approach based on adapting to real and verifiable dangers. And this starts with environmentalists acknowledging the limits of our ability to curb emissions in the short run.
This is not to cede the fight. The reality is what we do in the West means increasingly little. Today's biggest emitters comes from China, which already emits more GHG than the U.S. and the EU combined, while the fast growth in emissions comes increasingly from developing countries like India, now the world's third largest emitter. These countries have developed a habit of blaming climate change on the West, then openly seeking to exempt themselves from net zero and other green goals. And the West's penchant for hyper-focusing on our own state or national emissions misses the reality of where the future problems are actually concentrated.
We aren't just missing the forest for the trees, though. Under the green lobby's current policies, our "war" against climate change is doomed to make things worse for most people, creating what economist Isabel Schnabel calls "greenflation." Higher prices for energy and food, worsened further by the war in Ukraine, are already are forcing countries to adopt massive subsidies for food and gas. In the developing world, billions now face immiseration, malnutrition or starvation. And green targets of zero emissions only make this situation worse.
Residents of rich countries will also suffer from the rapid adoption of current green policies that are focused almost entirely on wind and solar. Germany, for example, suffered the highest electricity prices in the world before Russia's war in Ukraine. In California, residents pay up to 80 percent above the national average for power. Reliance on wind power has made even Texas' grid vulnerable.
The real winners from green policies are not the birds and the bees but tech oligarchs, the uncompetitive U.S. auto industry, and Wall Street.
Given our limited ability to meaningfully reduce emissions, more attention should be placed on adapting, something we're actually good at. Since the beginning of the modern era, technology and science have been employed successfully to changes in temperature and precipitation. In the 1700s, people dealt with a colder climate by planting potatoes, which thrive in cooler weather. They also learned to use waterpower, wind and most critically fossil fuels, which made life bearable in the icy cities of the north and, later, with air conditioning, in the brutally hot south.
The Netherlands, where catastrophic flooding in the sixteenth century prompted an extensive expansion of coastal berms to prevent future floods, represents a classic example of successful adaptation. The Dutch even profitted from rising sea levels by opening new farmlands and expanding their exports to the global economy. Climate change was thus turned into a net plus.
Constructing proper adaptive polices may not be as emotionally satisfying as screaming about "climate criminals," but it could prove far less damaging to the masses of people and to the future of democracies. A regime run by the climatistas is likely to be very authoritarian, with many seeing in the COVID-19 lockdowns a "test run" for top-down edicts over how people live. In a sign of things to come, Switzerland is considering jail terms for those who try to stay too warm this winter.
For us to make progress on climate, the environmental movement needs to give up "utopian fantasies," writes Ted Nordhaus, a longtime California environmentalist, and "make its peace with modernity and technology." Instead of placing all bets on fundamentally intermittent, unreliable and economically problematic solar and wind energy, we should focus more on other options, from nuclear power to hydroelectric generation to continuing to replace coal with abundant, cleaner natural gas.
A smart adaptive policy would start with a serious assessment of costs and risks. If our worry is rising ocean level, we may look into duplicating the sea-wall like that has protected the Texas Port of Galveston for the past century. A gradual shift to more energy efficient vehicles—not just electric cars—would allow for competition from other new technologies like hydrogen, recycled gas, and hybrids. Investment in a more decentralized power system, desalination plants, and better storage of water also could help alleviate damage often traced to climate change.
Nothing short of the stability of the global political economy is at stake.
Where climate hysteria promises only gloom, class conflict and ever-increasing repression, an adaptation scenario allows humans to adjust to a warming world, even as we work to bring down emissions. Adaptation gives us a way of addressing climate change while retaining prosperity, creating opportunities, and showing that, rather than wage a scorched earth policy to save Gaia, we can learn instead to work within its limits.
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Australia: fishing being hijacked by Green extremist thinking
The fishing industry in Queensland has been hijacked by greenies and it’s sending professional anglers out of business.
The latest Palaszczuk Government decision has been masqueraded as some sort of “save the fish’’ campaign, suggesting unless fishing bans on Spanish mackerel stocks were made they wouldn’t survive.
Rubbish. Spanish mackerel stocks have been replenished spectacularly in recent years.
It’s a stitch up by a fisheries department that has been infiltrated by conservationists who’d rather eat salad than fish.
This move by Fisheries Minister Mark Furner is just another example of a government caving into the Green movement, which it is tied to at the hip.
Charter boat operator and Cairns Professional Game Fishing Association spokesman Dan McCarthy is furious but not surprised. “Minister Furner and the QLD Labor government seem to always back green extremist ideology over hardworking Queenslanders,’’ he said. “More small businesses are now looking at their life’s work and their futures being trashed to please urban greenies.
Mr Furner’s anti-fishing program has reduced recreational catch to close to zero at one fish per person or two per boat.
Mr McCarthy says it’s the dodgiest science he’s seen. “These include warnings from scientific experts who specialise in Spanish mackerel and fisheries management who have been very critical of the process,’’ he said.
“They’ve used a baseline biomass from 1911. You can’t make this stuff up.’
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26 September, 2022
The trouble with ‘bourgeois’ environmentalism
"The left needs to shake off its ‘bourgeois environmentalism’. It needs to distance itself from the ‘bourgeois environmental lobby’ and make the case for fracking and the building of new nuclear power stations".
Who do you think said this? Some contrarian commentator? A right-winger irritated by eco-loons? Nope, it was Gary Smith, the general secretary of the GMB trade union.
In an explosive intervention in left-wing discourse, Smith has accused Labour of a ‘lack of honesty’ and of ‘not facing reality’ on the energy question. We are living through a severe energy crisis and yet still Labour is sniffy about fracking and down on nuclear power, he says. All because it is in thrall to bourgeois greens who just don’t like industry and modernity very much.
Yes, climate change is a problem, he says, but we need energy. ‘We import a huge amount of fracked gas’ from America, he points out, so why don’t we just frack our own? We should get serious about developing nuclear power too, says Smith.
The GMB represents 460,000 working people, including the majority of workers at the UK’s nuclear-power stations. So it is logical – and good – that Smith would defend the nuclear industry. But his broader point is even more important.
‘(The) question’, he says, ‘is where is the electricity going to come from? We cannot do it by renewables and we cannot rely on energy imports.’ In short, we should get cracking – and fracking – on generating our own abundant sources of energy.
His killer comments concern the aloof, elitist tendencies of green activists. The renewables industry – ‘and many of those who espouse it in politics’ – have ‘no interest in jobs for working-class communities’, he says. He continues:
‘(We) should stop pretending that we’re in alliance with them. The big winners from renewables have been the wealthy and big corporate interests. Invariably the only jobs that are created when wind farms get put up, particularly onshore wind, have been jobs in public relations and jobs for lawyers.’
This is really important stuff. Smith has laid down a gauntlet to the modern left – are you on the side of working-class communities who benefit from well-paid jobs in the energy sector and from the domestic production of energy, or are you on the side of ‘bourgeois’ greens who are offended by any kind of human intervention in nature, whether that’s digging down for gas or unleashing the awesome power contained in uranium?
For far too long, Labour and left-wingers more broadly have been embracing the ideology of environmentalism. This has always struck me as utterly bizarre, because it seems pretty clear that green politics run entirely counter to the interests of working-class communities.
It is not a coincidence that environmentalism is the favoured political pursuit of the upper middle classes, posh influencers, privately educated columnists and even our new King (God save him). Because this anti-industrial worldview, this ideology that looks with such horror upon our mass consumer society, and the masses who partake in it, is the perfect vehicle for the expression of an older aristocratic disdain for modernity.
Environmentalism is a modern manifestation of the 19th-century Romantic reaction against the Industrial Revolution. Only back then it was more honest – it was all puffy-collared rich folk shocked that the serfs who once worked their lands were now headed into teeming new cities to work in factories. Today, the misanthropic scorn for modernity tends to be more deceitfully dressed up. It’s less ‘Who will toil my farmland now?!’ and more ‘What will happen to the air I breathe if millions of gammon are driving to Aldi every day?’.
Smith, who made these comments in an interview with the New Statesman, is dead right: ‘bourgeois’ is exactly the right word for modern environmentalism. It is alarming that the left has bought into all this middle-class green nonsense. I trust Spectator readers will forgive me for quoting Trotsky, but he did say that the task of left-wing revolutionaries was to bring about the increase of ‘the power of man over nature and the abolition of the power of man over man’. The modern left does the precise opposite of this. It seeks to shrink man’s power over nature and to boost man’s power over man, via new forms of authoritarianism and censorship. Please, right-wingers, I implore you: stop calling modern leftists ‘Trots’.
Gary Smith has done something incredibly important. He hasn’t only put pressure on Labour to think seriously about fracking and nuclear. He has also forced the left to ask itself why it has lost touch with working-class concerns and found itself so beholden to posh pursuits like ‘saving the planet’. A left that represents bourgeois interests is of no use to anyone. Except, of course, the bourgeoisie.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/the-trouble-with-bourgeois-environmentalism/
**************************************************NY governor's insane green power scheme likely to raise New Yorkers’ power costs
The green-energy movement has been very good for Wall Street, and not so good for consumers. Energy prices remain stubbornly high because environmentalists control vast swaths of government on both the federal and state levels mandating inefficient windmills, solar panels and other costly boondoggles.
Meanwhile, the Wall Street cash register keeps ringing. Money managers sell high-cost funds investing in environmental causes to unsuspecting buyers, and banks tap into businesses that receive green subsidies.
The latest example of Wall Street’s green cash machine at work: Blackstone’s investment in so-called “clean hydropower” that will bring this allegedly spotless electricity to New York City residents. The project is being sold as a clean and cost-efficient way to put a cap on our skyrocketing energy cost
The reality might be much different.
Gov. Hochul and the state Public Service Commission recently approved a plan that was 10 years in the making. A decade ago, Blackstone, a private-equity firm with $881 billion under management, made a hydro-transmission outfit known as Transmission Developers Inc., or TDI, one of its portfolio companies, with a grandiose vision of making it a player in the state’s utility market.
Now that’s playing the long game, and it gives you an indication of how the people at Blackstone smartly bet that the left’s obsession with everything green would be a huge business opportunity someday.
That day is now. TDI will soon be laying 338 miles of transmission cable lines from hydro stations in Canada through the floor of the Hudson River, all the way to New York City — to provide power to some 1 million homes when the project is completed in 2026.
It’s pretty complex stuff that is made even more daunting given the costs involved. Just a few months ago, the project was slated to run no higher than $4.5 billion. It’s now at $6.1 billion because of the immense amount of infrastructure and manpower necessary to carve cables through hundreds of miles of land.
But it’s happening. Financing terms, as Fox Business was first to report last week, will be announced later this month or next. They include Blackstone cobbling together bank loans to cover $5 billion in costs. Blackstone is responsible for another $1 billion, comprising the only equity stake in the transaction.
That’s a lot of money for a private-equity firm that has traditionally prospered by taking private companies in tech or hospitality, fixing their operations, and then selling them at a profit. But Blackstone thinks it’s well worth it. People there privately estimate they will easily double their investment in a couple of years.
One big reason Blackstone is so giddy is New York’s embrace of everything green — virtually guaranteeing it a huge payday. Recall former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s shuttering of the Indian Point nuclear plant and his plans to slash fossil fuels in the state to be replaced by green substitutes that Hochul has fully embraced.
That is leaving a huge hole in the state’s power grid. TDI and its transmission line — dubbed the Champlain Hudson Power Express, or CHPE — will become one of the only games in town as city dwellers face surging electricity costs amid shrinking supply.
Yes, a sweet return for doing God’s work on the environment, and I don’t begrudge Blackstone for cashing in. A spokeswoman said “this project . . . will deliver consistent, reliable, clean power to New Yorkers.”
My beef is with New York state officials who have failed to level with consumers over why they want to embrace a Rube Goldberg-like approach to energy when simpler solutions exist (i.e., clean and increasingly safe nuclear and, yes, natural gas, which is cleaner than coal).
First: There’s no guarantee that transmission lines running under the Hudson will work as envisioned and reach the near 100% efficiency of Indian Point. Also, the project might not be that environmentally sound. Hydro power sounds clean since it comes from water flowing through dams way up in Canada. Still, some green groups are raising a stink because the construction might endanger fish and cause pollution.
State officials are also not telling New York consumers that this whole effort might do little to stop the spiraling cost of energy, people with direct knowledge of the project tell me. Project supporters say while reducing CO2 emissions, CHPE will lower rates by $17.3 billion over 25 years. Sounds like a lot until you put it through a little logic: The “reduction” will be more than offset by massive increases in energy costs because of the inefficient green push, and Hochul won’t dare increase the supply of energy through more efficient nuclear power or she will face the wrath of the Democratic party base. Ditto for more natural-gas-created electricity.
Blackstone as a green savior also comes with a significant caveat: Hydro-Quebec, the Canadian utility supplying the power to TDI, is allowed to throttle some of its power supply during the winter months. Canadian winters are notoriously harsh and when power is needed closer to home, less energy might flow to New York City. (Hydro-Quebec says it can only throttle “capacity,” which it calls an “insurance product,” and will deliver power all year.)
As we all know, winters in New York are also no bargain. Thus this deal is no bargain — unless you’re Blackstone.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/24/hochuls-green-power-scheme-may-raise-new-yorkers-power-costs/
******************************************************UK: Net zero rules watered down in scramble to boost North Sea drilling
Jacob Rees-Mogg has significantly watered down net zero restrictions on North Sea oil and gas projects as ministers push for a drilling spree to boost Britain’s energy security.
In a victory for fossil fuel companies, a “checkpoint” that new developments must pass to get approval will no longer feature tests requiring regulators to take account of the carbon emissions they could generate.
The quiet shelving of the proposal comes as the Government prepares to open a new licensing round that could grant more than 100 permits for drilling in the North Sea.
Oil and gas companies said the decision would ensure “more control over our own economy” and make the UK “less dependent on other countries”.
But the revised checkpoint was branded a “sham” by green campaigners, who have called for a halt to all new oil and gas licences and threatened a barrage of legal action.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Business Secretary, said the need for domestic energy production had become more urgent after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent oil and gas prices soaring.
Under Liz Truss, the Government has vowed to make the UK energy independent by 2040.
Mr Rees-Mogg said: “To get there we will need to explore all avenues available to us through solar, wind, oil and gas production – so it’s right that we’ve lifted the pause to realise any potential sources of domestic gas."
The original “climate compatibility checkpoint” proposed last year included six tests that new developments would have to meet.
These would measure the oil and gas industry’s efforts to reduce the emissions created by extraction itself, the UK’s status as a net importer or exporter of energy, progress in moving to greener sources of energy and whether extracting fossil fuels from new developments was consistent with the UK’s commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
The fifth test would have specifically considered indirect carbon emissions – known as “scope 3” – created when companies further down in the supply chain burned the oil and gas that had been extracted.
And the sixth would have considered the “global production gap”, or whether the proposals for further drilling would prevent United Nations climate targets from being reached.
The Government said it had decided to scrap the fifth test because it “understands that North Sea operators do not control the final destination of crude oil that they produce, or how it is used once it arrives at its final destination”.
On the six test, it said: “The government accepts that producers globally will ultimately need to leave some oil and gas in the ground in order to meet global climate targets.
“However, in practice, global carbon emission reductions are far more likely to be attributable to reductions in global consumption of oil and gas rather than a proactive curtailment of global production, unilateral or otherwise.”
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Climate models ‘a global bank risk’
Bank regulators could cause “major systemic risk to the global financial system” if they continue to use climate models with little understanding of the uncertainty inherent in model projections, some of Australia’s most senior climate scientists have said.
The warning, published in the August issue of the journal Environmental Research, comes as efforts to assess risks to the financial system associated with climate change are growing.
Lead author Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, told The Weekend Australian: “Climate models are very valuable tools for many applications but they are not something I want used to decide investment strategies for my superannuation.”
The central issue is the difference between weather and climate and the inability of models to predict weather events at city scale.
Professor Pitman said attempts to use dynamical downscaling to get far higher resolution data was “excellent science but not science designed for the financial sector”.
Climate risk is a growing concern for financial market regulators and central banks.
In 2017 a group of central banks and financial supervisors formed the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS), to work out how to future-proof the global financial system from climate change.
The network hypothetical scenarios provide a common reference point for understanding how climate change (physical risk) and climate policy and technology trends (transition risk) could evolve in different futures.
The network’s climate-risk methods are rapidly emerging as the de facto standard.
The Reserve Bank has said it will use network-derived climate scenarios in its internal analysis of climate-related risks.
According to the Environmental Research paper, the network’s efforts commonly combine the use of integrated assessment models to obtain changes in global mean temperature and then use coupled climate models to map those changes on to finer spatial scales.
But the UNSW scientists, warn that deep uncertainty exists in climate projections, at local scales, that cannot be ignored.
The paper said “if all central banks use a methodology that is systematically biased, this could itself lead to major systemic risk to the global financial system”.
The main problem is that climate models are not designed to predict the weather.
“While it is understood that ‘weather’ (the day-to-day variability) and ‘climate’ (the average of the day-to-day variability over several decades) are not interchangeable, and despite acute risks being weather-related, ‘weather and climate’ tend to be combined when discussing material risks to the financial sector,” the paper said.
“Unfortunately, physical climate models do not represent weather-scale dynamical responses or how weather changes the interactions between the thermodynamic and dynamical responses to global warming reliably. This is linked, in part, to the spatial resolution used by the models (approximately 100 × 100km pixels) which are too coarse to capture weather-scale processes.
“Broadly, this introduces a serious limitation in determining future climate risk for the financial sector.
“Material extremes will almost always be weather-scale phenomena which are least skilfully simulated by existing global climate models.”
The paper said the current NGFS scenarios do not represent the range of plausible climate outcomes at a country level and most banks, insurers and investors are using these scenarios without fully accounting for uncertainty.
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25 September, 2022
IPCC's greenhouse narrative is becoming implausible, eminent climate scientist says
London, 23 September - A prominent climate scientist has warned that the picture of climate change presented in the IPCC's narrative is simplistic, ill-conceived, and undermined by observational evidence.
In a new discussion paper, Professor Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) points out that the official picture, focusing narrowly on carbon dioxide as a warming agent, becomes implausible when applied to the details of the climate system.
According to Lindzen,
"If you are going to blame everything on carbon dioxide, you have to explain why, on all timescales, temperatures in the tropics are extremely stable while those in high latitudes are much more variable. The IPCC's story is that small amounts of greenhouse warming near the equator are 'amplified' at high latitudes. But neither theory nor data support the idea of amplification."
Instead, says Lindzen, this pattern - of stable tropical temperatures and fluctuating ones in high latitudes - is mostly a function of natural processes in the atmosphere and oceans; in other words, changes in oceanic and atmospheric currents that transport heat poleward while drawing varying amounts of heat out of the tropics. These changes in transport affect the tropics, but they are not determined by the tropics.
"The changes in the earth’s so-called temperature are mainly due to changes in the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles – at least for major changes. The changes in tropical temperature, which are influenced by greenhouse processes, are a minor contribution."
Richard Lindzen: "An assessment of the conventional global warming narrative" (pdf)
Contact: Professor Richard Lindzen. e: rlindzen@mit.edu
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Global temperature hiatus may not have ended after all, new study suggests
The so-called hiatus in global annual average temperature between 2002 – 2014, once controversial to some but now well-established in the peer-reviewed literature, ended in 2014 with the start of a series of record-breaking El Nino events that spiked global temperature with a subsequent fall-back. Now a new study into the effect of man-made aerosol pollution adds to likely reasons for the end of the hiatus, and may point to lower estimates for future global warming.
An international research team writing in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, uses satellite data to show that concentrations of aerosol particles have decreased significantly since 2000. This is good news as cleaner air benefits health, but it also reduces particles’ which have a cooling effect on the terrestrial climate.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by 2019 the global temperature had risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels due to increasing greenhouse gasses from burning fossil fuels. At the same time the combustion of fossil fuels emit aerosols which cool our climate by reflecting sunlight and increasing the reflectivity of clouds.
Professor Johannes Quaas, a meteorologist at Leipzig University, and colleagues from Europe, China, and the US have published robust observational evidence of significant reduction of aerosol pollution and improved global air quality.
“We analysed data from NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. They have been providing comprehensive satellite observations of the Earth since the year 2000, measuring incoming and outgoing radiation, but also clouds and aerosol pollution. The latter has decreased significantly across North America, Europe and East Asia since 2000,” Professor Quaas said.
Although Dr Quaas and his colleagues say this new study stresses the urgent need for rapid and strong reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the reduction of the compensating effect of cooling aerosols can also be seen in another way.
The researchers estimate that the weakening of aerosol-induced temperature change between 2000 – 2019 is similar to that estimated by the IPCC’s AR6. Most of this weakening occurred post-2010 coincident with the end of the end of the so-called global warming hiatus period. It suggests that perhaps up to 60% of the global temperature increase since then is down to the reduction of global aerosols.
When taken together with a couple of super-strong El Nino events which temporarily drove up global temperature (see graph below), the new findings suggest that the global warming hiatus — clearly evident prior to 2014 — may not have ended yet. If NASA’s satellite data are confirmed, it would suggest that much of the very moderate changes in global temperature this century may have been driven primarily by cleaner air and naturally-occurring El Ninos.
The new observational data has strong implications for predictions of future global warming due to greenhouse gas forcing, suggesting it might be significantly lower than most models suggest.
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How African coal is saving Green Europe from freezing this winter
Dar es Salaam. The sleepy Tanzanian port of Mtwara mainly dealt in cashew nuts until late last year. Now it bustles with vessels loading up with coal, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drives a worldwide race for the polluting fuel.
Also Read: Mtwara port cargo volume up thanks to high exports of coal
Tanzania traditionally exports thermal coal only to neighbouring countries in East Africa; sending it further afield was out of the question, as it required trucking the material more than 600 kilometres from mines in its southwest to Mtwara, the nearest Indian Ocean port.
Europe’s crippling energy crisis has changed all that.
Prices for thermal coal, used to generate electricity, have leapt to record levels as a result of the war, which has led to many European countries losing access to vital supplies of natural gas and coal from their top provider Russia.
Buyers in Europe and beyond are now vying to pay top dollar for coal from often remote mines in places such as Tanzania, Botswana and even potentially Madagascar.
The resurgent coal demand, driven by governments trying to wean themselves off Russian energy while keeping a lid on power prices, clashes with climate plans to shift away from the most polluting fossil fuel.
“European players, after the Russian war, are going to any place where there is coal,” Mr Rizwan Ahmed, the managing director of coal miner Bluesky Minings said in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. “They are offering to pay very good prices.”
Commodities trader Cargill has seen a marked rise in coal shipments into Europe in recent months, said Jan Dieleman, president of Cargill’s ocean transportation division, with the company transporting 9 million tonnes of coal globally in the June-August period compared with 7 million a year earlier.
“Europe is competing with other buyers and the alternative is more expensive, which is gas,” said Dieleman. “Europe should be able to source coal and we will see very strong flows into Europe from Colombia, South Africa and even further away.”
Even though the window of opportunity may be short should the geopolitical winds shift, some countries with coal resources see the margins to be gained as too good a chance to miss.
Front-month physical thermal coal at Australia’s Newcastle port - a global benchmark - was trading at $429 a tonne on September 16, just below an all-time high of $483.50 in March and up from around $176/tonne this time last year.
Mtwara has seen 13 vessels load up with coal since November last year when it launched its first-ever coal shipment, according to a port official; the latest, the MV Miss Simona, a bulk carrier with 34,529-tonne capacity, docked last week, loaded up and sailed off to France.
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The West Mimics Mao, Takes a Green Leap Forward
By Helen Raleigh
The green movement’s rush to transform the energy economy while ignoring the laws of nature and economics calls to mind China’s ruinous Great Leap Forward. By 1957, Mao Zedong had grown impatient with his country’s slow industrial development relative to the West. He sought to transform China quickly from an agricultural society to an industrial powerhouse through forced industrialization and agricultural collectivization.
Steel production was a priority of the Great Leap Forward. Mao wanted China to surpass the U.K. in steel output within 15 years. Across the country, including in the village where my father lived, people tried to contribute to this goal by building small backyard furnaces. Each village had a production quota to meet, so everyone—including children and the elderly—pitched in. Using everything they could find to keep the furnaces burning, villagers melted down farming tools and cooking pots. These efforts yielded only pig iron, which had to be decarbonized to make steel. That was a process a backyard furnace couldn’t handle. The effort and resources were wasted.
The steel campaign diverted manpower from farming, even as the government ordered farmers to meet unrealistic quotas. Local party officials initially compelled farmers to experiment with ineffective and sometimes harmful techniques, such as deep plowing and sowing seeds much closer than usual. When these radical methods failed to increase yield and depleted the soil, local leaders had no choice but to lie to their political superiors about how much had been produced (a practice referred to as “launching a Sputnik”). Based on these false production figures, the state demanded villages sell more grain than they could spare. In a vicious circle, the more the local officials lied about their output, the higher the central government set the quotas. Farmers were forced to hand over every bit of grain they had, including the following year’s seeds, to meet the quotas. Resistance was violently suppressed.
The combination of lies, failed experiments, absence of labor and violent requisition practices led to famine. From 1959 through 1961, an estimated 30 million to 40 million Chinese people died from hunger. The Chinese government continues to refer to the famine as a natural disaster, pretending forces beyond their control were to blame for this man-made calamity.
Like Mao, today’s advocates for the green-energy revolution have become impatient with the slow progress made by renewable energy. Fossil fuels and nuclear power provide 80% of the energy the world needs. Despite years of subsidies, renewable energy is still unstable and unreliable, since the sun doesn’t shine at night and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Almost all renewable-energy power plants require either nuclear or fossil fuels as backups.
Rather than gradually phasing out fossil fuels while investing in renewable energy research and development, Western green-energy revolutionaries have launched their own version of the Great Leap Forward in Europe and the U.S. Today’s greens operate in a democratic system unlike Mao, but they have resorted to government coercion to replace fossil fuels (and nuclear power) with renewables on an aggressive deadline. The European Union is set to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030, and the Biden administration promises to “achieve a 50-52 percent reduction from 2005 levels in economy-wide net greenhouse gas pollution in 2030.”
One of the essential lessons from China’s Great Leap Forward is that catastrophic failures inevitably follow from politicians’ insistence on ignoring reason, logic, truth and economics. Europe’s current energy crisis, California’s continuing power outages and Sri Lanka’s food shortages are all warning signs. The Green Leap Forward has set humanity on a fast track to another man-made catastrophe.
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23 September, 2022
Important new paper challenges IPCC’s claims about climate sensitivity
A new paper reduces the estimate of climate sensitivity – the amount of warming expected for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations – by one third. The results therefore suggest that future global warming will be much less than expected.
The paper, by independent scientist Nic Lewis, has just appeared in the journal Climate Dynamics. It is an important challenge to the official view of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Lewis has critiqued a 2020 assessment of climate sensitivity by Sherwood et al., which strongly influenced the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, in 2021. Lewis commented:
"It is unfortunate that Sherwood et al.'s assessment of climate sensitivity, which underpinned the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, contained such serious errors, inconsistencies and deficiencies in its methods".
After correcting the Sherwood et al. methods and revising key input data to reflect, primarily, more recent evidence, the central estimate for climate sensitivity comes down from 3.1°C per doubling of CO2 concentration in the original study to 2.16°C in the new paper.
This large reduction shows how sensitive climate sensitivity estimates still are to input assumptions, and that values between 1.5°C and 2°C remain quite plausible.
Climate sensitivity represents the long-term global temperature increase caused by a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. There are different measures of climate sensitivity. Both the Sherwood and Lewis papers estimate the so-called ‘effective’ climate sensitivity, which reflects a new equilibrium state projected from centennial changes after a doubling of the CO2 concentration. This measure is considered the most relevant one for predicting climate change in the coming two centuries.
Climate sensitivity has always been a very important, but also highly uncertain, parameter in the climate change discourse. Earlier IPCC reports assessed its value as likely to be somewhere between 1.5°C and 4.5°C, with a best estimate of 3°C. However, prompted by the Sherwood paper, the 2021 Sixth Assessment Report moved that range upwards, to 2.5 to 4°C. Although for outsiders this might sound boring, for insiders it was a revolutionary change.
Lewis’s corrections and revisions lead to a likely range of 1.75 to 2.7°C, which is not only lower but is also much less uncertain than either the 2021 official IPCC assessment or the very similar Sherwood et al. estimate (2.6 to 3.9°C).
Nic Lewis is the lead or sole author of ten peer-reviewed papers on climate sensitivity. He was a participant in the 2015 workshop that kicked off the World Climate Research Programme project that led to the Sherwood et al. 2020 paper, but he was not a co-author of that paper.
Lewis commented:
"The substantial reduction in assessed climate sensitivity upon updating key input data suggests that the increase in the bottom of the climate sensitivity range in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report was unjustified".
Lewis’s paper is entitled 'Objectively combining climate sensitivity evidence’.
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Move over, Greta: new influencer makes nuclear cool
When she was 11, Greta Thunberg stopped eating for two months. Her heart rate slowed and her blood pressure dropped. She was anxious about climate change, an anxiety that would go on to spur a worldwide protest movement that culminated in her notorious “How dare you” address to the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit.
Thunberg is not alone in her anxiety. Ask any member of Gen Z today what they are afraid of and they will tell you: climate change. In a study of 10,000 young people in 10 countries, published in The Lancet in December last year, 59 per cent of young people surveyed around the world were found to be “extremely worried” about the climate, with 84 per cent at least moderately worried. More than 50 per cent felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless and guilty, and more than 45 per cent said their feelings interfered with their daily life and functioning.
One of the reasons this climate anxiety is so debilitating is because constructive messages that provide a feeling of hope are few and far between.
Which is one reason I’m excited about Isabelle Boemeke, the world’s first nuclear-power influencer. A former fashion model from Brazil, Boemeke is cutting through to a young audience with playful memes about the merits of nuclear power. It doesn’t hurt that she is gorgeous and funny. It also helps that her message is backed by a solid scientific consensus.
In a TED talk delivered this week, Boemeke describes how she became a nuclear power advocate after reading tweets from American planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, an advocate for nuclear. Porco piqued Boemeke’s interest as she assumed, like many of her peers, there was something wrong with nuclear power.
But after speaking to dozens of scientists and gathering their opinions on nuclear energy, she described receiving the same answer over and over again. The message was: 1) nuclear power is good; 2) we need it; and 3) people hate it. Why do people hate nuclear energy? Boemeke argues it’s because of a bad meme. A concept first developed by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, a meme is an idea that spreads through human cultures through imitation. Like a gene, a meme can self-replicate, mutate and respond to selection pressures. And like certain genes, memes can be advantageous or deleterious (like the genes for a heritable disease).
The meme that nuclear energy is bad is a particularly deleterious one for human civilisation. Created in the 1970s, the meme arose primarily out of a legitimate fear of global nuclear warfare. Groups such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and Peace Action opposed nuclear armament and testing.
But this concern mutated into hostility towards nuclear energy itself, a shift Boemeke argues was as irrational as opposing electricity on the basis of the electric chair. It is understandable many baby boomers harbour a deep-seated fear about nuclear energy. Yet for those of us born after the Cold War, the threat of nuclear war is much less salient.
Climate change, on the other hand, looms large as a profound existential threat.
Boemeke acknowledges that over the past 10 years, despite spending trillions on renewables, the world still gets only 8 per cent of its electricity from wind and solar. While Boemeke prefers renewables to fossil fuels, she is realistic in acknowledging that wind and solar are not enough. Her central argument is that nuclear power is humanity’s best hope for replacing fossil fuels.
On the issue of safety, Boemeke argues the problem is that nuclear accidents are rare but dramatic (attracting lots of attention), while deaths from fossil fuels are pervasive yet boring (attracting little attention). And she’s not wrong.
A 2018 study that measured global deaths from air pollution caused by the burning of fossil fuels such as wood and coal estimated that 8.7 million deaths occurred globally in 2018 alone. Boemeke points out that these statistics equate to 5.8 Chernobyls a day.
On the issue of nuclear waste, she tells her audience about the repositories being built deep underground in geologically stable locations in Finland and Sweden. On the issue of cost, she reminds us that solar energy was once considered to be too expensive but that we decided solar was “cool” and invested in it.
Boemeke’s vision is a challenging one but ultimately full of hope. “What if, instead of viewing nuclear power as destructive, we view it as a force for energy independence and even peace,” she asks. “What if this technology offers our best hope for the future? A future where wars aren’t funded by our addiction to fossil fuels. A future where energy is clean. A future where electricity finally makes its way to the 700 million people on earth who still don’t have access to it.”
The world has become accustomed to climate change activists who wish to take humanity backwards to a time of agrarian primitivism. From Extinction Rebellion fanatics who want to destroy capitalism, to Thunberg’s advocacy of the degrowth movement, too many environmentalists advocate for a strategy that would unwind our living standards and sentence the global poor to a destitute future.
A more positive vision of environmentalism is one that is not in conflict with capitalism, high living standards or technology. And it is one that is not in conflict with lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, either.
If Thunberg was the face of climate anxiety, Boemeke may become the face of climate hope. All she asks is that we help her spread the meme that nuclear energy is cool.
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Facing calls to resign, World Bank's Malpass changes answer on climate crisis
Under pressure to resign for declining to say whether he accepts the scientific consensus on global warming, World Bank President David Malpass said on Thursday it was clear greenhouse emissions are causing climate change and defended his record as bank chief.
Malpass sought to restate his views in a note to staff and an interview on CNN International, during which he was asked if he was a climate change denier. His views drew scrutiny after he refused to say during a public event this week whether he believes fossil fuel burning is warming the planet.
"I'm not a denier," Malpass told CNN International.
"It's clear that greenhouse gas emissions are coming from manmade sources, including fossil fuels, methane, the agricultural uses, the industrial uses, so we're working hard to change that," Malpass said.
Malpass has long faced criticism from climate advocates, who renewed calls on President Joe Biden to replace him. His remarks at a climate event hosted by the New York Times on Tuesday also rekindled concerns about the bank's lack of a deadline to stop funding fossil fuels. read more
Speaking onstage during a panel on climate finance, Malpass was asked several times whether he believes the "manmade burning of fossil fuels is rapidly and dangerously warming the planet." He tried to dodge the question before saying: "I don't even know. I'm not a scientist."
The president of the United States, the largest World Bank shareholder, traditionally nominates World Bank presidents, subject to confirmation by the bank's board. Former president Donald Trump nominated Malpass to a five-year term in 2019.
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Australian Greens: Don't bother us with facts
Are Greenies EVER interested in the facts?
Imagine being a political party that obsesses about identity-driven virtue signalling as the most important qualification for Parliament – and then not even being able to get that right.
The NSW Greens have been forced to apologise – not once, but twice – for seeking donations to elect the first Indigenous woman to State Parliament.
The Greens – whose commitment to solar panels and wind turbines is matched only by their obsession with race and gender – failed to notice that two Indigenous women had already been elected.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard on them. We live in an age where the chief medical officer cannot say for certain what a woman is.
Authenticating aboriginality is even more complicated, involving proof of ancestry and confirmation of acceptance by the Indigenous community.
Nevertheless, when identity politics is your raison d’etre you’d expect the Greens to be at least competent.
A fundraising email for Greens Upper House candidate Lynda-June Coe told supporters ‘there’s never been a First Nations woman in the NSW Parliament’.
Except that wasn’t true, and if the Greens devoted half as much time to studying history as they did to cultivating grievance, they would have known that.
In defence of the Greens, maybe we can agree it was their truth. But I digress.
The email went on to ask supporters to donate $25 so ‘we can change that’.
It took someone on Twitter to point out that Linda Burney, an Indigenous woman who is currently the Indigenous Affairs Minister, had served as the member of Canterbury for 13 years before entering federal politics.
The Greens issued an apology on Tuesday, but virtue-signallers-gonna-virtue-signal. So the apology went like this:
‘This email was incorrect and a correction and apology has been emailed this afternoon.
‘The email intended to note only that Lynda-June would be the first First Nations person in the Upper House of NSW Parliament.’
All was not lost. See what they did there? While voting Green wouldn’t result in the first First Nations woman in Parliament, it would result in the first First Nations woman in the Upper House of Parliament.
Except that wasn’t true either, so the Greens’ apology had about as much value as the Greens’ climate policy – net zero.
Auburn MP Lynda Voltz – whose grandfather was Indigenous and grew up on the St Clair Aboriginal Mission in Singleton – was elected to the NSW Upper House in 2007 and served for 11 years.
So the Greens, having already apologised, were then forced to apologise for the apology. Their economic policy was beginning to make more sense!
Greens NSW State Election Campaign co-ordinator Andrew Blake wrote:
‘Greens NSW unreservedly apologise to Ms Burney and Ms Voltz and acknowledge the work they have done for the people of NSW during their time in NSW parliament.’
In claiming that the Greens were the one group you could count on to recognise Indigenous women, the Greens had become the one group that failed to recognise Indigenous women.
Awkward.
All of which leaves the Greens with an enormous problem.
‘Help elect the third First Nations woman to the NSW Parliament’ doesn’t have quite the same appeal as their original virtue signalling strategy.
The Greens will now be forced to find another reason to recommend their candidate, or perhaps find a different candidate that belongs to a smaller identity group.
Alternatively, the Greens could just stick to policy (except they aren’t much good at that either)
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/greens-a-masterclass-on-how-to-fail-at-identity-politics/
***************************************September 22, 2022
California Turns To Jet Fuel-Burning Power Plant To Keep The Lights On
California’s Independent Systems Operator (CAISO), a large state grid operator, is requiring the Dynegy Oakland power plant, which burns jet fuel, to continue operating until the end of 2023 to stave off power outages, according to a Thursday news release.
CAISO’s board unanimously voted to extend the Dynegy plant’s “reliability must-run contract designation” (RMR), which contracts the plant to deliver power during peak demand periods so it remains available to be called into service during “grid emergencies,” according to the news release. However, in 2018, the operator accepted a plan to close and replace the jet fuel plant, which it is now relying on to prevent electricity shortages, with cleaner and more efficient alternatives, according to trade magazine Power Engineering.
The Oakland-based jet fuel-burning plant is required to operate under the RMR until Dec. 31, 2023, and will provide a total of 159.2 megawatts (MW) of electricity to meet local power demand.
“New grid facilities and the state’s progress on resource adequacy have lessened the need for RMR contracts in recent years, however, they remain a valuable backstop mechanism to provide energy when it’s needed to meet heightened summer demand,” the press release reads.
The plant generated 4,066 megawatt-hours of energy by burning only jet fuel in June, according to the Energy Information Administration. The state is currently facing severe energy shortages amid elevated grid demand as people move to cool their homes during a heat wave, and residents are being urged to curb energy consumption to prevent power outages, according to a Wednesday CAISO announcement.
“We are not responsible for policy or procurement, but jet fuel is not being considered in any of our transmission plans,” CAISO Senior Public Information Officer Anne F. Gonzales told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We don’t have visibility into resource types unless it affects our transmission or interconnection.”
CAISO will also keep three other petroleum and natural gas power plants open to offset some of the stress being placed upon its electrical grid.
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Uncool: Biden Pushes Senate to Ratify Treaty That Would Raise Cost of Air Conditioning
After a hot summer with utility bills rising, reasonable people would think that President Joe Biden would want to keep air conditioning costs low for Americans.
But the Senate is poised to vote on a climate treaty that would raise those costs and put yet another notch in the belt of Biden’s whole-of-government, whole-of-the-economy climate agenda.
In his first week as president, Biden issued Executive Order 14008, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.” Among the many regulatory actions it initiated, Biden’s order also directed his administration to pursue the Senate’s ratification of the Kigali Amendment to the U.N. Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.
What does a treaty on the ozone layer have to do with global warming? Very little, but it offers a convenient cover to slip in costly climate policy that would drive Americans’ air conditioning costs even higher.
The Kigali Amendment mandates a phasing down of hydrofluorocarbons—the most common and affordable compounds used in the U.S. and globally for air conditioning, refrigeration, building insulation, semiconductor manufacturing, and even fire extinguishers. Hydrofluorocarbons also emit greenhouse gases (more on that later) and consequently have become a target of global warming alarmists for elimination, regardless of the costs or benefits of doing so.
Think just of where Americans use air conditioning—in houses, cars, businesses, offices, hospitals, and data centers—and the scope of the Kigali Amendment becomes clearer, to say nothing of the other uses of hydrofluorocarbons.
Ratification of the Kigali Amendment is an unmistakable item on the Biden administration’s climate “to do” list. But it adds up to trouble for Americans.
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U.S. Farmers Grab the Lobbying Pitchforks as Greens Sow Costly New Reporting Mandates
Echoing conflicts from Sri Lanka to Canada to the Netherlands, tensions between farmers and green-minded government policymakers are building in the United States, where producers are squaring off against a costly proposed federal mandate for greenhouse-gas reporting from corporate supply chains.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in March proposed requiring large corporations, including agribusinesses and food companies, to report greenhouse gas emissions down to the lowest rungs of their supply chains as a means of combatting climate change, which environmental campaigners contend imperils the planet and life on it.
Reporting such indirect, “scope 3” emissions would require corporations to demand data on the use of fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, and other chemicals from small-scale farmers who say they lack the personnel and resources to comply. The challenge has been led by the powerful American Farm Bureau Federation and its state affiliates, whose representatives have met with SEC officials and organized their lobbyists in Washington.
“The farmers we represent are already heavily regulated at the state, local, and federal level but have never been subject to things concerned with Wall Street,” said Lauren Lurkins, director of environmental policy at the Illinois Farm Bureau. “Our farmers do not have a team of compliance officers or attorneys, and they don’t have a network of people to help them understand this. They really want to make sure they are growing crops and raising livestock and that [they] take care of the food supply.”
Farmer protests worldwide, including tractor blockades, come at a time of heightened global food insecurity created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a major wheat exporter, and other supply-chain disruptions from the pandemic. The restiveness darkens global economic prospects with recession a foregone conclusion to many as the Federal Reserve and other central banks tighten credit to tame high inflation.
The most dramatic consequences of a governmental push for sharp limits on farming occurred in Sri Lanka, where a 2021 fertilizer ban led to a massive reduction in crop yields, sparking starvation that helped bring down the government in July.
In the United States, the last major farmer protest was in 1979, when thousands of farmers – some on tractors – came to the Capitol in Washington to pressure the Carter administration to prioritize the lagging agricultural sector.
“If we start going down this path where regulators literally put farmers out of business as in Sri Lanka and the European Union with these climate decisions, you could see something like that,” said Jordan Dux, a lobbyist for the Nebraska Farm Bureau.
The downstream data reporting is required, the SEC claims, to determine larger, publicly traded companies’ green score, called an ESG, or environmental, social, and governance rating. The greenhouse gas measurements would be made at least partly in accordance with a set of standards developed in 2011 by an international consortium of environmental groups and corporations.
While the SEC released its first climate-related disclosure guidance in 2010, the new requirements are driven by the “elevation of climate issues,” Erik Gerding, the SEC’s deputy director of legal and regulatory policy in its division of corporation finance, said in a May webinar put on by the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, an international group formed to increase reporting by companies of climate-related information.
The proposed rule is not driven by the average individual investor, but rather investment giants managing large portfolios.
“Several institutional investors who have collectively trillions of dollars and investments under management have demanded climate-related information … because of the investor assessment of how climate change poses a risk to their portfolio,” Gerding said.
Most shareholders in the U.S. prioritize traditional corporate performance over environmental and other social welfare concerns, according to a Gallup study released in February. The poll queried its Gallup Panel with $10,000 or more in equities or bonds.
In another survey, investment professionals in the National Investor Relations Institute ranked an ESG score fourth in risk to a company behind performance, crisis, and management troubles.
Agriculture industry supporters contend the pending SEC rule will hinder an already struggling food supply chain, driving up prices while harming small communities reliant on agriculture, and forcing many small and mid-sized operations across the U.S. to close.
Gary Gensler, the Biden-nominated chairman of the SEC and a long time progressive, said in announcing the plan that “it would provide investors with consistent, comparable, and decision-useful information for making their investment decisions.”
But the plan drew “an extraordinarily high” number of substantive comments to the agency – around 14,000 – during the 60-day requisite comment period, according to Ropes & Gray, a law firm that compiled a report on public comments submitted to the SEC on the climate disclosure proposal. Because of that, the comment period was extended an extra 30 days and closed on June 17.
Agribusiness represented 20% of the total comments received by the SEC, mostly opposing the rule. The SEC was scheduled to adopt the plan in October, but it is expected to finalize the rule later due to the volume of comments and pleas for reconsideration.
Among the comments was the promise of litigation from a group of 24 Republican state attorneys general, which cited this year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA that a federal agency does not have the authority to regulate greenhouse gases.
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Sydney: no petrol or diesel cars, no gas, no future
New South Wales is in for an energy nightmare, and it makes no difference whether they vote Labor, Green, or Kean at the next election.
There is a plot underway to ban the purchase of all petrol and diesel cars and outlaw gas connections in new properties.
Too bad, I guess, when the next blackout comes along. I’ll be boiling water on the stove and having a hot dinner – the rest of the state will be staring at the darkness eating a packet of biscuits.
Before we get into the nonsense, I have a question for Labor’s Anthony Albanese.
If cutting our emissions in half by 2030 is the government’s chief priority, why has Labor decided to import 400,000 new people next year? How many services and privileges are the rest of us going to lose in order to maintain our existing standard of living and endure the emissions cut with all these additional ‘carbon units’ wandering around?
No really, Albanese. Are we saving the planet or pushing toward a ‘Big Australia’ which requires ‘Big Infrastructure’ for your union mates?
As far as anyone can determine, the Labor government is deliberately making the quality of life for Australians paper-thin so that we can be comfortably bundled up into a Treasury report.
The nonsense specific to NSW is coming out of the Committee for Sydney thinktank – also known as ‘a collection of people paid to sit around and make everyone’s lives miserable’.
The Decarbonising Sydney report reads more like a guide to return to the stone age:
Sam Kernaghan, the Committee’s Resilience Director, said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report (August 2021) had put an intense focus on what a warming world would look like, and the need to accelerate climate action.
‘We still have time, but not much,’ he said.
‘We can’t wait until 2050. We need to set ambitious and optimistic goals for 2030 – goals that show leadership and set the direction.
‘These actions will help Sydney play its part in combating Climate Change, but they’ll also provide benefits to our communities, economy, and environment – from improved air quality to lower household bills and more resilient energy grids that are better able to cope with the extremes of weather that we can expect to face in coming years.’
Utter fantasy. The more ‘green’ our grid goes, the higher our energy costs climb. This is a worldwide pattern that some call ‘teething issues with transition’ but the rest of name as ‘a permanent flaw’ that is opening like the Mariana Trench beneath our feet.
The Sydney Committee’s plan is to funnel as much money as possible into the billionaire renewables barons. If their business model is so successful, why are the increasingly poor public paying for it?
Why hasn’t anyone asked the Committee what they plan to do about global shortages of raw materials that currently prohibit the creation of their energy dreams?
It’s almost like the ‘thinktank’ didn’t ‘think’ about any of the real-world practicalities and instead prefers to prattle off dangerous idiocy from their gilded city cages without having any clue that their comfort comes off the back of coal, oil, and gas.
Their plan (if you can call it that) is to halve Sydney’s emissions by 2030. We could probably achieve that by putting a stop on the flight plans and unnecessary mansions of Sydney’s richest businessmen and politicians, but in a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ reality, only the peasants will suffer.
Banning gas to households is stupid and petty. The government is not doing it to ‘save the planet’ – they are doing it because they desperately need the gas reserves to prop up their failing renewables grid. They don’t want to come out and say that because it involves admitting that solar and wind require fossil fuels to work.
If politicians opened a few nuclear plants, citizens could have as much cheap gas as they wanted, instead, panic is setting on the energy industry as unreliable renewables shake grid stability to its core.
If you do any sort of real work in this country, banning petrol and diesel cars is going to be a catastrophe. The state government wants vehicles sales to be 100 per cent EV, but as of 2021, there were only around 10,000 in the whole state (because no one wants them).
As pointed out earlier, the world doesn’t have the resources to build these cars and Australia doesn’t have the power grid to charge them.
At the same time, NSW is pushing for solar on homes made from the same limited resources that EVs require. The natural consequence is what we are already seeing around the world – huge price increases in EVs and renwables. Their costs are growing in tandem and they have no price ceiling as resources dry up.
Owning your own car is soon to become a fantasy for the middle and working classes.
The report says as much. One of their priorities is a ‘shift to car-sharing’ that says:
‘In the future [of Sydney] people are going to use a car when they need one without having to own one. Car-sharing (as represented today by companies like GoGet) and ride-sharing (as represented today by companies like Uber) are the early examples. As the vehicle fleet evolves toward autonomous electric cars; it’s simply not going to make sense for people to own their own cars when they can summon one to get where they want to be at any time. The net result will be a massive gain of urban space as all of the street space and garages can be converted to new uses. Sydney should do everything in its power to support this transition.’
They also want to see a ‘dynamic road pricing plan’ to make your trip to the city even more unaffordable.
This will make the eco-fascists happy. Their goal is not to facilitate a green ‘change’ to our transport sector, it’s to strip cars away from the population to improve their Net Zero goals. While those penning these thinktank travesties live in the middle of the cities, half a block from civilisation, everyone else in the country is going to have to go out and find themselves a horse and cart – that is, provided you’re still allowed to own farm animals.
Where is the Liberal government? They are supposed to protect the people from this kind of selfish, reckless, bureaucratic garbage.
If you are wondering where all of this comes from, Kernaghan, the man behind the virtuous plan, worked with the Chief Resilience Officers ‘across Australia, New Zealand and across Asia to develop and implement comprehensive city resilience strategies as part of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Network’.
Most of the links for the 100 Resilient Cities Network no longer go anywhere, with their webpages long-dead, just like our cities will be if we keep pursuing the thought bubbles of Utopian ideologues.
http://spectator.com.au/2022/09/sydney-no-petrol-or-diesel-cars-no-gas-no-future/
***************************************September 21, 2022
Don’t Believe the Hype About Antarctica’s Melting Glaciers
Alarming reports that the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking misrepresent the science under way to understand a very complex situation. Antarctica has been ice-covered for at least 30 million years. The ice sheet holds about 26.5 million gigatons of water (a gigaton is a billion metric tons, or about 2.2 trillion pounds). If it were to melt completely, sea levels would rise 190 feet. Such a change is many millennia in the future, if it comes at all.
Much more modest ice loss is normal in Antarctica. Each year, some 2,200 gigatons (or 0.01%) of the ice is discharged in the form of melt and icebergs, while snowfall adds almost the same amount. The difference between the discharge and addition each year is the ice sheet’s annual loss. That figure has been increasing in recent decades, from 40 gigatons a year in the 1980s to 250 gigatons a year in the 2010s.
But the increase is a small change in a complex and highly variable process. For example, Greenland’s annual loss has fluctuated significantly over the past century. And while the Antarctic losses seem stupendously large, the recent annual losses amount to 0.001% of the total ice and, if they continued at that rate, would raise sea level by only 3 inches over 100 years.
Many fear that a warming globe could cause glaciers to retreat rapidly, increasing discharge and causing more rapid sea-level rise. To get beyond that simplistic picture, it is important to understand how glaciers have flowed in the past to predict better whether they might flow faster in the future.
Two recent studies reported in the media focus on the terminus of glaciers—i.e., where the ice, the ocean and the ground come together. One study used an underwater drone to map the seabed at a depth of 2,000 feet, about 35 miles from the terminus of the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica. Detailed sonar scans showed a washboard pattern of ridges, most less than 8 inches high. The ridges are caused by daily tides and serve as a record of where ice touched the seabed in the past. Researchers could read that record to infer that at some time in the past the glacier retreated for half a year at more than twice the fastest rate observed between 2011 and 2019.
The cause of the specific event at the Thwaites Glacier remains unknown, in part because the time of the rapid retreat hasn’t yet been determined. It likely happened more than 70 years ago, if not several centuries ago. But the media goes with this angle: “A ‘doomsday glacier’ the size of Florida is disintegrating faster than thought.” A correct headline would read: “Thwaites Glacier retreating less than half as rapidly today as it did in the past.”
A second study tested the idea that freshwater from the melting of one glacier could be carried by currents along the shore to accelerate the discharge of nearby glaciers. Because global climate models are insufficiently detailed to describe the ocean near the coast, researchers constructed a special model to prove out their idea. If ocean currents can connect the discharges of distant glaciers, that would add to the complexity and variability of changes in the Antarctic ice sheet.
Under scenarios deemed likely by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a connection between ocean currents and discharge would increase the overall discharge rate in one region of the continent by some 10% by the end of the century. But to emphasize the idea being tested, the modelers used human influences almost three times larger. Even though that fact is stated in the paper, reporters rarely catch such nuance, and the media goes with headlines such as “Antarctic Ice Melting Could Be 40 Percent Faster Than Thought” with the absurd statement that “a massive tsunami would swamp New York City and beyond, killing millions. London, Venice and Mumbai would also become aquariums.” A more accurate headline would read: “Ocean currents connecting antarctic glaciers might accelerate their melting.”
These two studies illustrate the progress being made in understanding a dauntingly complex mix of ice, ocean, land and weather, with clever methods to infer past conditions and sophisticated computer modeling to show potential future scenarios. These papers describe the science with appropriate precision and caveats, but it is a shame that the media misrepresents the research to raise alarm. That denies the public the right to make informed decisions about “climate action,” as well as the opportunity to marvel at the science itself.
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Biden's energy policies encourage global instability
When it comes to energy independence – a key component of global stability – the America of 2022 could learn a lot from the America of 1942.
In that year, American energy dominance powered the Allied war effort of World War II, making production substantially cheaper and producing an abundance of war material: aviation fuel, gasoline, synthetic rubber and more. America would produce seven times as much aviation fuel as all the other major belligerents combined. She outproduced Japan in coal by more than a 10-to-1 margin and pumped 700 times as much oil.
In short, American energy was a cornerstone of Allied victory.
More recently, renewed American energy independence, which was becoming energy dominance, was a pillar of geopolitical stability. Increased American production created lower prices, which acted like a choke collar on hostile nations that rely on energy exports to fund their war machines. Simply put, Russia did not invade its neighbors when oil and natural gas prices were low and American energy exports were increasing.
People often underestimate the degree to which energy markets impact military exercises and excursions, something that the Greatest Generation knew intimately.
The Nazi war machine and the Imperial Japanese juggernaut were starved for energy by the Allies, who themselves were backstopped by a burgeoning American energy industry. Fast forward 80 years, and Germany is again being strangled by losing energy imports, while the rest of Europe is being threatened by the Soviet Union’s hostile descendant.
When America is producing affordable and abundant energy not only for herself but for her allies around the globe, then Columbia’s enemies think twice before stepping out of line. American energy dominance is not only pro-American but pro-peace. Inexpensive American energy is a key pillar to geopolitical stability.
But that pillar was knocked down and the subsequent stability rent asunder by President Joe Biden’s “green” energy boondoggles and anti-energy policies. Canceling pipelines, imposing additional taxes and regulations on coal, oil, and natural gas, promising to end these three industries in just a few years, and stonewalling new leases for drilling are just some of the ways he has hamstrung one of America’s greatest strategic assets.
America cannot even keep the lights on here at home, with multiple states experiencing severe energy shortages in recent days. That projects weakness, not strength.
By abdicating the global energy throne, America has left a power vacuum, which China, Russia, Iran and others are thrilled to fill. This has left our supposed European allies in a bind, as Russia's Vladimir Putin now has them over an oil barrel, with the ability to shut off the continent’s energy until sanctions are lifted. Germany, the largest economy in Europe, is facing a catastrophic shortage of modern fuels, and Germans are searching online for firewood at a rate that is a multiple of previous records.
German industry will be brought to a grinding halt from this energy shortage and the economy forced to its knees. The industrial incapacitation that took years of American and British bombing campaigns and millions of Soviet casualties is now being accomplished much faster and less bloodily by simply shutting off Russian energy exports.
Energy is not just a domestic policy issue, but a foreign policy requirement. Nations that are energy reliant are vulnerable while those that are energy dominant control spheres of influence. America would likely not be sending arms to Europe if she had already been sending tankers and freighters of affordable, reliable energy. But such exports presume a robust domestic energy industry capable of exceeding demand at home and projecting power abroad.
Biden clearly never learned this lesson from history. Now would be a good time to start.
https://www.arcamax.com/politics/opeds/s-2725272
**********************************************EV Owners Sick and Tired of Allegedly Being Lied to About Their Cars: Massive Lawsuit Filed Against Tesla
Tesla has been slapped with a class-action lawsuit. The suit claims the electric car company has misled the public regarding its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving technology.
The law firm filing the suit issued a news release on Wednesday stating that many customers paid thousands of dollars for the software believing that it would make their vehicles fully autonomous.
However, “Tesla has yet to produce anything even remotely approaching a fully self-driving car,” said Briggs Matsko, the suit’s named plaintiff, according to Reuters.
“Since at least 2016, Tesla has misleadingly and deceptively marketed its supposed autopilot and full self-driving technology as either already fully functional or just around the corner,” the news release said.
The law firm pointed to a video demonstration published on Tesla’s website back in 2016, which declared that “the person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”
The New York Times later reported that the demonstration wasn’t a realistic representation of real-world use and that the car had crashed into a barrier during the making of the video.
The release also said Tesla’s “self-driving” technology has caused people to lose their lives and suffer serious injuries.
In fact, there have been enough deaths and injuries that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board and other regulating bodies have opened investigations into the matter, the release said.
In addition, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has filed a complaint against Tesla accusing the company of making false and misleading statements about its Autopilot and FSD technology.
If the state DMV’s claims are found to be valid, Tesla’s vehicle dealer and manufacturing licenses could be revoked and the company required to pay restitution.
Matsko said Tesla’s motive for misrepresenting its technology was to “generate excitement” about its vehicles.
It was also allegedly intended to draw investors, increase sales, avert bankruptcy and inflate Tesla’s stock price so that the company would appear to be a “dominant player” in the electric vehicle industry.
Additional problems that Tesla owners have reported in connection to the “self-driving” software include vehicles failing to make routine turns, running red lights and veering into oncoming traffic.
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Australia has become a nation ruled by fools
We have surrendered power over every aspect of our lives and industry to fifteen debating chambers in eight ruling cities. These assemblies are controlled by lawyers, unionists, centralists, green dreamers, power seekers, and tax consumers.
Their direct cost alone is horrendous.
There are 837 politicians (ignoring local government). Each has a salary (say $200,000), travel and office costs (say $150,000 per year), and staff costs (say $200,000) – a billion here, plus a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
Now add all the state and federal governors, the cabinets with their limos and press corps, eight armies of tax collectors, and the accountants and lawyers trying to protect taxpayers from them. Then there are the building costs with each citadel probably getting its red-and-black flag (the NSW version flag cost $25 million).
But salaries and perks are a minor part of their real cost. The killer costs are incurred when they use direct investments or fiddle the rules on taxes and subsidies to chase impossible green dreams.
Most of our 837 politicians and their servants are obsessed with Net Zero and, learning from the Covid lockdowns, they now dream of Climate lockdowns.
Devoid of engineering talent or economic common sense they presume to design our electricity network (but they ban emissions-free nuclear power while planning the destruction of the old reliables, coal, gas, and hydro). Although the green-infected electricity grid is struggling to meet current demands, they ‘plan’ to add even greater loads to turn water into hydrogen, push water uphill, charge giant batteries and power subsidised fleets of electric vehicles.
Pretending to save the bush, their green mandates and subsidies are replacing useful grasslands and valuable resources of hardwood, softwood, mulga, and saltbush with bird slicers, roads, poles, wires, plastic, metal, concrete, and glass as the new green energy landscapes. Then they plan to use this intermittent low-density green energy to produce hydrogen which can never recover the energy used to produce it, and also consumes nine tonnes of fresh water for every tonne of hydrogen produced.
Ignorant of the realities of food production, they turn grasslands into havens for weeds and pests, and lock-the-gates to explorers, farmers, foresters, and fishermen. They think we can have drought and flood mitigation without dams, timber without foresters, minerals without mines, and food without farmers and fishermen.
They reward people who won’t work and tax those who do. Ignorant of the benefits of federalism, they strive to destroy federalism by inventing a ‘National Cabinet’, and run endless centralising summits, enquiries, and talkfests. Soon, the veto of The Voice could make anything and everything impossible!
A cold hungry winter is about to show Europe the deadly dangers of listening to green dreamers. It is surely time for Australia to withdraw from foreign entanglements like the Paris treaty, and chop Canberra’s green tentacles, limiting its duties to defence, foreign affairs, and maintenance of free trade (exactly as our founders intended).
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/ruled-by-fools
***************************************20 September, 2022
Angry Tesla Owner Found Out He'd Have to Pay $26,000 to continue using his 9 year old car
Mario Zelaya, a Canadian ax-thrower, entrepreneur and Tesla owner, told TikTok viewers in a series of now-viral videos starting Aug. 29 that his “piece of trash” 2013 Tesla Model S — which cost him $142,000 Canadian when new — now required a new battery that would cost him approximately $26,000 to replace.
Worse still, without a battery, he was having trouble selling the car because he couldn’t even open a door to get inside the vehicle.
Zelaya, in a video posted to TikTok that has garnered over 660,000 “likes,” explained that he purchased the Tesla new in 2013. In it, he described an alleged design flaw: “They made it so the air conditioning condenser unit dumps all the water on top of the battery, so my battery is full of water, which is why it needs a new one. And now they’re saying it’s not covered under warranty, even though it started happening during the warranty period.”
According to Fox Business, Zelaya said, “I got Transport Canada involved, and they actually did an investigation on the car. Not only did they do an investigation on this car, they’re gonna be doing one that Tesla doesn’t realize is coming up.”
“Tesla’s trying to sweep it under the rug,” he said. “They won’t give them any explanation of why their battery died.”
Zelaya argued that when Tesla vehicles are serviced, the battery is not inspected. He said that Tesla has no incentive to do so, according to Fox Business.
Acknowledging that he was one year beyond his warranty, Zelaya told viewers that he wanted to sell the car and had a $20,000 offer, but was struggling. His ownership papers were in the car and he couldn’t get into it.
In the end, he would have to spend $30 for new papers before he could sell the car.
“I’ll never buy another Tesla again,” Zelaya said. “That’s the long way of me saying stay the (expletive) away from Teslas. They’re brutal cars, brutal manufacturing, and even worse, they’re a 10-year-old company.”
Fox Business wrote that in a video update, Zelaya said he finally sold the car and someone was going to pick it up from his home. The buyer is allegedly shown taking off the front bumper of the electric vehicle and charging it.
“That’s going to be the end of my Tesla journey. It’s out of my life. Keep it out of yours,” he said.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/tesla-owner-experienced-ev-nightmare-found-pay-26000-unlock-car
***********************************************Electric vehicles might be booming in cities but diesel remains king on the land
How do you run a battery-powered machine for 24 hours straight?
While passenger car manufacturers are rapidly moving to electric power to meet emissions regulations and market demand for cleaner urban transport, machinery dealers in Western Australia are raising concerns that similar pressure to switch their equipment to electric will prove unworkable in remote and regional areas.
Diesel still powers the majority of machinery in the state's agricultural sector, and dealers do not see that changing anytime soon.
Dealers and buyers of agricultural equipment also are concerned about what will eventually replace the current generation of conventionally powered tractors and headers sourced from US and European manufacturers.
"It will be determined by what happens overseas," Farm Machinery and Industry Association of WA executive officer John Henchy said.
"Because Australia is a relatively small market, manufacturers aren't going to develop something specifically for us, so it just depends on what happens overseas."
Electricity supply a challenge
Mr Henchy said the state's agricultural sector was unique in many respects.
Tractors, headers and self-propelled sprayers around Western Australia operate around the clock during seeding and harvesting, something existing electric systems would not currently be able to do.
"The size of our operation, particularly in WA, where we have big farms, there are distance challenges, and critically, electricity supply challenges," he said.
"So overseas might develop something but it's got to be compatible with the way we do things in WA."
Athol Kennedy, from an Esperance machinery dealer, said there were no signals from government about the future of fuel in agriculture.
"We hear and see nothing to guide us," he said. "I don't think they have a plan for us."
Mr Kennedy said there were concerns about using batteries in agriculture, particularly given 24-hour working cycles and pressure on regional power grids.
"I cannot see how we in Australia can use electricity to run our agricultural sector," he said.
"Our infrastructure through the whole of WA wheatbelt is struggling to run our houses and our workshops."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-19/future-of-farming-fuels-electric-vehicles-diesel/101452356
************************************************The failures that led to the UK’s energy crisis
Our energy market has not looked this bleak since the Winter of Discontent in the 1970s, a period seared into the memories even of those of us that are too young to actually remember it. For the past year, the chaos has been building, with rising gas and electricity prices, scores of failing suppliers, subsidies for just about every part of the market, and the prospect of, if not blackouts, then energy rationing this winter.
We’re told that the market is ‘broken’, that energy companies are ripping us off with profit maximising behaviours, that price formation in the wholesale markets is ‘frankly ludicrous’, and that Putin’s evil war in Ukraine is largely to blame. The public is both mystified and appalled, seeing ever more expensive bills, grappling with the fallout of their suppliers going bust, and hearing about the possibility of rationing or even blackouts.
So how did we get here and what can be done about it?
There are two things that have coincided to create the current situation: a set of long-term policy failures which are now crystallising, and the war in Ukraine – the timing of which may well be linked to the growing vulnerability of several European countries which have pursued poorly thought out energy policies. Putin can identify these policy failures as much as any other market observer.
When we began our energy transition away from fossil fuels the government correctly identified three conflicting requirements for the electricity system which would need to be held in balance: security of supply, affordability and de-carbonisation, which came to be known as the ‘energy trilemma’. At the time, we had a degree of over-capacity in the market which was a hangover from the last days before privatisation and the 1990s ‘dash-for-gas’. We also had been enjoying a prolonged period of energy prices which were both low in value and volatility.
This encouraged a false sense of security: de-carbonisation and the pursuit of net zero became the priority, and the trilemma was neglected. In 2018 then Business Secretary, Greg Clark declared that the trilemma was over, and the government, cheered on by the other main political parties, pressed ahead with the deployment of intermittent renewable generation and allowed conventional power stations running on oil, coal, gas and nuclear to close. Over time that spare capacity disappeared, meaning that now, at times when wind generation is low, we can struggle to meet demand even in the summer when we use much less electricity (while winter demand might be around 55 GW, in summer it is nearer to 35 GW).
At the start of the transition, all kinds of assumptions were made along the lines of ‘it will always be windy somewhere’. It was also believed that energy imports together with battery storage would smooth out the intermittency problems with wind and solar power. Unfortunately, experience has shown us that this is not the case. There can be low wind across wide areas, and low wind can persist for days or even weeks – last September there was low wind output across Northern Europe for about three weeks. Of course, there is also no solar power at all at night-time, and the sun sets before there is peak energy in the evenings in winter.
Imports are proving less reliable than expected as well. Two countries in Europe that have typically enjoyed electricity surpluses which they export to Britain and elsewhere, France and Norway, are both experiencing problems that are likely to restrict their ability to provide electricity this winter. Half of the French nuclear fleet is offline following the identification of problems in the cooling circuits of the reactors, while Norwegian reservoir levels are now so low that its ability to export hydro power is at risk.
Battery storage is also not up to the task – the total amount of grid connected batteries currently deployed can back up wind power for 10 to 15 minutes, which is clearly inadequate when there is little wind for days or weeks.
The solution to this problem is to build more nuclear power and to ensure that there are enough gas power stations to fill the gap. The government has belatedly recognised this and has said in a recent consultation that more unabated gas (i.e. without carbon capture technology) will need to be built in the medium term to support security of supply. It is also trying to deliver new nuclear, but again it is making poor choices, relying exclusively on EDF to deliver a new type of reactor that it has spent 20 years trying to build and has yet to deliver in Europe (there are two similar reactors in China, but the lack of transparency over their costs and construction methods means little comfort can be drawn from them).
Earlier this month the Prime Minister unveiled a new energy support package to help both domestic and business consumers with the rising cost of energy. She also stated her renewed commitment to the energy trilemma, announcing two new reviews – one into the regulatory structures needed to deliver long-term energy security and affordability and another into ensuring that the 2050 net zero target is achieved in a way that is ‘pro-business and pro-growth’.
Britain is to rediscover its enthusiasm for oil and gas, which will boost income to the Treasury (something which is much needed to fund the new support package). It is also planning to build new nuclear reactors, with a commitment to meet 25 per cent of electricity demand through nuclear power by 2050. Alongside an accelerated deployment of green technologies, there is a new ambition for the country to become a net energy exporter by 2040.
Energy is vital to our society, but it is also a complicated system. The operation of gas and electricity markets is closely linked with physics, particularly in electricity where a lack of storage means that supply and demand must be closely matched in real time. We expect our lights to come on as soon as we press a switch, regardless of how many other people are also pressing their switches at the same time. But this becomes increasingly difficult when the supply of electricity is based on the weather, with each gust of wind or passing cloud affecting output.
It is essential that policymakers get back to basics and remember that each component of the energy trilemma is important, and that none can be ignored if we are to avoid cold, dark and expensive winters. For too long our energy security has been neglected, and we are going to be paying the price for this in the months to come.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/the-failures-that-led-to-the-uks-energy-crisis/
******************************************************The picture that shows what it's REALLY like to have an electric car
The alarming photo, taken in Millers Point, in Sydney, exposes the potential safety issues raised by charging electric vehicles for some drivers - a problem only set to get worse as ownership increases.
The makeshift charging set-up involves a a yellow extension lead hanging off an upstairs balcony, then looped around the branch of a tree and plugged into a powerboard.
From there another lead lays in some bushes and in a gutter before being plugged into the Tesla.
The photo was posted by 2GB's Ben Fordham on his Facebook page, who described it as 'plate of spaghetti' and argued that makeshift set-ups like this are an 'accident waiting to happen'.
Fordham claimed the 'bizarre' scene raises the question of whether the infrastructure exists for people who don't have garages, or designated parking spots, to own EVs.
The man who took the photo told Fordham it looked like a scene from a third world country. 'I was walking down the street to work and couldn't believe my eyes
The radio host said a pattern is emerging of people trying to get involved in the EV 'revolution' but facing 'roadblocks'.
Those include people who don't have off-street parking to charge their car at night.
Fordham said scenes such as the 'bizarre' scene in the photograph will be even more common when millions of EVs are on the roads.
'Tangled power lines from people's houses - hanging along fences and dangling down trees. 'It's something you'd expect in a third world country.'
Even when charging stations are attached to power poles demand for access would cause problems, Fordham said.
NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean responded to the photo, saying 'fast charging infrastructure' would avoid owners having to take such drastic measures.
Fordham also claimed power supply would also be an issue. He said with coal fired power stations set to close the already overloaded system might not cope with millions of EVs charging at once.
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19 September, 2022
This should be the absolute peak of hurricane season—but it’s dead quiet out there
To state the obvious: This has been an unorthodox Atlantic hurricane season.
Everyone from the US agency devoted to studying weather, oceans, and the atmosphere—the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration—to the most highly regarded hurricane professionals predicted a season with above-normal to well above-normal activity.
For example, NOAA’s outlook for the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, predicted a 65 percent chance of an above-normal season, a 25 percent chance of a near-normal season, and a 10 percent chance of a below-normal season. The primary factor behind these predictions was an expectation that La Niña would persist in the Pacific Ocean, leading to atmospheric conditions in the tropical Atlantic more favorable to storm formation and intensification. La Niña has persisted, but the storms still have not come in bunches.
All quiet
To date the Atlantic has had five named storms, which is not all that far off "normal" activity, as measured by climatological averages from 1991 to 2020. Normally, by now, the Atlantic would have recorded eight tropical storms and hurricanes that were given names by the National Hurricane Center.
The disparity is more significant when we look at a metric for the duration and intensity of storms, known as Accumulated Cyclone Energy. By this more telling measurement, the 2022 season has a value of 29.6, which is less than half of the normal value through Saturday, 60.3.
Perhaps what is most striking about this season is that we are now at the absolute peak of hurricane season, and there is simply nothing happening. Although the Atlantic season begins on June 1, it starts slowly, with maybe a storm here or there in June, and often a quiet July before the deep tropics get rolling in August. Typically about half of all activity occurs in the 14 weeks prior to September 10, and then in a mad, headlong rush the vast majority of the remaining storms spin up before the end of October.
While it is still entirely possible that the Atlantic basin—which includes the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea—produces a madcap finish, we're just not seeing any signs of it right now. There are no active systems at the moment, and the National Hurricane Center is tracking just one tropical wave that will move off the African coast into the Atlantic Ocean in the coming days. It has a relatively low chance of development, and none of the global models anticipate much from the system. Our best global models show about a 20 to 30 percent chance of a tropical depression developing anywhere in the Atlantic during the next 10 days.
This is the exact opposite of what we normally see this time of year, when the tropics are typically lit up like a Christmas tree. The reason for this is because September offers a window where the Atlantic is still warm from the summertime months, and we typically see some of the lowest wind-shear values in storm-forming regions.
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Renewables will save us a billion trillion pounds! Yeah, right
As readers here know, I keep a close eye on the cost of renewables, and have published papers on both offshoreand onshorewind, showing that the financial accounts of operators in both sectors show no sign of significant cost reductions. It’s not just me either: my findings closely match those of the energy economist, Professor Gordon Hughes, the energy analyst Kathryn Porter, and an important paperin the peer reviewed literature.
So the idea that renewables are going to save us lots of money is, at first sight, pretty implausible. I decided to take a look at the underlying paper, which comes from the Martin School, at Oxford University.
The methodology is, in essence, extremely crude: it involves extrapolating historic cost trends out along an expected curve (Wright’s law, apparently), while jazzing it up a little with what they call a stochastic methodology, which seems to just generate an uncertainty window. The latter details are, for the purposes of this post, largely irrelevant, however – it’s all gazing at tea-leaves in my opinion. What interested me was that they were generating predictions of future cost reductions from historic falling cost trends. As already noted, lots of people find no such cost reductions in windfarm accounts (and in fact, I have some limited data on solar, which tells a similar story).
Where are the Oxford Martin team getting this data from? Buried deep in the supplementary information to the paper, I learned that it came from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA). I have been trying to get to the bottom of IRENA’s claims of cost reductions for some time, and recently worked out what I think is the underlying reason.
It’s all to do with the way currency is handled. IRENA’s work is all demoninated in USD (and as a result, so is the Oxford Martin paper). But the problem of using a single currency is that the final cost figures will be affected by any currency fluctuations. And boy, have there been some big currency fluctuations in the last ten years. In particular, against the dollar, sterling has depreciated by 30%, the Euro by 25%, the Yen by nearly half, and the Brazilian Real by two thirds. When reporting in USD the costs of operators in any of these places, any reduction of less than these values represents an underlying increase in costs. Take the UK for example. According to IRENA, onshore wind costs fell from 0.086c/kWh in 2010 to 0.071c/kWh in 2019
But during that time, the exchange rate went from roughly 1.60 to 1.28, so in Sterling terms the equivalent figures are 5.3p and 5.5p – a small increase! This is exactly the situation I reported for UK onshore windfarms in my paper at the start of this year (Their absolute figures are much lower than mine though, presumably because they are using different assumptions to me).
This is clearly going to completely undermine IRENA’s overall figures for renewables cost trends. The UK, the Eurozone, Japan and Brazil between them have a very significant proportion of the world’s renewables. The only major centre for renewables that doesn’t seem to have suffered a depreciating exchange rate against the dollar is China, for which, interestingly, IRENA doesn’t detect much of a reduction in wind costs and for which the solar trend seems to have bottomed out
It didn’t have to be like this, of course. IRENA could have created some sort of an index (1990 = 100, or something) which would eliminate the currency effect. But they didn’t, and now the Oxford Martin School guys have picked it up without understanding it, and have extrapolated what is, in essence a foreign exchange fluctuation out to 2050 and have concluded that renewables will save the world.
Experts, eh?
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Pakistan’s floods and the climate attribution con
Climate alarmism and journalistic bias have reached new heights of misleading hype on the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan which is reported to have received more than three times its annual rainfall in August.
The question is, of course, if human-induced climate change has had anything to do with making the floods more dramatic that could reasonably have been expected in the absence of human influences, i.e, as a result of a natural disaster that have been hitting the Indian subcontinent for centuries.
The answer (as given in the small print) by climate scientists at the world weather attribution project is ‘no’ – although it is quite obvious that they, the BBC and much of the news media, don’t like this answer. As a result, they go all around the scientific and journalistic houses to give the contrary impression. When the case they want to make cannot be made they claim that the picture is “complex.” How can scientists think that this sort of thing is acceptable?
The BBC report says that “global warming is likely to have played a role in then devastating floods that hist Pakistan, say scientists.” On the face of it “likely” might, or might not, mean a better than 50% chance, but in this case it doesn’t. Far from it.
Consider the revealing statement by Friederike Otto of Imperial College London, one of the World Weather Attribution team,
Our evidence suggests that climate change played an important role in the event, although our analysis doesn’t allow us to quantify how big the role was.”
So now we have “important role,” added to “likely!” Are you being nudged in the right direction yet? Then we have the admission they don’t know how big this “important role” is? And it gets even stupider.
The world weather attribution website analysis has as its main conclusion the rather unsurprising conclusion that the flooding occurred as a direct consequence of the extreme monsoon rainfall. Then it long-windedly goes on to explain why climate models are no good when it comes to analysing the event or its connection to climate change, concluding that the existence of natural variability means it is actually
infeasible to quantify the overall role of human-induced climate change.”
Well, you don’t say. But wait, there’s more confusion.
What we saw in Pakistan is exactly what climate projections have been predicting for years.”
But then they admit the event is well within the range of historical natural variability pointing out that 2022 was the wettest years since err…1961! And let’s not forget that only a few years ago climate scientists claimed that “our analysis found that the summer monsoon rainfall is decreasing over central South Asia – from south of Pakistan through central India to Bangladesh.”
So the real story is, “There is no solid evidence climate change had anything to do with Pakistan’s flooding” — in sharp contrast to the BBC’s headline of “Climate Change: Pakistani Floods ‘likely’ made worse by flooding.”
How can the scientific community, and those interested in the subtleties and realities of climate communication justify being so misleading? How can journalists stand to distort scientific ambiguity using faux certainty to support a climate narrative abandoning any sense of journalistic rigour?
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Potemkin emission controls in Australia
They are not nearly as tough as they seem. Loopholes mean that lots of big polluters will skate
Labor may fail to hit its 2030 climate target because flaws in the Albanese government’s proposed safeguard mechanism have created a “large hole” in its emissions reduction policy, the firm which modelled the target has warned, with half of all major polluters gaining a financial benefit from the scheme.
The operators of 215 large industrial facilities – contributing 28 per cent of Australia’s emissions – are weighing up Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen’s overhaul of the mechanism, which anchors Labor’s 2030 pledge to cut emissions by 43 per cent and is due to kick in from July 2023.
Carbon and electricity adviser RepuTex, which initially modelled the 2030 target, said a government plan to provide free carbon credits to high emitting companies – without requiring them to represent pollution cuts – could see Labor fail to hit its flagship climate change policy goal by the end of this decade.
According to RepuTex, companies would not be required to demonstrate any emissions reductions and would instead receive credits simply for being better than average. The credits would be used by the government to provide a financial subsidy to “cleaner” facilities.
“The plan to provide free credits to facilities where their emissions are below an ‘industry average’ could lead to other undesirable outcomes, with half of Australia’s 215 largest emitting facilities in line to receive a financial windfall – instead of being required to reduce their emissions,” RepuTex said.
The modelling firm said the financial benefit would seek to make ‘cleaner’ products and processes cheaper, but in reality it would be spread across the board. It would mean half of Australia’s giant LNG export industry – which makes up 10 of Australia’s top 20 highest-emitting facilities – would be given free credits and would not be penalised for emissions increases.
“By definition, half of all LNG facilities perform better than an industry average, even though they are among the country’s largest-emitting facilities,” RepuTex managing director Hugh Grossman said.
“These facilities would not be accountable for their emissions. Instead they would receive free credits, which could be banked, or sold to realise a windfall gain. While this aims to reward ‘cleaner’ processes, in practice, half of all fossil fuel producers could simply receive a financial benefit, instead of any emissions constraint.”
Amid an intensifying debate over the long-term use of oil and gas in Australia’s energy mix, the move could lock in fossil fuel production by creating a new subsidy. Current definitions suggest nearly 80 per cent of covered emissions and over half or 118 of all safeguard facilities could be classified as emissions-intensive and trade-exposed industries, with exemptions potentially undermining climate change goals.
Mr Bowen, who is expected to finalise the government’s plan within four to six months, said high-emitting companies, many with their own net zero by 2050 targets, must get on board to drive emissions 43 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.
Australia’s $4.5bn carbon market is also under the spotlight, with former chief scientist Ian Chubb leading a review probing integrity issues after whistleblower Andrew Macintosh described the scheme as a rort.
The review of Australian Carbon Credit Units follows allegations from Mr Macintosh, the former chairman of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, that a majority of carbon credits issued by the Clean Energy Regulator were flawed.
“Integrity of crediting is key to any emissions market,” Mr Grossman said. “If credits used by industry do not represent one tonne of emissions abatement, and that credit is used to offset emissions – as is the case here – then we would not see any real emissions reductions. Emissions reductions would occur in accounting terms only.”
The Morrison government made a major change to the carbon offsets market in March, allowing owners of land-based schemes to sell ACCUs on the open market rather than at lower prices to the Commonwealth. As a result the price of ACCUs crashed by more than a third, given market fears of an oversupply of the carbon units over the next few years. Prices have recovered by about a quarter and are trading at $30 per tonne.
The Minerals Council of Australia has warned the Albanese government against adopting a “one size fits all” safeguard mechanism amid concerns that exporters could be left behind by international competitors. Whitehaven Coal chief executive Paul Flynn has warned that Labor’s plan to drive down emissions in the industrial sector was a “carbon levy by stealth”.
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18 September, 2022
Climate Change Transformed India Into An Agricultural Superpower — Just Ask My Grandparents
By Vijay Jayaraj
My grandparents survived a nationwide famine in the 1960s that pushed many Indians into abject poverty. Little did they know then that they would go on to become farmers producing some of the best rice and coconuts on the planet.
Starting with purchases of small paddies, my grandparents supplemented income from professional occupations and other businesses with profits from rice and eventually invested in coconut farms. Their story is part of India’s agricultural revolution — a transformation partly made possible by the warmer temperatures and higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide of today’s climate.
According to researchers, poverty and a scarcity of food grains caused the famine of 1960-65, which had been preceded by many similar calamities that killed tens of millions over the centuries.
However, much changed in the 1970s when India’s government invited American agronomist Norman Borlaug to work alongside Indian scientists to introduce genetically modified crop varieties that were more resistant to diseases and produced higher yields.
Along with crops that failed less frequently and provided greater profits, the green revolution of the latter 20th century was helped by moderate increases in both temperatures and CO2 levels — the latter likely a result of emissions from human activities.
Contrary to the popular narrative of a changing climate being an “existential threat,” Earth’s green plants have been recovering from the “browning” of the Little Ice Age, which occurred from the 14th to 19th centuries. Modern warmth and CO2 levels are facilitating a greening that shows up on satellite photos and contributes to record crop harvests.
British Meteorologist Hubert Lamb, founder of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, said that the Little Ice Age devastated economies with crop losses. In a widely accepted paper, he writes that a “notably warm climate in many parts of the world” existed between A.D. 1000–1200, then was followed by a cooling that culminated with the coldest temperatures between 1500 and 1700 — “the coldest phase since the last ice age occurred.”
Lamb says these changes in climate were “undoubtedly upsetting for the human economies of those times (and perhaps of any time).”
The cold eventually gave way to rising temperatures in the 18th century, well before the modern industrial revolution in Europe and North America.
The positive of effects of the modern climate are found in arid climatic zones like those in India. NASA reports: “For rain-fed wheat grown in more arid climates, such as southern Africa and India, results show that doubled carbon dioxide levels, and their associated climate change impacts, increase yield by eight percent, an increase that’s driven by decreased crop water needs of up to 50 percent. As with rain-fed maize crops in arid climates, without the carbon dioxide boost these rain-fed wheat crops do not cope as well because of the greater water stress imposed on them, resulting in a 29 percent reduction in yield.”
Despite its population doubling to 1.3 billion since the 1960s, India can now produce enough food crops for both domestic needs and exports. In fact, since 2017, the country has been registering successive record harvests of food crops.
For the 2021-22 crop year, “a record output is estimated for rice, maize, gram, dry grains, rapeseed and mustard, oilseeds and sugarcane.” At 315.72 million tons, it is 5 million tons higher than the previous crop year.
According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, “India is the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses, and jute, and ranks as the second largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnut, vegetables, fruits, and cotton. It is also one of the leading producers of spices, livestock, and plantation crops.”
A recent Australian study reports that “CO2 fertilization correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa.”
Today’s warmth and CO2 levels are a boon to human civilization, not a bane. Just ask my grandparents.
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Is net zero emissions the Trojan horse for society?
Well intended passions for lower emissions may be contributing to the downfall of today’s society and the products that supports the eight billion on earth.
The transition to electricity generation from breezes and sunshine has proven to be ultra-expensive for the wealthy countries of Germany, Australia, and the USA representing 6 percent of the world’s population (505 million vs 7.8 billion). Those wealthy countries now have among the highest cost for their electricity, while the poorer developing countries, currently without the usage of the 20th century products manufactured from crude oil, are experiencing about 11,000,000 child deaths every year due to the unavailability of the fossil fuel products used in wealthy countries.
High electricity costs trickle down to everything in our daily lives, from the cost of food, lumber, and services, and ultimately to the high cost of living and housing and perpetuates the rise in homelessness and poverty.
The intermittency of weather generated electricity has resulted in the “nameplate” generating capacity of wind turbines and solar panels being a farce capacity to replace continuous uninterruptible electricity generation from coal, natural gas, and nuclear.
Those with a passion to rid the world of crude oil are oblivious to the fact that crude oil is virtually useless, it’s manufactured (refineries) into something usable. Those oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil are the basis of more than 6,000 products in our daily lives that did not exist before the 1900’s, and the fuels to move the heavy-weight and long-range needs of aircraft for military, commercial, private and the President’s Air Force One, and merchant ships, and the military and space programs.
Those so-called renewables of wind turbines and solar panels cannot manufacture fuels for the:
50,000 heavy-weight and long-range merchant ships that are moving products throughout the world.
50,000 heavy-weight and long-range jets used by commercial airlines, private usage, and the military.
The 290 million registered vehicles in the U.S. as of 2021, that were comprised of about 56 percent trucks, 40 percent cars, and 4 percent motorcycles.
The cruise ships that now move twenty-five million passengers around the world.
The space program.
Advocates of a carbon-free world underestimate not only how many products and fuels manufactured from crude oil the world already uses, but how much more the world will yet demand. In America, there are nearly as many vehicles as people, while in most of the world, fewer than 1 in 20 people have a car. More than 80 percent of the world population has yet to take a single flight.
The few wealthy countries have short memories of petrochemical products and human ingenuity being the reasons for the world populating from 1 to 8 billion in less than two hundred years. Efforts to cease the use of crude oil will be the greatest threat to civilization, not climate change, and lead the world to an era of guaranteed extreme shortages of fossil fuel products like we had in the decarbonized world in the 1800’s. It can only lead back to shorter life spans, diseases, malnutrition, and weather-related deaths resulting from the elimination of fossil fuels that are benefiting society.
The reasons why subsidized wind and solar electricity are not replacing fossil fuels, is that they can only generate electricity intermittently. Wind turbines and solar panels cannot manufacture anything for society. In fact, all the parts for wind and solar are made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil. Ridding the world of crude oil would eliminate wind turbines and solar panels!
https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/is-net-zero-emissions-the-trojan-horse-for-society
********************************************************California Governor Signs ‘Most Aggressive’ Package of Green Laws
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday announced a sweeping package of what he called the country’s “most aggressive” climate measures to “accelerate the state’s transition” to non-conventional energy sources.
The package includes 40 bills that appear to provide new green rules on laws related to things ranging from large-scale industry to the family home and private and public transportation.
The Democratic governor’s office said in a statement the package of climate change-focused measures aims to cut pollution and target “big polluters.”
It comes as America’s most populous state has struggled to provide stable electricity for residents amid a heat wave, which saw the state asking residents to use less power and suggest the best times to use air conditioners or charge electric cars.
“This month has been a wake-up call for all of us that later is too late to act on climate change. California isn’t waiting any more,” Newsom said in a statement. “Together with the Legislature, California is taking the most aggressive action on climate our nation has ever seen.”
“We’re cleaning the air we breathe, holding the big polluters accountable, and ushering in a new era for clean energy,” he continued. “That’s climate action done the California Way—and we’re not only doubling down, we’re just getting started.”
In July, Newsom called for “bold actions” to combat climate change. He declared his climate-focused vision for California involves a push to achieve 90 percent “clean energy” by 2035, “carbon neutrality” by 2045, “setback measures” to target oil drilling, carbon capture programs, and to “advance nature-based solutions” to remove carbon from “natural and working lands.”
40 Green Bills
Newsom’s office said his sweeping package of measures will create four million new jobs over the next 20 years, cut air pollution by 60 percent, and reduce state oil consumption by 91 percent.
How this would be achieved was not explained in the governor’s news release.
The package of measures, the governor’s office said, will save the state $23 billion by avoiding damage from pollution. It further aims to cut fossil fuel use in buildings and transportation by 92 percent and refinery pollution by 94 percent.
The governor named a list of the 40 new green bills, which touch on things from the broad scope of the climate to more everyday matters such as community air quality, electricity supply, vehicle permits, and gas pricing.
Some of the bills, which were all named in the governor’s news release, include:
AB 1279: “The California Climate Crisis Act”
AB 1389: “Clean Transportation Program: project funding preferences”
AB 1749: “Community emissions reduction programs: toxic air contaminants and criteria air pollutants”
AB 1857: “Solid waste”
AB 1909: “Vehicles: bicycle omnibus bill”
AB 2075: “Energy: electric vehicle charging standards”
AB 2622: “Sales and use taxes: exemptions: California Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project: transit buses”
AB 2836: “Carl Moyer Memorial Air Quality Standards Attainment Program: vehicle registration fees: California tire fee”
SB 529: “Electricity: electrical transmission facilities”
SB 1063: “Energy: appliance standards and cost-effective measures”
SB 1205: “Water rights: appropriation”
SB 1230: “Zero-emission and near-zero-emission vehicle incentive programs: requirements”
SB 1322: “Energy: petroleum pricing”
SB 1382: “Air pollution: Clean Cars 4 All Program: Sales and Use Tax Law: zero emissions vehicle exemption”
How the package of new green laws and regulations might impact, for example, standards required for cars to be permitted on Californian roads; how and when homes can be cooled; the source of electricity allowed to be supplied to homes; the manufacturing of everyday appliances and products, etc., were not outlined in the governor’s news release.
This latest pronouncement comes on the heels of Newsom enacting regulation to phase out sales of new gas-powered cars by 2035.
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If you’re told ESG is the next big thing, beware of greenwashing
Joe Kennedy famously said that when the shoeshine boy gives stock tips, it’s time to get out of the market. The story goes that the investor exited the market just ahead of the great Wall Street crash of 1929, clued in to a bubble created by dilettantes piling in.
More recently, an ad popped up in Australian bus shelters, which read “this is the sign you’ve been looking for to get into crypto”. Shortly after, cryptocurrency tanked.
So when a public relations conference told me this week that ESG is the next big thing, I took it as a warning that it’s about to be over.
In the last few years, environmental, social and (corporate) governance, or ESG, has become an increasing concern for companies which realise that securing their long-term profitability depends on the wellbeing of the environment and the societies in which they operate. The “governance” part is monitoring that the organisation isn’t making decisions which deliver profit right now but run counter to actual laws or implicit norms. Banks turning a blind eye to the money trail leading to paedophiles, for instance, or casinos knowingly participating in money laundering.
ESG can seem simple: commit to reducing emissions, develop a modern slavery statement and, above all, become a values-led organisation. Only, anyone who believes it’s that simple is almost certainly doing it wrong.
That has always been the case, but the war in Ukraine and growing concerns over China’s activities at home and abroad are making it more obvious how just how wrong the simplistic approach is.
Germany is the poster child of half-baked ESG. Under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, Europe’s largest economy began shutting down its nuclear power plants, planning to use gas as a “bridge” while transitioning entirely to renewables. Many analysts warned against the move, pointing out the strategic dangers of relying on Russian gas. But Merkel persisted and many German investors fell in line, in the name of ESG.
Of course, we now know how that turned out. The ESG value of the nuclear shutdown was one-dimensional: it failed to balance the pros and cons of nuclear against other potential fuel sources, or take into account the geopolitical context. As a result, when Putin invaded Ukraine, Germany continued to pay for Russian gas and, in doing so, funded a war it opposes. In fact, it wasn’t until the beginning of September, when President Putin retaliated against NATO sanctions by shutting off gas supply to Europe, that many European countries, Germany included, stopped handing hard currency to Putin.
Now it can no longer rely on hypocrisy to keep the lights on, the power crisis is sending the German economy into recession. Companies face insolvency due to soaring energy prices and people are facing huge bills for heating their homes. “Warming centres”, or heated community halls, are being established across Europe to prevent people freezing to death in their apartments. If a new strain of COVID appears, these could also become hubs of transmission. The poor, naturally, will be hardest hit. If this is environmentally and socially responsible, what on earth is not?
In another ESG complication, building greater renewable energy capacity can lead to an increase in slavery and child labor. That’s because 80 per cent of solar panels are manufactured in China and a significant share of the materials for them comes from companies in Xinjiang Province, using forced Uighur labour. Climate change versus slavery – is there an acceptable trade-off? And if so, who decides what it is?
Even the fashionable expressions of organisational “values” can quickly lead from sublime intention to ridiculous action. Late last year, the legal faculty of a major Australian university proposed that the academics make a public resolution of support for the Indigenous Voice to parliament. While personally in favour of a Voice, my legal academic friend recalls her acute discomfort at being called on to make a public statement of this kind despite her lack of constitutional expertise. Expressing her values in this way forced her to breach a professional ethic.
Real ESG is as complex and layered as the world it is practised in.
The result of overly superficial ESG action is sometimes called greenwashing. “Greenwashing businesses routinely underinvest in their ESG reporting, using corporate spin as a proxy for a real strategy and progress against it,” according to Luke Heilbuth, CEO of BWD Strategic, a consultancy focused on helping businesses navigate the complexities of ESG.
Company regulator ASIC defines greenwashing as “the practice of misrepresenting the extent to which a financial product or investment strategy is environmentally friendly, sustainable or ethical” and has issued advice that the practice falls under its ban on misleading or deceptive statements. Given the current fashion for ESG-as-advertising, it seems almost inevitable that an increasing number of companies boasting of their ESG credentials will find themselves in breach.
Heilbuth, a former diplomat, believes companies serious about ESG need to appreciate the geopolitical context, but can realise opportunities in doing so. As the world splits into two major powers, responsible countries will focus on building green manufacturing in Australia to take advantage of our minerals and other natural resources. We must.
“Beijing also controls much of the infrastructure required to refine the minerals critical to the energy transition,” he says. “Chinese refineries supply 50 to 70 per cent of the world’s cobalt and lithium and over 90 per cent of rare-earth minerals.”
While the far-sighted Chinese look to harness the commodities of developing nations connected to the Belt and Road, and export expensive services to them, it will be strategically and ethically necessary to ensure we aren’t reliant on them.
Chinese President Xi Jinping told Putin grandly this week that we must “play a guiding role to inject stability and positive energy into a world rocked by social turmoil”. See, it’s easy to make war and unethical practices sound good. It’s harder to actually practice ESG. The spin is no longer enough.
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17 September, 2022
International study finds no evidence in records of ‘climate emergency’
An international study of major weather and extreme events has found no evidence of a “climate emergency” in the record to date.
The study by Italian scientists provides a long-term analysis of heat, drought, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes and ecosystem productivity and finds no clear positive trend of extreme events.
The authors do not say that no action should be taken on climate change but argue the issue should be placed in a bigger context.
“Fearing a climate emergency without this being supported by data, means altering the framework of priorities with negative effects that could prove deleterious to our ability to face the challenges of the future, squandering natural and human resources in an economically difficult context,” the report, published in European Physical Journal Plus, said.
The paper – “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming” – found the most robust global changes in climate extremes are found in yearly values of heatwaves, but it said global trends in heatwave intensity were “not significant”.
Daily rainfall intensity and extreme precipitation frequency were stationary.
Tropical cyclones show a “substantial temporal invariance”, as do tornadoes.
The impact of warming on surface and wind speed remained unclear.
The team, led by Gianluca Alimonti from the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics and the University of Milan, extended the analysis to include natural disasters, floods, drought, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat).
“None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events,” the report said.
The authors said it was important to underline the difference between statistical evidence of excess of events, with given characteristic, and probabilistic calculation of anthropogenic attribution of extreme events. The statistical evidence is based on historical observations and tries to highlight differences between these and recent observations or possible trends as a function of time. “The anthropogenic versus natural attribution of the origin of a phenomenon is based on probabilistic models and makes reliance on simulations that hardly reproduce the macro and microphysical variables involved in it,” the researchers said.
“In conclusion, on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.”
On floods, the report said: “Although evidence of an increase in total annual precipitation is observed on a global level, corresponding evidence for increases in flooding remains elusive and a long list of studies shows little or no evidence of increased flood magnitudes, with some studies finding more evidence of decreases than increases.”
The paper said there was “no evidence that the areas affected by the different types of drought are increasing”.
In conclusion, the findings do not mean we should do nothing about climate change. “We should work to minimise our impact on the planet and to minimise air and water pollution,” the authors said.
“Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.
“How the climate of the twenty-first century will play out is a topic of deep uncertainty. We need to increase our resiliency to whatever the future climate will present us.”
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Rethinking the Greenhouse Effect
A former head of Australia’s National Climate Centre is arguing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has adopted an overly simplistic approach to global warming and has ended up exaggerating the human contribution to recent climate change.
William Kininmonth argues that the warming of the planet is fastest in winter and in high latitudes near the poles. He argues that this is mostly due to increased heat transport from the tropical oceans.
However, the recent warming of the tropical oceans can’t be explained by the greenhouse effect due to carbon dioxide, because that effect is small in the humid tropical atmosphere. The most probable explanation is natural changes in ocean currents.
William Kininmonth says:
“The IPCC’s radiation balance approach is very simplistic, ignoring the fact that nowhere on the Earth’s surface is in radiation balance. Mainstream climate science may have led us all up a blind alley”.
GWPF invited the Royal Society and the Met Office to review this paper, and to submit a response to be published as an appendix to it. No reply was received.
About the author
William Kininmonth joined the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in 1960, and retired in 1998 as head of the National Climate Centre. He was a consultant to the World Meteorological Organization’s Commission for Climatology and participated in regional coordination and training programs. William Kininmonth is author of Climate Change: A Natural Hazard.
Contact
William Kininmonth
e: w.kininmonth@bigpond.com
m: +61 418 376 236
https://mailchi.mp/4b5e1017732a/press-release-rethinking-the-greenhouse-effect-191191?e=cc88839e92
**********************************************************What Happened When 1 Government Fell Under Influence of World’s Environmental Extremists
Starvation. Poverty. People struggling to buy medicine and fuel.
Disaster happened after one government fell under the influence of the world’s environmental extremists.
Many “experts” say pure nature is best. United Nations officials now tell politicians that the climate “crisis” demands countries make all sorts of sacrifices, like cutting nitrogen waste.
Much of that waste comes from synthetic fertilizer, so activists applauded when Sri Lanka’s government decided to become the first country to really take their advice. Sri Lanka banned all synthetic fertilizers.
Oops.
Suddenly, the same farms produced much less food. Food prices rose 80%.
One result: riots. As my new video shows, thousands swarmed the president’s mansion. Some had a cookout on his lawn.
The president resigned and fled the country.
It turns out that we need chemical fertilizers.
Environmental writer Michael Shellenberger says that if countries listened to today’s green activists, there would be mass starvation.
“We could only support 2 to 3 billion people on Earth if we just relied on natural fertilizers like manure,” Shellenberger says. “[But] there’s 8 billion people.”
“Why can’t we just make more organic manure?” I ask.
“It takes twice as much land to produce all the cows that you need to get the manure,” he explains. “Synthetic fertilizers are a friend to saving nature because they reduce how much land we need.”
Now the environmental purists make excuses for Sri Lanka.
Mother Jones said it’s “ridiculous to single out [the fertilizer ban] as the ‘underlying’ cause, as Shellenberger did.” Others say that Sri Lanka just needed time to adjust to organic farming.
“You might be able to become poorer over five or 10 years, rather than over six months,” replies Shellenberger. “But the result will be the same.”
I push back. “There were other causes of the problems: higher oil prices, COVID, other stuff happened.”
“But those same problems affected other countries where the economies did not collapse,” Shellenberger replies. “What made the difference in Sri Lanka was its fertilizer ban.”
We are right to worry about chemical fertilizer. Not only does the nitrous oxide emit a greenhouse gas, but when nitrogen runs off into waterways, it can kill fish.
“Absolutely. We should be concerned,” says Shellenberger. “But that’s best dealt with through a gradual process of farmers getting better at applying the fertilizer.”
Farmers are already doing that. Fertilizer is expensive, so farmers have an incentive not to waste it.
“We know you can significantly reduce pollution while producing the same amount of food,” Shellenberger points out. In the Netherlands, he says, “They reduced fertilizer pollution by 70%.”
But that still wasn’t enough for environmental zealots in the Dutch government. They want to force farmers to cut nitrogen emissions by another half, even though they admit that will force 11,000 farms to shut down.
This green extremism is “out of control,” says Shellenberger. “You would think that Sri Lanka would be a wake-up call. But we haven’t seen any slowdown.”
Fortunately, most countries don’t yet embrace the zealots’ most destructive ideas, like banning synthetic fertilizer or the Green New Deal’s demand for 100% renewable energy.
But many countries closed nuclear plants.
And President Joe Biden killed pipelines, stopped a long-planned sale of offshore oil rights, and imposed a moratorium on new oil and gas leases on public lands.
This is a war on affordable energy.
“We’re in the worst energy crisis in 50 years,” says Shellenberger. “Yet governments are trying to make energy more scarce and expensive. It’s totally insane. There’s no other word for it.”
The pursuit of a chemical-free world is insane. Modern technologies such as synthetic fertilizer make people’s lives better. They especially make poor people’s lives better. Banning them brings disaster.
The hardcore environmental left got its way in Sri Lanka. Let’s hope they don’t destroy more countries.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/09/07/going-hungry-under-green-policies/
****************************************************"Green" subsidies in Australia
Simply to list the subsidies available for green purchases (think here solar panels, small batteries, LED lighting, shower heads, home insulation, electric vehicles, etc,) would require the space of several columns. So let me pick out just a few examples. In Victoria, you can get $1,400 plus an interest free loan if you want to install solar panels on your roof. There is also a thousand dollars available for solar hot water. Even better, there is nearly $3,000 for a solar battery. If you want to upgrade your heating or cooling, there’s another grand available.
For those homes that generate excess electricity that is fed back to the grid, there are ‘feed-in tariffs’. Initially, the size of these tariffs was obscene. In Queensland, for instance, households were paid 44 cents per kilowatt hour and those who signed up early will enjoy this rate until 2028. More recently, feed-in tariffs have crashed and are generally well below 10 cents per KWh.
When it comes to buying an electric vehicle – they are now called zero emissions vehicles (ZEVs) to emphasise their worthiness – there’s an upfront grant of $3,000 in Victoria but the car has to be worth less than $69,000. No top-of-the-line Tesla for you. You may have to pay a small road user charge in the future but the overall amount in dollar terms will be small compared with the excise on petrol and diesel paid by less well-heeled motorists.
One of the first actions of our new federal treasurer, Jim, was to remove the fringe benefits tax from the purchase of electric vehicles. In this instance, the maximum value of the car is $85,000. Treasury calculates that the owners can save between 5 and 9 grand per year – not bad if you can afford the purchase price in the first place.
Getting back to Bloomberg’s Greener Living, one interesting fact contained in the document is that Norway, the nirvana of EV enthusiasts, taxes the living daylights out of petrol/diesel cars, thereby propelling the shift to EVs – sorry ZEVs. The average tax imposed on normal vehicles is $US15,000 – which is 22,500 big ones here.
It’s actually surprising that anyone at all in Norway, which by the way is the size of a handkerchief, would even contemplate buying an internal combustion engine vehicle with that sort of impost. The Sheriff would be extremely proud of the politicians who dreamt up this grand theft.
And don’t forget the absence of road tolls, free parking and the use of bus lanes that further entice the Norwegian public to do the ‘right thing’. You wonder whether it might be cheaper for the government to simply give EVs – OK, let’s just forget ZEVs – to every citizen with a driving licence.
But don’t think it’s just the Europeans who are into these reverse Robin Hood subsidies. The US government under great uncle Joe is really ramping them up. And this is on top of the raft of subsidies that exist at the state level, particularly in California.
Under the laughably titled Inflation Reduction Act, there are new point-of-sale tax credits for all electric vehicles although there are some price and income caps. It turns out that unless subsidies take the form of an immediate reduction in the sale price, they don’t work very well and the Biden administration has acted on this advice.
The IRA (funny that) also restored a 30 per cent tax credit for both home solar and home battery storage systems, extended out to 2034. There are also subsidies for heat pumps and electric induction stoves.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/robin-hood-robin-hood/
***************************************September 16, 2022
UK: Liz Truss ditches the environment
That's not how she would put it but I think that is the essence of it. She could be another Thatcher
The Government’s Energy Bill is set to be paused or ditched completely as Liz Truss focuses on capping customers’ bills and reforming the UK’s electricity market, i has been told.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the new Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, told officials on Monday that he planned to effectively put on hold the Energy Bill currently going through the House of Lords, multiple sources said.
The legislation, part of Boris Johnson’s last Queen’s Speech, was wide-ranging and would have overhauled everything from carbon dioxide transport to carbon capture and civil nuclear power production.
But the bill, which is still at an early stage of its parliamentary process, now faces being scrapped or dramatically reworked after Downing Street stressed the Prime Minister wanted to prioritise capped bills and urgent reform of electricity markets.
No 10 is understood to be pushing for two big reforms. First, decoupling electricity prices from the global gas price – not least as renewable energy is now nine times cheaper than gas. Secondly, introducing “locational pricing” to incentivise the private sector to build extra capacity, a change that would boost wind and solar power.
When he was Business Secretary, Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng launched a consultation on both changes in July but the process could be fast-tracked to produce legislation as soon as possible.
Abandoning parts of the Energy Bill could mean ditching a landmark reform, the creation of the “future systems operator” arm of the National Grid that Mr Johnson hoped would secure renewable energy to hit the UK target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
In the coming weeks, Ms Truss will continue to prioritise the economic crisis. The Office for National Statistics announced on Wednesday that inflation had eased slightly but at 9.9 per cent it remains near its highest level since the 70s.
The Resolution Foundation warned that the poorest households are still experiencing double-digit inflation because they are more exposed to swings in the price of staples such as food.
And the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market think-tank seen as closely aligned with the new Prime Minister, predicted that the Bank of England would have to continue raising interest rates, a move which risks tipping the UK’s economy into a recession.
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The Great Leap Backwards: Mao-style climate cultists must be stopped
IN 1958, the Chinese leader Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, a crash programme of economic modernisation that he hoped would lead the country to the promised land of communism.
The intention was to transform the Middle Kingdom, the world’s most populous country, from a largely agrarian society into an industrial and economic superpower in just a few years.
It was decreed that scrap metal be transformed into steel in backyard furnaces to be set up across the country. The country was denuded of trees to fuel the furnaces and workers were transferred from productive activity elsewhere in order to man them. The results were almost worthless, but dissenters were ruthlessly purged.
In similar fashion, vast irrigation projects were undertaken using forced labourers, hundreds of thousands of whom died as a result. But this was nothing compared to the results of the programme of agricultural reform, which caused a collapse of the food supply. Estimates of the death toll range from 15million to as high as 55million.
It was a disaster of historic proportions. The Great Leap Forward was an astonishing example of unchecked ideology – a secular religion with no rationality, no humanity, and which tolerated no dissent.
Does any of this sound familiar? We are setting out to transform the most extraordinary society, in which wealth and abundance have spread across the world, into … what? An agrarian society of the kind Mao and his followers were trying to escape?
We might look back in astonishment at the irrationality of the Great Leap Forward, but is what we are doing any more rational? We have mandated decarbonised electricity systems, with no idea of how to deal with the intermittency of renewables – we are literally crossing our fingers and hoping someone invents something.
We install solar panels in places where the sun barely shines. We have suppressed the fossil fuel industry in the full knowledge that we have no way to replace its output in many applications.
With households unable to afford to heat their homes, we are introducing a ban on house coal. We are restricting fertiliser use on our farms, in the full knowledge that this will cause yields to collapse.
This is a Great Leap Forward, but a green one rather than a red one. And just as the horrible reality of what Mao had unleashed eventually became clear, the next few months will make it clear that we have been fatally misled by the ravings of a bizarre anti-human cult.
Our energy systems have been made so frail that power cuts and rationing seem unavoidable. While the Government has shown itself willing to print money to keep the costs for consumers down, businesses will be hung out to dry in the spring. Unless we return to rationality quickly, we can expect economic chaos and even societal meltdown to ensue.
That return to rationality needs to be put in place quickly, and Professor Gordon Hughes and I have just published a short plan that shows that dramatic reductions in energy prices can be achieved in the short term. But only if the Government is radical enough. And unfortunately that seems unlikely to be the case.
The Parliamentary Conservative Party seems still to be in the grip of the climate cult, and that means that even if she wants to, Liz Truss will find it impossible to take the necessary steps.
The termination of the fracking ban seems to have been little more than a sop to the rational rump of the party; the continuation of the preposterous rules that govern shale operations shows that the cult remains in control, and means that the industry will remain little more than a pipedream. So expect more money-printing and more dallying with renewables, which will only make things worse.
If rationality is going to be restored, the climate cultists will have to be removed from the corridors of power and positions of influence. That will happen eventually, of that there can be no doubt; the only questions are how long it will take, and how much of our abundant society will be left by the time they are gone.
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UK: Electric car charging cost hits record £1 per kWh milestone as energy price crisis hits sector
Osprey has become the first charge point operator in the UK to raise its prices to a record £1 per kWh as the soaring cost of electricity pushes the electric car charging sector into crisis.
The firm’s chief executive, Ian Johnston, has announced that all Osprey rapid chargers will now cost £1 per kWh to use, up from 66p per kWh previously and well above its competitors’ prices.
Osprey operates hundreds of chargers across the UK. Its price rise means charging a VW ID.3 from 10 per cent to 80 per cent – a typical charging session – will now cost £40, up from £16 a year ago.
It is the latest sign of the pressure EV chargepoint operators are under amid the energy price crisis.
Mr Johnston said he “had no choice” but to increase prices, given “sky high” wholesale energy prices and no support to date from government.
Last week the new Prime Minister Liz Truss announced plans to cap the price of electricity and gas for households as part of a £150bn package to tackle the energy crisis.
But businesses, which are also facing huge increases in the cost of gas and electricity, are still waiting for details of their support scheme.
“Until we know more about the government support scheme, we have no choice but to increase our prices,” Mr Johnston said in a video message. “Of course, we want to reduce these prices, if we are able to do so.”
Industry experts have been warning for weeks that EV charge point operators are struggling with rocketing energy prices. Almost every operator has already increased prices at least once this year, and some have bumped their prices four times.
Osprey is for now by far the most expensive public charging network, with the next most expensive rapid chargers Ionity at 69p per kWh, followed by Instavolt at 66p per kWh. But cheaper charging is also available, with some supermarkets still offering free slower-rate charging for customers.
Yet experts warn that without further support, more charge point operators will be forced to raise their prices to the £1 per kWh threshold over the coming months. That could dent severely dent consumer demand for switching to electric motoring, threatening the UK’s net zero goals.
“This is a huge charging price hike from Osprey, but more companies will follow suit,” said Ginny Buckley, chief executive and founder of Electrifying.com.
She called for action from government and energy providers to tackle the problem: “I’d like to see the Government take decisive action to address this by reducing the 20 per cent VAT rate currently imposed on public charging to five per cent,” she told i.
“Energy providers also need to play their part and introduce more cheaper off-peak tariffs at public charge points to help balance the supply grid and support those without access to home charging.”
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Australia's love of pickups and SUVs is slowing down the country's efforts to reduce carbon emissions
Sales of electric vehicles nearly tripled in Australia last year but average emissions from new cars only decreased by two per cent.
The commission's report, released on Thursday, said that was partly due to increasing sales of SUVs and utes where there were fewer cleaner vehicles options.
More than 43,000 utes were sold in Australia between 2020 and 2021, while large SUV sales rose by about 25,000.
Many of those vehicles emit more than 210 grams of CO2 per kilometre.
Australia is falling behind other countries when it comes to its average vehicle emissions, the report states, with 45 per cent of new cars sold emitting 160 grams or less of CO2 per kilometre. That's compared to 90 per cent of all new cars sold in Europe.
More needs to be done to encourage Australians to purchase electric vehicles, the commission said in its report. "Increasing investment in public recharging stations, preferential tax arrangements and other incentives, and the adoption of emissions standards can lead to significant uptake in greener vehicles," the report states.
Battery and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles represent just 0.23 per cent of Australia's 18.4 million vehicles. About 2.8 per cent of Australia's 2021 car sales were electric.
That's compared to 17 per cent in Europe, 16 per cent in China, five per cent in the United States and 4.4 per cent in New Zealand.
"The National Transport Commission continues to collaborate with governments and industry to develop the data needed to support the commitment of all jurisdictions to transition to a zero emissions fleet," the report said.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/aust-ute-suv-sales-stall-173100511.html
***************************************15 September, 2022
Global mooning? ‘Wobbly’ moon probable cause of mass mangrove deaths
It's refreshing to hear of an environmental problem that is NOT caused by global warming
Aside from that, however, it was previously established that a sea-level fall in the Northern Australia/Indonesia area was responsible for mangrove die-offs. What we read below is a good explanation of the sea-level fluctuations concerned.
Dare I mention that a sea level fall is also a good explanation for some of the famous but transient bleaching events on the Great Barrier Reef, which is broadly in the same area? What if global warming had NOTHING to do with coral die-back in Northern Australian waters? Coral is sensitive to sea-level fall so it is a likely possibility. Coral does not like being dessicated. See also here
What a horror all this is for the climate crooks at James Cook university in Townsville. Peter Ridd will be laughing
A wobble in the moon’s orbit around Earth affects mangrove cover across Australia and likely contributed to mass tree deaths in the Gulf of Carpentaria, new research suggests.
A study published in the journal Science Advances has found that an 18.61-year cycle known as the lunar nodal cycle shapes the condition of tidal wetlands.
The moon’s orbit around Earth does not occur in a flat plane. “Since the 1720s, people have known that it moves up and down by a few degrees,” said the study’s lead author, Prof Neil Saintilan of Macquarie University. He likened the motion to “when you’re spinning a coin – as it loses momentum, it kind of wobbles”.
Changes in gravitational pull as a result of this lunar wobble are known to affect the Earth’s tides. Previous research conducted by Nasa scientists has predicted that in the mid-2030s, the lunar wobble will amplify rising sea levels caused by climate change, resulting in high-tide floods along coastlines.
Depending on the phase of the lunar nodal cycle, there can be “as much as 40cm of difference in the tide range” in places such as the Gulf of Carpentaria, Saintilan said.
Mangroves “grow between the average high-tide level and the highest high-tide levels”, he said. At lower tidal ranges, mangroves are inundated less frequently. “When they’re stressed, because they lose water through their leaves, they just drop their leaves.”
The scientists used historical satellite imaging to quantify the extent of mangrove cover across Australia every year between 1987 and 2020. The oscillation in canopy cover was “immediately obvious when you graph the data”, Saintilan said.
Along the Arnhem coast in the Northern Territory and the Carnarvon coast in Western Australia, the researchers found that peaks in closed canopy cover – where thickened mangrove canopy covered more than 80% of ground area – coincided with the peak tidal phases of the moon’s wobble.
They believe the lunar wobble likely contributed to mass mangrove dieback in the Gulf of Carpentaria in 2015-16, an event in which an estimated 40m trees died. At the time, a “low tidal range” phase of the lunar wobble coincided with a severe El Niño.
“They had a combination of a 40cm drop in the mean sea level associated with the El Niño and, on top of that, a 40cm drop in tide range [due to the lunar wobble],” Saintilan said. “There were mangroves in creeks [previously] being inundated every day that might have been inundated just a handful of times in the whole of the dry season.”
A quirk of the lunar wobble is that it has the opposite tidal effects along coastlines which have one high tide daily compared to those that have two high tides daily.
In a region with only one daily high tide, a phase of the lunar cycle may result in a lower tidal range and less frequent water inundations. The same phase will have the inverse effect along coastlines with two daily high tides, resulting in more mangrove inundation.
The Gulf of Carpentaria is one of few Australian coastlines that has one high tide daily. Mangroves in adjacent regions that survived the 2015-16 El Niño were in a “high tidal range” phase of the lunar cycle. The El Niño was previously thought to be the cause of the mass dieback, but “the nodal cycle also seems like a necessary condition for mangrove mortality”, Saintilan said.
“So far, global warming has been good for mangroves. With higher sea levels they’ve been expanding into areas that they could not survive before,” he said. “But under high rates of sea level rise [greater than 7mm a year] … we know that they can’t survive for too long.”
Dr Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University, who was not associated with the study, likened the lunar wobble to the vertical bobbing of an object in water. “It does this bobbing up and down every 18.6 years,” he said. “If the moon is further up or down in relation to Earth, that’s going to change the gravitational pull.”
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Private equity still investing billions in dirty energy despite pledge to clean up
Private equity firms pumping billions of dollars into dirty energy projects are exposing investors, including pensioners, to unknown financial risks as the planet burns and governments face escalating pressure to act, new research finds.
The first-of-its-kind climate risks scorecard ranks Carlyle, Warburg Pincus and KKR as the worst offenders among eight major private equity companies with significant fossil fuel portfolios.
All three continue investing heavily in greenhouse-gas-emitting projects with no adequate plan on transitioning away from oil and gas, according to the analysis by two financial watchdog non-profits of publicly available information. The firms also have scant transparency on political and climate lobbying, the report finds.
Private equity refers to an opaque form of financing away from public markets in which funds and investors buy and restructure companies including startups, troubled businesses and real estate operations.
The eight firms on the scorecard manage a combined $3.6tn in assets including about $216bn in energy projects – an amount equivalent to the fossil fuel financing by the world’s five biggest banks last year.
Carlyle is rated F, the lowest in the climate credentials scorecard that has been created by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (Pesp) and Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund (Afref).
Table of eight private equity firms’ climate risk scorecard.
More than three-quarters of Carlyle’s energy investments are in fossil fuels, and just over 60% of its 2022 first profits came through its subsidiary NGP Energy Capital, which focuses almost exclusively on oil and gas projects.
Last year Warburg Pincus announced that it would not seek further fossil fuel investments in its next buyout, yet since then its dirty energy portfolio has expanded.
KKR, one of the world’s wealthiest private equity firms, has said it will continue to invest in fossil fuel projects despite publishing a climate action strategy.
Among the worst downstream polluters is Blackstone, which also scored a D rating, with its power plants emitting a combined 18.1m metric tonnes of planet-warming carbon dioxide in 2020 – equivalent to the annual emissions of nearly 4m gas-powered cars, according to the report.
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Why it’s not anti-environmental to be in favour of economic growth
In the midst of today’s cost of living crisis, many people who are critical of the idea of economic growth see an opportunity. In their recent book The Future is Degrowth, for example, prominent advocates Matthias Schmelzer, Aaron Vansintjan and Andrea Vetter argue that the post-Covid inflation has predominantly been caused by the inherent instability in the capitalist system.
This came in the form of problems with global supply chains and the asset price inflation which stemmed from government action in response to the pandemic. Since the same system is, in their view, also responsible for causing climate change, moving away from it and curbing the economic growth on which it turns will help kill two birds with one stone.
Arguments like these recall and are directly influenced by a famous scientific report from 50 years ago called Limits to Growth. Written by a group of researchers commissioned by the Club of Rome think tank, it warned of an “overshoot and collapse” of the global economy within 100 years.
The researchers forecast that this decline would be caused by exponential growth in populations, industrialisation, pollution, food production and resource depletion. The answer, they said, was to move to a state of economic and ecological stability that would be sustainable far into the future.
When the oil crisis of October 1973 to March 1974 saw oil prices quadrupling, it was seen as vindicating the report’s prediction of a dramatic surge in the price of oil. A famous Newsweek edition from late 1973 ran with the headline “Running out of everything”, next to a picture of Uncle Sam looking into an empty cornucopia.
Yet contrary to the predictions in the Limits report, the oil shock was not caused by resource scarcity but by geopolitics. The Saudis and oil-supplier cartel Opec had imposed an oil embargo on the west to protest the US arming Israel in its wars against Syria and Egypt.
A similar misapprehension lies at the heart of the arguments by today’s degrowthers over the cost of living crisis. The oil and gas shortages causing soaring prices are mainly due to the Ukraine war and a fall in supplies due to the majors investing less in production because of the net zero agenda.
Wrongheaded economics
Not only did the writers of the Limits report predict a spike in oil prices for the wrong reasons, they also failed to consider how the market would respond. Higher prices reduced demand and incentivised energy efficient investment and oil exploration, with major new reserves being identified.
Growth has not (yet) been constrained by a lack of resources, partly because technological advances enable us to generate more from less, and partly because of market forces. When a product or commodity becomes more expensive, people either use less of it or switch to an alternative.
So the reality is that inflation may well subside over time, depending of course on what central banks do with monetary policy. Equally, pursuing degrowth could be inflationary or deflationary. It depends on whether the supply of goods and services falls further than the demand.
Both in the 1970s and today, one of the main issues is a fundamental misunderstanding of what economic growth is and what drives it. It is seen as being quantity driven, in the sense that degrowthers think there is an insatiable demand for more of the same, which will eventually have “devastating consequences for the living world”.
But economic growth is more about quality than quantity. It’s not just about producing more cars, for example, but about making them more fuel efficient or electric. This in turn creates demand for different resources, such as lithium for batteries.
Or to give another example of how economists view growth, one important study looked at how the price of a unit of light fell over time. This was because as technology shifted from candles to modern light bulbs, the cost of production in terms of hours worked fell dramatically.
Yet in another respect, the degrowthers are entirely right. Again, it’s worth looking back at the Limits report to understand this. To test their base case, the researchers looked at various alternative scenarios for how the future might pan out.
In one, they assumed that the world’s stock of available non-renewable resources doubled. This meant that scarcity was less of a problem than in their base case. But they predicted that, rather than averting catastrophe, this would instead cause damaging increases in pollution associated with economic activity.
Pollution has indeed become a bigger issue than resource constraints. For example, Limits predicted that CO? concentration in the atmosphere would reach 435 parts per million (ppm) by 2022 if trends in fossil fuel consumption continued unabated. It is currently 421ppm, so they were fairly close. It is this linkage between environmental harm and the economy that is the report’s most important legacy.
Managing the wealth of nations
After the Limits thesis, economists began incorporating the idea of finite resources more explicitly into models of economic growth. This formed the basis of the economic approach to sustainable development, which says that you achieve intergenerational equity by reinvesting the proceeds from finite resources into other assets like buildings, machines or tools.
For example, if US$1 of oil is extracted from the ground, US$1 should be reinvested elsewhere. Though still far from universally adopted, some oil-producing nations such as Norway do this.
A related idea is that we should move away from thinking about growth of national income and instead focus on managing national wealth. Wealth in this context refers to all assets from which people obtain wellbeing, and changes in wealth per capita – referred to in the field as “genuine saving” – are indicators of whether development is sustainable.
The key is to put the right price on different types of assets, including taking into account damage from pollution. For example carbon is clearly very important when valuing changes in wealth. The following chart uses our calculations to show an alternative to using GDP to measure progress over the 20th century.
Rather than encouraging degrowth, it is now accepted by most environmental economists that this measure of human wealth is a useful complement to GDP. This is being taken increasingly seriously by governments. For example, the US recently announced it would start accounting for its natural assets.
But if we are to win the argument about changing the basis on which we measure human progress, it is vital that we are clear about the reasons for doing so. Believing that economic growth is inherently bad is not helpful.
https://theconversation.com/why-its-not-anti-environmental-to-be-in-favour-of-economic-growth-189421
***************************************************China makes Australian Greenie policies look stupid
It is a tale of two cities. First is Barcaldine, Queensland, which has been left reeling after a proposed coal-fired power station was recently crushed by state and federal Labor governments worried about carbon emissions.
Second is Ordos, Inner Mongolia, where locals are celebrating the commissioning of phase one of their new Shanghaimiao power station with 1,000 megawatts coming online. Workers are in the process of completing phase two, which will take total capacity up to 2,000 megawatts.
Interestingly, the capacity of Shanghaimiao is similar to the capacity of the Eraring power station in New South Wales, which Origin Energy plans to close in 2025 due to economic pressure from heavily subsidised renewable energy projects.
In both Barcaldine and Ordos, the power stations shared a commitment to the latest ‘ultra-supercritical’ coal-fired power station technology. This means less coal is required to generate each megawatt of electricity and, therefore, fewer carbon emissions are produced.
The key difference is the one in China was built, whereas the one in Australia remains locked in red and green tape hell.
Australia’s was held back despite the abundance of affordable and reliable energy it would generate, the 545 jobs it promised to create during construction, and the 90 ongoing operational jobs.
The determination of state and federal Labor to block the construction of coal-fired power stations is in stark contrast to China. According to a report in the New Scientist in April, China is building more than half of the world’s new coal-fired power plants.
China accounted for 52 per cent of the 176,000 megawatts of energy under construction around the world in 2021. In just one year alone, China added three times more coal-fired power generation than exists in Australia today.
Australia has an abundance of high-quality coal which has proven to be a lucrative export commodity for generations. When burned, it allows other nations to access affordable and reliable electricity, and in many cases, has helped lift them out of poverty.
Yet Australia’s leaders stand silently by while our affordable and reliable baseload electricity, generated by that same coal, is replaced by highly subsidised renewables that require vast amounts of backup energy and extra transmission lines to work. All of this adds a huge cost to taxpayers.
The Minerals Council of Australia, a club for the major mining companies, has boasted of the hundreds of new high efficiency, low emissions (HELE) coal-fired plants in operation or in planning and construction.
The MCA even spruiked how these plants could deliver ‘reliable, base-load energy while reducing CO2 emissions by up to 40 per cent’ saying:
‘Coal has a fundamental role to play in the provision of low cost, reliable energy for the foreseeable future.’
Meanwhile, the MCA makes no mention about how Australia would be able to benefit from these new technologies.
Is it because key MCA members vocally endorse Net Zero in order to provide the requisite political cover from activists to continue to mine and export coal, all while our domestic power supply is being thrown under the proverbial bus?
It’s hard not to think this is why they led the charge to close down the Australian Coal Association and its ‘Coal21’ outreach program, which was devoted to the roll-out of new technologies.
The stakes for Australian domestic and industrial energy users are high.
In Victoria, the ageing Hazelwood power station was closed with just six months’ notice in 2017, resulting in a wholesale power price jump of 85 per cent. The imminent closure of Liddell Power station in the Hunter Valley will, no doubt, have a similar effect.
Had these power stations been replaced in an orderly and sensible manner using the latest technologies, the National Electricity Market would still have an abundance of affordable and reliable energy, instead of being in the midst of the current energy supply crisis.
In addition, environmentalists could have welcomed the reduced amount of carbon emissions associated with ‘ultra-supercritical’ power-generating technology.
The key remaining coal-fired power plants in Australia slated for closure in the next decade should all be maintained, refurbished, and operated until such future time as baseload generation is available, either from high-efficiency, low-emission coal or nuclear sources.
Queensland Senator Matt Canavan gets it right when he says:
‘Remember when they said there was no one that wanted to build a coal-fired power station? Then when someone says, “Yes, I do!” They say, “Sorry, you can’t get approval…”’
China, which has firmly rejected the policy of Net Zero emissions by 2050, is getting on with the job of providing reliable and affordable power for its people and industries.
If Australia had the same attitude, communities in the Galilee Basin could look forward to an influx of new jobs, and Queenslanders could be more confident of enjoying efficient, affordable, and reliable energy well into the future using the coal beneath our feet.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/a-tale-of-two-cities/
***************************************14 September, 2022
Melting Swiss glaciers reveal ancient hiking path not seen for over 2,000 years
So present-day warming is NOT unprecedented. Where were the SUVs and coal-fired power stations 2,000 years ago?
Following the hottest summer in Europe on record, a path usually covered by ice and snow has been uncovered for the first time in at least 2,000 years.
The ski resort, Glacier 3000, in the Les Diablerets area of western Switzerland said this year's ice melt was around three times the 10-year average.
"Ten years ago I measured about 15 metres of ice. So more than 15 metres of ice and snow have melted," says Mauro Fischer, a glaciologist at the University of Bern's Institute of Geography.
Bare rock can now be seen between the Scex Rouge and the Zanfleuron glaciers at an altitude of 2,800 metres, and the pass is expected to be completely exposed by the end of this month.
Why is the ice melting so dramatically in the Alps?
Since last winter, which brought relatively little snowfall, the Alps have sweltered through two big early summer heatwaves. Not only did a hot, dry summer melt snow and ice but the lack of rain means there’s very little to replenish it.
"What we saw this year and this summer is just extraordinary and it's really beyond everything we have ever measured so far," Fischer adds, referring to the speed at which the ice has melted.
The Alps' glaciers are now on track for their biggest mass losses in at least 60 years of record-keeping, data shows.
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Climate Change is making people angrier online
Hot weather has long been associated with inflamed mood but you can have that without global warming
Hateful comments spike on social media when temperatures rise above 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research have found.
“It’s an indicator of how well people can adapt to high temperatures,” said Annika Stechemesser, lead author of the study published in The Lancet Planetary Health earlier this month. “If temperatures go too hot or too cold, we found that there’s an increase in online hate speech, no matter the socioeconomic differences, religion or political beliefs.”
Global warming of about 1.1°C on average since pre-industrial times has unleashed all sorts of extreme weather events across the world. This summer, drought and a string of heat waves hit Europe, China and the U.S. For humans, heat is associated with psychiatric hospitalizations, increased rates of suicide and more domestic violence, according to research.
And aggressive behavior online has been linked to violence offline too. Incensed posts have led to more violence toward minorities, including mass shootings, lynchings and ethnic cleansing, according to the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank.
Stechemesser and other researchers analyzed a sample of 4 billion tweets between 2014 and 2020 from users based in the U.S. They used artificial intelligence to identify about 75 million hate messages in English, using the United Nations’ definition of online hate, which includes racial discrimination, misogyny and homophobia. They then analyzed how the number of tweets changed when local temperatures increased or decreased.
The researchers found that online hate speech increased as daily maximum temperatures rose above 21°C (70F) — a “feel good” point. Hate messages went up as much as 22% on hot days, compared with the average online hate during times of mild weather.
Across all climate zones and socioeconomic groups in the U.S., online tensions intensified even more significantly when temperatures exceeded 30ºC. Researchers observed that online hate speech increased by as much as 24% — from the feel good point — when temperatures reached 42ºC to 45ºC in U.S. regions with hot and dry climates such as parts of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. Last year, a study by the same researchers focusing on Europe reached similar conclusions.
“When discussing climate change, it’s a point to remember that we feel the effects everywhere, not just in places with big disasters,” Stechemesser said. “There are places where the social consequences of heat have been not discussed very thoroughly, especially around how we can live together as a society and deal with our well-being in the future.”
Researchers analyzed the tweets as a whole and did not look into specific incidents. That means there’s no way to know if the weather made online tensions worse following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, for instance, or in the lead up to the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January 2021. Still, some conclusions can be reached ahead of the US mid-terms on Nov. 8.
“Our results show that if September is particularly hot, we can expect to see more hate on Twitter,” said Stechemesser. “But the research doesn’t really show what kind of hate it is or on what topics — we don’t know yet whether the hate we observe is tied to political issues.”
The direct relation between heat and online hate has also been documented in China, where researchers analyzed over 400 million tweets from a sample of 43 million users posting on the country’s largest microblog platform — Sina Weibo. They concluded that days with temperatures above 35°C, rain, higher wind speed, overcast skies and air pollution all make people grumpier online.
“Of course people can to an extent decide consciously whether they want to be nice or not, but we still find you’ll have more hateful behavior if you find yourself a certain temperature range,” Stechemesser said. “The first thing to do is limit global warming, that’s the most obvious approach to solving this.”
https://www.arcamax.com/knowledge/scienceandtech/technews/s-2724630
************************************************ESG and Corporate Totalitarianism
Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores are a Trojan horse for left-wing totalitarianism; yet, the American right was largely caught off guard by its sudden rise. The world's largest private capital firms, government institutions, and NGOs have discovered, seemingly in concert, the need to remake the global economy in the image of this arbitrary left-wing metric, which poses a serious threat to ordered liberty the world over.
Tellingly, the proponents of ESG value quixotic goals such as carbon dioxide emissions reduction above sensible environmental protections and conservation. ESG’s “social” goals are even more nebulous, as social justice itself is entirely subjective. However, the point of ESG is not actually to improve the environment or protect social justice. In reality, the point is to establish control over the many by the few.
What the radical Left could not achieve by force with the typical levers of government power, it is now poised to accomplish with nominally public-private enterprise partnerships. This new strategy has confused the conservative and libertarian response. If such heavy-handedness were attached to the arm of the state, free-market organizations and policymakers would mobilize quickly against it. Coming primarily from the private sector, however, has forestalled an effective response to the ESG agenda.
Unlike government bureaucrats, private sector proponents of ESG are happy to immodestly expose their totalitarian urges in public. Bank of America Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan explained his plans to enforce ESG with characteristic subtlety, in describing Bank of America's war chest: "200,000 people, a three trillion-dollar balance sheet, 60 billion in expenses; you start aiming that gun, and you take that across all these companies, it is huge." The true lightbearer of the ESG movement may be BlackRock's aptly named CEO, Larry Fink. He summarizes his firm's role in promoting ESG with equal artfulness, noting, "...at BlackRock we are forcing behaviors."
If a nominee for the president's cabinet exercised such candor, even the ossified U.S. Senate would yawn into action and reject them. But policymakers have struggled to respond to left-wing totalitarianism when it comes from corporate America. They should not hesitate to act, though. These are multinational firms, and they are not products of free and fair competition. Their business model intentionally blurs the lines of distinction between public and private enterprise, making effective regulation a murky, but very necessary, affair.
The old Left versus Right paradigm of government versus business is a complete farce in the age of neoliberal triumphalism. BlackRock lives in the nexus of nationless corporations, governments, and quasi-governmental bodies. BlackRock's leadership enjoys a cozy relationship with the Biden administration, as it did with the now-dormant House of Clinton, possibly even the CIA, and of course the World Economic Forum.
BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Capital are the top three shareholders in a startlingly large number of the world's largest and most influential companies. They all sing from the same dark hymnal on governance, which is how they have cartelized private global enterprise to promote their left-wing agenda. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the purpose of their hard-won power seems to be the attainment of ever more power.
It could be inferred that BlackRock's role in the cartel is to financially leverage compliance with the "voluntary" standards set by nongovernmental bodies like the World Economic Forum, itself a leader of even more obscure policymaking bodies. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission polices compliance, and spins the revolving door of Fortune 100 executives, nongovernmental technocrats, and public administrators. The boot on the neck of the middle class is the commonality of both government and corporations. At the highest levels, there is no meaningful difference.
BlackRock has been rewarded handsomely for its leadership of the cartel. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank made an unprecedented arrangement with BlackRock last year, allowing the firm to purchase securities on behalf of the Fed, which in turn invested in BlackRock funds, its first ever purchase of ETFs or corporate bonds. What a lucky break for the world's largest private asset manager.
The Fed itself is perhaps the paragon of government-corporate opacity. Despite its statutory privilege to print dollars and purchase the sovereign debt of the American taxpayer, its ownership is a conglomeration of regional banks owned by unspecified private entities. When former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) humbly proposed that the American public deserved to know how the Fed decides whom to bail out and why, Congress' greatest libertarian was cynically told his questions constituted undue government interference in the free market.
Corporate-government power is now being turned against the credulous Right. Its victims are the very conservatives and libertarians who have developed a neurological inhibitory structure that prevents them from criticizing megacorporations as a class. In their heart of hearts, they believe that private enterprise exists only to make us all rich, and government exists only to destroy private capital. While there are kernels of truth in these sentiments, the unquestioning loyalty of the upper middle class to nationless corporations precludes closer inspection of how "free" this market really is and who actually runs it.
It should not surprise anyone that corporate-government power would now lurch Left. This new leftist elite is only one side of a controlled dialectic in a centuries-long campaign to undermine and destroy the concept of a constitutional republic. Totalitarianism is as useful to the left as it is to the right, despite the insistence of political "scientists" that it is exclusive to the latter.
For example, Benito Mussolini's government could be considered the purest expression of fascism in modern history, largely inspired by his court philosopher Giovanni Gentile. Although Gentile was squarely a man of the Right, he shared many influences with the far Left, including Benedetto Croce, who was foundational to arch neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Neo-Marxism is the indisputable fountainhead of the Left's war on all that is good and pure in the world, even though the mainstream media writes it off as the anti-Semitic fever dream of right-wing terrorists.
Conservatives and libertarians are correct to approach the regulation of private enterprise with caution. It is important to create regulatory tools that cannot be turned against small, independent businesses. The Right should not, however, hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defeat the ESG plutocracy. It is thoroughly totalitarian and destructive in nature.
Fortunately, there are rays of hope on the horizon that the Right may rise to the occasion. These efforts are politically popular, and they must be greatly expanded if constitutional republicanism is to survive in the world.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/esg_and_corporate_totalitarianism_.html
****************************************************Boost in lithium battery manufacturing in Australia
The universal shift toward a clean energy economy has lithium classed as a critical metal and Australia is fast becoming a manufacturing hub for lithium-ion batteries.
Australia is the largest producer of lithium metal, producing approximately 50% of the world’s lithium as hard rock lithium concentrate. In 2021, Western Australian mines produced about half the world’s lithium, at an estimate of 55,000 metric tons.
The last 12 months have seen increased lithium battery manufacturing facilities begin production in Australia. In 2021, Energy Renaissance based in the Hunter Region in NSW, became Australia’s pilot lithium-ion battery production facility.
In 2017, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) produced Australia’s first lithium battery at its purpose-built battery testing facility, The National Battery Testing Centre (NBTC).
Humiscope director John Morgan stated that lithium-ion batteries are highly energy efficient and are being used to power hybrid and electric cars. Humiscope, an Australian-owned company, is experienced in designing and building ultra-dry lithium battery manufacturing and testing rooms.
Over the last year, Humiscope has been contacted by three separate manufacturers from three different states in Australia, each requiring a different size manufacturing facility. In late 2021, NBTC contacted Humiscope to discuss having a second dehumidifier installed as they expand their testing facility.
Morgan explained that due to Australia’s significant weather variations with fluctuating humidity from region to region and at different times throughout the year, environmental control during battery production is essential.
“When designing lithium battery production facilities, it is important to understand that lithium-ion is a highly reactive and flammable alkali mineral, and the batteries consist of several hygroscopic chemical components. These chemical components attract moisture,” Morgan said.
“Due to the chemical sensitivity to moisture, specially designed ultra-low dew point, ultra-low humidity, ultra-dry rooms are required to both test and manufacture lithium batteries.”
Lithium-ion batteries are the most popular battery used today. They are lighter than alkaline batteries and offer high operation voltage and high-power storage, therefore widely used as a power source for portable devices such as mobile phones, laptops, and digital cameras.
There has been an exponential worldwide increase in lithium production since 2017, with analysts from GlobalData stating that lithium demand will more than double by 2024.
https://www.ferret.com.au/news/lithium-battery-manufacturing-australia/
***************************************September 13, 2022
Liz Truss Appoints A Climate Skeptic As Energy Secretary
Britain appointed lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has expressed scepticism about the need to fight ‘climate change’ as the new business secretary, raising concerns that he could delay the target of reducing net zero emissions by 2050.
Rees-Mogg, nicknamed “the honorable gentleman from the 18th century” because of his poshness and trademark double-breasted suit, was on Tuesday put in charge of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which is responsible for the government’s strategy on ‘climate change’.
In the past, Rees-Mogg has expressed concerns about “climate alarmism”, said humanity should adapt to, rather than mitigate, ‘climate change’, and warned that the drive to getting to net zero emissions is responsible for high energy prices.
After his appointment, Rees Mogg said his priority would be to provide help for people dealing with sharply higher energy bills and that the government will soon bring forward a package to help the public.
New Prime Minister Liz Truss has backed the (unfortunately) legally binding target of reducing net zero ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions by the middle of this century, but has supported scrapping green levies and bringing back fracking if there is local support.
One contentious issue facing Rees-Mogg is providing a clear and settled policy environment for business after successive Conservative governments have produced energy and industrial strategies that were abandoned just a few years later.
The 2017 Industrial Strategy, which aspired to make Britain the world’s most innovative economy, was abolished by Rees-Mogg’s predecessor Kwasi Kwarteng in 2021, who said it was a “pudding without a theme”.
British business leaders told Reuters they need certainty to underpin investment and expressed scepticism Rees-Mogg will be able to provide that assurance.
One British business leader said that Rees Mogg, who embraces his image as an English gentleman, “was more in tune with the Industrial Revolution than the digital revolution”.
Rees-Mogg, 53, the current minister for Brexit opportunities, has pushed to force all civil servants back to the office, which was dubbed by former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries as “Dickensian”.
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has previously backed Rees-Mogg’s campaign. Johnson’s spokesman said everything needed to be done to get government officials to return to their normal office working environments after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The son of a former editor of The Times newspaper, Rees-Mogg was raised by his nanny – who now looks after his own six children – and then studied at Eton, an exclusive private school, and Oxford University, where he studied history.
Rees-Mogg joined J. Rothschild investment management in 1991, focusing on emerging markets, and later worked in Hong Kong. He then set up his own asset management company.
Since entering politics in 2010, Rees Mogg lobbied for a purist vision of Brexit and was appointed Leader of the House of Commons in 2019 in his first ministerial job.
https://principia-scientific.com/liz-truss-appoints-a-climate-skeptic-as-energy-secretary/
*************************************************CA Spends $54B to Fight Climate Change With ‘No Realistic Plan’
The California State legislature voted to spend $54 billion to fight climate change even though one expert has said “there’s no realistic plan for implementation.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom pushed the deal in the legislature, CalMatters reported, with only about three weeks left in the session.
The package of bills will prevent the state’s last nuclear power plant from closing, add new restrictions on oil and gas drilling, and require the state to no longer add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2045.
The Golden State will have to cut emissions at least 85 percent by 2045 and offset the rest of the emissions by planting trees or “using still-unproven technologies like direct air capture, which collects gasses after they’ve already been discharged into the atmosphere,” The New York Times reported.
But the state isn’t even on track to meet its 2030 goals, according to Danny Cullenward, policy director at CarbonPlan, a nonprofit group that evaluates climate programs.
He said regulators in the state were holding out hope that a cap-and-trade program that imposes a ceiling on emissions from large polluters would work but hasn’t.
“If these new targets force state regulators to go back to the drawing board and come up with a credible new plan to cut emissions, that’s great,” Mr. Cullenward said, The NYT reported. “But in my view they still don’t have a realistic plan for implementation, and that’s the most important part.”
Among the $54 billion in spending is $6.1 billion for electric vehicles, $14.8 billion for transit and rail projects, more than $8 billion to clean up the electric grid, $2.7 billion to fight wildfires, and $2.8 billion in water programs to help the state deal with drought, The Times reported.
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Scientists hope to feed primary school children edible insects to make the UK greener
Children are to be fed bugs as part of a plan to get a new generation to switch from meat to insects – and potentially persuade their parents to follow their lead.
Pupils at four primary schools in Wales are to be offered insects to eat as part of a project to gauge children’s appetite for “alternative protein” such as crickets, grasshoppers, and mealworms.
Researchers hope their findings will give clues as to how best educate children on the environmental and nutritional benefits of edible insects across the UK, and potentially overseas – and, in turn, their parents, as the world looks to help the environment by cutting meat consumption.
The project, which starts this week, will use surveys, workshops, interviews and focus groups to explore young people’s understandings and experiences of alternative proteins.
The researchers have teamed up with teachers and hope many of the five to 11 year old’s in the study will be willing to taste some edible insects to see how they find them.
“We want the children to think about alternative proteins as real things for now, rather than just as foods for the future, so trying some of these foods is central to the research,” said Christopher Bear, of Cardiff University.
“Although edible insects are – for now – not sold widely in the UK, they form part of the diet of around 2 billion people worldwide. Much of this is in parts of the world where they are part of long-standing culinary traditions. And they are increasingly popular elsewhere,” he said.
The researchers stress that they will not be forcing children to eat insects.
But they hope to be able to offer a range of alternative proteins to try, if children wish to do so, as long as they have written parental consent.
These will include plant-based foods and may involve edible insects, depending on whether they have received ‘novel foods’ approval by the Food Standards Agency by that point.
They hope to offer them a product called VeXo, which combines insect- and plant-based proteins.
A 2020 study estimated that 9 million European consumers had eaten insects in 2019, and forecast that this would increase to 390 million by 2030, according to the International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed (IPIFF), the insect production charity.
They have been promoted by organisations such as the United Nations for their potential environmental and nutritional benefits, and as a potential contributor to global food security, Dr Bear pointed out.
Carl Evans, Headteacher of Roch Community Primary School in Pembrokeshire, which is taking part in the project, said: “There is an important connection between our local community, food production and wider global issues surrounding sustainable development.”
“These issues are important to children, but also difficult to make sense of and can often be confusing for them,” he added.
Verity Jones, of the University of the West of England in Bristol and who is also involved in the study, has previous experience of children and edible insects. She is confident they can be a powerful force for changing their parents’ behaviour in this matter.
“Many children have the power of pester, so in some cases can be great agents of dietary change within the family,” she said, adding that bits of insects find their way into many of the foods we eat daily.
“Everyone eats insects everyday – there’s over 30 parts of bugs in every 100g of chocolate … bread, fruit juices, hops … you name it, you’re eating insects,” she said.
“And I have found that, once children know that insects are already, by the very nature of processing, in many of the foods we eat; and are assured that they won’t become ill from eating them, they are very open to trying,” she said – although in most cases they are much happier eating them ground up than entire insects.
“All research, for adults and children, indicates whole insects are off-putting, but ground-up insects within foods are very acceptable. No one likes the idea of having a crunchy bit of wing or antenna between their teeth. But, in fact, children were more likely to choose food containing edible insects over usual meat products on a matter of sustainable credentials if given the option,” she said.
“Children can be squeamish, just like adults – but my previous research found that it’s all in the preparation and prior knowledge. If children are aware of where they are from, that they won’t make them ill, that they are actually healthy and in lots of food already (though in tiny amounts), this reduces the yuk factor and normalises it a bit more.”
“My research indicates, as with adults, that boys are more likely to be up for trying the new foods first – but overall both boys and girls seem to be willing to have a go in equal measure,” she said.
Many edible insects are rich in protein, antioxidants, vitamins and other nutrients and have a much lower environmental impact per kilogram than meat.
Mealworms, for example, produce less than 1 per cent as much greenhouse gas as cows and about 10 per cent of a pig’s smaller carbon hoof print. House crickets polluted even less, according to a study in the journal PLoS ONE.
Another study, in the journal of Cleaner Production, found that insect farms emit 75 per cent less carbon and use half as much water as poultry farms, per kg.
Consumers in the UK have shown an increased demand for healthy, sustainable diets, with a focus on reducing traditional meat products such as beef and chicken.
A recent study by the Finder research group found that over seven million adults in the UK follow a meat-free diet and a further six million intended to shift to vegetarian or vegan diets.
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Renewables push won’t bring down Australian power prices any time soon
Last week in parliament, Anthony Albanese attempted to explain how electricity prices were determined in this country: “It is not really rocket science. You don’t need an economics degree … to know that if the market changes from a more expensive level of energy to a cheaper level of energy, you get cheaper energy prices … That is why (Australians) got solar panels on their roofs.”
It may as well be rocket science for the Prime Minister because he clearly doesn’t understand how electricity prices are set or the irrelevance of the example of the installation of small-scale solar panels by households.
It is the case that households are subsidised to install rooftop solar panels, with the precise arrangements varying from state to state. They are then further subsidised through generous feed-in tariffs for any surplus electricity that is fed back into the grid. These subventions are paid for by taxpayers and other electricity consumers without solar panels.
The households that got in early have done the best, with some of the most generous deals being grandfathered by state governments. Those that have taken up the offer to install solar panels recently have done less well. After taking account of the capital expenditure and the fact panels don’t last very long and can be unreliable, they offer a reasonable but not excessive return.
Most households with solar panels remain connected to the grid: after all, the sun goes down and there can be cloudy and wet days. While some have invested in small battery storage, this is an expensive option, although it is further subsidised in some jurisdictions such as South Australia.
Electricity retailers charge a service charge as well as a tariff based on usage. Across time, we should expect this service charge to grow proportionately as the penetration of solar panels increases further. In effect, this is the option price for customers for remaining connected to the grid. Albanese is correct that Australians have been encouraged to install solar panels because of the possibility of saving money on their bills. Where he is astray is to think this is an efficient way to reduce emissions as part of a climate change policy.
Abatement costs per tonne of CO2 are very high for these sorts of small-scale efforts relative to all other measures. And these types of subsidies are a case of Robin Hood in reverse – wealthier households with their own freestanding homes are effectively subsidised by other households, including renters and those living in apartments.
Let me return to how electricity prices are determined in the national electricity market, which links five states and the ACT. Albanese is adamant “renewables are the cheapest form of new energy” and “that we stand by our modelling”. But electricity is not like the market for most goods. Shifting up the supply curve at certain times of the day won’t necessarily reduce the overall price paid by consumers. Supply must meet demand at all times, 24 hours a day, every day. It is the marginal supplier that determines the price at any point, with suppliers bidding into the market and the operator ensuring the market clears.
What has emerged recently, as the penetration of large-scale renewable energy has risen, is large variations in the wholesale price of electricity across the day. On sunny and windy days, the price can be low, sometime negative, during the day, but the price shoots up at night when the sun sets and the wind often dies down. At this point, renewable energy is not useful and only reliable or firming generation (coal, gas, hydro) can be used to meet demand.
Another feature of the electricity market is that these diurnal variations in the price undermine the economics of firming generation, particularly coal. Because coal-fired plants operate on a continuous basis, the losses they incur during the day need to be offset by profits made at other times for them to stay in business. But with many plants ageing and the price of coal rising steeply, the likely effect of more renewable energy is to hasten the exit of plants, which puts upward pressure on electricity prices. Indeed, the higher the penetration of renewable energy, the greater the increase in prices unless new reasonably priced firming capacity quickly enters the market.
Californians are struggling to escape a scorching heatwave, as the state's power grid operator raised an…
Gas-peaking plants are an obvious answer but the price of gas is high and rising.
It is why there is much discussion and some investment in large-scale batteries. The trouble is that we have not reached the point of achieving economic, long-duration batteries – they can provide power for only a few hours. Given the shortage of minerals needed for construction of these batteries, the outlook for batteries to counterbalance the inherent intermittency of renewable energy is highly uncertain.
It is also why the Snowy 2.0 project is important because it provides a substantial source of storage that can be used to firm supply. But the costs and timeline of this project have blown out and 2027 looks like the earliest starting date. While there are investigations being initiated on other possible pumped-hydro projects, they are unlikely to make any difference for years.
The federal government also is placing much store by additional investment in transmission as a way of connecting far-flung renewable energy projects to the grid and potentially adding to the reliability of renewables generation. There are numerous problems with this solution, including that regulated transmission lines earn a guaranteed rate of return for owners and the price of transmission simply flows to consumers. Transmission and distribution costs amount to 40 per cent of the retail price, with the wholesale price another 25 per cent and the remainder mainly the retail margin.
The bottom line is our Prime Minister, even with his economics degree, has a lot to learn about electricity prices. The average wholesale price in the June quarter was triple the level of a year ago and the Australian Energy Regulator predicts prices will stay high for years. Retail customers are about to be hit with much higher bills. Elsewhere, the higher the penetration of renewable energy, the higher are electricity prices: think Denmark and California.
Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen quickly need to walk back from their pledge that average household electricity bills will fall by $275 a year. It also would be useful if they acknowledged that pushing more renewable energy into the system as well as subsidising unpopular new transmission lines are not magic bullets. State energy ministers should take note.
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September 12, 2022
Do YOU have this dining set at home? Expert reveals the dangerous reason why you should stop eating off them immediately
Ingesting lead is undoubtedly bad for you but where is the evidence that lead leaches through a hard glaze into food? If it does, how many molecules are involved? Very few, I would think.
An American expert and child health advocate has revealed shocking news about the vintage Royal Doulton Bunnykins dining sets.
Tamara Rubin, from Oregon, is best known for testing pottery, crystal, and toys for lead after two of her children were poisoned with the toxin in 2005.
The mum-of-four has discouraged people from using the popular vintage Bunnykins dining sets with food, as she has found them to contain high levels of lead and arsenic.
She recently tested a Bunnykins baby bowl with a raft on it and found 93,600 ppm of lead and 3,460 ppm of arsenic.
The expert also revealed that 90 ppm and up is extremely unsafe for children and dangerous to consume.
'Vintage Bunnykins are not safe for food use and especially not safe for children to use,' said Tamara in a recent post on her website.
A Royal Doulton spokesperson told FEMAIL that a product's safety and quality was very important to them.
'We are committed to putting our customers first and listening to their concerns about consumer issues,' they said.
'We are conscious that manufacturing safety standards have changed over time and recommend that our vintage designs are not used for tableware as originally intended, but enjoyed and loved as a collector's item.
'Royal Doulton is committed to full compliance with all laws and regulations in relevant countries, however, we are aware some of our customers may still be worried about the Bunnykins pieces they own.'
'We would recommend they send a photo of the product back stamp and pattern to our customer service team, this information can be used to help determine the age of the product and reassure our customers about the safety of our Bunnykins products for food use.'
Generations of Australians have enjoyed the family-favourite dining sets, with many passing down the adorable plates, bowls, and cups to their children and grandchildren as gifts.
She added, 'For context: anything made today (2020) with over 90 ppm lead in the paint, glaze or coating is considered illegal in the United States if it is an item that is intended for use by children.'
The child health advocate also revealed that she found multiple other Bunnykins dishes to contain lead and arsenic as well.
'Bunnykins baby bowl with the artist contains 80,000 ppm lead on the food surface,' she said with her test report of the dish.
The high levels of lead and arsenic can cause several health and developmental issues, including severe pain, learning disabilities, chronic fatigue, memory loss, and more.
The Australian Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment, and Water has warned residents that lead in ceramics pose extreme health risks.
'Lead is a toxic substance that can affect people of any age,' they revealed in a 2021 report.
'Lead has long been used in ceramic ware, both in glazes and in decorations'
The government also divulged that the substance is 'especially harmful' to children, pregnant women, and unborn babies as it accumulates in your body and can hence pose a health hazard over time.
'This is because the lead can get into food and drink prepared, stored or served in the crockery,' the report said.
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16 reasons why you need to buy an electric car
You have a penchant for Tolstoy, but never got around to reading War and Peace. Now you can devour this 1,225-page novel at your leisure while waiting in the charging queue.
You’ve dined at them all. Aria. Bennelong. Quay. Yet you’ve never experienced dining at the local servo. No, it’s not just chocolate bars and chips on the menu. Once you finish War and Peace, you can peruse the finer things that petrol stations have to offer. Think Slurpees, gristly meat pies, and try-hard coffee. Who knows, you may be lucky enough to have breakfast and lunch there depending on the length of the charging queue. YOLO.
You have a guilty pleasure and no, you’re not Bill Gates and it’s not private jets. You like to heat your garage in winter. Think how toasty you’ll feel when you step into your garage that’s been heating all night because electric cars, just like you, do not like cold weather. Myev.com offers the suggestion that parking your car in a heated garage will ensure your electric car works well. Synergy.
You’re not sure what you enjoy more, the adventure of hitchhiking or sitting alone in your car on a deserted country road awaiting the NRMA as your car has run out of charge. Electric cars need to charge frequently. So if you’re going on a long journey, there’s a chance you may not make it to the next electric vehicle charging station. This is where War and Peace also comes in handy.
You have a longing for Victorian times and it’s not just the taxidermy and corsets. Children learned the value of money in those times. Maybe sending them down a coal mine wasn’t ideal but better than being stuck up a chimney and having someone light a fire. Child slave labour is alive and well today in Africa where children are used to mine cobalt by hand in order to produce the 60 pounds of cobalt needed for one EV battery.
You are a closet Goth (Vic lit). Blackouts all the way. Cold baths and cockroach milk too.
Coal mining is so pre-Covid. Now it’s lithium, cobalt, graphite, aluminium all the way. A single EV battery needs 30 pounds of lithium, 60 pounds of cobalt, 130 pounds of graphite, and roughly 500 pounds of steel aluminium, manganese, plastic, and other materials. Happy. Happy. Joy. Joy.
You’ve always wanted to live in a permanent Disneyland – believing that electric cars have zero emissions. California awaits.
Virtue signalling has become an obsessive pastime. You now have the Tesla logo in your profile along with six needles and a Ukrainian flag.
Anything a diesel Mercedes C220 D can do your Tesla Model 3 can do better i.e. emit 11 – 28 percent more CO2 over a lifespan of the Mercedes.
You live in a Teal seat. When electricity prices reach $1 per kWh as they are set to do in Norway, it’s nothing to spend $100 to fully charge your car as long as you can wear Teal and drive a Tesla. You know you are one cool dude. Go on post that seventh needle in your profile.
You care about first-world countries and believe that it’s important to keep the pollution emissions away from them and ensure that it’s the third-world countries that are exposed to higher rates of toxic substances needed to make the batteries the EVs.
You’re a great delegator and will happily delegate power regarding your movements to the government. Of course, they should be allowed to turn your car off at any time because Science.
You’ve always wanted to work for MI5 and have one of those tracking device thingies like James Bond. (Plus you’re so glad 007 is a woman now. Hopefully they will be Trans soon and driving a Tesla, like you.)
You’ve always had a soft spot for China and think it’s important to contribute to their economy. After all, China processes 40 per cent of the world’s raw lithium and their market share for lithium is 80 per cent.
You don’t actually know how an EV charges and where the coal-fired electricity comes from. It’s battery operated and that’s all that matters.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/16-reasons-why-you-need-to-buy-an-electric-car/
**********************************************Millions of Californians like me are told there's no energy left to charge the electric cars that could speed us away from wildfires — is this the most idiotic example of a climate cult gone mad, asks STEVE HILTON
California is in the grips of a deadly crisis! No, not the weeks-long 100-degree-plus temperatures blanketing the state. Heat waves come and go.
I'm talking about something far more insidious. The state is being strangled to death in the clench of a 'climate cult.'
All week every Californian with a cellphone has been receiving desperate text messages pleading with them to 'turn off your appliances' and turn down their air conditioning.
Governor Gavin Newsom has been sending plaintive pleas thanking us for complying and urging us to continue with the rationing measures. You see -- California's electricity grid cannot cope with the additional demands put upon it by the hot weather.
Newsom assures us our compliance will ensure that 'we can get through this together.'
Get through what? A stretch of hot days in the summer is nothing new, despite Newsom's false claims of 'unprecedented' temperatures. The last comparable heat wave occurred in 1988. That's not exactly ancient history.
No, the real reason that California – a state that ranks as the world's fifth largest economy – cannot power its citizens' homes is that for years Newsom and far-left Democrats have waged war on energy in the name of fighting climate change.
For them, the only thing that matters is pushing forward, with all the zeal of the religious fanatic, a crazed and irrational anti-energy, anti-human agenda.
Reliable sources of electricity, like gas-burning power stations and nuclear power, have been undermined, while renewable alternatives like wind and solar have been encouraged through regulation and subsidy.
Let's be clear, the climate is changing, and I have always supported reasonable, balanced policies to address that reality. I also back the sensible use and development of renewables.
But I – and millions of Californians – are not willing to plunge ourselves and our children into hot and dangerous darkness in the pursuit of a vague, self-righteous, ill-conceived crusade that won't even deliver its stated objectives.
There is zero evidence that California's self-sacrifice will amount to any meaningful reduction in global warning.
In any case, there has been no long-term increase in heatwave frequency or severity in the U.S. over the last century, and deaths from heatwaves have fallen significantly - mainly because of the increased availability of air conditioning.
But the climate cultists are telling us to turn our air conditioning off! Isn't that proof that the headlong retreat from reliable energy has gone too far?
Apparently, not for the high priests of the 'climate crisis', as they call it.
'We understand we cannot have the lights go off,' Siva Gunda, vice chair of the California Energy Commission told The Washington Post. 'But the fear of these questions being brought up is not a reason to slow down from what we know is morally and societally what we need to do.'
There it is in black and white. It is moral to cripple energy production. Unbelievably, in the midst of this entirely self-created crisis California is doubling down.
The latest centerpiece is the program to force the electrification of our economy with bans on gas cookers in new homes, and, most famously, banning gas cars by 2035.
Electric vehicles for all!
But in potentially the cruelest and most inept recent edict, Californians with electric vehicles were told not to charge their cars.
To complete the picture of chaos and confusion, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Isaac Sanchez pleaded with people to ignore that command, with parts of the state under wildfire evacuation warnings.
'We recommend cars are fully charged and ready to go. If that's your means of evacuation and if you don't do it, you are unable to evacuate, life safety is a priority. At least it is to us,' Sanchez told Newsweek. 'Our priority is always to err on the side of life safety.'
But 'life' is not a priority for the demented 'climate' zealots who have brought California to this sorry state of affairs.
They have even contributed to the very wildfires which they use as an excuse to push ahead with their agenda.
By forcing utilities like Northern California's PG&E to spend money on vanity 'climate' projects, vital ongoing maintenance work has been neglected. Time and again, investigations have shown that faulty equipment has been the cause of the most damaging wildfires.
The tragedy of all this - and the warning to the rest of America - is that it is all so unnecessary.
Like America as a whole, California has abundant energy reserves, especially natural gas, which we could be using to reliably power our economy and society while reducing carbon emissions.
Instead, we're pathetically muddling through with a combination of rationing and the import of far dirtier fossil fuels from some of the world's worst regimes.
We all shuddered at the revolting spectacle of Biden's 'fist-bump of shame' with Mohammed Bin Salman, the Butcher of Saudi Arabia.
Now the Saudis are throwing it back in Biden's face with a pledge to cut production instead of increasing it, in order to keep prices high.
It is a truly grotesque abdication of U.S. leadership. Yet these Democrat politicians have the nerve to claim that their disastrous and shambolic energy policies are somehow to be admired and replicated.
Newsom brags that where California leads, the nation will follow - a sentiment recently echoed by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and one that should terrify all Americans.
If Democrats in California - or at the national level - really wanted to do that, they would give a massive boost to the most reliable form of clean energy we have, nuclear power.
Instead in California after years of demonization we just saw a grudging reprieve for our last remaining nuclear power station, Diablo Canyon, with zero long-term investment and nothing from Biden but a token commitment.
When you consider the astonishing incoherence and deep destructiveness of the Democrats' energy policies, you inevitably conclude that they are truly in the grip of a 'climate' cult.
Anti-science, anti-human, inconsistent even on its own terms…it is all one giant, self-indulgent exercise in elitist virtue-signaling, and as usual ordinary Americans are left in the dark.
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Evidence-free assertions about climate change
If there is evidence for your case, you don’t need activists to glue themselves to the road to try and convince others to believe in your ‘cause’. Armed with evidence, you don’t need to bluster and disparage your political opponents. If you have evidence for your case, you don’t behave like a smug, arrogant ignoramus, inside or outside Parliament.
It was an enfant terrible of the climate alarmist Michael-hockey-stick-Mann, who years ago labelled the climate alarmist movement as a cause when he derided dissenting climate scientist Dr Judith Curry for her views, saying, ‘It’s not helping the cause. Nor her career…’
Mann should be reminded that science does not exist to support ‘causes’.
I am motivated to make these points in the wake of a series of overheated, under-informed comments by the Minister for Climate Change and Energy, The Hon. Chris Bowen.
He is so loud and derisory in his Parliamentary outbursts on matters to do with his portfolio that his behaviour invites ridicule. One might say that he exhibits the unquestioning confidence of the truly ignorant.
Confucius once said, ‘Real knowledge is knowing the extent of one’s ignorance.’ And while I’m quoting people, it was Charles Darwin who said, ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’
Back in 2010, 43 Fellows of the Royal Society (The United Kingdom’s national academy of sciences, a Fellowship of some 1,600 of the world’s most eminent scientists) wrote to its then president, Paul Nurse, to complain about the unscientific tone of the society’s messages on Climate Change. Eight years later, a group of 33 current and former Fellows of the Geological Society wrote an open letter to their president in similar vein.
The letter notes:
‘The IPCC position matches observations that almost half of the warming that has occurred over the last 150 or so years since industrialisation, had already happened by 1943, well before the rapid rise of industrial carbon dioxide. This difference of opinion is critical, for if carbon dioxide did not cause the pre-1943 warming, the claimed consensus that Catastrophic AGW is caused by human carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution, which is supported by GSL, must be mistaken.
‘As this letter makes clear, it is not true that 97 per cent of scientists unreservedly accept that AGW theory is fixed, or that carbon and carbon dioxide are ‘pollutants’ and their production should be penalised; how can the primary nutrient in photosynthesis be a pollutant? We also note that 700 scientists have made submissions to the US Senate expressing dissent from the consensus and 166 climate scientists issued a challenge to Ban Ki Moon on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 to provide proof of human-induced global warming, which he did not do.’
My point here is that there are plenty of scientists whose work in the wickedly complex field of climate science is available for scrutiny. Ministers should avail themselves of all relevant information to their portfolios before playing with policy blocks.
Not far behind Bowen in blustering rhetoric is the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese. Several times he has summoned up the angry gods of extreme weather events as examples of the dangerous ‘Climate Change’ that his government dragon will slay with the Net Zero mantra.
For example, in early July 2022, Albanese was commenting on the floods which had devastated large regions in Sydney’s northwest. He told the media how Climate Change was causing ever-increasing extreme weather events. He repeated this at a news conference in early September.
My concern is that the Prime Minister is making emphatic public statements that are simply wrong and swiftly contradicted by history. Perhaps he has not been properly advised on this topic? His alarmism flies in the face of the IPCC’s SREX special report of 2012 on extreme weather, which conceded that warming could well reduce extremes, rather than increase them – another glaring contradiction. Further, it would be 20-30 years before any climate effects on extreme weather would even be detectable against natural climate variability, if ever. The 2013 IPCC report broadly endorsed those findings.
While the Prime Minister and his ministers continue to peddle false alarms about ‘Climate Change’ using ordinary weather events which contradict even the questionably reliable IPCC Bible on the subject, no one dares to call them out. Does the government have any advisers who can steer them off such … well, inaccuracies?
When the IPCC was set up over 30 years ago its objective was ‘to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [i.e., human-induced] interference with the climate system’.
The original mandate from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the IPCC was to address ‘dangerous human-caused Climate Change’. That set the agenda, which became the ruling orthodoxy, a circular argument that starts with the conclusion it is trying to prove.
The main dogma of Climate Change science is stated in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
‘It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period (Figure SPM.3).’ (IPCC 2014)
Chris Bowen, Anthony Albanese, and the whole Parliament wrapped up in the narrative of climate terror may like to heed the words of biosciences researcher Dr Javier Vinós and petrophysicist Andy May:
‘There is no evidence confirming this dogma. It is based on computer model results that were programmed with the same assumptions that emerge from them, in a clear case of circular reasoning.’
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/show-us-the-evidence-minister/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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11 September, 2022
‘Doomsday Glacier’ hanging on ‘by its fingernails’ in Antarctica, scientists say
Warmists have been prophecying ice-sheet collapse for years but nothing significant ever happens.
And if the Thwaites glacier did detach it is unlikely to be due to global warming. It is located in West Antarctica, where there is a lot of subsurface vulcanism. The collapse is said to be coming from below not from the top down. And that suggests vulcanism
A glacier three times the size of Tasmania is hanging on “by its fingernails”, scientists have warned.
Thwaites Glacier — otherwise known as the “Doomsday glacier,” due to the fact it could raise the sea level by several metres — is allegedly hanging on “by its fingernails”.
Scientists discovered that the glacier’s underwater base has been eroding due to the increase in the Earth’s temperature, according to a study published in Nature Geoscience.
“Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails,” said Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist who co-authored the study.
“And we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future — even from one year to the next — once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed.”
West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is roughly three times the size of Tasmania and could potentially raise the sea level should it fall into the ocean, which scientists predicted could happen within the next three years.
NASA said the Amundsen Sea region, which is “only a fraction of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet,” would “raise global sea level by about 5m”.
Researchers have monitored the glacier’s recession since “as recently as the mid-20th century,” according to lead author Alastair Graham, and have recorded a disintegration rate of nearly double since the last decade.
Earlier this year, an international group of scientists attempted to study the glacier in an effort to help stop the erosion, however, the group was thwarted by a chunk of ice from the doomed glacier.
Graham stated that it “was truly a once-in-a-lifetime mission” and he hopes that the team will be able to return to the glacier soon — since scientists believed the erosion was working at a slower pace before the study was published.
“Just a small kick to the Thwaites could lead to a big response,” said Graham
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California’s electricity woes offer a taste of a possible future green-energy nightmare
California has become an example of what a state looks like when it is controlled by a single party — in this case Democrats, who are trying to impose a green-energy secular religion on their people.
State officials have banned the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, but a preview of the nightmare that could occur in the near future is happening now.
Facing a heat wave this week and the high chances of rolling blackouts, Californians are being told to turn up the temperature on air conditioners to at least 78 degrees and not charge their electric cars on Sunday afternoons and evenings. If there isn’t enough electricity to charge the current number of electric cars in California (estimated by the office of Gov. Gavin Newsom to be “1 million plug-in electric cars, pickup trucks, SUVs and motorcycles), how much confidence should Californians place in the availability of electricity in 2035 and beyond?
There are approximately 29 million cars, light trucks and motorcycles in the state. By some estimates it will take 15 years to fully transition to all electric vehicles. Currently, reports the Associated Press, California has about 80,000 re-charging stations in public places, “far short of the 250,000 it wants by 2025.”
CalMatters columnist Dan Walters gets to the heart of the problem for electric-car enthusiasts: “Let’s say someone living in San Francisco wanted to drive to Lake Tahoe for skiing. A 150-mile range would not even cover a one-way trip. The solution might be lots of recharging stations along interregional highways, but whereas a fill-up of gasoline might take 10 minutes, recharging electric cars now takes much longer. Is California willing to build the hundreds of thousands of recharging stations a complete conversion to battery-powered cars would require? Could Californians drive their mandated [zero-emission vehicles] into other states without running out of juice?”
There are other concerns, such as the cost of EVs, the life of batteries and the high cost of replacing them, the source of lithium from countries that are poor practitioners of human rights, as well as where all the required new electricity will come from (mainly fossil fuels now, though greenies think costly and ugly windmills, wind and solar sources can produce sufficient power, which is unlikely). There is little consideration for increasing the availability of nuclear power, again because of the left’s antipathy toward that clean energy source.
Then there is the premise on which “climate change” is based. It is more political than logical. With China and India still producing the most CO2, will electric cars in America address the perceived problem? Not according to David Kelly, academic director of the Master of Science in Sustainable Business Program at the University of Miami: “You have to think about what is the lowest cost way to get where we want to go. So, if the goal is to reduce carbon emissions or other pollutants, then electric vehicles are unlikely to be that.” Kelly drives a Tesla.
California is ordering its people to abandon choice when it comes to transportation in favor of expensive electric vehicles that are unlikely to provide the freedom they now enjoy with their gasoline-powered cars, all because of a secular faith that claims to know best what is good for us.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/09/californias-electricity-woes-offer-insight-to-green-energy-nightmare/
*******************************************************UK: Fracking shares rocket after Truss lifts drill ban unlocking what are thought to be huge reserves of shale gas under the UK
Shares in fracking companies soared after the Prime Minister lifted the ban on drilling for shale gas onshore.
In her second day in office, Liz Truss lifted a moratorium which came into force in November 2019 amid fears fracking caused minor earthquakes or tremors.
Companies can now apply for planning permission to frack what are thought to be huge reserves of shale gas under the UK.
Investors have anticipated the move as shares in AIM-listed Egdon have more than doubled since the start of August.
Managing director Mark Abbott praised the Prime Minister’s decision as the ‘logical and pragmatic response to the new geopolitical reality’.
‘With Egdon’s material shale-gas position, we look forward to working positively with government and local communities to deliver this nationally important resource in a timely fashion,’ he said
IGas Energy, meanwhile, which was founded in 2003, said the UK’s ‘world-class shale gas resource’ is now a ‘strategic national asset’ given the ongoing energy crisis.
Boss Stephen Bowler said the decision would improve the UK’s energy security, to increase tax take and provide a means to level up the economy.
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Conservatives Are Mastering the Art of the Proxy Ballot to Fight ESG
For decades, getting a proposal on a company’s proxy ballot, the mainstay of shareholder democracy, had been used by corporate gadflies to try to pressure boards into taking controversial positions. More recently, fund management giants have pushed companies into adopting environmental and social changes through the proxy ballot—the document that publicly traded companies mail to shareholders to cast votes ahead of annual meetings. This year, 272 such measures made it onto company proxies, up from 158 in 2021.
Now conservative groups are getting into the game, led by two little-known strategists who have mastered the art of the proxy ballot. Coincidentally, the US Securities and Exchange Commission is helping to pave their way with important rule changes. “As corporations are making more and more decisions that conservatives feel cater to the left, then [conservatives are] going to not just make more noise about this but be more organized,” says Doug Heye, a Republican strategist and former communications director of the Republican National Committee.
One of the two activists, Scott Shepard, could be seen in February delivering a jeremiad against what he called “Woke Inc.” at a Florida Conservative Political Action Conference convention. Shepard, who leads the Free Enterprise Project at the Washington-based National Center for Public Policy Research, exhorted attendees to put corporate America on the defensive for championing ideas on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues. Shepard says he hopes to rein in companies that promote LGBTQ rights and racial justice without also letting conservatives air their views in the workplace. He estimates his group filed some 275 proposals in the past decade. Over at the National Legal and Policy Center, another right-leaning group in the Washington area, Paul Chesser is doing much the same. Hired in 2021 to direct the group’s Corporate Integrity Project, Chesser is almost single-handedly responsible for the doubling of conservative proposals this year.
Chesser, 58, and Shepard, 49, both conservative writers and researchers, communicate enough to avoid bringing similar measures at the same company, Chesser says. Both groups raise funds mostly from individual donors, according to their spokespeople. During this year’s proxy season—the late winter through spring months when most companies issue annual reports, schedule annual meetings, and mail ballots to shareholders—the two groups say they sponsored 55 proposals, up from 27 in 2021.
Of the 25 from Chesser’s group, all but two appeared on corporate ballots—no small feat given that companies work hard to keep proposals from being voted on. Four of Chesser’s proposals notched support from 34% to 40% of proxy voters, remarkably high for first-time filings. “We’re of the opinion corporations shouldn’t be involved in politics,” he says, and should be managed simply to maximize profits, a position some view as political itself.
Chesser’s group opposes the transition away from fossil fuels because investing in costly alternatives could reduce earnings. It also criticizes corporate boards that include women and minorities yet lack individuals from “non-elite” economic or political backgrounds, saying they lack diversity of thought. Such a measure at JPMorgan Chase & Co. got only 4% support. His proposals calling for disclosure of company political or charitable giving at ConocoPhillips, McDonald’s, and Twitter won support from 19% to 40% of voters, well above the 5% the SEC requires for first-time proposals to be resubmitted.
Shepard’s group filed 30 proxy measures, of which 17 went to a vote, he says. Most got 3% support or less. Many of his measures asked companies, including AT&T, CVS Health, and Walt Disney, to conduct a racial equity audit to investigate discrimination against, essentially, White men. Emphasizing race in hiring creates “massive reputational, legal and financial risk” if others are discriminated against, a supporting statement notes.
SEC rules require a shareholder to own at least $2,000 of a target company’s stock for at least three years to file a proposal. Companies have found numerous ways to keep them off their ballots, including by petitioning the SEC to let them boot a proposal by claiming it’s “substantively similar” to another already on the ballot or arguing it’s irrelevant to the company’s purpose. In the past, the SEC leaned toward the view of many company managers who find proxy ballot battles a distraction or waste of time. No longer: The agency in November said companies would face greater skepticism when asking to keep significant social issues off their proxies. The SEC followed that in July by proposing to make it harder to claim measures are similar to those already filed.
Most ballot proposals fail to garner strong support from fellow investors, much less a majority. Those that do win more than 50% aren’t binding on a board, but can pressure it to adopt changes or risk becoming the target of activist investors, who often point to such votes while campaigning to unseat directors.
Other shareholder proponents view the groups’ work with skepticism. “No one’s taking them seriously,” says Andrew Behar, chief executive officer of the nonprofit As You Sow, which promotes socially responsible investing. But Heye, the Republican strategist, says it’s too soon to count the groups out. “This is new territory for conservatives.”
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9 September, 2022
Earth barrelling towards multiple ‘irreversible’ climate tipping points under current warming rate, study says
What a joke! This analysis was not an analysis of any facts. It was a digest of previous Warmist articles. It found that previous articles from Warmists predicted various disasters. Anybody could have told them that without the need for an "analysis"
The Earth’s current warming rate due to greenhouse gas emissions could lead to the planet crossing several “irreversible” and “dangerous” climate tipping points by the 2030s, a new study warned.
The research, published on Friday in the journal Science in advance of a major conference at the University of Exeter, calls for limiting additional warming “as much as possible” as risks of irreversible damage to the planet increase with each tenth of a degree of further warming.
“Our new work provides compelling evidence that the world must radically accelerate decarbonising the economy to limit the risk of crossing climate tipping points,” Tim Lenton, director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter, said in a statement.
Climate tipping points, researchers say, are threshold conditions on the planet beyond which climate change becomes irreversible and “self-perpetuating.”
“These changes may lead to abrupt, irreversible, and dangerous impacts with serious implications for humanity,” scientists warned in the study.
In the new research, scientists conducted a comprehensive review of over 200 papers published since 2008, and developed an updated assessment of the most important climate tipping points, including their temperature thresholds, time scales, as well as impacts.
These include the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, widespread abrupt permafrost thaw, and massive die-off of tropical coral reefs.
The research found that 16 major systems involved in regulating the planet’s climate – so-called “tipping elements” – “have the potential” to cross tipping points where their changes can become self-sustaining and likely irreversible.
It suggested that even if the global temperature stopped rising, once the ice sheet, ocean, or rainforest passed a tipping point, it would carry on changing to a new state.
Five of the sixteen known tipping points may be triggered even at today’s temperatures, scientists say.
They say four of these move from “possible events” to “likely” at a global warming scenario of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and five more become possible around this level of heating.
“We can see signs of destabilisation already in parts of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, in permafrost regions, the Amazon rainforest, and potentially the Atlantic overturning circulation as well,” study lead author David Armstrong McKay from the University of Exeter says. “The world is already at risk of some tipping points. As global temperatures rise further, more tipping points become possible.” Dr McKay adds.
Limiting warming to well below 2°C and preferably 1.5°C, a goal that nations agreed to at the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, is not enough to fully avoid dangerous climate change, scientists warn.
The new research finds that the risks of tipping point increase markedly in the ”Paris range” of 1.5-2°C warming, with even higher risks beyond 2°C.
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Japan’s nuclear reactor’s may be restarting sooner than expected
Since Japan took its nuclear fleet offline following the 2011 earthquake and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, the country has experienced issues with the provision of adequate electricity supplies, especially at times of extreme heat or cold.
In March, the country experienced energy supply problems following an earthquake. At one point on March 22nd, the consumption rate in the country was 106 percent, meaning that demand had significantly outpaced supply. Nearly 3 million households in the country faced the threat of blackouts, and urgent measures were taken to curtail consumption as lights were dimmed and air conditioners turned down or off. Crisis was averted, but the scare and the litany of similar if more minor incidents that have occured in recent months and years have prompted the country to take a hard look at its energy infrastructure. It has been found wanting.
This has only been escalated by Japan’s sanctions on Russian coal. It hopes to sanction Russian oil and gas as well, but relied on the country for nearly 10 percent of its LNG last year.
In the wake of the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and the reelection of his Liberal Democratic Party’s government, maintaining Fumio Kishida as Prime Minister, the country’s pro-nuclear party is looking at its old nuclear plants as a solution to the current power supply crisis.
In July, Prime Minister Kishida said during a press conference that, “For this winter, I have directed [Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Koichi Hagiuda] to proceed with the operation of up to nine nuclear reactors, which are equivalent to roughly 10% of Japan’s total electricity consumption volumes.” Japan currently has five operating reactors (ten have been restarted,” but only five were producing power at the time of his comments; that number has now risen to seven), so this promise would require bringing four additional reactors that were shuttered after Fukushima was brought back online.
Even more remarkably, on Wednesday Prime Minister Kishida announced that in addition to the restarting of formerly closed reactors, the country would look toward investing in next generation nuclear technology in order to meet its energy needs and meet its climate goals. If this occurred, it would be a major change in the country’s nuclear policy after more than a decade of post Fukushima nuclear skepticism.
Although there has certainly been opposition, the shift back toward a pro-nuclear public opinion in Japan has been caused in large part by rising electricity prices and tightening electricity supplies. As energy concerns mount, and energy conservation alerts abound, the public has become much more open to any available option to meet demand than they had been in the immediate wake of the accident.
Meeting energy demand is a problem across the world right now, as decades of poor energy policy and planning in Europe and Asia as well as the United States are beginning to come to a head. When it comes to how countries react to these policy failures though, there is significant variation.
Germany is resisting keeping nuclear plants running, preferring to reopen mothballed coal plants despite a serious need for every spare megawatt of capacity that the country has, while France is reaping the rewards of chronic underinvestment in its heretofore reliable nuclear fleet, and everyone is feeling the supply pressures resulting from geopolitical uncertainty regarding Russian gas.
Within this landscape, the moves that countries take now to secure their grids will have important implications for both the heatwaves that come next, and the upcoming winter. As such, it’s good to see Japan take another step back toward utilizing its nuclear fleet.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2022/09/06/japan-energy-crisis/ ?
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Green and Woke California Forced to Activate 4 Gas Generators for the First Time as Electric Grid Suffers Major Meltdown
With California’s energy grid unable to meet demand, four emergency gas-powered generators have been called on to ease the strain on the state’s power grid.
California is facing a heat wave with triple-digit temperatures breaking records, according to CBS, which noted Livermore — in the Golden State’s Alameda County — set a new record Monday at 116 degrees.
“We have now entered the most intense phase of this heat wave,” said Elliot Mainzer, president and chief executive of the California Independent System Operator, according to The Sacramento Bee. “The potential for rotating outages has increased significantly.”
He added that the grid faced “energy deficits of 2,000 to 4,000 megawatts, which is as much as 10 percent of normal electricity demand.”
To avert that, the California Independent System Operator on Monday called on the Department of Water Resources to activate four emergency generators, according to KMPH-TV. The generators were installed in 2021, two each in the Sacramento-area cities of Roseville and Yuba City.
The generators can provide up to 120 megawatts of power through natural gas. That’s enough to power about 120,000 homes, according to a Department of Water Resources news release.
The situation facing California was described by The Sacramento Bee this way: “California’s increasing reliance on solar power and other renewable sources has made the grid susceptible to blackouts in the early evening, when solar panels go dark but the weather stays hot.”
“We are on razor-thin margins,” said Siva Gunda, vice chairman of the California Energy Commission, according to the Bee.
On Monday, the California Independent System Operator, which manages the state’s electricity flow, put out a statement in which Mainzer said demand reduction was essential.
“We need a reduction in energy use that is two or three times greater than what we’ve seen so far as this historic heat wave continues to intensify,” he said.
Jack Brouwer, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California at Irvine, told CBS in late August that the state’s energy infrastructure grid cannot provide what is being expected of it.
“The grid does not currently have the capability to add millions of battery electric or even fuel-cell electric vehicles today,” he said, according to CBS.
Ram Rajagopal, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, has said the strain EVs will place on the power grid will be devastating.
“Let’s say we were to have a substantial number of [electric] vehicles charging at home as everybody dreams,” he said, according to a Yahoo report in May. “Today’s grid may not be able to support it. It all boils down to: Are you charging during the time solar power is on?”
Rajagopal led a study that showed that peak charging demand could more than double by 2030 if EV owners charge vehicles after work at their homes.
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Dutch city bans adverts for holiday flights amid climate crisis
A Dutch city has announced it will ban advertising for holiday flights as part of a range of measures to tackle the climate crisis.
Haarlem will be the second city in the world after Amsterdam to impose such a ban.
The city in the northwest of the Netherlands will enforce the prohibition on adverts for air travel, fossil fuels, and non-electric cars from 2024.
It will also be the first city in the world to ban adverts for meat.
When the ban is enacted, Haarlem’s population of about 160,000 will no longer see adverts for fossil fuel-related products and services, or meat, on public buses, shelters and screens.
The ban is delayed until 2024 due to existing contracts with companies that sell the aforementioned products.
Haarlem seeks to follow in the footsteps of the neighbouring Dutch capital of Amsterdam – which last year was the first city in the world to ban adverts for recreational air travel and fossil fuels.
Ziggy Klazes, a councillor from the GroenLinks (‘Green Left’) party, drafted the motion banning adverts for meat in Haarlem.
She reportedly told the Haarlem105 radio channel: “We are not about what people are baking and roasting in their own kitchen.
“If people wanted to continue eating meat, fine ... We can’t tell people there’s a climate crisis and encourage them to buy products that are part of the cause.
“Of course, there are a lot of people who find the decision outrageous and patronising, but there are also a lot of people who think it’s fine.”
Critics of the ban have argued that it restricts the freedom of expression.
Sander van den Raadt, leader of the conservative-liberal Trots Haarlem group, said: “It’s remarkable that the municipality of Haarlem is holding a large poster campaign that you can be yourself in Haarlem and love whoever you want, but if you like meat instead of soft grass, ‘the patronising brigade’ will come and tell you that you are completely wrong.”
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8 September, 2022
Is Extreme Weather Causing the World’s Rivers to Dry Up?
By DAVID R. LEGATES
A recent CNN article entitled “The World’s Rivers are Drying Up from Extreme Weather. See How 6 Look from Space” purports to argue that rivers such as the Colorado, Yangtze, Rhine, Po, Loire, and Danube are dwindling due to “a painful lack of rain and relentless heat waves.” The article concludes that “the human-caused climate crisis is fueling extreme weather across the globe,” which is responsible for making these rivers shrink in both length and breadth and, potentially, become virtually impassable.
While it is true that these rivers are indeed in low-flow conditions, it has long been argued that floods, droughts, and streamflow are driven by several factors in addition to precipitation. Yes, a lack of precipitation over an extended period of time will likely cause low flows in the area’s rivers. But it is not necessarily true that the existence of low flows indicates that a lack of precipitation was the culprit. Humans need water not just to survive, but to carry out a variety of water-intensive industries including paint and coating manufacturing, paper mills, wineries, and pesticide and other agricultural chemical manufacturing, for example. Agriculture too has a high demand for water, and the simple increase in population may tax existing water supplies.
So, it is unrealistic to simply assume that low flows in the six rivers upon which the CNN article focuses are caused by a lack of rainfall and the “relentless heat waves” that have supposedly swept the planet. In fact, the usual mantra from the climate alarmists is that rainfall will increase, not decrease. The rationale for this is that warmer conditions will lead to more evaporation (remember that more moisture can be held in saturated air at warmer temperatures than at colder temperatures), which, in turn, lead will to more rainfall, since “what goes up, must come down.” But, contrary to the actual physics, we are told that the climate becomes more “variable” under climate change in what has been referred to as “climate weirding.” This helps climate alarmists to argue that both floods and droughts will increase, as well as that both more snowfall and less snowfall is indicative of climate change.
To determine whether CNN is correct in suggesting that rivers are drying up due to “the human-caused climate crisis,” let’s take a closer look at some of these rivers.
Let’s start close to home. The Colorado River is cited as the first example, and, although CNN attributes its drying to the “historic drought in the US West,” they do not suggest that this drought is human induced. They do mention, however, that “around 40 million people in seven states and Mexico rely on the river’s water for drinking, agriculture and electricity.” But an evaluation of the current conditions from the USGS National Water Dashboard indicates, as shown below, that many stream gauge stations in western Colorado and Utah are near normal, and in New Mexico and Arizona, they are above and much above normal.
The black and dark blue dots indicate streamflow that is either at or near a record high, and the current forecast is for more rainfall. In fact, the 20th Century was the wettest century of the past millennium. Lake Mead (highlighted by the CNN article) is drying up, not because the streamflow in the region has gone to near zero, but, as University of Alabama climate scientist Roy Spencer shows, because the population of the “desert” has grown so much that the water resources of the region cannot support the water demand.
Next, the CNN article focuses on the Yangtze River in central China. The controversial Three Gorges Dam lies on the Yangtze River, and operation of the dam greatly affects the water levels of both the upstream and downstream portions of the river. Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, but it also serves to enhance the shipping ability of the Yangtze River by controlling streamflow and reducing flood potential for downstream communities. It has adversely affected the landscape and ecology of the region, which is why it has become highly controversial, both domestically and internationally.
Earlier this year, an article in Science Alert (from a published study in Geophysical Research Letters) suggests that the biggest climate change threat to East Asia arises not from drought but from “atmospheric rivers” that will increase rainfall from more frequent and more severe events. So, which is it—lower flows or more flooding?
The remaining four rivers on which the CNN article focused lie in Europe—the Rhine in Germany, the Po in Italy, the Loire in France, and the Danube in Romania. For the Rhine, wetland restoration in the German mountains has had an impact on summer flow, particularly because “the recession flow following the peaks is higher” (i.e., the decrease in flow following the flood peak is increased), which would, according to Wetlands International, cause the water to drain faster, thereby creating a low flow sooner. The Po, too, is low due to a drought, but its flow was lower seventy years ago—well before purportedly manmade global warming took hold. The effect of draining wetlands and extensive industrialization also has had an effect on the river. Euronews reported an expert’s view that while the Loire is “drier than usual this year,” some of the photos of the Loire “are at least a dramatisation of the situation.” And the Danube in Romania is affected by extensive urban land development, the loss of flood plains, and deforestation. All three will exacerbate floods but decrease the flow during low flow conditions as little water exists in transit to the river to sustain the flow when rainfall is low.
However, the single most important factor that debunks the CNN argument that “the human-caused climate crisis is fueling extreme weather across the globe” that is causing the world’s rivers to dry up is in the pictures they choose to demonstrate their point. For five of the six rivers on which they focus (all but the Colorado River), their before-and-after aerial photography compares August 2022 to... August 2021—just one year before. The dramatic change in just one year leads to the inescapable conclusion that this is not a climate issue; rather, it is a normal change in yearly weather conditions and local effects in dam operations. Climate change is measured over periods of at least 30 years, not a single year. On the Colorado River, diminishing streamflow is not the culprit for the low flow conditions; the highly increasing demand for water by a rapidly growing population in the desert Southwest of the United States is a far better explanation.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14265
*****************************************************Climate gains are ‘inconvenient truth’ — it’s not all bad news about the environment
By Bjorn Lomborg
In the 1920s, around half a million people were killed by weather disasters, whereas in the last decade the death-toll averaged around 18,000.
It’s easy to believe that life on Earth is getting ever-worse. The media highlight one catastrophe after another and make terrifying predictions. With a torrent of doom and gloom about climate change and the environment, it’s understandable why many people — especially the young — genuinely believe the world is about to end.
The fact is that while problems remain, the world is in fact getting better. We just rarely hear it.
We are incessantly told about disasters, whether it is the latest heatwave, flood, wildfire or storm. Yet the data overwhelmingly shows that over the past century, people have become much, much safer from all these weather events. Indeed, in the 1920s, around half a million people were killed by weather disasters, whereas in the last decade the death-toll averaged around 18,000. This year, just like 2020 and 2021, is tracking below that. Why? Because when people get richer, they get more resilient.
Weather-fixated television news would make us all think that disasters are all getting worse. They’re not. Around 1900, around 4.5% of the land area of the world would burn every year. Over the last century, this declined to about 3.2%. In the last two decades, satellites show even further decline — in 2021 just 2.5% burned. This has happened mostly because richer societies prevent fires. Models show that by the end of the century, despite climate change, human adaptation will mean even less burning.
And despite what you may have heard about record-breaking costs from weather disasters (mainly because wealthier populations build more expensive houses along coastlines), damage costs are declining, not increasing, as a percent of GDP.
But it’s not only weather disasters that are getting less damaging despite dire predictions. A decade ago, environmentalists loudly declared that Australia’s magnificent Great Barrier Reef was nearly dead, killed by bleaching caused by climate change. The UK Guardian even published an obituary.
This year, scientists revealed that two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef shows the highest coral cover seen since records began in 1985. The good-news report got a fraction of the attention.
Not long ago, environmentalists constantly used pictures of polar bears to highlight the dangers of climate change. Polar bears even featured in Al Gore’s terrifying movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” But the reality is that polar bear numbers have been increasing — from somewhere between five and ten thousand polar bears in the 1960s, up to around 26,000 today. We don’t hear this news. Instead, campaigners just quietly stopped using polar bears in their activism.
There are so many bad-news stories that we seldom stop to consider that on the most important indicators, life is getting much better. Human life expectancy has doubled over the past century, from 36 years in 1920 to more than 72 years today. A hundred years ago, three-quarters of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Today, it’s less than one-tenth.
The deadliest environmental problem, air pollution, was four-times more likely to kill you in 1920 than today, mostly through people in poverty cooking and heating with dung and wood.
Despite COVID-related setbacks, humanity has become better and better off. Yet doom-mongers will keep telling you the end is nigh. This is great for their fundraising, but the costs to society are sky-high: we make poor, expensive policy choices and our kids are scared witless.
We also end up ignoring much bigger problems. Consider all the attention devoted to heatwaves. In the United States and many other parts of the world, heat deaths are actually declining, because access to air conditioning helps much more than rising temperatures hurt.
However, almost everywhere, the cold quietly kills many more. In the US, about 20,000 people die from heat, but 170,000 die from cold — something we rarely focus on. Moreover, cold deaths are rising in the US, and our incessant focus on climate change is exacerbating this trend, because politicians have introduced green laws that make energy more expensive, meaning fewer people can afford to keep warm. Lacking perspective means we don’t focus first on where we can help most.
On a broader scale, global warming prompts celebrities and politicians to fly around the world in private jets lecturing the rest of us, while we spend less on problems like hunger, infectious diseases, and a lack of basic schooling. When did politicians and movie stars ever meet for an important cause like de-worming children?
We need some balance in our news, but that doesn’t mean ignoring global warming: it is a real problem, caused by humanity. We just need perspective. To know what to expect from a warming planet, we can look at the damage estimates from the economic models used by the Biden and Obama Administrations, revealing the entire, global cost of climate change — not just to economies, but in every sense — will be equivalent to less than a 4% hit to global GDP by the end of the century.
Humanity is getting more prosperous every day. In a separate report, the United Nations estimates that without global warming, the average person in 2100 would be 450% better-off than today. Global warming means people will only be 434% richer they say. That is not a disaster.
Climate change fear is causing life-changing anxiety. You might be hearing nothing but bad news, but that doesn’t mean that you’re hearing the full story.
https://nypost.com/2022/09/06/theres-plenty-of-good-news-about-the-environment/
**********************************************************California Dreamin’
On August 25, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) voted unanimously to ban the sales of new internal-combustion vehicles in the Golden State by 2035 because of climate change, of course.
According to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, “We can solve this climate crisis if we focus on the big, bold steps necessary to cut pollution. California now has a groundbreaking, world-leading plan to achieve 100 percent zero-emission vehicle sales by 2035.”
So, in just 13 years, the most populous state in the Union has decided it will outlaw its citizens from purchasing new gasoline-powered vehicles. And more than a dozen other states have indicated they already have, or soon will, adopt regulations that will do the same.
This begs many questions, foremost among them: Do Americans desire electric vehicles (EVs)? The answer to that important query is a resounding no.
Per a recent survey by AAA, only “one-quarter of Americans say they would be likely to buy an electric vehicle (powered exclusively by electricity, i.e., not a hybrid) for their next auto purchase.”
As the AAA survey indicates, there are many reasons Americans remain reluctant about buying an EV, including “higher purchase price,” “concern there are not enough places to charge,” “concern about running out of charge when driving,” “unsuitable for long-distance travel,” “high cost of battery repair or replacement,” and “unable to install a charging station where they live.”
Aside from the fact that the vast majority of Americans remain hesitant, if not resistant, to purchasing an EV, it is also important to note that EVs are not as environmentally friendly as their advocates claim they are.
Unlike their gasoline-powered counterparts, EVs require a huge amount of rare earth minerals, specifically for the production of their batteries. As CNBC recently reported, “Producing electric vehicles leads to significantly more emissions than producing petrol cars. Depending on the country of production, that’s between 30% to 40% extra in production emissions, which is mostly from the battery production.”
Keep in mind, most of the mines that produce the rare earth minerals necessary to produce EV batteries exist in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo, which rely on child labor.
What’s more, charging EVs requires substantial amounts of electricity. According to Pew Charitable Trusts, “The average electric vehicle requires 30 kilowatt-hours to travel 100 miles — the same amount of electricity an average American home uses each day to run appliances, computers, lights and heating and air conditioning.”
Several states, especially California, are in the midst of transitioning their electric grids from fossil-fuel-based power sources to renewable energy power sources, which is already overburdening their systems and leading to rolling blackouts.
In fact, just days after California announced CARB’s new rule, the California Independent System Operator issued this alert:
“Consumers are urged to reduce energy use from 4-9 p.m. when the system is most stressed because demand for electricity remains high and there is less solar energy available. The top three conservation actions are to set thermostats to 78 degrees or higher, avoid using large appliances and charging electric vehicles, and turn off unnecessary lights. Lowering electricity use during that time will ease strain on the system, and prevent more drastic measures, including rotating power outages.”
If California’s electric grid is already on the verge of rolling power outages, which requires that residents refrain from charging their EVs during evening hours, how in the world could the grid handle a much larger share of the state’s residents charging EVs in the years to come?
Simply put, it cannot.
In recent years, California has become the locus of ill-considered progressive policies, which many states have unwisely followed. Unfortunately, California’s absurd decision to ban the sales of new gasoline-powered vehicles in just over a decade is quite possibly one of the most asinine policies conceivable. It will do little to combat so-called climate change, however, it will do lots of damage to hard-working Californians, who will have less agency, freedom of movement, and access to reliable and affordable energy.
https://redstate.com/heartlandinstitute/2022/08/31/california-dreamin-n620659
**************************************************No realism in sight about Australia's electricity supply
In their frantic efforts to avert a long forecasted but never arriving climate disaster, activists have managed to bring on a very real energy Armageddon plunging Europe back into a new dark age, and Australia may yet follow.
Australia has so far been spared scenes of citizens queuing for hours to buy coal (Poland), reverting to wood fires to heat their homes (Germany), or businesses facing closure due to energy costs (the UK), but power prices have skyrocketed, the grid has become considerably less reliable and it is set to get worse.
When the Liddell power station in NSW closes in 2023, almost 2 gigawatts of reliable supply will vanish from the system. That may not sound like much compared to the almost 60 GW of generating capacity in the National Energy Market, but it represents firm, dispatchable (that is, it can be switched on and off at command) power in a market that is increasingly dominated by renewables, the output of which is dictated by the sun and the wind.
Even with Liddell still operating the grid’s problems are bad enough. As previously noted in this publication (‘Transition to Lunacy’, 30 July) the government is expected to pay perhaps $1.7 billion to major power users who agreed to stay off the grid during a full-blown power crisis mid-year, and electricity prices still spiked. In Queensland wholesale power prices more than doubled to an unheard-of average of $323 a megawatt-hour in the June quarter. When brown-coal-fired power stations ruled the old state grids 20 years ago, wholesale power might have cost about $40 a megawatt hour.
More closures are to follow Liddell. Origin Energy will shut the 2,880 megawatt Eraring coal-fired power station in 2025, and Victoria’s Yallourn power station (1,480 MW, brown coal) is scheduled to close in 2028. To put those closures in perspective, when Victoria’s Hazelwood power station representing just 1,600 MW closed in 2017, the Australia Energy Regulator later noted that average electricity spot prices increased between 85 and 32 per cent across the eastern states.
The new Labor government has not only proved oblivious to this looming crisis, it has placed near impossible conditions on the one major, reliable generator to be built, a $600 million 660 MW gas-fired plant at Kurri Kurri in the Hunter region of New South Wales.
The Morrison government pushed through construction of this generator, designed as a fast-reaction plant to meet peaks in demand, in the teeth of opposition from activists and Labor. Since then Labor has reversed its opposition but only on the condition that 30 per cent of gas used by the generators is green hydrogen from day one of operation, expected to be in December 2023. Further, all of the plant’s gas supply has to be hydrogen by 2030, or in just eight-years time.
Although the plant can run on hydrogen as opposed to vastly more convenient natural gas, there are no sources of green hydrogen in that region or any significant sources anywhere else in Australia. During the federal election in February, Labor declared that it would set aside another $700 million for the Snowy Hydro Authority, which will run the plant, to make green hydrogen on the site. In other words the government wants to build a renewable energy power plant on site to generate power which will then use scarce fresh water to create hydrogen. The resulting hydrogen will be used to power the gas plant to produce electricity.
To have any chance of meeting the 30 per cent target consistently, the project will also need some so far undiscovered means of storing hydrogen safely in large enough quantities, to tide the gas plant over long periods when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.
One of those who tried to convince the government, specifically the Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen, that this eccentric approach just would not work was Snowy Hydro chief executive Paul Broad. As well as publicly declaring that the commercial use of hydrogen as a fuel was years away, Broad also tried to tell the government that, with Liddell closing, the grid needed several peaking plants, not just one. Those plants could then be powered up very quickly when the wind dies over large areas of the eastern seaboard, which is expected to happen all too frequently, and turned off when it starts to blow again. This is not an efficient way to run any grid, and will certainly not be cheap, but activists will still have their wind farms and the lights will remain on, for now.
All that sensible advice seems to have fallen on deaf ears with Broad resigning in late August, citing clashes with Energy Minister Bowen.
Another problem contributing to friction between the two men was that of the Snowy 2.0 project. Conceived as a giant water battery using existing dams by the conservative government of Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, the capital cost of the project has blown out from the original estimate of $2 billion to more than $5 billion, not counting extensive work on transmission lines to connect the project. The project is now expected to cost more than $10 billion, with no hope of recovering even a portion of that cost from revenue.
With the National Energy Market, the grid for Australia’s east coast, heading towards potential disaster when Liddell closes in 2023, drastic measures are required. Coal and gas plants must be kept open and, if necessary, diesel plants found and put into service, just as the South Australian government did in 2017 in response to a massive state blackout. The SA plants are still there as backup generators and, at 276 megawatts available at any time, they can contribute vastly more power in an emergency than the much-vaunted Hornsdale battery at Jamestown.
However, the Federal government shows little sign that it understands the problem, let alone the need to devise a workable solution. To date the new Labor government has only made things worse.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/the-energy-end-is-nigh/
**************************************************************7 September, 2022
Amazon's Solar Roof Fires Imperil Zero Carbon
On the afternoon of April 14, 2020, dozens of firefighters arrived at an Amazon warehouse in Fresno, California, as thick plumes of smoke poured from the roof of the 880,000-square-foot warehouse.
Some 220 solar panels and other equipment at the facility, known as FAT1, were damaged by the three-alarm fire, which was caused by “an undetermined electrical event within the solar system mounted on top of the roof,” Leland Wilding, Fresno’s fire investigator, wrote in an incident report.
A little over a year later, about 60 firefighters were called to an even larger Amazon facility in Perryville, Maryland, to put out a two-alarm blaze, local news outlets reported.
In the intervening months, at least four other Amazon fulfillment centers caught fire or experienced electrical explosions due to failures with their solar energy-generating systems, according to internal company documents viewed by CNBC.
The documents, which have never been made public, indicate that between April 2020 and June 2021, Amazon experienced “critical fire or arc flash events” in at least six of its 47 North American sites with solar installations, affecting 12.7% of such facilities. Arc flashes are a kind of electrical explosion.
“The rate of dangerous incidents is unacceptable, and above industry averages,” an Amazon employee wrote in one of the internal reports.
The solar snafus underscore the challenge Amazon and many other large corporations face in their quest to shrink their environmental footprint and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. Amazon has been among the most aggressive. In 2019, founder Jeff Bezos launched the Climate Pledge, promising the largest online retailer would zero out emissions by 2040, embrace renewable energy and move away from gas-guzzling delivery vans, including through a billion-dollar-plus investment in electric vehicle company Rivian.
Amazon’s learning curve with solar
Corporate America is under pressure from regulators and a growing subset of investors to set and report on environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals.
Many will be able to reap financial rewards for renewable energy efforts after Congress in August passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes climate provisions projected to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by roughly 40% by 2030.
Commercial solar in the U.S. is expected to see 8% annual growth over the next five years, thanks in part to the legislation, according to Wood Mackenzie solar analyst Michelle Davis. Warehouses can take outsized advantage of solar, she said, because they have large roofs and the systems can power all the HVAC, refrigeration and other energy-heavy systems located inside.
But costly and dangerous issues can arise.
By June of last year, all of Amazon’s U.S. operations with solar had to be taken offline temporarily, internal documents show. The company had to ensure its systems were designed, installed and maintained properly before “re-energizing” any of them.
Amazon spokesperson Erika Howard told CNBC in a statement that the incidents involved systems run by partners, and that the company responded by voluntarily turning off its solar-powered roofs.
Excluded from the public sustainability report is any mention of the expenses Amazon incurs when there’s a failure. An Amazon employee estimated, in the documents circulated internally, that each incident cost the company an average of $2.7 million. Costs included third-party audits of rooftop solar systems, checks on how much electricity they were generating and repairs for any broken or faulty parts of the systems that inspectors identified.
The Amazon employee also said the company would lose $940,000 per month, or $20,000 for each of the 47 decommissioned North American sites, as long as the solar remained offline. There could be additional costs for Amazon depending on contracts with clean energy partners for renewable energy credits, the documents show.
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Green parties are facing a reality check
How pleasant it is to watch an idea fall apart. Especially when it is an idea held by people you don’t particularly care for. In recent years all of the democracies have been plagued by green parties. The kindest interpretation of them is that they provide a wake-up call of some sort: a reminder that we should be kind to our planet, that sort of thing. But in every country they got too free a ride. They ended up preaching catastrophism to a supplicant media. And they ended up demanding that we all get off fossil fuels yesterday without any satisfactory explanation of how we were meant to keep the lights on today. That pleasant period for them came to a halt this year, when that old friend of conservatives – reality – kicked in.
When Vladimir Putin chose to invade Ukraine in February, one of the things that was finally brought to greater public attention was Europe’s reliance on Russian gas. In recent years countries such as Germany were very happy to rely on Russian gas for their energy needs. At the same time they were thrilled to be able to cover themselves in a green veneer by shutting down their nuclear and coal-fired power stations.
Four years ago, at the United Nations General Assembly, the then president Donald Trump spoke about the dangers of such reliance. As he put it:
‘Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the western hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers.’
But the Germans, and everybody else, knew better.
While Trump has never been the world’s best vessel for the communication of truth, what he said in this case was right. Yet the world couldn’t help making fun of him. Germany’s representatives at the UN did it right there and then, smirking, shaking their heads and laughing performatively while president Trump spoke. Their reaction went viral online, and traditional media followed suit. ‘The German delegation had the best reaction to Trump’s UN speech’ was how Bloomberg reported it, while the Washington Post went with: ‘Trump accused Germany of becoming “totally dependent” on Russian energy at the UN. The Germans just smirked.’
Well, they’re not smirking now – particularly as Russia has just shut down Nord Stream 1 for 72 hours of ‘maintenance’. And least smirky of all are the Greens. For the German Greens do not have the luxuries of opposition afforded to their counterparts in the UK. In Germany the Greens have been part of the coalition government since last year and have therefore had to face up to the realities, not to mention the burdens, of power.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions were imposed on Russia, the Russians have been happy to play tit-for-tat by holding Europe’s gas supply hostage. One result of this is that the German Greens have had to grow up awfully fast.
Hitherto their stated policies have been all the usual stuff. They want renewable resources to be the main source of energy today and want to get off fossil fuels and nuclear energy now. Sensible critics point out that while we wouldn’t mind if the technology was already in place, the fact is that it isn’t. Maybe it will be in the coming years, but it isn’t right now. Still, like all of their European counterparts, the German Greens continued to pretend that their critics were dogmatists with a positive fetish for fossil fuels rather than the realists that they actually are.
Now the Greens are having to make a great energy leap. As members of the German government they are staring close up at the realities of soaring energy prices. They are having to face the prospect of the lights going off this winter, and of public buildings in major cities such as Hamburg already trying to ration the amount of electricity they use. The Greens’ demand that everybody else join them in a fantastical leap has now reversed into the Greens recognising that their society simply is not ready.
In June Robert Habeck, the co-leader of the Green party and vice-chancellor of Germany, announced that the country would be significantly increasing its use of coal power to counter the effect of the Russian energy lock. So right there is the Green party signing up for fossil fuels. Next is nuclear. The German Greens grew partly out of the country’s 1970s anti-nuclear movement. They cheered Angela Merkel on as she scheduled the shutting down of Germany’s three remaining power plants. For while Frau Merkel saw no danger in relying on Russian gas she did think that nuclear energy was a great risk.
In recent days German officials announced they would be reversing the policy of shutting down nuclear power plants. The Greens seem to be aware that for them this would be the final hurdle. Habeck has ruled out the idea of keeping the nuclear plants. It is not an enviable position that he and his party are in.
On the one hand, they could make the leap on nuclear as they did on fossil fuels – but then would they be a Green party any more? One imagines not. On the other hand, they can try to stick to just one of their principles and either crash the government or see themselves held responsible this winter when the lights go off in Germany.
It is an uncomfortable position, to be sure, but a pleasant one to observe. It would be pleasanter still if other people in the green movements across the West observed it too.
In the UK we have just had another burst of middle-class maniacs attacking and vandalising petrol stations to try to force us off petrol. Because I don’t know about you, but whenever I get to the pump and see that it isn’t working, I immediately ditch the car for good and go about the rest of my life on foot. But I wish these ‘activists’ and the other greenies noticed what is happening to their counterparts in Germany. For there a pipe dream is meeting reality. And reality is winning, as she so often does.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/the-changing-shade-of-the-greens/
******************************************************Come 2035, California residents will have to shop elsewhere for new gasoline powered vehicles
Come 2035, California residents will have to shop elsewhere for new gasoline powered vehicles. On August 25, the California Air Resources Board voted to require that all new cars sold in the Golden State from 2035 and 70 percent of cars sold from 2030 be battery-powered electric, plug-in hybrid, or hydrogen fuel cell, which CARB considers to have zero emissions.
The stated rationale: these cars produce fewer carbon emissions than cars with internal combustion engines; emissions contribute to global warming; and global warming “poses a serious threat to the economic well-being, public health, natural resources, and the environment of California.”
Everyone loves battery-powered electric vehicles, especially when gasoline is over $3 or $4 per gallon. Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) tweeted that everyone should get an electric car. But although Teslas and Ford F-150 Lightning pickup trucks might be fun to drive, these new purchases might not be reducing greenhouse gas emissions and saving the planet.
Batteries Use Fossil Fuels for Charging. The latest research shows that electricity for battery-powered vehicles is coming from coal and natural gas, rather than renewables. If battery-powered vehicles were to be charged with emissions-free energy, then emissions from transportation could perhaps be reduced. But solar, wind, and nuclear are generally fully used for other purposes, and additional sources of energy to meet electricity demand come from fossil fuels and hydropower. As I have written elsewhere, the mix of fuels turned on and off to meet additional demand is not the same as the mix used for total electricity production. Until emissions-free fuels are common enough to have a net environmental benefit, battery-powered vehicles will not reduce emissions.
Producing Batteries Results in Emissions. Seventy percent of the world’s electric batteries are produced in China, and 83 percent of China’s energy comes from fossil fuels, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The longer the range of the battery, the more carbon is used in the production process. Kelly Senecal of Convergent Sciences has calculated that carbon emissions to produce a battery for a Nissan Leaf were equivalent to driving a BMW 320d for 24,000 miles. For a larger Tesla Model S battery, carbon emissions used in production are equivalent to driving the BMW 320d for 60,000 miles. In addition, transporting batteries from China to the United States uses emissions, but the magnitude is more difficult to calculate.
Mining Battery Ingredients Causes Environmental Damage. Those concerned about greenhouse gas emissions may also be worried about the negative effects on the environment of mining for battery components. Such mining disrupts the land in low-income countries, such as cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where abuses have been documented by Amnesty International. Lithium is another crucial component of batteries, and China, Chile, Argentina and Australia are home to potentially damaging lithium mines, according to the Institute for Energy Research.
Battery-Powered Electric Vehicles Are Impractical and Expensive. Pure battery-powered vehicles lack sufficient range to satisfy most customers. Although 60 to 70 miles of range is enough for most trips, people buy cars for all circumstances, including vacations and cold weather. Those heading out on vacation this Labor Day weekend will worry about finding charging stations along the highway, as well as lines to charge cars. If it takes 30 minutes to charge, and two cars are ahead, that’s a break of one-and-a-half hours. Add a few irritable kids, and the experience becomes a disastrous way to begin a vacation.
In most large cities, such as New York City, many do not have access to indoor garages for overnight charging. Using charging stations on the street, if available, risks theft of expensive charging cables.
The economic well-being of low-income Californians might be harmed by having to purchase more expensive vehicles. Battery-powered electric vehicles cost more than gasoline-powered equivalents. Ford’s base model F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck costs $46,974, and its gasoline-powered twin costs $32,000.
California’s actions generally send ripples eastward, as other states adopt Golden State policies. But until electricity can be generated by emissions-free power, battery-powered vehicles will generally increase, rather than reduce, emissions, and make travel more inconvenient and costly for drivers.
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More Warmist deception
In public discourse, there are those promoting the truth, and those looking to further their agenda. This is most obvious regarding the topic of Climate Change where feelings and ideology are weaponised to not only win the argument, but to scorch the earth of opposing views.
Into this battle swaggers The Australia Institute, a Canberra think tank staffed by Greens-loving activists and commentators. Their Climate Change rhetoric is infused with UN-style anti-human de-growth dogma — a study in green-left ideology dedicated to choking Australia’s economy and future opportunities that forms part of the wider agenda to constrain fossil fuel production.
Throw enough mud and it sticks, and TAI’s partisan analysis of Climate Change and energy leaches into the public debate like toxic sludge. TAI is often quoted by The Guardian Australia, and then regurgitated online in blogs such as Renew Economy, Crikey, The Saturday Paper, and The Conversation.
In March 2022, TAI released Fossil fuel subsidies in Australia asserting that the fossil fuel industry was provided $11.6 billion in subsidies in 2021-22. The exaggerated claims were widely repeated including online by news.com.au.
In other words, for every minute of every day in the 2021-22 budget period these subsidies cost the public $22,139. For context, $11.6 billion is 56 times greater than the $206.8 million budget of the National Recovery and Resilience Agency.
In direct contradiction, the Productivity Commission calculated that 2020-21 assistance to the entire mining industry, not just the fossil fuel industry, was just $476 million.
The mining sector received only 4 per cent of allocatable assistance ($476 million), despite accounting for 11.5 per cent of value added — meaning it was the least assisted sector relative to its size.
This would imply that there has been a significant overstatement in the amount of subsidy from governments to fossil fuel industries by listing the $8 billion diesel fuel rebate — which is neither a subsidy, nor is it specific to the fossil fuel industry.
The report also claims $200 million of equity in Kurri Kurri Power Station used to firm wind and solar, and $900 million in federal tax concessions for aviation fuel. At a state level, the report incorrectly lists government investments in profit-making state-owned power stations, mines, ports, and railways as fossil fuel subsidies.
In May 2022, TAI penned APPEA members who pay no income tax, which argues for higher taxes on resource companies. The author, widely quoted by The Australian and other news sources, wants us to believe that gas companies get a free ride, based on selectively edited tax data, and without considering costs and deductions.
The report cherry-picks just five gas companies, but APPEA (Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association) represents over sixty full-member companies, making no attempt to convey the huge expenses incurred in developing resources, such as the $100 billion construction cost of Queensland’s three LNG projects.
A more holistic review of the ATO tax data would have revealed that other APPEA member gas companies paid a combined total of $5.4 billion in taxes in the same period, with an additional $7.8 billion in Petroleum Resource Rent Tax.
Furthermore, the report used modelling figures from 2012, suggesting that $85 billion would be collected by government from eight LNG trains. The industry ended up with six trains, and a much smaller estimate of $58 billion in government income over the twenty-five-year life of the projects.
In the August 2022 op-ed, It’s time to tax mining and energy giants properly, TAI executive director Richard Denniss argues for higher taxes on Australian gas companies, citing the $137 billion total revenue of the Norwegian oil and gas sector as an example of a ‘good resources tax system’.
This is a flawed perspective as the Norwegian government sells oil and gas itself, in addition to collecting fees and taxes from private sector petroleum companies. Australian governments derive income from fees, taxes, and royalties, but do not extract and sell oil and gas. As Australian taxpayers do not provide the massive capital required to develop natural resources, and do not sell these resources directly, the comparison is invalid.
Further muddying the waters is the lack of separation of oil production from natural gas production. These commodities have different markets, different benchmark pricing, and furthermore, Australia does not produce significant amounts of oil. How much of Norway’s petroleum income is from oil, and how much from gas? As the saying goes, don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.
These offerings, however, provide some insight into the mindset of the staff and leadership at The Australia Institute, in direct contradiction to their mission statement.
Our Goal: The Australia Institute provides intellectual and policy leadership. We conduct research that drives the public debate and secures policy outcomes that make Australia better. We are confident that we consistently deliver on the promise of our motto: research that matters
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/09/too-many-climate-change-think-tanks/
***************************************6 September, 2022
Germany: Coal power stations return to keep people warm this winter
A power station once marked for closure in the town of Bexbach is being resurrected.
For the last few years, the plant was in the "grid reserve", meaning it was called upon to supplement shortages in the power network a few days a year.
Now, it's one of more than 20 which could come back online full time to help fill the gap left by dwindling energy supplies from Russia.
Michael Lux, the manager at Bexbach, said: "We need energy in Germany, and we need energy in Europe, and there is lack of energy...You don't want to imagine if people have to live in cold houses."
Germany has pledged to totally cut its coal use by 2038, with the government ideally hoping to phase it out by 2030, but the war in Ukraine has forced a temporary resurgence.
The German government is looking at long term solutions like boosting renewable energy sources and importing liquified natural gas (LNG), but these take time - the mothballed coal plants can start producing power almost immediately.
For the moment, Bexbach, and its sister plant at Weiher, will operate until April 2023, with the possibility of an extension to spring 2024. To guarantee Bexbach can supply energy over the winter, it needs to be fully operational by November.
Seventy-year-old Horst Haefner has come out of retirement to help. Like many Germans, he is far from ecstatic about turning back to coal power, but admits they have little choice. "We have to replace the gas and the price of energy has gone up tremendously," he said.
Making sure the power station can operate full time is also technically difficult.
For a start, many of the workers are reaching retirement and their skills can't be learned overnight.
From his seat in Bexbach's control room, Martin Giesen is all too aware of the challenges.
"We have staffing problems; they can't be explained away.
"We have logistical problems with the fuel.
"We have logistical problems with the additives that are needed.
"We have technical problems with a 40-year-old power plant that has not been well maintained over the last few years because there are no staff left, and that's the way it is.....We do our best," he explained.
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The First Energy War of the 21st Century
Russia’s war on Ukraine has greatly clarified the need for non-Russian energy sources. Will the rest of the world rise to the challenge?
How long can Russia afford to wage a ground war in Europe? One might be reasonably skeptical of answers coming from those who didn’t see any prospect for Russia to invade Ukraine. The answer, as with any war, will emerge from what we learn about not just battlefield capabilities, but also about the financial capabilities of the counter-parties to sustain war, and the non-military capacities each side has to inflict economic harm on the other.
One of the first responses to the invasion included freezing $300 billion worth of Russia’s financial reserves — about half of that nation’s pre-invasion war chest — residing in Western financial institutions. Then Congress appropriated $40 billion in financial aid for Ukraine. Those actions were followed by the U.S. and Europe seeking to reduce Russia’s income with sanctions on purchasing Russian oil or natural gas, some implemented, and others promised or threatened. So far, the effects aren’t what policy-makers had hoped or expected.
Russia’s cash reserves have rebounded. Sales of oil and natural gas have replenished the treasury. In fact, Russia’s current-account balance soared to $70 billion in the second quarter of this year alone, the biggest since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That happened even though its overall gas exports to Europe are some 50 percent below pre-invasion levels, and Russian oil is sold at a deep discount around the world. But exports are now sold in an environment of far higher global prices. (Is it a complete coincidence that Putin launched the war when oil prices were already heading north of $100 a barrel?)
Countries, including China and India, have ignored the sanctions and overtly expanded purchases of Russian energy because they enjoy the benefit of discounts. India co-mingles Russian oil at refineries and sells diesel fuel to Europe (at high prices). Even Saudi Arabia buys discounted Russian crude, enabling more Saudi exports at sanction-free market prices. Russian crude has also continued to move into markets using shippers that work around sanctions both overtly and via “dark market” traders. It’s not the first time the world has learned what happens with energy sanctions. Similar efforts directed at Iran and Venezuela saw crude continue to flow via “ghost fleet” tactics, fake registries, spoofing of ship location, and surreptitious transfers at sea.
The natural-gas dynamic is playing out a little differently but with similar consequences. European nations have scrambled to increase pipeline flows from non-Russian sources (Algeria, for example) and, to the extent feasible with existing infrastructure, increase imports of seaborne liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar and America. At the same time, the EU has seen gas demand slide. Many industrial boilers and power plants are switching from gas to oil (increasing the EU oil-import bill). Other industrial facilities have throttled back and many, because of staggering wholesale energy price increases (some reaching as high as 1000 percent), have shut down in a financially devastating slide towards deindustrialization. Epitomizing the dismal dimming of the European economy, cities across the continent are literally turning off lights with bans on lighting, including signage, landmarks, and even traffic lights (all of which, by the way, in energy terms, are trivial), along with mandating higher air-conditioning temperatures, or fining shopkeepers for leaving doors open. Huge swaths of the European economy are descending into energy poverty.
The effect of all this has been to vault natural gas and oil prices everywhere, not just in Europe, with the high prices and uncertainties ripping destructively through every facet of the economy. Russia triggered this cascade of events. But the price that’s being paid by the world is a direct result of two decades of European energy policies.
Those policies distill to a monomaniacal pursuit of wind and solar energy (and now batteries) while simultaneously shutting down existing energy supplies from coal mines and coal power plants to nuclear plants and offshore oil and gas fields. Over the past two decades, Europe has spent trillions of dollars in pursuit of an “energy transition” to replace hydrocarbons. But the EU today still gets 70 percent of all its energy from the latter.
So much of the danger arising out of the reckless decisions by so many European countries to depend so heavily on Russia for essential supplies of hydrocarbons was amplified by the fact that it’s impossible to surge solar and wind energy production in meaningful time frames. Consequently, Putin still holds one unused card to weaponize energy, a kind of economic ‘nuclear’ option: Russia could yet choose to sanction, or embargo, the West by radically reducing overall energy shipments to the world, rather than merely throttling back Europe’s supplies while selling more elsewhere. Such an embargo would really send prices soaring. It wouldn’t be the first time a major energy producer sought to inflict economic punishment.
The first two global energy shocks in modern times — the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1979 Iranian revolution, each of which entailed a loss of supply roughly equal to taking half of Russia’s exports off the market — triggered oil price increases of 200 percent and 400 percent, respectively, and touched off global recessions.
We have yet to experience (as of this writing) a loss of supply or rise in prices comparable to the previous two energy shocks. Today, Russia remains one of the world’s three largest producers and exporters of petroleum and natural gas. The loss of a major share, never mind all, of Russia’s energy supplies to the world would trigger a third (and the greatest) global energy shock since the invention of the computer. In such a case, JPMorgan analysts recently noted, oil could hit $380 a barrel.
This time, there’s potential for even greater harm because, unlike the previous two oil-centric shocks, the Russia factor also involves natural gas at a scale comparable to the oil at risk. While oil keeps everything moving, natural gas keeps the lights on and is an irreplaceable chemical feedstock in both manufacturing and food supply chains.
Some believe Russia wouldn’t or couldn’t invoke such an embargo for technical reasons. But oil is easy to store; Iran’s been doing it for years and even now has over 100 million barrels in “floating storage” (tankers) awaiting the end of sanctions there. While natural gas is harder to store, it can be simply flared or burned off at the source instead of sold. Of course, the latter is just like burning money. But the key is how long Russia could afford to inflict global economic pain while enduring the financial loss of, say, half its export income. The answer is found in Russia’s restored financial war chest. Guessing whether such an embargo is likely falls into the fog-of-war calculus.
Naïveté about energy realities and Russian ambitions (or ambitions of other unfriendly nations) has robbed Europe and the U.S. of important “soft power” options, i.e., precisely the kind of geopolitical leverage that Russia has now. Civilization still depends on hydrocarbons for 84 percent of all energy, which is a mere two percentage points lower than it was two decades ago. This comes after some $5 trillion of global spending on non-hydrocarbons. Solar and wind technologies today supply barely 5 percent of global energy. Electric vehicles still offset less than 0.5 percent of world oil demand.
There is no small irony in the fact that America’s Congress has now committed to follow Europe down the same energy path, with the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act and the plan to spend at least $400 billion on alternative energy. Even if all that money is spent — it’s possible a future Congress could defund it — fifteen years from now America will still get the majority of its energy from hydrocarbons.
Regardless of how the Ukraine crisis plays out, no matter how much money is spent on alternatives, the world will need greater supplies of hydrocarbons to both diminish Russian influence — not to mention minimize entanglements in the ever-troubled Middle East — while also fueling economic growth. You’d think policy-makers would be focusing on a critical geopolitical and economic question: Who will supply the world with those essential hydrocarbons?
The opportunities to expand non-Russian hydrocarbon supplies are dominated by just three domains: OPEC, deep-water rigs (global and U.S. offshore), and America’s shale fields.
It’s worth remembering that, in roughly a single decade, the United States went from being the world’s biggest importer of petroleum and an importer of natural gas to becoming (for now) the world’s biggest exporter of the latter and one of the biggest exporters of the former. To put this into geopolitical perspective: The growth in U.S. production over the past decade was greater than Russia’s total supply of oil and gas to Europe.
Any prospects for U.S. oil and gas firms to expand yet again will require taking the kinds of risks that are invariably associated with adopting new technologies and deploying capital onshore and offshore. And those prospects are enormously influenced by government actions.
One can imagine — because it could be done, not that it will be done — Congress engaging in a reset of energy policies to facilitate a radical increase in domestic hydrocarbon production and exports. Think of it as a shale resurgence along with a similar expansion of deep-water production. Such a reset need not, in fact shouldn’t, replace alternative energy ambitions, but complement them.
And it bears noting that enacting such legislation would not require subsidies or cost taxpayers money, but instead lead to reduced energy prices for consumers, as well as profits and jobs at American firms.
But as it stands today, America’s hydrocarbon industries face a potent combination of policy and regulatory impediments, higher costs of materials and services, lingering supply-chain disruptions from the global lockdowns, and skilled-labor shortages. At least one U.S. shale CEO has said that not even $200 oil would inspire his firm to expand production faster. And this says nothing about the investment-killing potential of calls for “windfall profits” taxes which, if implemented, would be as destructive and ineffective as they were when tried in 1980.
It is possible that reality may impact American policy-makers as it has those in Europe, in which case there is some hope of an energy realpolitik yet emerging with an “all of the above” energy policy. And if that were to happen — something that will require legislation, not executive orders or rhetoric — then one might yet see the mighty American hydrocarbon machine help restore order and economic sanity to the world.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/the-first-energy-war-of-the-21st-century/
******************************************************UK: The truth about "Extinction Rebellion"
Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse – Extinction Rebellion are back! Well, if you thought an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis, fuelled by a global scramble for gas, would have led the eco-irritants to sit things out for a bit, you don’t know XR. For them, the ‘climate emergency’ trumps all. Plus, reading a room has never really been their strong suit – as we saw when they tried to win the hearts and minds of commuters by climbing on top of Tube trains, or when an animal-rights XR offshoot went after that most universally disliked of figures in Britain, the Queen.
This time their target is the Houses of Parliament. Earlier today, Extinction Rebellion activists bike-locked themselves to the gates outside parliament. A handful got inside the Commons chamber and glued themselves to the Speaker’s chair. Their message? ‘Let the people decide’, a nod to one of Extinction Rebellion’s core demands – namely, a ‘Citizens’ Assembly on Climate and Ecological Justice to break the deadlock’, as described on their website.
While police in Westminster fetch the solvents, it’s worth examining XR’s message here more closely. For, as with their other demands, this call for the people to have their say isn’t all it seems. Just as XR demands we all ‘Tell the truth’ about climate, despite spewing alarmist guff about the number of climate deaths, its proposed citizens’ assemblies aren’t democratic in the slightest. If XR ever got their way, these assemblies would be exercises in creating the pretence of public support for their own mad aims.
For one thing, establishing a ‘Citizens’ Assembly on Climate and Ecological Justice’ would suggest that the destination is settled and all we need to decide on is the route. We got a flavour for what this might look like with the 2020 Climate Assembly UK, commissioned by six select committees of the House of Commons. This brought together 108 British citizens to address the question, ‘How should the UK meet its target of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050?’, with the help of handpicked experts. Whether or not we should be pursuing ‘net zero’ or ‘climate and ecological justice’ seemingly isn’t up for debate. Then there is the question of who selects the experts and materials to be put before the assembly members, and on what basis the members are selected.
Now, parliament has hardly covered itself in glory on the climate issue. But contrary to Extinction Rebellion’s warped view, of a House of Commons stuffed with fossil-fuel lobbyists dragging their feet on the ‘climate emergency’, MPs have embraced alarmist and costly climate policies with very little debate or scrutiny. The net zero by 2050 pledge sailed into law via an amendment to the Climate Change Act in the final days of Theresa May’s government. This unprecedented commitment, entailing the total overhaul of our energy system at enormous expense, was nodded through with no formal vote after 90 minutes of backslapping ‘debate’.
If Extinction Rebellion want to let ordinary people have their say on climate policy, why not push for a referendum on net zero? Or why not kickstart a proper democratic debate about energy policy beyond the narrow terms set by some expert-led ‘citizens’ assembly’? The reason, I dare say, is that they fear what the answers would be. Even more so now that the cost-of-living crisis has reminded us all of the crucial importance of cheap and reliable energy, after years of climate policy that focused myopically on expensive and unreliable ‘green’ energy.
None of this should surprise us. Whenever Extinction Rebellion activists glue themselves to something or start doing interpretative dance in the middle of a busy road, interviewers ask them the same questions. Won’t this hurt your campaign? Is this really how you win people over? The truth is, XR don’t care what you or I or most people think. Their aim has always been to egg on the government to implement eco-austerity on a slightly swifter timetable than it is already committed to. Let the people decide? As if. Theirs is a campaign against the people, and it always has been.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/the-truth-about-extinction-rebellion/
***************************************************Tenth of British homeowners plan fires instead of central heating due to energy costs
One in 10 homeowners have said they plan to use real fires instead of central heating, leading to concerns among insurers that some could be putting their properties at risk.
Research from Aviva found a tenth of adults said they plan to light fires or stoves more often in their homes to avoid central heating amid soaring energy prices.
In October, millions will see their energy bills rise by 80% after regulator Ofgem confirmed it will increase its price cap for the average home from £1,971 to £3,549.
The study also showed that 92% of people are looking towards alternative ways to keep themselves warm as they seek to reduce their bills.
Homes, possessions and sadly lives can be put in jeopardy if chimneys are capped or aren’t swept properly - or the wrong type of fuel is used
However, the data also showed that three out five resident who plan to enjoy real fires this autumn are ignoring some necessary precautions.
Only 37% of fire users ensure their chimney is swept annually, while a similar proportion said they check whether fuel is suitable for their fire or stove.
It added that just 41% said they make certain their chimney is not blocked or capped off, according to the survey.
Hannah Davidson, senior household underwriting manager for Aviva, said: “It is a real concern that people could be putting so much at risk by not taking simple fire safety steps.
“Homes, possessions and sadly lives can be put in jeopardy if chimneys are capped or aren’t swept properly – or the wrong type of fuel is used.
“We’d urge people to take action now to make sure fireplaces and stoves are safe and suitable if people plan to use them this year.
“It’s understandable that people are looking for alternative ways to heat their properties, but it’s vital that people put a few checks in place first, to enjoy the warmth and comfort of a real fire without worry.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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5 September, 2022
Climate change can make bumblebees wake up too early and die - study
This is just another prophecy about a future that may never come -- and which ignores adaptation. If there is survival value in waking up later, bees which wake up later will dominate. There are around 2,000 bee species in North America and if one species gets into trouble, others will move into any vacant ecological niche
The effects of climate change could be devastating for bumblebees, as altered seasonal weather changes could cause the bees to wake up from hibernation early, a new study has found.
The findings of this study were published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Biological Conservation and present some stinging news regarding the damage climate change can wreck on bumblebees and, by extension, global agriculture.
Bumblebees may not be producers of honey like their more popular cousins, the honeybees, but they serve an extremely important role in the ecosystem as being pollinators.
Pollenating is necessary for the spread of many types of plants. As such, they play a major role in agriculture, as well as food production, with a large percentage of food crops relying on bee pollination.
Bumblebees hibernate during the winter and wake up during the spring. This is important because they will have access to pollen and nectar from plants for food to survive.
But what if bumblebees wake up too early? Unfortunately, the odds don't look too good for them, as they won't have access to the food they need without spring flowers.
And with climate change, that's going to be a bigger issue.
The researchers behind the study at the University of Ottawa in Canada were able to study the variations in when different bumblebee species emerged from hibernation.
This was done by going through databases of different bees in museum collections throughout North America.
The factor that seemed to link these early bumblebee emergences was the climate. This is because climate change can possibly lead to an early start to spring, which would make the bumblebees wake up before the food is available.
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Cloudy With a Chance of Fraud: Federal Weatherization's Back
Alarm bells are sounding at the Department of Energy as the Biden administration has moved to triple the budget for the Weatherization Assistance Program, which provides low-income applicants with free home and apartment renovations, such as insulation, duct-sealing, new heating systems, and kitchen appliances. The last time the program was lavished with such a surge in funds, through President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, audits and investigations uncovered a pattern of fraud, embezzlement, shoddy work, inflated expenses for parts and materials, sketchy billing, kickbacks, and gimcrack construction.
In a private meeting in February, the department’s inspector general, Teri L. Donaldson, warned Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm that the enormous new budget for the program – slated to grow to $1 billion a year from $315 million – threatens to overwhelm the department’s ability to protect taxpayers’ money. In April, the inspector general made that warning public with a memo to Secretary Granholm cataloging the risks to the money being entrusted to the Department of Energy. Donaldson identified a history of problems with the program, noting that “few administrative remedies such as suspensions and debarments were made for the multitude of problems that occurred and were identified.”
Despite those problems, the program’s labyrinthine structure remains. Congress apportions weatherization funds to the Department of Energy. The department, then, distributes grants to the states; the states, in turn, disburse the monies to “community action agencies” [CAAs], organizations that administer, at the local level, various programs to aid the poor, including Head Start, “Community Services Block Grants,” and “SNAP Education & Training.”
The model used for the weatherization program illustrates how many federal anti-poverty programs operate. There are over a thousand community action agencies managing the local implementation of federal anti-poverty programs, and for many the weatherization program is their flagship. If there are problems with the management of weatherization, there are likely to be similar problems, if not worse, with the programs that are less visible.
For the weatherization program, CAAs collect applications from low-income residents and check that they meet eligibility conditions, including that an applicant’s income falls below 200% of the poverty line. People “who are most in need,” the DOE states, “are often moved to the top of this list.” Contractors bid for the weatherization work and are chosen and paid by local community action agencies to install insulation, plug holes in ductwork, repair or replace doors and windows, install programmable thermostats, and put in new furnaces, water heaters, and refrigerators.
But just like shoddy connections in a gas or water line, the many junctures where money changes hands can lead to leakage. Costs are supposed to be kept low by awarding contracts to the most competitively priced bids, but the DOE’s office of inspector general has found that low bids are often followed with “work scope changes” – extra parts or labor added on well after the bid, and even added to final bills. Work changes, the IG warns, tempt contractors to sidestep the cost controls of the competitive bidding process. An audit to test how Tennessee was handling and spending its share of Obama-era stimulus funding, for example, found local Community Action Agencies regularly approved work order changes – often after the job was done. It also found that “prices for smoke alarms, fire extinguishers, and thermostats ranged from about 120 percent to 200 percent over the average retail price.”
Other audits have found that CAAs have problems verifying who is and isn’t eligible for free weatherization. The community groups have also struggled to meet the demands of other rules such as competitive contracting and “proper accounting for funds.” Previous inspector general reports have chastised states and local agencies for “insufficient oversight.”
At the top of the IG’s list of threats to the weatherization program is “senior leadership fraud,” better known as embezzlement. Recent years have seen several cases of theft from program coffers.
Steven Lloyd Taylor, for example, was a manager at the Northwest Michigan Community Action Agency, where he was in charge of handing out money to weatherize low-income housing in nearly a dozen of the state’s counties. Taylor created a shell company and phonied-up invoices to his fictitious weatherization company. In a year and a half, Taylor stole $349,210. He bought, among other things, an 18.5-foot Seaswirl fishing boat. When he was sentenced at the end of 2019, Taylor was ordered to pay $431,828 in restitution – the amount he embezzled, plus the taxes he failed to pay on that money.
Randi Smith was chief fiscal officer of the New York State Weatherization Directors Association, a group representing WAP agencies in the state. She embezzled from the group for four years. It’s possible she might have done so for even longer if her son hadn’t gotten his hands on the checkbook too. Together they stole over $1 million. They pleaded guilty to the theft in 2018.
The weatherization program was launched in 1976 and has been managed by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, an agency within the Department of Energy. Now the Weatherization Assistance Program, together with a grab bag of other new offices, such as the Local Government Energy Program and the Energy Futures Grant, are being housed in a new bureaucracy, the Office of State and Community Energy Programs. SCEP – in best Washington fashion, the new office is already being referred to by its initials – promises to “expand the weatherization provider network to assist low-income families with home energy retrofits.”
For all those grand plans, the department’s inspector general seems as if she would be happy if the State and Community Energy Programs merely managed to keep participants in the weatherization game from robbing the government blind. Issues with billing proved to be “pervasive,” the IG said in her report.
So too problems with quality control: Audits found as much as a third of projects to be unacceptable because of “substandard workmanship,” slipshod contracting such as “improperly installed kitchen exhaust ductwork…creating a potential fire hazard,” heating systems emitting dangerous levels of carbon monoxide, and “alarming” numbers of gas leaks.
And that’s the work that got done. On 10 of the 15 houses examined in Illinois as part of the inspector general’s accounting of how the Obama-era funds were spent, auditors found contractors had billed for work that wasn’t done.
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Australia: A major Central Queensland coal mine expansion approved
A major Central Queensland steelmaking mine will undergo a massive expansion after getting the green light from the State Government.
More than 700 jobs will be supported during the expansion of Carborough Downs near Moranbah, increasing the metallurgical coal mine’s lifespan by another 11 years.
The underground mine, which is owned and operated by Fitzroy Australia, currently employs about 700 people, with almost 70 per cent of its workforce being local or drive-in, drive-out workers.
Coal production from the expansion is expected to begin in the next 12 months.
Resources Minister Scott Stewart said Carborough Downs was a “significant” employer and economic contributor to the Isaac region, with the extension ensuring the future stability of jobs.
“This investment is a strong vote of confidence in Queensland resources sector, including our state’s large deposits of high-quality steelmaking coal,” he said.
“Importantly, this extension will create flow on economic benefits for the entire Isaac region, from tools, safety and workwear suppliers right through to our pubs, café’s and accommodation providers.
“Queensland offers a great lifestyle and having good jobs available in the regions is an important way to sustain this.”
Mr Stewart said the resources sector in Queensland supported about 77,000 jobs, with regional areas accounting for two-thirds of all mining jobs.
“Queensland is naturally blessed with the world’s highest quality metallurgical coal, which the world needs to make steel,” he said. “Even as the world transitions to renewables, metallurgical coal for steel will remain an essential, and valuable, international export commodity for Queensland.”
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Interview with Lord Monckton in Italian newspaper
Featured in La Verità (August 23rd), by Franco Battaglia
Q: Lord Monckton, what was your role in Mrs Thatcher’s government?
As one of the six advisers to the Prime Minister in her Policy Unit at 10 Downing Street, I advised her inter alia on climate change, saying the situation should be carefully monitored; the hull design of warships, exposing a complex international fraud; computer modelling of voting in the 1983 general election, predicting the large victory won by Margaret Thatcher; the interaction of the taxation and benefit systems, leading to simplification of both; the epidemiology of HIV, leading to a change in the government’s messaging; railway network analysis, leading to a $50 billion saving; housing demand analysis, leading to a $50 billion saving; analysis of homelessness in London, exposing a Communist front group that had been artificially increasing homelessness; analysis of when human life begins, so that the Prime Minister decided not to welcome a report approving experimentation on human embryos; and evaluation of the practicalities of defence against incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles, so that the government became aware of the true source of danger from nuclear weapons.
Q: Was Mrs Thatcher among the first who wondered about a possibly dangerous impact of manmade CO2 on climate and asked scientists to investigate the issue?
It was not until 1984 that James Hansen at NASA first perpetrated the elementary error of physics that led him, and thousands of climate scientists thereafter, to predict large and dangerous rather than small and harmless global warming. In my time at 10 Downing Street, from 1982-1986, global warming was discussed, but had not yet become a substantial political issue. It was my successor, the late George Guise, who wrote a speech for Mrs Thatcher in which she said that unless action were taken there might be as much as 1 degree of global warming per decade (a prediction that has proven excessive by an order of magnitude). She and I both came to realize that the alarmist position was scientifically untenable. In her memoirs she retracted her earlier position.
Q: After decades of research, what has been the most plausible conclusion regarding the “climate emergency”.
There is no “climate emergency”. The notion of large and dangerous (rather than small and net-beneficial) global warming arose from an elementary error of physics. At the temperature equilibrium in 1850 the direct warming by the preindustrial greenhouse gases was 8 K, but the total natural greenhouse effect that year was 32 K, of which 24 K was feedback response. It was, therefore, incorrectly assumed that, thanks to feedback response, a 1 K direct warming by doubled CO2 in the air would cause about 4 K final warming. In reality, the multiple of direct warming to allow for feedback response was not 32/8 = 4. Climate scientists had forgotten the Sun was shining, and that, without any greenhouse gases in the air, the average temperature would be 260 K. That crucial feedback-driven multiple of direct temperature was (260 + 32) / (260 + 8), or less than 1.1. After correcting this climatologists’ error, there will not be 4 K warming this century, as currently imagined, but little more than 1 K, which will be globally beneficial. Warming is already proving beneficial:
Q: Can we say that respectable conjecture has turned into an embarrassing superstition?
Yes. But it is more than a superstition. For decades, the Disinformation Directorate of the KGB, and its successor body the FSB, together with Chinese agents of influence such as the “Confucius Institutes” at Western universities, have been working via Communist-led environmentalist front groups such as Greenpeace, the World Wide Fund for Nature, Oxfam, Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion to promote global-warming alarm, with the declared aim of destroying the economic hegemony of the West. It was the Directorate that planned and executed the miners’ strike of 1984-5 in Britain in Margaret Thatcher’s time. We defeated that strike. The Directorate, realizing it could no longer rely on Communist union leaders when the very great majority of union members were not Communist, switched its tactics after that defeat and began to penetrate the environmental movement. One of the Directorate’s first targets was Greenpeace, one of whose founders, dr. Patrick Moore, has said that when the Communists moved in he and other true environmentalists were driven out. We know of the Communist origin of the attack on affordable energy supply in the West, including the global-warming scam, thanks to General Ion Mihai Pacepa, who led the Directorate from its foundation in 1945 until 1978, when he defected to the West and told us everything. Sadly, he died earlier this year.
Q: Why does the climate superstition have the potential to cause great harm to humanity?
The chief harm is already occurring. The West, whose politicians have been cowed into silence by the threat of reputational assault if they do not faithfully adhere to the climate-Communist position, has thrown away its economic and political hegemony of the world, and has handed it to two of the world’s most murderous regimes – Russia and China.
Russia’s ambition is not merely to make energy unreliable and cripplingly expensive, destroying the very lifeblood of the Western economies, but also to profiteer by the increase in gas prices that has arisen since Communist agents persuaded foolish Western governments to close down the coal-fired power stations that used to provide clean, reliable electricity at $30 per megawatt-hour. Recently, to keep the lights on in London during a heatwave, the grid authority had to pay more than $11,300 per megawatt-hour for electricity generated in Europe chiefly by Russian gas and sent to us via the undersea inter-connector. Germany and Italy are the two largest contributors to the cost of Russia’s special military massacre in Ukraine, for – exactly as the Kremlin’s economic advisers had predicted – the war pushed up the usual price of gas many times over. Similar increases have occurred in nickel, cobalt and lithium for electric vehicles. Mr Putin is laughing all the way to the Moscow Narodny Bank: he is making many times more by selling these and other commodities to Europe than he is spending on his massacre.
China, too, is profiteering by Western scientific feeble-mindedness, economic illiteracy and political poltroonery: it now controls most lithium carbonate production worldwide, and the price has soared since the massacre in Ukraine began. Expect the price to rise considerably further: if the UK alone replaced all real cars with electric buggies, it would on its own consume nearly all the global production of lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide. The price of lithium and all such rare-earth metals can, therefore, be expected to rise many times over in the coming years, as a direct consequence of the needless shuttering of coal-fired power stations capable of generating electricity at a levelized cost of only $30 per MWh.
Q: How did the “97% consensus” about global warming turn out to be a 0.3% consensus?
Cook et al. (2013) reported that 97.1% of 11,944 scientific papers on climate and related topics published in the 21 years 1991-2011 had stated that global warming was chiefly manmade. That result was – and still is – widely publicized in the far-Left Western news media. In response to that paper, Mr. Obama tweeted that “global warming is real, manmade and dangerous”. However, Legates et al. (2015) showed that Cook et al., in their own list of all 11,944 papers, had marked only 64, or 0.5%, as stating that recent warming was chiefly manmade. Legates et al. read all 64 papers and found that only 41 of them, or 0.3% of the entire sample, had actually stated that recent warming was chiefly manmade. At the request of a citizen of Queensland, the site of Cook’s university, the police investigated and concluded that a deception had been perpetrated. A private intranet used by Cook and his conspirators was penetrated. It revealed that they were self-declared Communists.
Public money is being diverted from real emergencies, such as earthquake protection, into the climate superstition. What other real emergencies should be addressed?
More than 99.9% of all species on Earth had become extinct long before Man first came down out of the trees in Africa. Volcanism, meteorites, ice ages and pandemics have all caused extinction-level events. Genetic studies of human mitochondrial DNA show that a super-eruption in what is now Indonesia some 70,000 years ago wiped out all but 5000 humans, from whom all of us are descended. In practice, we can do very little about volcanism, meteorites and ice ages. However, we could have done something about a) the HIV pandemic, which has killed 50 million worldwide and established a base in the human population via exceptional sexual promiscuity among a certain subset of the population in San Francisco; b) the Chinese-virus pandemic, which, once the pathogen had escaped from the Wuhan laboratory and had begun to kill 40 million Chinese, was deliberately spread worldwide by China with the active assistance of Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian Communist who was China’s nominee as head of the World Health Organization, so that the pathogen has killed another 20 million worldwide, when most of those deaths could have been prevented; c) the monkey-pox pandemic, again chiefly spread by sexual promiscuity among a certain subset of the population.
It is also now urgent to end the environmentalists’ war on meat. At present, under the influence of the sugar lobby, Western governments foolishly advocate high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets for their citizens. The direct result has been a dramatic and dangerous expansion in obesity, diabetes and their complications. In the United States, one health dollar in three is now spent on diabetes treatment, and it is proven that the surge in diabetes since the mid-1970s is a direct result of the promulgation by the “Democrats” of guidelines recommending a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet. The human species has evolved to eat meat, and almost nothing but meat, throughout the past 2.1 million years. Ending meat-eating, as the far Left demand, would greatly increase the prevalence of diabetes and cause still more damage to the Western peoples and economies than the global-warming nonsense.
In 2007 Al Gore, accepting the Nobel Prize, said the North Pole would completely melt by 2013. What would you say to Al Gore today?
I should say what I said to Al Gore when he made his silly Arctic-melting prediction at the Bali climate-change conference: his prediction was anti-scientific nonsense. That year, I assisted a London truck driver who took the British Government to court when it proposed to circulate Al Gore’s sci-fi comedy horror movie to every school in England. The truck-driver, who had two children in school, won the case and the Government was ordered to send 77 pages of corrective guidance to every school. Gore is now a joke figure.
Q: Why is there such an insistence on spreading this superstition? Is it the desire for money, or for power obtained by promoting fear, or for political reasons?
It is the far Left who have been driving the climate scam, with the effect – whether intended by Communists or unintended by those whom Lenin contemptuously but accurately characterized as “useful idiots” – of gravely damaging the Western economies and greatly benefiting the two Communist-led states, Russia and China. Global hegemony is passing from the benevolent democracies of the West to these two malevolent dictatorships. The silencing of all debate on the climate issue has been achieved by a typical totalitarian tactic – organized and continuous reputational assault against anyone brave enough to question the Party Line on the climate issue. For instance, a single Communist agitator based in a small Cambridgeshire village has rewritten the Wikipedia biographies of 2500 sceptical climate researchers, including mine, to make us out to be knaves or fools or both. Fear of reputational assault has cowed politicians, journalists and opinion-formers into silence. This technique of Rufmord, invented by Goebbels, was found by the MGB in the files of the Reichs-propagandaamt in Mauerstrasse, in the governmental Mitte district of Berlin, in April 1945. Within a month, the MGB (soon to become the KGB) established the Disinformation Directorate with Pacepa at its head. Its original mission was to assault the reputation of anyone successful or prominent in speaking out against Communism. This technique of Rufmord has been deployed against all of us who have been speaking out against climate Communism. The electronic media, substantially Communist-influenced, ban or shadow-ban the accounts of climate sceptics. The legacy media likewise refuse to allow both sides of the climate question to be debated: only the Communist position is presented and argued for.
In the UK, coal, oil and gas provided 90% of energy in 2000 and 80% in 2021, while CO2 emissions increased by 50% worldwide. What was and is the economic impact of measures intended to abate emissions and, eventually, to achieve net-zero emissions?
Two years ago, the typical UK household’s energy bill was less than $1000 a year. Next year, it will be $8000, and it will continue to rise thereafter. In 2030 the use of real cars will be banned and it will be possible to buy only electric buggies, which by then will be at least twice the price of real cars. Most households will no longer be able to afford personal motor transport. The poor will be hardest hit, but that suits the agenda of the revolutionaries whose real aim is to exploit the grievances of the poor so that they can overthrow democracy itself.
Suppose that Britain actually achieved net-zero emissions by 2030. The cost, according to McKinseys Consulting, would be £4 trillion ($5 trillion), or four times the Government’s estimate and almost twice the grid authority’s estimate. And how much abatement of global warming would that $5 trillion (or probably much more, given the inflation of rare-earth prices) actually buy? The devastating arithmetic is simple, but until now it has never been published. One can do the arithmetic on the back of an envelope:
In the past 30 years, 1 unit of manmade forcing has arisen, at a near-straight-line rate of 1/30th of a unit per year. If, therefore, the whole world were to move in a straight line to net-zero emissions in the three decades to 2050, half a unit of forcing that would otherwise have arisen will be abated. Final warming per unit of forcing is 3/4 degree per unit. Therefore, if the whole world achieved net-zero emissions, just 3/8 degree would be abated by 2050. But Britain represents only 1% of global emissions. So, if we actually achieved net-zero (and we won’t), the reduction in global warming by 2050 would be less than 1/250th of a degree. For this reason, even if global warming were a problem rather than a benefit, every cent spent on attempting to abate it would be a cent wasted, since the effect even of global net-zero emissions would be so small as to be unmeasurable. These economic facts have been kept from the general public.
https://clintel.org/interview-with-lord-monckton-in-italian-newspaper/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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3 September, 2022
To fight climate change, environmentalists may have to give up a core belief
To attain their goals they may have to build things instead of obstructing things. But can they do that?
For decades, environmentalists have made their mark by stopping things. Petroleum facilities that spew toxic air pollution. Pipelines that cut across Indigenous lands. Drilling for oil and gas.
But climate change is about to change everything. To cut U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to zero, experts say, the country is going to have to do something environmentalists have traditionally opposed: It’s going to have to build a lot of energy infrastructure. And fast.
Right now, many roadblocks stand in the way of building wind, solar, and the transmission lines that can carry their power to city centers. And while Democrats have a bill in the works to speed that sort of permitting, most environmentalists oppose it — because it could also promote oil and gas development.
“We’re going to have to build a lot more of everything clean,” said Josh Freed, the director of climate and energy at the center-left think tank Third Way. “The United States has an infrastructure building crisis. We can no longer build anything big — let alone big and ambitious — in a reasonable time frame.”
To reach net-zero carbon emissions, according to a study by Princeton University, wind farms will have to spread across the Great Plains and the Midwest, covering an area equal to at least the states of Illinois and Indiana. Solar panels will sparkle across an area at least as large as Connecticut. And thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines will need to be built to carry all that power from where it’s generated — mostly in rural parts of the country — to urban centers far away.
And these projects need to be up and running soon. According to an analysis by the DecarbAmerica Project, solar and wind power in the U.S. will have to double in just the next eight years.
At the moment, however, a miasma of confusing regulations and local opposition have stymied many of these plans. Residents blocked project to build wind farms off the coast of New England for decades, complaining it would ruin their ocean views. A transmission line from Pennsylvania to Maryland was blocked by Pennsylvania landowners who argued that the line wouldn’t provide sufficient benefits to their state.
Now a deal between Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Senate Democratic leaders could streamline energy permitting. During negotiations over the Inflation Reduction Act, the giant health and climate spending bill that passed Congress in August, Democrats promised Manchin that they would pass a separate bill this fall, to speed up the permitting process for building energy infrastructure — both fossil fuel and clean.
Some environmental groups have blasted the deal, arguing that it would expedite a key priority of Manchin’s, the Mountain Valley Pipeline — a 300-mile pipeline that would transfer natural gas from West Virginia to Virginia — and other fossil fuel projects. “Prolonging the fossil fuel era perpetuates environmental racism, is wildly out of step with climate science, and hamstrings our nation’s ability to avert a climate disaster,” more than 650 environmental groups wrote in a letter sent to Congress in late August. Meanwhile, a group of Appalachian activists are planning a march on D.C. next week to protest the permitting reform deal and the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Here's what President Biden's doing to tackle climate change
But energy experts argue that, depending on the structure of the deal, permitting reform could help the U.S. switch over to clean energy — and ultimately benefit renewables more than fossil fuels.
For example, Liza Reed, the research manager for electricity transmission at the center-right think tank Niskanen Center, argues that building a more connected electric grid is absolutely essential to cut carbon emissions. Wind and solar energy, she points out, are rarely located in the same place where power is needed. “We need to build transmission very quickly and very dramatically,” she said. “There’s no two ways about it.”
One thing that could help, Reed argues, is giving the federal government authority to approve the construction of big, high-voltage transmission lines. At the moment, power lines have to get approval from every state that they cross, including states that may not benefit much from having gigantic power lines weaving over their homes and buildings. Federal authority would allow the government to rubber-stamp transmission lines without getting into the local and state regulatory morass. (Similar authority already exists for natural gas pipelines.)
Romany Webb, a senior fellow at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, says that law is critical to making sure that communities aren’t adversely affected by energy and pipelines. But, she added, “I do think there’s ways to streamline the NEPA process to make it work better for some of these large renewable energy projects.”
Green groups, however, still have reservations.
“Whatever the proposed project is — whether it’s a pipeline or a highway or a solar farm — it should be subject to the same commonsense review process,” Mahyar Sorour, a deputy legislative director for the Sierra Club, said in an email. “If we want these projects to move forward faster, we shouldn’t be weakening environmental laws, but investing more resources into the agencies and staff.”
It remains unclear exactly what the permitting bill will say, and whether it will pass. It needs 60 votes under Senate rules to pass, so some Republicans will have to get on board. And some Democrats may not vote for it, since any permitting reform agreement will also leave the door open to further fossil fuel extraction.
“The devil is in the details,” Freed said.
Without reform, though, many believe that the clean-energy transition will not happen at the pace the country needs.
But the shift will be a change for an environmental movement that has spent decades learning to block, not to build. It will require careful analysis of how to rapidly expand wind, solar, and even nuclear with community input.
“With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, the environmental movement broadly has endorsed building,” Freed said. “Now the question is: ‘How?’”
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“WEF should engage in open scientific debate with CLINTEL”
Media and social media commentators swiftly pounced on an opinion piece by Inbal Goldberger posted by the World Economic Forum (WEF) on their site on Aug. 10, 2022, which proposed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to censor harmful online misinformation, but Friends of Science Society says that’s not the most important issue. Friends of Science Society is calling on the WEF to engage in open, civil debate on their climate misinformation the old-fashioned way – in person with CLINTEL.
The WEF regularly engages in climate misinformation, says Friends of Science, noting that WEF gave Greta Thunberg a public stage and much media coverage (posted Jan. 25, 2019 and again Jan. 1, 2020) over her “I want you to panic”… “Our house is on fire” commentaries.
Greta’s comments terrified millions of children and adults worldwide, but in testimony to the US Congress on April 21, 2021, Greta stated that there is ‘no science’ behind her comment; it was just a metaphor. At no point has WEF or any of its bevy of Big Tech and media-mogul trustees stepped up to apologize for foisting fear on citizens of the world.
The WEF’s claims to be “Committed to Improving the State of the World.” It is difficult to see how scaring millions of people accomplishes that goal, says Friends of Science.
On January 20, 2020, CLINTEL, the climate intelligence think tank based in The Netherlands, sent a letter to Borge Brende, President of the WEF, calling for engagement on the issue of the claimed “climate emergency,” writing:
“Despite heated political rhetoric, we urge all world leaders to accept the reality that there is no climate emergency. There is ample time to use scientific advances to continue improving our society. Meanwhile, we should go for adaptation; it works whatever the causes [of climate change] are.”
“We also invite you to organize with us a constructive, open meeting between world-class scientists on both sides of the climate debate. Such an event complies with the sound and ancient principle that all pertinent parties should be fully heard: Audiatur et altera pars.”
To date, Friends of Science says that CLINTEL reports there has been no response.
Friends of Science and CLINTEL issued a joint video statement: “Declaration to WEF – Good News for Greta” in Jan. 2020, explaining that the fear of climate emergency came from the misuse of a scenario known as RCP 8.5.
CLINTEL has a prestigious list of climate scientists, scholars, and climate commentators of more than 1,123 signatories to the World Climate Declaration. In short, the Declaration states there is no climate emergency, that natural factors are more influential than human emissions on climate, and we do have time to adapt to climatic changes, which may be warmer or cooler.
On Dec. 24, 2021, CLINTEL also issued a letter to the President of Switzerland, concerned about the ‘host state’ status that Switzerland had conferred on the unelected, unaccountable, transnational WEF on Jan. 23, 2015. The Paris Agreement was signed that year and it appears that WEF has adopted the mission to push the [Club of Rome’s Planetary Emergency agenda.
The WEF’s 2006 Global Risks report featured oil price shock and pandemic as two serious global risks; by the 2020 report WEF had removed both from the list of risks and replaced them with climate change.
Now the world is experiencing global oil price shock, an energy crisis, and is struggling to recover from a pandemic. Millions of people face energy poverty and famine due to skewed energy investment markets, much of it driven by WEF trustees like Mark Carney demonizing essential energy.
To entice citizens into agreement on carbon taxes, Switzerland and Canada have instituted carbon rebate programs, but the evidence shows most Canadians do not get ‘free money’ as The Atlantic claimed in Jan. 2022, and that carbon taxes are a burden for no benefit.
Recent work by Dr. Roy Spencer, shows there is no likelihood that warming will exceed 1.5 ° C anyway by 2050. Carbon taxes are unnecessary and do nothing for the climate.
The WEF’s unwillingness to engage with CLINTEL in open scientific debate on climate change suggests the WEF is not acting with “moral and intellectual integrity is at the heart of everything it does” as it claims, says Friends of Science.
https://clintel.org/wef-should-engage-in-open-scientific-debate-with-clintel/
************************************************British families could be asked to ration their energy use when the WIND doesn't blow to avoid blackouts
Millions of Britons could be asked to limit energy use this winter to head off blackouts by avoiding using gas and electricity at peak times and turning off the lights on days when the wind doesn't blow, an energy expert has warned.
Kathryn Porter, from consultancy Watt-Logic, said it was possible households could be asked not to use energy guzzling appliances at peak hours or eat their dinner at a different time.
In the US tens of millions of people have been asked not to use washing machines, dishwashers and ovens between 2pm and 8pm because of the global energy crisis. Charging cars before 9pm is also not advised.
Away from the home, in Germany, street lights are being dimmed, traffic lights at quieter junctions are turned off, hot water and central heating is off in public buildings, monuments will no longer be lit overnight, lighting monuments overnight.
Ms Porter has said that it's 'very possible' the UK will see plans for energy rationing, despite Liz Truss absolutely ruling it out.
She told BBC’s World at One: ‘Unfortunately, as each winter goes by, the risk of blackouts is increasing because we have been replacing thermal and nuclear generation with intermittent renewables. That makes us vulnerable in times when wind output is low.
‘We have had quite low wind output in July and August...Demand is a lot higher in the winter, so if we have those weather conditions in the winter, our system is going to get very tight and that raises a risk of blackouts.’
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Australia: The incorrectness of coal
He spoke too soon. It’s always a gamble going out on a limb. But when Richard Marles, then a Labor shadow minister, spoke in 2019 about the (temporary) collapse of the world market for thermal coal he didn’t have to add that ‘at one level that’s a good thing’.
Shane Wright, the economics writer who pops up in the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, also opted for a florid description: ‘coal is like candlesticks’. According to him, ‘the Candle Makers’ Union of old was wont to say 150 years ago: the light bulbs, they’ll never catch on’. So droll (and inaccurate) of him to predict the demise of coal in this way.
Now you could argue that Wright doesn’t count and Marles only a little bit, but Treasury also has it in for coal. Take the assumption from this year’s Budget delivered at the end of March – less than six months ago – that the price of thermal coal (used to generate electricity) would decline from $US320 per tonne to $US60 per tonne by the end of the September quarter 2022. (It’s currently trading close to $US400.)
You might think I have made a mistake typing these numbers. But no, in the span of just over a half a year, the Treasury expected the global price of thermal coal to fall by nearly three-quarters notwithstanding other predictions contained in the Budget that the outlook for the global economy was fairly rosy. (Precipitous declines in other commodity prices, apart from oil, were also anticipated.)
This was despite the fact that the war in the Ukraine was in full swing, the price of natural gas in Europe was skyrocketing (it had actually risen sharply before the war) and Europe was being forced to turn back to coal to maintain its output of electricity. Don’t Treasury officials read the international press? Or maybe they stopped reading after the glorious victory of the Glasgow Cop 26 and its faux commitments from some countries to get out of coal, including Germany.
There is surely an irony that Germany is now ramping up its coal-fired electricity generation – using brown coal, indeed – after it became clear that the flow of cheap natural gas from Russia could no longer be assured. The government has even reluctantly agreed to extend the lives of the last three remaining nuclear plants. That’s right, renewable energy doesn’t really cut it when a crisis emerges. Other countries to turn back to coal include Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and the UK.
Actually, it seems a lifetime ago when the climate-fest was held in Glasgow. It was only last November and Boris was still at the helm. He was flitting back and forwards to convince some uncertain world leaders of the need to sign up for the net-zero journey – sadly, including our own prime minister, Scott Morrison. (It’s not clear how many other ministerial positions he also held at the time.)
As it turned out, it was probably the peak of climate fear-mongering, with all the likely urgers there to make themselves look important and/or to snaffle more government largesse. Our own Twiggy Forrest had his own stand providing free bumf about green hydrogen to anyone who walked by. Even Greta turned up after a long train ride, although her impact is clearly waning.
One of the biggest points of contention at the conference was the call to phase out coal, which the ‘greenest’ countries supported, or phase down, a position supported by Australia, India and even the US. Rather than go away without any ‘consensus’, the final decision was unanimous agreement that (unabated) coal should be phased down and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies should be removed.
What a joke those days of verbal wrangling turned out to be! Thermal coal is now at historically high prices; metallurgical coal is even being used to generate electricity with its price sometimes lower than that of thermal coal – unheard of; and global demand for thermal coal is expected to be higher next year than this year. Demand is particularly strong in China and India.
The International Energy Agency, well-known for its lop-sided bias towards anything renewable and away from coal, has had to admit that its predictions of the early demise of coal as a source of energy have been completely wrong. The term ‘stranded asset’ is unsurprisingly absent from its more recent reports.
We have also seen the predictions of the ESG crowd go pear-shaped as coal companies announce record profits and dividends. When mining giant Anglo American decided to peel off its thermal coal division into a separate company, Thungela Resources, there were green-tinged market analysts who estimated the value of the new company at zero and firmly told shareholders to sell. The price of Thungela Resources has risen by close to 600 per cent since listing and its dividend yield is 25 per cent!
Then there’s the story of BHP exiting thermal coal – that company is particularly in thrall to the ESG crowd – only to be outwitted by the cunning executives at Glencore. By taking the price risk during the period during which the transaction was being completed, Glencore as the buyer was able to fully pay for the purchase!
One of the most alarming aspects of these recent developments is the failure of the news to reach so many of our politicians, including those who are actually in power. The state energy ministers (they are right down the political food chain) have decided that coal can have no role in ensuring the stability of the electricity grid in the future. Federal Climate Change Minister, Chris Bowen, simply doles out favours to green rent-seekers without understanding the full implications. But here’s the thing: there is breathless hypocrisy surrounding the behaviour of these politicians. The fact is that coal is propping up both the federal budget and the budgets of Queensland and New South Wales, in particular. In just the few months between this year’s budget and the end of the financial year, the bottom line of the federal budget was better by $25 billion because of higher commodity prices. The Queensland budgetary position would be dire were it not for coal royalties.
Evidently, it’s fine to bite the hand that feeds you if you are an environmentally concerned politician. No one in the mainstream media will pick you up, particularly those journalists who think that coal and candlesticks are the same.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/09/coal-is-bad
2 September, 2022
The truth about electric car range: how far an EV will really go on a full charge
It’s one of the biggest criticisms levelled at modern electric cars: yes, the official range figures look fine – but you’ll rarely get close to them in the real world.
In the years up to and beyond 2030, when the sale of brand new petrol and diesel cars will end, many more of us are going to have to get used to life with an electric car – and one of the incontrovertible facts of that life is that an EV will rarely travel as far on a charge as the figures say it will.
Why is that? What can we do about it? And what sort of range can one really expect to get before one runs out of charge? To answer these questions, we’ve combined our own experience of road testing cars with insight from an expert to give you the best idea of what to expect if you’re considering making the switch to battery power.
The answer lies in the official test. Currently, the range figures the manufacturers are allowed to publish are dictated by the WLTP, or World-harmonised Light vehicle Test Procedure. This is the same test used to calculate fuel economy for petrol and diesel cars and, as is widely understood, it doesn’t fully replicate the sort of conditions you’ll encounter in the real world.
To put it another way, the discrepancy between the real-world range of your electric car and its official range figure occurs for the same reason there’s a difference between the fuel consumption you’ll achieve in your petrol or diesel car and its official fuel economy figure: while the latest WLTP test is more realistic than the old NEDC (New European Driving Cycle) economy test, it still doesn’t quite reflect real-world conditions accurately (more of which we’ll come onto).
With an electric car, that discrepancy is often more noticeable because a drop in range can make the difference between having to stop for a lengthy charge during your journey, or not.
But this isn’t the only reason. The other issue is that electric cars’ batteries perform better in warmer temperatures, and worse when it’s colder. So modern EVs have sophisticated battery heating and cooling systems to keep the battery operating at its optimum temperature. These systems drain energy themselves, though, so their usage still results in a drop in range.
Given that the WLTP tests are carried out at 23 degrees and 14 degrees, with the latter test factored into the former using a complex formula, it’s inevitable that the colder temperatures we usually see here in the UK in autumn, winter and spring will result in lower ranges than predicted in those official tests; there’s no escape even in summer, though, because batteries operate best in a fixed temperature range, so on the warmest of days extra energy must be expended cooling them.
What’s more, this effect is exacerbated in extremes of temperature because there’s an additional drain on the battery from the car’s electrical accessories. Heating elements and fans, heated seats, lights and wipers will all reduce the car’s range further if they’re activated in cooler temperatures; likewise, air-conditioners working hard against the midday sun will reduce range in particularly hot weather.
Some of this effect, it should be noted, can be mitigated by preconditioning – which is to say, using an app or on-screen menus to tell the car in advance when you plan to leave, either manually or by setting a timer. That way, the car can heat or cool the battery and the car’s interior while it’s still plugged in, using power from the mains, which causes less of a drain on the battery than if it has to do so once it’s unplugged.
However, this requires one to plan ahead and precondition the car to get the best of it – something some drivers simply can’t or won’t remember to do.
How far will my electric car actually go?
This is where it becomes tricky. You see, because there are so many variables, it’s hard to predict. But Andrew English, the Telegraph’s motoring correspondent, says his personal rule of thumb is to prepare for the worst – that way, his expectations will always be bettered.
“In cold weather, with the heaters going, at speed and going up and down hills, I always expect to halve the official range,” he says. “You probably won’t use quite that much, but it’s better to be pleasantly surprised if you don’t, than caught out if you run out early.”
And as English points out, it’s not just about whether you’ll get there – it’s about how many miles you’ll want to have available when you arrive. “If you want to get home again, you might need to get to a charger first, so you’ll want to have at least a few miles in reserve – not arrive on zero.”
The key, then, is to build in a margin of error, and it’s here that cars with bigger batteries start to come into their own. For example, in a test of the Kia EV6, a car whose WLTP range is 300 miles, English says he struggled to get more than 237 miles’ predicted range to show on the car’s dashboard display – 79 per cent of the WLTP figure.
That figure, by the way, was with the radio, the passenger heater and all of the other accessories inside the car switched off – so the dent in the range came purely from the need to heat the battery on a cold day.
Meanwhile, our long-term test of an Audi e-tron Sportback, with its quoted range of 247 miles, actually achieved around 190 miles, or around 76 per cent of the official figure, before it slowed to a crawl.
These examples should give you a rough idea of what can be achieved, proportionately, in an EV in the midst of the British winter. In the summer, expect better results, but in all likelihood you’ll only ever see the official WLTP range in ideal conditions.
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New York Was Wrong to Close the Indian Point Nuclear Plant
In recent years, a number of fully operational nuclear power plants with years and sometimes decades remaining in their permitted operating lives have been prematurely shuttered in the United States. Many of these closures have been politically motivated, coming on the heels of drawn out litigation from state governments and environmental groups who are not motivated by specific concerns, but by an overarching distrust of nuclear technology.
Closures have also come as the result of shifting energy economics caused in no small part by high subsidies for wind and solar technologies, coupled with the refusal to treat nuclear power as green or zero carbon; despite the fact that nuclear power is less carbon intensive than solar, and has the same carbon intensity as wind, it is not treated as such.
It has now been more than a year since the premature closure of New York State’s Indian Point Energy Center, where Units 2 and 3 were shuttered on April 31st of 2020 and 2021 respectively. As other nuclear plants are on the chopping block for the near future, there is no better time to reflect on the outcomes.
Since the closure of Indian Point, New York has built two new natural gas plants and increased its imports from neighboring states and Canada.
Although the state has built new wind and solar in the interim, and has more coming online later this year, there is a limit to the benefit that this capacity can provide to the state’s grid because of the intermittency of those technologies. We can see the impact of intermittency when we examine the capacity factor of various energy sources.
Capacity factor compares the actual output of a facility to the theoretical output it could produce if it were operating at its maximum capacity. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) for January of 2022, the average capacity factor for wind facilities in the U.S. was 38.5 percent, and for solar facilities it was only 17.4 percent. In comparison, the capacity factor of nuclear power that same month was 99.3 percent. For natural gas, this figure was 63.6 percent, but it would be dramatically higher if gas were not the resource that is most often cycled up and down to account for the short falls of intermittent technologies because of its high degree of flexibility on short time frames.
Because of intermittency, all of that new wind and solar capacity currently requires reliable base-load power to back it up. So in reality, most of the base-load that Indian Point was providing has been replaced by the new gas plants the Cricket Valley Energy Center, a 1,100 MW natural gas electricity generating facility operated by Advanced Power on behalf of EthosEnergy Group, and the CPV Valley Energy Center, a 680 MW natural gas-fueled combined cycle power plant owned by Competitive Power Ventures.
Now, natural gas is a great energy source to replace this lost capacity with. It can cycle up and down quickly to handle the inconsistency of wind and solar for the grid. But the claim made by the Cuomo administration and the environmental groups that worked to close Indian Point was that the plant would be replaced entirely by renewables and efficiency gains. This simply isn’t the case.
As an array of energy writers, myself included, predicted at the time of Indian Point’s closing, not only was the plant’s capacity not replaced exclusively by renewables and efficiency gains, but it also led to increased energy imports for the state, and increased grid reliability concerns.
Imports accounted for 19.7 percent of New York State’s Electricity in 2019, this increased to 22.2 percent in 2020, the year that Unit 2 shut down, and rose to 27.2 percent in 2021 when Unit 3 followed suit. Increased imports, especially from international providers like Hydro Quebec are all fine and good until frigid temperatures hit New York and Quebec simultaneously and the utility prioritizes capacity for its local market.
The most recent Comprehensive Reliability plan from the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) found that although the states power system, “will meet all applicable reliability criteria from 2021 through 2030 for forecasted system demand in normal weather,” the state’s reliability margins are shrinking, and during extreme weather conditions reliability becomes far more uncertain.
The NYISOs Vice President of System & Resource Planning, Zach Smith, said that the study, “demonstrates that our reliability margins are thinning to concerning levels beginning in 2023.” The reliability of New York State’s electricity grid has been compromised by this and other ill-advised decisions, and it is only likely to get worse from here.
As policies discouraging or outright banning the residential and commercial uses of natural gas for cooking, heating, and other uses are discussed with increasing frequency by state legislators and regulators, and the market for electric cars increases in the state, there will only be increasing stress on the grid. The failure to maintain and create adequate reliable sources to meet that demand is a policy choice. Months or years down the line when the consequences of decreasing grid reliability become apparent, decision makers will treat it as an act of God that couldn’t have been foreseen, but that simply is not the case. The logical conclusion of this course of action is and has been clear: prematurely shuttering reliable capacity is no way to maintain an electrical grid.
https://blog.independent.org/2022/08/27/new-york-indian-point-plant-natural-gas/
*****************************************************9 Past Climate Change Forecasts
“‘The trouble with almost all environmental problems,’ says Paul R. Ehrlich, the population biologist, ‘is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead. … We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.’” —The New York Times, 1969.
“No real action has been taken to save the environment, [Ehrlich] maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.” —Redlands Daily Facts, 1970.
“Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century. … If the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States. … By the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.’” —The Boston Globe, 1970.
“The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. … ‘In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’—‘five to 10,’ he estimated—‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’” —Washington Post, Times Herald, 1971.
“Dear Mr. President: … We feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. … The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. … The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century.” —Brown University, Department of Geological Sciences, 1972.
“However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.
“Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age. Telltale signs are everywhere—from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7 [degrees] F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.” —Time magazine, 1974.
“A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” —Associated Press, 1989.
“Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” —former Vice President Al Gore, 2006.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/08/29/climate-change-forecasts/
***********************************************************Boris Johnson 'goes nuclear' as he prepares to sign off on first of EIGHT new atomic reactors
Boris Johnson will today sign off on the first of eight new nuclear power stations – and urge his successor to focus on shoring up the UK’s energy supplies.
In one of his final speeches as Prime Minister, Mr Johnson will say investment in domestic production is the only long-term solution to the energy crisis.
The Prime Minister will announce that the Government has agreed in principle to take a 20 per cent stake in the new £30 billion Sizewell C reactor in Suffolk, which will be built by French firm EDF next to its current Sizewell B plant.
And he will confirm plans to sign off on a further seven new nuclear plants by 2030.
Mr Johnson will warn that the war in Ukraine and the subsequent surge in energy prices has underlined the need to boost domestic production, which has been ignored for years. ‘The situation we face today is deeply worrying, but this government has already stepped in to help with billions of pounds in support,’ he will say.
‘And our British Energy Security Strategy is not just about meeting demand today, but many years hence.
‘The big decisions this government has made on our energy future will bequeath a United Kingdom where energy is cheap, clean, reliable, and plentiful, and made right here on British soil.
‘A future where families and businesses are never again at the mercy of international markets or foreign despots.’
Mr Johnson will also urge his successor to maintain the focus on green energy, saying the UK’s net-zero pledges should be maintained.
And he will criticise previous administrations for failing to grasp the nettle on controversial issues such as nuclear power. A source said: ‘His view is that if previous administrations had got a grip on this, Sizewell C would be warming homes by now, not just getting under way.’
Speaking during a visit to Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, yesterday, Mr Johnson said: ‘This is the country that split the atom for the first time, we built the first civilian nuclear reactor and for 13 years under the previous Labour government... we didn’t start a single nuclear reactor. We’re going to do one every year.
‘I’m not saying nuclear is the only solution – of course it isn’t – but it’s a part of the solution.
‘You’ve got to have nuclear as part of your baseload so it’s reliable, so it can continue to deliver steady sustainable and, by the way, carbon-neutral supplies.’
The Sizewell C reactor will generate around 3.2 gigawatts of electricity – enough to power more than six million homes. Final negotiations are continuing with EDF but Whitehall sources said it was a ‘done deal’ that the taxpayer would take a 20 per cent stake in a project expected to cost up to £30 billion.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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1 September, 2022
California goes haywire! Electric car owners are told NOT to charge their vehicles because of heatwave - just days after announcing 2035 ban on gas cars
Californians are being advised not to charge their electric cars during certain hours as a 90-degree heatwave rolls in.
The move comes just weeks after the California Air Resources Board voted to ban gas-powered vehicles by 2035.
The California Independent System Operator (ISO) has called for residents across the state to 'reduce' energy usage between 4 and 9pm 'when the system is the most stressed because demand for electricity remains high.'
Starting on Wednesday and running until Tuesday, residents are being asked to not charge their electric vehicles between those hours, set their thermostats at 78 degrees or higher, avoid using large appliances, and turn off unnecessary lights.
'Lowering electricity use during that time will ease [the] strain on the system, and prevent more drastic measures, including rotating power outages,' the bulletin said.
California has officially become the first in the world to enforce a ban on the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035, following a public hearing on Thursday that ended with the California Air Resources Board voting to approve the policy.
Automakers are now required to reduce the number of gas guzzlers they sell in order to reach the first quota of the plan that mandates 35 percent of new cars, SUVs and small pickups sold in California by 2026 be zero-emission vehicles.
The quota increases every two years, with 51 percent by 2028, 68 percent by 2030 and then 100 percent of all new vehicles sold should be battery-powered five years later - 20 percent of those sold can be hybrid plug-ins.
The new policy may be a step in the right direction to combating emissions, but officials have several obstacles to make sure each of the targets are met.
One such hurdle is installing enough charging stations across the state.
Although California has the most in the nation, it will need 2.1 million by 2030 to meet the demand of the new massive fleet of electric vehicles.
More than 73,000 public and shared chargers have been installed to date, with an additional 123,000 planned by 2025.
These numbers fall short of the state's goal of 250,000 chargers by 54,000 installations.
John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, said the mandate would be 'extremely challenging' for automakers to meet.
'Whether or not these requirements are realistic or achievable is directly linked to external factors like inflation, charging and fuel infrastructure, supply chains, labor, critical mineral availability and pricing, and the ongoing semiconductor shortage,' Bozzella said in a statement.
'These are complex, intertwined and global issues.'
In addition, officials have not mentioned how they plan on enhancing the power grid to deal with the onslaught of more electric vehicles, nor how it will deal with an overwhelmed power grid during heatwaves in the future because of it.
The CA ISO told DailyMail.com that the primary stress on the power grid in the summer is air conditioners, but said it was too soon to know the last effects more electric vehicles will have on the power grid as driver switch over.
'It’s too soon to tell what the impacts of the 2035 ban will be, but for now, we are asking EV owners to avoid charging during 4-9 pm on Flex Alert days, if possible,' CA ISO Public Information Officer Anna Gonzalez told DailyMail.com on Wednesday.
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Republicans are cracking down on ESG
The politicisation of green investing remains a “peculiarly American” culture war, local commentators say, but there are signs the debate is already emerging in Australia.
Texas is cracking down on investment funds and companies it considers to be boycotting energy companies. The giant US state, which has a population larger than Australia’s, is implementing a 2021 law that could require state-based pension funds to pull investments from companies it considers hostile to the energy sector.
Texas comptroller Glenn Hegar, a Republican, last week released a list of 10 companies and 348 investment funds deemed to have boycotted energy companies, including heavy-hitter US investor, BlackRock.
Those companies and investors on the comptroller’s blacklist list are subject to divestment provisions brought into law in 2021, which forbid state-run and owned entities, including pension funds, from doing business with those that have fallen foul of the law.
The comptroller is basically the chief financial officer for Texas and, by extension, its oil sector, which produces almost 43 per cent of the US’s crude oil supplies, making it the biggest oil-producing state.
For the likes of investment giants BlackRock and Vanguard, both named on the comptroller’s list, it’s a case of, “Houston, we have a problem”.
ESG ‘opaque and perverse’
BNP Paribas, Credit Suisse, UBS and Schroders also made the 10 financial companies, joined by Danske Bank, Nordea Bank, Swedbank, Svenska Handelsbanken and Jupiter Fund Management.
Announcing the list, Hegar accused the environmental, social and governance movement of producing an “opaque and perverse system”, which has meant some financial companies no longer make decisions in clients’ and shareholders’ best interests.
Instead, they “use their financial clout to push a social and political agenda shrouded in secrecy”, he says.
“Our review focused on the boycott of energy companies, rather than a review of the entire ESG movement.
“This research uncovered a systemic lack of transparency that should concern every American regardless of political persuasion, especially the use of doublespeak by some financial institutions as they engage in anti-oil and gas rhetoric publicly, yet present a much different story behind closed doors.
“This list represents our initial effort to shine a light on entities that are engaging in these practices and create some clarity for Texans whose tax dollars may be working to directly undermine our state’s economic health.”
Several companies on the list have rejected the comptroller’s list, claiming they are not boycotting the energy sector.
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Australians, Americans ‘most divided over climate change’
Australians and Americans are more divided over the push to fight climate change than voters in any other developed nation, according to a new Pew Research survey which finds fear of climate change nevertheless tops a list of voter concerns around the world.
The gap between the share of “right” and “left” leaning voters, respectively, who said climate change was a “major threat” was highest in the US, followed by Australia, whose “left-leaning” voters were also more concerned about climate change than those anywhere else.
“In Australia, 91 per cent of those who place themselves on the left side of the political spectrum say climate change is a major threat, compared with only 47 per cent among those on the right,” Pew said, a 44 per centage point gap that turned out to be double that of the UK, and quadruple the gap in France.
In the US, 22 per cent of right leaning voters thought climate change was a major threat, compared to 85 per cent for those inclined to vote Democrat.
Israelis cared the least, overall, given only 52 per cent of those who voted left thought climate change was a major threat, and 37 per cent of those on the right.
“Despite the dire concerns about climate change in Europe, concerns are relatively muted in the US, as they have been for years,” the survey, published on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) in Washington, found.
Women and younger voters were consistently more likely to express concern about climate change across countries, the survey of over 24,500 adults in 19 nations, also revealed.
“In Australia, 85 per cent of those ages 18 to 29 say that climate change is a major threat, compared to 63 per cent of those 50 and older,” the survey, conducted from February to June this year, as a soaring summer heatwave and record energy prices engulfed Europe, concluded.
Pew asked respondents to compare five potential threats: climate change, cyber-attacks, the spread of online false information, the prospect of a recession, and the spread of infectious diseases.
A median of 75 per cent of respondents across the 19 nations said climate change was the biggest threat, followed by the spread of mis and disinformation.
A little over 60 per cent said the threat of disease was a major threat, the lowest among the five, and substantially lower than in 2020, when Covid-19 emerged as a global pandemic.
“Concerns about cyber-attacks, possibly heightened by the tensions between Russia and Ukraine, and prominent instances of hacking across the world, are at all-time highs,” the authors said.
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Questions for the cult of climate hypocrisy
Ron Pike
In my recent article When truth is flummoxed by sophistry, hopefully I rationally and successfully established that not only is Climate Change a fraud, but that present government policy to fight Climate Change has failed.
As I highlight in that article, there is no dispute that CO2 concentrations have risen from around 280 parts per million to a present concentration of around four hundred parts per million in the last thirty years or so.
There is equally no dispute that this increase in CO2 has been advantageous, not prejudicial, to life on earth.
It is widely agreed that our planet is ‘greener’ and more productive than previously. Not only that, dreaded apocalyptic heating has not occurred despite these increases in CO2 concentrations.
So why, dear leaders, are you pursuing policy that cannot make any difference to a hyped problem that does not exist?
Why are you touting the obvious nonsense that ‘renewable energy’ sources can supply our power needs, and then extending the lie by claiming that this so-called ‘renewable power’ will be cheaper than our previous power sources? Do you expect those of us who are impacted by your productivity-killing efforts to applaud this policy madness?
Why are our leaders (in name only) insisting that the main source of their ‘renewable power’ should be the sun when it falls dark for around thirteen hours per day?
Where, dear leaders, do we get our power from when the sun does not shine? Could it be from our old coal-fired power stations? If so, how do you justify using solar at all? Why not just let the coal-fired power stations do what they have done so effectively for over one hundred and twenty years and produce cheap power twenty-four hours per day?
In summary, if the production of CO2 from burning fossil fuels is doing no harm to our planet, and given that most other countries are presently increasing CO2 emissions by building new coal-fired power plants (many using Australian coal), why are we destroying our previous advantage of abundant and cheap power? Why are you making it difficult for our businesses to compete with other nations who are using cheap power and gas, often supplied from Australia.
Surly, dear leaders, this is hypocrisy writ large… You are destroying Australian jobs, not creating them.
It is time for our leaders to answer these questions.
Why did we vote for you in the first place?
Why are you not acting in the interests of the Australian people?
Why can’t you accept truth and act accordingly?
Why should the people accept anything you have to say on this subject?
Why can’t you acknowledge that ‘privatisation’ of power production and distribution was not in the interests of the Australian people? It only benefited the numerous monopolies created; all now gouging Australian consumers.
Why indeed… Because every day you perpetrate more questions, but answers are nowhere to be found.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/08/questions-for-the-cult-of-climate-hypocrisy/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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