This document is part of an archive of postings on Greenie Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written
This is a backup copy of the original blog
30 April, 2023
The inhumanity of the green agenda
‘Man is the measure of all things’, Greek philosopher Protagoras wrote over 2,500 years ago. Unfortunately, our elites today tend not to see it that way.
In recent years, the overused word ‘sustainability’ has fostered a narrative in which human needs and aspirations have taken a back seat to the green austerity of Net Zero and ‘degrowth’. The ruling classes of a fading West are determined to save the planet by immiserating their fellow citizens. Their agenda is expected to cost the world $6 trillion per year for the next 30 years. Meanwhile, they will get to harvest massive green subsidies and live like Renaissance potentates.
In Enemies of Progress, author Austin Williams suggests that ‘the mantra of sustainability’ starts with the assumption that humanity is ‘the biggest problem of the planet’, rather than the ‘creators of a better future’. Indeed, many climate scientists and green activists see having fewer people on the planet as a key priority. Their programme calls not only for fewer people and fewer families, but also for lower consumption among the masses. They expect us to live in ever smaller dwelling units, to have less mobility, and to endure more costly home heating and air-conditioning. These priorities are reflected in a regulatory bureaucracy that, if it does not claim justification from God, acts as the right hand of Gaia and of sanctified science.
The question we need to ask is: sustainability for whom? US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen recently suggested that her department sees climate change as ‘the greatest economic opportunity of our time’. To be sure, there is lots of gold in green for the same Wall Street investors, tech oligarchs and inheritors who fund the campaigns of climate activists. They increasingly control the media, too. The Rockefellers, heirs to the Standard Oil fortune, and other ultra-wealthy greens are currently funding climate reporters at organs like the Associated Press and National Public Radio.
Under the new sustainability regime, the ultra-rich profit, but the rest of us not so much. The most egregious example may be the forced take-up of electric vehicles (EVs), which has already helped to make Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, the world’s second-richest man. Although improvements are being made to low-emissions vehicles, consumers are essentially being frogmarched into adopting a technology that has clear technical problems, remains far more expensive than the internal-combustion engine and depends primarily on an electric grid already on the brink of blackouts. Green activists, it turns out, do not expect EVs to replace the cars of hoi polloi. No, ordinary people will be dragooned to use public transport, or to walk or bike to get around.
The shift to electric cars is certainly no win for the West’s working and middle classes. But it is an enormous boon to China, which enjoys a huge lead in the production of batteries and rare-earth elements needed to make EVs, and which also figure prominently in wind turbines and solar panels. China’s BYD, which is backed by Warren Buffett, has emerged as the world’s top EV manufacturer, with big export ambitions. Meanwhile, American EV firms struggle with production and supply-chain issues, in part due to green resistance to domestic mining for rare-earth minerals. Even Tesla expects much of its future growth to come from its Chinese factories.
Building cars from primarily Chinese components will have consequences for autoworkers across the West. Germany was once a car-manufacturing giant, but it is expected to lose an estimated 400,000 car-factory jobs by 2030. According to McKinsey, the US’s manufacturing workforce could be cut by up to 30 per cent. After all, when the key components are made elsewhere, far less labour is needed from US and European workers. It’s no surprise that some European politicians, worried about a popular backlash, have moved to slow down the EV juggernaut.
This dynamic is found across the entire sustainability agenda. The soaring energy costs in the West have helped China expand its market share in manufactured exports to roughly equal that of the US, Germany and Japan combined. American manufacturing has dropped recently to its lowest point since the pandemic. The West’s crusade against carbon emissions makes it likely that jobs, ‘green’ or otherwise, will move to China, which already emits more greenhouse gases than the rest of the high-income world. Meanwhile, the Chinese leadership is looking to adapt to changes in the climate, instead of undermining economic growth by chasing implausible Net Zero targets.
There are clear class implications here. California’s regulators recently admitted that the state’s strict climate laws aid the affluent, but hurt the poor. These laws also have a disproportionate impact on ethnic-minority citizens, creating what attorney Jennifer Hernandez has labelled the ‘green Jim Crow’. As China’s increasingly sophisticated tech and industrial growth is being joyously funded by US venture capitalists and Wall Street, living standards among the Western middle class are in decline. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ life expectancy has recently fallen for the first time in peacetime. Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heymann suggests that the only way to achieve Net Zero emissions by 2050 is by squelching all future growth, which could have catastrophic effects on working-class and middle-class living standards.
Rather than the upward mobility most have come to expect, much of the West’s workforce now faces the prospect of either living on the dole or working at low wages. Today, nearly half of all American workers receive low wages and the future looks worse. Almost two-thirds of all new jobs in recent months were in low-paying service industries. This is also true in Britain. Over recent decades, many jobs that might have once supported whole families have disappeared. According to one UK account, self-employment and gig work do not provide sustenance for anything like a comfortable lifestyle. Rates of poverty and food shortages are already on the rise. As a result, most parents in the US and elsewhere doubt their children will do better than their generation, while trust in our institutions is at historic lows.
The fabulists at places like the New York Times have convinced themselves that climate change is the biggest threat to prosperity. But many ordinary folk are far more worried about the immediate effects of climate policy than the prospect of an overheated planet in the medium or long term. This opposition to the Net Zero agenda was first expressed by the gilet jaunes movement in France in 2018, whose weekly protests were initially sparked by green taxes. This has been followed by protests by Dutch and other European farmers in recent years, who are angry at restrictions on fertilisers that will cut their yields. The pushback has sparked the rise of populism in a host of countries, notably Italy, Sweden and France. Even in ultra-with-it Berlin, a referendum on tighter-emissions targets recently failed to win over enough voters.
This is class warfare obscured by green rhetoric. It pits elites in finance, tech and the nonprofit world against a more numerous, but less connected, group of ordinary citizens. Many of these folk make their living from producing food and basic necessities, or from hauling these things around. Factory workers, truck drivers and farmers, all slated for massive green regulatory onslaughts, see sustainability very differently than the urban corporate elites and their woke employees. As the French gilets jaunes protesters put it bluntly: ‘The elites worry about the end of the world. We worry about the end of the month.’
This disconnect also exists in the United States, according to long-time Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira. Attempts to wipe out fossil fuels may thrill people in San Francisco, but are regarded very differently in Bakersfield, the centre of the California oil industry, and in Texas, where as many as a million generally good-paying jobs could be lost. Overall, according to a Chamber of Commerce report, a full national ban on fracking, widely supported by greens, would cost 14million jobs – far more than the eight million jobs lost in the Great Recession of 2007-09.
No surprise then that blue-collar workers are not so enthusiastic about the green agenda. Just one per cent, according to a new Monmouth poll, consider climate as their main concern. A new Gallup poll shows that just two per cent of working-class respondents say they currently own an electric vehicle and a mere nine per cent say they are ‘seriously considering’ purchasing one.
These Western concerns are nothing compared to how the sustainability agenda could impact the developing world. Developing countries are home to roughly 3.5 billion people with no reliable access to electricity. They are far more vulnerable to high energy and food prices than we are. For places like Sub-Saharan Africa, green admonitions against new agricultural technologies, fossil fuels and nuclear power undermine any hope of creating desperately needed new wealth and jobs. It’s no wonder that these countries increasingly ignore the West and are looking to China instead, which is helping the developing world to build new fossil-fuel plants, as well as hydroelectric and nuclear facilities. All of this is anathema to many Western greens. To make matters worse, the EU is already considering carbon taxes on imports, which could cut the developing world off from what remains of global markets.
More critical still could be the impact of the sustainability mantra on food production, particularly for Sub-Saharan Africa, which will be home to most of the world’s population growth over the next three decades, according to United Nations projections. These countries need more food production, either domestically or from rich countries like the US, the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and France. And they are acutely aware of what happened when Sri Lanka adopted the sustainability agenda. This led to the breakdown of Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector and, eventually, to the violent overthrow of its government.
We need to rethink the sustainability agenda. Protecting the environment cannot come at the cost of jobs and growth. We should also assist developing countries in achieving a more prosperous future. This means financing workable technologies – gas, nuclear, hydro – that can provide the reliable energy so critical for economic development. It does no good to suggest a programme that will keep the poor impoverished.
Unless people’s concerns about the green agenda are addressed, they will almost certainly seek to disrupt the best-laid plans of our supposedly enlightened elites. In the end, as Protagoras said, human beings are still the ultimate ‘measure’ of what happens in the world – whether the cognoscenti like it or not.
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The narcissism of Just Stop Oil
Just Stop Oil (JSO) activists have an insatiable appetite for mayhem. Protesters from the environmental group are slowing down traffic in London today, conducting a ‘go slow’ march through Parliament Square. This isn’t the first time, of course, that they’ve caused disruption.
Cast your minds back to July last year, when five members of JSO glued themselves to the Last Supper painting in London’s Royal Academy. A few days before this rather odd demonstration, campaigners entered the National Gallery in central London and proceeded to glue themselves to the frame of John Constable’s the Hay Wain.
Earlier this month, a JSO protester disrupted the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield by jumping onto the table and emptying a bag of orange powder paint over the playing surface. Next up, according to reports, is the King’s coronation.
Some JSO members appear to be hypocrites of the highest order
A peer-reviewed paper, released earlier this month, suggests that some activism is driven by narcissism. The study, conducted by two prominent psychologists at the University of Bern, Switzerland, found narcissism to be a common feature among ‘anti-sexual assault activism’. But might that narcissism also be a motivating factor for other demonstrators, including members of JSO?
When we think of narcissism, we tend to focus on agentic narcissism (those with diminished empathy for others), or grandiose narcissism (someone who displays an excessive sense of self-importance). However, communal narcissists – those who consider themselves the most caring person in his or her social surroundings – differ from more traditional narcissists, in that they use communal events to satisfy their grandiose needs. According to the researchers, manipulative individuals with ulterior motives may view some types of activism as a vehicle for obtaining positive self-presentation (e.g., virtue signalling) and gaining status. They may also view public demonstrations – particularly those against sexual assault – as a way of dominating others and engaging in social conflicts to ‘get their thrills’. In short, some are willing to exploit the adoration (or notoriety) of the movement to fuel their own egotistical desires. The authors aren’t describing JSO members specifically, but you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
One of the psychologists involved in the study, Alexander Bertrams, told me that many forms of modern day activism are attractive to narcissists, as they help satisfy their self-related needs.
‘In this sense,’ he said, ‘we have found a relationship between greater involvement in activism and a higher inclination for virtue signalling.’ This allows an activist to advertise their supposed moral superiority over non-activists.
‘We think that narcissists are involved in activism not for altruistic reasons, but for selfish ones,’ said Bertrams, who was quick to emphasise that activism in itself is not narcissistic. Instead, an increasing number of individuals with narcissistic traits view activism as a powerful channel to act out narcissistically.
On JSO protesters, Bertrams told me that climate activism, which ‘is currently receiving a lot of media attention, elicits strong emotional reactions from the people, and involves a certain amount of aggression’. For this very reason, he noted, ‘it is likely to be very attractive to narcissists.’
According to Bertrams, there are two groups of climate activists: those who take action out of their authentic views and are truly convinced that urgent action is required; and, on the other side, there are the narcissists who appear to be more interested in performative acts of ‘care’. They are fixated on the idea of drawing attention to themselves, rather than actually drawing attention to any specific environmental matter.
‘If trying to damage artworks in the name of saving the climate leads to increased admiration in one’s peer group and invitations to talk shows,’ said Bertrams, ‘that strikes me as very attractive to narcissists.’ Indeed.
Narcissists derive great pleasure from being able to control and influence the actions of other people. ‘I can imagine that the negative emotions that a roadblock triggers in the affected citizens are emotional feed for a narcissist,’ said Bertrams. ‘Triggering a strong reaction in others through one’s own behaviour is a form of exercising power and control.’
Then, there is the matter of hypocrisy: an infuriating practice that is intimately associated with narcissism. Some JSO members appear to be hypocrites of the highest order. After all, they famously used adhesives made from fossil fuels to glue themselves to paintings and roads. They claim to care about saving humanity, yet have prevented ambulances and fire engines from reaching their destinations.
Bertrams stressed the fact that ‘narcissists place a lot of value in presenting themselves in a positive light,’ but rarely, if ever, live up to their lofty ideals away from the public eye. A virtuous image is important to them, even if this image is built on nothing but a foundation of sand.
Of course, one needn’t be a trailblazing psychologist to see through the JSO charade. Nevertheless, the study sheds some much needed light on the motives of some modern day activists.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-narcissism-of-just-stop-oil/
********************************************UK Food Strategy and Net Zero
A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation warns that imposing radical decarbonisation targets on the agricultural sector is a serious threat to food security and could have highly damaging effects.
According to author Martin Livermore, modern farming unavoidably emits greenhouse gases, which are intrinsic to the production of fertiliser and raising of livestock.
That being the case, governments appear to have decided that we should all be pushed towards a vegan diet and that productive intensive arable farming should be discouraged. This would have an enormous negative impact on farmers, the rural economy and the landscapes we value.
Martin Livermore says:
“Moves to limit fertiliser use have already brought farmers onto the streets in the Netherlands, and will surely do so elsewhere. Farming is vital for the countryside and for our food security. We cannot just wish it away.”
Dr Benny Peiser, GWPF director, adds:
“Martin Livermore’s paper shows the risk of putting our livestock farmers out of business in order to shave a small fraction off our carbon dioxide emissions. It’s an extraordinary threat to Britain’s food and national security.”
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Scrap Bank of England’s climate mandate, Balls and Osborne say
Climate goals should be stripped from the Bank of England’s remit to remove any distractions from its focus on inflation and financial stability, according to one of the architects of UK central bank independence.
Ed Balls, an adviser to former Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown when the Labour Party made the bank independent in 1997, said it “doesn’t make any sense” to give the BOE a role for which it has no tools. In the same House of Lords committee meeting, ex-Conservative Chancellor George Osborne agreed with Balls — in effect criticizing current Tory premier Rishi Sunak.
“It concerns me, the idea that you start to throw into the mix objectives which aren’t really affected sensibly by the instrument the bank has – which is interest rates,” Balls, who opposed Osborne as Labour’s shadow chancellor from 2011 to 2015, told the Lords’ economic affairs committee on Tuesday.
Sunak, who was then chancellor, added the goal of supporting the government’s net zero ambition to the BOE’s monetary and financial policy remits in 2021. The bank has since come under attack for failing to prevent double-digit inflation, with some critics arguing it was distracted by such policy “baubles.”
Balls said there is value in doing climate stress tests on commercial banks to ensure they are resilient to financial risks posed by global warming.
“But the government has got to be clear that meeting an objective like climate change and reducing emissions is a matter for fiscal policy, regulatory policy and the government,” he said.
Osborne said that while he respected “the desire to get all arms of the British state trying to deal with the challenge of climate change, I don’t think it’s necessary to single out that objective.” He added that it was “a good exercise every few years to simplify these things.”
The former politicians’ comments were made to a House of Lords’ inquiry into the independence of the BOE. Paul Tucker, a former BOE deputy governor, and John Vickers, a former BOE chief economist, have suggested that net zero has been a distraction.
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28 April, 2023
Climate Scepticism on the Rise Throughout the World
Scepticism about human-caused climate change continues to increase around the world. A recent poll conducted by a group within the University of Chicago found that belief in humans causing all or most climate change had slumped in America to 49% from the 60% level recorded just five years ago. Similar falls have been recorded elsewhere, with a recent IPSOS survey covering two thirds of the world’s population revealing that nearly four people in every 10 believe climate change is mainly due to natural causes.
Perhaps the most surprising statistic from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC) survey is that 70% of Americans are unwilling to spend more than $2.50 a week to combat climate change. Nearly four in 10 Americans said they were unwilling to pay a couple of dimes. Despite decades of relentless green doomsday agitprop designed to corral populations into living under a collectivist Net Zero-ordered society, it appears that the vast majority of Americans are unwilling to pay even the chump change in their back pockets to stop the climate changing.
Surveys such as EPIC and IPSOS speak to the fundamental flaw in the ‘settled’ science surrounding the suggestion that humans burning fossil fuel are causing the climate to breakdown. The hypothesis is unproven – not a single science paper provides conclusive proof. Natural causes and the proposition that carbon dioxide becomes ‘saturated’ beyond certain atmospheric levels are more convincing explanations for scientific observations. Fears that mainstream climate science is heavily corrupted by faulty data, pseudoscientific modelling and outright political cherry-picking are becoming more widespread.
Interestingly, the recent overall fall in support for human-caused climate change in the U.S. is due to Democrats and Independents.
Scepticism levels remain high among Republicans but there have been dramatic increases among Left-leaning Democrats. Nevertheless, Democrats were found to be more likely than Republicans to be influenced by the ‘evidence’ of what is called ‘extreme’ weather (71% vs 30% for Democrats vs Republicans). This news will bring some comfort to green propogandists since the recent lack of noticeable global warming has led to a massive rise in pseudoscientific attributions of single weather events to overall climate change. Personal observations are said to influence 55% of Democrats, compared with 20% of Republicans, while appeals to higher authority play better on the Left than the Right. News coverage ranks higher for Democrats at 47% vs 20% , while scientists, most of whom go along with the ‘settled’ agenda, score 73% against just 32% for more sceptical Republicans.
EPIC also found that scepticism was rising among young people aged between 18-29 with a 17% decline in numbers who think humans play a predominant role in changing the climate. The drop was just as significant for those who graduated from college as those with a high school diploma (11%). Of considerable interest was this 17% fall compared with just a 9% drop for those aged over 60. This will concern alarmists, since the impressionable young are heavily targeted with green agitprop from an early age.
The IPSOS survey found that levels of climate scepticism were similar in all age categories. As with EPIC, it found that political leanings were decisive. In the seven countries where political input was sought, 28% of supporters of the Left turned out to be climate sceptics, compared with 50% on the Right.
Is it surprising that climate scepticism is increasing throughout the world? As noted, anthropogenic climate science rests on a shaky evidence base, which no amount of debate cancellation, modelling, invented attributions and data manipulation can hide. Over nearly 50 years, laudable environmental concerns have been hijacked to promote a collectivist, controlling political agenda. But decades of easy virtue-signalling are coming to an end, and the harsh realities of Net Zero are starting to become obvious. Claims that the green revolution will be largely painless are seen for the nonsense they are by the realistic Net Zero appraisal publicised by the Government-funded U.K. FIRES collaborative project.
According to the FIRES report, written by a number of British academics, Net Zero means just 60% of current levels of food cooking, heating and energy by 2050. Within less than 30 years there will be no beef and lamb, and all flying and shipping will have to stop. Road use will be restricted to 60% of today’s levels. There will be no cement, and the only steel available will be recycled. Norman Fenton, the recently retired Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London, noted that these conclusions are consistent with UN/WEF Agenda 21, the UN ‘World at 2050’ agenda and the WEF Great Reset. The latter, noted Fenton, incorporates ‘Build Back Better’ in which you’ll “own nothing and be happy”, and eat bugs instead of meat.
Another senior academic, the nuclear physicist Dr. Wallace Manheimer, recently warned that Net Zero would lead to the end of modern civilisation. The new green infrastructure will fail, cost trillions, trash large portions of the environment, and be entirely unnecessary. Manheimer noted that before fossil fuel became widely used, energy was provided by people and animals. Because so little energy was produced, “civilisation was a thin veneer atop a vast mountain of human squalour and misery, a veneer maintained by such institutions as slavery, colonialism and tyranny”.
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Biden proposes $2 trillion for clean energy projects, calls for end to power plant emissions by 2035
Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden on Tuesday proposed spending $2 trillion over four years on clean energy projects and ending carbon emissions from power plants by 2035.
The former vice president’s proposal is part of a series of economic plans aimed at jump-starting an economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic.
In a speech detailing the plan Tuesday afternoon in Delaware, Biden called the threat posed by climate change a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to jolt new life into our economy.”
“We’re not just going to tinker around the edges. We’re going to make historic investments that will seize this moment in history,” he said.
The plan marks a clear shift by Biden toward progressives’ goals of urgently reducing fossil fuel consumption to combat climate change. Biden’s new proposal is more ambitious than the 10-year, $1.7 trillion plan he’d offered during the Democratic primary, which included the goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050.
Biden used the speech to mock President Donald Trump’s lack of commitment to addressing climate change. “He said he doesn’t like LED because, quote, the light is no good. I always look orange,” Biden said.
His proposed 100% clean electricity standard by 2035 is modeled after a proposal initially offered by Washington Gov. Jay Inslee and later embraced by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The same aim was included in a series of recommendations recently negotiated by a task force made up of members appointed by Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and co-chaired by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a chief proponent of the Green New Deal.
“It’s no secret that we’ve been critical of Vice President Biden’s plans and commitments in the past. Today, he’s responded to many of those criticisms: dramatically increasing the scale and urgency of investments, filling in details on how he’d achieve environmental justice and create good union jobs, and promising immediate action – on day 1, in his first 100 days, in his first term, in the next decade – not just some far-off goals,” said Varshini Prakash, the co-founder of the Sunrise Movement.
Biden’s aides told reporters on a call Tuesday he would pay for it in part by undoing Trump’s tax cuts, raising taxes on wealthy Americans and increasing the corporate tax rate to 28%. They said more details on how Biden will pay for his proposals will come in the weeks ahead, after he unveils other economic proposals.
The clean energy plan marks the second straight week Biden has proposed stimulus spending to bolster a reeling economy as part of his “Build Back Better” agenda. Last week, he called for $400 billion for US-made manufacturing efforts such as clean-energy vehicles, telecommunications equipment, steel and other building materials and health care equipment, as well as another $300 billion in research and development on areas like 5G, artificial intelligence and electric vehicle technology.
It’s an approach similar to how former President Barack Obama and Biden entered office in 2009. Biden aides argue that the former vice president’s role in enacting the stimulus package back then makes for a strong contrast with Trump, who has not signed into law any major infrastructure plans and whose administration’s efforts to make infrastructure the theme of specific weeks – only to repeatedly be derailed by controversies Trump caused – has become a long-running joke in Washington.
Biden on Tuesday highlighted his role in the passage of the stimulus in the early days of the Obama administration.
“I know how to get it done. In 2009, President Obama and I inherited an economy in free fall and we prevented a depression,” he said.
During the Democratic primary, Biden had expressed skepticism about Green New Deal objectives of net-zero emissions by 2030. Pressed by an activist in New Hampshire, he said he was committed to achieving that goal – but not on the same timeline progressive activists had called for.
“By 2030?” she asked. “No, it can’t be done by 2030,” he said, “but it can be done by 2050.”
Republicans criticized Biden’s proposal for endangering the jobs of millions of people employed by fossil fuel companies.
“Joe Biden’s economic and climate agenda shows that he is beholden to left-wing ideologues and not to the American people who face the prospect of eliminated jobs and higher taxes under his plan,” Republican National Committee spokesman Steve Guest said in an email to reporters.
Biden’s campaign said the plan would create union jobs in clean energy and through projects such as the construction of electric vehicle charging stations, the weatherization of millions of buildings, updating electric grids, expanding broadband internet access and more.
In his speech Tuesday, the former vice president was also critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic and his rush to reopen schools and businesses.
“Mr. President, ‘open everything now’ isn’t a strategy for success. It’s barely a slogan. Quit pushing the false choice between protecting our health and protecting our economy. All it does is endanger our recovery on both fronts,” Biden said.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/14/politics/joe-biden-clean-energy-plan/index.html
*************************************************US ESG Bond Market Chokes on Republican Backlash, Investor Angst
US sales of bonds designed to help companies do good are plunging amid pressure from investors and Republican politicians.
Companies sold about $6 billion of bonds last quarter to pay for projects that help the environment, achieve a social goal, or improve their governance, a type of debt known as ESG. That’s down more than 50% from the same time last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, which focused on companies outside the financial industry.
The slump in issuance comes amid a political assault on ESG investing by some of the biggest names in the Republican party, including former Vice President Mike Pence and the governors of Florida and Texas, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott. DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential candidate, said last month that he’s leading an alliance of 19 states intent on banning ESG investing outright.
“Before, ESG could do no wrong and the scrutiny that should have been there wasn’t there,” said Andrew Poreda, a senior research analyst at Sage Advisory Services. “Now there’s more skepticism and policing.”
Some states are prohibiting external asset managers that oversee public pension funds and other investment pools from considering ESG criteria, wrote JPMorgan Chase & Co. credit analysts led by Eric Beinstein and Nathaniel Rosenbaum in February. That could be making borrowers less interested in selling ESG debt, they wrote.
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Australia closes oldest coal plant, pivots to renewables
Here come blackouts on windless nights
Australia's oldest coal-fired power plant was shuttered Friday, as the country -- a once-notorious climate straggler -- prepares for a seismic shift towards renewable energy.
The Liddell power station, a three-hour drive north of Sydney, was one in a series of ageing coal-fired plants slated to close in the coming years.
Built in 1971, Liddell provided about 10 percent of the electricity used in New South Wales, Australia's most populous state.
Liddell's owner AGL said it would take about two years to demolish the hulking facility, which would free up the site for new clean energy projects such as a hydrogen power plant.
"More than 90 per cent of the materials in the power station will be recycled, including 70,000 tonnes of steel -- which is more steel than there is in the Sydney Harbour Bridge," the company said.
For decades, coal has provided the bulk of Australia's electricity, but University of New South Wales renewable energy expert Mark Diesendorf told AFP that stations such as Liddell were fast becoming unreliable "clunkers".
Besides being inefficient, highly polluting and expensive to repair, the continued widespread use of coal-fired power plants would make Australia's climate targets almost impossible to meet.
Australia has long been one of the world's largest coal producers and exporters, and a series of governments have resisted pressure to scale back the industry.
But the centre-left Labor Party elected last year on the promise of climate action has pledged that 82 percent of the country's electricity will come from renewable sources by 2030.
This demands a drastic overhaul -- while world leaders such as Norway produce more than 90 percent of their power through renewables, Australia currently sits around 30 percent.
"The plans are for a fairly rapid phase-out," Diesendorf told AFP. "These stations are overdue for retirement and there's no economic argument for replacing them with new coal."
- 'Right direction' -
Under growing public pressure to address the climate crisis, many Australian fossil fuel companies increasingly prefer to shutter old coal plants than keep them online.
Australia's largest coal-fired power station, the Eraring facility in New South Wales, is scheduled to close in 2025 and a handful more will follow over the next decade.
While these closures will test whether renewables are ready to fill the gap, a government report released Friday indicated Australia was heading in the right direction.
The Australian Energy Market Operator found that record levels of renewable electricity -- mostly solar power -- were already driving down both emissions and household power prices.
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27 April, 2023
Insane German attempt to make super-expensive steel
In Germany’s industrial heartland, a slender spire of tubes rises amid a cluster of smoke-belching foundries. Owned by Salzgitter AG, Germany’s second-largest steelmaker, the installation is an ambitious attempt to revolutionize the steelmaking process, and ultimately, secure a critical piece of the country’s economy.
Steel is the most important material for Germany’s manufacturing sector, going into everything from Volkswagen AG automobiles to the advanced machinery made by Siemens AG. The metal is “the starting point of any value chain that you can think of,” Salzgitter Chief Executive Officer Gunnar Groebler said in a Bloomberg TV interview, describing it as “an important factor in any industry in any economy.”
Yet steel is also one of the worst offenders in terms of carbon emissions. Its production techniques, which have remained unchanged for over a century and a half, rely on fossil fuel-burning furnaces that generate over one ton of carbon for each ton of steel created — more than the cement or chemicals sectors.
Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Gateway Europe conference outside Dublin this week, Rachel Muncrief, deputy director of the International Council on Clean Transportation, singled out steel for not getting enough attention as a “massive polluter.”
With Germany racing to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045, the switch to green steel is an early test of what kinds of heavy industry Europe will be able to retain – and adapt — in the transition to a cleaner economy.
It’s also a deeply personal question in steelmaking regions like Lower Saxony, the Ruhr valley and Saarland. If beleaguered German steel companies Thyssenkrupp AG, Salzgitter and Dillinger Hüttenwerke falter, firms like Mercedes-Benz AG and BMW AG will have to turn elsewhere for supplies. That could potentially lead manufacturing supply chains to drift overseas, and would close a chapter on a key part of the country’s industrial heritage.
“Not managing to achieve this transformation to clean technologies means the end of steel here,” said Juergen Barke, economy minister of Saarland, which witnessed the closure of an ironworks factory that produced steel helmets for the Kaiser’s armies in World War I. “It’s a question of survival.”
Salzgitter’s site in the gentle hills of Lower Saxony is a case study in real-time structural change. While molten metal streams from the bowels of the three coal-fired blast furnaces on one edge of the sprawling facility, elsewhere on the site, a twist of pipes uses power from nearby wind turbines to convert water into hydrogen, which then gets pumped into chambers to refine raw iron ore into purified pellets, known as sponge.
In contrast to traditional foundries, iron used in the green steel process doesn’t need to be melted. To complete the conversion, the purified ore is combined with other elements in an electric-powered furnace akin to a giant pressure cooker. The process eliminates some 97% of carbon emissions but implementing it doesn’t come cheap: while Salzgitter has already secured nearly €1 billion ($1.07 billion) in state aid, the first phase of the transition alone is expected to cost the company as much as €2.4 billion.
To make green steel production work over long haul, Salzgitter needs to ensure that it has enough renewable power and the right infrastructure to convert energy into hydrogen – and that customers, or governments, are willing to cover the potentially greater costs.
Under pressure from investors and regulators, steelmakers across Europe are pouring resources into the challenge. Salzgitter aims to convert all three of its traditional foundries by 2033, and other competitors are getting ready as well. ArcelorMittal is investing in facilities in France and Belgium, while in Sweden, SSAB and startup H2 Green Steel are working on projects that would tap the country’s hydropower resources.
All this is just a small window into Germany’s larger struggle to prove that it has a future both as a net-zero country and an energy-intensive production location. The imperative of hitting climate goals means abandoning coal, the fuel around which Germany’s steelmaking regions originally sprang up, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has meant the end of its reliance on cheap natural gas. Moreover, as green energy executives eye the Middle East and North Africa for future production sites, Germany’s capacity to produce renewable resources is limited by its relatively small coastline and dark winters.
For the steel industry, these challenges are forcing them to consider options that would have once seemed far-fetched. Thyssenkrupp is mulling a plan that could see it reduce upstream steel production and instead import foreign steel blocks into Germany, where they would be processed into higher-value products.
While this would reduce the manufacturer’s carbon footprint, the Duisburg-based company may have little choice in the decision: to make the enough hydrogen for a year’s worth of green steel, it would need a year’s worth of power from 3,800 wind turbines — about 13% of Germany’s current capacity.
The weeds sprouting between the rusting pipes of the Voelklingen ironworks in western Germany indicate what can happen if this transition goes wrong. Once among the mightiest metal producers in Europe, the plant closed down in 1986 after failing to adapt to the onset of globalization.
At its peak in the 1960s, more than 17,000 workers labored in around-the-clock shifts to melt and mold metal at the Voelklingen factory. Now, more than three decades on, what was once a sprawling array of blast furnaces, ore conveyors and coking plants has been transformed into an art space and destination for fans of industrial history.
In a cavernous hall that used to house giant blowers to keep furnaces blazing, a video work called “When We Are Gone” by Julian Rosefeldt explores the demise of the capitalist system. Playing in a loop amid silent machinery, the film follows scientists who have returned to a barren earth to research the legacies of now-vanished cultures. It’s an unsettling critique of Germany’s existing industrial economy, and a reminder of how much work the country must undertake to adapt this economy to a net-zero future.
But the people on the front lines are optimistic.
“We need to be courageous in order to overcome the huge challenges facing German industry,” Saarland’s Barke said. “We’re working hard to make this transition a success.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/germany-fights-green-production-most-040000918.html
*******************************************Biden's Energy Secretary Endorses Suicidal Mission for the U.S. Military
Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm says she supports requiring the U.S. military to adopt an ALL-electric vehicle fleet by 2030
Ah yes, this will work perfectly in places like Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Africa and everywhere else around the globe without electric charging stations. And how long does Granholm propose U.S. troops ask the enemy to hold off while they wait for days to recharge their military vehicles?
Of course this is an idea also backed by President Joe Biden, who insists the military should be 100 percent electric in the next decade.
During Earth Day remarks delivered in Washington state on April 22, Biden said, “We’re going to start the process for every vehicle in the United States military, every vehicle is going to be climate-friendly.”
“Every vehicle. I mean it. We’re spending billions of dollars to do it,” he said.
To make every one of those vehicles climate-friendly would place service members at increased risk, as well as bankrupt the Department of Defense, all in the pursuit of Biden’s misguided goal.
Warfighters rely on our government to provide them the best tactical equipment available. By declaring that “every vehicle” in the military will be “climate friendly,” Biden risks sacrificing warfighting capability in the pursuit of his radical climate agenda.
It's a delusional proposal that puts the national security of the U.S. at risk, not to mention putting the country even further behind when it comes to global competition
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How the Green cult has disarmed Europe
Most NATO members have long failed to meet the alliance’s defense-spending benchmark of 2% of GDP. Europe’s defense industry relies on private investment to help fund research and development, training and recruitment of a skilled workforce, and more. Yet in recent years defense investment has become taboo.
Much of the pressure not to spend comes from the political left that lobbies investors and legislatures through nonprofits. “We have a problem because we think that deliveries and weapons exports” are “fueling conflicts and are at the end responsible for deaths and a big number of refugees,” says Thomas Küchenmeister, managing director of the nonprofit Facing Finance.
The Swedish Consumers’ Association says it wants to restrict investment in defense companies that make controversial weapons like mines or cluster munitions or sell to governments that are corrupt, unstable, have a poor track record on human rights, or “spend a disproportionate part of their budget on purchases of arms.” But war is an inherently ugly business, and good luck finding a defense company that can meet these standards.
The ESG mindset has also spread to European Union institutions. The European Investment Bank, the EU’s development bank, has a policy against providing financing for “ammunition and weapons, including explosives and sporting weapons, as well as equipment or infrastructure dedicated to military/police use.”
The Ecolabel is a voluntary EU certification program that directs consumers to sustainable products and businesses, and an effort is underway to include financial products. But the most recent draft proposal suggests a restriction against investment in companies that derive “more than 5% turnover from the production or trade of conventional weapons and/or military products used for combat.” Have they told the Russians?
The EU is also working to develop a unified definition for what qualifies as an ESG investment. In July 2021 the EU published a draft proposal for a “social taxonomy” that lists weapons alongside gambling and tobacco as “harmful sectors or activities” that “cannot qualify as socially sustainable despite e.g. good worker-related performance.”
After Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, a proposal scaled back the social-taxonomy language to designate as “harmful” only controversial weapons like mines, cluster munitions and chemical or biological weapons.
But Jan Pie, secretary general of the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe, says “European banks and investors have picked up the signal that Europe would be about to say defense is not a sustainable activity.” Mr. Pie says some investors are limiting exposure to the defense industry, some banks have denied loans and guarantees, and some insurers are raising premiums.
Alessandra Genco, chief financial officer at the Italian aerospace and defense company Leonardo, said the industry may face higher capital costs if fewer banks and institutions are unwilling to invest. Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said last month that it’s “a problem” that “our pension funds here in the Netherlands prefer not to invest in the defense industry.”
Examples abound of financial institutions that have adopted policies to restrict defense investment. Allianz Global Investors says its sustainable-labeled funds don’t invest in companies that derive more than 10% of revenue from weapons, military equipment and services.
The German GLS Bank condemns “the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a war of aggression and against international law,” says spokeswoman Nora Schareika. But the bank doesn’t invest in “weapons and armaments,” a policy “based on its conviction” that they “can never be sustainable, since they destroy lives.”
Bad actors like Russia and China share no such ethical qualms. They respect only military power. A West that is reluctant to arm itself won’t deter aggressors, and the result will be a more dangerous, violent world.
\
https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-defense-spending-esg-investment-russia-china-ukraine-ac7a6829
*****************************************Carbon capture project in Norway temporarily halted by high costs
A project to capture carbon emissions from a waste plant in the Norwegian capital Oslo has been paused for a year amid projections of large cost overruns, potentially dealing a blow to wider Norwegian plans to foster the fledgling technology.
"New cost calculations show that we cannot implement the original plans for the carbon capture project within the existing budget," Knut Inderhaug, head of project operator Hafslund Oslo Celsio, said in a statement.
The reasons were higher costs from suppliers due to inflation, the geopolitical instability that has lifted energy prices, and a weakened Norwegian crown, Celsio said without providing specific overrun figures.
Investment costs for the Klemetsrud waste plant, which are being subsidised by both the Oslo city council and the Norwegian government, were initially set at 5.5 billion Norwegian crowns ($518.88 million).
To date, Celsio has spent around 450 million crowns, a spokesperson told Reuters.
The company will now take a 12-month hiatus to find ways to reduce costs, which would delay the project from its initial 2026 commissioning date, it said.
Celsio was also in contact with municipal and state stakeholders over how best to realise the project.
The CO2 captured at Klemetsrud is part of Norway's prestigious Longship carbon capture and storage (CCS) project, which also includes carbon capture at a cement plant and the Northern Lights transport and storage project.
Klemetsrud was expected to capture round 400,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, corresponding to 14% of Oslo's overall emissions of greenhouse gases.
The delay would likely impact deposits at Northern Lights, a joint venture founded by oil firms Equinor, TotalEnergies and Shell, although interest from European customers may see lost volumes replaced, Celsio's spokesperson added.
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26 April, 2023
The endless wind drought crippling renewables
The spectre of power failure is haunting Europe as Britain and Germany demonstrate that modern societies can’t run on wind and solar power. Wind droughts are the fatal flaw in the system and one can envisage a future book titled How Wind Droughts Destroyed Western Civilisation. Think about the consequences of a system blackout if Net Zero policies are pursued to the bitter end in Western Europe and Australia…
Texas in 2021 gave us a glimpse of the abyss during a spell of low wind and a serious cold snap. Hundreds died and it would have been thousands if the state had gone completely black, instead of hanging on by a thread. Now, Texas is planning to subsidise gas producers to maintain capacity in the face of competition from subsidised wind and solar power.
Don’t laugh, this was happening here with a deal in Victoria to maintain the supply of coal power from Loy Yang A to the Portland aluminium smelter. However, plans are now in motion to close Loy Yang B ahead of schedule with things looking increasingly grim for the smelter. Both the major parties in NSW promised before the recent election to keep the coal fires burning at Eraring.
Wind droughts were not properly considered in the rush to decarbonise the power supply, but they can’t be ignored any longer. The burning question is: How did the meteorologists fail to issue wind drought warnings? They monitor every other kind of extreme weather to feed the inexhaustible appetite of the media for bad news about ‘climate change’.
In Australia the answer is easy. According to a CSIRO report in 2002, the Bureau of Meteorology used the average velocity of the wind for weeks and months to measure wind resources with information collected at hundreds of sites established by the BOM during the 1990s. Tom Quirk and Paul Miskelly first reported wind droughts using the AEMO data which reports the output from the registered wind farms at five-minute intervals.
Our wind droughts mostly last less than a day and they max out around three days, based on the AEMO records. In the BOM records, a wind drought lasting three days would simply lower the number for the week or the month without signalling that there was a serious restriction in the supply.
The neglect of wind droughts in Europe is harder to explain because the Dunkelflaute or ‘dark doldrums’ (the still, dark periods), can persist for weeks. They must have been well-known to sailors for centuries, also to the millers who pumped water in Holland and those who milled grain across the continent. And what about the experience of recreational sailors in modern times? In the absence of readily available historical records, it was helpful to read this comment by ‘Michael’ on a recent post by my colleague Peter Smith. It is an extract from a 1901 book by H.G. Wells.
‘Wind was extremely inconvenient for the purpose of pumping [water from mines] because in these latitudes it is inconstant: it was costly, too, because “at any time the labourers might be obliged to sit at the pit’s mouth for weeks together whistling for a gale”.H.G. Wells, in Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, 1901.’
Yes Virginia, they did have wind droughts in England before 2020!
Official recognition in the wind industry was slow in coming, although the German policy of energiewende was clearly in trouble in 2018 when a government report admitted that it was failing on three vital metrics: cost, reliability, and emission reduction. Recently, there has been more coverage of wind issues, but officially the green transition is still happening. More research is required, with hard questions directed to the responsible authorities.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-endless-wind-drought-crippling-renewables/
***************************************Lazard's levelised cost of power generation figures remain "highly implausible"
Net Zero Watch has slammed new estimates of the cost of electricity generation published by the merchant bank Lazard.
Lazard's Levelised Cost of Generation report appears annually, and is widely cited, supposedly as an authoritative source. However, its credibility must now be in serious doubt, because of the divergence of its underlying assumptions from reality.
Net Zero Watch's criticism centres on the cost of offshore wind, an area in which it has considerable expertise, and where highly transparent UK data make firm conclusions possible.
Net Zero Watch's deputy director, Andrew Montford, explained:
"Lazard's estimates of lifetime output are probably overstated by more than 50%, and their estimate of operational expenditure by more than 200%. Their figures are highly implausible."
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Australian EV drivers will soon benefit from nation-wide fast charging program
This is amusing. It's like a dog chasing its tail. It never catches up. The facility will entice more people to go electric, which will heighten the chance that when you roll up to recharge there will always be someone there recharging ahead of you. Frequently spending hours waiting to refuel will not tbe attractive. Electric cars are ok as suburban runabouts but are a pain for long trips
Electric car owners will be able to drive from Adelaide to Alice Springs, cross the Nullarbor, and run from Tasmania to Far North Queensland without stressing about charging, thanks to a new network coming to Australian roads.
A Federally funded program working with the NRMA to put 117 fast chargers on Australian highways will bring an end to “range anxiety”, according to Minister for Climate Change and Energy Chris Bowen.
“EVs aren’t just for the cities, and Australians who drive long distances either for work or for holidays should be able to reap the benefits of cars that are cheaper and cleaner to run,” he said.
“We’re making range anxiety a thing of the past. This project will help close the gaps and known black spots in the network and make it possible to drive from Darwin to Perth, Broken Hill to Adelaide, and from Brisbane to Tennant Creek in the NT.
“This national rollout will help put more Australians in the driver’s seat of cheaper and cleaner cars.”
The Federal Government’s “Driving the Nation” fund will spend $39.3 million ensuring electric car chargers are placed at 150 kilometre intervals on national highways.
Full technical details – including the charging speed of the network – have not been released.
The NRMA will be using purpose built charger models for various public charging locations depending upon environmental conditions, location and power availability, sourcing chargers from manufacturers including Tritium, Kempower and ABB.
A spokesman for the organisation said plug power for the public charging locations “will initially range from 75kW to around 300kW”.
The fastest chargers currently used in Australia can add around 300 kilometres of range in about 20 minutes to high-end electric cars with more than 500 kilometres of range.
Cheaper models such as the Nissan Leaf, that can’t handle the flow of energy at need about an hour to add around 200 kilometres of range.
Mr Bowen drives a Tesla Model 3 – Australia’s most popular electric car.
Priced from about $64,000 drive-away, the Tesla offers around 491 kilometres of driving range.
Tesla has a widespread “Supercharger” network that is not available to owners of other electric cars.
Carly Irving-Dolan, NRMA chief executive for energy and infrastructure, said the network would be the charging backbone of Australia.
“The NRMA is excited to be partnering with the Australian Government to grow our regional network of fast charging stations across the country because we fundamentally believe that regional Australia should not be left behind,” she said.
“Australia’s expansive landscape presents some unique and local challenges to ensure that we are ready for more electric vehicles on our roads.
“NRMA has over 100 years’ experience helping Australia address transport challenges and we are committed to building on this work through this national charging network.”
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25 April, 2023
Everyone forgot about Earth Hour
Editor’s Note: Earth Hour is the creation of the World Wildlife Fund. It is an event during which companies and individuals symbolically turn off their lights for an hour to virtue-signal their commitment to the environment, effectively wasting energy rather than conserving it, due to the nature of power production. This year, it was held on March 25, but you probably missed it…
We should spend Earth Hour in a salute to coal, oil, gas, and uranium.
It was coal that produced clean electric power which cleared the smog produced by dirty combustion and open fires in big cities like London and Pittsburgh. Much of the third world still suffers choking fumes and smog because they do not have clean electric power and burn green fuels like wood, cardboard, and cow dung for cooking and home heating.
It was coal that saved the forests being felled to fuel the steam engines for electricity generation and to produce charcoal for the first iron smelters.
It was coal that powered the light bulbs and saved the whales being slaughtered for whale oil lamps.
It was coal that produced the steel that replaced shingles on the roof, timber props in the mines, wooden fence posts on the farms, and the bark on the old bark hut.
And it is diesel and petrol that powers our farms, mines, and road transport.
In Australia today, coal still provides our most reliable electricity for lighting, cooking, heating, refrigeration, rail transport, and steel.
Without coal, oil, and gas much of the world would be back in the dark days of candles, wood stoves, chip heaters, open fires, smoky cities, hills bare of trees, and streets knee-deep in horse manure.
Coal is fossil sunshine as clean as the green plants it came from, and often less damaging to the environment than its green energy alternatives.
Earth Hour candles are green tokenism for rich status-seekers and nostalgic dreamers.
We should spend Earth Hour saluting the real heroes who, despite the abuse, still produce the coal, oil, gas, and uranium on which most people on Earth depend.
The Real Agenda of Earth Hour below:
‘We must make this place an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects – we must reclaim the roads and plowed lands, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers, and return to the wilderness millions and tens of millions of acres of presently settled land.’
– Dave Foreman, ‘Earth First’
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/everyone-forgot-about-earth-hour/
*********************************************Weird Weather
When someone tells me, “Boy, the weather sure has been weird in recent years,” I am pretty confident of two things: one, they have bought into the climate change hoax, and two, they know absolutely nothing about history. Upon hearing the “weather is weird lately” comment, I immediately ask two questions: “Compared to what?” and “How do you know what the weather was like 200 years ago?” To the first question, they might mumble something like, “well, it’s weirder than it was a few years ago” and to the second question, they have no answer. Because they don’t know. Except in general, I don’t, either.
So, the weather is weirder than it was 5 years ago, but maybe not as weird as it was 205 years ago. Brilliant. Let’s destroy the world’s economy on that.
Lots of tornados in America so far this spring? Weird weather! Climate change! Global warming! Snow in the northern plains in late April? Uhh...has to be climate change. Somehow. “It’s been a long winter,” I heard the nice lady on The Weather Channel say a few days ago. She probably will never be heard from again. You people in Montana have fun sweeping that “global warming” off your sidewalks.
As an historian, I have frequently, in various writings, bemoaned the abysmal ignorance of history evident among most Americans today. To use history effectively, we must broaden our viewpoint beyond what we had for dinner last night, and especially put events into their historical circumstances. The last point is critical and what most people almost never do, simply because they don’t know enough history to accomplish it. This is true with the “climate change” discussion.
One conundrum is that thinking is an exercise which requires a little bit of training and labor, more than most folks want to accede to. People don’t think, and they often don’t think because they have little knowledge to think about. You must “know” something before you can “think” rationally about it, and Americans know virtually nothing about history. This is obviously true regarding climate history. And Al Gore has made millions off that ignorance while Joe Biden has destroyed American energy independence via the same method.
So, back to the southern tornadoes for a moment. Yes, terrible. Can anybody tell me the weather in Mississippi on March 20, 1701? How about in central Utah on June 13, 1666? Mr. “Weird Weather Genius,” please enlighten me about the weather in western Arizona on October 3, 1312. Florida panhandle on April 15, 1512. Manhattan Island from February 5, 772 B.C. to March 25, 756 B.C. Don’t know? Then how do you know our current weather is “weird”? How many tornadoes did Oklahoma have in 1412? 1639? 1845? You have no clue, have you. All you know is the “weather is weird '' and “global warming/climate change is true” because CNN and Greta Thunberg tell you so.
“But the weather records show warming...” Yes, that is true—over the last few decades. How far do accurate instrument-measured weather records go back? Maybe 140 years, tops. So how do we know about specific weather events, on specific days or even months, before those records started being kept? We don’t. Climate scientists can tell us weather trends over decades and centuries, but they cannot tell you how many tornadoes Mississippi had in any month, for thousands of years, prior to recent record-keeping. It is folly to say our weather is “weird” because we don’t know what “normal” was like in the past. It may have been even weirder. Thirty years is nothing historically, and the planet shouldn’t be revolutionized based on information over such a small sample period.
On top of that, satellite data (the most accurate current weather instrumentation) demonstrates that there has been no true “global warming” since 2013 (check Marc Morano’s “Climate Depot” website for more information about this). There is a reason the switch was made from “global warming” to “climate change”—there ain’t been no warming recently. Climate scientists also know, through various methods, that the earth was warmer in the year 100 A.D. than in 2000 A.D. The 2000-year trend, except for the “Medieval Warming Period”, has been towards colder weather. Since about 1900, there has been gradual, but inconsistent, warming. We can see the developments of weather, but no specific places or dates (Mississippi, April 3, 1102). Thus, there is absolutely no way of knowing if, historically, this spring’s tornados are “weird” or “normal.” It may have been worse 1,000 years ago.
Climate scientists also speak of the “Medieval Warming Period” (appx. 1000-1300 A.D.), followed by nearly 500 years of a “Little Ice Age.” The earth only began to recover from that last century, though predictions of another “ice age” were widespread in the 1950s-70s. Now the trend is back to greater warmth. Except for the long winter this year. But, of course, the hotter temperatures, especially over the past 30 years, are the evidence “global warmists” use for their theory. And it is man’s fault.
But how did humans cause temperatures to rise 2000 years ago in the Roman period? What industries did medieval men invent that created the Medieval Warming Period? Peasant farming, I guess.
Thomas Jefferson, in 1799, noted there was generally less snow then than 60 years earlier (there was indeed a warming trend in the 1700s). Did mankind cause that, too?
A little history can work wonders in debunking hoaxes and myths. That is why Karl Marx so accurately said, “Keep people from their history and they are easily controlled.” People are being 'controlled’ now by Leftist, “climate change” lies, and one of the major reasons for it is an abysmal ignorance of history. Marano (“Climate Depot”) and others are trying. But they are being swamped and overwhelmed. As long as the Left controls the global narrative and the American education system, our climb is decidedly uphill.
https://townhall.com/columnists/marklewis/2023/04/24/weird-weather-n2622307 ?
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Your Taxes at Work: ‘Eco-Anxiety’ Counseling
US Fish and Wildlife Service employees are struggling to cope with feelings of trauma and loss over the world’s changing climates and imperiled environments. Their work repeatedly confronts them with ecological changes, but even a sense of “anticipated loss” perhaps decades from now requires compassionate help. Or so the FWS and American Psychological Association tell us.
The FWS is thus offering paid leave to employees who attend “eco-anxiety” and “climate grief” training. When the House Natural Resources Committee called the sessions a colossal waste of money, the agency downplayed their cost and scope. But naturally the “woke” programs don’t end there.
FWS Director Martha Williams is also pushing diversity-equity-inclusion-LBGTQ programs as the agency’s “number one priority” (or perhaps number two, after climate change). Employees can take as much paid time off as needed for DEI and “gay pride” programs and eco-anguish counseling.
There’s no word about programs to help employees deal with widespread habitat and wildlife destruction that will result from millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and tens of thousands of miles of new transmission lines, due to “net zero” policies implemented in the name of averting the “climate crisis.” Apparently no programs offer paid leave to participate in “conservative pride” campaigns or study Earth’s historic ice ages, warm periods, little ice ages and decades-long droughts.
That’s hardly surprising. The FWS and Interior Department were getting eco-centric and anti-fossil-fuel when I worked there 35 years ago. Like American and Western society in general, their culture has simply gotten more noticeably and intolerantly devoted to extreme environmentalist agendas since then.
Movies, television and news stories, constant instruction in what to think, rather than how to think, an absence of religion and ethics in many schools and homes, and incessant themes of inequality, victimhood and global doom foster widespread tension, anxiety and depression. They leave too many children, teens and adults unable to cope with life and setbacks, less respectful of authority and human life, inured to violence, and aggressively intolerant of opinions that differ from their own ideologies and agendas.
Even before they were forced to endure Covid-induced lockdowns, nearly 20% of Americans were taking antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs, some linked to precipitating acts of violence; a third of high school students experienced prolonged anxiety, depression and hopelessness; and almost one in five teenagers had contemplated suicide.
Social isolation, minimal physical and outdoor activity, video games and reading self-selected online media have amplified depression and “chronic incapacitating mental illness” in America and many Western countries. Also hardly surprising, the problems are increasingly blamed on climate change.
“Climate grief is real,” self-proclaimed experts insist, and it’s spreading rapidly among young people. “The future is frightening,” 77% of 10,000 young people ages 16-25 from the USA and other countries told “climate anxiety” and “climate depression” investigators. Many children have climate nightmares.
“The climate mental health crisis” already affects people who have “lost everything in worsening climate infernos,” claims a NASA scientist and climate activist who’s certain we face “the end of life on Earth as we know it.” He’s not alone in being convinced that every extreme weather event and ecological calamity today is due to or made worse by fossil fuel and agricultural emissions.
“I don’t want to be alive anymore,” wailed a four-year-old who’s clearly been indoctrinated already. “The animals are all going to die, and I don’t want to be here when all the animals are dead.”
Parents fantasize about killing their children, over fears of a “climate-ravaged future.” Parents, teens and even children increasingly consider suicide.
At least one psychologist has based his entire practice on addressing climate psychoses. The Climate Psychology Alliance provides an online directory of “climate-aware therapists,” and a “peer support network” offers grief therapy modeled on twelve-step drug addiction programs.
There’s only one real solution to this epidemic, other “experts” insist: Governments must “take action now” to “end the climate crisis,” to eliminate “the death knell of climate chaos” that threatens us. Otherwise the epidemic of anxiety, depression, pills, climate grief and suicide will steadily worsen.
This is nonsense, insanity. We don’t have a climate crisis. We have a climate fear-mongering crisis.
We don’t need to “fix” exaggerated and over-hyped climate problems. We need to end the junk science, the indoctrination dominating news stories and classroom discussions about energy and climate change, the censorship that prevents alternative, reality-based facts and voices from being heard, the massive government funding of one side of this crucial debate.
Claims of “unprecedented” temperatures and extreme weather, floods and droughts have no basis in real-world evidence. The “climate crisis” exists in greenhouse-gas-focused computer models, headlines and hype, not in reality. There is no unprecedented upward trend in the frequency of violent US tornados, or US landfalling hurricanes, for example – though the 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes hitting the United States between Wilma (October 2005) and Harvey (August 2017) is an all-time record.
Unfortunately, viewpoints, evidence and experts challenging climate crisis claims are too often banished from school curricula, news and social media, and government policy discussions.
President Biden’s “national climate advisor” worked closely with Big Tech and news organizations, to suppress facts about climate change, fossil fuels, and the acreage, raw materials and mining required for wind, solar and battery power. Meta (Facebook), YouTube, pre-Musk Twitter and other companies routinely help to deplatform, demonetize and censor anyone contesting crisis-promoting claims.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “summaries for policy makers” often misrepresent scientific findings and advance frightening but unsupported scenarios about Earth’s future climate. The IPCC also ignores studies that demonstrate how increased atmospheric carbon dioxide improves plant growth and wildlife habitats, how climate has changed repeatedly throughout Earth’s history, and that eliminating fossil fuels would result in extensive ecological damage from wind, solar, battery and transmission line mining and installations.
China, India and other countries are rapidly expanding their oil, gas and coal use, to improve their economies and lift billions out of poverty. China dominates raw material and “green tech” supply chains, making the West increasingly reliant on China for energy, economy and national defense needs – via Chinese mines, processing plants and factories that operate under minimal standards for pollution control, habitat destruction, and slave and child labor. As a result:
* Nothing the United States, Europe, Canada and Australia do will have any effect on global fossil fuel use or greenhouse gas emissions.
* Western foreign and domestic policy options will be restricted by reliance on adversarial nations for pseudo-renewable energy materials and technologies.
* Prices for energy, goods and services will skyrocket, because every megawatt of wind and solar must be duplicated with backup batteries or generators.
* Politicians and bureaucrats – egged on by loud, often violent mobs – will increasingly dictate our energy consumption, living standards, home sizes, vacations, and what we can eat, drink, drive and buy.
These are the real existential threats to democracy, society, humanity and planet. Parents, voters, legislators and judges concerned about our future must take action now to stop this insanity.
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‘Environmental Justice’ From Climate Saint Joe
Putting an adjective before the word “justice” usually means you’re no longer getting justice. Such is the case with Joe Biden’s Earth Day Eve executive order that will further weaponize every federal agency, this time to save the planet by making it their “mission” to ensure “environmental justice for all.”
Never underestimate what the climate cultist will do to worship Gaia.
“Under this order,” Biden explained during the signing ceremony Friday, “environmental justice will become the responsibility of every single federal agency — I mean every single federal agency.” It even comes complete with “the first-ever Environmental Justice Scorecard.” And we all saw how well mobilizing government for the global emergency of COVID worked for everyone.
“This is about people’s health,” Biden declared in a similar vein. “It’s about the health of our communities. It’s only about the future of our planet.”
We’re killing the planet, Team Biden says, and it’s because we’re racist.
“For far too long, communities across our country have faced persistent environmental injustice through toxic pollution, underinvestment in infrastructure and critical services, and other disproportionate environmental harms often due to a legacy of racial discrimination including redlining,” read a White House statement. “These communities with environmental justice concerns face even greater burdens due to climate change.”
The statement adds that Biden “is working to ensure that all people” have access to “cleaner air and water, reduced risk for asthma, cancer, and other health burdens, and better access to green space, safe and affordable housing, and clean transportation.”
On the surface, that sounds pretty good. We all want clean air and water and to eradicate cancer and other health problems. We all want the American Dream.
In practice, however, Biden’s order means top-down government control over an ever-increasing portion of our lives, and that will often hamper the stated goals. Central planning never works. “Affordable housing,” for example, means penalizing people with good credit in order to subsidize those with bad credit. That’s on top of rampant inflation thanks to Biden’s spending spree, the response to which is increasing interest rates that make houses even more unaffordable.
“Clean transportation” means subsidizing and mandating Team Biden’s favored electric vehicles while waging war on gas-powered cars.
Speaking of energy, Americans get 60% of our electricity from coal and gas-fired power plants. The EPA is set to announce strict carbon limits on those power plants, and you better believe the objective is not to make that energy more affordable for American families of every color who are already struggling to keep up after two years of declining wages and rising prices.
Indeed, we all pay more for everything from homes to vehicles to energy as a result of this grossly distorted and patently unconstitutional “whole-of-government commitment to environmental justice.”
This isn’t Biden’s first executive order related to “environmental justice,” either. In his first days after taking office, he carpet-bombed America with EOs on everything from banning the term “China virus” to mandating masks in various places to regulating the supply chain to directing government agencies to pursue “environmental justice.”
Nevertheless, Biden is renewing the push now as the White House drums up anticipation over his looming reelection announcement, perhaps this week. We need to reelect the demented octogenarian, the argument will be, because the planet itself is at stake.
Biden alluded to this by fearmongering about GOP opposition to his schemes. “The MAGA Republicans in Congress want to repeal climate protections in the Inflation Reduction Act,” the president warned. Indeed, the House GOP did pass the Lower Energy Costs Act (HR 1) last month to reduce regulations on American energy production so as to reduce the cost of filling up our cars and heating our homes.
Biden called it “a thinly veiled license to pollute” and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer pronounced it “dead on arrival.”
Elections have consequences and, unfortunately, Americans put Biden in the White House and Democrats in control of the Senate. A lot of folks might feel good about saving the planet, but others of us know just how economic damaging and constitutionally contemptuous the resulting bid for “environmental justice” really is.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96743-environmental-justice-from-climate-saint-joe-2023-04-24 ?
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24 April, 2023
Media Won't Report That Renewable Energy Subsidies Dwarf Fossil Fuel Subsidies
On April 11, The New York Times ran an article titled, “Why Are Taxpayers Propping Up the Fossil Fuel Industry?” in which the author claims, “Around the world, taxpayers are helping to support fossil fuels through subsidies when their money could be funding green energy transitions instead.”
This article should have been printed 10 days earlier, on April 1, under the heading: “April Fool’s Joke!”
In reality, taxpayers are not propping up the fossil fuel industry, however, they are propping up the renewable energy industry.
According to the World Economic Forum, “Government spending on clean energy has risen by more than $500 billion since March 2022…This brings the total amount allocated to clean energy since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic to more than $1.2 trillion.”
In the United States, under the Biden administration, green energy subsidies have increased substantially as well.
For example, thanks to Biden’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. government will spend more than $400 billion on renewable energy subsidies over the next decade. This includes a $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of an electric vehicle (EV) and a $14,000 tax rebate for the purchase of “heat pumps and other energy efficient home appliances.”
Biden also packed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law with more than $100 billion in green energy subsidies, which includes $7.5 billion towards EV charging stations and $5 billion for electric school buses.
According to Biden, “This moment demands urgent investments the American people want and our nation needs – investments that will bolster America’s competitiveness, resilience, and economy all while creating good-paying jobs, saving people money, and building an equitable clean energy economy of the future.”
Make no mistake, renewable energy subsidies are not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, the United States has been “investing” in renewable energy technology since 1979, when it began offering tax credits for wind and solar power.
In 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which allocated more than $87 billion in green energy subsidies. At the time, Al Gore praised the law, claiming it would create, “critical investments in energy efficiency, renewable energy and a unified national smart grid. By accelerating America’s shift to a clean energy economy, this bill lays the foundation for a true recovery and is an important first step in dramatically reducing our carbon emissions.”
Fourteen years after the fact, we now know that Gore (as per usual) wildly overstated these claims. We also know that many of these subsidies, such as the $570 million guaranteed loan the government gave to Solyndra, turned out to be a total waste of taxpayer money.
Yet, despite the hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds that have flowed to green energy projects over the past few decades, the industry still represents only a fraction of total power generation in the United States. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), “In 2021, renewable energy sources accounted for about 12.4% of total U.S. primary energy consumption.”
Since 2010, according to EIA data, subsidies for renewable energy have dwarfed subsidies for fossil fuels.
Per the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), “since the mid-2000s, new legislation has expanded the scope of federal energy policy, and the share of total financial support provided through energy-related tax incentives that goes toward the production of fossil fuels has decreased.”
How much has this decreased? The CBO notes, “Roughly three-fourths of the projected cost of tax preferences for energy in 2016 was for renewable energy and energy efficiency. An estimated $10.9 billion, or 59 percent of the energy-related tax preferences, was directed toward renewable energy; $2.7 billion, or 15 percent, went to energy efficiency or electricity transmission. Fossil fuels accounted for most of the remaining cost of energy-related tax preferences—an estimated $4.6 billion, or 25 percent.”
Keep in mind, that was all the way back in 2016, well before the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law added $500 billion more to the left’s renewable energy slush fund.
And, that was five years before President Biden signed an executive order that “directs federal agencies to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies.”
Clearly, a trend is occurring in which the U.S. government, and governments around the globe, are picking energy winners and losers.
However, unlike the Times article would have you believe, these governments are not pouring billions into “propping up” fossil fuel companies. Instead, they are villainizing fossil fuels as they stubbornly continue to throw good money after bad.
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Residents Erupt After Michigan Dem Approves CCP-Backed Green Energy Deal
Michigan residents erupted angrily after state Democrats approved funding for a Chinese-backed green energy project.
During the Michigan State Senate Budget Committee hearing, Democrat lawmakers granted the final approval of $175 million in taxpayer money in a 10-9 vote to Gotion, a Hefei-based, China-based Gotion High-Tech subsidiary building electric vehicle (EV) battery factory in Big Rapids.
However, almost all of the residents in attendants were less than thrilled about the plan, slamming the Chinese-backed deal.
"Why are we even considering, why would the county, the township, the state of Michigan even consider a Chinese-based company if, in fact, there is an American company willing to build this type of plant," Russ Jennings, a resident, said.
Another resident expressed frustration and anger, criticizing the state for rushing a lucrative decision that would impact everyone.
"I am angry. I'm angry that this vote slipped into the agenda today with as little information as possible so people like me wouldn't know it's happening," she said. "I am furious that you, our elected officials, have ignored requests from my community to submit this ballot until a small semblance of due diligence can be conducted."
Furthermore, a community member accused the Chinese government of having a broader plan to "overthrow the United States without firing a shot."
She said that the whole state should be concerned and that the Chinese Communist Party is dangerous and a "threat to our way of life and our God-given and constitutional freedoms."
Last year, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich) announced that Gotion would invest $2.4 billion to build two 550,000-square-foot manufacturing facilities on 260 acres in northern Michigan. Praising the proposal, the Democrat claimed it would boost the state's status as a "global hub for mobility and electrification."
The supervisor of Barton Township, a jurisdiction near the proposed site, Kyle Luce, said 85 percent of its residents were against Gotion's CCP-funded project.
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NYC exposes its own folly on climate change
City Comptroller Brad Lander no doubt thought he was helping the climate war (and scoring points with warriors) when he boasted of his “dashboard” on climate progress last week, in advance of Saturday’s celebration of Earth Day.
Instead, he wound up exposing the utter folly of New York’s pricey efforts to lower Earth’s temperature.
Start with Lander’s revelation that the city’s reliance on fossil fuels for power has grown since 2019 — from 75% to 89%.
That’s largely thanks to the closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant, which accounted for 25% of the city’s juice.
The city plans to make up for that by expanding solar, with 72 megawatts installed last year, putting Gotham on pace to meet its 2030 goal.
Yet that goal,1,000 MW, is just half of the 2,000 MW Indian Point could put out.
And just a fraction of the 13,000 MW the city needs.
Lander’s term for the goal, “modest,” is the understatement of the century. (And Indian Point didn’t need cloudless skies to generate power.)
There’s more: The city is “committed” to limiting its greenhouse-gas emissions to 12 metric tons a year, an 80% cut by 2050, the dashboard notes.
Yet over the decade since 2011, it brought them down by less than 4%, to 53.9 metric tons in 2021.
And added cuts will only get harder as low-hanging fruit vanishes.
Lander’s dashboard also brags of a $3.8 billion divestment from fossil fuels, in pursuit of “net zero greenhouse gas emissions,” by companies in the city’s pension funds by 2040.
Yet divesting from an entire economic sector will inevitably narrow the funds’ diversity, boost risks and preclude the opportunity for greater returns. (Remember: Taxpayers must make up any pension-fund shortfalls.)
And the greenies continue to demand ever more pain, including a push for all-electric buildings that’ll require vast infrastructure upgrades — and spell the end of gas stoves — without actually reducing emissions, since fossil fuels still generate the most electricity.
Meanwhile, the left’s Climate Change Superfund Act aims to make fossil-fuel companies pay for their past, perfectly legal business operations.
If it actually became law and survived court challenges, it might help cover the monster tab — as much as a half trillion dollars — of meeting the state’s emission goals.
Then again, New York consumers would get socked with hefty new costs as the firms pass along that charge.
And the big picture is all about futility: Even if the city and state somehow meet their goals (at enormous pain and expense), it won’t budge global temps one bit, especially as nations like China and India continue to increase their greenhouse-gas output.
Yet if the entire world stopped doing anything more to combat it, climate change would still have a negligible impact on worldwide GDP by 2100, per the UN’s own climate-change panel.
Lander’s inadvertent admission about the failures of the city’s climate agenda, in short, is just a case study of the futility of the entire global campaign
https://nypost.com/2023/04/22/nyc-exposes-its-own-folly-on-climate-change/
************************************************How liberal politicians steer trillions of public funds via ESG
It’s no surprise that liberal politicians have been some of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies’ strongest proponents.
ESG-friendly politicians often co-opt pension fund money for political ends.
However, that’s not the only power they have.
Elected officials can also wield influence through executive orders, agency directives, and letter writing to pave the way for ESG asset managers to access the back door of corporate America and sometimes even shove those managers through.
That’s exactly what President Biden has done.
The first thing he did when he took office was pick up his executive order pen.
He used it to direct his federal agencies to revisit their rules with an eye toward making them more ESG-friendly.
There was no need for messy bipartisanship, congressional compromises, or involving the legislative branch at all.
Why bother with the tedious, constitutionally approved method of making new laws when there is an army of federal bureaucrats at your disposal?
On day one of his presidency, he lamented “the unbearable human costs of systemic racism” and mandated an “ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”
To that end, he instructed every federal agency to “assess whether, and to what extent, its programs and policies perpetuate systemic barriers to opportunities and benefits for people of color,” among other things.
He gave the agencies 200 days to do so and report back.
The same day, he rejoined the Paris Agreement, and simultaneously issued another order directing that all federal agencies “immediately commence work to confront the climate crisis.”
This time, the agencies had 30 days to respond.
Within a week, he issued yet another order, promising “bold, progressive action that combines the full capacity of the Federal Government with efforts from every corner of our Nation, every level of government, and every sector of our economy.”
He charged every federal agency with appointing an “Agency Chief Sustainability Officer” and announced that the United States would be “promoting the flow of capital toward climate-aligned investments and away from high-carbon investments.”
By May, his executive orders became even more specific, focusing federal climate efforts on the financial sector in particular.
Through strokes of the executive pen, a Green New Deal that would never be approved by Congress would be pushed on corporate America through Wall Street, guided by the heavy hand of federal agencies at every turn.
Following the orders of the new climate commander-in-chief, the government joined the ESG battle. For the most part, federal agencies were pleased to be conscripted into service.
The Department of Labor was one of the first agencies to respond.
At the time Biden took office, the department had regulations that made it harder for retirement fund managers to do ESG investing.
The existing Trump-era rule memorialized the DOL’s long-standing requirement that private pension fund managers consider only pecuniary factors when making investment, engagement, and proxy voting decisions.
Less than two months after President Biden took office, the department announced that it would not enforce the rule.
As a department representative explained at the time, the DOL sought to replace the existing financially focused rules with ones that “better recognize the important role that environmental, social and governance integration can play in the evaluation and management of plan investments.”
And replace the rules it did. In October 2021, the Biden administration proposed a new regulation that repealed the Trump-era rules and replaced them with one that encouraged ESG investing with retirement and pension fund money.
The proposed rule pushed retirement fund managers to consider ESG factors such as “climate change” and “collateral benefits other than investment returns” when investing employees’ money. Indeed, it said that consideration of ESG factors was “often require[d].”
The enacted version was slightly less radical; it says that investment managers “may” consider ESG factors, rather than requiring them.
The overall message is still pro-ESG. It still represented a departure from the strict financial focus of the Trump-era rules.
The Department of Labor, of course, is not supposed to be in the business of making environmental policy; it’s supposed to be protecting workers — their working conditions, their safety, their wages, and, in this instance, their retirement funds.
The very reason Congress had asked the Department of Labor to oversee pension and retirement accounts was to ensure that the funds would have as much money as possible — not just because American workers are depending on it but because taxpayers will end up on the short end of the funds fall short.
Now, if a company’s pensions are underfunded or a company goes bankrupt, taxpayers will make up the shortfall.
But in return, companies providing retirement benefits are required to fund their pensions and invest the assets “solely in the interest of the participants and beneficiaries.”
Allowing plan managers to invest for “collateral benefits” doesn’t just run afoul of this statutory language; it runs counter to the justification for allowing the Department of Labor to regulate pension funds in the first place.
That’s not just my opinion, but the opinion of 25 state attorneys general.
In January, a coalition of 25 states and a handful of private businesses sued the Department of Labor.
They alleged that the rule change allows large asset managers to “leverage ERISA plans assets for nonpecuniary ESG purposes,” which violates ERISA and exceeds the department’s authority.
In this case, the rule change isn’t just bad, but likely illegal.
Only time will tell if the Texas court decides to use the Wite-Out on the presidential pen
https://nypost.com/2023/04/22/how-liberal-politicians-maneuver-trillions-via-esg/
***************************************23 April, 2023
The Supreme Court will soon decide on cities pushing an extreme climate agenda
Municipalities like Boulder, San Francisco and Baltimore, among others, have been filing claims against oil and gas companies, seeking damages they allege are directly attributable to the firms’ actions.
But holders of these cities’ bonds could be forgiven for being surprised by these lawsuits.
Why?
Because the ambiguous claims these cities made to their bondholders belie the specific nature of the claims they later made to courts.
In their bond disclosures, these cities all acknowledge they’re unable to forecast with any degree of certainty climate change’s adverse effects and the science underlying their assumptions is evolving.
Fair enough. But contrast this with the incredibly specific claims in these cities’ lawsuits.
In 2017, San Francisco’s city attorney, Dennis Herrera, filed a lawsuit in state court against five energy companies, alleging they are responsible for very specific effects of climate change and should pay for infrastructure such as sea walls to deal with its ongoing and future consequences.
The lawsuit’s claim about predicting the effects of climate change comes into serious question when the city attorney’s bond-issuing employer has stated it cannot accurately determine the extent of climate change for its investors.
In a 2018 petition in Texas state court, Exxon alleged the “stark and irreconcilable conflict” between the municipalities’ allegations in the lawsuits and their disclosures in bond offerings indicated the suits were brought “not because of a bona fide belief in any tortious conduct by the defendants or actual damage to their jurisdictions, but instead to coerce ExxonMobil and others operating in the Texas energy sector to adopt policies aligned with those favored by local politicians in California.”
Its petition was denied, but the concern about the “stark and irreconcilable conflict” has quietly simmered ever since — and for good reason.
Disclosures in other areas have been a source of angst for muni bondholders.
In 2016, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued a cease and desist order against the City of Boulder for misstating that it had complied with prior agreements to provide continuing disclosure to its investors.
What prompted renewed interest in this issue was not just the reexamination of bond risks after Credit Suisse’s failure but also the solicitor general’s recent recommendation to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to reject ExxonMobil and Suncor’s petition for their case to be heard in federal rather than state court.
Credit Suisse’s AT1 investors have reason to be upset but not necessarily all that surprised.
After all, those bonds were yielding 9.75%, suggesting the risks were high.
For comparison, the average yield on ostensibly much safer 10-year muni bonds is about 2.49%.
But what if, in addition to the risks laid out in disclosure documents, Credit Suisse had been aware of other material risks it had failed to disclose to its bondholders?
Well, that would be securities fraud.
Might the same hold true for these municipalities doing the bidding of trial lawyers pushing an extreme climate agenda?
To the extent that these cities have a much greater degree of certainty about the risks they face, have those risks been adequately described to all audiences, investors and the courts alike?
And while these lawsuits seem meritless, one hopes the Supreme Court concludes at least that they ought to remain in federal court — where they belong.
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Chefs and Restaurateurs Win Big as Trump-Appointed Judge Leads Unanimous Panel in Overturning Gas Stove Ban
The California Restaurant Association has been doing a slow burn since the city of Berkeley cooked up a scheme in 2019 to ban natural gas hookups to new buildings.
But the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals put chefs’ favorite appliance back on the menu — at least for now — when they overturned the ban Monday, USA Today reported.
Berkeley’s ordinance went into effect in 2020, making the San Francisco Bay Area community the first municipality to take such a step. Many others have since enacted similar laws.
“The measure, which took effect in 2020 to cheers from environmentalists, was intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gasses that contribute to global warming,” the Associated Press reported.
But restaurant owners were not among those cheering.
“Natural gas appliances are crucial for restaurants to operate effectively and efficiently, as they allow for a wide variety of cuisines and innovations in the restaurant industry,” California Restaurant Association President and CEO Jot Condie said in a statement published on the organization’s website.
Condie argued that cities and states “are not equipped to regulate the energy use or energy efficiency of appliances that businesses and homeowners have chosen; energy policy and conservation is an issue with national scope and national security implications. This ordinance, as well as the solution it seeks, is an overreaching measure beyond the scope of any city.”
That’s the stance the organization’s lawyers argued before the court, and the Ninth Circuit agreed.
The court ruled that Berkeley’s ordinance was preempted by the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act, Bloomberg Law reported.
The court ruled that “Berkeley’s ban on natural gas infrastructure in new buildings is ‘clearly outside the preemption provision of the EPCA,’” according to the outlet.
Judge Patrick Bumatay, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, wrote in an opinion that Berkeley’s action was not permissible in light of the language in the EPCA.
“Put simply, by enacting EPCA, Congress ensured that States and localities could not prevent consumers from using covered products in their homes, kitchens and businesses,” he wrote.
Sarah O. Jorgensen, attorney for the restaurant association, said in a statement:
“The Ninth Circuit’s ruling today underscores the importance of a consistent national energy policy, which was Congress’ intent the whole time.
“Cities and states should not be permitted to overrule energy decisions that affect the country as a whole.
“The panel’s unanimous decision that Berkeley’s ban on natural gas piping is preempted by EPCA sets an important precedent for future cases, especially with other cities considering similar bans or restrictions on the use of natural gas.”
Despite the victory, gas-stove proponents still face a heated battle to continue using their appliance of choice, according to USA Today.
“The Berkeley ordinance was not a building code requirement, so the appeals court ruling will only affect other municipalities that used the same type of ordinance and only in Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington state,” the outlet reported.
“Most municipalities that have such bans in place use building energy codes, which the appeals court specifically said was allowable.”
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The Real Reason the Left Is Banning Gas-Powered Cars
Last summer, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a directive to his wealthy constituents not to plug in their electric vehicles. It was an emergency. The grid was overloading, and if EVs weren't taken off their chargers, the system would melt down. For many, this meant being effectively stranded, but they still had the option to call a gas-powered Uber for a ride.
The plea to unplug, a regular and repeated occurrence each summer, came at the same time Newsom signed a new rule to outlaw all gas-powered vehicles by 2035.
"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," Newsom declared in a statement, calling on other states and the federal government to follow his lead. "This plan's yearly targets — 35 percent ZEV sales by 2026, 68 percent by 2030, and 100 percent by 2035 — provide our road map to reducing dangerous carbon emissions and moving away from fossil fuels."
To put it bluntly, these directives for change are suicidal — especially given politicians like Newsom know how quickly the grid gets overwhelmed.
To the contrary, Elon Musk, the creator of the most successful electric car company in the world, warns that the United States — not to mention the rest of the globe — isn't ready for a rapid transition to electric.
"Realistically, I think we need to use oil and gas in the short term because otherwise, civilization will crumble," Musk said last fall during a conference in Norway. "One of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced is the transition to sustainable energy and to a sustainable economy. That will take some decades to complete."
In addition, Americans can't afford the move, and the sales numbers at car dealerships across the country prove it. How will regular people get to work when their affordable, gas-powered vehicles are illegal or no longer available for purchase and repair?
"Only 19% of U.S. adults say it's 'very' or 'extremely' likely they would purchase an electric vehicle the next time they buy a car, according to the poll, and 22% say it's somewhat likely. About half — 47% — say it's not likely they would go electric," a recent survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago shows. "Six in 10 said the high cost is a major reason they wouldn't and about a quarter cited it as a minor reason. Only 16% said the high cost would not be a factor in rejecting the EV."
Musk is right. Civilization will crumble without oil and gas, so why are the Biden administration and their globalist, elite allies trying to accelerate the collapse? If U.S. infrastructure isn't capable of handling the switch to electric, and Americans can't afford to buy electric cars, how is this new and alternative utopia going to come to fruition?
To critically thinking people, these facts don't logically add up to a good faith effort to save the environment. Instead, it raises red flags about the true intention of the rapid shift. This is especially true given those who are pushing the shift most aggressively. John Kerry and Bill Gates, for example, aren't changing their own habits of private jet use, SUVs and luxury, living in mansions or ornate government buildings. So what's going on here?
Catastrophes enable government control. Look no further than the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which was extended for years by bureaucrats and politicians interested in exercising power over the population as long as possible, for proof. The coming government-inflicted mobility crisis will be similar to the pandemic response, with directives about who can work, when, how long, where they can travel, whether you really need to travel to church and much more. A lack of gas-powered vehicles means forced reliance on public transportation. It will cripple life in rural America, forcing moves into the cities. Social credit scores regarding travel, like the ones we're already seeing when purchasing airline tickets, will certainly be implemented.
The government-mandated move to electric vehicles has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with the left's vision for America: tyrannical government control. Time will tell if the country is willing to go along with it.
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Earth Day at 53
None of the eco-doomsday predictions have come true
From predicting ecological collapse and the end of civilisation to warnings that the world is running out of oil, all environmental doomsday predictions of the first Earth Day in 1970 have turned out to be flat out wrong.
More than three decades before Greta Thunberg was born — the Swedish environmental activist on climate change — more than 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.
We now look back at quotes from Earth Day, Then and Now,” by Ronald Bailey of the spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions from Earth Day 1970.
Considering the current doomsday predictions scaremonger activists are verbalising about global warming that will result in the demise of civilisation within the next decade, many of those unscientific 1970 predictions are being reincarnated on today’s social and news media outlets.
Many of the same are being regurgitated today, but the best prediction from the first earth day five decades ago, yes 50 years ago, was that the “the pending ice age as earth had been cooling since 1950 and that the temperature would be 11 degrees cooler by the year 2000”.
The 1970’s were a lousy decade. Embarrassing movies and dreadful music reflected the national doomsday mood following an unpopular war, endless political scandals, and a faltering economy.
The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970 — okay, “celebrated” doesn’t capture the funereal tone of the event. The events (organized in part by then hippie and now convicted murderer Ira Einhorn) predicted death, destruction and disease unless we did exactly as progressives commanded.data.
Behold the coming apocalypse as predicted on and around Earth Day, 1970:
1. “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner
3. “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich
6. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day
7. “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter
8. “In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine
9. “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
10. “Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich
11. “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt
12. “[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine
13. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt
History seems to repeat itself as there will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future–and the present–never looked so bleak. I guess we’ll need to critique the 2020 doomsday predictions in the year 2050 and see if they were any better than those from the first Earth Day 50 years ago.
https://mailchi.mp/093a98a205a8/happy-earth-day-4j6imn4q1z-195551?e=cc88839e92
*****************************************************21 April, 2023
'Total Madness': Germany Shuts Country's Remaining Nuclear Power Plants
Amid an ongoing energy crisis, Germany closed its final three nuclear power plants in a move critics say is “total madness.”
The Saturday closure of Emsland, Neckarwestheim II, and Isar II, planned over a decade ago as part of the country’s transition to more renewable energy, has been sharply criticized.
As energy prices spiked last year due to the war in Ukraine, some members of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz's government got cold feet about closing the nuclear plants as planned on 31 December 2022.
In a compromise, Mr Scholz agreed to a one-time extension of the deadline, but insisted that the final countdown would happen on 15 April.
Bavaria's conservative governor, Markus Soeder, who backed the original deadline set in 2011 when Angela Merkel was Germany's chancellor, this week called the shutdown "an absolute mistaken decision".
He said: "While many countries in the world are even expanding nuclear power, Germany is doing the opposite. "We need every possible form of energy. Otherwise, we risk higher electricity prices and businesses moving away."
Advocates of nuclear power worldwide have criticised the German shutdown, aware that the action by Europe's biggest economy could deal a blow to a technology they tout as a clean and reliable alternative to fossil fuels.
The German government has acknowledged that, in the short term, the country will have to rely more heavily on polluting coal and natural gas to meet its energy needs, even as it takes steps to massively ramp up electricity production from solar and wind. (Sky News)
Tesla founder Elon Musk called the decision "total madness" and a major "national security risk," but psychologist Jordan Peterson said "crazy is the point."
But crazy is the point. Anti-nuclear is not a pro-environment stance; it is an anti-human, anti-industrial stance. So crazy is a feature not a bug.
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GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA
Three articles below
Govt to spend $150 million on reef water quality woes
Farm and other runoff affects only close-in reefs. The Barrier reef is not affected
The federal government will spend $150 million on a program to boost water quality on the Great Barrier Reef after a UN mission said the site should be listed as in danger.
The program will repair land in catchments that are dumping large amounts of fine sediment into rivers discharging water to the reef, smothering coral, killing seagrass and increasing pollution loads.
It’s part of a $1.2 billion spend on reef health previously announced by the Albanese government, which has promised to fight an in-danger listing for the site.
The recommendation to list the reef as a World Heritage site in danger came late last year. It was based on what UN experts saw when they visited Australia about a year ago, when the Morrison government was still in power.
The UN report took Australia to task for not doing enough to tackle the key threats of climate change, poor water quality and harmful fishing activities.
In announcing the program on Thursday, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said the $150 million would fund work including fencing, revegetation, grazing management of cattle, and structural works to stabilise gullies and riverbanks.
“Sediment can coat seagrass beds, it can kill off seagrass, it can affect the health and even be responsible for the loss of animals and plants that make our reef special,” Ms Plibersek told reporters in Townsville.
“By dealing with sediment we are of course restoring the riverbanks and creek banks that’s good for the land, and we are protecting the reef from one of the greatest threats identified for the future of the reef.”
She said catchments along Queensland’s coastline will be targeted, with funding allocated pending the complexity of each individual matter.
Traditional owners and Indigenous groups will help identify priority projects.
“What we’d like to see is land care organisations, traditional owner groups and others come forward with proposals that will make a significant difference to the quality of the water flowing into the reef,” Ms Plibersek added.
The program will be carried out in collaboration with the Queensland government, which is spending $75 million on its own water quality program.
Special envoy to the Great Barrier Reef, Sentator Nita Green, said the funding is pivotal in rectifying inaction over the last decade.
“We are taking the divisiveness and the debate out of this conversation…to make sure that we can invest in our land holders, in our farmers and our traditional owners to make such a big difference to the Great Barrier Reef for generations to come.”
In its report last year, the UN mission said Australia’s efforts were not sufficient to protect the reef’s outstanding universal values.
It found management frameworks, strategies and plans had not been fully implemented, particularly in relation to water quality and fishing.
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Beetaloo Basin cattle company loses Supreme Court bid to stop fracking exploration
A gas company will be able to continue exploration in the Beetaloo Basin after a cattle company's appeal to stop the activity was dismissed by the Northern Territory Supreme Court.
Rallen Australia, owned by the Langenhoven-Ravazotti family, had sought to overturn a February 2022 NT Civil and Administrative Tribunal decision that allowed Tamboran Resources' subsidiary Sweetpea Petroleum to come onto Tanumbirini Station to explore for gas.
Justice Peter Barr dismissed all eight grounds of appeal that Rallen's lawyers had argued.
The case was seen as a precedent for legal interactions between pastoralists and gas companies because it was the first to test mandatory land access laws introduced in the NT in 2021.
Tamboran chief executive and managing director Joel Riddle said in a statement that he was "pleased with the NT Supreme Court's ruling" and was looking forward "to working closely with all our stakeholders in progressing the development of the Beetaloo Basin in a safe and responsible manner".
"As the first challenge of the NT government's changes to the legislation and regulations permitting access for exploration purposes, the decision sets an important precedent for future operations across the Beetaloo Basin," he said.
"We are pleased to lead the way by securing this important precedent and ensure that the benefits of the decision will extend to many stakeholders."
Rallen has fiercely opposed any gas exploration on its properties and director Pierre Langenhoven previously declared the pastoral and gas industry "cannot coexist".
Mr Langenhoven said Rallen would "consider this decision and our appeal options" for the Supreme Court decision.
"We are disappointed in the decision, as the land access agreement provides minimum protections to pastoralists and puts all the risk and all the cost onto the pastoralist," he said in a statement.
"This sadly sets a precedent for poor quality and punitive agreements moving forward."
Since then, Mr Langenhoven said he felt like he had "lost control" of the part of Tanumbirini within Sweetpea's permit area. "I cannot protect the station and my cattle from the impacts of fracking, all I can do is monitor and seek compensation after the damage is done," he said.
Rallen Australia will receive a minimum of $15,000 compensation per gas well drilled on the property as a part of its land access agreement with Sweetpea.
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Electric dreams still have long way to run
The government’s electric vehicle and lower emissions strategy confirms a golden rule of the net-zero transition that unfailingly hits the poor and favours the rich.
That rule is to make existing technologies more expensive to make the ones favoured by advocates appear reasonable by comparison. This is true for electricity, where increasingly the cost is being hidden in consolidated revenue through cascading subsidy payments both to producers and, increasingly, end users.
The dream of a world in which motorists get about in electric-powered cars confirms the trend.
Ideally, a single price on greenhouse gas emissions would remove the need for ad hoc policies. But in the absence of this we are left with state, local and federal schemes, some of which equate to a carbon price of thousands of dollars per tonne.
Electric vehicle schemes are at the top of the tree in terms of cost per tonne but nowhere near enough to satisfy the green groups who think more should be done to promote their use.
The government’s latest policy is in addition to generous tax breaks and exemptions. Chris Bowen has set a target for six outcomes: a greater choice of EVs, a reduction in transport emissions, more charging stations, an increase in domestic manufacturing and recycling with the ultimate goal to make it cheaper for people to run their vehicles.
For this to happen, however, existing technologies will inevitably become more expensive, to compensate.
The plan to introduce a fuel efficiency standard follows what is happening in other parts of the world. The US has just introduced a scheme calibrated ultimately to make EVs the only reasonable choice to make on financial grounds.
The EPA is using its authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate vehicle emissions with the aim of making EVs account for about two-thirds of car sales in 2032, up from 6 per cent last year.
The EPA justifies its intervention, which will increase costs, because of subsidies that are available under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.
There are no details yet on where the government’s new policy will land but EV lobby groups are telling Bowen to go hard.
Attempts to tighten emission laws have a troubled history in Australia. This is because car makers will be forced to increase the cost of the cars people want to buy to subsidise the ones they presently can’t afford or don’t want to drive. The emissions target is for the overall fleet sold so, in effect, internal combustion car buyers will be forced to subsidise those who want to drive EVs.
The hope is that car makers will make more less expensive EV models available. But much of the cost of EVs is in the battery, which are getting more expensive.
Environmentally, charging an EV today still requires plenty of coal-fired power.
There is no doubt the driving world is changing. The big selling point for emissions standards is that without new rules Australia risks becoming a dumping ground for less efficient models the rest of the world won’t take. Everybody wants to breathe fresh air.
But it is all part of a transport vehicle transition with an as yet unknown destination. Europe has pulled back from an outright ban on internal combustion engines in favour of low-emissions fuels. The US is under pressure to do the same. The best that can be said is an emissions standard leaves the door open for new technologies.
This is a journey that still has a long way yet to run.
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20 April, 2023
DOE wants to ban gas stoves
The Department of Energy (DOE) is proposing to revise their standards for natural gas stoves. The practical effect of the new standards is banning gas stoves by regulation and switching people from gas to electric stoves. ?The DOE itself admits that electricity costs 3.5 times the cost of natural gas per energy unit - $42 versus $12 for natural gas per million BTU, so the new rules will necessarily increase cooking costs greatly.
On April 17th, the CO2 Coalition filed an extensive 23-page comment for the DOE on these economically destructive and freedom-crippling regulations. In it we conclude that:
“…the scientific method proves there is no reliable science supporting the proposed standards based on the proposition that electric stoves are more energy efficient than gas stoves” and the estimates “used in the proposal are fatally flawed science.”
“Thus, the DOE standards must not be adopted and the IWG SCC Estimates must not be used. If adopted, the DOE standards should be ruled invalid by the courts.”
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/DOE-wants-to-ban-gas-stoves.html
*****************************************************A Texas-Sized Energy Fiasco
What a mess. Renewable subsidies have distorted and destabilized the Texas electric grid, which resulted in a week-long power outage during the February 2021 freeze. To prevent more blackouts, Republicans in the Lone Star State now plan to subsidize gas power plants.
The Texas Senate last week passed putative energy reforms to “level the playing field,” as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick put it. Texans will now spend tens of billions of dollars to bolster natural-gas plants that provide reliable power but can’t make money because of competition from subsidized renewable energy.
Federal tax credits have encouraged an oversupply of wind power, which Lone Star State Republicans assisted last decade by charging rate payers $7 billion to build thousands of miles of transmission lines from West Texas and the Panhandle to big cities. Solar and wind supply about 30% of Texas power on average but sometimes can produce more than half.
Wind generators pocket a tax credit for every kilowatt hour they produce no matter if the grid needs it. A surfeit of wind is increasingly driving wholesale power prices negative—i.e., generators have to pay to offload their power. Wind producers can still make money because of the tax credits, but fossil-fuel plants that provide baseload power can’t.
Baseload plants were developed on the financial assumption that they’d run 85% to 90% of the time, but many aren’t because they are being squeezed by renewables. Coal plants are closing, and gas generators are at risk. Too few new gas plants are being built to support a growing population and industry. As a result, power is becoming unreliable, especially during extreme weather.
The state Senate’s answer is to create a Texas Energy Insurance Program to support gas generators to backstop renewables. The state would commission gas plants with as much as 10 gigawatts—enough to power about two million homes during peak demand—to run only during grid emergencies. Keeping them idle at other times isn’t efficient, but letting them compete in the wholesale power market could make it even harder for existing generators to make money.
The Senate Finance Committee set aside $10 billion in its budget proposal to fund part of the cost for these emergency plants, but the legislation also proposes charging consumers. An insurance program would finance zero-interest rate loans to existing gas generators to maintain their equipment, which they are struggling to do owing to negative power prices.
Another Senate bill would create financial incentives for “peaker” gas plants that could ramp up on demand. Yet building peaker gas plants that run only 10% of the time costs about three times more than a baseload gas plant that operates 85% to 90% of the time.
To sum up: Texas Republicans are trying to fix the enormous inefficiencies caused by federal and state renewable subsidies with state subsidies that cause more inefficiencies.
Texas’s grid mess offers a portent for the rest of the U.S. and another illustration of how the Inflation Reduction Act will cost Americans much more than the $391 billion that Democrats claimed. States may have to subsidize backup power generation to keep the lights on. Subsidies that create market distortions invariably lead to more subsidies and more distortions. California couldn’t have done it better.
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Ignore the Earth Day hype: To save the planet, invest in fossil fuels
By John Stossel
Earth Day is Saturday! Hooray? “Saving humanity from the climate crisis,” says EarthDay.org, requires us to “push away from the dirty fossil fuel economy.”
Sounds logical. But my latest video explains why doing that is cruel to poor people.
“Three billion people in the world still use less electricity than a typical refrigerator,” explains Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels.” If they’re going to have “their first well-paying jobs,” “their first consistent supply of clean water,” “a modern life,” “that’s going to depend on fossil fuels.”
But the greens say we have a better replacement: wind and solar power.
So I push back at Epstein: “Solar is getting cheaper all the time. It’s already cheaper than fossil fuels.”
“When we look at solar and wind around the world,” he answers, “it always correlates to rising prices and declining reliability. Why? Because solar and wind are intermittent. At any time, they can go near zero.”
That means wind turbines and solar farms don’t replace fossil-fuel plants. You have to build them in addition to fossil-fuel plants.
“We spent trillions of dollars in subsidies and mandates putting solar panels and wind turbines everywhere,” Epstein points out, “Yet we’re still having shortages of fossil fuels.”
Germany invested heavily in solar and wind power. Elites around the world praised German politicians for creating record renewable power. But that didn’t work so well when the winds slowed and clouds appeared.
Germany has even turned to coal for energy. Coal! Coal is the filthiest fuel. Yet Germany now imports coal from Russia and America.
OK, say the activists, even if renewables have problems, soon we’ll have better batteries so we can bank wind and solar energy and store it until it’s needed!
Batteries are “getting continually better and cheaper,” I say to Epstein. Backing up all solar and wind with batteries would cost “multiples of global” gross domestic product, responds Epstein. “This is a total fantasy.”
“You say unaffordable,” I push back, “but who’s to determine what that is?”
“The general narrative is we’re destroying the planet with fossil fuels, so who cares how much energy costs?” Epstein says. “The truth is, the planet is only livable because of low-cost, reliable energy from fossil fuels.”
Before fossil fuels, “Life expectancy was below 30. Income was basically nonexistent. The population was stagnant because people had such a high death rate. The basic reason is that nature is not a very livable place for human beings.”
By contrast, thanks to cheap fossil fuels, “We make it unnaturally safe by producing all forms of climate protection. We produce drought relief . . . sturdy buildings. We produce heat when it’s cold, we produce cold when it’s hot. We have this amazing, productive ability. That’s the only reason we experience the planet as livable.”
Unfortunately, because of today’s foolish hysteria over fossil fuels, energy prices will climb. “When you threaten an industry, you scare investors and producers. Massive threats to industry have definitely cut down production.”
America’s affluent protesters can afford the higher prices. But poor people will suffer. Allowing billions of the world’s poor to live a modern life requires energy from gas, oil and even coal.
The United Nations now puts pressure on countries to stop using fossil fuels. Governments in poor countries, eager for UN handouts, often listen.
“Their whole population is going to suffer,” warns Epstein. “People who have by far the least in the world [are] most subject to today’s international pressure against fossil fuels.”
If we want more of the poorest people to have decent lives, we need to invest in both fossil fuels and nuclear power.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/19/ignore-the-earth-day-hype-to-save-the-planet-invest-in-fossil-fuels/
****************************************************Service station owners are calling on the Federal Government to help them install EV charging bays on their forecourts
Another huge cost of the climate myth
Australian Association of Convenience Stores chief executive Theo Foukkare said it cost an estimated half a million dollars to upgrade a site’s electricity grid to accommodate EV chargers.
“We’ve got thousands of AACS members across the nation that want to go green but they’re not able to get their hands on half a million dollars on their own,” he said.
He said his members were supportive of the government’s new EV strategy, released this week.
“However, we really think a government funded program that helps small business owners to pay for these critical upgrades is essential to achieve that,” he said.
The recent surge in EV take-up – sales are up 150 per cent in the first three months of this year – meant there weren’t enough recharge stations to cope with existing drivers.
“Public infrastructure charging is being rolled out slowly by the federal and state and territory governments, however, most only include slow charging equipment. That means they can only be used by two cars at once, potentially leaving other drivers waiting hours before they are even able to plug in,” Mr Foukkare said.
A spokeswoman for Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said small businesses could apply for a grant from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency ARENA, which had $70 million set aside to help businesses develop charging infrastructure.
Mr Bowen announced the latest round of grants yesterday and said infrastructure funding was a “critical step to make electric vehicles more accessible for all Australians”.
He said the latest funding round would make it easier to install the right type of public charging infrastructure and give Australians better access to facilities, particularly in remote and regional communities.
“Transport costs are a huge part of household budgets, and getting the charging infrastructure in place for electric vehicles is critical to ensuring households have a real choice when it comes to picking their next car,” Mr Bowen said.
But Mr Foukkare said that slower charging stations being rolled out by governments often lacked access to basic amenities.
“Australian motorists expect amenities like toilets, a place to sit and eat or enjoy a coffee, free Wi-Fi and even somewhere to do a small grocery top up,” he said.
“Our members already have those facilities – and they employ more than 70,000 people across Australia – so they could certainly do with the extra custom.
He said service station EV chargers could also address a “charging void” for the 25 per cent of Australian drivers who don’t have off street parking.
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19 April, 2023
Federal appeals court strikes down Democratic city’s natural gas ban backed by Biden admin
A federal appeals court ruled unanimously Monday that a natural gas ban proposed by the City of Berkeley, California, would illegally circumvent federal law.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that Berkeley’s natural gas piping ban, which the city’s government passed in 2019 as part of its climate agenda, violated the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) of 1975.
By banning gas pipes in new building construction, the city effectively violated the EPCA which prevents local regulations from impacting the energy use of natural gas appliances.
“Instead of directly banning those appliances in new buildings, Berkeley took a more circuitous route to the same result,” Judge Patrick Bumatay wrote in the opinion of the court Monday. “It enacted a building code that prohibits natural gas piping into those buildings, rendering the gas appliances useless.”
“In sum, Berkeley can’t bypass preemption by banning natural gas piping within buildings rather than banning natural gas products themselves,” he continued in the ruling. “EPCA thus preempts the Ordinance’s effect on covered products.”
In July 2019, Berkeley’s city council passed the ban which was set to go into effect in January 2020, making the city the first in the nation to approve such a measure.
Berkeley Councilwoman Kate Harrison, who authored the legislation, said at the time that it was part of the city’s effort to take “more drastic action” on climate change and curb greenhouse gas emissions.
However, months after it was approved, the California Restaurant Association (CRA) filed a federal lawsuit challenging the city’s ability to pass a law banning new natural gas hookups.
After a lower court ruled in favor of Berkeley in July 2021, the CRA filed an appeal, leading to Monday’s ruling.
“The Ninth Circuit has unanimously affirmed the central issue in this case: local ordinances cannot override federal law,” CRA President and CEO Jot Condie said in a statement on Monday. “Cities and states are not equipped to regulate the energy use or energy efficiency of appliances that businesses and homeowners have chosen; energy policy and conservation is an issue with national scope and national security implications.”
“This ordinance, as well as the solution it seeks, is an overreaching measure beyond the scope of any city,” Condie added. “Natural gas appliances are crucial for restaurants to operate effectively and efficiently, as they allow for a wide variety of cuisines and innovations in the restaurant industry. Cities and states cannot ignore federal law in an effort to constrain consumer choice, and it is encouraging that the Ninth Circuit upheld this standard.”
The case drew the attention of industry groups that supported CRA — including the American Gas Association and Air Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute — and environmental groups and other jurisdictions across the country that supported Berkeley’s ordinance — including the National League of Cities, California, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Washington, DC, and New York City.
In February 2022, the Department of Justice filed a brief in support of Berkely’s law, arguing the lower court was correct to uphold the city’s natural gas hookup ban.
The ruling Monday, meanwhile, comes as the Department of Energy continues to consider regulations curbing which types of natural gas stoves manufacturers can sell.
And it comes after a President Biden-appointed member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) made headlines when he told Bloomberg in early January that a gas stove ban was “on the table” given the product’s purported impacts on health.
The White House later denounced a ban, but the CPSC said it would proceed with taking in public feedback on gas stove safety.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/17/federal-appeals-court-strikes-down-democratic-citys-natural-gas-ban/
**************************************************Warmism good for China
The Green Energy Revolution is strengthening the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and weakening the United States. Based on an ideology that believes reducing carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere will reduce or eliminate climate change, billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent on lithium batteries, electric vehicles (EVs), windmills, and solar panels.
The EV ideology pursued by the Biden administration “could imperil national security,” states a top Democratic donor, Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co. The CCP’s unrestricted warfare strategy includes economic warfare to dominate the world’s batteries, rare earth, semiconductors, and EVs.
The hysteria over climate change is driving green energy ideology. Science has not proven that increased carbon dioxide leads to global warming and, if so, what are the dangers to humanity? More carbon dioxide might lead to greater plant growth and increased food supply. Warmer temperatures might free up northern lands in Canada and Russia for more farming. Warmer temperatures can reduce deaths; more people die of cold than of heat.
Computer models project various climate change scenarios, but such scenarios should be taken with a grain of skepticism. How accurate is your local weather station’s forecasting for a week? And we are supposed to believe a 20-year projection based on suspect data? For over four billion years, the climate has been changing and continents moving. As recently as 20,000 years ago, northern parts of the present-day United States were covered in 5,000 feet of ice. What caused that ice to melt?
The U.S. government is spending billions of dollars subsidizing green carbon-free energy for EVs, windmills, and solar panels. All are unreliable, cost-inefficient, environmentally toxic, and a poor allocation of the nation’s resources. And while the U.S. green agenda is driving inflation and weakening national and economic security, it is laying waste to important economic segments in America---------the automobile and energy industries.
Ford Motor Company recently announced a $3.1 billion loss in the first quarter of this year due to EV costs and chip supply chain issues. Ford predicts electric cars will be profitable in a few years and plans to make 2 million by 2025. That would be an incredible achievement, considering Ford sold only 61,575 cars in 2022 and had sold 3,624 cars as of February 2023.
General Motors (GM) is asking for the voluntary separation of 5,000 employees to save $1.5 billion as it invests $35 billion in EVs between now and 2025. GM plans to sell one million electric cars by 2025, even though it sold only 40,000 in 2022. The so-called affordable GM Bolt sells for $30,000 yet loses $9,000 for the company. The only way the automobile industry can survive is through massive government subsidies, tax credits, and government mandates, such as in California, where in 2035, you can only buy EVs. (Fascism, anyone?)
Millions of American jobs will be lost because of the government's central planning Marxists establishing unattainable regulations and mandates. Industries associated with energy and automobiles will suffer closures and bankruptcies. Society will suffer from increased unemployment and mental depression. Increased family fractures, alcoholism, and drug use will follow.
Consumers don’t want electric vehicles because they are too expensive and too unreliable. Internal combustion engines work fine, are dependable, can be recharged easily, and are cost-efficient. Outside of major urban cities, the electric grid will not be able to supply the electricity needed to power EVs. Even then, major cities may not have power due to declining carbon-based power plants and unreliable wind/solar power plants. If climate change ideologues were honest, they would support nuclear energy. It is carbon dioxide-free, 24/7 reliable, cost-efficient, and not dependent upon CCP raw materials and technology.
The mining industry does not have the capacity to supply the minerals used in EVs. Much of the country will not be able to charge EVs economically, that is assuming consumers will buy them. The U.S. will end up like Cuba, where the citizens desperately work to keep old cars running. The climate will not be changed by a switch to EVs.
Summary
What is the purpose of this irrational green energy revolution? Is it to strengthen China and weaken America? China is the world’s biggest contributor to atmospheric carbon dioxide. China is building two coal-powered power plants per week, or six times more than any other country. The United States and the European Union are building none.
While Americans are committing societal suicide with the clean green energy revolution, the CCP is getting stronger. China does not have the gas, oil, and coal energy resources of the U.S. What China does have, is a stranglehold on rare earth minerals and lithium batteries------- all used by American green energy industries and the military. The U.S. is banning the export of high-tech chip technology. What would happen if China retaliates against the U.S. and bans rare earth exports as it did with Japan in 2010?
The United States must stop funding this green energy madness. If the product makes sense, the consumer will buy it. It should not be forced fed as it is in totalitarian societies.
Peace Through Strength
https://www.conservativehq.org/post/red-china-green-energy-revolution
***********************************************Heavier EV’s not funding California Roadways
California has almost 400,000 miles of roadways used by the State’s 31 million vehicles. Those roadways are heavily dependent on road taxes from fuels that contribute more than $8.8 billion annually, the same gas tax revenues that also funds many environmental programs. That revenue source will be diminishing in the decades ahead as EV’s begin to replace internal combustion engine vehicles.
California Governor Gavin Newsom has mandated no sales of internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles after 2035 but appears incapable of acknowledging EV’s currently contribute nothing for road maintenance and repairs and that EV’s are heavier than ICE vehicles and will be inflicting more wear and tear on California roadways.
Newsom’s silence on how California will finance the billions of dollars for the roads being used by those heavier EV’s is an indication that he will just pass that problem on to his predecessor. Newsom will not even discuss funding for future road maintenance as the EV mandate starts to negatively impact the revenue stream to maintain California roadways.
It’s public knowledge of Newsom’s dyslexia challenges that may hamper his ability to read reports that renewables and fossil fuels are not comparable for their support of humanity, but California voters support his avoidance of addressing those tough energy policy questions that would expose his limited energy literacy.
Regarding the high cost of energy in California, voters continue to be complacent with the state governments hidden taxes and mandates that contribute to the highest energy costs in America:
Fuels that are more than a dollar a gallon higher than the national average and
Electricity rates that are more than 60 percent higher than the national average and
Natural gas rates are more than 30 percent higher than the national average.
The California Governor may be experiencing a “dangerous delusion” of a global transition to “just electricity” that eliminates the use of the fossil fuels that made society achieve so much in a few centuries. From the proverb “you can't have your cake and eat it too” tells us that:
you can’t rid the world of fossil fuels and
continue to enjoy the products and fuels manufactured from fossil fuels.
Newsom may not be well read that there is little to compare between fossil fuels and renewables as fossil fuels are primarily used to manufacture products and fuels for humanity, while renewables manufacture nothing for humanity.
Fossil fuels make products for humanity that allowed the world to populate from 1 to 8 billion in 200 years.
Renewables cannot manufacture anything for humanity! The current rhetoric is falsely transitioning from apples to oranges, as renewables and fossil fuels are different.
To add insult to injury, those so-called renewables of wind and solar are 100 percent made from the products manufactured from fossil fuels!
The above insult pales to my disappointment that our elite leaders are oblivious to the fact that fossil fuels made it possible for humanity to grow from 1 to 8 billion in 200 years, because they can be manufactured into thousands of usable, life-enhancing and life-saving products. On the other hand, renewables can only generate occasional electricity, but cannot manufacture anything for humanity, while fossil fuels manufacture everything for humanity.
By contrast, “transitioning” humanity to just electricity means converting to wind and solar systems that can manufacture none of the vital products now being used by humanity. That will very likely cause the death of BILLIONS of people from diseases, malnutrition, lowered living standards and weather-related disasters, whereas projections of millions of fatalities from “carbon emissions” and climate change are based on computer models that take none of these realities into account.
National economies and nations’ militaries still run on fossil fuels. As both World War I and II historians Russia and China know, the country that controls the minerals, crude oil, and natural gas, controls the world! They both know there is no substitute for fossil fuel product dominance in the foreseeable future, even on a longer-term horizon. To believe a transition to just electricity from renewables is possible from the products manufactured from fossil fuels and act accordingly is suicidal for humanity. As former Congressman Don Ritter of Pennsylvania wrote “It’s the real “existential threat.”
In any event, you cannot run households, businesses, hospitals, and the military on occasional electricity and no products from fossil fuels!
EV buyers beware that the “tax equalizer”, higher electrical rates and/or the “VMT” is coming. The Vehicle Mileage Tax (VMT) that has been discussed for years sounds like a logical idea – requiring the users of the highways to pay the fees to maintain those highways. The VMT tax will be needed to replace the $8.8 billion annually from fuel sales that will be diminishing in the decades ahead.
https://heartland.org/opinion/heavier-evs-not-funding-california-roadways/
************************************************No More Cheap Flights Is the New Reality for Air Travel
Jetting off to the Mediterranean this summer? I hope you got a good deal, because cheap flights are becoming increasingly hard to find.
You probably had an inkling that the era of absurdly cheap short-haul flights in Europe was coming to an end. After all, according to travel search engine Kayak, summer flights between the UK and the continent are currently one-third more expensive than last year. But two new reports make it clear that this isn’t just temporary turbulence.
It’s the new reality for flying as airlines face a huge decarbonization challenge and tightening climate-compliance laws.
The first headwind stems from two big changes in the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). Airlines must have enough emissions allowances to cover every metric ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere on flights starting and ending in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland. Right now, they get about half of those allowances for free. But that deal comes to an end in 2026, as the share of allowances they have to pay for starts to rise from 2024. That is effectively going to double their carbon costs over just three years.
The unit price of carbon emissions has also soared recently, topping €100 ($111) for the first time in late February, and it doesn’t seem to be on its way back down. A report by Alex Irving, European transport analyst at Bernstein, puts the resulting cost from these changes for European airlines at about €5 billion in 2027.
Polluting Price
The cost of emitting CO2 in Europe has nearly quadrupled from the 2019 average
That’s just the thin end of the wedge. Over the next three decades, aviation has to transform itself from a polluting industry — planes are responsible for 2.5% of global CO2 emissions — to a net-zero one. Under Destination 2050, the European sector’s plan to reduce emissions, it’ll do that by investing in future aircraft and infrastructure, making operations more efficient, and using alternative fuels and carbon-removal technologies.
A report by research groups SEO Amsterdam Economics and the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre, commissioned by airline industry bodies, has put the cost of reaching net zero by 2050 at a whopping €820 billion.
Destination: Net Zero
The biggest climate outlay for aviation will be on alternative fuels, but this also delivers the biggest carbon saving
Note: Costs/investments are from 2018-2050 and measures the premium expenditure on top of a business-as-normal scenario.
Both reports conclude the sector won’t be able to absorb these costs itself. The changes to the EU ETS alone will slash the operating profit of the continent’s six largest point-to-point airlines (Ryanair Holdings Plc, EasyJet Plc, Wizz Air Holdings Plc, Vueling, Eurowings and Transavia) by an estimated 77%. That means ticket prices will have to be higher, which in turn means that demand destruction is inevitable. As Irving writes: “If it were possible to charge more without spoiling demand, airlines would have already been doing so.”
Demand growth is a touchy subject for airlines, as a recent battle over proposed flight caps between the Dutch government and Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport illustrates. The forecasts are strong: The International Air Transport Association suggested that passenger numbers would nearly double to just under 8 billion by 2040 from 2017 levels. Time will tell if rising ticket prices dampen that, but the question remains whether growth is even compatible with ambitions for carbon-neutrality.
The answer might be hard to swallow. Decarbonizing flying is hard enough without the extra passengers. A briefing from the Royal Society, for example, outlined that even meeting existing UK aviation demand with biofuels would require about half of the country’s agricultural land.
Fewer flights is, naturally, the easiest way to slice carbon emissions, and so a demand drop would come with its own climate benefits. The aviation industry’s report calculates that, in 2050, the drop in demand from raising prices to pay for sustainable airplane fuel would reduce emissions by 12%, and economic measures — such as emissions-trading obligations and CO2 removal investments — would lead to a further 2% reduction, compared with a business-as-usual scenario.
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18 April, 2023
Disasters report features ‘crudely manipulated data’
The Global Warming Policy Foundation has called on the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to withdraw its fatally flawed 2022 Disasters in Numbers report.
The Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), together with the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), recently published their 2022 report on “Disaster in Numbers.”
On its front cover, the report deceptively suggests that the 387 reported disasters, the loss of 30,704 lives, affecting 185 million individuals and causing economic damage of $223.8 billion are due to “climate in action” – although the report also covers earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides and wildfires.
The annual review of disasters of all kinds has been examined by extreme weather expert, Dr Ralph Alexander, who has published a strongly worded critique at his website.
Dr Alexander notes that:
* data has been crudely manipulated to suggest that there may be a hidden underlying increase in weather-related disasters
* false claims are made on the basis of statistically invalid comparisons.
GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said:
“Dr Alexander has shown that the authors of the latest ‘Disasters in Numbers’ report are bending over backwards to provide support for the narrative of climate doom, when the data and trends of weather-related disasters are pointing in the opposite direction.
The Catholic University and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) should be ashamed of what is appearing in their name. This publication is fatally flawed and should be withdrawn.”
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The State of the Climate 2022
In his annual review of the state of the global climate, Professor Ole Humlum finds much of interest to readers, but little to alarm them.
There are some climate trends that support claims of climate concern – but many that do not.
For example, Professor Humlum draws attention to the patterns of ocean warming:
“The top of most oceans shows significant warming, but below the top layer there is very little. Further down you find warming again. This suggests that changes in ocean circulation are just as important as carbon-dioxide driven warming.”
Similarly, while the surface of the Antarctic and equatorial oceans have warmed in recent years, the Arctic ocean has cooled at almost all depths.
“There are far more factors to the climate than carbon dioxide”, says Professor Humlum.
The review covers a wide range of temperature measurements in both ocean and atmosphere, alongside reviews of oceanic oscillations, sea level, snow and ice measurements and storms.
https://mailchi.mp/52df827f135a/the-state-of-the-climate-195311?e=cc88839e92
*************************************************Eco-zealots cancel the snooker: World Championship game is postponed after Just Stop Oil protester jumped on table during match and tossed orange paint over it
What has snooker got to do with climate? This is just attention-seeking
A Just Stop Oil protester tossed orange paint over a snooker table during a World Championship game, causing the match to be cancelled this evening.
Two eco activists invaded the arena at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield shortly after play began, with a man interrupting the match between Robert Milkins and Joe Perry by jumping on the table where he released a packet of orange dye.
A female protester was stopped from attacking the match between Mark Allen and Fan Zhengyi on table two by the quick-thinking response of referee Olivier Marteel.
Play was immediately suspended at the event as cleaners brought vacuum cleaners into the arena and master of ceremonies Rob Walker was among those helping to sweep up the mess.
Snooker fans jeered and booed the male activist as he interrupted play. One irritated fan shouted: 'Get him off!'
South Yorkshire Police said a 30-year-old man and a 52-year-old woman were arrested on suspicion of criminal damage and are in police custody.
The force said in a statement: 'Two people were detained after protesters gained entry to The Crucible earlier this evening.
'A 30-year-old man and a 52-year-old woman were arrested on suspicion of criminal damage. Both are in police custody.'
The affected table will be re-covered overnight.
It is the second time in three days that a major international sporting event has been disrupted, after 118 people were arrested at Aintree on Saturday as they tried to scale the perimeter fence at the Grand National
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The Climate Lunatics Have a New Food Target
Climate change lunatics who want to ban beef and force everyone to eat bugs have a new target.
According to AFP news, climate "scientists" are targeting rice farming as a "dangerous," emissions heavy practice. They say flooded rice fields, which then naturally ferment hay and other plants, produce too much methane.
According to National Geographic, rice is a main and key food source for 3.5 billion people.
"Rice is a food staple for more than 3.5 billion people around the world, particularly in Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa. Rice has been cultivated in Asia for thousands of years. Scientists believe people first domesticated rice in India or Southeast Asia. Rice arrived in Japan in about 3,000 years ago. The Portuguese most likely introduced it into South America in the 16th century," the magazine reports. "Today, the world’s largest rice producers are China, India, and Indonesia. Outside of Asia, Brazil is the largest rice producer. Rice grows in warm, wet climates. It thrives in waterlogged soil, such as in the flood plains of Asian rivers like the Ganges and the Mekong. "Deepwater rice" is a variety of rice that is adapted to deep flooding, and is grown in eastern Pakistan, Vietnam, and Burma."
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka recently adopted a number of climate change policies on reducing fertilizer and caused a major food crisis.
"In April 2021, then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa announced an abrupt ban on the import of chemical fertilisers to force the country of 22mn to embrace organic farming. The prohibition lasted only about six months, but analysts said the ill-fated policy not only stoked an economic crisis, it would leave Sri Lanka’s agricultural sector hobbled for years," the Financial Times reports. "Over the past 18 months, the country has become a cautionary tale for global agriculture. Vital inputs such as fuel and fertilisers are in short supply, with prices soaring. Yields from rice and other staples have halved in many areas and the once largely self-sufficient Indian Ocean island now depends on international aid to combat a hunger crisis."
There's no doubt a new climate attack on rice will have a catastrophic impact.
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17 April, 2023
A new super-careful estimate of a global temperature trend based on the satellite record
Some very sophisticated Chinese mathematicians have been at work. I reproduce their conclusions only below. The point to note is that they found a warming trend over the last 40 years of only fourteen hundredths of one degree per decade. I quote:
"the total tropospheric temperature trend derived from TMT was 0.142 ± 0.045 K/decade from 1979 to 2021".
That's about as tiny a trend as you can imagine and is certainly no cause for alarm. Global warming is totally trivial. It's to laugh at. The globe HAS been warming but at a not remotely catastrophic level. Whether ANY warming will take place in the future is unknown. Claims that it will are mere speculation based on a very dubious hypothesis of continuity.
Mid-Tropospheric Layer Temperature Record Derived From Satellite Microwave Sounder Observations With Backward Merging Approach
Cheng-Zhi Zou, Hui Xu, Xianjun Hao, Qian Liu
9 Conclusion
We have developed STAR V5.0 TMT time series for the period from late 1978 to present using a backward merging approach. The RTMT time series during 2002–present based on AMSU-A and ATMS observations onboard satellites in stable sun-synchronous orbits was used as the reference and earlier satellites before NOAA-19 were adjusted to RTMT in the backward merging. Brightness temperatures from NOAA-10 to NOAA-19 were recalibrated first before they were merged with RTMT and a semi-physical model was developed for diurnal drift adjustment. Adjustments of channel frequency differences between MSU and AMSU-A companion channels and instrument blackbody warm target effects were also conducted on observed radiances. The recalibration and adjustments for diurnal drift and warm target effects had effectively removed satellite bias drifts and resulted in inter-consistent satellite radiance data with small inter-satellite difference trends and standard deviations. Major differences in STAR V5.0 from the existing data sets is that recalibration has removed large spurious warming drifts in NOAA-11, NOAA-12, and NOAA-14 and a large cooling drift in NOAA-15 observations. The removal of the spurious warming drifts in NOAA-11 to NOAA-14 resulted in the warming trends in STAR V5.0 during 1979–2021 much smaller than the existing versions of the STAR and RSS data sets but close to the latest version of the UAH data set. After removal of the lower-stratospheric cooling effect, the total tropospheric temperature trend derived from TMT was 0.142 ± 0.045 K/decade from 1979 to 2021. This total trend was separated by two distinct periods with trends during the latest half period were nearly doubled the earlier half period over ocean and the globe, showing accelerating tropospheric warming. The estimated acceleration rate of the tropospheric warming was about 0.029–0.39 K decade?2 over ocean and the globe.
The STAR V5.0 data set. also include TUT, TLS and TLT time series. Similar backward merging approaches and diurnal adjustment algorithms as used in the TMT development were applied to TUT and TLS channels for their development. TLT is obtained using regressions of TMT, TUT, and TLS following approaches in Spencer et al. (2017).
The STAR V5.0 CDR for TLT, TMT, TUT, and TLS is publicly accessible from the STAR website with a URL address: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/smcd/emb/mscat/products.php . Plans are also being developed to transition the STAR V5.0 data set to NOAA/NCEI for operational archiving and distribution for user applications.
The cut-off dates for MSU and AMSU-A observations used in STAR V5.0 from all earlier satellites were before the end of 2018. Future update of STAR V5.0 will only need update of the ATMS observations in RTMT. The update of the monthly RTMT has been made every month for ATMS observations onboard SNPP and NOAA-20. Future JPSS satellites such as JPSS-2 are planned to be launched onto the same stable orbits as in SNPP and NOAA-20. When ATMS observations from these satellites are available, they will be simply added to RTMT without the need for diurnal drift adjustment. Such a STAR V5.0 data set is expected to extend to the next 20 years for climate change monitoring and assessment in the atmospheric temperatures.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2022JD037472
***************************************************Los Angeles Is Sitting on $1B for Water Storage
The old Greenie hatred of dams. CA is the last place to build new ones
As the West faces extended droughts and water shortages, Los Angeles officials thought they would get ahead of the curve by investing about $1 billion into water storage solutions. Now, four years later, the droughts are intensifying while that money sits unspent, according to the according to The New York Times.
The Times reports that California used to have a state-of-the-art flood control system, with dams and channels to control flooding from heavy storms. However, more frequent and intense droughts are creating a greater demand for stored water, but the systems are not designed to hold back much water, meaning tens of billions of gallons are flowing back into the Pacific Ocean.
To remedy this, LA County began collecting money to increase the storage capacity of their flood control systems. Over four years, it has collected around $1 billion, but has yet to spend most of it.
Regarding the slow pace of expenditures and lack of plans, the Times writes that, “The era of great dam building passed long ago, owing largely to the multifronted environmental wars California is fighting and the county has been slow to adopt alternatives.”
Now, bureaucrats are proposing spending $300 million per year on hundreds of small water capture projects that, in 30 to 50 years, could hold as much water as just building a new mountain dam. Experts are already warning, however, that this “greener” approach “will be expensive and may deliver less than expected,” despite the project not even starting yet.
LA County could use its taxpayers’ money to improve the quality of life of its citizens, but thanks to a strong environmental lobby and a slow-moving bureaucracy, residents are left with less money and less water.
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Activist warns global push to add bugs to the menu is part of alarming trend
One activist, however, warns the trend is more sinister than an alternative protein source.
“I think that the push for insect eating is just a compliance test because our politicians know that when they control the food, they control the people,” Dutch political activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Friday.
Previewing a new season of “Tucker Carlson Originals” on Fox Nation, Vlaardingerbroek provided insight into the bug food industry which she argued will “influence the food supply worldwide.”
“The fact that we, the second-largest exporter of agricultural products in the world, our nation with such a rich farming history, is now cracking down on its farms and opening insect factories should be of no surprise to you. This is not something that is just going to affect the food supply of the Netherlands. Like I said, we’re the second-largest exporter of agricultural products in the world after America. So this will influence the food supply worldwide. And we’ve spoken to farmers who said, well, this could lead to actual starvation if we’re not careful,” she said.
However, political activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” “the push for insect eating is just a compliance test because our politicians know that when they control the food, they control the people.”
At the World Economic Forum, voices like founder and executive chairman Klaus Schwab made climate change a focal point of the conversations surrounding the global economy and future policies.
Warnings like “an extinction of large parts of our global population” were shared from center stage, and bugs have gradually been championed as one solution to the climate crisis.
Professor Arnold Van Huis at Wageningen University argued that it is “absolutely necessary” to adopt bugs into the food system. “I think there is no other way,” he said on the Fox Nation show. “It’s the only way to go, but it will take some time.”
The trend has caught the eye of celebrities and influencers including big names like actress Nicole Kidman.
Emerging on the scene are also chefs and culinary experts trying to make the bugs more appetizing.
Chef Joseph Yoon is an Edible Foods Ambassador for Brooklyn Bugs works to create recipes with the creepy crawlers. “We work to raise awareness and appreciation for sustainable forms of protein,” Yoon said on “Let Them Eat Bugs.”
“How can we sustainably feed the growing population around the world? And it doesn’t suggest that we want to get rid of anything. How do we add something to our diets and maybe look towards the past for solutions for the future? They’re incredibly nutritious. They’re sustainable, but most importantly, they can be prepared absolutely deliciously.”
Carlson tried some of Yoon’s creations including a chocolate-covered cricket, cricket caramel corn and even a cricket burger on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Friday.
While new recipes may be making the trend more easily digestible, critics like Vlaardingerbroek remain skeptical of the big bug business.
“They’re telling us that it’s good for the climate, that this is the way that we can save the planet and that that little steak that you have on your plate that gives you some joy in life is what actually ruins the world. And of course, none of that is true,” she said.
Vlaardingerbroek, who also appears in “Tucker Carlson Originals: Let Them Eat Bugs,” argued that while bugs may not inherently be an issue to bring in to a diet, it is the politics behind the insects that raise red flags.
“Nobody’s being asked. And I think that that’s the point. Nobody really inherently wants to eat bugs,” she told Carlson.
With the transformation of our food system and diet away from meat to insects, there are also ramifications on farmers which the Netherlands has experienced firsthand.
“We’ve had massive protests. So our farmers’ protests that you and I have been speaking about plenty of times now and that also have been featured in this documentary, they’ve been very successful,” she said.
“We actually had elections just now in the Netherlands where… actually the largest party was the Farmers Party. So the Dutch people don’t want to be eating insects. We understand that a traditional profession such as farming that we have been good at for centuries on end is not the cause of a modern-day so-called crisis such as climate change.”
The fear is whether global elites are using the bug industry and climate change as another method of controlling the global population.
“It’s all a fantasy, it’s all a new religion. And it’s a scary religion because, of course, once the people are scared, the people in power can do whatever they want,” Dutch politician Wybren Van Haga said on “Let Them Eat Bugs.”
“So we have to be fearful and scared for COVID, for nitrogen, for carbon dioxide, for Putin. We have to be scared for everything, and meanwhile these people who are in power, now they do whatever they want.”
https://nypost.com/2023/04/15/activist-warns-of-global-push-adding-bugs-to-the-menu/
***********************************************Biden Admin Affirms Trump-Era Decision to Export Natural Gas From Alaska
The Department of Energy (DOE) on Thursday affirmed a Trump-era decision to export liquified natural gas (LNG) from a facility in Alaska.
Under the Trump administration, in 2020, a company called Alaska LNG was authorized to export LNG to any country with which the United States has not entered into a free trade agreement (FTA).
In a supplemental record of decision (pdf) issued by the department on April 13, Biden administration officials reaffirmed the original authorization in 2020. However, they also amended the project to include more restrictions intended to protect the environment.
The decision on April 13 comes after the Sierra Club, an organization that seeks to “fight for environmental and social justice,” in September 2020 filed a Request for Rehearing over the matter.
The department had agreed to the request to look further into the project’s environmental impacts, after which it would either reaffirm, modify, or set aside the Trump-era authorization.
“Upon review, DOE finds that the environmental impacts presented … are not sufficient to alter DOE’s determination … that exports of LNG from the proposed Alaska LNG Project to non-FTA countries are not inconsistent with the public interest,” the department stated.
One Change
As such, the department affirmed the original Trump-era order but with one modification that was an amendment the Sierra Club recommended: Alaska LNG is required to certify each month that the natural gas produced for export in LNG form “did not result in the venting of byproduct carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, unless required for emergency, maintenance, or operational exigencies and in compliance with the FERC Order for the Alaska LNG Project.”
“DOE believes that this venting prohibition will reduce emissions of [greenhouse gases] from the Alaska LNG Project beyond what may have occurred under the Alaska LNG Order.”
Otherwise, other parts of the authorization remain the same.
The LNG pipeline and export project was estimated in June 2020 to cost $38.7 billion. It was first proposed in 2014 by the Alaska Gasline Development Corp (AGDC), which was tasked with maximizing the state’s natural gas reserves by the Alaskan legislature, and is leading the project.
Construction of the Alaska LNG project was authorized in May 2020 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). According to plans, the project would include a liquefaction facility in the Nikiski area of the Kenai Peninsula in south-central Alaska, a natural gas treatment plant on the North Slope of Alaska to produce natural gas, and a 800-mile pipeline to carry the natural gas from the North Slope to the liquefaction facility.
AGDC has been seeking buyers for exports, but it has not reached a final vestment decision on whether to start construction, an Energy Department spokesperson told the Anchorage Daily News.
“Alaska LNG is authorized to export this LNG in a volume equivalent to 929 billion cubic feet per year (Bcf/yr) of natural gas (2.55 Bcf per day), by vessel from a liquefaction facility … in the Nikiski area of the Kenai Peninsula in south central Alaska,” reads the DOE’s document.
Altogether, Alaska LNG “is authorized to export LNG from the Project for a total of 33 years—a 30-year export term, with an additional three-year Make-Up Period to export any LNG that it was unable to export during the 30-year export term.”
The latest move comes a month after the Biden administration approved the $8 billion Willow oil field development project to allow the company ConocoPhillips to drill for oil over three decades.
It also comes a year after the Biden administration expanded exports of LNG to Europe. President Joe Biden announced an agreement in March 2022 that committed the U.S. LNG industry to supply 15 billion cubic meters (bcm) more of LNG to Europe for the remainder of the year.
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16 April, 2023
Biden's Fascistic EV Edict
David Harsanyi writing below knows his history: That Fascism was Leftist. In the 1920s Mussolini was a prominent Marxist intellectual. It is only Soviet disinformation that has propagated the myth that Fascism was Rightist
President Joe Biden is set to "transform" and "remake" the entire auto industry -- "first with carrots, now with sticks" -- notes the Washington Post, as if dictating the output of a major industry is within the governing purview of the executive branch. The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing draconian emissions limits for vehicles, ensuring that 67% of all new passenger cars and trucks produced within nine years will be electric. This is state coercion. It is undemocratic. We are not governed; we are managed.
In fascist economies, a powerful centralized state -- often led by a demagogue who plays on the nationalistic impulses of people -- controls both manufacturing and commerce and dictates prices and wages for the "common good." Any unpatriotic excessive profits are captured by the state. All economic activity must meet state approval. And crony, rent-seeking companies are willing participants. Now, I'm not saying we already live in a fascist economic state. I'm just saying the Democratic Party economic platform sounds like it wishes we were.
The coverage of Biden's edict has gone exactly as one might expect. "Biden makes huge push for electric vehicles. Is America ready?" asks Politico, for instance. The conceit of so much modern media coverage rests on the assumption that the left's ideas are part of an inevitable societal evolution toward enlightenment. The only question remaining is when will the slaw-jawed yokels in Indiana and Texas finally catch on.
I'm sorry, EVs are not a technological advancement -- or much of an environmental one -- over vehicles with internal combustion engines. Most of the comforts EV makers like to brag about have been a regular feature of gas-powered cars for decades. At best, EVs are a lateral technology. And, as far as practicality, cost and comfort go, they're a regression. If EVs are more efficient and save us money, as administration officials claim, manufacturers would not have to be compelled and bribed into producing them.
The problem for Democrats is that consumers already have perfectly useful and affordable gas-powered cars that, until recently, could be cheaply fueled and driven long distances without stopping for long periods of time. Fossil fuels -- also the predominant energy source used to power electric cars -- are the most efficient, affordable, portable and useful form of energy. We have a vast supply of it. In recent years, we've become the world's largest oil producer. There are tens of billions of easily accessible barrels of fossil fuels here at home and vast amounts around the world. By the time we run out, if ever, we will have invented far better ways to move vehicles than plugging an EV battery -- which is made by emitting twice as many gases into the air as a traditional car engine -- into an antiquated windmill.
"I want to let everybody know that this EPA is committed to protecting the health and well-being of every single person on this planet," the EPA's Michael Regan explained when announcing the edicts. No one is safer in an EV than a gas-powered vehicle. The authoritarian's justification for economic control is almost always "safety." But the entire "safety" claim is tethered to the perpetually disproven theory that our society can't safely -- and relatively cheaply -- adapt to slight changes in climate. If the state can regulate "greenhouse gases" as an existential threat, it has the unfettered power to regulate virtually the entire economy. This is why politicians treat every hurricane, tornado and flood as an apocalyptic event. But in almost every quantifiable way, the climate is less dangerous to mankind now than it has ever been. And the more they try to scare us, the less people care.
So let the Chinese communists worry about keeping their population "safe." Let's keep this one innovative, open and free.
https://townhall.com/columnists/davidharsanyi/2023/04/14/bidens-fascistic-ev-edict-n2621942
**********************************************************Population Bomb' Morphing Into Population Decline: There is no reasoning with the doom-and-gloom ecofascists
There are many alternate religions created by secular leftism. For example, you have the gender ideology cult, the critical race theorists, and the pro-abortion group. But perhaps the most pagan of secular leftism's alternate religions are the climate activists, specifically the climate doom-and-gloomers who have resigned themselves to the end of humanity's existence.
As this writer has pointed out before, end-of-the-world climate cultists have been around for a very long time. Not a single one of their predictions have come true.
One of the most famous theories was posited by Paul Ehrlich, writer of The Population Bomb. He suggested in his infamous book that overpopulation was a clear and present danger for the world. In other words, people are the pollution. This is a patently absurd stance since it is the new and younger generation that takes up the mantle, develops new things, and continues to build society. The birth decline we are seeing all over the world, but particularly in the United States, will cause the economy to take a hit.
Yet the supposed dangers of overpopulation have been so embedded in the American psyche "that people with large families are guilt-tripped on a routine basis," according to political analyst Robert Spencer. "The population explosion myth became the basis for many of the Left's other favored agendas, including the 'climate crisis,' the bug-eating plan, and even the sexual revolution, which was in large part made possible by the contraception and abortion that we were told had to be readily available in order to try to bring the world's population under control."
However, this climate-induced hysteria directed toward reproduction of the human species has taken an interesting twist.
In a study financed by a group called Club of Rome and carried out by a group called Earth4All, the findings suggest that the world population will peak at 8.8 billion and then rapidly decline. This sounds like a debunking of the "population bomb" myth; however, when you read further, the machinations become more sinister.
According to The Guardian, "The peak could come earlier still if governments take progressive steps to raise average incomes and education levels." What on earth could that mean?
Communism. It means communism. The writers of the study even tell us so.
One of the Earth4All study authors, Ben Callegari, said of the results: "This gives us evidence to believe the population bomb won't go off, but we still face significant challenges from an environmental perspective. We need a lot of effort to address the current development paradigm of overconsumption and overproduction, which are bigger problems than population."
An article in New Scientist declares that this Earth4All study prediction could be escalated by "reducing inequity." This government-facilitated (read: communist) redistribution of goods and services could accelerate the population decline to six billion. The writers of this article seem to be issuing a warning, but they also seem to be completely fine with the Maoist-style communist ideology that is driving this new study.
So, to paraphrase writer James Lindsay, the debunking of the population bomb with this study is merely a premise to explain why communism is the way of the future (or the manifesto of the Marxist Death Cult). The study writers and the New Scientist writers demand that everyone makes environmentally friendly changes so that perhaps the decline won't be so bad.
Sound familiar? It's just another way of manipulating gullible people down the path of the pagan sun monster hysteria, threatening that unless you give them more power, more control, and more obedience, the world will end, and it's your fault.
This communistic taint is infecting everything and should keep us on our guard.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96482-population-bomb-morphing-into-population-decline-2023-04-14
******************************************************Straw Ban Arguments
A few years ago, a moral panic spread across the globe as governments, companies, and right-minded celebrities united to banish plastic straws from respectable society. The impetus for the crusade came after a decade of data about the imminent environmental dangers of single-use plastic. Most of all, however, one peculiarly specific number inflamed the activist imagination, a single statistic lodging itself deep in the conservationist’s bleeding heart: 500 million plastic straws are used in the United States every day.
But a movement cannot live on numbers alone. And into this minefield of climate alarmism, fate tossed a tortoise, when marine biologist Christine Figgener uploaded an amateur video of a maimed sea turtle in Costa Rica with a plastic straw stuck in its nose. Every crusade needs a martyr. 39 million views later the straw movement had its poster turtle.
Society’s shapeless eco-panic consolidated around a tangible villain: the single-use straw—and concerned citizens around the globe answered the call to arms. First came the nonprofits as snappy, single-issue campaigns started popping up around the web: The Last Plastic Straw, For a Strawless Ocean, Our Last Straw, and Straw Wars. Entourage star Adrian Grenier launched the Lonely Whale nonprofit which led to the “Strawless in Seattle” initiative, and the Surfrider Foundation dubbed 2018 “the year we say goodbye to plastic straws.” Then the TED Talk phase arrived, and a string of precocious child activists were trotted out on the lecture circuit with recycling testimonials that scanned as first drafts of future college application essays. Nine-year-old Molly Steer announced the “Straw No More” initiative on the TEDx stage in Australia, while the brother-sister team Olivia and Carter Ries introduced their nationwide “One Less Straw” campaign as teenagers in 2016.
Then Hollywood joined the cause. Brooklyn Decker and Neil deGrasse Tyson starred in viral PSAs for the #stopsucking campaign—which elicited 50,000 pledges to give up plastic straws and amassed 831 million media impressions. Influencers from Leonardo DiCaprio to Chelsea Clinton vowed their hashtag loyalty to the #stopsucking revolution, and the issue took a victory lap as icons from Martha Stewart to Tom Brady shared their social media endorsement throughout 2018.
Where celebrities tweet, brands soon follow. Alaska Airlines replaced stir straws with “marine-friendly stir sticks” to take the “next step on our sustainability journey.” Royal Caribbean bid a bon voyage to single-use straws as part of their “Save the Waves” initiative. Hyatt, McDonald’s, and Disney phased out the shameful suckers in the name of climate compassion, while IKEA publicly exhibited its last plastic straw at London’s Design Museum as an “emblem for change.” Most conspicuously, Starbucks announced in July 2018 it would replace its signature green straws with recyclable lids to honor the company’s “long history in sustainability.”
On the back of this PR tailwind, the anti-straw zeal glided effortlessly from press release to policy proposal, as governments around the world wrote plastic purges into law. Seattle became the first major American city to bar single-use straws in July 2018. Other progressive strongholds soon passed similar legislation, and California became the first state to ban nonrequested straws in September 2018. India barred single-use straws by 2022, and France went one step further to outlaw plastic cups in 2020. Even Queen Elizabeth insisted that the sinful silicate be purged from the royal estate. The campaign’s sudden, intercontinental success offers a case study in what might be called the iron law of internet activism: viral animal video + quotable scare stat = “great moral cause of our time,” or at least until the next cute cat collides with a scaremonger stat on Twitter.
But what about that original statistic that launched a thousand hashtags? Where did this estimate of 500 million daily straws come from? The answer: a 9-year-old boy in Vermont. And the story of how this number goes from an elementary school to public policy reveals something essential but rather disconcerting about the progressive political imagination in the age of social media, and how misinformation takes root and then spreads in today’s highly politicized media ecosystem.
The year is 2011, and Milo Cress is in fourth grade in Burlington, Vermont. In the spirit of personal conservation, the 9-year-old launches the “Be Straw Free” campaign to persuade neighborhood restaurants and “concerned citizens to reduce the use and waste of disposable plastic straws.” Due to the lack of reliable figures on the issue, the fourth-grader decides to conduct a phone survey with three national manufacturers and averaged the results to reach the estimate that the country consumes 500 million straws each day. Our fledgling activist promptly earns adoring local and national coverage. Then in 2012, the nonprofit Eco-Cycle picks up Milo’s campaign and partners with the National Parks Service to publish a blog post on Milo’s research. And once a statistic enters the hallowed ground of a dot.gov URL—voila—the number is now enshrined as fact-checking gospel. Five years later, the 500 million figure is everywhere: appearing in CNN, USA Today, The Washington Post, Fox News, NPR, National Geographic, and The New York Times. The number graces U.N. climate reports, nonprofit white papers, and proposed bills in statehouses from Hartford to Sacramento. Climbing from a fourth grade classroom in Burlington Elementary to the governor’s desk in Sacramento in seven short years—Milo’s statistic grew up to be somebody.
It is important to note—in the name of context—that other straw counts from professional research groups are more conservative than Milo’s number. The market research firm Technomic estimates Americans use 170 million straws per day, and the Freedonia Group puts the number at 390 million. The Foodservice Packaging Institute, an 85-year-old trade association, estimates fewer than 250 million straws are consumed each day. But I did not write this piece to quibble with the venerable Foodservice Packaging Institute about their daily straw quotas—for my concern is not quantifying what Americans drink but qualifying how Americans think.
The viral success of Milo’s statistic is a symptom of a larger liberal failing—where the combination of complacent journalism, social media activism, and gullible audiences hungry for easy solutions come together to divert the energy for reform toward strawman causes. On closer examination, disposable straws are hardly Public Enemy No. 1 in the war on plastic. A 2018 study of the Pacific Waste Patch found that the main aqua pollutant was fishing nets (46%) and only 8% came from microplastics. While straws do make up 4% of total plastic trash by piece, they weigh so little that billions of straws make up just 0.0002% of the plastic littering the oceans each year. To add it all up: Straws account for 2,000 tons of the 9 million tons of annual plastic sea waste— or two ten-thousandths of the world’s marine pollution.
There is another issue: Alternatives to straws often prove more harmful to the environment than the status quo. To take one example, Starbucks replaced their old straw-and-lid combo with a recyclable “sippy” lid. But when Verify’s Jason Puckett weighed both the classic and the new Starbucks lid, he discovered the new “sustainable” version is 0.6 grams heavier than the old. In other words, the alternative out-pollutes the original.
To summarize, the straw ban is a policy based on unverified data from an elementary school student targeting a microscopic problem which often aggravates the malady it attempts to remedy. So how did we get here? Why did this policy become the cause célèbre for the climate cognoscenti?
What people choose to believe and what they choose to doubt is an urgent question in American political life. In a sharply polarized culture, skepticism tends to follow party lines. The right naturally distrusts liberal claims, and the left instinctively suspects conservative arguments. When presented with statistics that challenge one’s core values, most partisan soldiers will scrutinize the number for potential bias or prejudices—will look for the flaws in the source, not the subject. In this sense, skepticism is primarily a defensive weapon in politics, guarding against misinformation from outside rather than within the group. Yet when one encounters a data point that meets your preexisting worldview, you’re inclined to accept rather than interrogate. Scruples dissolve in the warm glow of self-validation. Thus, the critical eye melts into a forgiving ear ... especially when the big-ticket issues of the left enter the public square.
The consequences of this disparity are magnified by the liberal monopoly on legacy journalism jobs (where only 7% of journalists were Republicans in 2013). In such an uneven landscape, certain subjects earn maximal scrutiny while other agendas receive minimal scrutiny at a systematic scale. Add in the looming specter of “cancel culture,” and this discrepancy in coverage can evolve, in some newsrooms, from an honest oversight to a moral imperative. Even reporting statistics that complicate the prevailing progressive viewpoint is increasingly controversial at many high-profile outlets. (In just one example, Matthew Yglesias sparked an office scandal at Vox by publishing a story about the decrease in police shootings of African Americans since Ferguson.) The more sensitive the topic, the less contravening evidence will be tolerated in certain left-wing circles. Thus, the most important progressive issues of the day often have the least informed, nuanced discussions.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/straw-ban-arguments
****************************************Australia: Grave doubts about the accuracy of BOM records
They are frantically trying to cover up the distortions in what they have done
A dispute over how the Bureau of Meteorology records daily temperatures is hotting up, with the release of more than 1000 pages of data that show new probes can record different temperatures to mercury thermometers in the same location at the same time.
The documents, released after a years-long Freedom of Information campaign, show temperature measurements taken using updated BOM probes in automatic weather stations at the Brisbane Airport site could be up to 0.7C warmer than the temperature taken using a traditional thermometer at the same time at the same site.
More than three years after a FOI request for parallel data was lodged by scientist John Abbot, the BOM released three years of data on Easter eve after the matter was taken to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
In the end, the BOM released only limited data, paving the way for a wave of FOI demands that full records be released in the public interest.
Release of the data is the first opportunity to analyse the performance of BOM probes alongside mercury thermometers. The bureau has long claimed the readings are identical but critics have said the BOM was not following World Meteorological Organisation guidelines on how they should be used.
Given that even small variations in temperature recordings can have an impact on the long-term record, accuracy is vital.
The main issue is how well temperatures recorded by new technologies can be compared to earlier methods to establish a continuous record.
The BOM maintains that an assessment of the full 2019-22 period at Brisbane Airport finds no significant difference between the probe and mercury thermometers.
Yet analysis of the data by scientist Jennifer Marohasy has found a statistically significant difference exists. Over the three-year period for which records have been made available, probes returned temperatures higher than the mercury thermometers placed alongside them 41 per cent of the time.
Recordings were the same 32.8 per cent of the time and lower 25.9 per cent of the time.
Dr Marohasy said the BOM had not disputed that the probe at Brisbane Airport had recorded up to 0.7C warmer than the mercury at the same site at the same time.
She said the bureau had not provided comment on the actual difference daily between temperatures as measured by the probe and the mercury, nor the average monthly or annual difference between the probe and the mercury.
In response to questions from The Weekend Australian, the bureau said it “verifies temperature probes to ensure that they are within specification”. The BOM said the temperature measurement system at Brisbane Airport was verified 24 times between January 2008 and July last year.
“Probes undergo a verification test in situ to ensure the probe is operating within specification”, it said. “If the result of this test is that the probe is outside of its operating specification, it is replaced with a laboratory-verified probe.
“A second verification test is undertaken to ensure it is compliant with the specification. “This verification process is more rigorous and reliable than recalibration.”
The documents released by the BOM under the FOI request included 1094 A8 reports with the handwritten daily maximum and minimum temperatures from both probes and traditional liquid-in-glass thermometers recorded from instruments in the same shelter/Stevenson screen.
They represent about 20 per cent of the parallel records held for the Brisbane airport site, one of 38 sites originally requested under FOI.
Dr Marohasy said analysis of the Brisbane airport data proved the BOM claim that the new probes had been specially developed to measure exactly the same temperatures as the mercury thermometers was wrong. Dr Marohasy has had a years long dispute with the BOM over the accuracy of the new probes and what she says is a failure by it to adhere to WMO guidelines to average the data recorded and maintain mercury thermometers alongside new technologies for an extended period.
“Readings from the probe are taken every second, and the highest value in a 24-hour period becomes the maximum temperature for that day. WMO guidelines recommend that instantaneous readings from probes be averaged over at least one minute”, she said.
Dr Marohasy said the difference in readings between probes and mercury thermometers was significant.
“Given new ‘hottest ever’ days are often called and make newspaper headlines when the temperature is only some fractions of a degree warmer, future new record hot days could be a consequence of the probe rather than global warming”.
“This has implications for the artificial generation of new record hot temperatures”, she said.
The other key issue was that Brisbane Airport parallel data showed a dramatic change in the difference between the mercury and probe temperature readings after December 2019.
“It is important to know whether this average difference of 0.35C had been caused by a recalibration of the probe that is the official recording instrument at Brisbane Airport”, she said.
Dr Abbot said he would request further parallel data sets from the BOM and was hopeful that previous barriers to access in regard of the existence of these records and costs would not reoccur. “Under FOI legislation, fee waivers should be granted as the information derived is clearly in the public interest” Dr Abbot said.
“We hope previous assertions from the BOM that analysis of parallel temperature data is only of benefit to John Abbot personally and has no public interest will not reoccur,” he said.
“The public is constantly being told of impending global catastrophe should temperatures rise by more than 1.5C. Discrepancies of more than 0.5C because of instrumentation differences are therefore very significant, and certainly should satisfy the public interest test”, Dr Abbot said.
“Different measuring instruments have been used to record temperatures at Brisbane Airport. Given the importance of reliable continuous records, it is important to know whether these instruments are recording the same temperatures, or not. The parallel data so far made available constitutes only a small portion of what the BOM holds.
“It is important to extend the analyses to longer periods and for other geographical locations.”
Dr Abbot first requested the parallel data for Brisbane Airport on December 12, 2019.
The case eventually went before the AAT on February 3, 2023, and was subsequently resolved with the bureau agreeing to provide three years of data.
Dr Marohasy said the data represented just three of the 14.5 years (January 2008 to July 2022) of parallel data that the bureau held for Brisbane Airport.
“It is also just a fraction of the 760 years of parallel data the bureau holds for 38 different locations spread across the landmass of Australia,” she said.
Probes in automatic weather stations began replacing mercury thermometers across Australia and the world 30 years ago.
Dr Marohasy said the probes were generally more sensitive to changes in temperature, so they could measure extremes of temperatures that traditional mercury thermometers with slower response times could not detect.
Most meteorological offices tried to achieve equivalence between the probes and mercury by averaging instantaneous recordings from probes over 1-5 minutes.
Dr Marohasy said the BOM adopted took instantaneous readings every second from custom-designed probes with longer time constants purported to mimic mercury thermometers.
The bureau has claimed in correspondence with Dr Marohasy that it never averaged measurements from probes.
Bureau chief executive Andrew Johnson has told her the probes were specifically designed to have a long response time to mirror the behaviour of mercury in glass, making numerical averaging unnecessary.
Dr Marohasy said the lack of numerical averaging despite the use of probes made the BOM measurements unique in the world.
She said equivalence was important for the construction of reliable historical temperature datasets, for understanding temperature trends and for knowing whether a record hot day as measured automatically by a probe really was hotter than what might have been read manually from a mercury thermomete
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14 April, 2023
Biden EPA’s New Vehicle Emissions Standards Spark Backlash From Auto Industry, Republicans
The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed emissions standards for automobiles and trucks are raising eyebrows in the auto industry and Washington alike.
“EPA’s proposed emissions plan is aggressive by any measure. By that I mean it sets automotive electrification goals in the next few years that are … very high,” John Bozzella, president and CEO of the automaker trade organization Alliance for Automotive Innovation, wrote in an April 12 blog post.
The federal standards would tightly restrict emissions from new vehicles. That will effectively force automakers to boost their sales of electric vehicles (EVs).
The agency’s proposal anticipates that under the new standards, two-thirds of new light-duty vehicles sold in the United States would be electric by the model year 2032.
It similarly predicts that 46 percent of new medium-duty vehicles sold in the United States would be electric by that model year.
EVs made up less than 6 percent of total new vehicle sales in 2022. That’s an increased percentage relative to past years even as total new vehicle sales were down to 13.8 million units from 17.3 million in 2018.
The EPA claims its standards would lower carbon dioxide emissions by 10 billion tons.
Agency administrator Michael Regan described the standards as the “strongest ever” during an April 12 press conference.
“The proposal exceeds the administration’s own 50 percent electrification target,” Bozzella wrote, adding that his industry is “fully committed to an electric and low-carbon transportation future.”
Not Enough Chargers
Less than two weeks ago, the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department issued complex guidance on EV tax credits that could make it harder for consumers to benefit from those financial incentives.
Bozzella, who began his career working for Democrat New York Mayor David Dinkins, said the guidance would reduce the number of vehicles qualifying for tax credits. That would seem to disincentivize EV adoption even as the administration steps up other measures intended to facilitate more EV purchases.
Bozzella added the 100,000 public, non-proprietary EV chargers in the United States are “not enough.”
An April 6 memo from the automotive alliance argued that electrification would take a “massive, 100-year change to the U.S. industrial base and the way Americans drive.”
Beyond the auto industry, other groups also voiced concerns.
Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, a consumer protection organization, said that the standards are “the same thing BlackRock and ESG extremists like Larry Fink are doing with U.S. pensions and retirement dollars.”
“The American people won’t stand for it,” he added.
Republicans Object
Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill responded critically to the announcement, which comes days after new EPA coal plant standards and Biden vetoes aimed at furthering the president’s environmental agenda.
“The Environmental Protection Agency will make cars unaffordable by following California’s lead towards a complete ban on gas-powered vehicles,” said Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
“His [Biden’s] misguided policies are hurting American families while helping China,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
“The ‘electrification of everything’ is not a solution. It’s a road to higher prices and fewer choices.”
Sen Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, highlighted some potentially significant issues for the United States as the domestic EV fleet expands.
“These misguided emissions standards were made without considering the supply chain challenges American automakers are still facing, the lack of sufficiently operational electric vehicle charging infrastructure, or the fact that it takes nearly a decade to permit a mine to extract the minerals needed to make electric vehicles, forcing businesses to look to China for these raw materials,” Capito said.
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California’s Last Nuclear Power Plant Diablo Faces Closure Against Lawsuit
An environmental group on Tuesday sued to block Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) from seeking to extend the federal operating licenses for California’s last active nuclear power plant.
A complaint filed in the San Francisco Superior Court by advocacy group “Friends of the Earth” asks the court to prohibit the utility from sidestepping its 2016 agreement with environmentalists and plant workers to close the twin-domed Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant by 2025.
In a Twitter post, the environmental group said, “We’re taking PG&E to court to make sure California’s last remaining nuclear plant is retired We won’t stop until the aging, destructive Canyon is closed for good!”
Hallie Templeton, legal director for Friends of the Earth, called out PG&E for allegedly backing out of their agreement.
“Contracts simply don’t vanish into thin air,” Templeton said in a statement. “Yet ever since California passed legislation supporting Diablo Canyon’s extension, PG&E has been acting as if our contract has disappeared. Setting aside the agreement to retire Diablo, there are myriad legal prerequisites for extending operations of a nuclear power plant, including federal decisions that states cannot dictate.
“We hope our litigation can push PG&E to reconsider its potential breach and uphold its obligations, including preparing for the agreed-upon retirement.”
The Diablo power plant runs along the Pacific Coast and has been operating since 1985.
California is the birthplace of the modern environmental movement that, for decades, has had a fraught relationship with nuclear power, which doesn’t produce carbon pollution like fossil fuels but leaves behind waste that can remain radioactive for centuries, requiring special waste treatment.
Nuclear Reactor Needed to Maintain Reliable Power
The California legislature passed SB846 last year, which was signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newson, in an effort to extend the power plant’s operations for another five years, according to the bill.
In March, Newson toured the Diablo Canyon Power Plant after it was announced that the plant may continue operating after its expiration date.
“As we experienced during the record heat wave last September, climate change-driven extreme events are causing unprecedented stress on our power grid—the Diablo Canyon Power Plant is important to support energy reliability as we accelerate progress towards achieving our clean energy and climate goals. I look forward to our continued work with the Biden-Harris Administration and the Legislature to build a reliable and resilient clean electric system,” Newson said in a statement.
The California Energy Commission ruled earlier this year that continuing Diablo’s operations past 2025 is needed to maintain reliable electricity supply throughout the state.
Siva Gunda, the Energy Commission’s vice chair, said that Diablo is an important part of California’s energy options.
“As California confronts a rapidly changing climate, extraordinary heat events and record energy demand are becoming increasingly ordinary. The state needs to keep all options on the table to protect public health and safety,” Gunda said in a statement to LA Times. “This includes maintaining Diablo Canyon’s operations.”
In 2016, then Gov. Jerry Brown agreed to a proposal that would shut Diablo down by its original deadline, along with California utility regulators and state Legislatures, according to the document. This could pose a potential issue during the current lawsuit against PG&E.
According to the PG&E website, “Diablo Canyon has continued to safely produce clean and reliable energy without greenhouse gases (GHG), avoiding 6 to 7 million tons per year of GHGs that would be emitted by conventional generation resources,” the site states.
PG&E said in a statement it had not yet seen the lawsuit but that, as a regulated utility, will follow state policy.
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Dutch minister warns EU leaders of waning public support for climate policies
A senior Dutch minister has warned fellow politicians in Europe of waning public support for the region’s climate policies as showcased by a continuing stand-off between farmers and the government over greenhouse gas limits in the Netherlands.
Deputy prime minister Sigrid Kaag, who also serves as minister of finance, told the Financial Times of the increasingly difficult task her government faces rallying some parts of the electorate behind policies with intergenerational ramifications, including the need to reduce nitrogen-based emissions, which has led to significant disruption, clashes with police and a political upset in elections for the Dutch senate.
https://www.ft.com/content/9777e52a-e290-4d87-ab7f-b5a073921222
*********************************************Australia’s ‘green energy’ chimera
The government has asked the Joint Committee on Trade and Investment Growth to inquire into ‘Australia’s transition to a green energy superpower’. It wants ideas on how to accelerate growth in sectors covering renewable energy, batteries, electric vehicles, and so on.
The inquiry attracted 125 submissions. A few submissions, like that of the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF), pointed out that the proposal rests on the case for reducing human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide but that there is no scientific proof that this would have any significant effect on our climate. And, the non-Western world is not going down that same path, with the consequence that the de-carbonising economic suicide into which the West is sleepwalking, can have no global effect.
But most submissions, including those from industry, advise the government on how to fund projects that cannot and will never stand up on their own merits.
For example, the Electric Vehicle Council calls on, ‘Governments [to] further support domestic industry development by providing guaranteed demand through bulk EV orders across government vehicle fleets and introducing programs that incentivise the use of local content.’ It also predictably seeks, ‘…further debt and equity financing to innovative projects to accelerate the clean energy transition.’
The Clean Energy Investor Group calls for the continuation of the subsidies to windmills beyond their cut-off date of 2030. By that time subsidy-seekers had previously assured us that this infant industry would have become the cheapest supply source. CSIRO claims this is already a reality even though wind/solar still needs the support of regulatory subsidies – subsidies that in 2020 amounted to $7 billion a year and which have been increased by the recently enacted Safeguard Mechanism.
The Advanced Materials and Battery Council claims Australia is already making huge gains in new technologies but warns, ‘Governments need to move fast to avoid losing these companies and opportunities to those more determined to develop national battery supply chains elsewhere.’
The Australian Aluminium Council seeks to get on the National Critical Minerals Strategy gravy train and makes the vacuous statement, ‘Providing electricity is supplied consistently, with firm power, and at internationally competitive prices, aluminium smelting can be run on renewable electricity.’ DUH!
The Australian Hydrogen Council claims members are going great guns in this pie-in-the-sky technology but just want the government to mandate targets ‘to develop markets for hydrogen across a range of sectors’. In addition, the council wants ‘investment attraction mechanisms in the vein of the US Inflation Reduction Act including fiscal or other incentives to draw foreign capital to Australia’.
The Green Energy Superpower proposal is that we continue to tax fossil fuels and subsidise their replacement with wind, solar, batteries, and eventually hydrogen (even though nuclear technology is the only one that might equal fossil fuels in cheapness activists avoid the energy ‘N-word’).
Regrettable outcomes have followed from the continued pursuit of a green energy superpower goal with its landscape-defiling windmills, solar farms, and a trebling of transmission lines to carry this intermittent energy. These facilities are planned to quadruple. Wind turbines are lethal for bird life when it gets too close and their land-hunger knocks out native animals. Concerns about threatened species in part led Apple to abandon its purchase of power generated by Windlab, Andrew Forrest’s proposed Queensland project. Added to the renewables conversation is the underlying environmental problem of the disposal of toxic wind turbines and solar panels at the end of their relatively short lives.
The failure of wind/solar installations to supply low-cost and reliable energy was illustrated by the collapse of the $22 billion Forrest/Cannon-Brookes Sun Cable project in the Northern Territory, which fortunately had only minor taxpayer support.
Green hydrogen is ear-marked as a future area of promise and its carpet baggers have attracted considerable government subsidies. At present, even its aspirational costs leave it 4-5 times more expensive than coal-based power, while considerable transport problems remain. And if at some future time green hydrogen were to become economical, that would be achieved by competition and profit-seeking creating the technological breakthroughs.
Australia has an ignominious history of terrifyingly expensive failures in seeking to have the governments play an entrepreneurial role. These include monstrous fiascos like the $70 billion broadband rollout.
We have also traversed the government-planned green innovation path trodden many times already. This wasted up to $20 billion on converting Snowy Hydro into a pump storage facility. Previous governmental plans to improve on private sector enterprise brought a blade factory in Victoria, which was to be the centre of a vast global supply chain taking advantage of government-stimulated growth of windmills; it collapsed within six months. Then there was the failed Ross Garnaut/Kevin Rudd geothermal venture in South Australia and, as the Spectator Australia catalogues, numerous programs to harness wave power.
Australia’s pursuit of the chimera of a ‘green energy superpower’ is part of a process under which, for the first time in human history, the Western world is using subsidies to replace the cheapest available and reliable sources of the energy by a more expensive and less reliable sources. The pursuit is accompanied by much collateral damage to the environment.
We have arrogated politics to a commercial role it can never play. Parliamentary inquiries will not only fail to discover the elixir that kickstarts new industries but, in holding out prospects for free government money, they distract entrepreneurs from seeking market-based solutions to profitable future breakthroughs.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/australias-green-energy-chimera
***************************************13 April, 2023
Coal generation rising despite global net-zero ambition
Australia generated a quarter of its electricity from solar and wind in 2022, more than double the global average, a think tank says.
Wind and solar are also accelerating worldwide, research released on Wednesday shows, with last year’s global rise in solar generation enough to have met the annual electricity demand of Australia.
The report by independent energy think tank Ember found last year may have been the peak of electricity emissions and the final year of fossil power growth, with clean power forecast to meet all demand growth this year.
But the report also found global coal-fired generation was still rising (up 1.1 per cent) even as wind and solar surged (19 per cent).
The electricity sector, in Australia and worldwide, is the biggest greenhouse gas emitter and must decarbonise if international net zero goals are to be met.
A cleaner power supply is also expected to trigger the electrification of big polluters in heavy industry and transport.
“Tracking progress on how our electricity is generated is critical, as it is not only a huge source of greenhouse gases, it is also needed as an enabler of a cleaner and more efficient energy system overall,” Ember’s chair Baroness Bryony Worthington said.
While 2022 may be seen as the turning point, fossil fuels are still providing the backbone of the electricity system in many large economies including Australia, according to the Global Electricity Review 2023.
However, the carbon intensity fell to a record low in 2022 on record growth in wind and solar, which counted for 12 per cent of the global electricity mix – up from 10 per cent in 2021.
Solar generation rose by almost a quarter (24 per cent), making it the fastest-growing electricity source for 18 years in a row, while wind generation grew by 17 per cent.
Gas power generation eased 0.2 per cent in 2022, falling for the second time in three years as high gas prices continue.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made many governments rethink their plans amid spiking fossil fuel prices and security concerns about relying on fossil fuel imports, but it also accelerated electrification with rising consumer demand for electric cars and heat pumps.
Gas-to-coal switching was limited in 2022 because gas was already mostly more expensive, with only 31 gigawatts of new gas power plants built in 2022, which was the lowest in 18 years.
A gas power phase-down is now within reach for the first time, the report said.
But last year also saw the lowest number of coal plant closures in seven years as countries relied on the fossil fuel to maintain back-up capacity.
Coal power remained the single largest source of electricity, producing more than a third (36 per cent) of global electricity in 2022.
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NOAA Proposes to Ignore Whales Killed by Offshore Wind
The death of numerous whales off New Jersey, mostly humpbacks, deserves a lot of attention. The federal NOAA Fisheries agency is responsible for whales. An outrageous statement by their spokesperson got me to do some research on humpback whale deaths. The evidence appears to suggest that offshore wind development is killing whales by the hundreds.
“NOAA said it has been studying what it calls 'unusual mortality events' involving 174 humpback whales along the East Coast since January 2016," reports The Morning Call. "Agency spokesperson Lauren Gaches said that period pre-dates offshore wind preparation activities in the region."
The humpback death rate roughly tripled starting in 2016. But the claim that this huge jump in mortality predates offshore wind preparation activities is wildly false. In fact, it coincides with the large scale onset of these activities.
To begin with, offshore lease sales really geared up 2015-16, with nine sales off New Jersey, New York, Delaware and Massachusetts. These sales generated a lot of activity, including damaging sonar. In fact, 2016 saw the beginning of what are called site characterization surveys. These surveys are licensed by NOAA Fisheries under "Incidental Harassment Authorizations" or IHAs.
There is misleading jargon here. These IHAs are "incidental" to offshore wind development. They are not incidental to the whales. The term “harassment” includes injuring the whales. That is called level A harassment, while level B harassment just causes behavior changes or temporary deafness, which can also be deadly.
NOAA has issued 46 one-year IHAs for offshore wind sites, each authorizing the harassment of numerous whales. Site characterization typically includes use of what I call “machine gun sonar.” This device emits an incredibly loud noise every few seconds, often for hours or days at a time, as it maps the sea floor.
There are lots of ways this sonar blasting can cause whales to die. Simply fleeing the noise could cause ship strikes or fish gear entanglements, the two leading causes of whale deaths. Or the whales could be deafened, to be struck later. Note that defenders of offshore wind often point to ship strikes as somehow showing that sonar is not the culprit. In fact, it is evidence sonar is guilty.
The point is that the huge 2016 jump in annual humpback mortality coincides with the jump in NOAA IHAs. Nor is this just about humpbacks. There are the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whales, on the verge of extinction. Their precipitous decline also began in 2016.
Clearly we need a moratorium on new IHAs until the safety of the whales can be assured. But "Damn the whales, full speed ahead" is the policy of Biden's NOAA. They now propose to approve yet another New Jersey site survey, just 10 miles off Atlantic City.
The survey area is an incredible 2,300 square miles. Ironically, the project is called Atlantic Shores, which is where all the dead whales are washing up. In fact, this is a renewal of a prior permit. NOAA acts as though nothing has changed, ignoring the horrible New Jersey whale deaths.
NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is taking public comments on this preposterous proposal (details below).
NMFS predicts that a great many marine mammals will be subjected to unsafe levels of survey noise. Here are the staggering numbers by category:
42 Whales
2,534 Dolphins
142 Porpoises
1,472 Seals
"....[O]nly Level B harassment is proposed for authorization, which NMFS expects would be of a lower severity, predominately in the form of avoidance of the sound sources that may cause a temporary abandonment of the location during active source use that may result in a temporary interruption of foraging activities for some species," NOAA's bureaucratic argument reads. "NMFS does not expect that the proposed activity will have long-term or permanent impacts as the acoustic source would be mobile and would leave the area within a specific amount of time for which the animals could return to the area."
In short, these thousands of critters will get the hell out of the way and come home when the survey is over, in a year or so. Apparently NMFS thinks this massive forced relocation is harmless. Here are two harmful possibilities, among many.
First, the site is deliberately in a relatively low ship traffic area, surrounded by high traffic zones. This is one of the busiest ship traffic areas in the world. Being forced to relocate into higher traffic areas is virtually certain to increase the incidence of fatal ship strikes.
Second, moving this many animals into territory already occupied by similar animals should greatly increase the population densities for each species. But the food supply remains the same, which could lead to food scarcity.
The treatment of the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whale is especially egregious. NOAA says this: "...the size of the survey area (5,868 km2) in comparison with the entire migratory habitat for the North Atlantic right whale (269,448 km2) is small, representing 2.11 percent of the entire migratory corridor."
Right Whales migrate through the area twice a year, going between offshore Georgia and New England so the "corridor" is indeed large, but this is irrelevant. What is crucial is that the survey area is about 35 miles wide east to west and the migrating whales presently pass through it. Thus the survey has the effect of blocking the migration, or seriously disrupting it.
NOAA maintains this proposed harassment is exempt from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). They claim there is "no anticipated serious injury or mortality." They should anticipate a little harder. NEPA requires assessment if injury is reasonably likely. Injury and death certainly are reasonably likely here, to thousands of supposedly protected marine mammals, including the severely endangered Right Whales. More deeply, the Atlantic Shores Wind Project has yet to be approved and may never be. Site surveys should not be authorized until the Project is approved.
Comments should be addressed to Jolie Harrison, Office of Protected Resources, National Marine Fisheries Service. Written comments should be submitted via email to ITP.Potlock@noaa.gov. In the offshore wind stampede Biden's National Marine Fisheries Service has lost sight of its mission to protect marine mammals. Just say no to NOAA.
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Science betrayal
Peter Ridd
There is no surer proof that people are losing faith in the scientific establishment than the recent Rasmussen poll of Americans which found 60 per cent of respondents agreeing that, ‘Climate change has become a religion that “actually has nothing to do with the climate” and is really about power and control”.’ Even 45 per cent of Democrats agreed.
This is a staggering result considering the relentless barrage from almost every major science organisation on earth asserting that climate change is ‘real’ and dangerous. Despite all the indoctrination at universities, all the stories in the media by climate ‘experts’, a solid majority thinks they are being conned.
Why have so many people reached this conclusion?
It is not because the general population has been reading up on the history of climate science. I doubt those 60 per cent of Americans know that the climate was hotter when the Egyptians were building pyramids, that American wildfires burnt a far greater area in the 1930s than in recent decades, or that the Great Barrier Reef has never had more coral.
But they can smell a rat, and they can recognise a high-pressure salesman. The alarmist side has cried ‘Wolf!’ hundreds of times too many, and its treatment of those who dare to dissent only makes the rat smell worse.
The public everywhere realises how strange it is that all the effects of climate change are supposedly terrible – that there is nothing good. Consider somebody gazing out of their window in Montana, onto mounting snow drifts in minus 20°C temperatures – they might think it odd that a couple of degrees warmer could be such a universally bad thing.
But the scientific establishment argues that it will not just get hotter, it will also get colder. Do the institutions honestly expect us not to question the peculiar nature of this argument – however much we would like to believe them because we know we should believe ‘The Science’?
And one does not have to delve too deeply into the institutions’ evidence to see that a lot does not make sense. For example, last month’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report again argued that the world’s coral reefs will lose 90 per cent of their coral with a trivial 1.5°C temperature increase – of which, it claims, we have already experienced more than one degree. But data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science shows that corals at the colder southern end of the Great Barrier Reef will grow at least 30 per cent faster in the event of such a temperature rise. Corals like it hot. Maybe corals living in the planet’s hottest water extremes are in trouble, but surely then, some of the corals in the cooler parts of the world must benefit from a little extra warmth? Not according to the IPCC.
And let us not forget science’s dirty open secret. Detailed checks show that roughly 50 per cent of the recent scientific reports, which have been peer-reviewed, are wrong. It is called the ‘replication crisis’. All the big science institutions have known about it for a decade, but they do not like to talk about it. It is too embarrassing. Perhaps the Australian Academy of Science could write an article to The Spectator Australia explaining the problem and how it proposes to solve it.
What other profession gets it wrong so often? Thank goodness scientists are not airline pilots.
The general distrust of scientists revealed by the Rasmussen poll was most probably turbocharged by the Covid scare, and especially by the manner with which dissenters were treated. For example, those who argued that it was possible the virus originated in the Wuhan virology lab, rather than the city’s wet market, were simply labelled racist. But, of all the huge cities and all the wet markets in all of China, what is the chance that Covid popped up, entirely naturally, exactly where virologists were experimenting with Corona viruses? The answer is very roughly just 10 per cent – at most. There are ten cities in China as big or bigger than Wuhan. It was always a valid question to ask about a lab-leak. Even the CIA has stated that the lab-leak theory is plausible.
But people want to trust science institutions. People want to believe that the Great Barrier Reef is almost doomed, despite the wonderful news about record coral cover. This is because if the reef is not doomed, they must face the possibility of something worse – that they have been deceived by institutions they have always trusted implicitly. Organisations such as the ABC and CSIRO, which we have traditionally put on a pedestal. People cannot handle that thought – not immediately at least – but they come around eventually. The Rasmussen Poll, and those 60 per cent of Americans who see climate change is a religion, proves that.
We must make it possible for people to trust ‘science’ again. But that means it must become trustworthy. So far, the science institutions are still in denial.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/science-betrayal/
**********************************************Australia: State of the Climate 2022
Warming has stopped. For how long? The warmest year so far was 2019. Note that they record temperatures in decades. Differences between individual years are so slight. And note the paucity of figures. That is because the differences are in tenths of one degree, sometimes only hundredths. And the total difference between now and 1910 is tiny
Australia has warmed, on average, by 1.47 ± 0.24 °C since national records began in 1910, with most warming occurring since 1950. Every decade since 1950 has been warmer than preceding decades. The warming in Australia is consistent with global trends, with the degree of warming similar to the overall average across the world’s land areas.
Australia’s warmest year on record was 2019. The eight years from 2013–20 all rank among the 10 warmest years on record. The long-term warming trend means that most years are now warmer than almost any observed during the 20th century.
Warming is observed across Australia in all months with both day and night-time temperatures increasing. This shift is accompanied by an increased number of extreme nationally averaged daily heat events across all months, including a greater frequency of very hot days in summer. For example, 2019 experienced 41 extremely warm days, about triple the highest number in any year prior to 2000. Also in 2019, there were 33 days when national daily average maximum temperatures exceeded 39 °C, a larger number than seen in the 59 years from 1960–2018 combined. Increasing trends in extreme heat are observed at locations across all of Australia. Extreme heat has caused more deaths in Australia than any other natural hazard and has major impacts on ecosystems and infrastructure.
There has also been an increase in the frequency of months that are much warmer than usual. Very high monthly maximum temperatures that occurred nearly 2 per cent of the time in 1960–89 now (2007–21) occur over 11 per cent of the time. This is about a sixfold increase over the period. Very high monthly night-time temperatures, which are also a major contributor to heat stress, occurred nearly 2 per cent of the time in 1960–89 but now occur around 10 per cent of the time.
The frequencies of extremely cold days and nights have declined across Australia. An exception is for extremely cold nights in parts of south-east and south-west Australia, which have seen significant cool season drying, and hence more clear winter nights. This results in colder nights due to increased heat loss from the ground. The frequency of frost in these parts has been relatively unchanged since the 1980s.
http://www.bom.gov.au/state-of-the-climate/australias-changing-climate.shtml
***************************************12 April, 2023
Two former U.S. ambassadors are sounding the alarm on the increasing number of green energy projects nationwide being developed with the involvement of Chinese companies
Former U.S. Ambassadors Peter Hoekstra and Joseph Cella said Chinese companies, which are subject to strict Chinese laws, have made a concerted effort to take advantage of U.S. green energy goals. The companies, they said, are exploiting American tax incentives to build facilities and projects in the U.S., bolstering Chinese industry and ensuring continued U.S. reliance on technology from China.
"It'd be very ironic if we moved towards electric vehicles to the numbers that the Biden administration is talking about and the key component comes from China," Hoekstra, who served as U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands from 2018 until 2021, told Fox News Digital in an interview. "That is a terrible, terrible place to be."
"Right now electric vehicle sales are about 3 to 5% of new automobile sales," he continued. "Now is the time for the U.S. to establish its own capabilities rather than increasing reliance on an unreliable and a threatening adversary."
Hoekstra added that China's dominance throughout the green energy supply chain, from developing critical mineral mines in Africa to building battery components, exhibits intentionality that is "very perilous not only for our national security, but our economic security and prosperity as well."
Earlier this year, Hoekstra, who also previously chaired the House Intelligence Committee, established the Michigan-China Economic and Security Review Group, a watchdog group devoted to reviewing Chinese economic investments across the country with a particular focus on Michigan. Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer boasted last month that her administration has recently attracted $16.6 billion worth of electric vehicle (EV) and battery projects to the state.
Cella — who served as the U.S. ambassador to Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Tuvalu, and Tonga from 2019 until 2021 — joined Hoekstra's group as a director.
Together, Hoekstra and Cella have specifically called attention to two EV battery plant projects proposed for Michigan. The first, slated for Big Rapids, Michigan, involves the Hefei, China-based Gotion High-Tech while the second, proposed for Marshall, Michigan, involves the Ningde, China-based Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL).
"Subnational incursions are afoot," Cella told Fox News Digital in an interview. "China is on the hunt. The Chinese Communist Party is on the hunt. They are looking for these open doors to kick in, in states. And they have carried great sway. You just need to look at Gotion or CATL — textbook examples of this influence operation."
The former ambassadors said, altogether, the Whitmer administration has promised about $4 billion in tax incentives and infrastructure improvements to facilitate the construction of the Gotion factory and the second facility, a Ford Motor factory which CATL has promised to provide key technology for.
"The details of the business relationship between CATL and Gotion are different," Hoekstra said. "But the bottom line is we are enriching the Chinese battery industry at the expense of providing the opportunity for American or companies in our allied countries to expand and grow their business."
************************************************
From Global Warming to Global Cooling to Global Warming
Here is an interesting quote:
“Snows are less frequent and less deep. They often do not lie below the mountains more than one, two, or three days and very rarely a week. They are remembered to be formerly frequent, deep, and of long continuance. The elderly inform me that the earth used to be covered with snow about three months every year. The rivers, which then seldom failed to freeze over in the course of the winter, scarcely ever do now. [This] change…in the spring of the year is very fatal to fruits…I remember that when I was a small boy, say 60 years ago, snows were frequent and deep in every winter.”
That was written by Thomas Jefferson in 1799, before fossil fuels dominated the energy industry, and when the earth’s population was far smaller than it is today. From all indications, there was indeed notable warming in the 18th century from the previous “Little Ice Age” period.
But let’s move ahead to the 20th century. The weather changes, of course, and Paul Ehrlich, who was always wrong about everything he ever said, told us in 1969, “We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.” Twenty years passed, no blue steam, people were still on the earth. I guess we were lucky. And Ehrlich was rich.
Global cooling was the craze then. Here are a few representative quotes from the 1970s:
Boston Globe (1970): “Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century”
LA Times (Oct. 24, 1971): “New Ice Age Coming—It’s Already Getting Colder”
Brown Science Dept. to the White House (1972): “Deep concern with the future of the world...falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age.”
The Guardian (1974): “Spy Satellites Show New Ice Age is Coming Fast”
Time Magazine (April 8, 1977) front cover: “How to Survive the Coming Ice Age”
That is just a sampling and could be multiplied exponentially. But then, the 1980s arrived. The Marxist Soviet Union began teetering, and by the end of the decade, was in full-scale collapse. Marxism was proven wrong, their globalist ideology in ashes, and all orthodox Marxists gave up their religion. Right?
Not so much. Actually, all they did was change colors—from red to green.
In the 1980s, the shift to man-made global warming began. Evidence was accruing that the planet, as a whole, was warming. That had happened many times throughout history and shouldn’t have been big news or alarming. Earth has been gradually warming since the Ice Age 10-15,000 years ago (land bridge between Russia and Alaska?).
The key, however, in the 1980s, was the addition of “man-made” to “global warming.” This time, (unlike in Jefferson’s day), it was humanity’s fault. We were making the climate warm up and it was up to us (world governments) to stop it. And we only had a few years to do it. Evidence:
AP (1989): “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.”
Salon (quoting NASA’s Jim Hanson, 1989): “The West Side Highway [along the Hudson River] will be under water [within 20 to 30 years].”
The Independent (2000): “Snow is starting to disappear from our lives...Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” Like Thomas Jefferson hardly ever saw it anymore, either.
The Guardian (2004): “Major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020.” I’m a little confused about this one. I thought Siberia was cold.
The Great Genius Al Gore (2007): “The North Pole will be ice-free in the summer by 2013 because of man-made global warming.” Has anyone swam by the North Pole lately?
NBC News (2006): “Leading U.S. climate researcher says the world has a 10-year window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert catastrophe.” I guess it’s too late now.
AP (2008): “In five to ten years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer.” Still waiting 15 years later.
These rather inaccurate predictions could also be multiplied. But we can see that the earth has gone from global warming (1700s) to global cooling (mid-20th century) and back to global warming (since the 1980s)—this time caused by humans. And, of course, the only solution is the one world government that Marxists have dreamed of all along.
Having spent many years working in American academia, I learned that the “publish or perish” mentality (especially among “major” universities) is real. Government grant money is lusted for and is in no way insignificant. The problem is, politically correct articles are essential. There exists no chance of publication if orthodoxy is challenged; tenure might be denied and jobs might be lost. The pressure to conform is enormous.
Hence, the “consensus” is established, is always right, and no one (in America) challenges it. For example, Darwinism (though any anti-Christian screed is acceptable). Or the Covid-19 vaccine and mask “science." And, of course, climate change. I suspect most climatologists know that, at best, the evidence for “man-made climate change” is tenuous. But scientists are human, too, and they love their cushy jobs and rising influence. And the universities want the money. So don’t challenge canon doctrine.
It also doesn’t hurt that industry is now pouring billions into the climate change hoax. It matters not if climate change is actually happening. Money is money is money, and if money can be made, any lie, swindle, or fraud will do. Covid proved that. Climate change is here to stay for awhile, folks.
The Left totally controls the global propaganda machine now. Turning that around will be a monumental task.
***********************************************
Germans Are Getting Mugged by Reality of Green Energy
When one of us (Mackenzie Fries) visited Germany last month, she saw firsthand the cost of the nation’s environmental policies, and it was staggering. Germans continue to complain about the ever-increasing energy costs that result from those policies, a major source of discontent.
The nation has been phasing out conventional fuels and phasing in less reliable, less abundant renewable energy sources, resulting in higher prices, shortages, and a greater reliance on adversarial nations like Russia and China. The country’s trials should prove to be a vital lesson for those of us in the United States.
Sebastian Lehnerer, a Berlin native, related, “The impact [of the energy crisis] is easy to say, I just have a lot less money. I now pay a quarter more in electricity since the Ukraine war started. The annual Warmmiete [warm rent] that I pay, which covers rent, heating, and hot water, is now 20% higher, not including the additional costs I have to pay at the end of the year. There are some people using only natural gas as a heating source who are paying 55% more.”
Energy prices have increased by 28% compared to February 2022. In the last year, natural gas prices have risen 39% and electricity prices have risen 27%.
Food prices increased by 23%, and the price of pork rose by 59%. The most shocking change was the almost doubling of sugar prices.
In terms of inflation, Lehnerer stated that prices are much higher than reported: “Flour is 100% more expensive. Many bakeries are going out of business because of the high electricity prices and expensive flour.”
Lehnerer also discussed restrictions for using carbon-based fuels in Germany, saying “The [former German Chancellor Angela] Merkel regime placed an additional carbon tax on car gasoline a few years ago. Every year, the gas tax increases.” In addition, he mentioned that individuals pay higher yearly car taxes depending on the amount of carbon their car produces.
The problem is not only that Germany was hit by the disruption in Russia’s natural gas supplies because of the Russia-Ukraine war. The greater issue lies in Germany’s efforts to phase out its own domestic resources of nuclear and coal-fired power. The majority of Germany’s nuclear plants have been closed in the last decade.
These energy problems ultimately caused Merkel to resign as chancellor after significant public backlash. The coalition government Merkel headed shut down nearly all of Germany’s nuclear plants following Japan’s Fukushima nuclear plant catastrophe.
Merkel’s closure of power plants made the country even more reliant on foreign natural gas supplies from Russia. The war in Ukraine simply brought the consequences of Germany’s green energy policies to the surface.
The resulting reductions in emissions in Germany comprise only a tiny fraction of global emissions. Germany’s emissions of 675 million tons of carbon dioxide account for less than 2% of the total 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide each year. Germans are ultimately being taxed for little global gain.
Germany’s nuclear exit signaled its growing weakness as it shifted away from cultivating greater energy independence. The nation has transitioned from relying on Russia for its natural gas to relying on China for solar panels and wind turbines. Ninety-five percent of the solar cells in Germany are manufactured in China. In addition, more than 50% of the raw materials used to construct wind turbines are sourced from China.
This past July, the German Bundestag passed the Onshore Wind Energy Act to ramp up the construction of wind turbines across the country. Germany’s green technology policies are only driving the country into the hands of China—and its reliance on wind is raising the price of electricity and slowing the economy.
A Daily Signal report on energy states that “renewable energy (i.e., wind, solar, biofuels, and hydropower) only accounted for 14% of the EU’s electricity mix, nuclear accounted for 10%, and conventional fuels (i.e., natural gas, oil, and coal) accounted for 76%.” American officials have long warned European countries to diversify their energy supplies and that renewable energy was not a reliable replacement for conventional fuels.
Germany should not rely on either China or Russia for something as critical as its energy supply. Countries need to be able to care for themselves and maintain their energy independence. The current German government is shooting itself in the foot by continuing to impose laws to destroy all coal power plants and nuclear power plants in the wake of its ongoing energy crisis—precisely when it needs them most.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/04/06/germanys-green-energy-debacle-should-be-warning-to-us/ ?
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Climate Science Shock: Methane’s Unexpected Cooling Impact Unveiled
UC Riverside researchers found that methane not only traps heat in the atmosphere but also creates cooling clouds that offset 30% of the heat. Methane’s absorption of shortwave energy counterintuitively causes a cooling effect and suppresses the increase in precipitation by 60%. This finding emphasizes the need to incorporate all known effects of greenhouse gases into climate models.
Most climate models do not yet account for a new University of California, Riverside discovery: methane traps a great deal of heat in Earth’s atmosphere, but also creates cooling clouds that offset 30% of the heat.
Greenhouse gases like methane create a kind of blanket in the atmosphere, trapping heat from Earth’s surface, called longwave energy, and preventing it from radiating out into space. This makes the planet hotter.
“A blanket doesn’t create heat, unless it’s electric. You feel warm because the blanket inhibits your body’s ability to send its heat into the air. This is the same concept,” explained Robert Allen, UCR assistant professor of Earth sciences.
In addition to absorbing longwave energy, it turns out methane also absorbs incoming energy from the sun, known as shortwave energy. “This should warm the planet,” said Allen, who led the research project. “But counterintuitively, the shortwave absorption encourages changes in clouds that have a slight cooling effect.”
Methane Long and Shortwave Effects
This effect is detailed in the journal Nature Geoscience, alongside a second finding that the research team did not fully expect. Though methane generally increases the amount of precipitation, accounting for the absorption of shortwave energy suppresses that increase by 60%.
Both types of energy — longwave (from Earth) and shortwave (from sun) — escape from the atmosphere more than they are absorbed into it. The atmosphere needs compensation for the escaped energy, which it gets from heat created as water vapor condenses into rain, snow, sleet, or hail.
“Essentially, precipitation acts as a heat source, making sure the atmosphere maintains a balance of energy,” said study co-author Ryan Kramer, a researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Methane changes this equation. By holding on to energy from the sun, methane is introducing heat the atmosphere no longer needs to get from precipitation.
Additionally, methane shortwave absorption decreases the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth’s surface. This in turn reduces the amount of water that evaporates. Generally, precipitation and evaporation are equal, so a decrease in evaporation leads to a decrease in precipitation.
“This has implications for understanding in more detail how methane and perhaps other greenhouses gases can impact the climate system,” Allen said. “Shortwave absorption softens the overall warming and rain-increasing effects but does not eradicate them at all.”
The research team discovered these findings by creating detailed computer models simulating both longwave and shortwave methane effects. Going forward, they would like to conduct additional experiments to learn how different concentrations of methane would impact the climate.
Scientific interest in methane has increased in recent years as levels of emissions have increased. Much comes from industrial sources, as well as from agricultural activities and landfill. Methane emissions are also likely to increase as frozen ground underlying the Arctic begins to thaw.
“It’s become a major concern,” said Xueying Zhao, UCR Earth and planetary sciences Ph.D. student and study co-author. “We need to better understand the effects all this methane will bring us by incorporating all known effects into our climate models.”
Kramer echoes the need for further study. “We’re good at measuring the concentration of greenhouse gases like methane in the atmosphere. Now the goal is to say with as much confidence as possible what those numbers mean to us. Work like this gets us toward that goal,” he said.
https://scitechdaily.com/climate-science-shock-methanes-unexpected-cooling-impact-unveiled/
***************************************11 April, 2023
Attribution of big wind events is just assertion
Data on tropical cyclones are among the most studied and reliable data you can find in climate science. These data are the result of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people doing the heroic work of science over more than a century.
The resulting dataset is called the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS) — a monumental scientific achievement (and also one the IPCC tried to throw shade on for not providing the “right” trends, but I digress).
Thanks to IBTrACS, data on tropical cyclone incidence worldwide is readily at our fingertips.
For instance, at Colorado State University, Phil Klotzbach uses IBTrACS to keep a real-time dataset of global tropical cyclone activity that is easy for anyone to use — and I use it often. The IBTrACS data is the basis for the analyses below.
You don’t need a math degree to see that there is no upwards trend in either. In fact, we can clearly see a gradual reduction in the number of hurricanes since the mid 1990s, the exact opposite of what the IPCC and other alarmists claim.
What we are looking at today, however, is the ratio of the bottom line to the top line — the proportion of all tropical cyclones of hurricane strength that are major hurricanes.
Well there we have it, there has been an increase in the proportion of major hurricanes since 1980. That must be ‘climate change’, right? Case closed?
Not at all.
You’ll note that the time series above starts in 1980. That is when the IBTrACS dataset has global coverage. It is also right in the middle of a decade-plus period where hurricane activity was extremely low, perhaps even the lowest in centuries.
Starting any trend analysis in 1980 for tropical cyclones is thus very likely to result in upward trends, but that doesn’t mean that they are the result of human-caused ‘climate change’.
Here it is important to revisit how the IPCC defines the detection of a change in climate:
Detection of change is defined as the process of demonstrating that climate or a system affected by climate has changed in some defined statistical sense, without providing a reason for that change.
An identified change is detected in observations if its likelihood of occurrence by chance due to internal variability alone is determined to be small, for example, <10 percent.
To conclude that a variable has changed requires demonstrating that a trend in observed statistics goes beyond that which might be observed within the variability of those data.
Otherwise, we risk misidentifying noise or internal variability as a change in the system. Climate data can be highly variable over many different time scales — this of course is why cherry-picking data can be problematic, but also appealing to the mischievous.
Fortunately, on tropical cyclones much data predates 1980, allowing us to explore in-depth internal variability in tropical cyclone occurrence and how apparent trends compare to that variability.
Specifically, there are longer-term data on tropical cyclones in the North Atlantic and Western North Pacific — NA and WNP, which represent about 50 percent of all global activity — dating back to 1950.
Let’s take a look at what those data show.
As we would expect, these time series are highly correlated, since the latter comprises 50 percent of the former.
We can conclude with some confidence that trends in the proportion of major hurricanes in the NA & WNP combined make for a good proxy for trends in the proportion of major hurricanes at the overall global level.
From 1950 to 2022, there is no upward trend in the proportion of major hurricanes. In fact, if you look closely at the red line, there is a slight decrease.
But if you start an analysis in the 1970s or 1980s, you will get an upward trend.
So where does all this leave us? Well, here is a cherry-picker’s guide to the proportion of major hurricanes:
Want to show an increase? Start your analysis in 1980.
Want to show no trends? Start your analysis in 1950.
Want to show a decrease? Start your analysis in 2002.
More seriously, what does the scientific community conclude when a climate time series does not indicate trends outside the bounds of observed variability?
Detection has not been achieved.
That means there is no trend to attribute. Neither detection nor attribution has been achieved.
The IPCC AR6 failed spectacularly on tropical cyclones in concluding that both detection and attribution have not only been achieved related to an increasing proportion of major hurricanes but that such conclusions have strengthened since 2014.
This is all fiction, misinformation even. Yes, I know these are strong words. The IPCC is far too important to allow errors of this magnitude.
This is what the IPCC and other organisations do. They pick low points to start their graphs, which will always show an upward trend.
This can only be seen as either total incompetence, or a deliberate deception.
https://principia-scientific.com/climate-expert-misinformation-in-the-ipcc-part-2/
******************************************Biden’s newest nominee vows to use loophole to push climate agenda
The Biden administration is pushing an aggressive climate agenda and has no problem spending taxpayer money to do it.
The latest example of this comes from the little-known Department of Transportation safety subagency, where Biden’s nominee to lead the agency privately boasted that she would use her position to push climate policies.
Ann Carlson, an environmental law expert, was recruited by the Biden-Harris transition team in early January 2021 to serve as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) chief counsel, according to emails obtained by the watchdog group Government Accountability & Oversight (GAO).
In her position, Carlson has overseen key agency initiatives like the modification of fuel economy standards and has served as acting administrator since September.
She boasted to colleagues at UCLA Law in January 2021 that “the agency is in charge of climate standards for cars and trucks, which is why they have recruited me for the position.”
Days later, she wrote to board members of UCLA’s Emmett Institute on Climate Change & the Environment, similarly boasting of the climate policymaking potential at NHTSA, saying “I view my appointment (and a number of others) as evidence that the Biden Administration is truly committed to a ‘whole of government’ approach to addressing climate change.”
In August 2021, Biden signed an executive order directing the Environmental Protection Agency and Transportation Department to issue regulations on fuel efficiency and emissions standards, and the NHTSA unveiled ambitious new standards that it acknowledged would cost automakers about $236.5 billion and eventually make cars $1,000 more expensive.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., the current chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee, said the regulations “will only add to the cost of new cars, depriving people of safe, affordable vehicles.”
But that hasn’t stopped the Biden administration from pushing their climate agenda. Carlson also reportedly helped coordinate high-profile climate nuisance lawsuits filed by a dark money-fueled law firm against fossil fuel companies in 2017 and 2018.
This whole situation is outrageous. The Biden administration is spending taxpayer money to ram through a climate agenda that was never voted on and goes against the will of the taxpayers. It’s also a huge waste of money and resources that could be used to help the American people in other ways.
What’s worse is that this administration is also pushing for stricter gun control laws, which goes against the 2nd Amendment. It’s clear that this administration is out of touch with the American people and their priorities.
If Biden and his team really wanted to do something about climate change, they should focus on policies that would actually make a difference, like investing in clean energy technology and incentivizing businesses to reduce their emissions. Spending taxpayer money on costly regulations is not only ineffective, it’s also fiscally irresponsible.
https://libertyonenews.com/bidens-newest-nominee-vows-to-use-loophole-to-push-climate-agenda/
****************************************************Ageing multi-storey car parks 'could collapse' under the weight of heavier electric vehicles
Multi-storey car parks across the UK could be at risk of collapsing due to the weight of electric vehicles, experts warn.
Electric cars, which are roughly twice as heavy as standard models, could cause serious damage to car park floors with especially older, unloved structures most at risk of buckling.
New guidance is now being developed recommending higher load bearing weights to accommodate the heavier vehicles.
Chris Whapples, a structural engineer and car park consultant, is at the forefront of these new measures which are due to be published in the coming weeks.
'I don’t want to be too alarmist, but there definitely is the potential for some of the early car parks in poor condition to collapse,' he told The Telegraph.
The weight of electric vehicles could cause the collapse of multi-storey car parks across the UK +3
The weight of electric vehicles could cause the collapse of multi-storey car parks across the UK
'Operators need to be aware of electric vehicle weights, and get their car parks assessed from a strength point of view, and decide if they need to limit weight.'
Most of the nation’s 6,000 multi-storey and underground facilities were built according to guidance based on the weight of popular cars of 1976, including the Mk 3 Ford Cortina.
But the electric cars currently on the UK market are far bulkier. For instance, the best-selling Tesla Model 3 weighs 2.2 tons fully loaded, making it more than 50 per cent heavier than a 1.4-tonne Cortina.
Electric vehicles are heavier predominantly because of the batteries used to power them, and the reinforced framework and suspension needed to accommodate them.
Hugo Griffiths, an investigative journalist, warned last year: 'Cars have been getting heavier for some time now. Back in the 1970s, a family car like the Ford Cortina weighed less than 1,000kg, while the original Range Rover was a tonne or so lighter than its modern-day counterpart.
'Consumer demand and technological advancements have seen a rise in the number of creature comforts fitted to cars, with features including electric windows and climate control piling on the pounds.
'Safety improvements have also led to increasing weights. Side-impact bars, airbags, laminated glass and traction-control systems help prevent collisions or reduce their severity, but features that make cars safer also tend to increase their mass.
'Added to this is the push towards electrification: a petrol engine might weigh 150kg or so, while an EV battery pack can easily come in at 500kg.'
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A green hydrogen fantasy in Australia
Green hydrogen is to renewable energy enthusiasts what gold was to ancient alchemists: the universal panacea that frees the human soul from disease and corruptibility and transports it to a perfect and everlasting state. They believe it holds the key to turning dilute, fickle sources of energy, such as solar and wind, into something vaguely useful.
That is the view of Andrew Forrest, a miner turned born-again renewable energy entrepreneur. Forrest’s company, Squadron Energy, is Australia’s biggest player in weather-dependent renewable energy. He is on record as predicting that renewables could squeeze coal out of the market by the end of the decade. But the real breakthrough will come with the development of green hydrogen, which, he claims, is Australia’s greatest resource.
“To make it, all you need to do is run electricity through water,” he told a Clean Energy Council summit in 2021. Water is the easy part. Generating the eye-watering quantity of electricity needed is a more formidable challenge.
Let’s assume global demand for hydrogen reaches 300Mt by 2050 and that the green energy superpower Australia is going to become produces one-15th of that total, as an influential Deloitte report suggests is possible. That would require about 900TW of electricity, which is roughly 3½ times Australia’s current annual output. The absurdity of the numbers sends green hydrogen into dreamy land even before we confront Forrest’s insistence that we do it with two hands tied behind our back.
For Forrest, the only genuinely green electricity is generated by weather-dependent renewable energy. The Minerals Council canvasses carbon capture and storage as an option but Forrest reckons that would be cheating.
Yet no amount of Forrest’s spin can overcome the iron law of energy density. Coal requires 25 square metres to generate a megawatt of electricity. A modern small modular nuclear reactor requires less than one square metre. A wind turbine plant typically requires more than 2000 square metres per megawatt, which means that even in a country as vast as Australia, the supply of available land is quickly exhausted.
In Queensland, where Squadron Energy is investing billions of dollars, wind and solar developments are being pushed beyond the boundaries of farmland into native scrub. In a rational world, Apple’s announcement last week that it was pulling out of a deal to purchase energy from Squadron’s proposed wind plant in the Upper Burdekin would be the beginning of the end for unreliable renewables.
An environmental assessment, released in December, found that 769 hectares of koala habit would be destroyed if the development goes ahead. It would involve the clearance of 662ha of Sharman’s rock wallaby habitat, 709ha of greater glider habitat and 754ha of habit that provides sanctuary for the red goshawk.
That a wind turbine development should even be considered on such a sensitive site shows how desperate the sector has become. Pushing renewables in such far-flung territory adds considerably to the cost. It requires wide roads to be cut through hillsides and the bulldozing of native tree, plus extra transmission lines.
The sheer weight of minerals needed for the construction of wind and solar plants brings other challenges, as Siemens Energy chief executive Christian Bruch acknowledged. “Never forget, renewables like wind roughly need 10 times the material (compared to) what conventional technologies need,” he said. “If you have problems on the supply chain, it hits wind extremely hard.”
Squadron’s Upper Burdekin development was already looking less profitable after it was forced to reduce the number of turbines from 139 to 80. Add to that the opprobrium foisted upon it by Apple’s withdrawal and the project looks to be in trouble. The kind of hydrogen Forrest is proposing is only green in the sense that it is technologically unripe.
Current international demand is so low as to be effectively non-existent compared to our exports of natural gas and coal. If international demand starts to accelerate, what’s to stop others cornering the market? The competitive advantage will belong to the jurisdiction with the cheapest electricity, and that’s not going to be Australia.
It’s little wonder that many with an eye on the capital markets are wondering if green hydrogen will ever get off the ground. In February, a meeting of federal, state and territory industry ministers called for the 2019 green hydrogen strategy to be “revised and refreshed” in the light of international developments.
President Joe Biden’s absurdly misnamed Inflation Reduction Act offers $US580bn of incentives for green innovation. Guy Debelle, a former Reserve Bank deputy governor, warned that Australia is at risk of being left behind by countries with generous subsidies, lower renewable energy costs and closer access to major industrial markets. He said the government would have to devote at least $15bn in public funds to counter a global hydrogen “subsidy arms race”.
A head somewhat cooler than the one sitting on the shoulders of the federal Energy Minister might conclude that this isn’t a fight Australia needs to be in. It would be better to focus our attention on the green economy games we can win; lithium, for example, where we are the world’s largest exporter; rare earths, where we’re the world’s second-largest producer; or cobalt, where we rank third.
Arriving at that conclusion, however, requires clear strategic thinking, indifferent to headlines and uncontaminated by hype. Policy formation in the 24-hour media cycle rarely happens that way
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10 April, 2023
Climate maniacs missing the forest for the trees
All the resources going into chasing “net zero” policies across the West are wasted in more ways than one.
The obvious one is that it all involves lots of pain for very little real gain when it comes to slowing climate change, since China, India and the developing world aren’t on board.
Worse, the passion distracts from the need to face actually looming environmental threats now confronting humanity.
Like overfishing.
That’s a genuine, short-term problem, one that could bring with it imminent catastrophe by disrupting marine food chains.
It has nothing — literally zero — to do with carbon emissions.
It can be solved by implementing policies that encourage fish farming and punish excessive drag fishing.
Not by forcing us all to use LED bulbs and eat mealworms.
Then there’s food waste.
By some analyses, as much as one-third of all food intended for humans now goes to waste.
That’s another massive environmental crisis, one that has nothing to do with carbon.
Its solutions lie with smart local network efforts and business innovation.
Or consider the insect collapse.
Global insect populations are dropping by as much as 2.5% a year.
No serious green thinker blames that on warming, and the risks it poses — mass plant death and subsequent planetary starvation — are far greater.
Green maniacs are actually causing terrible environmental problems, too. Like with solar, one of the chief renewables pushed by climate fanatics.
Turns out that the waste generated by the production of solar panels — which is 300 times as toxic as nuclear waste, and which is usually shipped from the rich countries that buy the panels to desperately poor ones — poses major health risks, all while solar does almost nothing to combat emissions.
And that’s to say nothing of green efforts to close down nuclear plants, forcing coal plants to come back online (at least 20 are being resurrected in Germany alone).
Look: Climate change is a risk, but it’s a long-term, moderate one.
Per the United Nations, as Bjorn Lomborg has noted, the cost of climate change by the 2070s will be equivalent to a per capita .2% to 2% loss of income. In other words, a moderate recession (albeit taking place in a much richer world).
That’s a legitimate, concerning risk.
But combating it doesn’t justify the wholesale reorganization of society, or keeping poor nations poor by denying them cheap energy.
Pushing to move from coal to LNG in developing nations and to build out nuclear capacity in developed ones would be a good start for those actually concerned.
But for greens, that’s a huge no-no.
So their focus on carbon emissions is not only causing the policies they advocate to miss real and immediate threats.
It’s making us all much worse off.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/08/climate-maniacs-missing-the-forest-for-the-trees/
*******************************************The Death of a Wind Farm
What can one wind facility in Southwestern Minnesota tell us about the state of the American electric grid? Quite a lot, actually.
In 2007, Minnesota began its quest to power the state with wind turbines and solar panels when the Next Generation Energy Act (NGEA) was signed into law, which mandated that 25 percent of the state’s electricity come from "renewable" energy sources by 2025.
These mandates, along with generous federal tax subsidies and monopoly utilities seeking to maximize their government-approved profits by building new infrastructure, led to a building boom in wind turbines and solar panels. From 2007 through 2021, Minnesota built thousands of wind turbines totaling 3,555 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity, and 1,093.5 MW of solar capacity en route to meeting the mandates in 2020, five years ahead of schedule.
However, many of the turbines built to comply with the 25 percent mandate are already being refurbished or “repowered,” long before the end of their supposed 25-year useful lives. In fact, one of these wind facilities, the Nobles wind farm, has already been repowered after just 12 years in service.
But why was Nobles refurbished more than a decade before the end of its useful life at a cost of $240 million? The official reason provided by Xcel Energy for repowering Nobles was to spur economic activity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and extend the retirement date of the facility from the year 2035 to 2045.
This story makes for good newspaper headlines, but the data tell a very different story. Digging deeper into the reasons surrounding Xcel’s decision to repower the Nobles facility illustrates how our state and federal energy policies are causing America’s energy decisions to grow increasingly irrational.
What is repowering and why does it occur?
To fully understand the depth and gravity of this situation and why it has a profound impact on energy policy moving forward, it’s helpful to take a closer look at what repowering is and why it is done.
Repowering is the process of retrofitting or replacing wind turbines in full (full repowering), or in part (partial repowering). Full repowering is the act of completely decommissioning smaller existing wind turbines at a facility and replacing them with larger, but typically fewer, wind turbines.
Partial repowering is the most common form of repowering, and it consists of replacing portions of old turbines, such as the gearbox, hub, main shaft, bearing assembly, rotor, and blades, while maintaining the original steel toners and concrete foundations.
New gearboxes can be needed because the bearings responsible for converting the relatively slow rotations of a turbine’s blades into the high speeds needed to generate electricity can develop cracks, reducing the wind turbine’s efficiency. Larger rotors and longer blades are frequently placed on the original steel towers to increase the wingspan of the wind tower, thus allowing it to access more wind energy and convert it to electricity.
All of these actions help increase the productivity of wind turbines, but the biggest reason that companies seek to repower wind turbines has nothing to do with how they perform, and everything to do with money. Repowering wind projects allows them to requalify for the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC), a lucrative federal subsidy that expires after the first 10 years of a project’s life.
It should come as no surprise, then, that data from the U.S. Department of Energy shows that the wind facilities repowered in 2021 ranged in age from 9 to 16 years old with the median age being 10 years. In essence, the lucrative federal subsidies paid to wind turbine operators are creating a perverse incentive to prematurely refurbish or replace wind projects long before the end of their useful lifetimes, including the Nobles wind project in Minnesota.
https://www.gridbrief.com/p/guest-feature-death-wind-farm
******************************************************A Belated Reckoning as Climate Act Costs Become Apparent
Four years after passage of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, NY state officials have finally begun to take a close look at the law’s consumer costs, and they don’t like what they see.
According to DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos, these costs could be “extraordinary,” such as a 62-cent increase per gallon of gasoline and an 80 percent increase in the price of natural gas, a devastating blow to the 60 percent of New York households that heat with gas.
Governor Hochul and state Senator Kevin Parker are scrambling to reduce those costs by changing how methane is accounted for under the Climate Act. The Act requires the use of a 20-year timeframe, while Hochul and Parker want to switch to the 100-year standard used by the federal government and 48 other states.
Under the 20-year time frame, each ton of methane emitted is calculated as equivalent to around 80 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), while on a 100-year basis, each ton of methane is equivalent to only about 25 tons of CO2. Understood this way, it’s easy to see that eliminating the equivalent of 80 tons of CO2 is more costly than eliminating only 20 tons worth.
And barring some other creative policymaking, these costs are likely to be passed onto consumers.
This belated recognition of the Climate Act’s consumer costs reflects the state’s failure from the beginning to seriously address how the law might affect New Yorkers’ wallets.
The Act was enacted in such a rush that neither the legislature nor then-Governor Andrew Cuomo bothered to produce any estimate of its fiscal and economic impacts, as the Empire Center pointed out during that process.
But they seem to have suspected the impacts would be substantial, because while the original draft of the bill required a scoping plan to be released by July 2022—just ahead of the legislative and gubernatorial elections—the final draft moved that deadline to the politically safer date of January 1, 2023.
A cost study may have been completed by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) under a promise by Cuomo to identify “the most rapid, cost-effective, and responsible pathway to reach 100 percent renewable energy statewide.” But when the Empire Center filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for this study, the agencies declined to provide it.
And when the Empire Center won an initial court order requiring the agencies to share the study, the agencies won on appeal by claiming that the study was not complete.
It’s uncertain whether this study ever was completed. And in March of this year NYSERDA again refused an Empire Center FOIL request for any internal cost-benefit analyses, despite an implicit admission that such a document exists.
An overall cost-benefit analysis was prepared by an outside consultant for the Climate Action Council as it worked on the Act’s Scoping Plan, but that study has many problems. Not least of those problems is that it was based on assumptions that were neither required by the Climate Act nor adopted by the Climate Action Council. That is to say, the policies assumed for that study are not necessarily those New York is actually implementing.
And when some members of the Council asked for a consumer cost analysis of the Act, co-chairs Seggos and Doreen Harris, President and CEO of NYSERDA, refused their request.
Now, at last, Seggos admits, “There hasn’t been a deep dive into costs . . . That’s what we are beginning to look at now.” But rather than acknowledge that they failed to do due diligence up front, the proposed change in accounting methods is argued as simply bringing the state into compliance with “internationally accepted best practices.”
However, Climate Action Council member and Cornell University climate expert Robert Howarth scoffs at the claim that a 100-year time frame is best practice. He argues that it is a scientifically archaic approach adopted when we had less understanding of methane’s heat-trapping potential. “The science since then,” he says, “has demonstrated that it severely under accounts for the climatic risk from methane emissions,” which have a much greater global warming potential than CO2.
Howarth has the better argument on which time frame is state of the art, but while countering climate change is one important value, the costs—both economic and political—of doing so are another. Even if the economic benefits ultimately outweigh the costs—a big if—people will feel the costs first and most immediately, which could create substantial political costs for the Hochul administration.
The administration, then, is finally coming to grips with the reality that while most New Yorkers support the Climate Act in the abstract, they also express a very limited willingness to pay for it. They have run headlong into the Iron Law of Climate Policy, which says that “when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time.”
Or as an op-ed penned by Seggos and Harris succinctly puts it, “Fighting climate change won’t work if people and businesses can’t afford it.”
But if the state had done its homework ahead of time—if it had analyzed the potential consumer costs before passing the law, or if the Climate Action Council had acted on its members’ request to do so—we could have had a more serious discussion about how to affordably reduce greenhouse gas emissions much earlier in this multi-year process.
https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/a-belated-reckoning-as-climate-act-costs-become-apparent/
***************************************************Australian scientists discover special crab to fix Great Barrier Reef coral destruction
The deadly starfish can devour up to 90 per cent of living coral tissue, and has contributed to an estimated 40 per cent of coral loss on the reef.
Scientists from the University of Queensland have now found a special species of crab which can eat the crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) before it reaches adulthood and begins feasting on the endangered coral habitat.
A team of biological scientists from the University of Queensland including researcher Amelia Desbiens, tested more than 100 species of crab, shrimp, worm, snail and small fish to see which creatures were potential COTS predators.
To their surprise, they discovered the red decorator crab had an impressive appetite for COTS. “You can’t imagine our excitement, we were beyond stoked,” Ms Desbiens said.
“We cast a wide net and to find such a voracious predator – each red decorator crab devoured more than five COTS per day while most other species barely ate a single one.
“It’s one of the best predators of COTS we’ve seen and could be a natural buffer against future outbreaks on the reef.”
Prior to the red decorator crab revelation, scientists held little knowledge of which COTS predators were most effective, with few animals able to eat adult COTS due to their ability to defend themselves with their toxic spines.
The new discovery is expected to help scientists rebalance the Great Barrier Reef’s natural predator ecosystem, with the crab able to effectively limit COTS mass-reproduction and population outbreaks.
“There’s already an extensive COTS culling program along the barrier reef and I can see this research fitting into the program ... which is really exciting,” Ms Desbiens said.
“The reef has already faced a lot of stress for climate induced issues, hopefully culling can provide a bit of relief from those other stresses.
“The next step is to look for the predators across other (reef) locations further than Heron Island and start searching for these crabs in places where the COTS outbreaks have been a real problem. Redirect our attention to more vulnerable areas.”
UQ senior research author Dr Kenny Wolfe agreed, saying scientists were now “on the right path” to addressing the COTS outbreaks along the severely damaged coral reef.
“We’d like to conduct broader surveys on the Great Barrier Reef across areas with and without outbreaks to evaluate whether the presence of this crab can help predict the chance of COTS gaining a foothold,” Dr Wolfe said.
“This preliminary study sets us on the right path to resolving the role naturally existing predators could play in controlling COTS outbreaks.”
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9 April, 2023
ESG Scores: The Problematic Grift
The Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement is being proactively challenged in the private sector, state legislatures, and in Congress.
What explains this? First, it won’t save the planet. Secondly, it’s political and hostile to conservative or independent views. And most troubling of all, its framework is antithetical to free market economics since it forces behaviors on the public.
ESG, unsurprisingly, has morphed into a pernicious ideology. Its reporting regime—specifically the scoring system— is similarly worthy of scrutiny since corporations reportedly pay upwards of $500,000 to attain good ESG scores.
The sustainability consultancy firm ERM issued a revealing report entitled Rate the Raters 2023: ESG Ratings at a Crossroads, exposing the industry’s controversial reporting practices.
As I noted on Independent Women’s Forum’s blog, publicly traded companies “spend an average of $220,000 and $480,000 annually to boost their ESG ratings compared to private companies (which pay between $220,000 and $480,000 annually). In contrast, investors spend an average of $175,00 to $360,000 annually to improve their standing.”
An August 2022 Stanford University study entitled “ESG Ratings: A Compass without Direction” found they are prone to vast shortcomings. The study concluded, “We find that while ESG rating providers may convey important insights into the nonfinancial impact of companies, significant shortcomings exist in their objectives, methodologies, and incentives which detract from the informativeness of their assessments.” The Wall Street Journal also stressed that ESG ratings, at best, are subjective opinions.
Are high ESG scores reflective of real-life behavior and practices? The evidence suggests the opposite is true. Before their respective collapses, both FTX and Silicon Valley Bank –coincidentally enough– boasted about high marks on sustainability and equity. The former even garnered a higher rating on factors like leadership and governance compared to oil giant Exxon Mobil. And three nations - Ghana, Sri Lanka, and the Netherlands - boasting near-perfect ESG scores collapsed or were on the verge of going under after adopting green bonds and banning fertilizer—policies aligned with the “E” prong.
Recently, ESG reporting has manifested in other ways, like monitoring biodiversity impact and even rating chocolate companies.
During the 15th annual United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal, Canada, last December, signatories agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework to advance a global, whole government policy to conserve 30% of “waters” and 30% of “lands” by 2030. (Biden’s “America the Beautiful” initiative mirrors the U.N.’s plan with its own 30-by-30 initiative.) Contained in the agreement is a call to action for corporations to start tracking biodiversity impact as they do carbon emissions.
Naturally, these guidelines were devised by the International Sustainability Standards Board and are aimed at supplementing existing climate disclosure frameworks already commonplace in ESG reporting.
Expanding disclosures to account for “ risks, dependencies and impacts” for biodiversity is arguably harder to track and extremely infeasible. Talk about an inconvenient truth.
ESG reporting is also coming for your favorite chocolate brands. An organization called Be Slavery Free is behind the hottest list out there, The Chocolate Scorecard, that rates “good eggs” and “rotten eggs” in the chocolate industry on sustainability. Their website says their team consists of “universities, consultants, and civil society groups engaging in transforming the chocolate industry.”
They score a company based on whether or not they align their business goals with the scorecard’s methodology. Metrics include “traceability and transparency,” “living income,” “deforestation and climate,” and “child and slave labor,” among those listed.
They deemed Walmart and General Mills their “cracked eggs” of 2023.
“We believe that all companies selling chocolate products should be able to provide the information requested in the survey,” the methodology paper said. “Consumers and investors have a right to be informed about the conditions under which chocolate is produced.”
Like other ESG scoring metrics, the report’s methodology is flawed and may ignore bad company behavior if they check the right boxes.
What’s the takeaway from ESG and its accompanying scores? These funds have a demonstrably low return on investment, while ESG reporting firms similarly suffer credibility problems. As the aforementioned Stanford study explains, “Unfortunately, it is rare for rating providers to offer concrete, systematic evidence to back up claims about their ratings.”
That isn’t stopping the Biden administration, however, from adopting its own policy on climate risk assessment by executive order.
Although the term has gotten so toxic, its proponents are urging people to use nice-sounding alternatives like “freedom to invest” and “responsible investing.” But as the Economist observed, it’s a deeply broken system steeped in sanctimoniousness.
ESG’s brand and scoring system is rightly being scrutinized by business people and a growing number of bipartisan lawmakers. Let’s hope more come out against it.
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Energy chinks in America's armor
In a rapidly changing world stage, America’s obsession with climate change, Net Zero emissions, and eradicating fossil fuel products, while transitioning to just electricity from renewables that manufacture nothing for humanity, are exposing chinks in our national security armor.
Voters, policy makers, and legislators need to focus on what that is doing to our military, and for our military preparedness, our national security, and our ability to prevent nuclear war.
From the shores of California’s 4th largest economy in the world these are a few chinks in its armor that expose obvious national security concerns for America:
China dominates the rare earths market used in advanced commercial and military technology, and net-zero emissions goals in wealthy developed countries.
The mining in China, Africa, and Brazil for the exotic minerals and metals required for wealthy countries to achieve their net-zero emission goals controls the earths most precious exotic minerals and metals. Those materials support wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries.
With in-state refinery closures, two of which occurring under Newsom’s watch, California can look toward Asia’s 88 new refineries for manufactured oil derivatives that are the basis of most every product being used by mankind, as well as the manufactured fuels used by every transportation infrastructure, and the military.
California is the only state in contiguous America that imports most of its crude oil demands for the state, from foreign countries. That dependence, via maritime transportation from foreign nations for the state’s crude oil energy demands, has increased imported crude oil from 5 percent in 1992 to almost 60 percent today of total consumption.
Total California imports from foreign countries were more than double that of exports from California ports, with China being the number one “trading partner”.
How is it possible that the Californian economy, and America, has allowed itself to become so dependent on authoritarian countries like China, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia over the 30 years since the end of the Cold War? The weaponization of energy by China and Russia have been extensively discussed in the three books co-authored by Ronald Stein and Todd Royal, including the 2022 Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations - Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy.
Today, the lion’s share of raw materials for wind turbines, solar panels, continue to come from China, and China-invested or China-run African, Asian and Latin American mines that are notorious for child labor, horrendous working conditions, and virtually no concern for the environment or human lives.
Even though America has bounteous oil, gas, and coal at home we have made most American mineralized and mining areas off limits – and the administration has rejected almost every proposed mining project it’s seen. America lacks the critical materials that go into wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and weapons only because the lack of environmental regulations and labor laws in foreign countries make these materials very cost effective to just import, rather than produce them at home.
Our government leaders believe that zero emissions at any cost is more important than the environmental and humanity abuses that support “clean” energy. Despite the Biden administration’s declaration that EV battery materials from China may be tainted by child labor, made with materials known to be produced with child or forced labor, America remains supportive of exploiting those in developing countries that support the “green” movement of wealthy countries.
President Joe Biden and California’s Governor Newsom continue to support subsidies to procure EV’s and build more wind and solar, when those subsidies are providing financial incentives to the developing countries mining for those “green” materials, that promotes further exploitations of poor people in developing countries.
I personally thought that Biden and Newsom had higher moral and ethical standards that would stop them from financially encouraging the exploitation of the poor in developing countries
Biden has done an excellent job of relinquishing “CONTROL” for the “green” materials to China and is actively relinquishing “CONTROL” of the crude oil supply to OPEC and Russia! Unbeknownst to President Joe Biden, is that China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are great War historians of WWI and WWII, and both know that the countries that controls the minerals, crude oil, and natural gas, controls the world!
California and Federal subsidy incentives and mandates to dismantle our proven energy and transportation infrastructures are unrealistic, and reckless as they bet our entire economic and national security on net-zero energy and transportation technologies that have no track record of working at the scale of a city, state or nation,.
Reliance on our adversaries, while the push for renewables for “just electricity”, that only generate electricity but cannot manufacture any products for the 8 billion on this planet, may be popular in politics, it is problematic in practice. That reliance on foreign sources is highly detrimental to our national security, economy and very existence.
American policies and practices that undermine hydrocarbons as a fuel source also destroy the production, availability and affordability of more than 6,000 fossil fuel derivative products essential to health, life and livelihood such as medicines, medical equipment, fertilizers, asphalt, wax, ink, clothing, recreation equipment, water pipes, antifreeze, dyes, paint, enamel, beauty products, contact lenses, telephones, sporting equipment, tires, rubbing alcohol, and nearly everything “synthetic”.
An absurd American government belief is that last year’s Inflation Reduction Act gave America’s renewable-energy industry a long, green signal.
Low carbon energy, i.e., renewables and fusion, only generate electricity, but wind, solar, and nuclear manufacture nothing for humanity.
Fossil fuels, on the other hand, manufacture everything for the 8 billion on this planet, i.e., products, and transportation fuels.
In fact, all the parts and components for wind, solar, and nuclear are made with the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil! Thus, ridding the world of oil will eliminate wind, solar, and nuclear!
The oil, gas, and raw material suppliers from Russia and China could well become the globally dominant force in the world over a fossil fuel-disarming America and West. God help America!
https://www.cfact.org/2023/04/06/energy-chinks-in-americas-armor/
***********************************************National Science Teaching Assn rejects climate debate
As we reported in our last message to you, the CO2 Coalition was removed from our purchased booth at the NSTA's National Conference on Science Education. If you did not see our last newsletter and you are just learning of this, we were thrown out for publicizing their anti-science position on the teaching of climate change.
CO2 Coalition Director, and Education Committee Chair, Gordon Fulks, Ph.D., succinctly penned this letter to the National Science Teaching Association Leadership: Dr. Erika Shugart, Executive Director; Dr. Eric Pyle, Retiring President; Dr. Elizabeth Mulkerrin, President; and Dr. Julie Luft, President-elect National Science Teaching Association, Arlington, VA, USA
Dear Drs. Shugart, Pyle, Mulkerrin and Luft:
I am the author of most of the CO2 Coalition's publications that your Chief Operating Officer, Mr. Ryan Foley, demanded we cease distributing at your conference in Atlanta last month. My question is simple: WHY? We paid for the exhibitor space that we utilized and were welcomed by many of your members.
What was so egregious about "Once Upon a Time," "Simon: The Solar-Powered Cat," and "The Magic Mirror" to justify such an intolerant response?
These stories were written by a Ph.D. astrophysicist, namely someone with the credentials to tackle such tasks. They are beautifully illustrated by a world-class Brazilian artist who lives near the largest city in the Southern Hemisphere, Sao Paulo.
The stories were produced by a remarkable team of real scientists, most with Ph.D.s. Mr. Foley met some of our team, including Dr. Rafaella Nascimento, a Brazilian with a Ph.D. in Chemistry who runs her own business in Houston. And Mr. Foley talked with Dr. Sharon Camp, a Ph.D. Chemist who taught advanced chemistry in Atlanta high schools for many years. Both are volunteers.
Mr. Foley ordered the Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition, Gregory Wrightstone, a man with a Master of Science in geology, to leave the building. When Mr. Wrightstone tried to explain that we were merely supporting the Scientific Method by emphasizing evidence over doctrine, Mr. Foley was adamant that our people had to leave.
Perhaps Mr. Foley was unhappy that we were also distributing a detailed scientific explanation of why we disagree with the National Science Teaching Association's policy supporting climate hysteria. Science is never about policy statements from organizations. It is about dialogue between properly credentialed scientists who can critique the available evidence. Amateurs can play a role, but only if they are sufficiently knowledgeable.
I was surprised to learn that Mr. Ryan Foley has no academic background in the sciences or in education, meaning that he should not be involved in passing judgments on real scientists with strong credentials.
Does he have ANY understanding that the Scientific Method dates from the 1660s, when the newly formed British Royal Society took as its motto “Nullius in verba,” meaning “Take nobody's word for it?” That expressed the determination of the Fellows to avoid the domination of authority and to make decisions based on facts derived from experiments.
This is the very foundation of science that all school children should understand and appreciate.
I am the Chairman of our Education Committee that edits and approves all the materials that we publish for children. All of our committee members have backgrounds in science, except for one who is an emeritus professor of economics. Most have Ph.D.s, two are members of the US National Academy of Sciences, several are Fellows of multiple scientific societies. One has been nominated for a Nobel Prize. Most are volunteers, and some are even donors.
This is not to say that we are necessarily correct about everything. But it does say that we have far better qualifications to address scientific topics than someone without a scientific background.
If Mr. Foley had any legitimate reason to question the publications we were distributing, he should have called in real scientists with real expertise to engage us in a constructive dialogue that would have set a good example for the teachers at your conference. They were overwhelmingly supportive of our efforts to return the discussion of climate to something scientific.
Science thrives on constructive debate but dies when non-scientists try to impose their political beliefs.
At the very least, you owe us a public apology for the bad behavior of one of your executives. You should redirect your efforts toward teaching children how to think like a scientist, NOT what to think.
Children (and their teachers) need to learn how science really works. It is evidence-based, NOT politically or religiously based. It has everything to do with consensus, in the sense that every scientific advance has come from a real scientist challenging “the consensus.” Galileo challenged the religious notion that there were only seven wanderers in the sky from which we get the seven days of the week. He observed some of the moons of Jupiter through his telescope.
We need to teach children to challenge paradigms that simply do not stand up to scrutiny.
Thank you for giving this matter your attention.
Sincerely yours,
Gordon J. Fulks, (Ph.D. Physics, University of Chicago)
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Children-should-be-taught-how-to-think--NOT-what-to-think.html
********************************************The world’s flattest batteries
The sheer stupidity of thinking that batteries can replace electricity generators
Kites are thought to have originated in China over two thousand years ago. Since the original incarnations, kites have evolved into a low-cost fun activity enjoyed by kids and adults alike. The link between ancient kites and modern batteries is tenuous but tangible – kites and renewables are equally useless on calm nights, but batteries are meant to change that for renewables.
In order to dissect the ideological policies forcing renewables and their batteries into the grid, it is necessary to test whether batteries are adequate for the task of ‘firming’. With a relatively small network occasionally isolated from the rest of the grid and plenty of hype around large batteries, South Australia is a good place to start.
Could batteries meet the electricity demands of South Australia’s slumbering 1.5 million population overnight?
Despite the lamentations of the renewable lobby and its enablers, we must consider specific periods for a simple reason – electricity is not consumed or generated in averages.
We could take the demand over a twelve-month period, find the average per day, and crow about the small amount of storage required to keep the lights on, but that would be dishonest. No design – be it bridges, boats, pipes or electricity – ever considers averages except in the most cursory terms. The extremes are the only parameters that matter. Will it fall down, will it sink, will it rupture, will it meet demand?
OpenNEM’s excellent visualisation provides near real-time visibility of supply and demand on the grid. One can select the entire NEM, or a preferred state, and analyse the types of generators that are meeting electricity demand.
Accordingly, it can be shown that South Australia’s peak summer electrical demand is around 3,000 MW, while in the comfortable shoulder months, peak demand barely nudges above 1,500 MW.
Sun and wind were absent from South Australia during the 8 hours of midnight to 8am on Tuesday March 28, 2023. Electricity demand was entirely supplied by local gas-fired generators and imports from neighbouring Victoria – itself mostly powered by three large lignite burning power stations.
In this particular 8-hour period, the state consumed 11,000 MWh of electricity with a peak of 1,553 MW. Imports from Victoria totalled 4,600 MWh, with local gas power contributing 6,300 MWh, meaning 99 per cent of electricity demand could not be met by renewables.
Could batteries have replaced 10,900 MWh of gas and imports in this period?
Batteries require a minimum of two numbers to enable basic comparisons. The first is peak instantaneous output (MW), a measure of how fast the battery can discharge. The second is the energy stored (MWh), a measure of how long it can discharge. The world’s largest battery can be found in Moss Landing, California at 400 MW / 1,600 MWh.
To calculate how many batteries are required to meet the instantaneous grid demand, we divide 1,553 MW by the peak output of the world’s biggest 400 MW battery.
1,553 / 400 = 3.88 of the world’s biggest batteries
You can’t have a portion of a big battery. Well you sort of can, but this is a quick model so we will round up to an even four batteries with 1,600 MW combined output – about 50 MW above our peak demand.
Ok, now let’s check the other number, the storage capacity in MWh.
Multiply the number of batteries by their individual MWh number to get the total MWh available from all four batteries.
4 x 1,600 MWh = 6,400 MWh
That’s significantly less than the 10,900 MWh needed.
We need to add more batteries to exceed the storage threshold, or the batteries will run out of juice before the 8 hours are up. This takes us up to six batteries. Six batteries will only supply 9,600 MWh at their combined peak output of 2,400 MW. However, a battery lasts longer if its output is below maximum, so six batteries will do the trick here.
We have established that six of the world’s biggest batteries can get sleeping South Australians through 8-hours of no wind and no sun.
Now let’s extend our thinking to the periods just outside the 8 hours. Calculations show that for those batteries to last the full 8 hours, they needed to be at least 70 per cent charged beforehand.
In the hours from 8am to 10am six of the world’s flattest batteries aren’t looking so great to morning commuters. Commuters who may take for granted that the biggest and most complex machine in the state will provide electricity for their barista-made coffees, elevators up to open plan offices, computers and lights, servers and zip boilers, printers and air-conditioning, coffee makers and fire detection systems.
It took local gas and imported coal to meet almost 90 per cent of electricity demand from 8am to 10am. There was no spare power to charge the flat batteries. In fact, across the entire day the ‘spare’ power available to charge batteries (identified as exports to Victoria) totalled just 2,000 MWh.
There is one last sting in the battery tail. One might be tempted to assume all the 2,000 MWh applied to the battery gets stored in the battery, but that’s not how these things work. Energy losses means a battery only stores about 90 per cent of the energy applied, which brings us down to 1,800 MWh. Less than 20 per cent of a full charge, lasting about 1 hour at the original conditions.
Better hope for some wind the next night, or the world’s flattest batteries won’t be much help.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-worlds-flattest-batteries/
***************************************7 April, 2023
Concentrated solar power?
This idea has always been attractive and exciting but it has been around now for long enough for us to assess its practicality. And the one certain thing about it is that is trouble-prone and often fails. You can imagine how dicey anything is going to be that relies on moving molten salt round at at 550 degrees C. The one thing it is good at is eating up goverment subsidies
The best-known such project is the Ivanpah installation in California. See below for some history of it:
http://jonjayray.com/short/ivanpah.html
Concentrated solar power (CSP) uses mirrors to focus heat from the Sun to drive a steam turbine and generate electricity.
While CSP was once the great hope for replacing coal and gas-fired generation, it's now generally considered to have been eclipsed by cheaper forms of renewable generation, like solar panels and wind turbines.
Recently, however, it's been making a quiet comeback.
The reason for this boils down to three words that describe one of the major challenges of decarbonising the grid: overnight energy storage.
The CSIRO's Renewable Energy Storage Roadmap, released last week, predicts that by 2050, CSP will be the cheapest way to store energy for 8–24 hours.
Developing this "medium-duration" storage is a necessary step to switching off coal- and gas-fired generators that produce most of the power we use at night.
For this reason, CSP projects are starting to gather momentum.
The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) recently approved $65 million in funding for a Sydney-based company, Vast Solar, to build the country's first commercial-scale CSP plant in Port Augusta, South Australia.
So how does CSP work?
And what role will CSP play in a net-zero Australia?
A technology that once rivalled solar panels
The idea of CSP is so simple that the technology hasn't changed much in decades.
Italy built the first CSP plant in 1968, and California installed the first commercial-scale array in 1981.
At the time, solar panels were expensive and mostly used in consumer electronics, whereas CSP relied on familiar technologies, such as steam turbines.
CSP plants also looked impressive: The popular "power tower" design featured a circular field of thousands of mirrors, focusing their light on the crown of a central tower, which in some cases soared taller than 200 metres.
But then, more efficient panels and larger factories drove down the price of photovoltaics (PV), while CSP plants ran into problems with leaking fluids and dirty mirrors.
In 2019, South Australia scrapped a $650 million project to build Australia's first commercial-scale CSP after the company behind the project revealed it could not raise funding.
"It's been a bit of a tale of woe in Australia," said Keith Lovegrove, director of the Australian Solar Thermal Energy Association. "We've actually managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory a couple of times."
As of 2021, the global installed capacity of CSP was 6.8 gigawatts, which was many hundreds of times less than the figure for photovoltaics.
But CSP is not dead. Spain, Morocco, South Africa, Israel and other countries are using CSP in their grids, while China has dozens of projects underway.
"China is the most active place at this, at this very moment," Dr Lovegrove said.
CSP cannot generate daytime electricity as cheaply as solar PV, but it has one advantage: built-in storage.
The heat from the Sun is stored in a medium such as molten salt. When the Sun goes down, this stored heat can be tapped to drive the turbine and generate electricity.
This combination of generation and storage makes CSP "dispatchable", meaning the power can be sent to the grid when it's needed. "The whole point about CSP is that it's dispatchable renewable generation," Dr Lovegrove said.
"It's generation you can have when you need it at night, or peak periods. It comes at a higher price because it's got this added value and complexity."
*********************************************
Germans Overwhelmingly Fed Up With Move To Green Energies As Massive Costs Loom
Most Germans used to be enthusiastic supporters of the country’s Energiewende (transition to renewable energies), especially in the early days when they were brazenly misled about the endeavor’s humungous costs and technical limitations.
Those days are gone.
As the government gears up to try to pass legislation that would force most homeowners to carry out extensive renovation to their homes and upgrades to their heating systems, the Energiewende is suddenly no longer looking like a bargain and is no longer welcome by the vast majority of Germans, according to a Forsa survey. The sun and wind don’t deliver energy for free after all.
The current Forsa survey on the subject of the transition to green energies gives the German government a catastrophic report card. Almost 90 percent of Germans no longer believe in the so-called energy transition – a historically low figure. In a similar survey in 2011, almost 40 percent still hoped for its success. Among the few who are convinced is Chancellor Scholz. ‘We can and will succeed in the energy transition,’ he recently announced in Berlin.
German industry, on the other hand, is less confident, warning of a total exodus of the manufacturing sector due to the expected electricity shortage and enormous energy prices.”
AUF 1 reports here at its website that “only ten percent still believe that Germany’s energy needs can indeed be covered by sun and wind energy”.
****************************************************
Seize property to build wind and solar farms, says JP Morgan chief
The chief executive of JP Morgan has suggested that governments should seize private land to build wind and solar farms in order to meet net zero targets.
Jamie Dimon, the longstanding boss of the Wall Street titan who donates to the Democratic Party, said green energy projects must be fast-tracked as the window for averting the most costly impacts of global climate change is closing.
In his annual shareholder letter, Mr Dimon said: “Permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow investment to be done in any kind of timely way.
“We may even need to evoke eminent domain – we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives.”
Eminent domain is when a government or state agency carries out a compulsory purchase of private property for public use and compensates the asset holder.
The proposal is unusual, especially coming from the longest-serving chief executive of a Wall Street bank, and could stir controversy as states in the US seek to crackdown on seizure orders.
In Iowa, state legislators on Monday passed a bill that aims to protect private property owners from eminent domain use by carbon pipeline companies.
Mr Dimon said the war in Ukraine was redefining the way countries and companies plan for energy security.
He added: “The need to provide energy affordably and reliably for today, as well as make the necessary investments to decarbonise for tomorrow, underscores the inextricable links between economic growth, energy security and climate change. We need to do more, and we need to do so immediately.
“To expedite progress, governments, businesses and non-governmental organisations need to align across a series of practical policy changes that comprehensively address fundamental issues that are holding us back.
“Massive global investment in clean energy technologies must be done and must continue to grow year-over-year.”
In the UK, reforms to Solvency 2 rules are expected to unleash a wave of investment in renewable energy projects after insurers and pension funds complained that EU-era regulations obstructed their ability to invest in infrastructure.
Mr Dimon’s comments also come as tensions between investors grow about how to tackle climate change.
In December, Vanguard, the world’s second largest asset manager, pulled out of Mark Carney’s global climate change alliance, saying the group’s full-blooded commitment to tackling climate change resulted “in confusion about the views of individual investment firms”.
Mr Dimon said: “Polarisation, paralysis and basic lack of analysis cannot keep us from addressing one of the most complex challenges of our time. Diverse stakeholders need to come together, seeking the best answers through engagement around our common interest.
“Bolstering growth must go hand in hand with both securing an energy future and meeting science-based climate targets for future generations.”
The banking chief also hit out against regulators in the wake of the banking crisis last month triggered by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).
He said the collapse of SVB and the government-engineered takeover of Credit Suisse by its biggest rival risked undermining confidence in the sector.
He added: “Ironically, banks were incented to own very safe government securities because they were considered highly liquid by regulators and carried very low capital requirements.”
Mr Dimon also warned regulators against tightening rules for lenders following the recent market turmoil.
He said: “It is extremely important that we avoid knee-jerk, whack-a-mole or politically motivated responses that often result in achieving the opposite of what people intended.
“Now is the time to deeply think through and coordinate complex regulations to accomplish the goals we want, eliminating costly inefficiencies and contradictory policies.
“Very often, rules are put in place in one part of the framework without appreciating their consequences in combination with other regulations.”
***********************************************
British Consumers face huge price rises for green power
Renewable energy operators have just been awarded huge prices rises, putting further pressure on hard-pressed consumers.
Generators in the Contracts for Difference subsidy scheme get an annual increase in the guaranteed ‘strike prices’ they receive for their output.
This year, many have received price rises of more than 10%. For example, the huge Hornsea 1 offshore windfarm saw an 11% price increase, which will boost its revenue by nearly £100 million per year.(1) Hornsea 2, due to come on stream in 2024, had a price rise of 14%.
With market prices for electricity now below £100 per megawatt hour, several windfarms have strike prices worth £209. There are several tidal power stations in planning which have been promised higher prices still. The Drax biomass power station has seen a 12% increase to £142.
Commenting on the news, Net Zero Watch’s deputy director Andrew Montford said:
"For years, ministers and civil servants have been telling the public that renewables are cheap. Make no mistake, they have been engaged in a cynical deception of the British public.”
***************************************
6 April, 2023
States and companies compete for billions to make hydrogen
This is all theory. The need to keep hydrogen in a pressure vessel is just one factor that will make it unaffordably expensive
The Biden administration is turning to hydrogen as an energy source for vehicles, manufacturing and generating electricity.
It's offering $8 billion to entice the nation’s industries, engineers and planners to figure out how to produce and deliver clean hydrogen. States and businesses are making final pitches Friday as they compete for a new program that will create regional networks, or “hubs,” of hydrogen producers, consumers and infrastructure. The aim is to accelerate the availability and use of the colorless, odorless gas that already powers some vehicles and trains.
How can enough hydrogen be produced to meet demand — in ways that don’t worsen global warming? And how can it be moved efficiently to where users can get it? Such questions will be tackled by the hubs.
Nearly every state has joined at least one proposed hub and many are working together, hoping to reap the economic development and jobs they would bring. The governors of Arkansas, Louisiana and Oklahoma came up with the “HALO Hydrogen Hub” to compete for funding, for example.
Big fossil fuel companies like Chevron and EQT Corporation, renewable energy developers such as Obsidian, and researchers in university and government labs are involved, too.
But only a select few will receive billions in federal funding.
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/states-companies-compete-billions-make-hydrogen-98386065
***************************************************China is winning the climate policy game
Search “strategy games” on the internet and you will find a seemingly endless list of computer games in which participants seek to win military or geopolitical competitions through careful planning, organization of forces, implementation of tactics to attain long-term advantage and, often, confusion of adversaries. The Rand Corporation and other U.S. think tanks have sometimes used similar gaming models to assess China’s efforts to supplant the United States as the world’s preeminent economic and military power.
What is seldom featured in such analysis, however, is China’s management of its global image as a “climate leader.” In 2020, President Xi Jinping promised China’s emissions would peak before 2030 and the country would reach carbon neutrality by 2060. China does lead the world in power generation from wind turbines and solar panels and it is the fastest-growing market for all-electric cars. Net-zero activists often praise the “China model” while condemning countries like Canada.
But activists’ assessments of China seldom focus on its additions to its coal-fired electricity generation capacity. Coal is the most carbon-intensive energy source, and China is by far the largest coal-consuming country, accounting for fully 53 per cent of global demand. China’s coal consumption increased from five billion barrels of oil equivalent (BBOE) in 2000 to 14 billion in 2021, almost tripling in two decades.
In 2022, according to Bloomberg Business Review local governments in China permitted 106 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity, about four times more than in 2021 and the equivalent of two large coal-fired plants per week. For comparison, 106 gigawatts is over 70 per cent of Canada’s annual electricity generation from all sources. That may be worth repeating: in 2022 China’s permitted increase in its generation capacity from coal was equal to 70 per cent of Canada’s electricity consumption from all sources.
All the approved capacity is needed to meet large increases in demand. Last summer a severe heat wave led to record levels of demand in a country in which rising average incomes have brought greatly increased use of air conditioning. China also needs affordable and reliable energy to power its industrial facilities, as it is still the worlds’ largest manufacturer. Renewables will play a role, but Chinese officials have indicated that coal-fired generation offers critical baseline capacity to ensure the stability of the power grid and minimize blackout risks.
The facilities China is constructing are state-of-the-art, high-efficiency plants designed to avoid most of the air-contaminant emissions historically associated with burning coal. With proper maintenance, they should have operating lives of 40 to 60 years or more. It is highly unlikely that China would choose to spend many billions of dollars building such plants with the intention of shutting them down by 2050, just 27 years from now. Whatever they may commit to at international conferences, China’s leaders are clearly placing both energy security and prosperity ahead of emissions-reduction goals.
That is not the case in Canada and several other OECD countries. This county is steadily phasing out coal-fired power generation. The centrepiece of federal government climate policy is a carbon tax of $50 per tonne in provinces subject to the federal regime. That rate is scheduled to rise to $170 per tonne by 2030, which is placing Canadian firms at a competitive disadvantage compared to firms in countries that have either no or very low carbon taxes. The few regions of China that impose a carbon tax use an emissions trading system. According to the World Bank, the most recent permit price was just $US9.20 per tonne. No wonder industries are fleeing Canada for lower-cost jurisdictions, taking their investments, jobs and emissions with them.
At COP 27, the UN climate conference held last year in Egypt, the central subject of debate was how much the wealthier countries should commit to pay to subsidize the efforts of developing countries to mitigate and adapt to climate change, as well as to cover the “loss and damages” they have incurred due to weather events allegedly caused by industrialized countries’ historic emissions. The Group of 77 developing countries demanded at least $1.3 trillion per year from 2025 to 2030, and more thereafter. Canada has committed to $5.3 billion over five years. China, despite its high emissions and immense economy, is not included in the list of countries that are expected to pay. In fact, it may even qualify as a recipient.
In many parts of the world, global climate policy is not yet perceived as a competitive game in pursuit of long-term strategic advantage — which is one reason that so far China is winning it.
*******************************************
The EU's Net Zero plan is in tatters - and not a moment too soon
If anyone had any lingering doubts that the EU is run by German car-makers (in association with French farmers), they will surely have been dispelled by the news that the bloc is to backtrack on its plan to ban combustion engines from new vehicles by 2035. While petrol and diesel cars will still be banned, carbon neutral synthetic "e-fuels" will be permitted. While bringing the EU's green juggernaut to a skidding halt may have required some very powerful lobbying, it is also the right decision.
Proposed bans on petrol and diesel cars in the EU and in Britain were put in place without any proper consideration as to whether electric cars were capable of replacing them. It was simply assumed that improvements in technology would solve the issues of range, ease of recharging, the cost of buying electric cars and their over-reliance on rare metals such as cobalt – which are extracted in troubled parts of the world. Yet prices of electric cars – not to mention the electricity to run them – have remained stubbornly high. Moreover, their manufacture can involve rather more emissions than a petrol or diesel equivalent.
Some are already trying to play down the significance of the EU’s decision, arguing that "e-fuels" will be so expensive that internal combustion engines will become a high-end, niche product. Yet two decades ago, long before we had a net zero target, drivers in Wales found to their pleasure (and to the annoyance of the then HM Customs and Excise) that an ordinary diesel engine could run quite happily on waste oil from chip shops. Since then, the government has made petrol with a 10 per cent renewable ethanol component the British standard, so most of us are already running our cars partly on non-fossil fuels.
As for synthetic fuels made from carbon dioxide and hydrogen produced by electrolysis of water, the German Aerospace Centre estimates such fuels could be made for aviation purposes using existing technology for around 2.26 Euros (£2 per litre). That is expensive – it currently costs around 50 pence to produce a litre of unleaded, the rest being tax and distribution costs – but it is not much higher than recent at-pump prices. The EU’s change of heart means that the car industry can now work developing what could be the ideal compromise: plug-in vehicles which could run 50 miles or so in pure electric mode, but which have a small engine – powered by synthetic fuel – to keep the battery charged on longer trips.
But what will Britain do? The government is showing no signs that its own ban on petrol and diesel cars will not go ahead as planned – which would mean no new pure petrol and diesels sold after 2030, and no hybrids from 2035. This is foolish, and the government will be forced to reconsider. No manufacturer is going to make cars exclusively with the UK market in mind, so if the internal combustion engine does remain a standard product in Europe and elsewhere in the world, UK motorists are going to find themselves restricted to a handful of pure – and expensive – electric models. What remains of our car industry will be put under even greater pressure.
If the electric car makers do improve and bring down the cost of their product, then that's great – most of us will want to drive them. But in keeping options open for internal combustion engines the EU, for once, has done something sensible that Britain should emulate.
***************************************************
Energy security is trumping climate concerns
On TikTok, a campaign to deny ConocoPhillips permission to launch an oil project in Alaska recently went viral. Look up the hashtag #StopWillow and the search results are full of protests warning of the potential damage the project could wreak. One video, which has been liked 3.4mn times, declares that approval would be “game over” for the planet.
As impassioned as the campaign was, it did not work: Joe Biden approved the drilling on March 13. The president had given ConocoPhillips almost everything it wanted, said Elise Joshi in one TikTok clip. “Biden just slapped young people in the face.”
Willow isn’t huge: Conoco says the $8bn project will produce 180,000 barrels a day of oil, or about 1.5 per cent of current US supply. Since Biden entered office, New Mexico’s shale wells alone have added more than 700,000 b/d. Still, approval came just days before the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned, again, of the catastrophe facing the world from existing fossil fuel infrastructure, let alone new projects that will pump for decades.
And the shift from Biden is telling. Fossil fuel interests are on the rise again. Biden entered office promising to ban new fracking and last year signed sweeping clean energy legislation into law. Now his administration promotes liquefied natural gas exports and boasts that US oil output will soon reach record highs.
European countries such as Germany that once pledged to stop funding fossil fuel projects in the poor world last year fired up their own coal plants and now seek to water down EU climate rules.
It marks a reversal from three years ago, when the pandemic shattered global fossil fuel demand, devastated Big Oil balance sheets and prompted claims that the decarbonisation era had begun. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is one reason for the turn. It has been a gift for the oil industry, pushing up prices and delivering record profits for producers.
For ExxonMobil and Chevron, the cash windfall has vindicated their dogged allegiance to a model of ever-rising fossil fuel output. For supermajor BP, the cash gusher has justified another decision to slow its retreat from oil and gas. Russia’s invasion has also changed the narrative. The stages at Davos still ring with “net zero” platitudes, but after last year’s energy crisis politicians’ concern is “energy security” — code for cheap fuel and stable supplies.
That’s why European governments ramped up subsidies for energy consumers last year and the White House released oil from strategic stockpiles while badgering shale companies to frack more wells. “We’re in the middle of a war,” US energy secretary Jennifer Granholm told the Financial Times in March. “We want to continue to see that increase in production even as we accelerate towards clean [energy] . . . We don’t want the prices to go up at the pump.”
Europe’s energy anxieties have been an especially big win for American fossil fuel exporters. “The key to energy security is American energy — and specifically US LNG,” Toby Rice, head of EQT, the US’s biggest gas producer, told Houston’s recent CERAWeek energy conference. Now, with Biden’s backing, another wave of LNG export capacity is under construction on the US Gulf Coast.
But the other reason that fossil fuel producers are gaining momentum again is that the energy transition is proving more fraught than some strategists expected.
The environmental, social, and governance movement was supposed to accelerate the transition by making capital cheap for clean energy projects, while deterring investment in more fossil fuel production.
Oil and gas capital spending has indeed fallen and many fund managers have left the sector for good. Wood Mackenzie reckons annual global upstream spending was $491bn last year, less than half the rate of investment from a decade ago. This level of upstream spending would be adequate if the world’s fossil fuel consumption was falling at the pace some models say is necessary to meet climate goals.
The problem is that consumers are not ditching hydrocarbons as quickly as those models would like. Fossil fuel consumption is soaring. Oil demand will break records again this year.
Renewable alternatives are rising fast but still supply less than 10 per cent of global energy. Annual spending on them is running at barely a quarter the $5tn needed to displace hydrocarbons, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
This dearth of capital amounts to “a self-inflicted train crash in slow motion”, according to Equinor’s chief economist Eirik Wærness. It implies higher demand and higher prices for oil and gas for longer. It’s also why Biden didn’t #StopWillow. If consumers are to keep burning so much oil, is it better coming from Alaska or Saudi Arabia?
https://www.ft.com/content/65d7d4d5-9aa5-466c-b686-796b2a6cf586
***************************************5 April, 2023
The National Audubon Society considers canceling itself
How thoroughly has diversity, equity and inclusion penetrated the sciences? “To the core!” at least if the recent travails of the National Audubon Society are any indication. For over two years, a woke storm has roiled the Society over whether it should purge its namesake, John James Audubon, from its title. After a year-long review, the Society’s Board of Directors recently announced its decision: Audubon’s name will stay.
The Society’s CEO, Elizabeth Gray, defended the decision on the sensible grounds that, for whatever his faults, Audubon remains a pivotal figure in the history of science in our once young republic. His legacy includes establishing ornithology as the burgeoning field that it is today, which draws both on professional experts and passionate amateurs. The board concluded that the Society’s mission, and ornithology in general, would best be served by keeping his name and the tradition it represents, while honestly acknowledging the man and who he was. This was accompanied by a promise to devote $25 million to the Society’s efforts to expand DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, to use the Society’s rendering). This has not mollified the cancel campaigners, of course. Threats to rename state affiliate chapters, to withhold results from the Society’s famed Christmas Bird Count, and other retaliatory measures remain hot topics on Twitter.
One might ask: isn’t this just a small quibble among prickly and persnickety birdwatchers, much ado about nothing? Perhaps. But sometimes small controversies can provide great insights because they allow more detailed scrutiny than would be possible with a larger problem.
The brief against Audubon includes the usual tropes. He owned slaves. He had doubts about the emancipation of slaves. He was a plagiarist and a fabulist. He harbored other impure thoughts. The counter-argument is also familiar: he was a man of his times (1785-1851). This idea, that one cannot judge people by future moral standards (was Audubon a transphobe?), and that we are all capable of making our own judgments on gleaning the good men do from the chaff they leave, carries no water for the cancel campaigners. To say it’s all or nothing is to miss the point: nothing can stand in the face of such absolutism.
So if Audubon is to be condemned as a fabulist, what is one to make of the writings of one of his most vocal critics?
J. Drew Lanham is a wildlife biologist at Clemson University, a passionate birder, and an ardent lover of nature. In short, he is precisely the kind of person that the Audubon legacy has helped to foster. There is much about him to admire.
Yet Lanham is a prolific fabulist himself. He has the rare ability to peer into the souls of white people and perceive the cold cruelty that lurks within their hearts, just by looking at them. This remarkable ability transcends time itself, allowing him to expose the malevolence of Audubon. He goes into the field for a bird survey, expecting to be “hanged that day.” He helpfully notes the special rules that black ornithologists must follow to avoid being lynched (question: how many black ornithologists have been murdered in Lanham’s day, or ever?). Lanham laments that he rarely encounters other black birdwatchers in the field. I think I know why: he’s scaring the daylights out of them.
Turning to another critique: was Audubon a plagiarist? So says Matthew Halley. In an impressive bit of historiography, Halley argues that Audubon’s painting of the “Bird of Washington” (likely an immature bald eagle) was copied from another contemporary painter of birds. Yet Halley’s critique lacks important historical context that would allow us to make sense of it. For example, Halley asserts that Audubon “was not formally trained in science.” Here’s some context: the word “scientist” did not even come into usage until 1834, when Audubon would have been nearly fifty, and seven years after the first edition of Audubon’s The Birds of America was published.
And here’s more context: “science” in Audubon’s day was not a practice of set norms and procedures, as it has come to be today; it was more entrepreneurial. Where modern science draws on the public fisc to pay its bills, Audubon (who was not a wealthy man) had to sell himself to wealthy patrons. What he had to sell was his extraordinary paintings of birds.
Still more context: the concept of intellectual property only began to take shape in the early eighteenth century, and it has been in flux ever since, driven (as it always has been) by evolving technology. From the invention of the printing press to the era of digital cut-and-paste, the line dividing plagiarism from fair use has never been clear-cut, and it remains fuzzy to this day. In the era of ChatGPT, we may find very soon that the solid ground Halley and others think they are standing on will liquefy under their feet.
So when Audubon painted his Bird of Washington, was he plundering someone else’s intellectual property (plagiarism) or was it fair use (not plagiarism)? Or was Audubon simply an entrepreneurial hustler who beat out his rivals to emerge as the era’s preeminent cataloguer of the North American avifauna? In answering that question, context is vital. In the end, the charge that Audubon was a plagiarist is anchored to a pretty thin reed.
However, it is not evidence of perfidy that has been driving the “cancel Audubon” campaign, but a narrative: the ongoing danger facing the black ornithologist — “birding while black,” in Drew Lanham’s phrase. What of that narrrative: is “birding while black” real or just another fable?
The infamous “Central Park birdwatching incident” of May 2020 is revealing. To recap, it was an early morning encounter between Christian Cooper, a black man birdwatching in the Ramble section of the park, and Amy Cooper, a white woman walking her dog. Their encounter, part of which Christian Cooper caught on his phone, blew up into a sensational example of the post-George Floyd narrative of systemic racism, of a privileged white woman attacking a defenseless black man just minding his business.
The evidence for this is as flimsy as Drew Lanham’s imagined impending lynching. A closer look at the narrative reveals that Christian Cooper was the likely instigator of the incident, that he had a history of inciting such encounters, and that Amy Cooper was likely the convenient target of a simmering conflict, not between black and white, but between birders and dog-walkers using the park. Yet systemic white racism was the narrative everyone wanted, and so that was the narrative everyone got.
So we see the real problem with the “cancel Audubon” campaign: it does not rely on a cool evaluation of evidence, a sober weighing of the good versus the bad. Rather, it is driven by a ginned-up narrative of racism, a slow-motion mob action with its aim being discord, not amity; division, not unity; aggravation of white guilt and white masochism rather than looking to move on from a troubled past; a sordid mud-wrestle rather than the transcendent and beautiful — like a love of nature and the role that birds play in its cultivation.
This is the future that is already playing out for the Audubon Society. It is the future that looms before us all.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-national-audubon-society-considers-canceling-itself
***********************************************************The Case Against Electric Vehicles
Compared to an electric car, a combustion car is a primitive and complicated device. But the combustion car has a energy usage system that electric cars are unlikely ever to match
Electric vehicles are expensive. The average price of an electric vehicle is about $18,000 more than the average price of a gas vehicle, and profits have been elusive even at that price point.
If electric vehicles made significant environmental progress, that would be one thing. But they don’t. Electric vehicles are not “zero” emissions—they create more emissions than internal combustion engine vehicles when they are produced, and they also cause emissions when they are charged, usually by burning fossil fuels.
Mining for many of the materials needed for an electric vehicle battery is done nearly exclusively overseas and is dominated by China. America’s lone lithium mine is responsible for about 2% of the world’s annual supply. Traditional cars have never been cleaner: Even President Barack Obama’s EPA head noted they are 99% cleaner than they were just a few decades ago.
Not only will electric vehicle mandates cost us more at the dealership, but they will also destroy American jobs. By limiting choice and increasing costs, fewer people will buy cars, hurting auto manufacturers and dealers alike.
Auto mechanics, masters at prolonging the life of the internal combustion engine, will also be impacted. America’s farmers would be devastated since more than a third of the corn crop ultimately goes to biofuels.
And America’s oil and refining workers would face a heavy blow. That is a huge issue in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, since all three have major oil refineries and form the epicenter of the refining industry on the East Coast.
Before COVID-19, America was leading the world in oil and fuel production, and we had finally achieved what every president since Richard Nixon dreamed about: energy security. Manufacturing jobs like those found at auto plants and refineries support dozens of other jobs and are the foundation on which an economy can be built. The oil and natural gas industry supports over 700,000 jobs in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
Why destroy those jobs? Jobs are often impacted by technology, and if electric vehicles end up being a consumer’s choice, that is understandable and the price of progress. But if people want to continue buying internal combustion engine vehicles, these workers could continue to serve their neighbors and provide for their families for decades to come.
Thankfully, members of Congress—led by Pennsylvania Rep. John Joyce—recently proposed the Preserving Choice in Vehicle Purchases Act, which is intended to counter and restrict the potent effects of the California plan by protecting the rights and freedoms of individual consumers.
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey should not join California. Last month, the political polling and survey company Ragnar Research conducted a survey showing that a resounding 73% of Delaware voters opposed a statewide ban on gas-powered vehicles by 2035.
Supermajorities in Delaware understand that buying a car is highly personal and the second most important financial decision we make. Bureaucrats in distant capitals do not know your situation, and they should not dictate your choices.
Internal combustion engine vehicles offer superior range, convenience, and durability at an affordable price. The median internal combustion engine vehicle has a range of 403 miles compared with the median electric vehicle at 234 miles. Cold weather and using the heater can reduce that range by some 40%. That means more frequent stops for electric vehicles to charge, and they take much longer than filling up at the pump.
Delaware’s and New Jersey’s internal combustion engine vehicles ban will hurt consumers, farmers, workers, and our national security. It’s time to say no to California’s car ban—in Harrisburg, Dover, Trenton, Washington, D.C., and across the country.
https://www.heritage.org/government-regulation/commentary/the-case-against-electric-vehicles
**************************************************************Polish PM vows to fight 'pseudo-green' EU plan to ban petrol cars
Poland’s Prime Minister has vowed to do “anything” to win the fight against a “pseudo-green” European Union ban on petrol and diesel engines.
Brussels plans to outlaw the sale of new petrol and diesel engines from 2035 through a ban on tailpipe emissions as part of its net zero plans.
“The ban on the sale of combustion cars after 2035 is unacceptable for the government,” Mateusz Morawiecki said. “We will do anything to protect Polish families against another pseudo-green idea by rich countries and bureaucrats from Brussels.”
Mr Morawiecki said that his Law and Justice party supported climate action in Poland.
But he added: “Not if its targets are set during backstage negotiations against the will and interests of millions of Europeans, including Poles.”
His government argues the ban would be expensive for families and hurt Polish firms producing car components for well-known global brands.
Germany won a carve-out from the ban for internal combustion engines running on greener e-fuels this week and now backs the amended law.
That has left Poland as the only EU country openly opposing the green law. Warsaw voted against the ban, while Bulgaria, Romania and Italy abstained.
But now that Berlin backs the EU ban, and the regulation has been amended, it will be almost impossible for Warsaw to prevent it becoming law.
The watering down of the ban raised questions over a similar British ban, which takes effect in 2030 but allows hybrid vehicles until 2035, and a potential loophole in Northern Ireland, which will have to follow the EU ban, unless it is blocked by Stormont.
Mr Morawiecki’s pledge to oppose the EU ban came as Law and Justice launched its campaign for parliamentary elections in autumn.
Poland has often found itself at odds with the EU over climate change legislation, as it looked to protect its coal industry over the years.
Miners have totemic status in a country where they were pivotal in the Solidarity protests against Poland’s then-communist government.
Mr Morawiecki has locked horns with the European Commission over accusations of sliding democratic standards, a crackdown on gay rights, and a Constitutional Court ruling questioning the supremacy of EU law in Poland.
Brussels is withholding billions in coronavirus recovery funds, amid the disputes, which have been played down for fear of exposing EU divisions after the invasion of Ukraine.
In a speech on the future of Europe earlier this month, Mr Morawiecki called for a repatriation of national powers from Brussels to make the EU “more democratic”.
“We share common values, but each nation has its own identity,” he said in the flagship speech in Germany.
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As the British Government unveils plans to make Britons poorer and colder... Welcome to basket case Britain
In their Gadarene rush to beat the rest of the world to a carbon-free future, ministers appear determined to turn Britain into an economic basket case.
Today was Green Day, when the preposterously titled Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, Grant Shapps, unveiled the Government's latest madcap plans for making us colder and poorer.
Presumably, Shapps had no idea that Green Day is also the name of a popular American punk rock group, whose breakthrough hit was called Basket Case.
Come to think of it, though, what could be more appropriate. In their Gadarene rush to beat the rest of the world to a carbon-free future, ministers appear determined to turn Britain into an economic basket case.
While even the EU hits the pause button on plans to phase out fossil fuels, at least for motor vehicles, our Government has set the controls for the heart of the sun.
Shapps flatly refused even to consider that there might be an alternative to banning the sale of all internal combustion powered cars after 2030.
This is despite Europe having second thoughts following the development of so-called 'e-fuels,' which are a clean alternative to petrol and diesel. So while German manufacturers get an exemption for e-fuelled cars and vans, the British motor industry gets a kick in the teeth.
Britain's ban on the sale of conventionally powered vehicles starts in 2030, five years before the rest of Europe. We're even phasing out hybrids from 2035.
Shapps said: 'We are not in Europe. We don't have to do what Europe does on this stuff. We have always been more forward leaning on this stuff than the EU.'
No, we don't have to copy Europe. But that doesn't mean cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Forward leaning? More like falling head-first from a great height.
Already, BMW is moving some of its UK operations abroad. Others will follow suit if they are prevented from at least exploring whether e-fuels have a viable future.
Today, however, the Government doubled down on its deranged carbon-neutral agenda, with Rishi Sunak announcing that car makers will be forced to ensure that 22 per cent of all vehicles sold in Britain are all-electric by 2024, rising to 100 per cent in 2035 — even though the chances of there being enough reliable electricity generating capacity to charge them all are less than zero.
Sunak and Shapps seem hell-bent on doing more damage to our domestic motor industry than useless managements and union militants like British Leyland's Red Robbo inflicted in the 1970s.
That should go down well in Red Wall seats in Derbyshire and Sunderland, where Toyota and Nissan employ tens of thousands. For now, anyway.
Of course, when it comes to leading the anti-car charge, XR poster boy Shapps has plenty of previous. During Covid, he bunged councils £250 million for 'temporary' measures to encourage cycling and walking.
At the time, some of us warned that these allegedly temporary measures would inevitably become permanent, even when the pandemic was over. And so it has come to pass.
In the name of saving the polar bears, local authorities across Britain have declared all-out war on motorists. Net Zero has become a convenient excuse for closing roads and imposing punitive fines and congestion charges. [...]
Forgive me for repeating former deputy Labour leader Nye Bevan's quote about ministerial incompetence in 1945: 'This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organisational genius could produce a shortage of both coal and fish at the same time.'
Today, our island is sitting on half a century's reserves of shale gas and billions of barrels of untapped oil and natural gas in the North Sea. Yet our modern organisational geniuses have managed to produce a home-grown shortage of both gas and oil, purely out of short-sighted political vanity.
As a result, we are forced increasingly to rely on forests of hideous, bird-shredding, onshore, War-Of-The-Worlds windmills and the promise of as-yet-untested mini nuclear reactors — which if the Government's less- than-impressive record on public infrastructure projects (HS2 anyone?) is anything to go by, won't be operational until way beyond 2050, if ever.
From what I can gather, the only new initiative announced today by Grant 'Green Day' Shapps was the launch of two new 'carbon capture clusters', whatever they are.
Still, I can certainly think of a word to describe the Government's Net Zero energy policy. And it definitely begins with 'cluster . . .'
Welcome to Basket Case Britain.
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4 April, 2023
Net zero is dying a slow death
Governments are coming to regret net-zero carbon-emissions pledges, as their cost and impracticality come into view, but politicians still hate to admit it. The latest quiet escape plan arrived Thursday in the United Kingdom, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak published a raft of net-zero measures aimed at rebooting Britain’s green agenda.
The optimistic take is that the plans mark another admission that net-zero is unlikely to happen in Britain. The policy emphasis is on carbon-capture technology, to which Mr. Sunak’s administration previously announced it will devote £20 billion. Mr. Sunak is pushing hard on carbon capture because he appears not to want to do anything else.
The plan includes little new money beyond what his administration has previously announced. There are few new plans beyond previous duds such as a promise to convert households to heat pumps from gas-fired central heating. Tellingly, Thursday’s plan elicited few objections from net-zero skeptics in Mr. Sunak’s Conservative Party.
The government is also stepping back from the phaseout of internal-combustion cars. Their sale is due to be banned by 2035. But the U.K. now will introduce a system of credits to let some auto makers buy the right to make more internal-combustion cars than they would have been allowed during the phaseout. Britain could hardly do otherwise after the European Union recently scaled back its EV mandate.
This fiasco is happening as green aspirations and economic realities collide at high speed following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The war, which disrupted Europe’s imports of Russian natural gas and caused global prices to spike, exposed the costs and inadequacy of wind and solar power as replacements for fossil fuels.
As a mandatory shift to electric vehicles approaches, it’s becoming clear that battery technologies don’t exist to make EVs a replacement for internal-combustion engines. The public is also noticing the shortcomings of proposed alternative fuels such as hydrogen. Nor are voters likely to be enthusiastic about having to pay higher taxes on domestic natural gas intended to steer them toward electricity.
Mr. Sunak is abandoning net zero in deed if not in word. Yet there’s a cost for what is becoming a global effort to escape net zero through the back door rather than admitting the plans won’t work. Witness the U.K.’s Rube Goldberg mechanism for keeping on the market the internal-combustion cars consumers want, or the subsidies for ineffective carbon capture. Both are set to become new corporate welfare on top of other green handouts.
Net zero is dying a slow death as voters and politicians realize its folly. Maybe someone will eventually admit it out loud.
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IRS Says Major Changes Are Coming to Electric Vehicle Tax Credits Next Month
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced Friday that it would propose rules that would make it more difficult for a number of new electric vehicles (EVs) to qualify for tax breaks, according to a news release.
Starting April 18, the IRS will enforce a domestic sourcing requirement for minerals and components used in EV batteries, the agency said. Analysts say that a number of new EVs won’t qualify for a clean vehicle tax credit of $7,500 that was implemented under the Inflation Reduction Act that was passed last year.
The act “allows a maximum credit of $7,500 per vehicle, consisting of $3,750 in the case of a vehicle that meets certain requirements relating to critical minerals and $3,750 in the case of a vehicle that meets certain requirements relating to battery components,” the IRS said. “The critical mineral and battery component requirements will apply to vehicles placed in service on or after April 18, 2023, the day after the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is issued in the Federal Register.”
A list of vehicles that will or will not be impacted by the rule change was not given by the IRS on Friday. The IRS issued another release detailing some of the requirements.
To qualify under the new rules, the IRS said that an EV must have a battery capacity of at least 7 kilowatt hours, have a gross vehicle weight of fewer than 14,000 pounds, be “made by a qualified manufacturer,” and those vehicles have to go through a final assembly in North America. The vehicle also has to be new and the seller has to report “your name and taxpayer identification number to the IRS for you to be eligible to claim the credit,” the release said.
It also said there are price and income caps, including $55,000 for sedans as well as $80,000 for trucks, vans, and SUVs. A list of EV manufacturers was placed on the IRS website.
Under the old rules, it “temporarily qualified some vehicles, like the Chevy Bolt, and some Tesla models, for the full $7,500 credit,” said electric vehicle website Electrek. “Both GM and Tesla have previously stated that they expect to lose access to some of the credit when the new battery rules go into effect (though with Tesla, this only applies to their cheapest model).”
Reactions
Some auto groups expressed their displeasure with the latest rule change.
“The proposed guidance continues to highlight the challenges ahead for U.S. automakers’ electrification efforts and consumers’ adoption of clean vehicles,” Jennifer Safavian, CEO and president of Autos Drive America, told Ars Technica. “The number of vehicles eligible for even a partial tax credit has been significantly reduced, slowing adoption of electric vehicles, under the new rules. Autos Drive America members are committed to an electrified future for our customers and look forward to continuing to collaborate with Treasury as the guidance is finalized.”
John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, told the outlet that he believes only few of the 90 or so electric vehicles that are on sale in the United States will be eligible for the tax credit starting next month.
“Some EVs will certainly qualify for a partial credit. Given the constraints of the legislation, Treasury’s done as well as it could to produce rules that meet the statute and reflect the current market,” he warned to Reuters.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced legislation this month seeking to block EV tax credits for batteries produced using Chinese technology, saying it would “significantly restrict the eligibility of IRA tax credits and prevent Chinese companies from benefiting.”
More Details
The rules are aimed at weaning the United States off dependence on China for EV battery supply chains and part of President Joe Biden’s effort to make 50 percent of U.S. new vehicle sales by 2030 EVs or plug-in hybrids. The U.S. Department of the Treasury is not immediately issuing guidance on “Foreign Entities of Concern,” a provision due to start in 2024 barring credits if any components or minerals used in EV batteries are made in countries like China.
The $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act signed by President Biden in August eliminated manufacturers’ EV sales caps, but imposed new conditions on EV credits. They included a North American assembly requirement from August, price and buyer income eligibility caps from Jan. 1, and now the battery and critical minerals sourcing rules, effective April 18.
The public will have until mid-June to comment on the proposed guidance.
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Green propagandists continue to inflict lethal damage to our electricity industry – it has become unreliable and expensive
Their intrusive green energy infrastructure is also nibbling away at our grasslands and farms, thus reducing their capacity to produce food.
These foolish green energy policies are also threatening electric power for refrigeration. City food supplies cannot survive without reliable refrigeration at every level, from farms to retail stores.
Less often recognised is the damage green propagandists are doing to our health and our food supply by attacking animal foods and promoting grains, vegetables, seeds, and fake foods for humans.
As far back as we have recorded history, humans have been hunter-gatherers. They hunted, cooked, ate and sometimes farmed cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, ducks, turkeys, swans, antelope, buffalo, caribou, mammoths, deer, bears, horses, mules, donkeys, camels, seals, herrings, prawns, oysters, crabs, clams, cod, whales, sharks, salmon, kangaroos, possums, rabbits, hares, rats, mice, dogs, cougars, eels, snakes, and even other humans.
When the hunters were successful, the tribe rejoiced and feasted mightily before the meats spoiled. But when the hunters failed, they relied on the gatherers for ripening fruits, honey, tubers, wild onions, nuts, and laboriously harvested grains. They learned that some plant foods were toxic unless treated in special ways by grinding, roasting, fermenting, and cooking. Meat was the staple food but some tribes also consumed raw milk, butter, cheese, and blood from their animals. Fruits were seasonal foods and tubers, onions, and grains were survival foods. Party foods like sugar and alcohol were more recent inventions.
Human teeth reflect the foods they are designed to use – canines for gripping and ripping meat off bones, incisors for cutting bite-sized bits, and molars for chewing and grinding. And humans have the forward-focused eyes of predators, not the all-round eyesight of their wary prey.
Men have always battled over hunting, fishing, and farming territory, but now green ideology is trying to destroy grazing and fishing territory with national parks, world heritage declarations, and bans and quotas on farming and fishing. They subsidise the sterilisation of farms and grasslands with wind and solar ‘farms’, access roads, and spider webs of power lines. They also promote the conversion of farmland to bush and encourage offshore bird choppers whose sonic noise upsets neighbours and seems to addle the navigating abilities of some sea creatures.
Now greens are attacking our carnivore diet and promoting a granivore-vegetarian diet for humans. Politicians should be free to choose their diet, but they should not force meat lovers to pretend they are granivores with crops and gizzards, or plant-eating ruminants with extra stomachs and who spend ages re-chewing their vegetarian cuds.
The world’s teeming cities are becoming increasingly reliant on grains, sugars, oil seeds, fruits, and vegetables grown by intense farming and heavily dependent on irrigation, herbicides, and chemical fertilisers. Grain-dependent feedlots produce much of our beef, pork, mutton, salmon, prawns, chickens, and eggs, and factories produce our baked, frozen and canned foods. Now greens are promoting denatured fake ‘meat’, and ‘milks’ containing no meat or milk.
Whilst intense farming has fostered a dramatic increase in human population, the human food chain is swamped with grains, greens, and seed oils with their unhealthy lectins, glutens, oxalates, phytic acid, harmful oils, artificial sweeteners, chemical additives, and sprays. This process parallels a dramatic deterioration in human health. Like green energy, green food for humans is proving a disastrous choice.
Pretending humans are herbivores and granivores has accompanied an epidemic of ill health. Obesity, arthritis, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, leaky gut, fatty liver, dental caries, heart failure, cancers, brain fog, knee replacement, stomach stitching, birth defects, and gender confusion seem to be hallmarks of our age. The surgery waiting lists keep expanding.
But instead of trying to fix our dietary problems, we have created a massive new ‘health’ industry. While human diets race off in the wrong direction, health research seeks magic bullets and focuses on profitable vaccines, patentable medicines, expensive surgery, and genetic wizardry.
Even grazing animals that once lived mainly on grasses and herbs (with a little ripening grass seeds just before the hard times of winter) are now confined in food factories, with little exercise, and encouraged to gorge on farmed grains. Omnivorous pigs and chickens and vegetarian cattle and sheep now stand in pens and feedlots eating grain-rich feeds.
The bun, chips, and salad have swamped the meat in the ‘beef’ burger and there is often more batter and potato than seafood in ‘fish and chips’. Breakfast cereals have replaced bacon and eggs, and fake ‘meat’ and fake ‘milks’ are lauded as healthy choices.
We can see the obese results of this green food revolution waddling down the aisles of supermarkets and ordering green smoothies and muffins in the food courts.
Green energy will prove a disaster for our economy, and green foods will be a deadly choice for many humans.
Footpaths will be crowded with mobility scooters and hospitals and care homes will be overwhelmed by unhealthy ageing vegans.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-green-foods-time-bomb/
***********************************************Capitalising on climate anxiety: what you need to know about 'climate-washing'
People are increasingly making choices about which products to buy and which service providers to use on climate change grounds. With concerns about climate change now affecting most Australians, businesses that promote climate-aligned practices and make emissions-reduction promises have a competitive advantage over those that don’t.
But sometimes these claims fail to live up to reality. Climate-related greenwashing, or “climate-washing”, communicates a message that exaggerates or misrepresents climate credentials through advertising, branding, labelling or reporting.
Examples include where corporate marketing and government campaigns promising “net-zero emissions by 2050” are not backed by a credible plan. Or products are promoted as “carbon neutral” or “climate friendly” when they’re not. It also includes where banks and other investors claim to fund a “cleaner future” when this is not completely true, potentially masking climate-related financial risk.
Climate-washing is a problem because the offending businesses capitalise on climate anxiety. It also allows businesses lacking robust credentials to gain customers and market advantage on false pretences. Ultimately, it also hinders rather than helps progress towards emissions reduction goals.
In March, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) announced a crack-down on climate-washing and greenwashing. This followed an ACCC report revealing claims made by more than half the 247 Australian businesses reviewed in an internet sweep raised concern. The ACCC has said it will now undertake enforcement, compliance and education activities.
On Wednesday the Senate agreed to establish an inquiry into greenwashing by corporations in Australia. The inquiry will investigate the impacts of greenwashing on consumers and the environment and will identify the legal and regulatory actions needed to stop it.
The credibility gap
The imperative to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century has been consistently reinforced by climate science. This includes, most recently, this month’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
One of the upshots has been a deluge of net-zero strategic marketing. Particularly in the case of large climate change contributors – such as fossil fuel companies, airlines and the meat industry – adopting a net-zero narrative switches public perception that the company is part of the solution, rather than the problem.
Climate-washing essentially describes a gap between what’s promised and what’s likely to be achieved. This “credibility gap” can be due to factors such as over-reliance on speculative technology, offsetting, and modelling that’s outdated or hasn’t been properly verified. Although there’s a big global push toward transparency, many entities don’t adequately disclose the data and assumptions behind their promises.
Complaints and court cases
Last week, a group called Flight Free and their lawyers approached the ACCC over Etihad Airways advertising that said, “flying shouldn’t cost the earth” and “net zero emissions by 2050”. The ads were shown prominently at a soccer match in Melbourne last year. Flight Free says the advertising is misleading.
The Etihad complaint follows the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility’s Federal Court proceedings against gas company Santos. Currently afoot, this complaint challenges Santos’ “clean fuel” and “net-zero by 2040” claims.
Earlier this year, corporate watchdog ASIC (the Australian Securities and Investment Commission) initiated proceedings against super fund Mercer for allegedly misleading investors into thinking their investments in a “sustainable” investment option excluded fossil fuels.
Around the world, there’s been a recent rise in climate-washing litigation. Multiple complaints allege that the football association FIFA falsely advertised the Qatar World Cup as “fully carbon neutral.”
In aviation, there’s a pending court case against KLM targeting its “fly responsibly” campaign, and there’s also been a successful challenge to RyanAir’s low-carbon campaign.
Product complaints have ranged from allegedly climate-neutral bin liners, to “climate-controlled pork” in Denmark, and “climate-neutral croquettes” in Germany.
How is climate-washing regulated?
Climate-washing is a form of misleading and deceptive conduct, which is regulated in Australia under federal competition and consumer law.
Climate-washing that relates to financial products and services is regulated under securities and investments law.
Both the ACCC and ASIC monitor climate-washing.
Globally, concerns over climate-washing have led to action by the United Nations. A High-Level Expert Group on the Net-Zero Emissions Commitments of Non-State Entities was formed last year to target climate-washing. The group has a “zero tolerance for net-zero greenwashing” mantra, and delivered a report at November’s Climate Change COP in Egypt, which contains a “how-to” guide for credible, accountable net-zero pledges.
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3 April, 2023
British PM now sees a future for fossil fuels in Britain
The location of Rishi Sunak and Grant Shapps’s net zero relaunch today shows there has been a change of emphasis since the PM set up the Department for Energy Security and Climate Change last autumn.
One suspects a bit of ideology creeping in: fossil fuels have become a great bogeyman, and nothing will make them acceptable
Whereas Boris Johnson might have sought to make such an announcement at a wind farm or solar farm, today’s relaunch took place at Culham in Oxfordshire, the site of Britain’s nuclear fusion research facility. Fusion is the holy grail of carbon-free energy which even enthusiasts admit is decades away from being commercialised, if it can be at all. But it is a hint that the government is no longer going to try to power Britain with wind and solar energy alone. A competition to pick out the most promising modular nuclear reactor designs – for further funding and development – is one of the strands of today’s announcements.
The most eye-catching initiative is carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS). In his recent budget Jeremy Hunt announced a remarkable £20 billion of investment in CCUS projects. Now we learn that eight ‘clusters’ of projects are planned (although they won’t include Drax, the woodchip-burning power station in South Yorkshire whose shares have dived this morning in response to the news it has lost out on government backing).
Compared with the £240 million the government has made available to develop its ‘hydrogen economy’, this is a vast sum. Today’s document, ‘Powering Up Britain’, doesn’t quite spell it out, but the quest for CCUS signals that the government has changed its mind and now sees a future for fossil fuels. The whole point of CCUS, after all, is to suck out from the air carbon dioxide which has been produced by burning fossil fuels. As things stand, the government remains committed to removing all fossil fuels from electricity production by 2035, banning petrol and diesel cars, as well as new gas boilers, by the same date and pushing for existing gas boilers to be replaced by electric heat pumps at the rate of 600,000 a year. But what if we had a CCUS industry that was removing carbon from the atmosphere at the same rate it was being pumped in? The objections to burning fossil fuels would theoretically disappear. We could, say, continue to use gas power plants to back up intermittent wind and solar – and eliminate the need to find some way of storing vast amounts of energy.
That is not, however, how many green campaigners see it. Anticipating today’s announcement, 700 scientists and campaigners have written to Sunak demanding that no new oil and gas licences be granted. They complain that CCUS is no solution because it has ‘yet to be proved at scale’. They are right on that point – although the same is true of numerous other technologies which have been floated as possible ways of getting to net zero, and which are regularly advocated by some of the signatories. One suspects a bit of ideology creeping in: fossil fuels have become a great bogeyman, and nothing will make them acceptable.
The truth is, if the world is going to get anywhere close to net zero, CCUS will have to be used – because the process emissions from steel-making, cement-making, fertilizer-manufacturing and agriculture are going to be extremely difficult to address. Yet the government is taking an enormous gamble with its £20 billion. A decade ago, David Cameron launched a similar initiative, involving the investment of a more modest £1 billion in a CCUS demonstration plant. But in 2015 the scheme was abandoned, shortly before the expected announcement of who had won the bid. The government on that occasion came to the conclusion that CCUS was too much of a unicorn to take a risk with. Question is: what has changed now?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/rishi-sunak-now-sees-a-future-for-fossil-fuels-in-britain
*************************************************Manchin Steps Up Clash With Biden Over Electric-Car Tax Credits
Senator Joe Manchin stepped up his fight with the Biden administration over its implementation of the president’s signature climate bill in a way Manchin says over-emphasizes clean energy technology, turns away from fossil-fuel production and spends too much.
“They just want to throw caution to the wind and put more money out and throw more money from the Treasury and credits that basically are not going to accelerate how quickly that we can be totally self-reliant,” Manchin, a Democrat of West Virginia, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
In separate comments on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Manchin wouldn’t rule out taking legal action to stop the administration’s interpretation of the legislation.
“I’m looking at every option I possibly have to make sure that that bill is fulfilled and basically implemented the way it was intended to,” he said.
The law in question is the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, passed last year with support from Manchin after he, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer and Biden hammered out a deal behind closed doors that circumvented the usual legislative process.
The law makes billions of dollar available — through subsidies and tax credits — to promote the production and purchase of electric vehicles.
Manchin says the administration is veering from lawmakers’ intent by not putting enough into domestic production of fossil fuels. It also, he says, has been too permissive in allowing foreign automakers to access some vehicle credits.
Other lawmakers, including Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Washington, have voiced concern over how the Treasury is deciding which countries can supply battery materials for cars that eligible for credits.
“I’m going to fight and fight back hard,” Manchin said on Fox. “And I would hope that my Democrat and Republican friends in the legislature will feel the same way and will work with us to hold the administration’s feet to the fire.”
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Old refineries incapable of manufacturing enough light hydrocarbons to electrify the world
The zero-emission movement in the wealthy countries are experiencing a “dangerous delusion” of a global transition to “just electricity” that eliminates the use of the three fossil fuels of crude oil, natural gas, and coal, that made society achieve so much in a few centuries. As old refineries accelerate their closure rates in the coming years, new Asia refineries are coming to the rescue! Does Asia’s rescue represent the good news or the bad news?
The future does not bode well as 20 percent of the 700 worldwide aging refineries are projected to close in the next 5 years that will result in less manufacturing with the loss of 140 sites to meet the ever growing demands of ships, jets, and the derivatives needed for all the products demanded by society. With less manufacturing in wealthy countries in the days ahead, further shortages and inflation of both fuels and products in perpetuity are guaranteed.
As old refinery closures accelerate, it’s becoming obvious that wind turbines, solar panels, and EV’s may face challenging growth as they are 100 percent made with those limited light end hydrocarbons that will diminish with refinery closures. But wait, Asia is coming to the rescue!
Asia is the region with the greatest number of future petroleum refineries. As of 2021, there were 88 new facilities in planning or under construction in Asia. The amount of oil fed through refineries in Asia has significantly increased in the past three decades as demand for petroleum products surged in developing countries such as China and India, both with significant less stringent environmental regulations than those in America. China is on track to succeed the United States as the country with the greatest oil refinery throughput.
These new Asian refineries, just like the mining in China, Africa, and Brazil for the exotic minerals and metals required for wealthy countries to achieve their net-zero emission goals, will be constructed and maintained on some of the LEAST environmentally controlled landscapes on this planet.
A subject for another time: Is the rescue by Asia’s new refining manufacturing capabilities exposing national security issues for America?
Today, oil refineries around the world are designed for specific crude oil feed-stocks available to those sites, and then manufacture a 42-gallon barrel of oil into light and heavy hydrocarbon products available from that feed-stock to support the world’s 8 billion on this planet are dependent on the 50,000 jets moving people and products, and more than 50,000 merchant ships for global trade flows, and the military’s of each country, and space programs that are based on the heavy hydrocarbons for the various fuels manufactured from crude oil. In addition, those light hydrocarbons are primarily used for making the more than 6,000 products now in society.
With enough money and technology, new refinery facilities could be designed to extract light hydrocarbons like ethylene from natural gas, and transportation fuels can be manufactured from coal, but both processes come with new equipment and produce excessive emissions.
No new refinery has been built in America since 1977, 46 years ago, so the need for new American refinery facilities to treat natural gas and/or coal may be a pipe dream to obtain environmental and construction permits for a new fossil fuel manufacturing site, when America is motivated to rid itself of both natural gas and coal, along with crude oil.
Today, about 90 percent of that 42-gallon barrel of crude oil is manufactured into the heavy hydrocarbon products like automotive gasoline’s, jet fuels, distillate fuel oils, diesel fuels, liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), and those “other products” which comprise the other 10 percent of a barrel of crude oil that contains light hydrocarbons, usually referred to as “oil derivatives” that are manufactured from crude oil.
Today, the big push is to reduce emissions, and the target is a future with net zero emissions. Here’s a very short scope of net zero (partial listing):
Electrify all cars, trucks, and train use.
Electrify most heat uses, especially gas heat.
Rebuild the grid so wind and solar generated electricity with battery storage are the primary electricity power source.
To achieve a world of only those light ends to make all the products now in society that supports lifestyles and all the infrastructures, there are thoughts among the green community that we can convert the existing old refineries to produce nothing but derivatives, and/or replace the existing refineries with derivative refineries, or just manufacturing those light ends. That may be another pipe dream as each refinery is designed for specific crude oil feed-stocks available to those sites, and conversions may be technically too expensive and not even permitted.
From the proverb: You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip:
A corn cob weighs in at about around 1 to 1.5 pounds per mature ear of corn. Fresh cut cobs yield around 6-7 ounces of corn. We can’t squeeze more kernels from a cob.
A 42-gallon barrel of oil contains about 90 percent of heavy hydrocarbons for various fuels, and about 10 percent of light hydrocarbons that are the basis of thousands of products made from those oil derivatives by -products. We can’t squeeze more light end hydrocarbons from a barrel of oil.
Such a switch of those old refineries to derivative refineries is a pipe-dream or an environmental and emissions disaster as 90 percent of that 42-gallon barrel of crude oil would need to be disposed of if not marketable as manufactured products like liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), automotive gasoline’s, jet fuels, distillate fuel oils, diesel fuels.
From the proverb “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” tells us that:
you can’t rid America of only the “fuels” manufactured from fossil fuels and
continue to enjoy just the by-products of those light ends hydrocarbons that are manufactured from the same crude oil.
We may get to zero emissions, like we had in the pre-fossil fuel days in the 1800’s, but once we rid America of those fuels that generate emissions, manufactured at old refineries, we also rid America of the light ends that are the basis of the 6,000 products that did not exist before the 1900’s.
Just a few hundred years ago when the world’s population was around just one billion, before oil, the world was unspoiled, decarbonized, and dominated by mother nature and the wild animal kingdom. In the 1800’s there was no coal fired power plants, nor natural gas power plants, and the Beverly Hillbillies had not yet discovered oil. There were fewer humans competing with the animals due to humanity’s limited ability to survive what mother nature provided. Before oil, life was hard and dirty, with many weather and disease related deaths.
The ruling class, powerful elite, and the media lack some energy literacy which may be the reasons they avoid conversations about the ugly side of “green” mandates and subsidies. Before anyone in Washington decides to procure wind turbines, solar panels, or an EV, they should read the Pulitzer Prize nominated book that I co-authored, “Clean Energy Exploitations”, and decide for themselves if they wish to financially support the humanity atrocities and environmental degradation among folks in developing countries with yellow, brown, and black skin, so that the wealthy countries can go green.
Thus, without planned replacements in America for what is now manufactured from fossil fuels, we may get to the net-zero emissions society but with heavy reliance on Asia to achieve those lofty goals.
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Australia: Climate wars rekindled
So, apparently the climate wars aren’t over quite yet. Thank goodness for that! That’s not us rekindling the battle, by the way, it’s the Greens’ ‘Treasury spokesman’ federal Senator Nick McKim who has discovered a new term of abuse: ‘ecocidal’ to describe opponents of net zero. Definitely a word for Kel Richards to strip bare, but obviously a contrived new term designed to imply somebody is guilty of genocide if they don’t subscribe to the climate cult’s nihilistic net-zero agenda.
This is good news. As far as we are concerned, the climate wars are desperately needed: an ongoing battle for common sense, reason, proportionality and above all science – real science, as opposed to ‘The Science’ aka left-wing political propaganda of the sort which caused so much unnecessary suffering (and death) during Covid.
Put simply, it has never been shown that human beings have any ability whatsoever to influence let alone to ameliorate or reverse global climate trends and patterns. The precautionary principle suggests that if the theory of anthropogenic global warming is valid, then heavily industrialised nations should do what they can to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, but – and this is critical – to do so in a way that does not cause equal or more harm in other areas. This is where ongoing proper cost-benefit analyses are required to influence genuine political debate and corporate decision-making, but they are entirely absent.
For example, what is the cost to the working poor if energy prices rise versus what is the actual benefit to the planet for that sacrifice? What is the cost to Third World countries when they don’t have access to cheap electricity versus what is the benefit to them of a potential and purely academic ‘modelled’ reduction in global temperatures? Or on an even more immediate topic: what is the genuine cost in terms of carbon emissions output involved in the manufacturing of an entire global fleet of electric vehicles, batteries and the infrastructure needed to power them versus the cost of simply carrying on with business as usual? What is the cost to entire societies of reducing the nitrogen in their soil versus the measurable benefit to the planet? What is the military and security cost of achieving net zero versus the hypothetical environmental benefit?
That’s if the AGW theory is valid. This week, in Kiwi Life, Amy Brooke analyses the claims of the climate catastrophists and concludes: just follow the money. David van Gend, meanwhile applies not only his clinical but his satirical skills to offer a diagnosis of Mother Earth herself.
Despite the relentless propagandising across virtually all media and from the major political parties here in Australia the simple fact remains: none of the doomsday predictions going back some three or four decades has come true. Not one. Indeed, weather patterns have often done the complete opposite of what was so stubbornly predicted. Much like the now-exposed fraudulent modelling on Covid, climate modelling is self-evidently deeply flawed as a ‘science’. A gypsy queen with a crystal ball in a Louisiana fairground probably has a better track record at peering into the future than Al Gore, Tim Flannery, Greta Thunberg, King Charles, Klaus Schwab and all the rest of them put together.
With wall-to-wall Labor governments across mainland Australia, we are now entering an extremely dangerous period in our history. The ideologues and the dreamers are now in charge. Sadly, due to the cowardice of the Liberal party under former prime minister Scott Morrison, the opposition has twice the task in front of it than it had during the Rudd-Gillard years when Tony Abbott was able to use climate madness as a cudgel against the Left.
Peter Dutton now faces a formidable task. He has to wage war first against the bedwetters within the Liberal party, the likes of Simon Birmingham, Andrew Bragg and Matt Kean – he who wreaked such destruction on the Liberal brand at the weekend. Then he has to convince his colleagues to either abandon net zero or abandon the nuclear moratorium. And then he will need to launch a comprehensive political campaign to explain to the average Aussie just what this prosperity-destroying concept really entails and what a world of energy poverty means for our children and grandchildren. And he has to do it all within the next eighteen months
Can he? Make sure you read James Allan and Judith Sloan this week..
The Labor victory in NSW at the weekend probably helps. Now, Labor has no excuses. They can implement all their lunatic policies and reap the whirlwind. Sadly, we will all be collateral damage but public sentiment will shift very rapidly once the net-zero agenda starts to bite and the Liberals need to be fully prepared to take advantage of that shift. As Mark Higgie points out, many Europeans are already turning against the craziness of electric vehicles. As winter approaches, how many Aussies will struggle to pay their energy bills? One study in Britain revealed a staggering number of households forced to sit in the dark without heating during the long winter months. This is what awaits Australians as our zealous Labor governments hurtle down the same path.
It is now up to the Liberals and Peter Dutton to re-engage in the climate wars. It’s a fight that can and must be won. We’re certainly up for it!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/climate-wars-rekindled/
***************************************2 April, 2023
15 minute cities: burning to the ground
Are this century’s ideological peasants finally revolting? It certainly seems that way after residents set fire to road block ‘planters’ which had been erected to prevent them from driving freely around their community.
UK neighbourhoods are being used as test cases for the 15 minute city plan that is, after a fashion and a few intermediary thought bubbles, the child of United Nations Sustainability Goals and World Economic Forum collaborations.
Others might describe them as open air prisons where ‘global citizens’ are being confined to small areas to ‘save the planet’ under threat of being fined.
Not everyone is impressed by the experiment, with residents in Rochdale destroying the barriers which some are trying to pass off as ‘traffic control systems’ rather than sinister infringements on basic freedom of movement. Others have found themselves prevented from travelling to work by unofficial and legally powerless self-appointed enforcers who refuse to allow the movement of traffic. Surely that is an offence? It is like being ruled by a mob.
The unavoidable truth is that people are already free to leave their cars at home if they want to embrace the de-industrialised lifestyle, but they choose not to. Why? Their free choice is to drive and thus, as with all socialist policies, government has decided it must use force to guarantee what it sees as good social behaviour. Get used to it. We are going to be seeing a lot more of this behavioural intervention.
You can find plenty of 15 minute city defenders on social media insisting that this is just a ‘suggestion’ or some sort of voluntary adjustment to the way people move through their cities. Far from it. In Oxford, which is another ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhood’, similar blockades were being manned by bright-haired randoms. Everywhere 15 minute cities are put in place, the working class freak out.
For a long time, residents in these areas either didn’t realise what was going on or thought these mutterings and endless surveys put out by their local council were some kind of joke. After all, Net Zero policies read as fanatical madness. Now that Woke councils are trying to put physical barriers up to enforce ‘planet saving’ ideology, residents are reacting loudly and, in some cases, destructively.
Needless to say, the 15 minute city is being delayed for ‘further consultation’.
No doubt community feedback will involve something along the lines of ‘bugger off’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/15-minute-cities-burning-to-the-ground/
*************************************************American Forests Are Being Razed So Europe Can Cling to ‘Green’ Energy
To bolster its climate-friendly credentials, Europe is increasingly reliant on an energy source as old as fire itself — dead trees.
While European Union officials refer to it as the more environmentally friendly “biomass” and call it a “renewable resource,” little of it is coming from the continent itself. Much of the forests being razed to heat and cool the continent are in the southeastern United States.
A German green energy entrepreneur, Simon Göss, recently published a report on the future of biomass and biogas as a method of transitioning toward a carbon-free Europe by 2050. Mr. Göss found that as of today, woody biomass makes up a majority of Europe’s “green” energy sector — nearly 60 percent across the continent.
“Most of the time, wind and solar or energy carriers and technologies such as hydrogen or batteries make it to the headlines,” he wrote in his report. “The larger part of the EU’s renewable energy mix is, however, made up of biomass … in different forms (liquid, gaseous, solid) and origins (wood, grasses, agricultural residues by-products, etc).”
In the continent’s largest countries, biomass plants are cropping up in the thousands. In Germany, there are 14,922 plants that burn some form of biomass — a 17.5 percent increase in the last 10 years. The United Kingdom is home to 226 biomass plants nationwide, which is enough to supply the energy needs of more than eight million homes.
The main use of these biomass sources is for heating and cooling — something vital to the lives of everyday Europeans as gas prices reached historic highs this past winter. Nearly 75 percent of the biomass used in Europe is for heating homes in the winter or cooling them in the summer.
The sustainability of woody biomass — most notably trees — has been questioned by climate activists and scientists in recent years as deforestation has increased. Between 2001 and 2021, the world lost 11 percent of its total tree coverage.
Despite these concerns, the European Union and its legislative body, the European parliament, have fully embraced the practice. In September 2022, when gas prices were three times their current rate on the continent, the European parliament voted to adopt the Renewable Energy Directive, which called for more investment in and use of biomass as an energy source. The parliament voted at the same time to strengthen protections for its own forests and implemented new “sustainability guidelines” to maintain tree cover levels.
Instead of razing its own forests to flout its green credentials, Europe is using America’s. Tree farms in the southeast provide tens of millions of tons of biomass to Europe every year, and some residents of the Deep South are starting to balk about it.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Europe consumed 23 million metric tons of wood pellets in 2021 and was on pace to burn 24 million metric tons in 2022. At the time, most of it came from Russia and the United States. The war in Ukraine and subsequent sanctions against Russia cut off that source, and now the United States provides as much as 99 percent of the wood pellets needed to power Europe annually.
The Southern Environmental Law Center is one group seeking to slow down the expansion of the industry in America. “Along with CO2, manufacturing and burning wood pellets produces harmful pollutants like nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, hazardous air pollutants, and microscopic dust particles that contribute to serious health risks,” the group’s website states.
Millions of tons of trees are extracted from the southeastern United States to feed this green energy sector, and many are issuing warnings about deforestation and the risks associated with it.
“Biomass energy has received growing attention in the United States,” the law group wrote. “We are committed to ensuring American lawmakers don’t make the same mistakes made in other countries, and that policy makers know the threats the biomass industry poses to the climate, local communities, and the South’s air, water, and millions of acres of forest land.”
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The Navy’s Climate Change Agenda
The United States Navy has long ruled the seas. That reputation was earned over many years, and while the Navy remains a formidable force on the world’s oceans, that strength may be waning more quickly than any of us realize.
China’s military has been on the rise in recent years, but instead of keeping pace with China’s emergence as a global sea power and making sure America stays on the cutting edge of technology, our Navy has another priority: climate change.
“The Department of the Navy is stepping forward with Climate Action 2030, a broad, multi-pronged approach,” explains the U.S. Department of Defense website. “The Navy is working to improve efficiency of ships, electrifying vehicles and greatly reducing emissions.” Furthermore, “The Navy is also funding efforts to help restore coral reefs and is eager to pursue further efforts on coral reef research, regrowth and even creation.”
Coral reef research? Electric vehicles? This is the Navy’s answer to China’s explosive growth as a naval power?
Unfortunately, the current Navy leadership thinks so.
“China, which is rapidly becoming the dominant marine force, doesn’t give a damn about adapting to climate change,” says journalist Daniel Greenfield, “except when it comes to peddling its junk solar panels assembled by slave labor to woke companies that will resell them at a massive markup while gobbling up tax credits because when we go ‘green,’ it only weakens us and strengthens our enemies.”
Indeed, while the West goes green, China continues building coal plants. “China became the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2006 and is now responsible for more than a quarter of the world’s overall greenhouse gas emissions,” reports the BBC.
Greenfield adds: “While our military brass obsessed over diversity, equity and inclusion, the PRC turned the South China Sea into its own private backyard, enabling it to potentially cut off traffic to the United States. China has built up chains of islands studded with its naval outposts so that its fighter jets and ant-ship and anti-aircraft missiles now encompass not only the coasts of Taiwan and China, but much of the coastlines of everything from Thailand to Malaysia to the Philippines.”
While current Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro publicly recognizes the threat from China’s navy, he and the Biden administration have planned to reduce the number of U.S. warships.
“The Biden administration released its proposed budget for 2024, which calls for shrinking the Navy fleet even though most military experts and senior Navy officers have called for more ships to deter China’s larger fleet,” Fox News reports. “For several years now, the Navy has set a goal of having 355 manned ships. But, for the last three years, the Biden administration has proposed shrinking the fleet below the roughly 298 ships it has available now, instead of increasing it toward a 355-ship goal.”
Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army is expected to have 400 ships by 2025.
But not to worry — President Joe Biden has mandated that each military service have a sustainability officer. Meredith Berger, assistant secretary of the Navy, talks about LED lighting and new salt-resistant paint for naval vessels.
That sure won’t deter China in a naval battle. But hey, if we can’t win, at least the paint on our ships won’t peel.
Even The Atlantic, not exactly a pro-military publication, warns: “It is time for the United States to think and act, once again, like a seapower state. As the naval historian Andrew Lambert has explained, a seapower state understands that its wealth and its might principally derive from seaborne trade, and it uses instruments of sea power to promote and protect its interests. To the degree possible, a seapower state seeks to avoid direct participation in land wars, large or small.”
That’s a clear, sensible assessment of the current state of the U.S. Navy compared to the gobbledygook in the Climate Action 2030 plan.
Assuming the Navy transitions to an electric vehicle fleet, reduces building emissions by 50%, implements nature-based erosion solutions, and diverts solid waste from landfills (all prominent objectives in its Climate Action plan), how will any of this prevent China from dominating the seas in the 21st century?
Of course, it will do nothing to combat China’s rise as the world’s new sea power.
A century from now, historians will scratch their heads and wonder how America could have been so naïve to give it all away. By then, maybe our leaders will have learned their lesson about the climate change religion.
Then again, maybe it will be too late to do anything about it
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96137 ?
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Australia's unsafe Safeguard Mechanism
And so, the Greens have joined the ALP in imposing additional carbon taxes on the top 215 greenhouse gas emitting firms. In passing the so-called Safeguard Mechanism, the voluntary program that the Coalition originally introduced is converted into a requirement on the nation’s top mining and industrial firms to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. Those emissions are said to be 137 million tonnes a year. Their curtailment builds up to constitute 40 million tonnes a year. This is in addition to abatement measures already in place, which confer a subsidy on wind and solar, that has enabled those energy sources to displace a quarter of the supply formerly provided by coal.
One way to meet the new reductions is by internal measures (for some firms, like AGL, this simply means closing down generation facilities). Alternatively, the targeted firms can supply or buy emission reduction certificates under one of the schemes managed by the Clean Energy Regulator and state governments.
The Commonwealth schemes create large-scale generation certificates (LGCs) and small-scale generation certificates (STCs) by requiring electricity retailers to include increasing shares of wind/solar energy in their supply mix. The certificates only have a value because governments have placed (hidden) regulatory obligations on consumers to buy them. Unlike goods offered in normal markets, the certificates have no intrinsic worth but confer a value of $40-90 per MWh on the renewable supplies. That is more than the total average market price of electricity that prevailed before the subsidies themselves undermined the economics of supply from coal generation.
Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, drawing off faulty CSIRO analysis and the pressures of the renewables lobby, maintain that renewables are already the cheapest form of energy. That belief is largely behind their concoction of a $275 per annum reduction in household energy prices that they claimed their ambitious renewable replacement policy would bring.
The irony of all this – and one the ALP and their media supporters missed – is that if renewables really were cheaper the subsidy these schemes confer on them and the penalties they impose on coal and gas would be an unnecessary cost.
The previous government introduced a further scheme, which was funded from the budget, that created Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) that confer a value on selected activities. The ACCUs, like generation certificates, subsidise high-cost measures thereby increasing the cost of living. Eligible activities include carbon capture and storage, converting farmland to bush, and capture of waste gas. The ACCUs have provided a cheaper means of meeting obligations but Greens in Australia and elsewhere have (correctly) come to view them as con jobs that are easily manipulated and provide no real emission reduction. Hence, as part of the deal to pass the Safeguard Mechanism, their use is to be sharply curtailed. Naturally, farmers and carbon capture subsidy seekers are spitting chips at their loss of taxpayer largesse.
The creation of new LGCs is the most likely alternative to shutting down facilities and moving production offshore (which, of course, brings no consequent reduction in emissions!). These will come at a likely price of around $80 per tonne (roughly $80 per MWh). The cost of the 40 million additional tonnes the 215 targeted facilities are to abate annually by 2030 would therefore be some $320 million a year. As this would largely be imposed on the internationally tradable sector it will, of itself, severely dent the nation’s competitiveness and income levels.
But the Greens boast that, through the concessions they have won in acceding to the government’s measures, they will create additional damage. Some of this is due to the restriction on the use of the cheaper ACCU means of firms buying out their new liabilities under the Safeguard Mechanism. In addition, they claim that the government will be obliged to restrain all new or expanded coal and gas proposals.
The measures certainly introduce new machinery that intensifies the government’s oversight and approval of new proposals. That is a real bonus for a government seeking to ensure support from major producers and to constrain their criticism. It also promises considerable new outlets for lobbyists in their roles of not-so-hidden persuaders and in confecting plans that get promising new proposals over the regulatory hurdles.
These outcomes constitute an Antipodean form of fascism. As a vehicle for greater economic control, the present government finds this irresistible but it will bog down the economy in the tentacles of political corruption and new layers of costs.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/the-unsafe-safeguard-mechanism
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