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, 2024
Hormesis: An Overview of the Pubmed Literature
Hormesis is when some things that are bad for you in high doses are actually good for you in low to medium doses -- including radioactivity -- which upsets Greenie scares about leaks of radioactivity.
On balance, it's probable that the Chernobyl meltdown did more good than harm, even to life in the surrounding area. Life is certainly flourishing there better than ever these days. Pesky!
Dr. Ronald N. Kostoff
OVERVIEW
The purpose of this Op-ed is to provide a broad overview of the Pubmed literature in Hormesis (a biphasic dose-response phenomenon characterized by a low-dose stimulation and a high-dose inhibition). A unique query was developed to retrieve this literature, and many Hormetins (any stress condition that is able to induce Hormesis) were identified. Hormesis has been a controversial topic because of its potential for modifying exposure limit regulations. Critical articles addressing both sides of this issue are also presented in the next section.
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
“Hormesis is a biphasic dose-response phenomenon characterized by a low-dose stimulation and a high-dose inhibition”. “Specific aspects of this general nonlinearity phenomenon have been described using various terms mainly addressing the shape of the dose-response curve, as biphasic, bimodal, bitonic, U shaped, inverted U-shaped, J-shaped, nonmonotonic, functional metabolism and stimulatory inhibitory, among others…..
Furthermore, terms such as adaptive response, preconditioning, autoprotection, heteroprotection, paradoxical and others have also been used to describe the shape of the dose-response patterns”. “Hormesis is a special type of biphasic dose-response relationship that has well-defined, quantitative features, including the magnitude and the width of the stimulatory zone and the relationship of the stimulatory zone to the traditional toxicological threshold (no-observed-adverse-effect level)…..
The hormetic dose response also must be seen within a temporal context–that is, as a dose-time-response relationship. The reason for incorporating a temporal feature in hormesis is that it also may be described as a modest over-compensation response following an initial disruption in homeostasis…..The hormetic dose response therefore represents the effects of a reparative process that slightly or modestly overshoots the original homeostatic set point, resulting in the low-dose stimulatory response…..The assessment of the dose response therefore is a dynamic process. Whereas harmful agents may induce toxicity in affected biological systems, the organism or biological system is not a passive entity but, rather, will respond to damage signals with a coordinated series of temporally mediated repair processes. This dynamic aspect of toxicological assessment requires the inclusion of not only a broad range of doses but also a series of temporal evaluations (i.e., repeat measures). Only by assessing the dose-response process over time can an accurate assessment of the dose-response relationship be determined, within which the hormetic dose response is best revealed.” .......
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
Hormesis is a biphasic dose-response phenomenon characterized by a low-dose stimulation and a high-dose inhibition. Hormetins are substances that produce Hormesis. The present Op-ed identified many hundreds of candidate Hormetins, and provided arguments that showed many more candidate Hormetins could be identified with a well-resourced study. Fifty candidate Hormetins were evaluated, and 45 of the fifty were validated as Hormetins, a 90% success rate. Each of the 45 Hormetins was briefly addressed, in describing the evidence that linked the substance to Hormesis.
The main categories of Hormetins (candidate and validated), based on numbers of studies published, appear to be ionizing radiation, agrochemicals, soil pollutants, water pollutants, air pollutants, medications, food pollutants, heavy metals, industrial chemicals, foods, physical activities, etc. From my perspective, the main limitations are the criteria the authors use for Hormetins, and the spatiotemporal omissions of most studies reported. Typically, the authors will select a few biomarkers, examine changes in their magnitude and direction related to the application of the candidate Hormetin, and if the changes go in a specific direction, conclude that the substance resulted in Hormesis. This is very limited.
If the results of these studies are to be used in health policy-making, as some leaders in the field have suggested, then the spatiotemporal boundaries need to be expanded significantly to ensure safety. More biomarkers need to be selected to ensure global maxima of benefits are obtained rather than local maxima (e.g., short-term, single stressor). For heterogeneous populations, one would expect a distribution of susceptibility to these stressors, where some members could experience positive Hormetic effects and other members might experience negative impacts. In other words, generalizability to whole populations needs to be established. More studies need to be done including combinations of candidate Hormetins, and combinations of candidate Hormetins with real-world substances operating at toxic levels. Additionally, they need to be performed over the long-term, not limited to short-term, as many of the studies reviewed here are. Most of all, because of the limited applicability of animal studies to humans, long-term studies on humans would be required for these myriad combinations. This would require many decades of well-controlled studies on humans, to ensure longevity is not impacted adversely and diseases of old age are not enhanced.
https://www.trialsitenews.com/a/hormesis-an-overview-of-the-pubmed-literature-5eb72af0
******************************************************Inside the Meltdown at the Sierra Club
Last year, the Sierra Club faced a $40 million funding shortfall and “significant fundraising uncertainty due to overall economic trends,” a spokesperson for the legacy environmental group explained over email in May.* Top management—helmed by then recently appointed Executive Director Ben Jealous, a former president of the NAACP, Maryland Democratic gubernatorial candidate, and venture capitalist—accordingly embarked on massive layoffs as it went about “creating new positions, eliminating some old positions and re-imagining others” to deal with the organization’s financial realities.
Layoffs were intended to be part and parcel of a restructuring of the organization and new strategic vision, a “50-state strategy,” by which club staff would be reorganized into work across four distinct regions, with a focus on red states. Employees who had spent years, in some cases, leading campaigns with the national organization were reshuffled into new roles. Some were reassigned to state chapter organizations or a new “field team” that runs the regional offices that serve as intermediaries between states and the national organization.
“Having a 50-state strategy is critical for us,” Jealous told Time. “In this moment, when the power grid will be changed in all 50 states, when we are building green industry in all 50 states, the Sierra Club must be as effective and impactful as possible in all 50 states.”
Nearly a year on, employees across the organization report widespread uncertainty over the strategic direction of the green group and the responsibilities required of new roles, offices, and departments. The Sierra Club has yet to finalize a 2024 budget. Managers in both the national organization and state chapters say they only have access to a few weeks’ worth of budgetary information at a time, which has made longer-term planning extraordinarily difficult. “They don’t tell us anything about the budget. There’s very little transparency,” one manager at a state chapter told me. “A lot of us just want to run functional campaigns and do power-building work, and it’s just tough when, from the top, there’s a lack of structure, a lack of organization, and a lack of communication.”
This is in addition to the increasingly contentious bargaining between management and the Progressive Workers Union, which represents a portion of Sierra Club staff. The PWU has filed multiple unfair labor practice charges, or ULPs, with the National Labor Relations Board against the Sierra Club.
Asked about criticisms of the restructuring process, Sierra Club’s deputy director of communications, Jonathon Berman, said that “numerous communications” at the outset made clear that “this would be a multistep process which would proceed over multiple months, and for some portions, more than a year.
We continue to follow that process, adjusting and tweaking based on feedback from a wide array of stakeholders as we return the organization to a position of growth.” Asked about the organization’s overall financial health, Berman said that the Sierra Club “continues to make the necessary reforms to ensure our fiscal health and ability to meet our core goals and mission. Just a year ago, leadership was confronted with navigating a potential $40 million deficit. Our work has remained focused on ensuring that such dangers to our fiscal health do not materialize as we finalize the 2024 budget.”
Several Sierra Club employees—who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation—were told that between 50 and 100 people could soon be laid off. “Sometimes I show up to work wondering if I’m going to have a job today,” another employee said. “Am I going to be able to log into my Sierra Club account?”
Several high-level staff have left the organization in recent weeks, including from the new field team that was purportedly built out to support chapters and drive the 50-state strategy forward. Members of that team, Sierra Club’s largest, have gotten questions from chapters that they can’t answer. Most pressing among those are questions about their budgets: While chapters can and often do raise their own funds, most rely on the national organization.
A document from spring of 2023, provided to PWU by Sierra Club via an information request, show that the top 10 earners at the Sierra Club, meanwhile—the group’s executive team—earned a combined 14.4 percent more ($3,236,620) at that time than what the same team had earned the prior year. Asked about these figures, Berman said he could not comment on the document without reviewing it. “There have now been multiple efforts by those seeking to spread misinformation to create numbers to fit their narrative,” he added. I responded that those figures had been provided to PWU by the Sierra Club but did not hear back from Berman in time for publication.
Last year’s layoffs kicked off a round of bargaining between the Sierra Club and the Progressive Workers Union, which represents staff in the green group’s state chapters and at the national level who are each covered under separate collective bargaining agreements. That “impact bargaining,” i.e., regarding who would be laid off, how they would be selected, and the terms of their severance, was followed a few months later by bargaining over a new contract. The contract for employees of the national organization is still underway.
The unfair labor practice charges PWU has filed against the Sierra Club include one last year alleging that leadership intended to prolong contract negotiations and provoke a strike, after which it would fire striking workers. Sierra Club management have repeatedly called the ULPs filed against them by PWU baseless.
In an emailed statement, PWU wrote that “management has made it clear that they are committed to their efforts to bust our union and gut integral provisions in our existing contract. Now, in the middle of ongoing negotiations and less than one year since the last massive layoff and restructure package threw the organization into disarray, rumors are swirling about proposals from senior management for further layoffs. It is time for the Board to take action to avoid layoffs and investigate the grievous mismanagement of the organization by Jealous and his Executive Team.”
When he arrived at the Sierra Club, Jealous also brought with him a largely new executive team. “There’s been 100 percent turnover in senior leadership before I got here, and there were a bunch of vacancies we had to fill,” he explained to E&E News last year. New hires included people that Jealous had previously worked with in his gubernatorial campaign, at the NAACP, and at People for the American Way, another progressive nonprofit focused on advocacy.
Throughout the Sierra Club, employees tasked with carrying out strategies made by the executive team say that rapid turnover, along with job reassignments and budgetary uncertainties, have made their work exceedingly difficult. One employee said that the email they received outlining their new job assignment was sent without critical information filled in. “Somebody messed up a mail merge, so it said, ‘You’re blank, you’re doing blank.’” After receiving their job assignment, the same employee learned they’d been demoted, after having been with the Sierra Club for more than five years and spending much of that time developing highly specific expertise. They described the news as a “gut punch.”
“I feel like the culture has shifted from feeling confident, cutting edge, and kicking ass to, ‘scared of our own shadow, not sure what’s going to happen tomorrow, and not sure who to trust,” they said. “The Sierra Club was a fabulous place to work because we have work-life balance and respect for the fact that we were moms and daughters and spouses and partners. There’s none of that right now. I think people would be afraid to share what they were going through.” Another employee, who’s represented by PWU, said that “what’s really sticking out to me right now is this feeling that you can’t trust anyone. There’s just a lot of fear around what’s going on and what could potentially happen.”
Another employee who has worked closely with the new executive team said it feels like that team “came in with an us-versus-them mentality. You either are on board with them and you’re the yes people or you’re not.” Top leadership at the Sierra Club reportedly call meetings about how to deal with the union “war room” meetings. Asked about this allegation, Berman said that “the Sierra Club does not have a war room.”
With the exception of chief legal officer Erica McKinley, the Sierra Club’s executive team has largely not been present for bargaining over this contract, PWU has said. They’re represented instead by several hired attorneys. The Sierra Club has declined to disclose how much it pays those lawyers, amid massive budget shortfalls, but employment lawyers have been known to charge from $300 to $1,500 per hour per attorney if billing hourly.
Management-level employees have been made to attend anti-union presentations that include point-by-point rebuttals of union demands, according to screenshots of slides from one such presentation shared with The New Republic. “We must balance managing the organization to maximize impact while also offering as flexible and worker-friendly [an] environment as possible,” one slide pertaining to PWU salary demands read.
One management-level employee who attended that presentation told me that the implication seemed to be that PWU and the workers it represents were interested only in salary raises, rather than saving the environment—an opinion this employee does not share: “The sense I get from the executive team is that PWU is trying to hamper the Sierra Club or to stop us from doing our work,” that employee said. But people “don’t come to work here because they hate the environment.”
Employees, including those who’d worked under previous executive directors, described an executive team less open to collaboration and operating with a more “corporate vibe,” as one employee put it. “Before there was just a lot more of a relationship with the executive level. We used to have town halls and open spaces to communicate with those higher up,” an employee represented by PWU said. “It’s just very cold and impersonal,” another relayed, noting that most employees receive only sporadic communication from Jealous and the executive team.
Around the time that layoffs were announced, PWU members joined all-staff Zoom meetings displaying union logos and symbols of solidarity. Shortly thereafter, the chat function in those meetings was disabled. Now all-staff meetings are held as webinars, where only the screens of presenters are visible and attendees cannot communicate with one another. (This change was the subject of another unfair labor practice charge filed by PWU.)
Asked how Sierra Club might confront low morale in the organization and fears about layoffs, Berman responded that a “core component of ensuring a strong Sierra Club is combating misinformation about who and what we are. We are not an organization that tolerates—and certainly not one that encourages—retaliation against our own employees, and the suggestion that we are without any proof has no other purpose than to try and divide the Sierra Club at a critical juncture,” he added. “We take pride in our employees and their work, which is why despite navigating a difficult economic environment we have continued to invest in our employees through overall benefits that are comparable to those offered by more wealthier corporations.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/180435/sierra-club-layoffs-union-leadership
**************************************************German Officials Said To Have Manipulated Documents To Support Nuclear Power Phase Out
A bombshell report in Germany released this morning by Cicero, a German media outlet, has uncovered that government officials manipulated documents to enable Germany’s phase out of nuclear power plants.
Top officials of Germany’s Green party, as per Cicero, manipulated expert reports to enable the shutdown to occur. Top officials from both the economics and environment ministries are said to have falsified the reports, leading to information being withheld from Economics Minister Robert Habeck.
One example of falsified reports include an internal note from the Environment Ministry in 2022, which was led by Steffi Lemke of the Greens. The note consists of an expert explanation on why the continued operation of the nuclear plants in Germany would be possible from a safety perspective. However, the note was re-written in a manner that was misleading, with the re-written note stating that the plants should not be extended for even months and that the suggestion should be “rejected for reasons of nuclear safety.”
Cicero summarizes the ordeal by stating, “The expertise of the experts in the own ministry, who were paid with taxpayers’ money, hardly played a role. Most of the time they weren’t even asked. The leadership circle of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of the Environment, which is responsible for nuclear safety, made up of Green party soldiers, has agreed on all the essential steps among themselves. When the specialist departments of both ministries were allowed to share their assessment, it was usually ignored – or deliberately falsified.“
It seems the Green party wanted to push through with the nuclear phase-out, regardless of the cost, and despite it defying economic and scientific reason.
And as it turns out, there is still hope for nuclear energy in Germany – expert opinions, which were previously not released, have indicated that at least five of the last six German nuclear power plants could be reactivated and begin generating power once again. Two different political parties in Germany, the CDU and CSU, have already indicated they intend to do as much should they return to power.
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Shareholders Reject Petroleum Giant Woodside’s Climate Plan
Shareholders of Australian petroleum giant Woodside Energy have turned down a climate plan proposed by the company’s management amid pressure from climate activists.
During Woodside’s annual general meeting on April 24, its shareholders voted on a number of issues, including the chairman position and an action plan to help the company transition to net zero.
While the incumbent chairman, Richard Goyder, was re-elected with 83.4 percent support, 58.4 percent of the shareholders turned down its climate plan.
Despite the vote on the climate plan being non-binding and purely advisory, it showed that most of Woodside’s shareholders disagreed with the company’s vision about its decarbonisation toward net zero emissions.
According to the most recent version of Woodside’s climate action plan (pdf), the company achieved a reduction in direct and indirect (scope one and two) emissions of 12.5 percent below the starting base in 2023.
The petroleum producer set targets to slash its scope one and two emissions by 15 percent by 2025 and 30 percent by 2030.
It also planned to lift the amount of investment in new energy products and lower carbon services from $335 million (US$218 million) in 2023 to $5 billion by 2030.
After the vote, Mr. Goyder expressed his disappointment with the shareholders’ decision.
“Naturally, we’re disappointed, but respect the result,” he said.
“The vote reflects the challenges and complexities of the energy transition, and today’s outcome is one that we take very seriously.”
The chairman also noted that before the April 24 meeting, he had over 80 meetings with Woodside’s shareholders and proxy advisors in the past year where they had honest and open discussions on the climate action plan.
“We would love to be investing more money in renewable energy right now, if only we had the customers, and current customers were prepared to make the trade-offs, particularly financial,” he said during the meeting.
Nevertheless, Mr. Goyder acknowledged that many of Woodside’s customers were incurring substantial costs due to their energy transition.
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29 April, 2024
Pledges and Endorsements: Should science societies and journals take political positions?
ROGER PIELKE JR.
Earlier this year, at its annual meeting the American Meteorological Society announced that the organization was signing a climate “pledge” along with EarthXTV, promising that it would work to mitigate climate dis/misinformation:
“Addressing climate change must be a top priority, if humanity and all life is to thrive. Therefore, the undersigned scientific societies and media organizations commit to working together to inform all audiences about the challenges and opportunities facing humanity at this point in the 21st century by signing a joint pledge to work together on all fronts from a science-based position to mitigate today's prevalent dis/mis-information about climate change.”
More than 15 other scientific societies signed the pledge — including the American Geophysical Union and meteorological societies from 9 other countries and regions. What exactly the pledge means in practice is not clear, but battles over misinformation are typically about politics more than information.
Scientific societies are membership organizations which are created to allow people to associate with others with similar interests or in similar professions. One function of membership organizations is to advance the shared interests of their members, and such advancement typically includes participating in politics, whether through communication and advocacy or more formally as lobbying.
Consider the third “A” in the largest scientific society in the United States, the AAAS — the American Association for the Advancement of Science.1 Scientific societies are interest groups which are absolutely essential to the functioning of a healthy democracy — exactly as envisioned by James Madison in Federalist 10.2
One answer to the question of whether science societies should take political positions in the form of pledges to this or that cause, or even endorsements of political candidates or platforms is — Sure, go for it. Interest groups comprised of likeminded people appealing to their fellow citizens and government for outcomes they believe to be in their group interest is the lifeblood of democracy.
However — and it is a big however — scientific societies also perform public interest functions that may be compromised by their special interest political positioning. Specifically, I am referring to the role that scientific societies play in overseeing peer-reviewed journals where scientific claims are made, challenged, debated, and collectively make up a significant part of what we consider to be scientific knowledge.3
The pursuit of special interests by a scientific organization could compromise its effectiveness as a public interest forum, in the words of Nature’s mission statement:4
“. . . to ensure that the results of science are rapidly disseminated to the public throughout the world, in a fashion that conveys their significance for knowledge, culture and daily life.”
Nature does not exist to serve only its subscribers or even the broader scientific community, but “the public throughout the world.” I assume that editors of virtually all scientific journals would agree.5
This creates a situation of potential conflict — Scientific societies exist to serve the special interests of their members whereas the journals that they host exist to serve the common interests of the public.6 What happens when special interests conflict with common interests?7
We do not have to speculate on the answer.
In 2020, Nature endorsed candidate Joe Biden in the U.S. presidential election.8 Several years after, Floyd Jiuyun Zhang of Stanford University explored the consequences among U.S. citizens of the endorsement on measures of trust in Nature and the broader scientific community.9
What Zhang found should have set off alarm bells in any editorial board or scientific organization looking to become more political:
This study shows that electoral endorsements by Nature and potentially other scientific journals or organizations can undermine public trust in the endorser, particularly among supporters of the out-party candidate. This has negative impacts on trust in the scientific community as a whole and on information acquisition behaviours with respect to critical public health issues. Positive effects among supporters of the endorsed candidate are null or small, and they do not offset the negative effects among the opposite camp. This probably results in a lower overall level of public confidence and more polarization along the party line. There is little evidence that seeing the endorsement message changes opinions about the candidates.
Zhang found that the endorsement of Joe Biden by Nature made polarization worse, decreased trust in the scientific community, and did not change views on the candidates. Other than that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?
Nature responded to the study by doubling down on its commitment to make political endorsements, regardless the consequences:
. . . the study does question whether research journals should endorse electoral candidates if one implication is falling trust in science. This is an important question, and there are, sadly, no easy answers. The study shows the potential costs of making an endorsement. But inaction has costs, too. Considering the record of Trump’s four years in office, this journal judged that silence was not an option.
Nature’s October 2020 editorial was an appeal to readers in the United States to consider the dangers that four more years of Trump would pose — not only for science, but also for the health and well-being of US society and the wider world. . .
The fact that just under half of U.S. voters who voted in 2020 voted for Donald Trump is clear evidence that the special interests of Nature (a London-based journal) conflicted with the interests of almost half of those who voted.
What action by Nature might have been more consistent with common interests? Not endorsing a candidate.
By not endorsing a candidate the common interests being served would have been helping to sustain and reinforce trust in the scientific community and not serving to compromise or polarize that trust. For scientific organizations, appeals to special interests at the expense of common interests is a choice.
Scientific membership organizations have every right to act as politically as their members desire — though here too I’d urge evidence-informed caution. But scientific journals are different, simply because they have a public interest focus.
Stronger institutional firewalls are needed between societies and the journals that they host. Journals have one job, and that is to provide a forum for publishing peer-reviewed research, which I’d note, will in individual papers will often reflect political agendas, arguments, and biases.
Journal editors should eschew the lure of and demands for playing interest group politics and stay focused on their core mission — that will better serve both common interests and the special interests of the scientific community to serve all people, no matter who they vote for.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/pledges-and-endorsements
************************************************‘Environmental Pollutant’—How a Key Climate Agenda Tool Harms Endangered Species
As the Biden administration expands its offshore wind projects as part of its goal to reach a carbon-free energy system, whales and other marine life may become collateral damage, according to new research.
Two independent studies measuring ocean wind turbine construction noise found that the sound emitted by vessels mapping the seafloor was significantly louder than estimated, and that noise protection for whales and other sea creatures during wind turbine pile driving doesn’t work.
Intense noise causes hearing loss in whales, other marine mammals, turtles, and fish, compromising their ability to navigate, avoid danger, detect predators, and find prey, according to scientific studies.
Robert Rand, an acoustics consultant with 44 years of experience, took underwater readings of the sonar survey vessel Miss Emma McCall off the coast of New Jersey. He also recorded acoustic readings of pile driving for Vineyards Wind 1, an offshore wind farm project under construction 15 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard.
In his pile-driving report, published March 28, Mr. Rand found that even the most advanced sound-dampening technologies didn’t adequately control harmful noise. The pounding was just as loud as seismic air gun arrays used for oil and gas exploration, long known to cause injury, hearing loss, and behavioral changes in fish and marine mammals.
Furthermore, the noise made by the construction vessel itself, which is not monitored, was almost as loud as the pile driving. Mr. Rand found that the standard formula used by the National Marine Fisheries Service to calculate how noise, over a period of time, affects a mammal’s hearing, significantly underestimates the sound levels experienced by dolphins and whales.
“These are real data,” Mr. Rand, who testified at a Congressional field hearing on January 20, told The Epoch Times. “I measured it. This is not a computer model. This is not a political press release. These are data.”
Many environmentalists fear that noise related to ocean wind farm construction is contributing to “unusual mortality events” affecting whales. From 2016 through April this year, 220 humpback whales have died, according to data collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
“Elevated humpback whale mortalities have occurred along the Atlantic coast from Maine through Florida,” since 2016, the NOAA states.
“The numbers have been decreasing, especially since 2017, when offshore operations really swung into gear,” Mr. Rand said.
“From my experience in noise control, that’s not a coincidence. Noise is an environmental pollutant. In human terms, it’s measured in life years lost.”
The North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium estimates 350 North Atlantic right whales exist in the world’s oceans today.
The completed wind farm project will comprise 62 wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean, spaced one nautical mile apart. The project is estimated to provide power to more than 400,000 homes and businesses.
The offshore wind farm is owned by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners of Denmark and Avangrid Renewables, part of the Spanish company, Iberdrola.
At the construction site in November 2023, Mr. Rand said an 874-foot crane ship called the Orion was using a massive hammer to pound a monopile foundation for a wind turbine into the seabed.
The monopile is a steel pipe 31 feet in diameter, 279 feet long, and weighs 1,895 tons, according to the manufacturer, EEW Special Pipe Constructions.
Vineyard Wind 1 implemented two sets of noise controls. The first is a “hydro sound damper,” which Mr. Rand said, is a vertical net in the water around the monopile that’s covered with foam or rubber blocks and balls.
The second is a “double bubble” curtain. These are two weighted hoses lying on the seafloor in concentric circles around the monopile. The radius is roughly 492 to 656 feet.
The hoses have holes in them, and compressed air from a support vessel is forced through the hoses, causing bubbles to rise to the surface. The bubbles are supposed to mitigate the sound pressure created by the pile driving.
“These are advanced techniques,” Mr. Rand said. “They aren’t used anywhere else.”
Unfortunately, the noise mitigation techniques don’t work, he said.
Mr. Rand dropped a research-grade, omnidirectional hydrophone into the water at six locations, starting at 4.10 nautical miles from the pile driving and moving closer to 0.57 nautical miles.
Analyzing the data, Mr. Rand found that even with sophisticated noise mitigation in place, the pile driving is as loud as multiple seismic air guns.
“People have been protesting and the government has been rigorously regulating seismic air gun arrays for years, if not decades, because of their sonic intensity and hazard for endangered species—for whales and other marine species,” Mr. Rand said.
“This pile driving is as loud as an array of air guns.”
The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) makes it illegal to kill, hunt, capture, or harass a marine mammal. Killing or injuring a mammal is considered a Level A harassment under the 1972 law. Level B harassment includes actions that disrupt an animal’s normal behavior, including migration, breathing, nursing, breeding, feeding, or sheltering.
The National Marine Fisheries Service provides a guide to marine acoustic thresholds, which are considered harassment at certain levels.
“Acoustic thresholds refer to the levels of sound that, if exceeded, will likely result in temporary or permanent changes in marine mammal hearing sensitivity,” the website states.
The Fisheries Service notes that Level B harassment is reached when continuous noise, such as a ship engine running, hits 120 decibels, or impulsive or intermittent noise, such as pile driving, hits an average of 160 decibels.
The agency says marine mammals can suffer permanent hearing loss at 173 to 219 decibels of continuous sound, or 202 to 232 decibels of impulsive sound.
Based on his data, Mr. Rand estimated the pile driving noise at the source at 241 decibels. Loudness decreases as sound waves move away from the source. Still, Mr. Rand measured peak sound levels ranging from 180 decibels at a distance of 0.57 nautical miles from the ship to 162 decibels at 4.10 nautical miles.
He also found that the continuous noise of the Orion’s propulsion and positioning thrusters exceeded 120 decibels at a distance of 3.7 miles from the ship.
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Interconnectors and their impact on the GB power market
Kathryn Porter:
We are keen to receive review comments for our new paper which is now available for open peer review (pdf)
Abstract
The GB electricity market has become increasingly reliant on interconnection with other European markets. Interconnectors are seen as key to managing periods of low wind output in an electricity system increasingly dependent on intermittent renewable generation. But what if the markets at the other end of those interconnectors are also experiencing dunkelflaute conditions?
As most of them (with the exception of Norway) share similar weather to the UK, and (with the exceptions of Norway and France) share similar wind-led de-carbonisation strategies, can we really rely on interconnectors to ensure security of supply?
And what about the effects of energy nationalism which has been increasing since the war in Ukraine? Can we rely on countries being willing to export at all times when GB needs to import?
Submitted comments and contributions will be subject to a moderation process and will be published, provided they are substantive and not abusive.
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Australian Greens want free IVF, label Liberals policy 'conservative and exclusionary'
This is a step in the right direction, given the falling birthrate. To support an ageing population, Australia needs all the babies it can get. And we know that IVF babies will be well treated and so fulfil their potential. It is however odd that the Greens support the idea. They used to be in favour of population reduction
The ACT Greens want assisted reproductive services to be free, condemning the Canberra Liberals policy as "conservative and exclusionary".
The Liberals announced this week they would pay up to $2000 towards IVF and certain fertility treatments for those who are deemed medically infertile.
The territory government has already fired back and said they are working on their own policy, after promising to explore options in late 2022. Labor is also expected to reveal a policy as part of its health commitments in the election campaign.
The Greens say they believe assisted reproductive services should be included in the public health system and it should be free.
"Assisted reproductive healthcare is expensive. Whether you have fertility issues, have a disability, are in an LGBTQIA+ relationship or no relationship at all, everyone should have choice and free access to start a family," ACT Greens health spokeswoman Emma Davidson said.
"The ACT Greens want a fairer public health system - where assisted reproductive services are available to everyone, for free, without the emotion toll that comes from fitting into an exclusionary definition of infertility."
Under the Liberals scheme, same-sex couples and individuals will only be able to access the rebates if they are medically infertile.
However, Ms Davidson said this would mean a person would be put through a distressing process and treatments such as IVF should be available to everyone.
"The ACT Liberals policy relies on a conservative and exclusionary view of what a family is. Canberra is incredibly diverse, and we need initiatives that reflect this to create a truly inclusive and fair community," she said.
"Not everyone can fall pregnant and it's not always because they are medically infertile. Under the Liberals policy, people will still need to go through a costly and lengthy process to be considered medically infertile which can be distressing on the individual, their partners and family."
The proposed rebates from the Liberals will cover out-of-pocket expenses of up to $2000 when undergoing IVF or certain assisted reproductive technology and up to $1000 for intra uterine insemination. The party says they are not considering a public service as part of their pitch to voters.
Opposition health spokeswoman Leanne Castley said the party had chosen to only open the scheme to those who were medically infertile as it was the biggest cohort in need of assistance.
"This is open for all Canberran families that have fertility challenges," she said this week.
"We hear from families who are struggling with infertility and believe that's the biggest cohort who do need assistance and it's just a small way we can help those families who are struggling with infertility."
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28 April, 2024
Pope Francis uses first ever US TV interview to slam climate change deniers as 'fools' and insists 'climate change exists'
He does generally seem to prefer Green/Left doctrine to Roman doctrine
Pope Francis spoke out against climate change deniers, calling them 'fools' in his first ever interview on American television.
The often 'progressive' pontiff spoke with CBS News' Norah O'Donnell at the Vatican this week to give his thoughts on violence in Ukraine and Gaza and other important subjects.
However, he made a pointed effort to express his displeasure with those who deny climate change when asked what he says to those who deny it by O'Donnell.
'There are people who are foolish, and even foolish if they show you them research. they don't believe it,' he said through an interpreter.
'They don't understand the situation or because of their interest, but climate change exists,' he added.
********************************************
Geoengineering Test Quietly Launches Salt Crystals into Atmosphere
The nation's first outdoor test to limit global warming by increasing cloud cover launched Tuesday from the deck of a decommissioned aircraft carrier in the San Francisco Bay.
The experiment, which organizers didn't widely announce to avoid public backlash, marks the acceleration of a contentious field of research known as solar radiation modification. The concept involves shooting substances such as aerosols into the sky to reflect sunlight away from the Earth.
The move led by researchers at the University of Washington has renewed questions about how to effectively and ethically study promising climate technologies that could also harm communities and ecosystems in unexpected ways. The experiment is spraying microscopic salt particles into the air, and the secrecy surrounding its timing caught even some experts off guard.
"Since this experiment was kept under wraps until the test started, we are eager to see how public engagement is being planned and who will be involved," said Shuchi Talati, the executive director of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering, a nonprofit that seeks to include developing countries in decisions about solar modification, also known as geoengineering. She is not involved in the experiment and only learned about it after being contacted by a reporter.
"While it complies with all current regulatory requirements, there is a clear need to reexamine what a strong regulatory framework must look like in a world where [solar radiation modification] experimentation is happening," Talati added.
The Coastal Atmospheric Aerosol Research and Engagement, or CAARE, project is using specially built sprayers to shoot trillions of sea salt particles into the sky in an effort to increase the density — and reflective capacity — of marine clouds. The experiment is taking place, when conditions permit, atop the USS Hornet Sea, Air & Space Museum in Alameda, California, and will run through the end of May, according to a weather modification form the team filed with federal regulators.
The project comes as global heat continues to obliterate monthly and yearly temperature records and amid growing interest in solar radiation modification from Silicon Valley funders and some environmental groups. It also follows the termination of a Harvard University experiment last month that planned to inject reflective aerosols into the stratosphere near Sweden before it was canceled after encountering opposition from Indigenous groups.
Solar radiation modification is controversial because widespread use of technologies like marine cloud brightening could alter weather patterns in unclear ways and potentially limit the productivity of fisheries and farms. It also wouldn't address the main cause of climate change — the use of fossil fuels — and could lead to a catastrophic spike in global temperatures if major geoengineering activities were discontinued before greenhouse gases decrease to manageable levels.
The University of Washington and SilverLining, a geoengineering research advocacy group involved in the CAARE project, declined interview requests. The mayor of Alameda, where the experiment is being conducted, didn't respond to emailed questions about the project.
The secrecy surrounding the landmark experiment seems to have been by design, according to The New York Times, which, along with a local newspaper, was granted exclusive access to cover the initial firing of the spray cannons.
"The idea of interfering with nature is so contentious, organizers of Tuesday's test kept the details tightly held, concerned that critics would try to stop them," the Times reported. The White House also distanced itself from the experiment, which is being conducted with the cooperation of a Smithsonian-affiliated museum.
The project team has touted its transparency, noting that visitors to the USS Hornet, which now serves as a floating museum, will be able to view the experiment.
"The world needs to rapidly advance its understanding of the effects of aerosol particles on climate,” Kelly Wanser, the executive director of SilverLining, said in a press release. "With a deep commitment to open science and a culture of humility, the University of Washington has developed an approach that integrates science with societal engagement, and can help society in essential steps toward advancing science, developing regulations, promoting equitable and effective decision-making, and building shared understanding in these areas."
The CAARE project is part of a larger coastal study that the University of Washington consortium is planning to pursue. The second phase of that effort would take place on a pier around a mile offshore in a coastal environment, according to a study description the school released Monday.
While a peer review of that proposal was generally positive, the scientists also flagged some transparency shortcomings.
"One reviewer noted that it would help to have more information on the site location," said a Washington-University-commissioned report. "Is there local resistance or concerns (whether founded or unfounded) around issues like local air quality, etc.? How many options exist, and how do different options affect the field study plan?"
The study plan also made no mention of its potential ecological impacts, a key consideration recommended by a 2022 Biden administration marine cloud brightening workshop. That's a significant oversight, according to Greg Goldsmith, the associate dean for research and development at Chapman University.
"History has shown us that when we insert ourselves into modification of nature, there are always very serious unintended consequences," said Goldsmith, who studies the implications of climate change for plant structure and function. "And therefore, it would be prudent to listen to what history has shown and look for consequences."
**********************************************
Hertz To Sell Off Even More EVs As Depreciation Losses Mount
The whole plan, it must be said, had the best of intentions.
American rental car giant Hertz saw the way the car market was going and decided to invest in building the largest electric vehicle rental fleet in North America back in 2021. That meant hundreds of thousands of EVs from Tesla, General Motors, Kia, Polestar, Volvo and more. It even got Tom Brady involved in the whole thing.
Unfortunately, a complicated confluence of events—including rapid-fire EV price cuts in 2023 that led to massive depreciation and higher repair costs—have led to nothing but headaches for Hertz. The company has endured massive losses, said goodbye to the CEO behind the move and has since spent the past few months offloading those EVs at fire-sale prices.
This week, the company announced that it's not even done. Hertz's first-quarter financial statement reveals that the company is increasing the amount of EVs it plans to sell privately this year by 10,000 units, aiming for a goal of 30,000 EVs sold in 2024. And it also admitted how much it's been stung by depreciation.
"The company incurred a $195 million charge to vehicle depreciation to write down the EVs held for sale which were remaining in inventory at quarter-end to fair value and recognize the disposition losses on EVs sold in the period," Hertz officials said. It added that depreciation costs are up $339 per vehicle now, and that "of the $339 per unit increase, $119 was related to EVs held for sale."
When you look at the situation on paper, Hertz's retreat from its aggressive EV makes financial sense. Post-pandemic travel is still going strong and so is the rental car business, even with increased competition from rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft or even Turo. Hertz's own Q1 revenue was $2.1 billion, up 2% from 2023. But thanks in large part to huge depreciation costs—almost a third of which it blames on EVs—Hertz's adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization still amounted to $567 million in quarterly losses. In other words, ouch.
First and foremost, last year's round of constant EV price cuts and discounts, led by Tesla, have had a profound impact on the value of cars. That includes private owners, but for companies like Hertz that drive significant revenue from a constant churn of cars in and out of the fleets, it was a major roadblock. And then you had other problems, like higher repair costs after mishaps from customers not used to electric acceleration and trouble sourcing parts from companies like Tesla and Polestar.
***********************************************
Biden’s Latest Power Plant Power Grab
Almost two years after a similar rule was rejected by the Supreme Court, the Biden administration on Thursday released another final rule for regulating America’s power plants.
Under the rule, coal-fired power plants and most new natural gas-fired power plants would have to eliminate 90% of their carbon emissions by 2039 or close down in 2040.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule would raise electricity costs for Americans, kill manufacturing jobs, and disproportionately affect the poor, farmers, and small business.
EPA’s rule, if it overcomes legal challenges, would result in the closure of coal-fired power plants that now produce 16% of Americans’ electricity. It would make natural gas power generation, which produces 43% of electricity, more costly and increase the incidence of blackouts.
Under the rule, America would become a less attractive location for energy-intensive manufacturing and Americans’ electricity bills would rise.
This is the latest in a series of government attempts to reduce emissions—and power—from the nation’s energy-generating sector.
EPA’s Clean Power Plan, proposed in 2015 under President Barack Obama, stated that if emissions exceeded the agency’s requirements, a state or group of states would be required to shut down power plants or install renewable energy sources.
But although the Clean Air Act allows EPA to set maximum levels of new and existing emissions sources, the Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency that the law does not allow EPA to shut down power plants.
Specifically, EPA can’t move from regulating individual power plants to regulating regional emissions, as it did in the rejected Clean Power Plan. The high court’s opinion cited the major questions doctrine, according to which Congress must “speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast economic and political significance.”
That’s why President Joe Biden’s EPA is trying another tactic to regulate emissions with this latest rule.
Rather than shutting down power plants by regulating regional emissions, as in 2015, the power plants would either have to comply with an unproven technology to sequester, or bury, 90% of their carbon dioxide emissions, or they would have to close down.
Obama issued his Clean Power Plan as a regulation because, despite sizable Democratic majorities in both chambers, Congress didn’t pass legislation to reduce emissions from power plants.
The American Clean Energy and Security Act (introduced in 2009 by Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Edward Markey, D-Mass.) and the American Power Act (introduced the next year by Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joe Lieberman, D-Conn.) would have accomplished this, but neither proposal became law.
In the same way, Biden’s plan to close power plants would not pass Congress, so he is trying to bring out a regulation to achieve the same goal.
However, this term the Supreme Court is reconsidering the so-called Chevron doctrine, which now gives government agencies wide leeway to interpret laws. That decision is due in May or June.
If the high court overturns the Chevron doctrine, as predicted, EPA’s new power plant rule will be on weaker grounds, because it relies on an ambiguous interpretation.
In 2022, the Supreme Court found the first Clean Power Plan to be an example of “agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.”
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts argued that “EPA claimed to discover an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority in the vague language of a long-extant, but rarely used, statute designed as a gap filler. That discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously declined to enact itself.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred, saying: “The framers [of the Constitution] believed that the power to make new laws regulating private conduct was a grave one that could, if not properly checked, pose a serious threat to individual liberty.”
Severe, government-imposed cuts in carbon emissions raise the cost of electricity and American-made goods. Under EPA’s new rule, power plants would have to invest in more costly equipment or close down.
Cleaner air and efficient power generation are worthwhile goals. But so is the security that comes from a healthy economy and the rule of law.
The Supreme Court, which struck down Obama’s power plant rule in 2022, could well strike down Biden’s version in the future.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/25/bidens-latest-power-plant-power-grab/
***************************************25 April, 2024
Climate Change is Class Warfare
The climate is up the spout and we’re to blame. The planet is boiling like a pan of porridge. We face the possible extinction of all life on earth. ‘Science’ says so. Anyone who questions it is a demonic scoundrel. The climate catastrophe is a 100% solid-gold, slam-dunk irrefutable fact.
Hmm. And yet, it is clear to anyone who has paid the slightest attention, that the tired, hysterical predictions of the climate alarmists (made repeatedly over four decades and based on their hypothetical computer-models) have proved to be spectacularly wrong, again and again and again. It does not take much digging (we have the internet these days) to discover that the outlandish claims of climate alarmists are flatly contradicted by lots and lots of perfectly good scientific evidence and data. We’re not talking here about fringe science put about by whackos. We’re talking about official data – mainstream science, published in respected journals. (Some of it is featured in my ‘climate-denier’ film, Climate: The Movie, available for free online).
The world is not boiling. We are, as any geologist will tell you, in an ice age – one of the coldest periods in the last 500 million years. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is not unnaturally or frighteningly high. Compared to the last half billion years of earth’s history it is extremely low. And there is no evidence that changing levels of atmospheric CO2 (it has changed radically many times in the past) has ever ‘driven climate change’. If there had been, Al Gore would have said so in his silly film, but he didn’t. Hurricane activity is not increasing, nor are the number of wildfires, nor are the number of droughts, and so on and so on. This is what the official data say. You can look it up.
Of course this is all a bit embarrassing for the science establishment. The climate alarm is worth billions to them in climate-related funding. A lot of jobs depend on it. A lot of reputations are at stake. And it’s deeply awkward for the renewables industry, which turns over around a trillion dollars a year.
The climate alarm is not supported by scientific evidence. It is supported by bullying, intimidation and the censorship of anyone who dares to question it. Climate catastrophism is politics, shamelessly dressed up as science.
The climate scare was the invention of the environmentalist movement, which stands opposed to vulgar, dirty, free-market capitalism. They say there are too many people, consuming too much. We must be restrained and contained, for the sake of Gaia. The solution to the global, existential climate problem is higher taxes and more regulation.
At any social gathering, you can pretty confidently predict who will think what about climate, by asking them about taxes and regulation. People who love the Big State can’t get enough of climate chaos. People who want lower taxes and less regulation will roll their eyes and say rude things about little Greta.
Across the Western world, the state has grown enormously over the last century, vastly increasing the number of people whose livelihoods depend on state-spending, and whose jobs are related, directly or indirectly, to government control. In the U.K. and U.S. both, more than twice as many people now work in government as work in manufacturing. And this does not include all those (in the third sector etc.) who rely indirectly on government largesse.
These people depend on government. They are paid for out of taxation. In such circles to proclaim the joys of a small state, lower taxes and less government is a breach of social etiquette. You have crossed a moral line. You will be suspected of liking Donald Trump, of voting Brexit, of hating lockdown and compulsory vaccination, of defending the Second Amendment, of being a climate denier.
And indeed all this may well be true. These views tend to hang together. As do the views of those on the other side. To repeat, the climate alarm is in fact politics dressed up as science. We are, as more people are beginning to realise, engaged in a class war. On one side, the tax-consuming regulating class that feeds from taxation and bosses us about. On the other, the rest of us in the private sector, who rather resent paying taxes and being told what to do and how to live our lives.
This is the real basis for the consensus on climate change. The consensus exists among our sprawling, tax-consuming establishment. This is not a small group of people. It is an entire class. It is, if you will, the ruling class. It controls our civil service, our schools and universities, large parts of our arts and science establishments and much of the media. It is an intolerant class, deeply aware of its own interests. The taboo that surrounds climate scepticism is a reflection of its power.
It would be nice to think that politely pointing to the actual scientific data might put an end to all the climate chaos nonsense. Sadly it won’t. Because this ain’t about science.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/04/18/climate-change-is-class-warfare/
**********************************************************The Federal Phase-Out of Gasoline Cars Has Begun
If these nutcases remain in charge -- unlikely -- there will one day be a vigorous trade in ICE used cars. Your old car will be a valuable asset
The Biden administration last week rolled out new emissions regulations that the New York Times said will “transform the American automobile market.”
In what the paper called “one of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history,” the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is mandating that a majority of new passenger vehicles sold in America be hybrids or EVs by 2032.
The Biden administration and defenders of the policy argue that the EPA’s regulation is “not a ban” on gas-powered cars, since carmakers are not prohibited from producing gas-powered vehicles. Instead, automakers are required to meet a government-mandated “average emissions limit” across their entire vehicle line, to force them to produce more EVs and fewer gas-powered cars.
It’s a clever ruse in that it allows the Biden administration to use regulatory power to force automobile manufactures off of gas-powered vehicles while denying that they are banning them.
Whatever one chooses to call the regulation, its purpose is clear.
“Make no mistake,” the Wall Street Journal noted. “This is a coerced phase-out of gas-powered cars.”
This might be music to the ears of those who see fossil fuels as evil, but economics and history suggest the White House’s plan to force Americans off of gas-powered cars could be a disaster.
What’s Holding Up EV Adoption?
A major reason why the White House is forcing this “transformation of the American automobile market” is that Americans aren’t voluntarily adopting EVs quickly enough to satisfy the White House.
Though Americans purchased more than a million EVs last year, that still represents less than 8 percent of total vehicle sales in the US. The government’s current target is 56 percent. (If the White House was serious about speeding up this transition, it might consider eliminating the 25 percent tariff on cars built in China — which accounts for some 60 percent of global EV sales — but that would be too easy.)
Despite massive subsidies encouraging consumers to purchase EVs, Americans didn’t buy them as rapidly as predicted, causing auto companies to pump the brakes. Ford recently announced it was halving production of its most popular EV, the F-150 Lightning. General Motors, the largest US automaker, and Toyota, the second-largest US automaker, followed suit, announcing significant reductions in EV production.
The weak demand for electric vehicles no doubt has several sources, but the BBC identified a few primary reasons, two of which appear over and over in consumer surveys: price and charging reliability.
Ford’s F-150 Lightning starts at $50,000. Its popular Mach-e starts at $40,000, and that’s after a recent $8,100 mark-down. GM’s top-selling EV, the LYRIQ, starts at $59,000. On average, EVs sell for about $5,000 more than similar gas-powered cars. And EV prices are going up, not down, researchers point out.
“In 2011, the inflation-adjusted price of a new EV was near $44,000. By 2022, that price had risen to over $66,000,” said Ashley Nunes, a senior research associate at Harvard Law School, in her testimony to Congress in 2023.
The second problem is that Americans have serious concerns about how they’ll charge their EVs. A 2023 survey conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago found that 77 percent of respondents cited concerns about charging stations as a reason for not purchasing an EV.
This is not an irrational concern.
When Americans drive their gas-powered cars, they are not worried about where they’ll fill up when their fuel runs low. Gas stations are plentiful in the US and easy to find. Charging stations are another matter.
Bloomberg reported last year that, despite steady growth in recent years of EV charging stations, there is just one quick-turn electrical vehicle charge station in the US for every 16 gasoline stations.
Federal efforts to expand charging infrastructure, including $7.5 billion in new spending to build half a million stations, have been embarrassingly slow.
‘Subsidizing EVs With Profits From Gas-Powered Cars’
Since Americans are not voluntarily adopting EVs as quickly as the government would like, the EPA is trying to hasten the transition. This could be a disastrous move.
As the Journal noted, Ford last year lost nearly $5 billion on its EV business. Yet the company still managed to generate a $4.3 billion profit in 2023. It doesn’t take a math genius to deduce how this happened.
“[Automobile] companies are heavily subsidizing EVs with profits from gas-powered cars,” the Journal notes.
Forcing automobile companies to expand production of their least-profitable product lines at the expense of their best-performing ones is economic madness. It calls to mind collectivized agricultural policies in the Soviet Union, where central planners embraced the worst farming methods.
While Stalin’s collectivization of farms in 1929 was a massive failure that led to the deaths of millions, agriculture in the USSR of course continued during and after his lifetime. But two distinct sectors emerged: a tiny private sector that produced a bumper crop of food, and a massive collectivized sector that produced very little.
The late economist James D. Gwartney (1940–2024) explained that families living on collectives in the USSR were allowed to farm on small private plots (no more than one acre) and sell their produce in a mostly free market.
Historians point out that in the 1960s these tiny private farms, which accounted for just 3 percent of the sown land in the USSR, produced 66 percent of its eggs, 64 percent of the potatoes, 43 percent of its vegetables, 40 percent of meat, and 39 percent of its milk.
Gwartney and economist Richard Lyndell Stroup note that by 1980, private farms accounted for just one percent of sown land in the USSR, but a quarter of its agricultural output.
“The productivity per acre on the private plots was approximately 33 times higher than that on the collectively farmed land!” they wrote.
In a free-market economy, farmers within the Soviet Union would have been allowed to shift toward private production — just like US automakers today would be allowed to shift away from EVs until the industry becomes more profitable.
But… the Environment?
Supporters of the Biden policy are likely to respond that we have no choice but to transition to EVs because of climate change. There are several problems with this argument.
For starters, EVs are not the green panacea they seem to be. Electrical vehicles actually require a massive amount of energy and strip mining. Half a million pounds of rock and minerals have to be mined to build just one battery, on average. EVs require far more energy and cause far more pollution when they are manufactured than gas-powered automobiles.
“[I]t’s true that the production of a BEV (battery electric vehicle) causes more pollution than a gasoline-powered counterpart,” the New York Times admitted in a 2022 article headlined “EVs Start With a Bigger Carbon Footprint. But That Doesn’t Last.”
If you weren’t aware that EVs cause more pollution on the production side than gas-powered cars, don’t be embarrassed; few do. It’s one of the dirty secrets of EVs: they start with an enormous carbon footprint. At a climate summit a few years ago, Volvo noted its C40 Recharge had to be driven about 70,000 miles before its total carbon footprint was smaller than the gas-powered version.
As the Times says, the footprint of EVs shrinks over time. But not as fast as many think. One big reason for this is that the bulk of the electricity produced in the US is produced by… you guessed it… fossil fuels. As the Energy Information Administration points out, fossil fuels generate about 60 percent of the electricity in the US, which means that most people charging their EVs are using electricity generated from fossil fuels.
Reducing that carbon footprint is also exacerbated by the fact that people tend to rack up fewer miles with EVs than gas-powered vehicles, which makes it more difficult to offset the large carbon footprint on the production side.
“[Our] data show that electric vehicles are driven considerably less on average than gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles,” researchers at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley noted in a 2019 study. “In the complete sample, electric vehicles are driven an average of 7,000 miles per year, compared to 10,200 for gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles.”
All of this helps explain why a 2023 Wall Street Journal analysis found that shifting all personal US vehicles to electric power would barely make a dent in global CO2 emissions, reducing them by less than 0.2 percent.
Who Chooses?
Forcing US automakers to expand their least-profitable autolines is backward economics. It puts automakers at risk, not to mention their workers and shareholders.
The higher profits automakers are reaping from gas-powered vehicles isn’t an accident. It’s a signal that consumers prefer them at the prices being offered, and heeding consumers is what separates capitalism from the failed collectivist systems of the past.
The Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained that in a free-market economy, it’s the consumers who ultimately call the shots, not the state or even the corporations. This idea is known as consumer sovereignty.
“The real bosses [under capitalism] are the consumers,” Mises wrote in Bureaucracy. “They, by their buying and by their abstention from buying, decide who should own the capital and run the plants. They determine what should be produced and in what quantity and quality.”
The real question here isn’t about which is better, gas-powered cars or EVs. It’s about who gets to choose.
By allowing unelected regulators to decide what kind of cars are built instead of consumers, the US is crossing an ominous line.
This kind of central planning failed miserably in the 20th century. Don’t expect it to be any different this time around.
This piece was originally posted on AIER.org, you can find it here.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/04/23/federal-phase-out-gasoline-cars/?omhide=true
*********************************************************Climate Change Is Normal And Natural, And Can’t Be Controlled
NASA claimed that “Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate” and “human activity is the principal cause.”
Others proposed spending trillions of dollars to control the climate. But are we humans responsible for climate change? And what can we do about it?
“The climate of planet Earth has never stopped changing since the Earth’s genesis, sometimes relatively rapidly, sometimes very slowly, but always surely,” says Patrick Moore in Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. “Hoping for a ‘perfect stable climate’ is as futile as hoping the weather will be the same and pleasant, every day of the year, forever.”
In other words, climate change is normal and natural, and you can forget about controlling it.
For instance, a major influence of weather and climate are solar cycles driven by the Sun’s magnetic field over periods of eight to 14 years. They release varying amounts of energy and produce dark sunspots on the Sun’s surface. The effects of solar cycles on Earth vary, with some regions warming more than 1°C and others cooling.
Climatic changes occur as a result of variations in the interaction of solar energy with Earth’s ozone layer, which influences ozone levels and stratospheric temperatures. These, in turn, affect the speed of west-to-east wind flows and the stability of the polar vortex.
Whether the polar vortex remains stable and close to the Arctic or dips southward determines whether winters in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are severe or mild.
In addition to solar cycles, there are three Milankovitch cycles that range in length from 26,000 to 100,000 years. They include the eccentricity, or shape, of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. Small fluctuations in the orbit’s shape influence the length of seasons. For example, when the orbit is more like an oval than a circle, Northern Hemisphere summers are longer than winters and springs are longer than autumns.
The Milankovitch cycles also involve obliquity, or the angle that Earth’s axis is tilted. The tilt is why there are seasons, and the greater the Earth’s tilt, the more extreme the seasons. Larger tilt angles can cause the melting and retreat of glaciers and ice sheets, as each hemisphere receives more solar radiation during summer and less during winter.
Finally, the rotating Earth, like a toy top, wobbles slightly on its axis. Known as precession, this third Milankovitch cycle causes seasonal contrasts to be more extreme in one hemisphere and less extreme in the other.
Moving from outer space to Earth, ocean and wind currents also affect the climate.
For instance, during normal conditions in the Pacific Ocean, trade winds blow from east to west along the Equator, pushing warm surface waters from South America towards Asia. During El Niño, the trade winds weaken and the warm water reverses direction, moving eastward to the American West Coast.
Other times, during La Niña, the trade winds become stronger than usual, and more warm water is blown towards Asia. In the United States and Canada, these phenomena cause some regions to become warmer, colder, wetter, or drier than usual.
In addition to El Niño and La Niña, there is also the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is driven by low air pressure in the North Atlantic Ocean, near Greenland and Iceland (known as the sub-polar low or Icelandic low), and high air pressure in the central North Atlantic Ocean (known as the subtropical high or Azores High).
The relative strength of these regions of low and high atmospheric pressures affects the climate in the Eastern United States and Canada and in Europe, affecting both temperatures and precipitation.
Similarly, Hadley cells are the reason Earth has equatorial rainforests that are bounded by deserts to the north and south. Because the Sun warms Earth the most at the Equator, air on either side of the Equator is cooler and denser.
As a result, cool air blows towards the Equator as the warm, less dense equatorial air rises and cools, releasing moisture as rain and creating lush vegetation. The rising, drier air reaches the stratosphere blowing north and south to settle in regions made arid by lack of atmospheric moisture.
These and other phenomena influencing our climate are well beyond the control of humans.
https://principia-scientific.com/climate-change-is-normal-and-natural-and-cant-be-controlled/
*******************************************Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Is Running on Eastern Coal
When your cell phone gets hot, that means its processors are computing faster or you have a lot of apps open. The same is true for “server farms,” which Gigabyte.com explains are “a large number—up to thousands—of servers grouped together to provide better functionality and accessibility.”
It takes a lot of energy to run those hot servers and air-conditioning to keep them cool. Artificial intelligence (AI) requires even more servers and energy. As The Real Deal reported, “Silicon Valley vies with SF as ‘AI capital of the world.’” So far, California remains ahead of everyone else, including Communist China, in the race for AI dominance.
So where would San Francisco and Silicon Valley AI companies, conscious of the need for energy from such renewable sources as wind and solar power, get the energy for their AI servers? Surely from California energy companies, especially Northern California’s PG&E?
Actually, there’s another, unexpected, source:
“Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal,” headlined the Washington Post on April 17. Datelined Charles Town, W.Va., it reported surveyors are “eyeing space for yet another power line next to the property—a line that will take electricity generated from coal plants in the state to address a drain on power driven by the world’s internet hub in Northern Virginia 35 miles away.
“There, massive data centers with computers processing nearly 70 percent of global digital traffic are gobbling up electricity at a rate officials overseeing the power grid say is unsustainable unless two things happen: Several hundred miles of new transmission lines must be built, slicing through neighborhoods and farms in Virginia and three neighboring states. And antiquated coal-powered electricity plants that had been scheduled to go offline will need to keep running to fuel the increasing need for more power, undermining clean energy goals.”
Note the number: 70 percent of global digital traffic. This is being processed in Northern Virginia, the center of the U.S. government and a major location for these server farms.
Silicon Valley Hypocrisy
This affirms what I have written several times in The Epoch Times: The world isn’t following California’s obsession with ending all reliance on carbon-based energy. Communist China certainly isn’t, as I detailed recently in, “‘Green Innovation’ Study Shows California CO2 Policies Mainly Help China.”
Now it’s obvious our own globe-leading computer, internet, and AI industries are not following that anti-progress development, either. That’s despite almost all of Silicon Valley and San Francisco backing Gov. Gavin Newsom and his mandate to achieve 100 percent zero-emission vehicles by 2035.
In his 2022 reelection, Mr. Newsom, a Democrat, received 59.2 percent statewide to 40.8 percent for Republican opponent Brian Dahle. But Mr. Newsom garnered 85.4 percent in San Francisco. And for Silicon Valley, it was 75 percent in San Mateo County and 70 percent in Santa Clara County.
In the 2020 presidential election, President Joe Biden grabbed 63.5 percent statewide to 34.3 percent for former President Donald Trump. But President Biden got 85.3 percent in San Francisco, 77.9 percent in San Mateo County, and 72.7 percent in Santa Clara County.
By contrast, in West Virginia, President Biden won just 29.7 percent to former President Trump’s 68.6 percent.
Silicon Valley might back green energy, but its business benefits from coal. The reason it can advance this hypocrisy is because of the vast network of fiberoptic cables crisscrossing the country. They hook up everything from computer companies to all kinds of businesses, and probably the computer network in your home. I’m writing this using Google Fiber.
TechTarget explains, “Fiber optics, or optical fiber, refers to the technology that transmits information as light pulses along a glass or plastic fiber.” And light, of course, travels at the speed of light: 299,792,458 meters, or 186,000 miles, per second.
The whole world also is entwined in fiberoptic cables, as well as signals from satellites. So computer servers are all around the world. But it makes sense for Silicon Valley and San Francisco companies to plant their servers in the United States, because our country is well-defended by the U.S. military. Since the cables between California and West Virginia traverse our vast continent, they can’t be cut by a foreign sea power like undersea cables.
Computer Money Talks
As the Washington Post reported, coal use to generate power continues, even in Virginia, despite the state “fully embracing” clean energy. The server farms bring in massive revenues to local governments from the state’s property tax, which applies to land and equipment. “With Amazon Web Services pursuing a $35 billion data center expansion in Virginia, rural portions of the state are the industry’s newest target for development.
“The growth means big revenue for the localities that host the football-field-size buildings. Loudoun collects $600 million in annual taxes on the computer equipment inside the buildings, making it easier to fund schools and other services. Prince William, the second-largest market, collects $100 million per year.”
President Biden won Virginia 54.4 percent to 44.2 percent for former President Trump. But President Biden won Loudon County with 61.9 percent and Prince William County with 62.8 percent.
Northern Virginia might be liberal Democratic now. But as in California, green activists walk, but AI money talks.
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24 April, 2024
A Long-Running ‘Paradox’: Evaporation Is Declining Even As Temperatures Rise
Evaporation is supposed to increase with warming. But, per a new study (Jin et al., 2024), “observation results around the world have shown that evaporation has been steadily declining since the 1950s.”
This is referred to as the anthropogenic global warming “evaporation paradox” problem, where models and assumptions are contradicted by observations.
According to the IPCC (AR6) and the most seminal paper on the subject (Trenberth, 2011, with 3800 citations), “anthropogenic forcings will drive an increase in global mean evaporation over most oceanic areas (high confidence),” as “increased heating leads to greater evaporation.”
However, the new paper once again points out that observations conflict with the anthropogenic global warming narrative.
“Paradoxically, against the backdrop of rising global temperatures, terrestrial observation results around the world have shown that Epan has been steadily declining since the 1950s…”
“The ‘evaporation paradox’ phenomenon has been reported in many studies on regional or global scales.”
The authors acknowledge it is “widely proposed” that there will be “increased evaporation in open water bodies” with warming. So their results, which show declining evaporation since the 1950s, may “seem surprising.”
“At first glance, these results may seem surprising, since the near-surface air temperature has been rising, and it is widely proposed that warming climate will make the air drier and promote the hydrological cycle, which will lead to increased evaporation in open water bodies, including pan evaporators.”
If it can indeed be established that evaporation increases with warming, and simultaneously, evaporation trends can be shown to be declining, at what point do we question if there has indeed been sufficiently significant warming in the regions where evaporation is declining?
Why is referring to these trends as a surprising “paradox” that can perhaps be explained away with more assumptions the better option?
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Wrong, BBC and Reuters, No Evidence Proves West African Heatwave Is Unprecedented
Multiple media outlets, including the BBC and Reuters, claim that a recent West African heatwave would be “impossible” without global warming. This is claim is misleading and not supported by real-world data. The study cited in both articles is merely an attribution modelling study, which is not proof of the influence of climate change.
In their article on a recent heatwave in West Africa and the Sahel, Reuters reports “[t]emperatures soared so high in Mali and Burkina Faso they equated to a once in 200-year event, according to the report on the Sahel region by World Weather Attribution (WWA).”
Reuters continues: “The severity of the heatwave led WWA’s team of climate scientists to conduct a rapid analysis, which concluded the temperatures would not have been reached if industry had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels and other activities.”
One of World Weather Attribution’s statisticians even went so far as to say that heat waves of that intensity wouldn’t happen at all in the region in a “pre-industrial climate.” This claim is utterly unfounded, as those parts of Africa are known for being at least semi-arid, subtropical, and prone to drought and heatwaves. While temperature records are not very lengthy or complete for many parts of Africa, April is known to be the hottest month of the year for Burkina Faso in particular, and many parts of the Sahel region in general, where temperature maximums on average are above 40°C – which is what the recent heatwave brought, meaning there is not justification for claiming the recent heatwave is historically unprecedented.
Climate Realism has frequently noted that WWA’s “rapid attribution” studies are more in the realm of fantasy than fact, as they depend on virtual models of climate conditions that do not actually exist in real life. The model of the climate that an event like the recent Sahel heatwave is compared against is one which represents how the scientists guess things would have been had it not been for the burning of fossil fuels. All of their modelling begins with the unscientific assumption that any given weather event WAS influenced in a dangerous direction by climate change. It proves absolutely nothing, because the “control group” is entirely fictional.
The BBC produced a slightly more balanced story, acknowledging that other climate experts say that El Niño is mostly to blame for at least some of the bad weather in Africa this year. Despite spending the vast majority of the article linking the heat wave to climate change, as Reuters does, the BBC at least acknowledged, “[a] separate study on drought in Southern Africa said El Niño was to blame, rather than climate change.”
So, as the Daily Sceptic pointed out in reporting on the BBC’s coverage, “… the headline could have read: Southern African drought “impossible” without El Niño. But it didn’t.”
El Niño has a wide range of effects that are often delayed in hitting Africa, lately it has been causing heatwaves and rainfall in cocoa producing countries like Ghana, which is acknowledged in other articles having to do with cocoa bean production.
In another Climate Realism post about cocoa production, H. Sterling Burnett also points out that this kind of weather is normal for the region, writing “across the region making up West Africa, it is common, not rare, for it to have heatwaves and heavy rains, interspersed with periods of drought.” He points out that “wet heatwaves” are not uncommon.
Once again, attribution science is hardly science and proves nothing about climate change. It certainly can’t determine whether human activities caused or even contributed to any given weather event. All of this is speculative at best. Frankly the enthusiasm with which supposed journalists and prominent media outlets embrace attribution modelling studies with no questions or skepticism whatsoever is an embarrassment to the profession. The BBC and Reuters ought to know better, and they should brush up on the facts before hyping scare-stories.
Wrong, BBC and Reuters, No Evidence Proves West African Heatwave Is Unprecedented
Multiple media outlets, including the BBC and Reuters, claim that a recent West African heatwave would be “impossible” without global warming. This is claim is misleading and not supported by real-world data. The study cited in both articles is merely an attribution modelling study, which is not proof of the influence of climate change.
In their article on a recent heatwave in West Africa and the Sahel, Reuters reports “[t]emperatures soared so high in Mali and Burkina Faso they equated to a once in 200-year event, according to the report on the Sahel region by World Weather Attribution (WWA).”
Reuters continues: “The severity of the heatwave led WWA’s team of climate scientists to conduct a rapid analysis, which concluded the temperatures would not have been reached if industry had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels and other activities.”
One of World Weather Attribution’s statisticians even went so far as to say that heat waves of that intensity wouldn’t happen at all in the region in a “pre-industrial climate.” This claim is utterly unfounded, as those parts of Africa are known for being at least semi-arid, subtropical, and prone to drought and heatwaves. While temperature records are not very lengthy or complete for many parts of Africa, April is known to be the hottest month of the year for Burkina Faso in particular, and many parts of the Sahel region in general, where temperature maximums on average are above 40°C – which is what the recent heatwave brought, meaning there is not justification for claiming the recent heatwave is historically unprecedented.
Climate Realism has frequently noted that WWA’s “rapid attribution” studies are more in the realm of fantasy than fact, as they depend on virtual models of climate conditions that do not actually exist in real life. The model of the climate that an event like the recent Sahel heatwave is compared against is one which represents how the scientists guess things would have been had it not been for the burning of fossil fuels. All of their modelling begins with the unscientific assumption that any given weather event WAS influenced in a dangerous direction by climate change. It proves absolutely nothing, because the “control group” is entirely fictional.
The BBC produced a slightly more balanced story, acknowledging that other climate experts say that El Niño is mostly to blame for at least some of the bad weather in Africa this year. Despite spending the vast majority of the article linking the heat wave to climate change, as Reuters does, the BBC at least acknowledged, “[a] separate study on drought in Southern Africa said El Niño was to blame, rather than climate change.”
So, as the Daily Sceptic pointed out in reporting on the BBC’s coverage, “… the headline could have read: Southern African drought “impossible” without El Niño. But it didn’t.”
El Niño has a wide range of effects that are often delayed in hitting Africa, lately it has been causing heatwaves and rainfall in cocoa producing countries like Ghana, which is acknowledged in other articles having to do with cocoa bean production.
In another Climate Realism post about cocoa production, H. Sterling Burnett also points out that this kind of weather is normal for the region, writing “across the region making up West Africa, it is common, not rare, for it to have heatwaves and heavy rains, interspersed with periods of drought.” He points out that “wet heatwaves” are not uncommon.
Once again, attribution science is hardly science and proves nothing about climate change. It certainly can’t determine whether human activities caused or even contributed to any given weather event. All of this is speculative at best. Frankly the enthusiasm with which supposed journalists and prominent media outlets embrace attribution modelling studies with no questions or skepticism whatsoever is an embarrassment to the profession. The BBC and Reuters ought to know better, and they should brush up on the facts before hyping scare-stories.
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New Jersey's 3 nuclear power plants seek to extend licenses for another 20 years
The company that owns New Jersey's three nuclear power plants said Wednesday it will seek federal approval to operate them for another 20 years.
The move comes as New Jersey makes a strong push to become the East Coast leader in offshore wind. But the three power plants run by PSEG Nuclear LLC provide nearly half of New Jersey's electricity, and a licensing extension represents a potential hedge against not enough wind projects being available to meet the state's needs.
An extension would enable the plants to run beyond 2050.
The company said it has notified the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission of its intent to seek renewed licenses for the Salem Generating Station Units 1 and 2, and the Hope Creek Generating Station. All are located on one site on Artificial Island in Lower Alloways Creek Township, Salem County.
It plans to file the extension request in the second quarter of 2027 but needed to alert the commission far in advance to allow it to prepare for the review. If approved by the NRC, the licenses for Salem Units 1 and 2 would be extended from 2036 and 2040 to 2056 and 2060, respectively, and Hope Creek station would be extended from the current 2046 expiration to 2066, the company said.
“For more than five decades, the nuclear generating stations in south Jersey have safely generated reliable, always-on carbon-free energy," Charles McFeaters, president and chief nuclear officer of PSEG Nuclear, said in a statement. “Seeking to renew our licenses signifies our commitment to continuing to contribute to New Jersey’s clean energy future and serving as a vital economic engine for the local community."
Beginning this year, a nuclear production tax credit included in the federal Inflation Reduction Act will provide nuclear generators with nine years of financial support through 2032.
And New Jersey officials also approved a $300 million customer-funded subsidy for the state's nuclear industry in 2019 despite its utilities board determining that the industry was “viable” and not in need of a subsidy.
Both incentives were designed in part to support clean energy sources as an alternative to burning fossil fuels, which contribute to climate change.
The company's move to extend its operating licenses drew bipartisan support Wednesday from New Jersey lawmakers.
"Nuclear power is a clean resource that provides reliability and diversity to the state’s supply of energy,” said state Sen. John Burzichelli, a Democrat.
“South Jersey’s nuclear plants consistently, reliably and affordably deliver power for our state, day and night, regardless of the weather,” added Sen. Michael Testa, a Republican.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jerseys-3-nuclear-power-plants-181340811.html
****************************************************Sims: don’t saddle Australia with high cost solar panels, wind farms
Former competition tsar Rod Sims has warned that embracing an ad hoc “Made in Australia” approach to the net zero transition by 2050 could “destroy” the chances of Australia becoming a clean energy superpower.
In an address to the Melbourne Economic Forum, the former chair of the ACCC warned against the nation embracing flawed approaches to achieving net zero and took aim at those who belonged to the “Made in Australia” camp as well as those whom he regarded as “market fundamentalists.”
Mr Sims, the chair of the Superpower Institute – a body dedicated to helping the nation capitalise on the opportunities of the green energy transition – used the address to warn against saddling the nation with high cost solar panels and wind farms.
But he also made clear there was a role for government in helping the nation make the most of the coming green revolution. However, he said any government support needed to be finely geared towards areas where Australia had a comparative advantage – such as in green iron.
He also listed a series of conditions that would be needed to govern any taxpayer support for industry.
First, he said assistance should be aimed at the so-called “superpower industries” where Australia “has or will have a comparative advantage due to the net zero transition.”
READ MORE: ‘Made in Australia’ sets new, dangerous course for Labor | What’s the point of PM’s flagship policy? | Future budget deficits to be Made in Australia | PM ‘betraying Hawke reforms’ |
Second, the purpose of any assistance needed to be clearly defined to address well-understood problems.
Third, there should be clear “qualification rules” for assistance and, fourth, support needed to be fully funded to ensure the nation maintained a strong budget position.
Mr Sims used the address to take aim at the proponents of the Made in Australia philosophy, arguing it was unclear – at this stage – what the policy was about or how it would work.
“We have the ‘Made in Australia’ group. The problem here is that it is unclear what this group seeks. Make everything we need, import nothing? What is the framework in this slogan for deciding what Australia does, and does not, make in Australia?”
He expressed grave concerns that simply throwing money at any green energy project would “destroy the Superpower opportunity.”
“Should government support be provided to ensure we make our own computers, cars, clothing?” he asked. “Without a clear framework Australia will take a series of ad hoc measures that invite rent seeking by businesses, raise Australia’s cost structure and lower our productivity.”
“The government’s current rhetoric around “Made in Australia” suggests there is a focus on projects relevant to the net zero transition. But again, what does this suggest we do? Is it ‘any green project deserves taxpayer support?’”
Mr Sims asked how the nation could achieve “low cost renewable energy if we are saddled with high cost solar panels, wind farms and electrolysers through a ‘buy local’ imperative?”
“Under this form of “Made in Australia” approach, Australia will not achieve the lowest cost inputs to the supply of such goods, so Australia will not be cost competitive in their supply, and the green traded products will not be as cost competitive with existing fossil fuel-made products.”
Mr Sims said such an approach would be damaging for three reasons – it would remove Australia’s ability to make the most of its comparative advantage in making green energy-intensive exports, it would displace budget dollars that could be better allocated and force labour into unproductive areas of the economy during a worker shortage.
His preferred approach to making the transition to net zero would only allow for goods to be made in Australia “where the economics have ‘flipped’.”
For example, Mr Sims said Australia was a leading exporter of iron ore, coal and gas.
“The “Made in Australia” camp, as some are expressing it, would have us use all these Australian ingredients and make iron metal in Australia now,” he said.
“There is no logic to government intervening in the choices the market has made; it seems best for Australia in the fossil carbon world to do as we are.
“We would undermine the advantages of other industries and see lower wages by having workers in always struggling industries who would be constantly lobbying government for help.”
But Mr Sims said it was sensible to make green iron in Australia, because this was an area where the nation had a comparative advantage.
“Green iron will very likely need green hydrogen as the reductant that gets the iron ore into iron metal,” he said. “Green iron should be made in Australia because the economics flip.”
“All overseas studies that I am aware of suggest that Australia is likely the cheapest place in the world to make green iron. And those seeking to make green iron by importing hydrogen, those studies say, will be uncompetitive.”
Mr Sims concluded that the world needed Australia to make many green products because the nation had more low cost renewable energy resources than its needed. By contrast, Japan, Korea, most of Europe and China did not have sufficient renewable energy resources to make all the electricity they needed.
“They will need to either import renewable energy, ammonia as a derivative of hydrogen and/or use nuclear energy – all at great cost – to meet their domestic electricity needs,” he said.
He concluded by arguing the government had not clarified what it meant by its “Made in Australia” agenda.
If it amounted simply to a suite of ad hoc measures that invited rent seeking by businesses and raised Australia’s cost structure while lowering productivity, the Made in Australia vision would only “kill the superpower ambition.”
“Australia cannot afford to follow this lead. Nor will it suit the world for this to happen,” he said.
“If the government is ... targeting producing goods in which Australia now has a comparative advantage in the net zero world, through clear qualification mechanisms that address well defined market externalities, the government must be applauded.”
“We will wait and see on May 14, budget night, which group they are in.”
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23 April, 2024
How we became 'Plastic People': Startling new documentary tracks global spread of toxic microplastics from the bottom of oceans to inside the human brain
"Toxic"? More scaremongering that totally misrepresents the fact that these particles are inert. They have to be in order to be used as freely as they are. So evidence that they can do anything is what is needed but is very unlikely to be found. Many of the things that we routinely eat -- such as most meat -- have greater potential for harm
A new film, called 'Plastic People,' has tracked the particle problem to the 1950s when the plastic industry convinced the public to abandon their thrift and frugality in favor of disposable products more beneficial to their bottom line.
The documentary team zeroed in on a 1955 LIFE magazine feature with the oddly euphoric title 'Throwaway Living' that celebrated a 'modern lifestyle' of single-use paper and plastic goods.
The article came with a photo spread of a happy family tossing all their single-use plates, cups and silverware up into the air like confetti.
The LIFE article positioned the plastic revolution as easing the burden on housewives by letting them toss dishes, cups and utensils in the trash and forgo hours of scrubbing and rinsing.
By the 1960’s, plastic had replaced other materials in the home like wood, metal, and glass.
Families began stocking cupboards with plastic tableware as companies produced them in an array of colors and at an affordable price.
The societal shift also saw people begin to furnish their homes with plastic-finished items like tables and couches.
Advertisements began to fill newspapers and magazines proclaiming plastic as the material of future that lets consumers create any shape with ease.
Then in the 1970s and 1980s, the world was introduced to bottled water, which was touted as a healthier solution to tap water.
Humans have continued to path of plastics to today - producing over 440 million tons of plastic waste each year.
And as the waste sits in landfills, it breaks down into microplastics, which are smaller than five millimeters in length.
'The first fact about microplastics is that they're everywhere,' said Addelman. 'You're breathing them in right now. There's nowhere on Earth you can avoid them.'
Microplastics enter our bodies through plastic packaging, certain food, tap water and even the air we breathe.
From there they enter our bloodstream and cause untold harm. In just recent years the tiny particles have been found in semen, the heart, breast milk, placentas, kidneys, livers and lungs.
The particles have been linked to the development of cancer, heart disease and dementia, as well as fertility problems.
Addelman noted that making Plastic People posed a unique challenge: how to illustrate a microscopic but pervasive problem.
'As far as a film goes, it's a tough subject,' Addelman said. 'It's an invisible and kind of literally 'hard to grasp' subject.'
Studies have estimated microplastics exposure cost the US healthcare system $289 billion in 2018 alone, in part because plastics do not decay back into natural organic molecules, instead retaining their synthetic chemical make-up as they get smaller.
And worse, thousands of hazardous chemical additives and precursors, including many of the now infamous cancer-causing 'forever chemicals,' come embedded in these microplastics as they seep deeper into humans and other living things.
Co-director Ziya Tong, Addelman and their film team traveled across the world — from Adana, Turkey to Portland, Texas; from Rome in Italy to Rochester, New York — interviewing scientists who investigate microplastics and shadowing their field work.
One researcher, Dr. Sedat Gündo?du at Cukurova University in Turkey, walked filmmakers across beaches were fine grains of microplastics intermingle with Mediterranean sand and farmland where plastics absorb into crops as they grow.
Dr. Gündo?du, whose work as a marine ecologist studying fisheries got him into tracking microplastics, showed Tong some of the first-ever evidence of microplastics crossing the blood-brain barrier in humans.
Tiny blue pigment from PVC piping had gotten past the barrier, a membrane that ordinarily helps keep any toxins in the blood from entering or harming the brain.
'If plastic can transfer from blood to brain, it can transfer from everywhere to everywhere,' Dr. Gündo?du told Tong. 'It's really scary, but it's not surprising.'
While animal studies have previously shown that microplastics have been able to migrate into the brains of mice, the 15 samples obtained by Dr. Gündo?du and his colleague, neurosurgeon Dr. Emrah Çeltikçi, appear to be the first in humans.
Tong said that more micoplastics were actually found in the brain samples than scientists could identify. 'It's one of the things that we don't talk about in the film,' Tong said.
'Because of the lack of transparency [from the plastics industry], there's a whole bunch where we don't know what the chemical cocktail actually is.'
'So he [Dr. Gündo?du] was able to find these particles, but he's not able to identify them,' she explained, 'because they're not in the database.'
This week, the international Scientists' Coalition for an Effective Plastic Treaty will attempt to persuade UN member states convening in Ottawa, Canada to compel the plastics industry into reporting on what they produce for these public databases.
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NY environmentalists’ next target? Individually wrapped cheese slices face ban under far-reaching bill
Hey! I use these. They prevent my cheese from becoming inedible if I don't eat it straight away. They REDUCE waste
Individually wrapped cheese would be largely banned under a far-reaching bill getting pushed by New York environmentalists and politicians to reduce the use of plastics, The Post has learned.
The state bill — called Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act — would require companies with net incomes over $1 million who sell or distribute food or products to reduce plastics and other packaging that ends in landfills or waterways by 50% over the next 12 years.
It would also impose a fee on companies that use plastic packages, with money going toward recycling programs and infrastructure.
“This legislation shifts the onus of recycling from municipalities and ensures that producers of products are serving our interests by establishing solutions to sustainable packaging,” Sen. Peter Harckham (D-Peekskill) said in a memo promoting the bill.
The typical New Yorker creates nearly 5 pounds of trash every day, which means the state produces approximately 15 million tons of waste each year, according to Harckham, who introduced the measure along with Assemblywoman Deborah Glick (D-Manhattan).
“This waste primarily goes to landfills and incinerators, but can often end up in our water, natural habitats, and municipal spaces,” the memo said.
Four states have implemented similar programs — Maine, Oregon, Colorado and California.
One leading environmentalist backing the bill confirmed that the goal is to eliminate single slices of cheese packaged in non-reusable plastic, as well as other wasteful packaging.
“We have to do something about the plastic crisis,” said Judith Enck, president of the group Beyond Plastics.
Enck, who previously served as the federal regional administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency under then-President Barack Obama, said mico-plastic wrapping for cheese slices could be replaced with alternatives.
“There was a time in America when we didn’t put a piece of plastic between every slice of cheese. They can substitute plastic with paper,” she said.
She noted it costs New York City $420 million a year to transport and dispose of its trash to landfills and incinerators — and manufacturers should be doing their part.
“These companies have to take responsibility for producing the waste. They’re getting a free ride right now,” Enck said.
Other companies — such as Starbucks — are voluntarily reducing the amount of plastic used.
But the war on plastic cheese wrap and similar packaging is provoking a ferocious backlash from food manufacturers, supermarkets and the toy industry that package food and products in vacuum-sealed wrapping for protection.
“Under this bill, New Yorkers can expect a future where they’re grabbing unwrapped products – from cereals, to cheeses, to hot dogs – from grocery store bins before buying them and carrying them home,” said Nelson Eusebio, a representative with the National Association of Supermarkets.
“There’s no question such a drastic change in shopping habits will reduce the flow of packaging waste to our landfills, but it does so at the risk of ignoring all we’ve gained in food preservation and health benefits with sanitary, air-tight, plastic packaging.”
The law could mean higher grocery bills, he warned.
“For grocers, this structural change in how we sell goods will mean more of the food we’ve purchased landing in the dumpster rather than consumers’ grocery bags, only adding to the 25% increase we’ve seen in grocery store bills since 2019 – a faster price increase than housing, medical care, and most other categories,” he said. “Worse, so many of the products impacted are the household staples available through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), hitting low-income earners the hardest.”
Owen Caine, vice president of the Toy Association, said plastic packaging keeps toys and popular dolls from breaking during transit and carries the appropriate labeling to insure safety.
“If we remove the current packaging tools without an existing, viable replacement, we’ll simply raise costs and put New Yorkers at risk of receiving faulty products that they cannot verify is legitimate and/or tested to ensure it is safe,” Caine said.
Anti-plastic packaging bills have been voted out of the environmental committees in the Senate and Assembly. It will now being reviewed by the Senate Finance Committee and Assembly Codes Committee.
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In California, Newsom’s Energy Experiment Goes Awry
This Earth Day, which falls on Monday, California residents must be glad that their state accounts for less than 1% of the greenhouse gas emissions of the top 50 countries. Yet Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, still wants to achieve 100% net-zero carbon electricity by 2045.
With the highest effective poverty rate in America and some of the nation’s highest electricity costs, Newsom’s top priority should be to shift to energy affordability.
dailycallerlogo
The intermittency of renewables such as solar and wind is one reality plaguing the Golden State. Another is the fact that the state’s transmission lines are sparking many wildfires, exacerbating problems with an increasingly strained and poorly maintained electrical grid.
In October 2017, Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s equipment caused 16 fires in California. By 2021, California experienced roughly 7,000 wildfires, some still resulting from trees and other flammable detritus hanging on transmission lines, which are PG&E’s responsibility to remove.
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has estimated that “average annual losses” resulting from wildfires from 2017 through 2021 totaled over $117.4 billion. These incidents have led to numerous lawsuits against the utility and repeated bankruptcy restructurings.
As part of the bankruptcy reorganization plan, PG&E was forced to adopt an Enhanced Oversight and Enforcement Process to manage vegetation. Despite missing every fire-risk-reduction target of its bankruptcy reform, the utility claimed that it couldn’t afford to keep its 5,500 tree trimmers on payroll. Instead, it wanted to distribute over $187 million in stock bonuses to the top 400 executives and employees—almost half a million dollars per recipient.
Facing financial strain and pressure to transition to renewables, the utility raised rates and saw profits increase by 25% in 2023. Over the past 10 years, PG&E customers have seen rates increase 127%, disproportionately affecting the poor, small businesses, and farmers.
Additionally, the Californian Public Utility Commission adopted new guidelines on net energy metering, which drastically reduced payouts for rooftop photovoltaic solar panels. Due to these needed reforms, rooftop solar sales have declined by about three-quarters since 2022. Currently, 75% of solar installers are considered “high risk,” with over 100 companies already filing for bankruptcy.
Despite these regular curtailments of solar panels, a joint report from the California Air Resources Board and other state agencies anticipates that electricity generation capacity will need to triple by 2045 to meet the state’s net-zero carbon goal.
Since solar and wind output vary with weather and time of day, California’s power grid will rely more on carbon-intensive natural gas “peaker” plants rather than on low-carbon, combined-cycle natural gas plants and carbon-free nuclear plants.
State law now requires zero-emission vehicle sales to be 35% of total sales by 2026 and 100% by 2035. Some have equated these energy policies to a new “Green Jim Crow,” as the policy disproportionately will impoverish the most disadvantaged Californian communities. The Public Policy Institute of California found that nearly a third of Californians live in or near poverty, and this policy will only exacerbate this situation.
If Newsom’s vehicle regulations are fully implemented, California would require drastically more electricity.
The California Energy Commission projects that transitioning to electric vehicles would require an additional 1.2 million charging stations by 2030 to accommodate the mandated 7.5 million EVs.
With a deficit of 54,000 installations in 2021, the goal of 250,000 chargers by 2025 is already out of reach, even with the $63 million federal grant approved in January.
This policy malfeasance of requiring massive electrification without drastically increasing grid capacity already has been felt. In August 2022, shortly after Newsom’s electric vehicle rule became state law, California faced a 10-day power shutdown. Subsequently, the governor announced that citizens should refrain from charging their electric cars—a few days after Biden Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm praised Newsom for pursuing his green energy agenda.
Newsom’s green energy policy experiments, such as the 2022 comprehensive energy bill, could result in an additional electricity cost of $830 a year per person to California residents. Only reality stands in the way of his plan for a net-zero power grid and automobile fleet by 2045.
Newsom’s policies have cost state residents almost a million jobs over the past five years. Millions of Californians have left for other states, with almost two-thirds of Californians considering following them.
Despite the increase in energy and transportation costs that will result if similar policies are pursued nationally, the Environmental Protection Agency has taken Newsom’s lead with its new tailpipe rule, which would mandate that 70% of new vehicles sold will be electric plug-in capable by 2032.
As we observe Earth Day on April 22, we should hope that any emulation of the failed Californian experiment will be stopped before such bad policy experiments further reduce economic growth.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/22/in-california-newsoms-energy-experiment-goes-awry/
***************************************Australia: Zombies cast fear across renewables dreamland
NICK CATER
Last Thursday, the Queensland parliament passed a law committing the state to reduce carbon emissions by 75 per cent by 2035. Debate resumed at 11.44am, and the Energy (Renewable Transformation and Jobs) Bill was done and dusted in time for lunch. Back-slaps all round.
At 4.32pm on Friday, Ark Energy announced it was withdrawing its application to install 42 wind turbines at Chalumbin in far north Queensland following advice that the federal Department of Climate Change and Energy was about to reject it.
The meagre odds that Queensland can meet its legislated emissions target using renewable energy are now too small to be visible under a microscope.
For the wind industry, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s rejection of Chalumbin is its Franklin Dam moment. It was a test case of the federal government’s willingness to weigh the environmental cost of installing turbines against the assumed benefits of low-carbon electricity.
Last July, when I drew national attention to the Chalumbin proposal in The Australian, I opened my column by noting that it would destroy 1000 of the remaining 8000 hectares of wet sclerophyll forest, the buffer zone between the rainforests and the open plains to the south.
Nine months later, the minister reached the same conclusion, telling The Guardian at the weekend the forest “provides a vital habitat for many birds, plants and animals, including the spectacled flying fox and the northern greater glider”.
Her decision measures how far the wind industry’s fortunes have sunk since June 2022, when the Queensland government approved the Chalumbin proposal under the corner-cutting assessment process. It applies to anything with the word “renewable” attached.
Bulldozers were ripping swathes through hundreds of hectares of remnant native forest at nearby Kaban, blasting 330,000 tonnes of rock and dirt from the sides of hills to build access roads and turbine pads bigger than football fields.
All of this was occurring without a squeak from environmental groups, every one of which appeared to have swallowed the renewable energy Kool-Aid and, in some cases, its cash.
Energy Minister Chris Bowen set a target of installing a giant 7MW wind turbine every 18 hours until 2030. He boasted of the number of projects in the pipeline, the implication being they were just a short step away from approval.
Today, the renewable energy industry has a name for projects that slip off the back of the pipeline: zombie projects. Last year was the worst year for the financial approval of renewable energy projects since 2016 and the worst for wind since 2015. The latest Green Energy and Investment Markets Review reports the window is closing fast on the government’s 2030 target.
Assuming an average of two years for construction, 8GW of new projects must receive financial approval every year from 2024 until 2027. That is almost five times higher than the amount approved in 2023.
Bowen could ill-afford the 400MW Chalumbin project to fall into the zombie zone, particularly since it was backed by Korean Zinc, a cashed-up corporation keen to get a slice of Australia’s renewable energy action.
Chalumbin signals to renewable energy speculators that the Dirty Harry days are over. The environmental costs of wind, solar, hydro and transmission will no longer be overlooked because of their assumed noble goal.
Now Plibersek has knocked back Chalumbin, it is impossible to see how she can approve the Upper Burdekin project in an equally sensitive area 4.8km from the boundary of the Wet Tropics World Heritage area.Global tech giant Apple read the writing on the wall a year ago when it walked away from an agreement to buy power from the proposed plant. Andrew Forrest, whose WindLab company is behind the project, might as well throw the towel in today.
The odds must be rapidly closing against Mt Fox, a 350MW wind turbine project in mountainous remnant forest on the edge of the wet tropical Girringun National Park, 50km southwest of Ingham. From there, the ruler must be run through cascading proposals hugging the Great Dividing Range to the Darling Downs. Few, if any, will be situated in already degraded environments since developers seek ridge lines that are unprofitable and, in many cases, impossible to farm. The remnant bush line has provided sanctuary for enough vulnerable and endangered creatures to fill Noah’s ark.
The Chalumbin precedent subjects every proposal to potential trade-offs. How many hectares of bulldozed koala habitat are too many? Which species are so unlovely, small or insignificant that we are prepared to sacrifice them in order to save the planet? If the same rules that apply to mining were applied to wind, solar and pumped hydro, the jig would be up.
Plibersek will be aware of her decision’s taming effect on the animal spirits of renewable energy speculators. On Saturday, she issued a keep-calm-and-carry-on press release announcing she had approved 63 wind turbines at the aptly named Mt Hopeful in central Queensland. “I’ve now ticked off 46 renewable energy projects … and we have a record 130 renewables projects in the approval pipeline.”
Yet the minister’s tick does not make Mt Hopeful immune from zombification. The developer, Neoen, still struggles to make the numbers stack up. Costs are ballooning as it discovers that making a project work on a spreadsheet is very different from making it work on planet Earth.
Even the environmental movement is waking up to the realisation that wind turbines might not be the answer to their prayers. Bob Brown, the father of the green movement, led the campaign to stop turbines chewing up birds in his home state of Tasmania. In Victoria, wetland conservation groups opposed the proposed terminal for offshore wind construction at the Port of Hastings, which Plibersek blocked in January.
The Chalumbin decision brought Queensland conservationists scurrying out of the woodwork to make out as if they had opposed the proposal all along. A year ago, all the Queensland Conservation Council was prepared to say publicly was that the issue was “complicated”. On Friday, the Council declared the Chalumbin decision as “welcome”.
“Today, our community breathes a sigh of relief as those important bits of nature remain intact,” said Lucy Graham, director of the Cairns and Far North Environment Centre.
It is too early to declare that the renewable craze has peaked, but that moment is a step nearer in Queensland, where expectations rise of an LNP victory at the state election in October. LNP leader David Crisafulli’s decision not to oppose Labor’s legislated target invites an intriguing question.
Since the LNP has pledged to pull back Labor’s renewable excesses, might Crisafulli be the first Coalition leader to seek an electoral mandate for lifting the ban on nuclear?
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22 April, 2024
Net Zero Watch applauds Humza Yousaf’s climate leadership
Campaign group Net Zero Watch has welcomed the Scottish Government’s decision to abandon its decarbonisation targets.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
The SNP and their Green partners are the first administration to face up to reality, but they won’t be the last. The era of virtue-signalling climate targets is coming to an end. Humza Yousaf is showing himself a real climate leader.”
Net Zero Watch head of policy Harry Wilkinson said:
Most politicians across Europe still have their heads in the sand. They will have to change course eventually, but until they do their decarbonisation dogma will continue to wreak havoc in their economies.”
UK policy
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/nzw-welcomes-yousaf-climate-leadership
"Incorrect" comment by JR: It is surprising enough that someone of Pakistani heritage is Prime Minister of Scotland but the fact that he is an SNP Prime Minister of Scotland is even more surprising. He must be a man of unusual talent. I won't mention what he would have been called a generation or two ago***********************************************
No, Wall Street Journal, Climate Change Is Not Threatening Coffee and Cocoa Production
We seem to get an alarm about this every year
An article from the Wall Street Journal, “Cocoa and Coffee Prices Have Surged. Climate Change Will Only Take Them Higher,” claims that climate change is driving recent spikes in the price of cocoa and coffee, and that things will likely get worse as warming continues. This is false. Cocoa and coffee have both set production records multiple times during the recent period of slight warming. A single bad season, or even a few bad seasons, for certain crops in certain regions of the world is not indicative of long-term change, significant shift, or trend.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that prices for coffee and cocoa are “surging as severe weather events hamper production in key regions, raising questions from farm to table over the long-term damage climate change could have on soft commodities.”
The WSJ adds that “more frequent heat waves, heavy rainfalls and droughts are damaging harvests and crippling supplies amid ever growing demand from customers worldwide.”
As discussed in multiple Climate Realism posts, data refutes claims that heat waves, droughts, or heavy rainfall are becoming more severe or more frequent. Also both coffee and cocoa bean production has enjoyed a steady climb over the decades, even amid modest warming.
Heat waves, heavy rain, and drought are all weather events that certainly can, and often do, impact crop production for a wide range of produce, not just cocoa and coffee, but evidence that these events are becoming a bigger threat to production is lacking.
The WSJ themselves point to a natural cause of the most recent heat waves and rainfall in West Africa, home of 70% of cocoa production: “powerhouses Ivory Coast and Ghana are facing catastrophic harvests this season as El Niño—the pattern of above-average sea surface temperatures—led to unseasonal heavy rainfalls followed by strong heat waves.”
This year’s heat and rain in both Africa and other parts of the world have been driven largely by El Niño, as discussed by Climate Realism here, for example, but that phenomenon is temporary, natural, and likely has already ended.
If it were true that climate change was leading to an increase in these kinds of events, that trend should be reflected in production data of coffee and cocoa over time, but the opposite appears in the data. Instead of a long-term trend of struggle and collapse, production has never been better for either coffee or cocoa.
According to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization covering the last three decades of climate change:
Cocoa bean production just set its latest record high as recently as 2022;
World cocoa bean production has increased 132 percent;
West African cocoa bean production has increased 167 percent;
World coffee production set its latest record high in 2020;
World coffee production has increased 77 percent
Climate Realism has previously discussed region-specific coffee and cocoa trends in posts here, here, and here, among others.
Neither coffee nor chocolate, which both thrive in warmer climates, are threatened by climate change. The data show as much. The WSJ and the analysts quoted in the story cage their claims in language like “climate change is set to play a major role” and “could” impact future crops. All of these projections are for a future that does not appear to be approaching any time soon, based on the data and trends. They should stick to reporting the facts.
Throughout history agriculture has suffered during bad weather years; there is nothing new about that. There is no justification for blaming climate change for short-term weather events or their impact on crops.
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Conservative states sue US EPA over vehicle emissions regulations – report
According to a report from news outlet Reuters, half of the 50 US states have joined forces in an effort to stop new regulations designed to reduce tailpipe emissions from new cars.
The new rules have the US EPA aiming to cut tailpipe emissions by almost 50 per cent between 2026 and 2032.
After pushback from the automotive industry, The White House relaxed the rules from the 56 per cent originally proposed.
Russell Coleman, the attorney general for Kentucky – one of the two states leading the lawsuit – claims the changes will increase the price of cars, put pressure on the electricity grid, threaten local jobs, and harm the country's economy.
Patrick Morrisey, attorney general for West Virginia – the other state pushing the action – claimed the regulations were "legally flawed and unrealistic, to say the least".
The 25 attorneys general – all of which are from so-called 'red states', held by the conservative Republican party – previously said the proposed laws went beyond the remit of the EPA, and were effectively a "top-to-bottom attempt to restructure the automobile industry".
According to the report, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming have also backed the legal action by Kentucky and West Virginia.
With the United States gearing up for another presidential election in November 2024, the possible re-election of former President Donald Trump could result in the regulations being repealed.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/conservative-states-sue-us-epa-over-emissions-regulations
**************************************************Australian State Introduces Bill to Set 75 Percent Emissions Reduction Target Into Law
Silly dream
Queensland Premier Steven Miles has introduced legislation into the state’s Parliament to cut climate change emissions by 75 percent.
The bill sets out emissions reduction targets in Queensland and also commits the minister to making 2040 and 2045 targets in the future.
The premier said he first became interested in climate change in 2007 when his wife Kim was expecting their son, Sam.
“Now, as the state’s premier, I think it is important to protect not just my children’s future but the future of all Queenslanders,” he said.
“Queensland is already the most disaster-affected state. We have experienced more than 100 disasters since 2011. They are the kinds of disasters that we know will be more regular and more intense as average temperatures increase.”
An explanatory note on the bill states the legislation aims to “support jobs and secure Queensland’s economic future by enshrining the state’s emission reduction commitments into law.”
The bill (pdf) sets out emissions reduction targets for Queensland of 75 percent below 2005 levels by June 30, 2035, as well as 30 percent below 2005 levels by June 30, 2030. In 2050, the law sets an emissions reduction target of zero.
“The Clean Economy Jobs Bill 2024 sets a clear emissions reduction target of 75 percent on 2005 levels by 2035—a responsible, credible, and critical target on the path to net zero emissions by 2050,” Mr. Miles said.
“The 75 by 35 emissions reduction target positions Queensland as a world leader on the pathway to net zero—a target that continues Queensland’s record of having reduced more tonnes of emissions than any other state or territory.”
In addition, the bill states that the minister must decide a target for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions in Queensland for 2040, along with a target for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions in Queensland for 2045.
“The minister must decide the 2040 interim target by Dec. 31, 2030, and the 2045 interim target by Dec. 31, 2035,” the bill says.
Reaction from Political Opponents
The Queensland opposition Liberal National Party has yet to announce an official position on the legislation, according to media reports, as leader David Crisafulli continues focussing on youth crime issues.
In response to the announcement, One Nation Australia, however, raised concerns the policy would drive up electricity prices.
“Don’t look now but Queensland Labor has just announced their new policy to drive up electricity prices, drive away industry, destroy jobs, and make the cost of living crisis worse,” the party said in a post to X.
James Ashby, One Nation’s candidate for Keppel at the state election, said, “Be upfront Miles, are you planning on ruining our beaches and reefs, our farmers, or both?”
Mr. Ashby drew on a Victorian Legislative Council report that said meeting net zero targets with renewables could result in 70 percent of Victoria’s agricultural land being repurposed for wind turbines and solar farms.
“So why don’t you tell the people how much of Queensland’s land and sea you are planning to deface for your climate alarmist agenda,” Mr. Ashby said on X.
A Queensland state election is due to be held on Oct. 26, 2024. By-elections will also be held in the seats of Ipswich West and Inala on March 16, 2024.
Demonstrating ‘Queensland’s environmental, social and governance credentials’: government
Explanatory notes on the Clean Economy jobs Bill 2024 state the legislation will help attract investment to Queensland and decarbonise the state’s existing industries.
The Queensland government said achieving the 75 percent emissions target is dependent on the state and federal governments working together.
The government said (pdf) legislating the state’s credible targets would “send an important signal to investors and demonstrate Queensland’s environmental, social and governance credentials.”
“Policy certainty will enable businesses and communities to make effective plans to secure their economic futures.
“It will enable industry to invest in innovation and new technologies in sectors like agriculture, resources, and manufacturing as well as leveraging Queensland’s world-leading solar and wind resources, new economy minerals, and proven workforce capability.”
The government said the bill will “protect Queensland communities” and “mitigate the impacts of climate change,” including for “Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples.”
“Coordinated and early climate action will support the creation of more job opportunities in Queensland’s emerging clean economy industries like hydrogen, critical metals and minerals, and advanced manufacturing, especially in Queensland’s regions. It will help to support jobs in existing industries by ensuring they remain competitive and meet market expectations in a decarbonising world.”
Australian Institute for Progress executive director, Graham Young, said, “As Anthony Albanese has just demonstrated, it’s easy to legislate, and it’s almost as easy to repeal. Which is just as well as they will never meet these targets in this time frame,” in a post to X.
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21 April, 2024
Rethinking Climate Change: Lessons From The African Humid Period
The African Humid Period (AHP) is a well-documented climatic event that occurred in the Sahara and Sahel regions of Africa, at pre-industrial levels of GHGs, transforming these typically arid areas into lush landscapes with an abundance of flora and fauna.
It serves as a crucial case study in understanding past climate dynamics and their drivers. This article explores the AHP, its underlying mechanisms, and how such dramatic climate swings challenge the simplicity of attributing all modern climate changes directly to anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
The AHP, which occurred approximately between 15,000 and 5,000 years ago, was a time when huge areas of North Africa, now arid or semi-arid, experienced significantly wetter conditions. This period, which occurred during remarkably stable CO2 concentrations, is commonly attributed to changes in the Earth’s orbit and axial tilt.
Which enhanced the monsoon systems and led to increased rainfall across the Sahara, transforming it into a savannah-like environment rich in lakes, rivers, and abundant vegetation. However, multiple recent studies suggest a much more rapid transition into and out of the AHP.
For example, a study published in Science Advances titled, “Rainfall regimes of the Green Sahara”, uses leaf wax isotopes from marine sediments to quantitatively reconstruct past precipitation in the western Sahara, a method that offers new insights into the rainfall patterns and the spatial extent of the Green Sahara. They conclude…
Our data indicate that the Green Sahara extended to 31°N and likely ended abruptly.
The findings indicate that during this period, the region received much higher rainfall than previously quantified, and suggests an abrupt end to the Green Sahara conditions. Importantly, the study highlights a temporary “pause” in these conditions around 8,000 years ago, which coincides with archaeological evidence of a hiatus in human occupation in the region.
This pause in rainfall aligns with the 8.2-ka cooling event, suggesting a connection between global climate events and regional climate changes in the Sahara.
The study emphasizes the critical role of vegetation and dust feedback in the climate system, noting that these natural mechanisms greatly influence rainfall patterns. Climate models that do not adequately simulate these feedbacks fail to accurately reproduce past climatic conditions, such as those of the Green Sahara, and challenge the notion that climatic shifts like those observed during the Green Sahara period occur gradually and over long timescales, as the data suggest that transitions can be relatively abrupt.
https://principia-scientific.com/rethinking-climate-change-lessons-from-the-african-humid-period/
**********************************************Wind/Solar/Alt-Energy Subsidies To Cost Federal Taxpayers $425 Billion Between Now And 2033
New Treasury Department estimate shows the 10-year cost of alt-energy tax credits has gone up 21-fold since 2015
Last month, Senator Chuck Grassley, the 90-year-old Republican from Iowa, celebrated Sunshine Week by taking to the Senate floor with a speech about “the importance of whistleblowers in promoting transparency and accountability.” According to Whistleblower Network News, Grassley, who has frequently touted his efforts to fight waste, fraud, and abuse in government, declared that “to control a government as big as ours, it takes a lot of very bright light shining on every agency and office.”
A government as big as ours should be shining more light on alt-energy tax credits. Back in 2015, Grassley declared, “As the father of the first wind energy tax credit in 1992, I can say that the tax credit was never meant to be permanent.” Grassley made that statement while lauding a deal to phase out the production tax credit (PTC), the lucrative federal subsidy that has driven the wind industry’s growth for decades.
When he made that statement, the estimated 10-year cost to federal taxpayers of the PTC was $16 billion, and the investment tax credit (ITC), primarily used for solar energy, was about $3.9 billion.
Those were the good old days. The tax credits that were “never meant to be permanent” have not only become permanent, they have exploded in cost.
According to a March 11 report by the Office of Tax Analysis at the Treasury Department, the alt-energy sector will collect a staggering $424.6 billion over the next decade via the PTC and ITC. The agency estimates that between 2024 and 2033, the PTC will cost taxpayers $276.6 billion, and the ITC will cost $148 billion. The PTC and ITC are the most expensive energy-related preferences in the tax code. (The 10-year cost of tax credits for “clean vehicles” comes in third, at an estimated cost of $112 billion.)
Thus, since 2015, when Grassley (who has been in the U.S. Senate for 43 years) lauded the phaseout of the subsidies for wind energy, the tax credits for alt-energy haven’t decreased at all. Instead, they increased by a factor of 21!
This year alone, again, according to the Treasury, the PTC will cost taxpayers $7.5 billion, and the ITC will cost taxpayers $27.5 billion. Thus, alt-energy subsidies will cost the federal treasury $35 billion in 2024. For reference, the oil and gas industry’s biggest tax credit, the depletion allowance, will cost taxpayers about $1.6 billion. The total of all hydrocarbon tax credits this year will be about $2.1 billion.
Although the Office of Tax Analysis doesn’t explain why the cost of the ITC and PTC is skyrocketing, it’s clear evidence that the Inflation Reduction Act has become one of the biggest corporate giveaways in American history.
In just two years, the expected 10-year cost of PTC and ITC has nearly quadrupled. In its fiscal year 2023 report (the federal government’s fiscal year begins on October 1 and ends on September 30), the Treasury projected that the ITC and PTC together would cost taxpayers about $112.8 billion between 2022 and 2031.
So where is all this money going? The expansion of the PTC and ITC under the Inflation Reduction Act allows a panoply of non-hydrocarbon technologies to feast on federal tax credits. That includes a lucrative boost for existing nuclear plants. Under the revised PTC, owners of nuclear plants can collect up to $15 per megawatt-hour for the juice they generate. Over the next few years, the big money will be doled out through the ITC. Between now and 2027, the Treasury expects the ITC to cost taxpayers nearly $75 billion. Offshore wind projects will likely be among the biggest winners because the ITC provides a tax credit of up to 30% of the project’s cost. Offshore projects can get another 10% under the ITC if they use sufficient quantities of domestically produced iron and steel. Offshore wind is only part of the story. As the Treasury report explains, the ITC covers:
Solar and geothermal energy property, qualified fuel cell property, stationary micro-turbine property, geothermal heat pumps, waste energy recovery property, small wind property, offshore wind, energy storage technology, qualified biogas property, microgrid controllers, and combined heat and power property. The credit is 30 percent for projects that begin construction before 2020 and 26 percent for projects that begin construction in 2020-2022. The credit returns to 30 percent for projects that begin construction after 2022 but the full credit rate is dependent on meeting prevailing wage and apprenticeship requirements.
Recall that on August 16, 2022, when President Joe Biden signed the IRA, he said the measure “invests $369 billion to take the most aggressive action ever — ever, ever, ever — in confronting the climate crisis.”
Today, less than two years later, the Treasury is projecting that the cost of the IRA’s climate provisions will be nearly $425 billion over the next decade, or 15% more than what Biden claimed. Furthermore, the March 11 estimate from the Treasury likely understates the long-term cost of that legislation. In April 2023, Goldman Sachs estimated the IRA “will provide an estimated $1.2 trillion of incentives by 2032” for alt-energy incentives, including tax credits for electric vehicles.
As the Cato Institute’s Travis Fisher explained last September, the IRA is supposed to move to technology-neutral tax credits for low-carbon electricity production starting in 2025. Those tax credits will begin winding down by 2032 or when the power sector’s CO2 emissions are slashed by 75% compared to 2022 levels. (Note that the Department of Energy uses confusing phrasing for this requirement, saying the phaseout will only occur after emissions fall to 25% of 2022 levels.) But Fisher (who has an excellent Substack) points to a 2023 Energy Information Administration analysis, which found that even with a high uptake of IRA subsidies, emissions from the power sector are likely to decline by about 35% by 2050.
Indeed, the idea that the U.S. power sector will be able to slash its emissions by 75% — even by 2050 — is little more than wishful thinking.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/windsolaralt-energy-subsidies-to
************************************************Examining the High Costs and Questionable Gains of Bag ban and carpet recovery
As we approach Earth Day, it is time to evaluate how green policies have performed. One such policy is the New Jersey bag ban, which was ostensibly designed to tackle plastic pollution, requiring stores over 2,500 square feet in size to replace disposable plastic bags with reusable ones.
The ban bag is an example of “extended producer responsibility,” which is a waste policy that forces companies to use only reusable or recyclable products. Advocates of extended producer responsibility champion measures such as plastic bag bans, but the real-world implementation has only fueled inflation with minimal environmental benefits.
Despite the ban effectively being a regressive tax on poorer residents, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy praised the state for “addressing the problem of plastic pollution” that will “help mitigate climate change and strengthen our environment.”
Unfortunately for the governor and other advocates of extended producer responsibility policies, a new study by the Freedonia Group has found a threefold increase in plastic consumption since the beginning of the May 2022 ban—from 53 million pounds to 151 million pounds—to create heavier, reusable bags (despite a 60% reduction in disposable plastic bag use). In addition, Freedonia found a $42 million increase in profits from a single 50-store retailer from selling these reusable bags.
Researchers concluded that 90% of these reusable nonwoven polypropylene plastic bags are used only two to three times before being thrown away or lost. To add insult to injury, reusable bags use 15 times more plastic and emit five times the greenhouse gases during production compared to regular plastic bags.
Additionally, reusable bags contain little to no recyclable materials and are often not recyclable themselves. These bags would need to be used 11 to 59 times just to break even on the increased greenhouse gas emissions from production.
The American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance, an association of plastic bag manufacturers that commissioned the Freedonia study, argues that the environmental effect of disposable plastic bags is being overstated. The alliance claims that plastic bags account for less than 0.6% of litter cleanups and less than 0.3% of municipal solid waste.
Instead of forcing everyone to use reusable bags that emit more greenhouse gases, the alliance argues that disposable bags should be properly recycled. These disposable plastic bags are then more easily used to create new bags. The alliance has a goal of 20% being made of recyclable material by 2025.
California’s Carpet Stewardship Act provides another example of extended producer responsibility leading to suboptimal outcomes. The law has been imposing an increasing fee schedule on new carpets to support carpet recycling efforts. The enforcement of this extended producer responsibility in California raises input costs for producers, increasing the cost of carpeting, and substantially leading to increased costs of housing, which disproportionately affects poorer residents.
The Carpet America Recovery Effort is the organization in charge of the stewardship program, and its executive director, Bob Peoples, admits that the tax “undoubtedly is a serious burden for the approximately 2,000 California carpet retailers and the 79 carpet mills with operations in the state.” In January 2023, the price of carpet tiles increased by almost half. Naturally, the cost of the tax falls on consumers, who now pay nearly 50% more for their carpets.
Extended producer responsibility policies often result in regressive, inflationary pressures without delivering on their environmental promises. Americans are grappling with soaring costs, from new homeowners needing 80% more income than they did four years ago to credit card debt reaching all-time highs. This is all while the federal deficit and interest rates soar.
Inflationary pressures will continue to increase further if the Environmental Protection Agency’s push for Americans to buy expensive zero-carbon emission vehicles and trucks becomes law. Simultaneously, electricity costs have risen 20% since 2020 and will rise by another 20% in some states to meet renewable energy requirements imposed by state lawmakers. California residents alone have seen an 11% rise in electricity prices just over this past year.
From Earth Day to every day, it is crucial to recognize that green policies like extended producer responsibility are often touted as beneficial; however, many of these initiatives are simply using green code-phrasing to justify inflating the cost of goods while ignoring their minimal environmental impact.
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House approves bipartisan bill aimed at bolstering nuclear energy
The House on Wednesday evening approved bipartisan legislation that aims to bolster nuclear energy. The vote was 365-36, with one additional lawmaker voting present.
All of the “no” votes were Democrats and included several members of the Progressive Caucus. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) voted present.
The legislation aims to bolster the U.S.’s nuclear energy production by speeding up environmental reviews for new nuclear reactors and reducing fees that applicants for advanced nuclear reactor licenses must pay.
It would also extend a law that limits the industry’s legal liability for nuclear accidents by 40 years.
In addition, the bill would also seek to bolster nuclear approvals by requiring “efficient, timely, and predictable reviews and proceeding” for licensing reactors.
The bipartisan legislation was sponsored by Reps. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.).
“The Atomic Energy Advancement Act restores American leadership in nuclear energy and technology which is critical to our economic and national security. I’m proud to lead the most significant update to nuclear energy policy in the United States in over a generation,” Duncan said in a written statement on its passage.
While it has bipartisan support in the House, it’s unclear whether the bill will advance in its current form, as the Senate has its own nuclear energy bill.
Both bills have bipartisan support and reports have indicated that both chambers have been in talks on how to reconcile the legislation.
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18 April, 2024
The current “Net Zero” agenda will backfire
The whole current policy agenda associated with responding to climate change is both misguided/counterproductive and almost guaranteed to annoy those people who do not want to change.
It is counterproductive because, firstly, it is based on the fantasy that renewable energy is a like for like replacement for fossil fuels. It simply is not – there is no alternative to fossil fuels for a whole range of economically vital activities (e.g. steelmaking, cement making, long-distance transport).
Secondly, because following the current agenda will make environmental problems much worse, and lead to more carbon emissions, not less. To build the amount of extra electricity-generating capacity we are talking about will mean mining more copper than we have done in the whole of history up to right now (not to mention a whole lot of other kinds of mineral/metal). To make all of the windmills and solar panels we will need will only be possible with massive use of fossil fuels so emissions will have to go up in the short to medium term.
So the whole Net Zero agenda is simply not going to happen – it is based on a fantasy and is actually a way of avoiding tough choices and appearing to do something while not actually doing it. What it does though is impose major costs and inconvenience on people who really dislike it and will react politically – I don’t welcome much of that political reaction (e.g. voting for Trump), quite the contrary, but it is a real phenomenon. The patronising and condescending language used by environmentalist activists and their supporters adds to this effect.
I think there is an actual class conflict at the root of this. I do not think this is a matter of masses or ‘ordinary people’ versus elites. It is a conflict of both interests and visions between two social groups, one of which makes up 25–35% of the population of developed countries while the other makes up roughly 40%. The first group consists of people who work in the non-physical economy and live in globally connected metropolitan areas, who do have higher social status on average than the people in the second group, but who do not necessarily have higher incomes.
The second group is the proverbial “man in the pub”, broadly defined (as mentioned, this group can include some very well-to-do people).
I think both sides are avoiding serious thinking about the actual issue. The first group are engaged in a displacement exercise in which they are advocating a set of policies that will put much of the costs of pretending to deal with climate change on the second group. They justify this with a kind of rhetoric that is hostile to mass consumerism etc but not to their own version of it – this is what enrages their interlocutors and gives rise to really bad politics. I think the beliefs of the first class are an ideology or false consciousness in the classic Friedrich Engels sense of the word – though you could make a similar point about the second.
What we actually need is a serious conversation about whether we can continue to have a high-energy civilisation, and if we decide we can do that and want to, how we do it, or if we decide that we cannot, what the alternative would actually look like. It would not mean for example, still using cars as the main form of transportation but just electric ones – that is a fantasy for all kinds of reasons. Most of the policies in place right now actively hinder this kind of debate or conversation and are provoking a very dangerous political backlash.
A good first step would be to impose a general carbon tax and then to use the price signals that are generated to decide via distributed decision making in the market which aspects of contemporary life we are prepared to pay for and continue and which not. What is simply not going to work is to impose policies in a top-down way and use a language and particular measures that disproportionately impact just under half of the population while (initially) not touching another third or more and justifying it with a perspective and arguments that denigrate the choices and preferences of those 40%.
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Real experts never warn of climate apocalypse
The end of the world is nigh. No, make that nigher. This was, in effect, the warning made last week at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) by Simon Stiell, often described as the UN’s “climate chief”. Stiell, a former minister in the government of Grenada, and now executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told his audience in London: “We have two years to save the world.”
The fact that you may not have been aware of his apocalyptic warning (though The Times ran it on page 10 of Thursday’s paper under the headline “Two years to save the planet, UN chief says”) only underlines how devalued such claims of imminent planetary doom now are. They never come from the experts involved, since none of the scientific reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have warned of human or planetary extinction as a result of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Rising temperatures and higher sea levels, yes, but nothing remotely on the scale of the catastrophe so frequently invoked by the politicians and lobbyists.
In his speech Stiell declared: “Who has two years to save the world? Every person on this planet”, adding that this would be best achieved by all of us “cutting fossil fuel production”. I suspect the moderator of the Chatham House event, who gasped “Amazing!” when this peroration ended, was unaware that Stiell had been part of the government of Grenada that passed a Hydrocarbon Exploration Incentive Bill, and served under a prime minister, Keith Mitchell, who declared before the country’s general election in 2018: “We can now confirm that we have found oil and gas in huge commercial quantities. Grenada is now on its way to becoming a major oil-producing country … This, sisters and brothers, is a game-changer.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/real-experts-never-warn-of-climate-apocalypse-0k78dd3sd
******************************************************How did the current obsession with decarbonization arise?
(part of a lecture givenby Prof. R, Lindzen to MIT Students for Free Inquiry on March 6, 2024)
Currently, there is great emphasis on the march through the educational institutions: first the schools of education and then higher education in the humanities and the social sciences and now STEM.
What is usually ignored is that the first institutions to be captured were professional societies. My wife attended a meeting of the Modern Language Association in the late 60’s , and it was already fully ‘woke.’ While there is currently a focus on the capture of education, DEI was not the only goal of the march through the institutions. I think it would be a mistake to ignore the traditional focus of revolutionary movements on the means of production. The vehicle for this was the capture of the environmental movement.
Prior to 1970, the focus of this movement was on things like whales, endangered species, landscape, clean air and water, and population. However, with the first Earth Day in April of 1970 , the focus turned to the energy sector which, after all, is fundamental to all production, and relatedly, involves trillions of dollars. This was accompanied by the creation of new environmental organizations like Environmental Defense and the Natural Resources Defense Council. It was also accompanied by new governmental organizations like the EPA and the Department of Transportation.
Once again, professional societies were easy pickings: the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and even the honorary societies like the National Academy of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, etc. There was a bit of floundering to begin with. The movement initially attempted to focus on global cooling due to the reflection of sunlight by sulfate aerosols emitted by coal fired generators . After all, there seemed to have been global cooling between the 1930’s and the 1970’s. However, the cooling ended in the 1970’s.
There was an additional effort to tie the sulfates to acid rain which was allegedly killing forests. This also turned out to be a dud. In the 70’s, attention turned to CO 2 and its contribution to warming via the greenhouse effect. The attraction of controlling CO 2 to political control freaks was obvious. It was the inevitable product of all burning of carbon - based fuels. It was also the product of breathing.
However, there was a problem: CO 2 was a minor greenhouse gas compared to the Origins of Decarbonization.pdf naturally produced water vapor. Doubling CO 2 would only lead to warming of less than 1 o C. A paper in the early 70’s by Manabe and Wetherald came to the rescue. Using a highly unrealistic one - dimensional model of the atmosphere, they found that assuming (without any basis) that relative humidity remained constant as the atmosphere warmed would provide a positive feedback that would amplify the impact of CO 2 by a factor of 2. This violated Le Chatelier’s Principle that held that natural systems tended to oppose change, but to be fair, the principle was not something that had been rigorously proven.
Positive feedbacks now became the stock in trade of all climate models which now were producing responses to doubling CO 2 of 3 o C and even 4 o C rather than a paltry 1 o C or less. The enthusiasm of politicians became boundless. Virtue signaling elites promised to achieve net zero emissions within a decade or 2 or 3 with no idea of how to achieve this without destroying their society. Ordinary people, confronted with impossible demands on their own well - being, have not found warming of a few degrees to be very impressive. Few of them contemplate retiring to the arctic rather than Florida.
Excited politicians, confronted by this resistance, have frantically changed their story. Rather than emphasizing miniscule changes in their temperature metric, they now point to weather extremes which occur almost daily some place on earth, as proof not only of climate change but of climate change due to increasing CO 2 (and now also to the even more negligible contributors to the greenhouse effect like methane and nitrous oxide) even though such extremes show no significant correlation with the emissions.
From the political point of view, extremes provide convenient visuals that have more emotional impact than small temperature changes. The desperation of political figures often goes beyond this to claiming that climate change is an existential threat (associated with alleged ‘tipping points’) even though the official document s produced to support climate concerns never come close to claiming this , and where there is no theoretical or observational basis for tipping points .
I should note that there was one exception to the focus on warming, and that was the ozone depletion issue. However, even this issue served a purpose. When Richard Benedick, the American negotiator of the Montreal Convention which banned Freon passed t hrough MIT on his way back from Montreal, he gloated over his success, but assured us that we hadn’t seen anything yet; we should wait to see what they would do with CO 2 . In brief the ozone issue constituted a dry run for global warming.
To be sure, the EPA ’ s activities still include conventional pollution control, but energy dominates. Of course, the attraction of power is not the only thing motivating politicians. The ability to award trillions of dollars to reorient our energy sector means that there are recipients of these trillions of dollars, and these recipients must only share a few percent of these trillions of dollars to support the campaigns of these politicians for many election cycles and guarantee the support of these politicians for the policies associated w ith the reorientation .
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Watchdog accuses Biden administration of inflating climate disaster numbers
The Biden administration relied on tainted, inaccurate, misleading and self-serving data analysis to claim storms are becoming more extreme and expensive due to climate change, according to a watchdog group.
Protect the Public’s Trust cited a new study that combed through data used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for its climate and disaster tracking project and found it inflated damage and made inexplicable data calculations that did not factor in obvious contributions to disaster costs, such as an increase in development in coastal regions and other areas vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding or wildfires.
Most recently, NOAA ballooned the cost of damage from Hurricane Idalia, a storm last August that affected the southeastern part of the United States.
While insured losses from wind damage and flooding totaled $310 million through mid-November, NOAA estimated the storm caused losses of $3.6 billion, or about 12 times the damage covered by insurance.
Idalia’s steep costs were included in NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters tracking project, which has been used by the Biden administration to push its climate change agenda by saying weather events are becoming much more severe and costly, to the tune of billions of dollars’ worth of damage each year.
The NOAA data was cited in a November Biden-Harris administration fact sheet justifying $6 billion in new spending to combat climate change and advance “environmental justice.”
The administration cited the NOAA figures in claiming the U.S. set a record in 2023 for the number of climate disasters that cost more than $1 billion and that the nation now experiences a billion-dollar disaster every three weeks on average compared with once every four months in the 1980s.
“Every degree of global warming we avoid matters because each increment of warming is expected to lead to more damage and greater economic losses in the United States. Each climate action taken to reduce and avoid warming reduces those risks and harmful impacts,” Biden administration officials said in the announcement.
According to NOAA’s assessment, there were 8.5 weather disasters on average annually from 1980 to 2023 that caused losses exceeding $1 billion. The number surged to 20.4 of this type of weather disaster in the last five years, NOAA calculated.
But NOAA’s data doesn’t add up or does not include enough information to explain why it inflated some costs well beyond the initial assessment made by insurers and NOAA’s own National Hurricane Center, critics said.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/apr/5/watchdog-accuses-biden-administration-of-inflating/
***************************************17 April, 2024
UK Electricity Rates Five Times Higher Than China’s Thanks To Net Zero
The United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change in 1988 and in 1995 the first Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP1) was held in Berlin.
There has been a COP meeting every year since then, apart from 2020 when covid intervened.
Last year COP28 was held in the United Arab Emirates and was attended by 84,000 delegates who flew in from all around the world to lecture the rest of us about the importance of reducing our carbon footprint.
In the nearly 30 years since COP conferences began, the U.K. has halved its CO2 emissions so that we now account for a mere 1% of the global total. But in this same time interval, the developing world has massively increased its CO2 emissions.
For example, China’s CO2 emissions have quadrupled and now account for 29% of the global total.
India’s emissions have tripled and now account for 7% of the global total. Both countries are still increasing their CO2 emissions.
The problem is that ‘green’ technologies are not very good. Electric cars and renewable energy are more expensive and inferior in performance to their fossil fuel equivalents.
So as the developing world industrializes, it is using fossil fuel technology to keep its costs down.
Is it right for the privileged people of the First World to tell the poorest people in the Third World to stop operating gas- and coal-fired power stations and stop driving petrol cars because of worries that in 50 years the planet will be warmer?
Climate modeling is so complex and uncertain that we don’t know how much warmer and we don’t know the consequences of that warming. Quite understandably the priority for the leaders of the developing world is to improve the lives of people now rather than worry about what may or may not happen in 50 years hence.
Even though [the UK] only produces 1% of global CO2 emissions, our government has decided we must press on with being world leaders in Net Zero.
Because our ‘carbon footprint’ is already so small, reducing it further will have no measurable impact on global temperatures, but it will further impoverish British people.
For example, we are repeatedly told by the green lobby (which these days occupy influential positions in politics, the media, universities, and business) that renewables are now the cheapest form of energy generation and we should build ever more wind farms and solar farms.
Since the U.K. is already a world leader in offshore wind, it follows that we should have some of the lowest electricity prices in the world.
In fact, the opposite is true; the U.K. has some of the highest electricity prices in the world.
Typically people in this country pay more than twice as much for electricity as they do in the USA, where shale gas has transformed the energy market, and more than five times as much as in China, where they are still building coal-fired power stations.
The reason the U.K.’s electricity prices are so high is that there is a massive hidden cost in renewables its supporters gloss over or never mention, namely the need to have backup energy generation for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.
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EPA Threatens Locally Produced Beef
On Jan. 23, 2024, under Biden Administration guidance, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that will bring 3,879 meat and poultry products (MPP) processing facilities under their jurisdiction. This was swiftly followed by an abbreviated comment period which closed on March 25, 2024, and then immediate implementation of the rule change.
All justified by wastewater levels of Nitrogen and Phosphorus coming from animal meat processing, mirroring the World Economic Forum (WEF) agenda to minimize Nitrogen runoff from European farms which has sparked the widespread farmer protests throughout the European Union.
The new rule involves a major shift in the technology-based effluent limitations guidelines and standards (ELGs) for the meat and poultry industry, threatening their livelihoods by forcing them to add water filtration systems to their facilities.
What does this mean to small meat processing facilities? It’s been reported that the initial cost to install a water filtration system bringing them into compliance would be $300,000–400,000 with a minimum of $100,000 annual maintenance. This would force many small meat-processing facilities to shutter their doors.
It is also a direct attack on the buy local foods movement. If local meat producers no longer have a nearby facility to process the meat, they will no longer be able to provide their product direct to the customer at food markets or online.
The EPA initially promulgated the MPP ELGs in 1974 and amended them in 2004. Currently, they only apply to approximately 150 of the 5,055 MPP facilities in the industry. But, in the EPA’s Benefit Cost Analysis, they state that “EPA estimates the regulatory options potentially affect 3,879 MPP facilities.”
Accordingly, the history of the EPA’s regulation of MPP effluent guidelines and standards has never extended beyond direct discharge facilities and this rule significantly expands their regulatory overreach.
The Kansas Natural Resource Coalition (KNRC) filed comments opposing the proposed rule and was joined by other county coalitions and American Stewards of Liberty. KNRC, an organization of 30 Kansas counties, states these proposed rules will “regulate indirect discharge facilities” that “departs from constitutional and statutory authority” significantly altering the balance between state and federal powers.
They also state that the proposal “gives priority to environmental justice goals and emphasizes ecological benefits, but the EPA jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act is not based on ecological importance or environmental justice.”
Demonstrating that the “comment period” was mere window dressing to meet formal federal comment requirements, immediately on March 25, 2024 the EPA jammed through a finalized version of its devastating new interpretation of the Clean Water Act, which it has titled “Effluent Limitations Guidelines and Standards for the Meat and Poultry Products Point Source Category.” Clearly this is another case of aggressive, arbitrary and capricious EPA regulatory overreach, directly analogous to the recent Supreme Court case West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, 597 U.S. 697 (2022), a landmark decision of the U.S. Supreme Court relating to the Clean Air Act, and the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can regulate carbon dioxide emissions related to climate change.
According to the EPA, after months of study and testing to look for bacteria, viruses etc., what they actually found in the wastewater of processing facilities was Nitrogen and Phosphorus. Two of the fundamental elements which all living things are composed of (Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus).
As a result, the EPA has decided that the entire meat industry—from slaughtering beef to poultry, marinas to packaging—must now retrofit current facilities with lagoons and biomass dissipates to turn “nutrients” into CO2 and methane in order to prevent these “pollutants” from entering local water supplies.
The EPA anticipates these new rules will, at least, result in the closure of 16 processing facilities across the country at a time when our country’s meat producers are already struggling to survive due to bottlenecks in USDA certified facilities. However, on the high side EPA estimates include an impact range of up to 845 processing facilities.
The EPA acknowledges (via the Federal Register) that this rule change will have far-reaching impacts up and down the supply chain from consumer prices to producer losses.
A press release was just put out by a consortium of protein producers who have said this will cost “millions more than the EPA’s highest estimates and result in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.”
It gets worse;
Facilities can bypass these new regulations by drastically reducing their weekly/annual pounds processed. However, the US population continues to grow (largely due to immigration) at a rate that we’re currently incapable of feeding with record low volumes of meet production. Reducing pounds processed will have sizable impacts upon food security, as will further closures, and supply chain disruptions. These issues have now risen to the point of being a national security threat.
Problems in the rule change;
* The rule change fails to provide clarity or funding to local water treatment facilities for testing or range of acceptable levels of runoff, and in my opinion oversteps federal authority (Waters of the United States (WOTUS) jurisdiction) by dictating local water rights. Especially as the EPA acknowledges most water used in processing is from a well source, or privately owned water source.
* The rules fail to account for foreign inputs, and actually incentivize domestic closures, prioritizing imported meat products in a manner conducive to the monopolistic multinational conglomerate beef producers who are not U.S.-based. This, at a time when the United States has gradually become a net importer yet facing critical infrastructure collapses, such as the Key Bridge.
* The rules specify 17 species of endangered animals that may become affected by the salt residues (a byproduct of the process they want used to turn biomass into gas), as these salts flow “downstream” from processing facilities. This is bogus language to attempt to establish jurisdictional standing, as the rules do not differentiate between facilities that are near navigable waters vs facilities that have private water rights.
However, for those that do comply, as opposed to reducing production, they’ll be left open and vulnerable to future lawsuits from environmental activists over endangered species. These lawsuits have historically become costly, with states eventually caving to the demands made, as evidenced by the Oregon Dept of Forestry v. Cascadia in filing after filing—Spotted Owl to CoHo Salmon—resulting in the drastic reduction of privately owned timber lands and logging contracts.
* The rules currently allow for the off-gassing of the biomass as it becomes CO2 and methane, but say nothing about future carbon taxes, or financial burdens that may be incurred due to the additional carbon outputs via the new carbon credit/taxes the Biden Administration created via the Commodities Credit Corporation. Oregon, California, and Washington have already instituted state versions of Cap and Trade legislation e.g. requiring companies to purchase these carbon credits in order to remain in business.
Aside from the massive overreach in relation to non-navigable waters of the United States, typically locally regulated, or an authority reserved to the states to regulate, these new rule changes have the potential to negatively impact our food supply for years to come.
Congressmen Estes and Burlison have proposed H.R. 7079, the “BEEF ACT” (formally known as H.R.7079—Banning EPA’s Encroachment on Facilities Act), as a means of prohibiting the EPA from using its deferential authority (Chevron doctrine) to interpret the Clean Water Act. However, this legislation currently has a 1 percent chance of being enacted, and only a 4 percent chance of passing out of the House Committee on Transportation.
In parallel to direct legislative action, there is clearly a need to mount a legal challenge to this action, one which can build upon the precedent established by West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, which should benefit from the anticipated Supreme Court action to overturn the Chevron deference legal precedent which currently enables this type of regulatory overreach. Further information concerning the Chevron deference can be found in this Substack essay, and SCOTUS Blog has covered the current status of the Supreme Court case in an article titled “Supreme Court likely to discard Chevron.”
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Scotland’s Net Zero Target ‘Beyond What Is Credible’: Report
Scotland’s target of reducing carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030 is “beyond what is credible” to be achieved, the independent climate advisory body has said.
On Wednesday, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) said that the Scottish Government was “failing to achieve” the country’s “ambitious” climate goals. The committee said that in order to meet the target, emissions reduction in most sectors would have to increase by a factor of nine between now and 2030.
“The acceleration required in emissions reduction to meet the 2030 target is now beyond what is credible,” the report to the Scottish Parliament said.
“The Scottish Government is failing to achieve Scotland’s ambitious climate goals,” the CCC said.
The report also noted that “only three of the 14 key recommendations from the CCC’s 2022 Scottish Progress Report scored ‘good progress’. Two scored ‘moderate progress’, seven scored ‘some but insufficient progress’, and two made ‘no progress’ at all.”
While the UK government has set net zero targets, Scotland has its own milestones for reducing carbon emissions, including the interim goal of reducing carbon emissions by 75 percent—compared to levels of territorial emissions in 1990—by 2030. The UK government aims for a 68 percent reduction by that year.
Annual Targets ‘Repeatedly Missed’
Scotland’s annual targets for reducing emissions are “repeatedly missed,” said the CCC, marking eight times in 12 years that goals have not been achieved. The report also noted that emissions increased in 2021, in part owing to colder than average temperatures and a rise in transport emissions post-COVID-19 lockdowns.
The CCC also chastised the Scottish Parliament for failing to publish its new draft Climate Change Plan, which was due for release in late 2023.
Without the plan, there is “no comprehensive delivery strategy for meeting future emissions targets” and “actions continue to fall far short of what is legally required.”
“Scotland’s Climate Change Plan needs to be published urgently, so we can assess it. We need to see actions that will deliver on its future targets,” said Professor Piers Forster, interim chairman of the CCC.
Progress ‘Off Track’ for Heat Pumps, Tree Planting, Recycling
The CCC pinpointed that “most key indicators of delivery progress are off track,” including heat pump installations, recycling, tree planting, peatland restoration, and selling electric cars and vans.
The independent advisory body noted that the sale of electric vehicles was lower than in the UK as a whole, at just 2 percent in 2022. The report said that Scotland will need to “treble the pace of rollout of public electric vehicle charge points” as well as reduce car traffic by 20 percent.
Just 6,000 domestic heat pumps had been installed in Scotland last year, with the CCC saying this needed to increase “by a factor of at least thirteen” to meet the target of 80,000 a year by the end of this decade.
Heat pump uptake has also been slow in the rest of Britain. The National Audit Office (NAO) said in a report published on Monday that the uptake of the new technology with the Boiler Upgrade Scheme in England and Wales was less than half (18,900) of that expected (50,000) between May 2022 and December 2023. The NAO said that the cost of installing and maintaining heat pumps was discouraging people from transitioning from gas boilers.
Scotland had also missed its peatland restoration target for the fifth year in a row, while “more than double” the amount of new woodland needs to be created, with just 8,000 hectares established in 2022–2023 compared to an aim of 18,000 hectares.
While the report did say that Scotland was on track for its offshore wind capacity by 2030, onshore wind capacity needs to “double.”
Mr. Forster said, “Scotland has laudable ambitions to decarbonise but it isn’t enough to set a target—the government must act.”
Scotland ‘Half Way to Net Zero’
The Scottish Government’s net zero secretary, Mairi McAllan, said that she was grateful for the latest advice from the CCC’s report, and that her government remains “fully committed to meeting our target of net zero emissions by 2045, and in 2024–25 alone we are committing £4.7 billion to support the delivery of our climate change goals.”
“Scotland is already half way to net zero and continues to decarbonise faster than the UK average,” Ms. McAllan said.
The minister outlined her government’s net zero endeavours in the last five years, including that Scotland had created around 75 percent of all new UK woodlands and invested over £65 million to support the installation of over 2,700 public electronic vehicle charging points, “ensuring Scotland has the best provision of public charge points per head of population in the UK, outside of London.”
“However, over the past 12 months Scotland has faced a series of unprecedented changes by the UK government, who have reneged on their net zero commitments, and rolled back on policies already announced and accounted for,” Ms. McAllan said.
“We are also expecting a real-terms cut to our UK capital funding of almost 10 percent over five years, totalling around £1.3 billion, which is deeply concerning given it has implications for the delivery of climate ambition in Scotland and our ability to produce a draft Climate Change Plan as intended,” she continued.
The net zero secretary said her government had also faced opposition to “modest” climate measures, such as low emission zones and workplace parking.
“We will now carefully consider the report’s recommendations and our next steps, including legislative options, before providing a formal response,” she said.
Scotland’s 2030 Target a ‘Fiscal Risk’
The CCC assessment of the Scottish Government’s ability to meet its ambitious net zero targets comes after the Scottish Fiscal Commission (SFC) said the government would have to spend £1.1 billion a year over the period of 2020 to 2050 to achieve net zero. This is around 18 percent of its capital budget.
The SFC said in its report published last week that while achieving net zero is a responsibility shared by the central UK and Scottish governments, the “fiscal burden” may fall more onto Scotland which will need to invest more in forestry and land use.
The committee also labelled the 2030 target to reduce emissions by 75 percent a “fiscal risk,” saying, “Overall, this presents a substantial pressure for public spending and could be difficult to manage within the Scottish Budget.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/scotlands-net-zero-target-beyond-what-is-credible-report-5610183
*********************************************Another limit to Australia's electric vehicle revolution
If you are towing something with an EV, you can't just drive onto a forecourt and fill up as you would with a combustion-powered vehicle. Anybody who ever tows a trailer of any kind would be mad to buy an EV. EVs are just a rich man's toy
I have financed an older couple to travel around Australia towing a long and very well-appointed caravan. A diesel Toyota Prado does an effortless and untroubled job of towing it. They pass through many country areas so would just not be able to do the trip with an EV.
The photo of a grey Tesla hooked up to a BP Pulse charging station at an undisclosed location was shared in a Facebook group on Thursday, captioned: 'I'm aware they don't have a spare tyre, I wasn't aware that they don't have reverse.'
Clearly well beyond the bay's perimeters, the majority of the car had mounted the kerb in front.
Social media users were quick to criticise the car's position, questioning why the driver didn't reverse into the spot to make it easier for the charging cable to reach the outlet.
But it soon became apparent why the Tesla was across the boundaries of the parking bay when the original image, which had been cropped, resurfaced and revealed the Tesla was towing a trailer.
It highlights yet another glaring issue with the government's plans to drastically grow the country's EV network by 2030.
Of the 3,000 electric vehicle charging stations currently available nationwide, none of them are equipped for cars towing caravans.
The current infrastructure means drivers often have to unhitch the trailer to effectively charge their vehicle or risk blocking other vehicles.
Carola Jonas, CEO and Founder of Everty, said it's something charging station owners and operators must 'pay close attention to'.
As well as having a lot of catching up to do in terms of having ample charging stations both roadside and in buildings, Jonas argued 'a balance' must be found with the types of bays available for drivers.
'If you look at the charging stations in Wilson or Secure car parks in the city CBDs the parking bays there are limited, but you also wouldn't use these ones with a trailer,' she told Yahoo News Australia.
'But then when you look at highway charging or charging in more public open locations, it would definitely be good if the charging networks start implementing a mix [of suitable bays].'
Some charging networks are currently installed in the 'trucking areas' of some petrol stations so trucks and longer EV vehicles can still use them, Jonas continued.
'So even if you come there with a normal passenger car, you can just drive into the trucking parking area and use the charger. The other way around, it wouldn't have been possible.
'So there are solutions, but it's really for the infrastructure providers to make sure they're for the right mix.'
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16 April, 2024
EPA sets new regulations on ‘forever chemicals’ in US drinking water
So global warming is not the only myth the EPA subscribes to. Note the weasel wording: "Has been linked to". Yes, a lot of people have linked PFAS to illness and have done so for many years. But nobody has produced good evidence for the link. Below is the most recent attempt to "link" PFAS to something. Pathetic
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2024/03/another-pathetic-pfas-study-pfas-is.html
See also:https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/2023/06/more-pfas-excitement-ever-since-erin.html
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has finalized rules on PFAS (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) also known as “forever chemicals” in drinking water systems across the US.EPA Administrator Michael Regan who previously served as head of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality from 2017 until early 2021, announced the regulations at the P.O. Hoffer Water Plant in Fayetteville on Wednesday.
The new rules require public water utilities to monitor for six types of PFAS and limit maximum contaminant levels (MCL).
Exposure to PFAS has been linked to serious health risks, including certain cancers, liver and heart damage in adults, and immune and developmental effects for infants and children.
“Today I’m proud to return to North Carolina to announce the first ever, nationwide, legally enforceable drinking water standard for PFAS,” Regan said, “this is the most significant action EPA has ever taken on PFAS.”
Regan noted the importance of these chemicals, but also the risks.
“These chemicals have a place and are important for certain industries and certain practices. There’s also no doubt that these chemicals entering our environment in an uncontrolled manner are harmful to our families, harmful to our communities, and harmful to our economy,” Regan said.
PFAS are a category of chemicals used since the 1940s to repel oil and water and resist heat, which makes them useful in everyday products such as nonstick cookware, stain resistant clothing, and firefighting foam.
13 months ago, Regan was in Wilmington at the campus of UNCW to announce the start of the rule-making process.
Southeastern North Carolina has been on the forefront of contaminated drinking water, since 2017 when it was reported that chemical company Chemours had been dumping GenX into the Cape Fear River for decades.
The Biden administration has allocated $1 billion to assist states in funding infrastructure upgrades to adhere to the new regulations. North Carolina is set to receive $29 million in grant funding to aid utilities in implementing testing and upgrading water treatment technology.
“You are going to hear a lot of talk about cost and it can’t be done and we shouldn’t do this,” Regan said, “Let me just tell you it can be done. It can be achieved using a range of technologies and approaches that many water systems are using today.”
The Cape Fear Public Utility Authority, which provides water to customers in New Hanover County, has already invested more than $40 million to install granular activated carbon filters to address PFAS.
https://www.carolinajournal.com/epa-sets-new-regulations-on-forever-chemicals-in-us-drinking-water/
*******************************************Study grades natural gas as best source for reliability, affordability and environmental impact
A new study finds that natural gas is the most effective energy source meeting growing energy demands affordably and reliably, while balancing environmental and human impact.
The “Grading the Grid” study by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a pro-free market nonprofit, and Northwood University rates natural gas, coal, petroleum, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, solar and geothermal generation sources on their reliability, environmental and human impact, cost, innovation and market feasibility.
Natural gas got an “A” grade, followed by nuclear, which got a “B+”. Wind and solar energy came in last, each receiving “F” grades, according to the study.
Natural gas, the study explains, is best suited to integrate with the intermittency inherent with wind and solar power, which only produce electricity under the weather conditions.
“Gas provides a reliable, affordable, and increasingly clean source of energy in both traditional and ‘carbon-constrained’ applications,” the study stated.
The study rated nuclear as the “best of all worlds” for its safety, abundance and reliability, as well as its ability to deliver electricity without carbon emissions.
The main challenges nuclear faces, according to the report, is its upfront costs and concerns about storage of nuclear waste. The study notes that this waste has been stored at reactor sites in dry casks that withstand a direct hit by missiles traveling 600 mph. The spent fuel may also be a fuel source for reactors currently under development.
Coal rated high in the study for abundance, affordability and reliability, but it lost points for its high levels of pollutant emissions and carbon dioxide. With U.S. gas producers hitting record-high production that drives down gas prices, the study notes, coal is facing stiff competition.
Hydroelectric received a “B-” grade. While it produces reliable energy without carbon emissions, the expansive nature of hydroelectric facilities make permitting new developments in the U.S. unlikely, which limits its potential to meet more demand.
Wind and solar don’t produce carbon dioxide emissions by themselves, but the study rates renewable energy low for other environmental and human impacts.
Because wind and solar energy require large amounts of land to produce the same amount of energy as other forms, they study explains, there are environmental impacts from the space they take up, which includes harms to wildlife.
The study also calls into question the ability of renewable energy to reduce emissions. Since they require backup from reliable sources, which is often natural gas, they aren’t drivers of major reductions.
While the fuel for wind and solar is free, the study states there are other costs associated with addressing their inherent intermittency, which make them the most expensive forms of energy of those the study examined, and the least reliable.
The study concludes that policies pursuing a rapid transition away from conventional, reliable sources will have a negative impact on human health and the well-being of an energy-abundant society.
“Advocates for wind and solar hold them up as essential to environmental and climate health. However, rushing a systemwide transition to these untested and unreliable energy options puts human lives and the North American economy at risk,” the study concludes.
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How Green Energy, EVs Actually Endanger America
Consider some inescapable self-inflicted scenarios from hell that government “experts” never warned you about regarding utopian visions of carbon-free vehicles powered by friendly breezes and sunbeams.
So, imagine it’s one of those warm, beautiful days when the first news breaks about a big hurricane or tropical storm heading your way.
You immediately begin thinking about stocking up on food supplies that don’t require refrigeration and charging up your electric plug-in to get out of town in a hurry if necessary … just like, it seems, everyone else is doing.
Or maybe, with no warning, “poof,” all power goes off because the grid is down for suspicious reasons no one fully understands or can inform you about.
As it turns out, a foreign adversary cyberattack precludes either of those previous options, plus an added problem.
Along with knocking out all power transformers, the malign hackers also took remote control of both autonomous and operator-controlled electric vehicles, jamming exit highways with colossal human and metal crash wreckage.
In both cases, it’s already too late.
In the first scenario, there isn’t enough available electrical power to serve the broad hurricane zone. It has been in dangerously short supply since millions of EV cars and trucks have been added to an ancient grid that has depended upon natural gas turbines to balance fluctuating wind and solar loads.
It seems that shutting down those fossil companies through “net-zero” carbon policies didn’t prevent extreme weather after all.
Instead, extreme ideological EPA policies such as imposing costly, useless carbon capture requirements on those natural gas producers prevented energy companies from economically competing with heavily government subsidized “green” fantasies.
A March 2024 ruling adding heavy-duty trucks to its original all-electric light vehicle mandate dealt another crushing drain on already slim power margins: each one of them consuming seven times as much electricity on a single charge as a typical daily home.
Sadly, your plug-in has no plug with any juice due to emergency rationing necessary to support medical care facilities and other critical services. And forget about any hopes of using municipal or commercial recharging stations which have the same problem.
The situation soon becomes more expansive and dangerous as high winds have downed long transmission lines connecting remote wind and solar sites to the grid sparking massive fires and extending regional power outages.
Deluges of rain have flooded metropolitan centers and small lowland communities, making them inaccessible for emergency rescue by now-useless electric ambulances, fire trucks and police vehicles with depleted batteries.
Downed trees collapse local power lines, further blocking access and operations of similarly stranded maintenance crews.
Even then, circumstances could have been much worse with cyber scenario two.
Neighbors and friends with battery back-up radios finally inform you one of three power grids serving the entire nation has been disabled by hackers of unknown geographic origin, with transmission connections to the other two intentionally switched off to prevent universal overload collapse.
Darkness soon descends everywhere around you except where backup energy generators temporarily powered by batteries and purloined natural gas provide isolated pockets of light which are soon extinguished as well.
Hospitals are rapidly losing limited generator-supplied electricity to operate life-critical equipment. Meanwhile, primary power can’t be restored any time soon due to melted power transmission lines and damaged turbines at few remaining conventional fossil and nuclear power plants.
Supplies of clean water are being depleted as well.
Whereas metropolitan areas with high water towers atop high-rise buildings will have enough gravity flow to supply most basic living needs for at best a few days, when that runs out, taps will go dry, toilets won’t flush, and emergency supplies of bottled water will become exhausted.
Mountains of uncollected waste, including human biological material, soon create a previously unimaginable unsanitary health crisis.
If you are fortunate enough to live within walking distance of a nondepleted grocery, plan to use cash because the credit card system won’t be operative. Ditto, any ATM machine.
In any case, those stores can’t be restocked because of stranded EV long-haul and local delivery trucks.
Meanwhile, police and fire responses who are busily engaged in rescuing people trapped in elevators and other emergency services have also become overwhelmed by widespread store looting by desperately hungry individuals and families.
As tens or hundreds of millions of others over many states share such chaotic dilemmas, there is no way of predicting when power will be restored. And whereas present weather and temperature conditions may be moderate, many of these regions – including yours – anticipate a coming winter home heating crisis which will put countless lives at risk.
There are few opportunities for people to leave for warmer climes. Personal EVs are useless, as are commercial EV buses and moving vans.
Contemplating either of such avoidably catastrophic scenarios might provide cause to seriously doubt those government experts who continue to warn us of climate change and extreme weather being our greatest threat, with the solution being to load our ancient, cyberattack-prone power grids with weather dependent energy systems overloaded with voracious EV electricity consumption.
No, climate change isn’t nearly as great as the threat presented by their own policies, with the best solution of all…powerful winds of regime change sanity blowing through November voting booths before it is too late.
https://www.newsmax.com/larrybell/green-energy-ev/2024/04/05/id/1159927/
******************************************Australia: "Low cost" renewable energy is an impossible dream
The amusing claim that wind and sunshine are "free" still sounds relevant to some. But converting wind and sunshine into electricity and and delivering it to peple's homes is VERY costly. Coal is free too -- until you start digging it out of the ground
The pre-eminent figure in political economy at Sydney during Albanese’s time at university was red-ragger Ted Wheelwright. Never a fan of the invisible hand, Wheelwright believed in something called “balanced economic development” while disparaging the role of multinational companies and foreign investment. He was a true believer in government intervention and big government, both key convictions of Albanese.
But here’s the thing: while the Prime Minister may sadly remember a lot of what he was taught all those years ago – he probably doesn’t sign up to the evils of foreign investment like Wheelwright did – he failed to come to grips with some ironclad laws of economics. These include the fact that price results from the interaction of supply and demand and that there is a difference between marginal and average costs.
I mention this because of his incorrect assertion that “investment in renewables will lead to cheaper power, because that’s what every economist tells us”.
Not this little black duck, aka an economist, I’m afraid. Virtually all my pals in the economics profession also take the view that renewable energy as a source of 24/7 power is actually more expensive than other sources after accounting for overbuild, additional transmission, the need for back-up/storage and frequency and voltage controls. By the way, economists need their friends in the engineering profession to get to the bottom of the issue.
It’s worth going through the issues because our Prime Minister needs to come to his senses: if he really believes renewable energy is cheaper power, we are heading for the economic rocks and quite quickly.
The most common (but deficient) way of looking at this issue is using levelised cost of electricity according to the source of generation. This is done for many countries but actually falls into the trap of confusing marginal and average costs. Marginal costs are the additional costs of generating an extra unit whereas average costs are the total costs divided by all the units generated.
LCOE takes into account the cost of installation as well as the expected lifetime of the asset. (Wind and solar last half as long as coal and nuclear). A key variable is the capacity factor of the different sources: nuclear has the highest and wind and solar the lowest (around 25 to 33 per cent).
By rights, extended wind droughts and cloudy periods should be taken into account but this rarely occurs. The cost of the feeder stock is then added – which is zero in the case of wind and solar, and meaningful in other cases
The end result is the net present value of electricity generation over the lifetime of the asset in question. Note here that the results are highly assumption-dependent and relate only to wholesale electricity costs, which make up less than one-third of retail costs in the National Electricity Market.
The reality is that LCOE estimates don’t tell us very much because we need electricity 24/7 and wind and solar, by definition, cannot provide this. Moreover, because wind and solar are decentralised assets, they require very expensive and substantial transmission lines to connect to the grid.
These lines have to be paid for and are becoming increasingly expensive to build. There is also a great deal of local resistance to their construction. In addition, ancillary services – frequency and voltage control – have to be paid for. The point here is that when you consider the issue in a holistic way, electricity generation dominated by renewable energy cannot provide the 24/7 power we need or offer affordable prices.
We only need to look at the countries that have pushed a great deal of renewable energy – leaving hydro to one side – into their systems through regulation and subsidies – think Denmark, Germany, the UK and the states of California and South Australia. They all have very high electricity prices with their attendant problems for households and businesses.
It might even pique the interest of our Prime Minister to observe Victoria, which is currently subsidising two brown coal-fired electricity plants having embarked on a headlong campaign to promote renewable energy installations across the state as well as offshore. Astonishingly, its government has also rejected the use of gas; gas peaking plants are the best fit with renewables.
If renewable energy really is cheaper, why would it be necessary to subsidise the investors? And if renewable energy is the best form of electricity generation, how is it the case that two coal plants are now being incentivised to continue? The Eraring plant in NSW is next in line.
The reality is that pushing renewable energy into the system undermines the business models of 24/7 coal-fired generators, but these generators become crucial to pick up the inevitable slack created by the intermittency of wind and solar. Expensive batteries can make a bit of difference but only for short periods. The number of large-scale batteries we would need to firm wind and solar renders this route completely impractical.
In other words, it’s not good economics, notwithstanding the naive view of the Prime Minister. It is also unacceptable to simply expect those in rural and regional communities to bear the external costs of having these installations littered in their backyards.
Over time, it is easy to predict that the owners of the last standing reliable plants will be able to hold the federal and state governments to ransom, thereby driving up electricity prices even further. It’s a perfectly rational business response.
You wouldn’t buy a fridge that only works a third of the time or a stove that only works a third of the time. But we are expected to believe renewable energy is the route to cheaper electricity and economic prosperity. Albanese’s assertion that “climate action is good for our economy” is simply not borne out by the figures.
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15 April, 2024
The Miami Herald is (Partially) Right – Python Farming Will Not Stop Climate Change
A recent article by the Miami Herald, titled “Pythons are eating the Everglades. Could eating them instead help fight climate change?” highlights some problems with a study out of Australia which proposes python farming as a solution to emissions associated with cattle farming. The Miami Herald points out major practicality issues with Python farming, but in the process misses the more important point that the shift in farming to battle climate change is unnecessary.
The study, published in Scientific Reports “Python farming as a flexible and efficient form of agricultural food security,” claims that python farming is well established in Asia, and offers “tangible benefits for sustainability and food systems resilience.”
The Miami Herald explains that the study authors give several reasons for how Burmese python farming is “climate friendly:”
Scientists found they are incredibly efficient at converting small amounts of food into large amounts of high-protein, low-fat weight gain. Also important, cattle burps, farts and poops are huge sources of methane, making up an estimated 45 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S. agriculture industry. Pythons poop every few days to even weeks, and if they do pass gas, it’s much, much less.
While it is true that cattle produce methane, the impact of those emissions are greatly exaggerated by climate alarmists and media acolytes. As discussed previously at Climate Realism (here, here, and here), the Environmental Protection Agency calculated the contributions of cattle related methane and found that cattle make up just 2 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. (See figure below)
Methane itself also plays a very minor role in the atmosphere’s energy absorption spectrum. It has narrow absorption bands that occur at wavelengths which are already being covered by water vapor. It is also a relatively short-lived atmospheric gas, with an atmospheric lifespan of around 12 years, making it unlikely to contribute significantly to any warming effect anyway. Methane is practically irrelevant when it comes to supposed human-caused global warming, so attempting to replace cattle farming with python farming for climate purposes is a waste of time and effort at best.
Besides these errors, the Miami Herald post points out that there are serious scaling (pun intended) issues with python farming, despite the fact that it might be easier to get people to accept eating snake rather than insects, another cattle replacement popular with climate alarmists. Python farmers have to individually remove the snakes one by one from their enclosures to hand feed them, which is labor intensive and becomes increasingly difficult to accomplish with more and more snakes.
Energy efficiency aside, pythons, Miami Herald points out, don’t feed on “sustainable growth like grass,” and are exclusively carnivores, meaning some emissions will result from producing the prey used to feed the pythons, and in housing the pythons in a secure location and processing the waste.
Wild caught snake is no silver bullet either. The Miami Herald reports that some pythons caught in the Everglades “had mercury levels 100 times too high for human consumption,” and the snakes are too difficult to find in quantities that would make them a viable food source for a reasonable number of people.
Python meat is also unpalatable to most python hunters in the Everglades, not just because of the potential mercury, but also because as the Miami Herald quotes, the meat is “very chewy” but slow cooking it turns it “to slime.”
There is nothing really wrong with python farming in general, for those who like the meat, but it is not a solution to climate change. Replacing cattle farming with snake farming will have an insubstantial impact on climate change, if any at all, and it’s questionable if the labor intensity and food requirements are really carbon neutral. The Miami Herald is right to be skeptical about the future of python farming in the West.
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The Spectator is Right, Climate Alarmist Messaging is Harming People
A recent editorial in The Spectator claims that alarmist messaging like warnings of impending doom by climate activists and the United Nations are hyperbolic and even harmful. This is true. Data show that there is no catastrophe in store for humanity due to climate change, and studies show alarmist messaging is counterproductive and harms the mental health of people who take it to heart.
The article, “The irresponsibility of ‘two years to save the planet’” written by Ross Clark, describes the hyperbolic language used by climate alarmists, such as the concept of a climate crisis or giving humanity a countdown to disaster, and how it is counterproductive or even harmful. This discussion follows the recent claims made by the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in which he stated that there are only two years left to save the planet.
Clark points out that these “only a few years left” warnings have been made repeatedly, and “[b]y my maths that means we became doomed a dozen years ago, so I was resigned to sitting back and waiting calmly for the end, like the elderly couple who sat in deckchairs on the Titanic holding hands as the ship went down.”
Humor aside, Clark’s perspective is shared by many, and not only among those who are skeptical of the climate crisis narrative. Climate Realism covered a trend last year in media outlets admitting that the catastrophe narrative was becoming counterproductive even to their would-be supporters, as climate “doomers” began to believe that it was already too late to do anything about climate change, so why bother.
WaPo stated at the time “some scientists and experts worry that their defeatism — which could undermine efforts to take action — may be just as dangerous as climate denial.”
Climate Realism previously discussed another one of Clark’s articles, where he pointed out that “if you believe that human societies are doomed anyway — as 56 per cent of young people apparently do — what is the incentive to cut emissions?”
Besides the general non-issue of climate apathy, however, there is one troubling result of catastrophizing, and that is the state of mental health among younger people. Clark talks about a 2021 study which asked students at the University of Bath between the ages of 16 and 25 questions about climate change, which found “45 per cent of people in this age group were so worried about climate change that it was affecting their day-to-day life, while 56 per cent said that they thought humanity was doomed and 40 per cent said they were hesitant to have children because they would be bringing them up in an uninhabitable world.”
He goes on to say that “[n]o reasoned interpretation of the evidence would say that humanity is doomed by a changing climate,” which is absolutely true. Weather is not becoming more extreme, the planet is greening and crop production is growing, and issues like sea level rise are occurring at a very manageable rate.
Climate Realism has likewise addressed the fact that many peoples’ mental health are being impaired by the media’s coverage of climate change, here, here, and here, for example. The media and alarmists spin catastrophic narratives that real world data debunk, but, unfortunately a lot of people believe the hype and don’t check or follow the science.
It is always beneficial when media outlets, like The Spectator, run op-eds which provide much needed balance to the discussion. In the face of the copious evidence that no climate crisis is in the offing, it is unreasonable to be terrified or deeply distressed by climate change. It takes efforts like Clark’s to inoculate people against catastrophism with the truth.
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Hidden Behind Climate Policies, Data From Nonexistent Temperature Stations
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicts July, August, and September will be hotter than usual. And for those who view warmer temperatures as problematic, that’s a significant cause for concern.
“Earth’s issuing a distress call,” said United Nations secretary-general António Guterres on March 19. “The latest State of the Global Climate report shows a planet on the brink.
“Fossil fuel pollution is sending climate chaos off the charts. Sirens are blaring across all major indicators: Last year saw record heat, record sea levels, and record ocean surface temperatures. … Some records aren’t just chart-topping, they’re chart-busting.”
President Joe Biden called the climate “an existential threat” in his 2023 State of the Union address. “Let’s face reality. The climate crisis doesn’t care if you’re in a red or a blue state.”
In his 2024 address he said, “I don’t think any of you think there’s no longer a climate crisis. At least, I hope you don’t.”
When recalling past temperatures to make comparisons to the present, and, more importantly, inform future climate policy, officials such as Mr. Guterres and President Biden rely in part on temperature readings from the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN).
The network was established to provide an “accurate, unbiased, up-to-date historical climate record for the United States,” NOAA states, and it has recorded more than 100 years of daily maximum and minimum temperatures from stations across the United States.
The problem, say experts, is that an increasing number of USHCN’s stations don’t exist anymore. “They are physically gone—but still report data—like magic,” said Lt. Col. John Shewchuk, a certified consulting meteorologist.
“NOAA fabricates temperature data for more than 30 percent of the 1,218 USHCN reporting stations that no longer exist.”
He calls them “ghost” stations.
Mr. Shewchuck said USHCN stations reached a maximum of 1,218 stations in 1957, but after 1990 the number of active stations began declining due to aging equipment and personnel retirements.
NOAA still records data from these ghost stations by taking the temperature readings from surrounding stations, and recording their average for the ghost station, followed by an “E,” for estimate.
The addition of the ghost station data means NOAA’s “monthly and yearly reports are not representative of reality,” said Anthony Watts, a meteorologist and senior fellow for environment and climate at the Heartland Institute.
“If this kind of process were used in a court of law, then the evidence would be thrown out as being polluted.”
Critical Data
NOAA’s complete record of USHCN data is available on its website, making it a vital tool for scientists examining temperature trends since before the Industrial Revolution.
Jamal Munshi, emeritus professor at California’s Sonoma State University, wrote in a 2017 paper that because many of the stations in the USHCN, and their data, date back to the 1800s, they’ve been “widely used in the study of global warming.”
“The fear of anthropogenic global warming has generated a great interest in temperature trends such that even minute changes in the temperature record are scrutinized, and controversial implications for their effects on climate, extreme weather, and sea level rise are weighed against the cost of reducing emissions as a way of moderating these changes,” Mr. Munshi wrote.
“Energy and development policy around the world are impacted by these evaluations.”
Mr. Shewchuk said the USHCN data is the only long-term historical temperature data the United States has.
“In these days of apparent ‘climate crisis,’ you would think that maintaining actual temperature reporting stations would be a top priority—but they instead manufacture data for hundreds of non-existent stations. This is a bizarre way of monitoring a climate claimed to be an existential threat,” he said.
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Global warming as ritual
The other day we were driving in a major Canadian city and a large wide heavy industrial truck trundled past with the slogan “On the Road to Net Zero” stuck on its side.
Whoever put it there probably realizes that the proposed destination does not permit trucks of this kind, yet they dutifully cheer on their own demise. Which oddly reminded us of the latest order of clothing to arrive from Amazon, also by truck, in a package claiming to be “reducing carbon emissions”.
Both offer up conventional pieties in an unconvincing, lackadaisical manner, as in the decadent phase of a state-imposed civic religion. It is like living in a society where it remains customary to offer oblations to the Olympian gods, while not giving two seconds’ thought to what Hermes would want you to do, or whether Zeus might punish you for denying hospitality to strangers.
The weird ritual quality to it all suggests the worst combination of conformity, cunning and indifference. Whether you call it “greenwashing” or mere hypocrisy, it is a rarity in the debate in that it irritates the zealots and the skeptics equally.
The former grumble that all these corporations genuflecting before the sign of Net Zero are just faking it while destroying the planet, and the latter that by carrying on with the pretense they are shoring up bad public policy.And both are annoyed, rightly, that this stuff is everywhere but doesn’t seem to mean anything. You can confront intransigence. But not mush.
The people who, for instance, make the garments in question are not lying when they say “Being earth-friendly is important to us.” We have no doubt that the majority of that firm’s employees, from top to bottom, really do care about the environment and like to go to bed at night thinking they haven’t spent the day helping wreck it.
The problem is that having agreed to the conventional formulation, like someone mumbling their way through the Lord’s Prayer while thinking about cooking some bacon for breakfast as soon as the dreary thing ends, they do not spend much time actually conforming their behaviour to their words, probably because they haven’t bothered discovering much about what it would require.
In the case of the trucking firm, the problem is that what they do is energy-intensive. And since wind and solar cannot power our economy, for reasons this firm certainly cannot control, the fact that they might at some point buy enough offsets or engage in other Jesuitical jiggery-pokery does not mean that they will not emit carbon.
It just means they’ve purchased the modern equivalent of an “indulgence”. Again, we do not accuse them of having worked through the whole thing and decided to fake it. On the contrary, we accuse them of having vaguely absorbed a few conventional pieties without careful consideration, made them into a slogan, and gone about their business.
You can find literally thousands of examples. Indeed, it is hard to find a product nowadays that does not merely claim to be environmentally friendly, but make a hoo-hah about climate in particular. Go ahead. Read the package, or the website promo, before you buy it. Whatever it is. And yet we are not on the road to Net Zero collectively because we are not on it individually. That people really think offsets somehow work doesn’t make it better. Especially if they go out of their way to avoid listening to any contrary claims lest it disturb their sleep.
P.S. We ourselves, since we do not believe in a man-made climate crisis, are not being lazy hypocrites in rejecting the advice on the underwear package to “Wash cold and save energy”. We strongly suspect that most people who buy such things don’t hunt through the packaging for ideological sore points.
(Just as most normal human beings don’t get riled up at those ridiculous notices telling you that everything you buy is known to the State of California to cause cancer, partly because they don’t read them.) But among those of us eccentrics who do, we strongly suspect that they wash them in whatever way they think will work, and those who choose to wash in cold water aim to save money not the planet.
https://principia-scientific.com/its-the-lack-of-thought-that-counts/
***************************************14 April, 2024
European Court Rules Government Protection From Climate Change Is a Human Right
The European Court of Human Rights sided with a group of female senior citizens who had sued its government over its perceived failures to sufficiently address climate change on human rights grounds, according to The Wall Street Journal.
A group of more than 2,000 Swiss women over the age of 64 alleged that the Swiss government’s climate change policies were in violation of the right to life and other provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, and the court ruled in its favor in its first decision pertaining directly to climate change, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
The decision sets a new precedent in most of Europe that could encourage similar cases against national governments and corporations.
“Climate campaigners are likely to seize on the conclusion that states have positive obligations under human rights law in relation to climate change, and use it as the basis for future claims against states which they deem to not be moving quickly enough to address the threat of climate change,” Tom Cummins, a partner at a global law firm called Ashurst, told The Wall Street Journal, adding:
Companies and financial institutions will also want to review these cases carefully. Corporate climate litigation often relies on human rights arguments, including in high-profile cases like the Dutch litigation brought by Milieudefensie against Shell. The decision in the case against Switzerland will likely encourage claims of this nature.
The European Court of Human Rights’ Tuesday decision will likely encourage similar lawsuits against national governments in Europe, according to Reuters. The court put a lawsuit against the Norwegian government—alleging that it violated human rights by issuing oil and gas exploration licenses—on hold ahead of issuing the landmark ruling in the Swiss women’s case.
Greta Thunberg, a prominent European climate activist, thinks that the Swiss women’s lawsuit is the start of a barrage of European climate lawsuits to come. A panel for the United Nations has suggested that children should sue their governments for perceived negligence on climate change.
“This is only the beginning of climate litigation,” Thunberg told Reuters. “The results of this can mean in no way that we lean back. This means that we have to fight even more, since this is only the beginning.”
The plaintiffs were senior women specifically because people 55 years old and above, and women especially, face increased risks of death related to heat, giving them standing to sue the Swiss government for its purported failures to stem the effects of climate change, according to Axios. The European Court of Human Rights’ decision in favor of the Swiss women is final, according to The Wall Street Journal.
There were two similar climate cases before the European Court of Human Rights on Tuesday, but the court dismissed each of them. One of those cases saw a group of Portuguese youths sue a group of 32 European countries, while a French mayor sued the French national government in the other.
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Tory backlash against European Court of Human Rights climate ruling
The Energy Secretary has led a Tory backlash against the European Court of Human Rights after it issued a landmark ruling that governments have a duty to protect people from climate change.
Claire Coutinho said she was “concerned” that Strasbourg judges were taking over decisions best made by elected politicians.
Senior Tories urged Rishi Sunak to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in the wake of the ruling.
They accused the court of acting in a “profoundly undemocratic” way and being “bent out of shape” by “progressive” activists and politicians.
The row came as an exclusive opinion poll for The Telegraph revealed that half of Conservative voters believe the UK should leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
Some 49 per cent of people who backed the party at the 2019 general election wanted to quit the convention, according to Savanta polling, with 35 per cent wanting to stay. In 2022, polling had found that 43 per cent of Tory voters favoured quitting the ECHR.
Last week, Mr Sunak raised the possibility of the UK leaving it if the Strasbourg court continued to block his delayed plans to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda.
On Tuesday, Ms Coutinho said: “I’m concerned by the Strasbourg court decision. How we tackle climate change affects our economic, energy and national security. Elected politicians are best placed to make those decisions.”
She made the comments after – in the first judgment of its kind – Strasbourg judges ruled that the human rights of a group of elderly Swiss women had been violated by the failure of their government to act quickly enough to tackle climate change.
The court found the Swiss state had breached article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the “right to respect for private and family life”.
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D.C. Cherry Blossoms Aren’t Safe Around Climate Activists!
Green/Left ideology is an incredible mess
The National Park Service — the organization supposedly missioned to preserve “unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the National Park System for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations”– will, after the 2024 National Cherry Blossom Festival, cut down 300 trees in Washington, D.C., 158 of which will be cherry trees. Their reason? To “fight” “climate change” — the 300 will be disposed of to make room for a reconstructed seawall around the Tidal Basin and Potomac River so D.C. can “withstand about 100 years of future sea level rise.”
At this point, climate change is like the dishrag punchline of a washed-up comedian — predictable and disappointing. As the bit goes, climate change is exacerbated by CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere — except that CO2 levels today are the same as they were 3 million years ago. The oceans are going to cataclysmically rise — except that in the last 122 years, the oceans have risen a grand total of eight inches with, at this rate, another 1,800 years before they reach apocalyptic levels. This must be why climate change activists like the Obamas and Neil DeGrasse Tyson keep buying beachfront properties.
The Pravda media are no different, insisting the cherry trees reached their earliest peak bloom in 20 years because of “an abnormally warm winter, consistent with climate change trends.” They scream, “Be afraid! The end is nigh!” while failing to mention the just-as-crazy winters from decades ago. For example, in mid-February of 1930, there was an abnormally warm 10-day period with recorded temperatures including 89 degrees Fahrenheit (Jefferson City, MO), 76 degrees (Burlington, IA), and 82 degrees (Richmond, VA).
What’s more, this “unusually warm winter” was not all that unusual when considering the eruption of the underwater Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in January 2022 followed by the arrival of El Nino in 2023. Under the circumstances, the unusual event would have been having a normal winter in the middle of this convergence.
The truth is, the “common knowledge” that 97 percent of scientists agree climate change is man’s fault is about as reliable as Barack Obama’s autobiography. And the cherry on top is that we could very well be heading for an extended period of cooling caused by diminished solar activity.
The Park Service says it will plant a variety of new trees following the project, but why chop down 300 trees in the first place, just to start over with immature trees and needless walls to the tune of $113 million? Money and power are the surface answers. Climate change is not science, but it is big business, with the federal government doling out billions of dollars a year on the subject and the spending only increasing. The power comes with restrictions on peoples’ travel (in both cars and airplanes), international carbon taxes, attempting to prosecute “ecocide” as an international crime, and shutting up anyone who raises a hand to question “the science.”
But there may also be a more disturbing and painfully ironic reason, both for the cherry tree demolition and the perpetuation of climate change fearmongering: the love of destruction for the sake of destruction.
Maintaining order and enforcing justice are the bare-bones requirements for any civilization. But the real, gold-standard civilizations — the Roman Republic, Victorian Britain, and the United States up to 1963 — go above and beyond the basics by promoting the arts and sciences and encouraging what de Tocqueville called the manly passion for equality — encouraging each individual to be the best he can and reach full, 100 percent capacity.
Look at the feats of architecture or entire artistic movements like Art Deco. Look at the accomplishments of Dickens, Frost, Hemingway, Tennyson, Disney, and Ford in the arts or at the Hoover Dam, the moon landing, and the rebuilding of Europe and Japan after 1945 — a civilization is supposed to create with purpose, and what it creates has to be good and beautiful. It needs to fill and lift the soul. Even dads in their garages were, once upon a time, encouraged to manifest themselves in this way.
Compare that to the regime under which we currently live. Now, works of art are attacked — in some cases completely destroyed — with only a whimper of counter-energy. In fact, when the suggestion is made to make beautiful things again, it’s decried as dangerous and fascist. Our institutions do worse than nothing — they aid and abet this mindset.
Look at the National Endowment on the Arts and Humanities, whose prime job is no longer to inspire and push people to the stars, but to applaud the latest manifestation of the zeitgeist. These include: plays with “Black Lives Matter” themes; Shakespeare performances that showcase an anti-Trump bent; “queer” theatre; mime performances about racism; an art exhibit dedicated to the life of Yuri Kochiyama, who once claimed Osama bin Laden as one of the people she “admired”; and theatre performances that allow people to “commune” with a cactus. The education system does its part by graduating fewer and fewer students who can read and add, meaning fewer students who can differentiate between art and slop.
Of course, most acts of creation involve some destruction; our own Republic was created by destroying the British Empire circa 1763. And, oftentimes, the destruction that does take place will be a compromise to prevent something even worse. But, destruction for the sake of itself — or for the sake of a fiction — threatens what is good, instills fear, and is a sign that a civilization is in decline.
Fear is the antithesis of hope — the mind-killer that eventually dissolves our humanity into a spineless glob, eager to hand over the keys to the algorithm. Whether it’s through skewed warnings about the end of “democracy” or the claim that the planet could burst into flames and floods at any moment, the Borg is determined to control our lives through fear. This is why, in the eyes of the elites, beauty itself is too dangerous. It causes people to dream, to push themselves, and, at its highest, imparts hope — it threatens their ability to wield fear.
Ultimately, beauty — from an Art Deco building to a blossoming cherry tree — makes us human. But that is what the Borg cannot allow, at any cost.
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China leads global coal power surge as capacity hits record
Global coal-power capacity rose to a record last year, led by a surge in new plants in China and a slowdown in retirements around the world, according to a new report from Global Energy Monitor.
The world’s coal fleet grew by 2% to 2,130 gigawatts, with China accounting for about two thirds of the increase followed by Indonesia and India, according to the climate research firm. China also started construction on 70 gigawatts of new coal plants last year, nearly 20 times more than the rest of the world combined.
China’s expansion of what’s already by far the world’s largest coal fleet highlights Beijing’s continued focus on energy security after a series of economy-damaging power shortages in 2021 and 2022. While officials say the plants will primarily be used to balance out intermittent generation from rapidly growing wind and solar farms, the building boom has raised questions about China’s climate commitments and stymied global efforts to phase out use of the dirtiest fossil fuel.
“The recent surge in coal power development in China starkly contrasts with the global trend, putting China’s 2025 climate targets at risk,” said Qi Qin, an analyst at the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, which contributed to the report.
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11 April, 2024
UK: Heat Pumps Are Unlikely To Ever Cut The Mustard
Has there ever been a more pernicious lie spread by government and lobbyists than the claim that net zero will save us money?
Heat pumps, for example, weren’t just supposed to ‘decarbonise’ home heating and thereby ‘save the planet’; they were all going to slash our bills as we switched from expensive gas to cheap-as-chips ‘renewable’ energy from wind and solar farms.
The narrative was always flawed: if heat pumps really did promise to save us money the government would hardly need to push them at us, offering grants of £7500 through its Boiler Upgrade Scheme.
The government has good reason to bribe, as heat pump installations last year reached only 55,000 – far short of the government’s target of 600,000 a year by 2028.
As today’s National Audit Office report all but confirms, people are not falling for the bait. The Boiler Upgrade scheme has been an expensive failure, with consumers seeing through the guff and working out that dumping their gas boiler for a heat pump is not going to save them a bean.
On the contrary, it will cost them more to install and more to run.
Remember how government grants were supposed to allow the industry to reach a scale at which prices would start to tumble? That’s not quite going according to plan.
The average real-terms cost of a heat pump installation has actually risen over the past four years, from £10,328 in 2019 to £11,287 in 2023 (both at 2021 prices). It still costs four times as much to replace a gas boiler with a heat pump than with a like-for-like replacement.
True, there are those aforementioned £7500 grants available for early-adopters, so it might be possible if you have a small property to fit a heat pump at no greater cost than a gas boiler.
But grants are not free money: we are all paying for them through our taxes and energy bills. If the government ended up having to bung all 30 million UK households grants of £7500 to fit a heat pump, it would add over £200 billion to annual public spending.
Electricity prices are so much higher than gas prices that you can’t count on saving money when it comes to running costs – even if your heat pump works as intended, and pumps at least three times as much heat energy into your home than it consumes in electrical energy.
In any case, field trials have repeatedly shown many heat pumps failing to reach this benchmark, with the coefficient of performance (the ratio of heat energy out to electrical energy in) achieving a median of 2.80, falling to a mean of 2.44 when the outside temperature falls below 2 Celsius – exactly when you need your heating the most.
Bizarrely, given this tale of serial under-performance in both cost and effectiveness, the green lobby wants the government to double down in pushing heat pumps on consumers.
The Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit preposterously blames low take up of heat pumps on government ‘dithering’ over hydrogen boilers. The government has said that it will make a decision by 2026 as to whether the existing gas network might be repurposed for hydrogen in future.
Predictably enough, the heat pump industry doesn’t like hydrogen and wants it ruled out sooner, saying that it will turn out to be too expensive.
Maybe it will, but the inescapable truth is that a switch to heat pumps, too, will cost the country a fortune.
And that the bill is going to fall on the heads of us all, in one way or another.
https://principia-scientific.com/heat-pumps-are-unlikely-to-ever-cut-the-mustard/
***********************************************Backlash Against Wind And Solar Projects Is Real, Global, And Growing
All around the world, big solar and wind projects are being rejected.
From rural England to the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, local communities are telling alt-energy developers to take their projects and put them where the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow. [emphasis, links added]
As I have documented in the Renewable Rejection Database, there have been at least 639 rejections or restrictions of wind or solar projects in the U.S. alone since 2015.
Why are so many communities objecting? The answer is simple: landowners and homeowners want to preserve the integrity of their neighborhoods.
They don’t want their landscapes and views destroyed by oceans of solar panels and forests of 600-foot-high wind turbines. They are also rightly concerned about the diminution of their property values and the noise pollution that comes with these projects.
Don’t blame yourself if you haven’t heard about these rejections.
The widespread opposition to wind and solar doesn’t fit the narrative that’s relentlessly pushed by the New York Times, National Public Radio, and other big media outlets about the “energy transition” and “clean” energy.
Nor do they fit with claims made by the Biden administration, which has repeatedly touted its goal of having a “carbon pollution-free power sector by 2035.”
These myriad rejections are a massive problem for corporate interests that are trying to build huge new wind and solar projects. Indeed, rural communities are standing between big business and tens of billions of dollars in tax credits.
According to the latest numbers from the U.S. Treasury, this year alone, the production tax credit (used primarily for wind energy) and the investment tax credit (primarily solar) will cost taxpayers $35 billion.
For reference, the oil and gas industry’s most significant tax credit, the depletion allowance, will cost taxpayers about $1.6 billion.
Given the vast sums at stake, it’s not surprising that lobbyists for the wind and solar sectors are pushing measures that strip local communities of their zoning authority and hand that authority to state bureaucrats.
In fact, four heavily Democratic states, New York, California, Michigan, and Illinois, have recently passed measures that do precisely that.
But before delving further into what’s happening across the U.S., here’s a quick roundup of what’s happening overseas.
Last December, a French court ruled that a wind project in southern France near the town of Luna must be dismantled due to “noise complaints from residents and the effect it is having on birds.” According to one news report, “Residents in the immediate surrounding area have long complained about the noise from the wind farm.”
In March, a judge in Ireland sided with local landowners and ruled that the noise pollution generated by a wind project in County Wexford built near their properties amounted to a “nuisance to the plaintiffs.”
The judge also wrote, “I find that the plaintiffs’ complaints are objectively justified in that the noise interferes with the ordinary comfort and enjoyment of their homes. When it occurs, this interference is a substantial interference.” Damages in the case have yet to be determined.
In England, the solar rejections are piling up so fast it’s challenging to keep track. Since January, local authorities have rejected a 102-acre project in Cambridgeshire, a 198-acre project in Holbeach, a 66-acre project in Kent, a 96-acre project in Herefordshire, and a 103-acre project in Coventry.
After the rejection of the Holbeach solar project, a local politician, Nick Worth, said the land “should be used for farming, not energy. We should be producing more food, not less, particularly on the best land in the country.”
In January, an Australian court rejected an application for a 10-megawatt solar project proposed near Mudgee in New South Wales.
The ruling confirmed the judgment of a regional council that had determined the project would be an “alien feature” on the landscape and that the area would be “irreversibly changed” by the 25,000-solar panel facility.
Last year, in Canada, regulators in Alberta imposed a moratorium on all wind and solar projects. In February, provincial officials announced updates to their regulations, including a ban on alt-energy projects on prime agricultural land.
Further, in an unprecedented move, the rules will require a 35-kilometer (21.7 miles) buffer zone between wind and solar facilities and protected areas or “pristine landscapes.”
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said the new regulations were made in response to Alberta residents who “don’t want large-scale developments to interfere with our province’s most beautiful natural features.”
Back here in the U.S., in February, local officials in Tennessee vetoed a proposed solar project that was supposed to help fuel a data center owned by Facebook parent Meta Platforms.
According to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, “A proposed solar farm that was slated to occupy about 600 acres of land in Millington was denied by the Shelby County Board of Commissioners Monday evening, amid fervent opposition from residents.”
The Shelby County denial is one of 212 rejections or restrictions of solar that have occurred since 2017.
Meanwhile, as we show in our new five-part docuseries, “Juice: Power, Politics & The Grid,” the Osage tribe is prevailing in the longest-running legal battle over wind energy in American history.
In December, a federal judge in Tulsa ruled that Enel, the Italian company, violated the tribe’s sovereignty when it built a 150-megawatt wind project on Osage traditional land but did not obtain mining leases from the tribe.
The judge ordered the company to remove all 84 wind turbines, which the company says will cost about $300 million.
The tribe’s legal battle with Enel started in 2011. Its court victory is a historic win for Native American sovereignty.
The federal court ruling is an embarrassing and costly loss for Enel and a massive black eye for the U.S. wind industry, which has repeatedly tried to roll over rural communities in its inexorable thirst for tax credits. Despite the importance of the decision, it’s been largely ignored in the media.
Legacy media outlets may refuse to honestly report on the growing backlash against wind and solar projects, but the facts on the ground are clear.
Legacy media outlets may refuse to honestly report on the growing backlash against wind and solar projects, but the facts on the ground are clear.
The binding constraint on the growth of solar and wind around the world is that fewer and fewer communities are willing to accept the landscape destruction that comes with large alt-energy projects.
And no amount of PR or spin can change that fact.
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BBC’s Failed ‘Fact Check’ of Daily Sceptic Report on Arctic Sea Ice
The BBC More or Less radio programme recently ‘fact checked’ the Daily Sceptic’s report that sea ice in the Arctic had soared to its highest level for 21 years on January 8th this year. Alas, the report was confirmed to be true so the Beeb went down the ‘cherry pick’ line of attack.
Curiously missing from the programme was any mention that the article dealt mainly with long term trends in Arctic sea ice and concentrated on scientific evidence that showed at least a decade-long slow recovery. The ‘fact check’ did little more than confirm the widely held suspicion that many BBC programmes are now infected with a need to crowbar a climate catastrophe narrative into broadcast messages.
Being accused of “cherry picking” by an organisation that routinely catastrophises bad weather events is of course risible. Taking lessons from a state-reliant operation that can publish a recent story from a “science correspondent” that starts, “Climate change threatens to ‘call time’ on the great British pint”, is also laughable. The 21-year high on January 8th was clearly identified as part of a number of short and long term trends, and in the third paragraph of the article it was noted that ”we must be careful not to follow alarmists down their chosen political path of cherry-picking and warning of climate collapse on the basis of individual events”.
It is evident that the BBC did little investigative work on the matter despite More or Less priding itself on checking statistics and data. Instead it relied on the usual ‘scientists say’, in this case Professor Julienne Stroeve. The UCL “Earth Scientist” attempted to muddy the Arctic sea ice waters by suggesting the ice extent is thinner, but presenter Tom Colls had to admit, “the data is not available yet”.
If you pick a particular day, you might just be talking about the weather, states Colls. There is no correlation between winter sea ice extent and how much the ice will melt in the summer, added Stroeve. What you see since 1979, continued Stroeve, is that the trend in Arctic sea ice is downwards for four decades. The overall decline in long term Arctic sea ice is very easy to see, adds Colls.
If you ‘cherry pick’ the date 1979, probably the high point for Arctic sea ice for almost a century, and draw a line to the present day, the cyclical trend is undoubtedly down. There was more ice around at the high point in 1979 than there is now, nobody disputes that. If you are just after a simple political message of climate collapse to promote the Net Zero fantasy, further examination of the data will be unwelcome.
But a more detailed review of the statistics gives a more realistic interpretation. According to recent work published by the Arctic scientist Allan Astrup Jensen, the summer ice plateaued from 1979-97, fell for 10 years and then resumed a minimal downward trend from 2007. Jensen observes that either side of the 10 year fall after 1997, there have been minimal losses.
In fact using a four-year moving average, the trend has been slightly upwards over the last few years. The graph below is compiled by the investigative science writer Tony Heller and shows the recent stability of Arctic summer sea ice around the minimum recorded every September. A slight recovery from about 2012 can be clearly seen.
As we can see, More or Less has produced little more than a narrative-driven attempt to keep the Arctic sea ice poster scare going for as long as possible. Since the drop in the early part of the century, alarmists have been forecasting ice free summers in the Arctic in the near future. Sir David Attenborough told BBC viewers in 2022 that the Arctic could be ice free by 2035. Professor Stroeve claims to have briefed former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, a man who has never lived down reporting that the ice could all be gone by 2014. In fact what has clearly been happening is noted by Tony Heller. They bury the old data going back to the 1950s, “and pretend they don’t notice sea ice is increasing again”. Nevertheless activists are starting to learn lessons about putting short timelines on their fanciful forecasts. For her part, Stroeve suggests ice free summers in the Arctic by the next 50 years.
Meanwhile, after the ‘hottest year ever’, the maximum winter sea ice for 2024 was recorded on March 14th at 15.01 million sq kms. Polar bear scientist Susan Crockford noted that the ‘U.S. headline writers’ at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre said it was below the average for 1981-2010. Indeed it was, although this year’s total was within two standard deviations, states Crockford. But why compare the a 30-year average to 2010 when another decade of data to 2020 is available? Cynics might note that taking out the higher totals of 40 years ago and replacing them with the lower recent figures would produce – more or less – an above average maximum in 2024.
https://climaterealism.com/2024/04/bbcs-failed-fact-check-of-daily-sceptic-report-on-arctic-sea-ice/
****************************************************The Age of Underpopulation Is Here
The age of overpopulation is over. The age of underpopulation is here. After decades of warnings and fear about an overpopulation crisis, population is now rapidly declining in most of the world. The overpopulation disaster predicted by world elites did not occur.
Total fertility rate is the average number of children born per woman. Demographers tell us that a country’s fertility rate must be at least 2.1 children per woman to sustain the current level of population.
According to data from the United Nations, total world population still continues to rise, but population is declining in all major nations, where fertility rates have fallen below the minimum population replacement rate. Africa is the only continent where the population continues to grow. According to birth rates and without counting immigration flows, population is now falling in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, the United States, and all European nations except Monaco and the Faroe Islands.
For the last four decades of the 20th century, world leaders warned of a coming catastrophe from an uncontrolled rise in global population. In 1950, the average woman was birthing about five children during her lifetime. Global population was growing at a rate of about two percent per year by 1955.
“The Population Bomb,” written by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, became a worldwide best seller. The prologue of the book stated, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The author warned of coming famines and resource shortages and advocated for compulsory population control.
The fear of overpopulation produced a population control movement by the early 1970s. A consistent theme of the movement was that population growth was unplanned. Ehrlich stated: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.”
The United Nations indicated that people were not intelligent enough to plan their own families. James Grant, Undersecretary General for the UN, wrote in 1992: “Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology available to the human race.”
Convinced by the overpopulation elites, governments of the world endorsed tragic population control measures. By the 1970s, it became U.S. government policy to grant foreign aid only if population control measures were implemented. The World Bank and the U.N. also established policies requiring population control in exchange for loans or aid.
During the last decades of the 20th century, population programs proposed by Western intellectuals and the U.N. were implemented in the form of anti-human policies by the governments of China, India and dozens of other nations. The government of India established sterilization and intrauterine device insertion quotas in 1966. Over 40 million people were sterilized between 1965 and 1985, most coercively.
The People’s Republic of China implemented population policies in 1970 and adopted a one-child policy for all families in 1979. By March 2013, the China government reported that 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations had been carried out since 1971. Sex-selection abortion became common and even the killing of girl babies was practiced in both China and India.
Population control policies typically disproportionally impacted disadvantaged races or social classes. In India, coercive policies often targeted people of lower castes. In 1966, sterilization programs were set up at federally funded Indian Health Service hospitals in the U.S. Thousands of Native American women were sterilized between 1966 and 1976, often without informed consent. In Peru, sterilizations targeted rural natives of Incan descent.
But the overpopulation intellectuals were wrong. Famine did not kill hundreds of millions of people as the Ehrlichs predicted. Instead, an agricultural revolution increased global output of corn, rice and wheat by a factor of five from 1960 to 2023. The malnourished portion of world population declined from 30 percent in 1950 to 10 percent today and continues to fall.
The world fertility rate dropped from about five children per woman in 1950 to 2.3 children per woman in 2021 and continues to fall. The population growth rate dropped to 0.82 percent per year by 2021 and is declining rapidly.
Nations moved from agricultural, to industrial, to technological societies, achieving the elimination of infectious disease, improved sanitation, improved food supply, a decline in infant mortality, and rising levels of education. Women entered the work force in larger numbers and family sizes declined.
But despite tragic implementation of population control policies in several nations, today’s families are having fewer children, the world population is stabilizing, and the predicted overpopulation disaster did not happen. Governments now pursue programs to boost family size in China, Japan, South Korea, and many nations of Europe.
But didn’t population control programs cause the drop in fertility rates? The answer is “no.” Fertility rates dropped faster in South Korea than in China, driven by economic development, rising incomes, and increased levels of education and workforce participation for women, without forced population control measures. Fertility rates dropped faster in Brazil and Mexico due to demographic changes, than in India where forced population control was employed.
What is the lesson from the overpopulation crisis that did not occur? The United Nations, the intellectuals, and strident political leaders were dead wrong about overpopulation. People do not multiply like cancer cells. Rather than being a species “out of control,” humans plan their own families and react to changing societal conditions. The lesson from the overpopulation debacle is that people adapt to their environment.
But the United Nations and world elites now warn of a coming climate catastrophe. They demand a costly energy transition to Net Zero emissions. They demand that we change our transportation and our home appliances, that we stop eating meat, and that we adopt hundreds of other proposed climate-saving remedies. Will we have a climate disaster, or will the global elites be wrong again?
https://heartland.org/opinion/the-age-of-underpopulation-is-here/
***************************************The ozone hole makes a comeback
Are we witnessing a new chapter in the story of the ozone hole over Antarctica? The past three years have seen the re-emergence of large, long-lived ozone holes, which seem to be expanding. This raises questions over whether global efforts to heal the ozone layer have been successful. New findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggest that the ozone has not been recovering over the last few decades as many forecast it would.
Analysing monthly and daily ozone readings from 2004 to 2022, the researchers found that the ozone hole contains significantly less ozone than it did. “Our analysis concluded with the data from 2022, but as of today, the ozone hole in 2023 has already surpassed the size of the three previous years: by the end of last month, it exceeded 26 million square kilometres,” said Hannah Kessenich from the University of Otago.
In 1987 the United Nations approved the Montreal Protocol, banning chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which scientists had discovered were depleting the ozone layer. It was hailed as a major environmental victory. Earlier this year a UN report projected that the ozone would return to 1980’s levels by 2040.
But it’s now becoming apparent that it’s not just CFCs at work. Some scientists have suggested ozone depletion might also be due to a low-pressure system of cold westerly winds – the Antarctic polar vortex. The pattern since 2004 is that the early spring shows indications of ozone-hole recovery, but by October the middle stratosphere is exhibiting significant ozone reduction, amounting to a 26% loss in the core of the ozone hole. Other scientists say that ozone holes have been caused by the 2019 wildfires and volcanic eruptions.
There is also the possibility that the role of CFCs has been overestimated, at the expense of decadal variations in ozone concentrations over the South Pole.
Understanding ozone variability is important because of the major role Antarctic stratospheric ozone plays in climate variability across the Southern Hemisphere. Climate change may have incited new sources of ozone depletion, and the atmospheric abundance of several CFCs has recently been on the rise.
In other words, whilst our attention was turned elsewhere, the ozone hole has been making a comeback.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/ozone-hole-makes-a-comeback
***********************************************The Ominous Rise of Climate Change Litigation
I was once in the audience at a conference when a very senior member of the judiciary of a major developed nation declared off-handedly, in a response to a question, that: “Law is relevant to every single issue of human conduct.”
It was a revealing remark and I noted it down verbatim. I often think about it. To somebody armed with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; to the judge, every problem looks like a court case. This is, I suppose, to be expected. And at that level the statement was almost oxymoronic.
But the comment also expressed something deeply important about modern societies. The German social theorist Niklas Luhmann described such societies as being divided into distinct communicative systems (politics, law, economics, medicine, mass media and so on) wherein the environment – meaning the underlying real world – is processed by a system of code into a communicative format which is digestible to the system proper. For the legal system, that code is ‘lawful/not lawful’: everything in the system’s environment must be understood in those terms, and the whole of reality (in the eyes of the legal system) is encompassed in that dynamic. It follows of course that nothing can happen that cannot be thought of by the legal system on the basis of it being lawful/not lawful, legal/illegal. Anything and everything that has ever happened, or potentially could ever happen, is either one or the other.
Sooner or later, then, it was inevitable that the climate itself – the literal environment – would be subsumed within this logic, and that human interactions with the very world in which we live would become subject to this binary coding. And so what was inevitable has indeed come to pass, in the form of two separate suites of litigation happening at opposite ends of the world, in Europe and New Zealand respectively.
One runs great risks when discussing the ins-and-outs of litigation that is ongoing. Judges can be unpredictable buggers. And one runs even greater risks in this regard when discussing litigation that falls to be decided imminently. This post will go out on April 8th and it concerns three cases in which the judgments will be handed down on the 9th. Those of you who read the post in time will therefore be able to follow along in real time, as it were, and see how accurate my predictions were. But, as I will emphasise towards the end of the post, in one important respect it actually doesn’t really matter what the outcomes are.
New Zealand first, then – land of lamb, pinot noir and weird names for rugby positions. In the recent case of Michael John Smith v Fronterra Cooperative Group Ltd and Ors [2024] NZSC 5, the Supreme Court of New Zealand overturned the decision of a lower court to strike out a claim (meaning, to deny a hearing) to a Maori elder who wanted to sue various New Zealand companies who were involved in the emission of greenhouse gases. The idea here is that the ‘climate crisis’ is endangering lands of cultural and spiritual significance to this man’s clan, and that the emission of greenhouse gases is a civil wrong – a tort – which should provide him (and presumably his people) with a monetary remedy. It’s either a public nuisance, negligence or an entirely new tort of “climate system damage”. The NZ Court of Appeal had earlier struck out the claim as being manifestly bound to fail – reasoning, I think pretty sensibly, that:
The magnitude of the crisis which is climate change simply cannot be appropriately or adequately addressed by common law tort claims pursued through the courts. It is quintessentially a matter that calls for a sophisticated regulatory response at a national level supported by international co-ordination.
In other words, if one grants that climate change is an issue which we will have to deal with in some respect (a position I agree with by and large), then that should happen through the democratic political process and not litigation. It’s a matter for parliaments, not courts. And so the case should not be heard.
The Supreme Court disagreed. Declaring, ominously I think, that “the principles governing public nuisance ought not to stand still in the face of massive environmental challenges attributable to human economic activity”, it decided that the claim should proceed to a full hearing. This does not mean it decided the issue one way or the other, but rather that said issue will now actually fall to be determined by a court (inevitably, ultimately, the Supreme Court itself). This will presumably happen later this year, although I am not familiar with the speed with which the wheels of justice turn down in Wellington.
Europe next – specifically Strasbourg, land of Eurocrats, Alsatian dogs and Franco-Prussian antagonism. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights will on April 9th 2024 hand down its decisions in the three conjoined cases of Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v Switzerland, Carême v France and Duarte Agostinho and Others v Portugal and 32 Others. In its judgments it will determine roughly the same issue as the NZ Supreme Court from the opposite direction, as it were. Whereas in Smith the dispute is in private law, and the claimant seeks compensation from the corporate defendants for the torts in question, in these cases the matter is one of public law: whether governments are breaching the human rights of their populations in failing to respond adequately to the aforementioned ‘climate crisis’.
In the first case, Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, the applicants, a group of elderly women, have complained that the public authorities are not doing enough to prevent climate change’s impacts on their living standards and health. In the second, Carême, a former Mayor of a municipality in France is suing the state on the basis that climate change represents a threat to his right to life and right to respect for his private and family life and not enough is being done to prevent it. In the third, Duarte Agostinho and Others (which, I have to say, is possibly the most egregious example of human rights litigation that I have ever encountered, and I’ve seen a lot), a group of six Portuguese nationals aged between eight and 21 years old have brought a claim against pretty much every state in the Council of Europe, alleging that climate change will “impact their lives, well-being, mental health and their homes” due to [checks notes] increased risk of heatwaves, wildfires and wildfire smoke. This, they allege, will breach obligations they are owed with respect to their rights to [checks notes again] life, prohibition of ill-treatment, respect for private and family life and non-discrimination (on the basis that global warming will affect young people more than old).
Leaving aside the merits (or lack of such) of these four cases, what will be the outcome? The vagaries of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights are such that it is almost impossible to predict in advance what it will decide on any given issue, and while I would once have said that the Supreme Court of New Zealand can be expected to be pretty sensible, I have to say that genuinely nothing would surprise me these days. All four cases could be laughed out of court, but, equally, all four could succeed.
What I think is most likely to happen – and we’ll find out in due course – is that the claimants in each case will fail, but that the court in question will not be able to resist the opportunity to ‘develop’ the law, and will hint that future claims, better made-out and better supported by evidence, may succeed. The New Zealand Supreme Court will say something along the lines of: “While here the claim cannot succeed, we see no reason why in principle there shouldn’t be a tort of climate system damage.” And the European Court of Human Rights will say something like: “While here the claims cannot succeed, a future claimant might do so by proving x, y and z.” And the doors will be thereby left open for further litigation.
Whatever the courts in question decide, however, the important point is that these cases are being brought and heard in the first place. Because they really shouldn’t be. Indeed, one could hardly imagine a subject which, on the face of it, is less suitable for being decided in a court of law. This is for three obvious reasons.
The first is that a court is supposed to apply, rather than make, law, and in this area there simply is no applicable law. There is no tort of “climate system damage” and nothing in the history of the law of tort resembles anything really like it. The drafters of the European Convention of Human Rights had nothing like climate change in mind when they came up with the treaty (though the Court has developed a complex doctrine, known as the ‘living instrument’ approach, or ‘evolutive interpretation’, to explain away this kind of problem). If any of these cases succeed it will be because the court in question has in effect indulged in law-making from the bench, and this is not what is supposed to happen in a properly developed legal system.
The second reason is that courts lack political legitimacy (at least outside of the U.S., where judges are either political appointments or are actually elected). They are not accountable to the electorate directly or indirectly via elected politicians. They should therefore not be the ones to be deciding important matters of policy, such as whether people who are affected by climate change (assuming causation can be proved, which is a rather large assumption) are entitled to a remedy of some kind – let alone what that remedy should be.
And the third reason is that courts lack expertise in complex matters. I don’t mean this only in the sense that judges are not climate scientists; a committee of climate scientists would lack expertise in this regard too. This is because the issues involved are ‘complex’ in the strict sense – they encompass a range of fields (science, economy, law, health, etc.), a range of sub-domains within those fields, a range of competing values, and a range of different priorities, and all of these different factors influence each other in unforeseeable ways. Not only is it the case, then, that no single body of men and women could properly ‘expertly’ evaluate the issues involved. It is also the case that many of those issues (particularly underlying questions about values and morality) cannot reasonably be described as being subject to expertise at all. No human being can be more of an expert than any other in what it is appropriate to value. The matters being litigated are, in other words, matters of politics par excellence – and politics is something that courts are very poorly equipped to do.
But this brings us, with a bump, back to Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann was an obscurantist and an elitist and he made his writing deliberately inaccessible (even for those with a good command of academic German, which I certainly do not have). And I will here therefore somewhat bastardise and bowdlerise him to make an argument I am sure he would not have endorsed. But I will do this to draw out what I think, lurking in the background, was one of his important messages: that modernity would witness a kind of withering, or shrinking, of politics and its replacement by, among other things, law.
We can think of the political as the realm in which decisions are made through the application of power. If we’re lucky, that power derives from democratic legitimacy; it could of course just as well derive from the might of an autocrat. The point, though, is that the power is executive: a wide range of factors – ideally all relevant factors – are weighed up, and a decision is reached on the basis of what is thought ‘best’, with what ‘best’ would look like being determined by the holder(s) of power. Obviously, ideally, they have a good hold on what would actually be ‘best’ and exercise their decision-making power accordingly – they may very well not do.
Yet we live in societies in which the vast complexity of the underlying reality (the things that are actually present, that are actually happening) is absorbed into functionally differentiated social systems which repackage them on the basis of simple binaries: the legal system categorises everything into lawful/not lawful; the mass media system categorises everything into news/not news; the scientific system categorises everything into true/not true; the medical system categorises everything into healthy/not healthy, and so on. The space for politics becomes smaller and smaller as a result, because the requirement for political decision-making as such is squeezed out in the face of the imperatives of the other social systems.
The classic example of this is of course COVID-19, in which, as you will remember, a new ‘happening’ bubbled up from the environment (the virus) and within a matter of weeks everybody seemed to ‘know’ about it in terms of what was news (wet market, terrible threat, new normal) and was not news (lab leak, early spread); what was ‘true’ (everybody is equally vulnerable, social distancing works) and what was ‘not true’ (old people are much more vulnerable than young people, social distancing is just theatre); what was lawful (stay at home) and what was not lawful (sunbathe, sit on a park bench, hug your grandmother at a funeral).
And all of this seemed to happen not on the basis of political decision-making in the sense that I outlined it earlier, but rather on the basis of a kind of collective communicative freak-out which encompassed politicians and non-politicians alike. Politicians were not absent from the picture but they did not wield politics as such; they rather were blown about and buffeted by a whirlwind of intense communication (opinion polls, scientific reports, modelling forecasts, tweets, etc.) that overcame them. The result was that the media, legal, medical and scientific systems staged a kind of undeclared revolt and went off on a wild frolic of their own – with the politicians trailing in the distance, trying to somehow keep up.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/04/08/the-ominous-rise-of-climate-change-litigation/
***************************************************Analysis: Even The IPCC’s Latest Report Doesn’t Support Climate Activists’ Lies
Climate campaigners and their political and media allies often tell us that their frightening forecasts are backed up by the best available science.
In particular, they point to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that they tell us are the gold standard of climate science research. If the IPCC said it, it must be true, they proclaim! [emphasis, links added]
The late Dr. Jay Lehr and I have often written about the serious flaws in the IPCC reports. Indeed, much of the IPCC science is wrong, leading many participating scientists to resign from the body.
As documented in the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (the most recent of which is here), there are thousands of scientists across the world publishing in leading peer-reviewed journals who show that much of what the IPCC concludes is incorrect.
Consequently, basing our nation’s climate and energy policies only on what the IPCC says would be irresponsible, even reckless.
But in many cases, climate campaigners are not even following the IPCC’s conclusions.
In this article, I will discuss what the IPCC actually said in its reports and show some examples (there are many) where even the UN body itself contradicts what alarmists tell us.
First, it is important to understand what the various confidence levels used by the IPCC mean. They are:
Very Low: Indicates very limited evidence or low agreement.
Low: Suggests limited evidence or agreement.
Medium: Represents moderate evidence or agreement.
High: Signifies substantial evidence or high agreement.
Very High: Implies robust evidence or very high agreement1 2.
Climate alarmists often tell us that we should expect to see increases in flooding due to man-made climate change. However, the IPCC finds no trends in flooding globally. Specifically, the IPCC writes on p. 1569 of the latest Assessment Report, the sixth:
“In summary there is low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale. In general, there is low confidence in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence because of a limited number of studies, differences in the results of these studies and large modelling uncertainties.”
Similarly, in the Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC wrote:
“There continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”
Note that they don’t even feel confident enough to conclude that floods are increasing or decreasing!
It seems that after every intense rainfall event, we are told that we will see even more of these due to man-made climate change, and these are responsible for more flooding. But the IPCC says:
“Attributing changes in heavy precipitation to anthropogenic activities (Section 11.4.4) cannot be readily translated to attributing changes in floods to human activities, because precipitation is only one of the multiple factors, albeit an important one, that affect floods.”
Even the Trudeau government’s left-leaning Environment and Climate Change Canada, in its 2019 climate report, said,
“There do not appear to be detectable trends in short-duration extreme precipitation in Canada for the country as a whole based on available station data.”
OK, not more rain. So there must be more drought, then, right? No, the latest IPCC report says:
“There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions.”
Oh, but hold on. Activists tell us we will have more and more heat waves across the US and Canada due to man-made (anthropogenic) climate change. No, the IPCC says we don’t know.
In particular, the IPCC indicates low confidence (~20%) in the detection of trends in extreme heat and the attribution of such trends to human causes for both central and eastern North America.
But what about more and more intense storms? For example, the derecho (which is a line of intense, widespread, and fast-moving windstorms, and occasionally thunderstorms, that moves across a great distance and is characterized by damaging winds) a year ago in Ottawa, Canada, and other extreme winds and storms that are blamed on anthropogenic climate change.
Concerning extreme winds (between 60S and 60N), the IPCC says:“
the observed intensity of extreme winds is becoming less severe in the lower to mid-latitudes while becoming more severe in higher latitudes poleward of 60 degrees (low confidence)”
Note: cities at or north of 60 degrees latitude include Reykjavik, Iceland, (64°N), and Helsinki, Finland (60°N). OK, so Fins and Icelanders might have a reason to worry about stronger winds, but not us.
The IPCC also shows no upward trend in landfalling hurricanes, including the strongest storms.
How about winter storms that are often blamed on anthropogenic climate change? The IPCC says, concerning winter storms:
“There is low confidence in observed recent changes in the total number of extratropical cyclones over both hemispheres. There is also low confidence in past-century trends in the number and intensity of the strongest extratropical cyclones over the Northern Hemisphere…”
But what about tornadoes, hail, and lightning? Surely those are increasing because of man-man climate change, or are at least happening differently now to how they were a decade ago, right? No, the IPCC says:
“observational trends in tornadoes, hail, and lightning associated with severe convective storms are not robustly detected due to insufficient coverage of the long-term observations”
“But, but, but, more forest fires are caused by climate change, OK?” environmentalists sputter.
The IPCC is not very confident about this. They write:
“There is medium confidence [in contrast to ‘high’ or ‘very high’ confidence] that weather conditions that promote wildfires (fire weather) have become more probable in southern Europe, northern Eurasia, the US, and Australia over the last century.”
Interestingly, the Royal Society wrote in a 2020 blog post:
“Fire activity is on the rise in some regions, but when considering the total area burned at the ground level, we are not seeing an increase an overall increase.”
In summary, Working Group 1 of the Sixth Assessment Report had “low confidence in the direction of change” of most of the climate impacts that most excite activists, sensational media, and politicians, namely precipitation, drought, fire weather, cyclones, and hurricanes, snow and ice, sea levels, coastal erosion, and ocean acidity, you name it.
Generally, it also has “low confidence” that a wider range of detrimental climate impacts will occur beyond 2050, except under “worst-case” scenarios.
Finally, it should be noted that the terms ‘climate emergency’ or ‘climate crisis’ are only mentioned once in the latest IPCC assessment reports, and that is merely regarding media coverage, not what the IPCC says is real. Specifically, the IPCC writes:
“Also, some media outlets have recently adopted and promoted terms and phrases stronger than the more neutral ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming,’ including ‘climate crisis,’ ‘global heating,’ and ‘climate emergency’ (Zeldin-O’Neill, 2019).”
So, when you next hear politicians, media, and activists claim that their proclamations are backed up by the IPCC, have some fun with them and insist that they show you where the IPCC says what they say they say.
And then sit back and watch them sputter and bluster and do their best to avoid the question.
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New Paper Finds Effect of Human-Caused Carbon Emissions on Climate is “Non-Discernible”
Every now and then, a giant of modern science should be allowed to express himself in language that we all understand. In the informative Climate: The Movie, the 2022 Nobel physics laureate Dr. John Clauser thundered: “I assert there is no connection whatsoever between climate change and CO2 – it’s all a crock of crap, in my opinion.” While not expressing himself in such forthright terms, the Greek scientist Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis might agree. He recently published a paper that argues it is the recent expansion of a more productive biosphere that has led to increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and greening of the Earth. It is widely argued that changing atmospheric carbon isotopes prove that most if not all recent warming is caused by the 4% human contribution from burning hydrocarbons, but such anthropogenic involvement is dismissed by Koutsoyiannis as “non-discernible”. Koutsoyiannis is Professor Emeritus of Hydrology and Analysis of Hydrosystems at the National Technical University of Athens.
The isotope argument has been around for some time and has been useful in closing down debate on the role of human-caused CO2 and its supposed effect in causing a ‘climate emergency’. The carbon in living matter has a slightly higher proportion of 12C isotopes, and recent lowering levels of 13C, which accounts for 99% of carbon in the atmosphere, are used to promote the idea that it is caused by burning hydrocarbons. But Koutsoyiannis argues that the more productive biosphere has resulted in “natural amplification of the carbon cycle due to increased temperature”. He suggests this may be a “primary factor for the decrease in the isotopic signature 13C in atmospheric CO2”.
Clauser’s remarks, along with contributions from a number of other distinguished scientists, have led to widespread attempts to shadow-ban Martin Durkin’s Climate: The Movie in mainstream and social media. If Clauser and scientists like Koutsoyiannis are correct, there is no need for the Net Zero global collectivisation. Trillions of dollars can be taken back from the Climate Industrial Network to be used to solve more pressing environmental and social problems. In such circles, the idea that humans control the climate thermostat is regarded as little short of pseudoscience. In the film, the former Princeton professor William Happer says he can live with the descriptive suggestion “hoax”, although he prefers the word “scam”. Disregarding the role of natural forces and promoting a 50 year-old hypothesis – science speak for ‘opinion’ – that can’t even agree on the degree of warming caused by higher levels of CO2 – holds little attraction for these sceptical science minds.
During the course of the Durkin film, the evidence mounts that the warming ‘opinion’ can’t explain any of the climate change observations seen over the last 500 million years of life on Earth. As the Daily Sceptic has noted on numerous occasions, it would help if there was at least one peer-reviewed paper that proved conclusively that humans caused all or most changes in the climate. A politically-manufactured ‘consensus’ and appeals to UN authority do not count.
Koutsoyiannis provides some of the historical background to the evolution of the isotope story, and its use to promote the ‘settled’ science narrative around CO2. The generally accepted hypothesis “may reflect a dogmatic approach or a postmodern ideological effect, i.e., to blame everything on human actions”, he observes. Hence, he says, the null hypothesis that all observed changes are mostly natural has not seriously been investigated. To add weight to his contention, Koutsoyiannis repeats the infamous claim made recently at a World Economic Forum meeting by Melissa Fleming, Under Secretary-General for Global Communications at the United Nations: “We own the science, and we think that the world should know it.”
The Koutsoyiannis paper is long and detailed and he uses data obtained from the California-based Scripps Institute that has been measuring isotopic signatures since 1978, along with proxy data going back five centuries. The complex workings can be viewed in the full paper with the author concluding that instrumental carbon isotopic data of the last 40 years shows no discernible signs of human hydrocarbon CO2 emissions. He also found that the modern record did not differ in terms of net isotopic signature of atmospheric CO2 sources and sinks from the proxy data, including Antarctica ice cores, going back 500 years.
The lack, or otherwise, of a discernible human-caused carbon isotope signature is an interesting branch of climate science to investigate, although, as we have seen, it is constrained by the political requirements governing the settled science narrative. In 2022, three physics professors led by Kenneth Skrable from the University of Massachusetts broke ranks and examined the atmospheric trail left by the isotopes. They discovered that the amount of CO2 released by hydrocarbon burning since 1750, “was much too low to be the cause of global warming”. The scientists found that claims of the dominance of anthropogenic fossil fuel in the isotope record had involved the “misuse” of statistics. They stated that the assumption that the increase in CO2 is dominated by or equal to the anthropogenic component is “not settled science”.
They warned that “unsupported conclusions” of human involvement “have severe potential societal implications that press the need for very costly remedial actions that may be misdirected, presently unnecessary and ineffective in curbing global warming”.
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9 April, 2024
Amusing Reason Strata Tower Roof Turbines Cannot Be Used
The Strata SE1 Tower in London was billed as a modern source of ‘green’ energy, but it hasn’t panned out that way
When the Strata SE1 tower in Elephant and Castle opened in June 2010, it marked the latest step in the area’s regeneration and was heralded as a fine example of ‘eco-friendly’ architecture.
However, Londoners have noticed that one of the striking features of the 482ft residential building is never in use.
The three giant turbines built into the roof of the £113.5 million structure were meant to be a source of ‘green’ energy and the building’s potential to generate ‘renewable’ power was key to securing its planning permission.
A promotional video for the building shows the turbines rotating, with one of the developers saying:
“We’re sending a message that you can incorporate new technologies…and we can reduce the carbon footprint.”
An engineer adds:
“The three turbines are on and running.”
Critics have since accused the developers of “greenwashing” and in August 2010, the Strata SE1 was awarded the 2010 Carbuncle Cup for bad architecture.
The unwanted gong recognised it as one of the “the ugliest buildings in the United Kingdom completed in the last 12 months”.
Since finishing construction, the residential bloc’s turbines were shut off, so they no longer spin.
In 2023, the chair of Southwark’s planning committee revealed that the turbines had been shut off due to the excessive noise and vibrations that permeated throughout the building.
Labour councillor Martin Seaton, who was not in post when the Strata SE1 was built, told MyLondon:
“In the very early days on my first term, I received some complaints that residents were being disturbed by the blades spinning.”
He added:
“The wind turbines haven’t worked since, mainly because of complaints of the noise disturbing residents.”
It doesn’t work, it’s a white elephant. [The developers] didn’t take into account when the turbines span they’d vibrate throughout the building.
It seems obvious to you and I, but the designers and planners are infinitely cleverer than us, and missed the blindingly obvious.”
He revealed that the chief-complainers lived near the top of the building:
“The closer you were to the top, the louder it was, but it propagated throughout the building. How on earth the planners and designers missed it, I have no idea.”
Despite its critics, the Strata SE1 Tower is home to more than 1,000 residents and has 408 flats.
Boris Johnson once dubbed the building ‘The Lipstick’ and added it had “a bit of oomph about it”.
https://principia-scientific.com/the-ridiculous-reason-strata-tower-roof-turbines-cannot-be-used/
**************************************************‘AVOID FALSE BALANCE’: AP Style Guide Aims to Silence Dissent From Climate Alarmist Narrative
Most news outlets rely on The Associated Press style guide—officially known as the AP Stylebook—as the arbiter for grammar, spelling, and terminology in news coverage. While AP puts forth its style guide as an impartial rubric for fair coverage, its rules often exclude conservative views from the outset.
Take AP’s latest round of updates, released Friday. The updates include guidance on how to avoid “stigmatizing” obese people, admonitions to avoid calling people “homeless” as it might be “dehumanizing,” and warnings to avoid the term “female” since “some people object to its use as a descriptor for women because it can be seen as emphasizing biology and reproductive capacity over gender identity.”
AP’s style guide prefers “anti-abortion” and “abortion-rights” as adjectives, urging journalists to avoid “pro-life,” “pro-choice,” and “pro-abortion.”
Yet one of the largest sections of the updated style guide involves “climate change,” a term that AP says “can be used interchangeably” with the term “climate crisis.”
“Climate change, resulting in the climate crisis, is largely caused by human activities that emit carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to the vast majority of peer-reviewed studies, science organizations and climate scientists,” the AP style guide intones. “This happens from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, and other activities.”
“Greenhouse gases are the main driver of climate change,” the guide adds.
AP insists that this is true, with a capital T. When “telling the climate story,” the style guide urges journalists to “avoid false balance—giving a platform to unfounded claims or unqualified sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views. For example, coverage of a study describing effects of climate change need not seek ‘other side’ comment that humans have no influence on the climate.”
Naturally, this is a red herring. Those who doubt the climate-alarmist narrative don’t maintain that “humans have no influence on the climate.” Rather, we say that the direct impact of human activities—including the burning of fossil fuels—is poorly understood and that efforts to predict future events based on various climate alarmist models have repeatedly failed.
In the 1970s, alarmists warned of a coming ice age. In the 1990s, the form of the destroyer would be global warming. Now, the alarmists have adopted the catch-all term “climate change,” so they can retroactively assign human agency to any disaster that strikes us at the moment.
It’s quite clever, if you want a perpetual fear-mongering tactic. Of course, the narrative is rather inconvenient for the rest of us who want cheaper energy and wish to solve the humanitarian crisis of extreme poverty in other parts of the world.
In fact, The Associated Press tacitly admits that the climate alarmists have no smoking-gun evidence that human activities are bringing about Armageddon.
“Avoid attributing single occurrences to climate change unless scientists have established a connection,” the style guide advises. “At the same time, stories about individual events should make it clear that they occur in a larger context.”
AP’s willingness to completely write off the “other side” proves particularly instructive, considering the style guide’s claim that climate change affects many other issues.
“The climate story goes beyond extreme weather and science,” the Stylebook notes. “It also is about politics, human rights, inequality, international law, biodiversity, society and culture, and many other issues. Successful climate and environment stories show how the climate crisis is affecting many areas of life.”
If journalists can throw out any pretense of objectivity on climate, and insist that climate change impacts all other social issues, can they also safely dismiss the obligation to cover “both sides” on politics, inequality, society, and culture? How does AP aim to prevent this rot from spreading across other topics and preventing fair coverage entirely?
The prognosis is not good. AP has repeatedly put its thumb on the scale to silence criticism of abortion and gender ideology—even going so far as telling journalists to avoid the term “transgenderism” because it “frames transgender identity as an ideology.”
Even while urging journalists to avoid using the terms “climate change deniers” and “climate change skeptics,” the AP style guide suggests a more “specific” alternative, such as “people who do not agree with mainstream science that says the climate is changing” or “people who disagree with the severity of climate change projected by scientists.” Talk about “stigmatizing.”
AP doesn’t admit that the supposed unanimity of scientists on man-made catastrophic climate change is based on a lie—that 97% of scientists don’t actually believe the world is going to end because we burn fossil fuels.
The study claiming to reach that conclusion merely analyzed peer-reviewed research papers, put them in seven categories, and then artificially claimed that the vast majority of the papers making any claim favored the alarmist view. Many scientists have said the study mischaracterized their research.
It remains unclear exactly how greenhouse gases are affecting the planet, mainly because the global atmosphere is extremely complicated. Most climate models fail to predict exactly what will happen. Perhaps decreasing carbon emissions will help the climate, but the science is far less settled than AP would have journalists believe.
If news coverage dismisses all skepticism of an alarmist narrative, it will skew the information ecosystem and disincentivize the very research that helps determine what precise impacts greenhouse gases have on the environment. It may also lead skeptical Americans to dismiss climate science altogether, in the same way that the medical establishment squandered much of its public credibility by suppressing concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.
So why does The Associated Press put its thumb on the scale? The creators of the style guide may legitimately believe there is only one perspective, but they also have a hefty economic incentive to act like it.
AP has received large grants from left-wing foundations, particularly for its climate reporting.
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation spent $2.5 million on AP’s climate and education reporting, the Washington Free Beacon reported. That foundation also funds Planned Parenthood.
The Rockefeller Foundation awarded AP a $750,000 grant in 2021 for a climate change initiative to report on “the increased and urgent need for reliable, renewable electricity in underserved communities worldwide.”
The KR Foundation, a Danish nonprofit that seeks the “rapid phase-out of fossil fuels,” gave approximately $300,000 to The Associated Press in December 2022, but AP appeared to hide that donation until late last year.
AP may push climate alarmism even without these funds—the latest style guide appears to feature left-wing groupthink on a host of issues—but the money still provides extra incentive.
The AP’s increasingly leftward tilt—and its attempt to force its groupthink through its style guide—creates a rather hostile climate for actual journalism, let alone good science.
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New EPA Emissions Standards Defy Reality
The recent stringent Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) carbon emissions standards for internal combustion engines defy economic realities. The EPA would have us believe that coercing folks to buy electric vehicles (EV) will somehow reduce alleged climate change extremes. The new rules will negatively affect California and the entire nation.
Obviously, most folks want to maintain clean air, land, and water ecosystems. However, scientists haven’t agreed on what degree human activity adversely impacts global climate change as opposed to natural causes for extreme climate events. Several dire predictions of rising seas haven’t panned out over several decades, while cooling and warming trends haven’t been too much out of the ordinary.
The new EPA standards are part of a government plan to make EVs two-thirds of new car sales by 2032. Thirty percent of heavy duty commercial vehicles have to be emissions-free by 2032 and 40 percent of short-haul trucks by the same time frame. Emission particulates must be reduced to nine micrograms for each cubic meter of exhaust. Spokespersons from the American Petroleum Institute stated that the new regulation “threatens consumer freedom, energy reliability and national security.”
These EPA goals are unlikely to eventuate due to several factors. First, Americans bristle when they are pressured into purchasing products that haven’t proven their worth over an extended period of time. Electric vehicles can be expensive and heavy due to large batteries that are costly to repair when they break down. They take too long to charge up when contrasted with diesel or gas refilling times. How will the grid handle millions of EVs when it can’t even cope with current electricity demands?
Next, electric vehicles lose power in wintry weather, thus increasing the already existent range anxiety. What if an owner needs to charge up the vehicle and the charger doesn’t work at a chosen location, or it has an incompatible charger? Moreover, owners must keep in mind that criminals cut charger cables for the materials, something they aren’t tempted to do at diesel or gasoline filling stations.
The car rental company Hertz learned a hard lesson when it purchased a fleet of EVs and hardly anyone wanted to rent them for reasons already noted. Hertz is now trying to sell 20,000 of these vehicles and adding back gasoline-powered cars. Other car rental companies will likely see the writing on the wall and follow suit. A similar scenario is unfolding with some bus and van companies as well.
Third, purchasing these vehicles benefits China, because the PRC controls most of the rare earth minerals that go into batteries, as well as the lithium battery industry. Products that are manufactured in China might have questionable quality control standards as they move through the production process. How reliable are these heavy batteries, and how often do they catch on fire? It is unwise to surrender critical facets of our national and technological security to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Fourth, mandating a rapid transition to EVs puts government policies way ahead of actual innovation in the free market. Consumers want choices when it comes to making big purchases, and if they want an EV or hybrid vehicle that’s fine, but buying an internal combustion vehicle ought to be an option, too. With decreasing options, the costs of energy will skyrocket and healthy competition will be stifled.
Fifth, although the new EPA guidelines would further reduce carbon emissions, the earth needs these emissions because plants turn CO2 into oxygen. Furthermore, climate alarmists ignore the fact that fossil fuel emissions have become much cleaner over the last four or five decades due to catalytic converters and pollution controls on industry. Extracting and refining fossil fuels have undergone a purer process.
Sixth, has the EPA thought about the pollution generated by the recycling of large batteries, car bodies, solar panels, and wind turbines? Fossil fuel energy will be needed to carry out this process, just as oil products keep the electric grid in operation. Solar and wind power are unreliable sources of energy and would result in brownouts and power shortages if petroleum products are left out of the energy equation.
Seventh, do government officials and well-heeled climate “progressives” truly believe what they are preaching? Most of them have fine cars, big homes, and they jet around the world leaving a huge carbon footprint in their wake. Their hypocrisy is staggering as they attempt to impose a minimalist lifestyle on other Americans while they live the high life. They don’t have to face the repercussions of their shortsighted mandates, yet they want the masses to regress back to a pre-industrial stage of existence.
Finally, America has plentiful supplies of natural gas and petroleum that could last more than a century. Transitioning to an emissions-free society will take several decades if it happens at all. Until then, cleaner and reliable fuel sources will be in constant demand to drive a modern economy and lift people out of poverty. Indeed, energy autonomy is a crucial aspect of economic, informational, and national security.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/new-epa-emissions-standards-defy-reality-5622137
************************************************UK: Revealed: Renewable Energy Jobs Are Being Subsidised by £250,000 Each, Every Year
Recently, Shadow Energy Secretary Ed Miliband has been promoting his party’s ‘Green Prosperity Plan’ again, promising more jobs, more investment and lower bills. However, these claims do not stand up to scrutiny. Currently each job in the wind and solar power sectors is being subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of over £250,000 per job, every year. This is the path to penury, not prosperity.
Miliband was ‘ratioed’ on X, meaning he received more replies than likes, so maybe the public is starting to rumble his ruse. Nevertheless, he is likely to be in the Cabinet after the election, so we need to pay attention to what he says. Time to work through the data to find out how much these mythical jobs in the renewable sector cost us.
From time to time, the ONS publishes an assessment of Low Carbon and Renewable Energy Economy (LCREE). This covers the number of businesses, turnover and how many jobs are involved in the LCREE sector. Helpfully, it breaks down the figures by sector, including offshore wind, onshore wind and solar power. The latest available figures for 2021 show the number of full-time equivalent jobs in the U.K. for these sectors was 10,600, 5,000 and 6,400, respectively.
There are three subsidy regimes for renewable energy in the U.K. These are Feed-in-Tariffs (FiTs), Renewables Obligation Certificates (ROCs) and Contracts for Difference (CfDs).
Each year Ofgem publish the FiT report and dataset that details the total amount of electricity generated, total payments and the capacity installed by technology. In scheme year 12, running from April 2021 to March 2022, 79.4% of FiT capacity was solar and 11.9% wind. The rest was made up of hydro and anaerobic digestion plants. The total payments under the FiT scheme were £1,557m. If we split these payments by capacity, we can determine that solar power received £1,236m in FiT payments and wind (assumed to be onshore) received £185m.
Details of ROCs issued cab be found on the Ofgem portal. The value of ROCs related to the output period of the whole of 2021 was £2,009m for offshore wind, £1,251m for onshore wind and £493m for solar power.
The Low Carbon Contracts Company publishes a database of CfD payments that can also be split by technology. This shows that offshore wind received £612m in 2021. This figure is lower than might be expected because gas prices started to spike in late-2021 and so some CfD-funded wind farms started to refund money under the CfD scheme. Because strike prices for onshore wind and solar power tend to be lower than for offshore wind, these two technologies paid back £22m and £204m, respectively.
The total subsidies in 2021 for these three sectors is around £5.56bn. This compares to the ONS estimate of £14.56bn turnover for the same sectors. Putting it another way, 38% of the turnover is pure subsidy.
Pulling all this together, we can add up the total subsidy received for these technologies and compare it to the number of jobs in each sector.
We can see that each offshore wind job cost £247,000 in subsidy, each onshore wind job nearly £283,000 and solar £238,000. The average across all three sectors is nearly £253,000 per job.
Now remember, this is not a one-off payment to get a new industry up and running, it is an ongoing annual payment. The ONS does not publish its estimate of the salaries in the sector, however, the annual subsidies are far higher than any reasonable estimate of the average salaries paid in the sector.
It is crystal clear that all talk of a “green revolution” is simply a pipedream. These green jobs are only a façade: Potemkin jobs to give politicians and policymakers a good sound bite and make them feel good about themselves. The idea that we can move to “green prosperity” by subsidising each job to the tune of over £250,000 each year is plainly absurd. If we take any further steps down this “green prosperity” road, we risk bankrupting the nation.
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8 April, 2024
Islands are growing, not shrinking
But what's 150 square miles between friends?
The sea level rise experienced in recent decades was supposed to lead to shrinking shorelines and inundated coasts.
Instead, satellite observations reveal the globe’s island coasts expanded seaward (net) by 402 km² (155 mi²) since 2000.
In a new study, over 13,000 islands were assessed for coastal change over the last three decades (1990-2020).
Only 12% of these islands experienced significant shoreline change during this period. Thus, approximately 88% of the islands had stable coasts ? neither substantial erosion nor accretion.
About 6% of these 13,000+ islands experienced coastline expansion (accretion), while 7.5% lost coastal land area (erosion).
The scientists point out that for the islands experiencing coastal erosion in recent decades, sea level rise was not a primary or predominant causal factor. This is “contrary to initial assumptions.”
“Moreover, the data results suggest that sea-level rise has not been a widespread cause of erosion for island shorelines in the studied region. Presently, it is considered one of the contributing factors to shoreline erosion but not the predominant one.”
“Contrary to initial assumptions, our empirical data does not conclusively link the widespread erosion of island shorelines primarily to historical sea-level rise, suggesting that human activities might mask the effects of sea-level rise.”
Somewhat consistent with the alarming sea level rise narrative propagated by anthropogenic global warming (AGW) activists, there was indeed a net loss (-259.33 km²) of coastal land area for the 13,000+ islands studied in the decade spanning 1990 to 2000.
But then, “in the subsequent decades, the trend reversed, with net increases of 369.67 km² from 2000 to 2010 and 32.67 km² from 2010 to 2020.”
Added together, in the last two decades the globe’s island coasts grew seaward by a net 402.33 km² from 2000-2020, and coasts grew by a net 157.21 km² for the entire 30-year period (1990-2020).
“Over the past three decades, the entire region experienced a cumulative increase in land area of 157.21 km² across more than 13,000 islands.”
“…over the past 30 years, fewer islands experienced landward erosion compared to those undergoing seaward accretion.”
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The Green Energy Mess That Nobody Will Admit to
Reports in newspapers this week revealed that Britain’s domestic production of energy has reached a new record low. The news comes from trade group, Offshore Energies U.K. (OEUK), whose analysis, far from unexpected, details the pressures on investment in conventional energy production, such as the windfall tax on oil and gas companies. Since the turn of the century, U.K. production of energy has fallen by two thirds, whereas consumption has fallen by a third. The difference has been met by an increased dependence on imports. Yet neither the report itself, which is at best agnostic about renewables, nor the stories that cover it, seem to have taken seriously the harm that Net Zero and adjacent agendas have done to our industries, businesses and economy – and are set to do worse.
The U.K. ceased being a net energy exporter in 2004, amid a flurry of green policymaking, culminating in the Climate Change Act 2008, and its increased ‘Net Zero’ target adopted in 2019. Over the duration, coal-fired power stations were demolished, but not replaced with equivalent (i.e. reliable) generating capacity, shale gas exploration was abolished before it had even started. Energy investors in the U.K. and across the continent, lured to attractive guaranteed profits by subsidy regimes, and dissuaded from conventional energy by rising costs of capital, lost interest in oil and gas. Despite promises of ‘green jobs’, a ‘green industrial revolution’ and ‘green economic growth’ and lower prices being the constant chorus of energy ministers of all governments and their so-called ‘opposition’ counterparts, domestic energy prices tripled. So if these new data on Britain’s energy production do not prove the expensive and dangerous folly of more than two decades of U.K. climate policy, what could?
It is as if the entire political establishment had at once decided to forget that there exists a relationship between scarcity and price. Yet, the effect of abolishing coal is just that: it creates scarcity. So too, do policies that either restrict the exploration of oil and gas, or increase the cost of capital, create scarcity. Politicians, lobbied by green billionaires’ ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations who pump false claims into the public sphere, then claim that the problem all along was ‘dependence’ on oil and gas. Green energy will lower prices and diminish the power of dictators, who turn energy into a ‘weapon’ that terrorises Europe, they claim. So successful are they in their policymaking that, since 2019, the Government has capped energy prices – a policy they stole from Ed Miliband in 2017, before taking us into Net Zero. If ‘green’ means anything at all, it means acute cognitive dissonance.
At stake, argues the OEUK report, is immense value that could be unleashed from the North Sea. But investment is being held back by policies, “having big impacts on the profitability of U.K. offshore energy”’ worth one trillion pounds of exports and £450 billion domestically “within the next 15 years”. However, though the bulk of that potential lies in oil and gas, the report includes in its analysis, wind power, CCS and hydrogen. Even oil and gas executives, it seems, have swallowed the green Kool-Aid. And that is a missed opportunity to reflect on the failures of the green agenda, as well as a disappointing failure of an industry to properly stick up for itself, and to defend industry in principle.
And it needs defending. The fig leaf that has concealed Britain’s shameful industrial decline, and blinding politicians to reality in recent years has been the notion that green policies have successfully caused GDP growth to ‘decouple’ from fossil fuel use. However, this conceit requires us to believe, in turn, that the 79% increase in GDP that coincided with the halving of emissions over the same period was not driven by funny money, tricksy policies and analytical sleights of hand, and that the deindustrialisation underpinning it has left us better off. Does anybody, other than green energy hustlers, actually feel better off? Who? How?! What better position can we claim to be in, now that we know that we produce less and import more at a higher price? How much of that ‘growth’ is just higher prices?
The embrace of green economics, at the expense of established economic orthodoxy, leads to regressive disdain for industry. It seems not to have bothered many that we are less capable of producing things and sustaining ourselves – an issue which would have once sent a modern government into a tailspin. It is as if using less energy was a ‘good thing’ in itself, not a reflection of rising prices and stagnant (or worse) productivity. As if to make my point for me, following OEUK’s report, the half-truthfully named Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the obedient press put a different spin on the matter. “The U.K. recorded the highest ever share of electricity generation by renewables last year”, declared the Standard.
As greens rejoice our production of less for more, U.K. energy market regulator, Ofgem, announced its “discussion on the future of the price cap”, which is “so customers remain protected as the energy market evolves to a smarter, more flexible system”. Why would customers need ‘protection’ from a ‘smarter, more flexible system’? It is, of course, doublespeak. The ‘dynamic price cap’ is time-of-day pricing, more honestly known as rationing. And ‘flexibility’ means using prices to force customers to organise their lives around the ‘smarter’ system, rather than the energy market meeting people’s needs. And it is made necessary by the scarcity created by green energy policy and green ideology.
It would be all for the better if regulators, industry associations and, of course, politicians simply admitted that they have made a catastrophic mess of the very industries that were pioneered in this country. Putting green political ambitions before any other practical consideration has made us poorer, and is going to create a problem far worse than climate change.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/31/the-green-energy-mess-that-nobody-will-admit-to/
***************************************************Pennsylvania's Senseless Expansion of Alternative Energy
In 2004, Pennsylvania implemented one of the nation’s most aggressive mandates to adopt wind and solar energy. At the time, less than 1 percent of net energy generation came from these sources. In 2023, after nearly $1.5 billion in subsidies, wind and solar generated approximately 2 percent.
So, what’s the point?
That is the question Gov. Josh Shapiro must answer as he seeks to expand Pennsylvania’s Alternative Energy Portfolio Standards (AEPS). Instead of admitting these proposals don’t work, the governor is doubling down on largely uneconomical fuels and technologies, resulting in higher electricity bills and a less reliable infrastructure.
AEPS requires Pennsylvania suppliers to provide 18 percent of retail electricity sales from more than a dozen alternative energy sources.
One measurable benefit of AEPS has been burning waste coal for electricity generation, cleaning up millions of tons of refuse from nearly 800 waste piles left by centuries-old mining practices. This program reclaimed more than 1,200 miles of polluted streams and 7,200 acres of land.
However, restructuring AEPS threatens to defund this worthwhile effort. Perversely, five of 15 waste-coal plants have closed because of environmental regulations and market forces hostile to coal.
“This is a huge concern for us,” said Jaret Gibbons, executive director of the waste-coal trade group. Shapiro’s latest proposal, the Pennsylvania Reliable Energy Sustainability Standard (PRESS), mandates that 35 percent of electricity come from politically favored sources, such as wind, solar, and small modular nuclear, by 2035. The proposal also calls for another 10 percent from hydropower and batteries and 5 percent from low-emission sources, like certain kinds of natural gas generation.
The governor touts the importance of this program to reduce carbon dioxide.
Yet, Pennsylvania has cut emissions annually, including a 10.8 percent reduction from 2022 to 2023—thanks mainly to the expansion of natural gas. If emission reduction is the goal, the governor should pursue policies that bolster natural gas and nuclear, which can back up solar and wind when the weather doesn’t cooperate.
AEPS sales totaled about 25 million megawatt-hours in the 2021–22 reporting year. That’s enough to power 2.4 million homes. Less than one-third of those megawatt-hours came from wind and solar.
In fewer than six months, the Homer City coal-fired power plant could produce energy equal to a year’s worth of AEPS-subsidized wind and solar power. Homer City, however, closed last year due to burdensome regulations.
AEPS proclaims that the state’s 606 megawatts of solar capacity are enough to power more than 79,000 homes. However, that is barely over 1 percent of Pennsylvania’s 5.7 million housing units.
In 2007, AEPS predicted the commonwealth would install nearly 6,000 megawatts of wind capacity by 2013. However, as of May 2022, we’ve seen less than one-quarter of that amount. Even if AEPS met this target, the value would be limited because, like solar, wind’s availability depends on nature’s vagaries.
The AEPS report claims the program created thousands of Pennsylvania jobs. Whatever jobs were “created,” it is impossible to produce net benefits by forcing more expensive, less reliable energy sources into an economy. Studies by the Beacon Hill Institute at Suffolk University and the Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity have concluded that such efforts result in economic losses, including fewer jobs and higher prices.
Industry leaders are growing wary of this transition to less-reliable energy. David Taylor, head of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association, called Shapiro’s vision of an expanded AEPS “an environmental disaster, a threat to public safety, a danger to American national security, a disgrace on labor and human rights, and an abuse of Pennsylvania ratepayers.”
Costing taxpayers billions of dollars is bad enough, but the most immediate concern is the effect of more “green” mandates on the reliability of the power grid. Industry and government officials have issued repeated warnings of power shortages caused by an overreliance on wind and solar.
As Shapiro says, we don’t have to choose between jobs and our environment. But his proposal is bad for both. Pennsylvania’s energy policy must reward reliability and affordability, which means developing proven sources like fossil fuels and nuclear power.
Twenty years after AEPS’s enactment, wind and solar still require subsidies while contributing only meager amounts of unreliable energy. How will doing more of the same produce anything different?
Again, what’s the point?
https://co2coalition.org/2024/03/26/shapiros-senseless-expansion-of-alternative-energy/
***********************************************************New England's last coal plants set to shutter, ushering in era of energy insecurity
The final coal-fired power plants in New England are slated to shutter in the coming years, making it the second region to phase out the energy source that powered the U.S. economy for decades.
In an announcement late last month, New Hampshire-based power provider Granite Shore Power said it had reached an agreement with federal officials to shutter its Schiller Station in 2025 and its Merrimack Station by mid-2028. The action underscores the region's and, more broadly, the nation's steady march toward a future dominated by green energy. Environmental activists have called for this change for years — energy advocates have warned against it.
"Everybody in our region is finally going to be breathing cleaner air," Johanna Neumann, the senior director of Environment America's Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy, told Fox News Digital in an interview. "I think the market has finally caught up to the reality — these coal plants are shutting down and being replaced with renewable energy infrastructure."
Environmental activist organizations have for years sought to ensure the closure of both New Hampshire coal plants, arguing the facilities had contaminated nearby water sources while emitting large amounts of soot into the air, threatening public health.
The Sierra Club, one of those groups that pushed for the shutdown of the plants, applauded the announcement and noted it means New England is the second U.S. region after the Pacific Northwest to be coal-free. New Hampshire Sierra Club Senior Organizer Cathy Corkery said locals had "unjustly shouldered the burden of health and safety concerns" associated with the facilities.
Together, the two facilities, which were first constructed roughly six decades ago, have a capacity of 560 megawatts, enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes. While the plants, and other coal stations in the region, once played a more central role in powering the grid, they have recently largely been inactive and used only in times of high demand or supply crunches.
"From our earliest days as owners and operators, we have been crystal clear; while our power occasionally is still on during New England’s warmest days and coldest nights, we were firmly committed to transitioning our facilities away from coal and into a newer, cleaner energy future," said Granite Shore Power CEO Jim Andrews.
As part of the announcement, Andrews added that both coal plants will be redeveloped into the state's first-of-their-kind "renewable energy parks." Once they officially close, the sites will be converted by Granite Shore Power into solar and utility-scale energy storage facilities.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Granite Shore Power said the company has been public about its intentions to transition its fleet away from coal for six years and that while that transition occurs, it will continue to support the regional grid. According to the spokesperson, the plans would include retaining workers at the Schiller and Merrimack sites and even increasing its overall workforce.
"When it comes to clean energy, the message in America today is clear: companies want to develop it, investors want to finance it, and American consumers and businesses want to buy it," said Ray Long, president and CEO of the American Council on Renewable Energy. "This historic agreement marks a significant step in the direction of America’s clean energy future."
The American Clean Power Association, another group that advocates for green energy development, pointed to data showing most new electricity generation nationwide is green and has created thousands of new jobs.
However, the announcement that another U.S. region is on a glide path to a coal-free future earned heavy criticism from some experts who noted the importance of having baseload, dispatchable power generation. While renewable sources like wind and solar are intermittent, or heavily dependent on weather conditions, coal, natural gas and nuclear can quickly be turned on in times of high demand.
According to the Energy Information Administration, coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants produce 49%, 54% and 93% of their listed capacity, respectively, while solar panels produce just 25% and wind turbines produce 34% of their listed capacity.
"There's a concerted effort to shift away from reliable sources of electricity generation to unreliable sources," said Daren Bakst, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment. "And ultimately the impact is going to be less reliable electricity, higher prices for Americans — it's going to have a disproportionate impact on the poor."
"You have to be able to call upon electricity sources when you need it, and you need it to be able to have consistent electricity, to be able to flip on the switch. You can't have that with intermittent sources. Right now, it's impossible to have that," Bakst continued. "Therefore, you need baseload electricity generation so that you can have consistent electricity when you need it."
ISO-New England, the region's independent grid operator, states on its website that coal is a critical tool in ensuring power "on the coldest winter days when natural gas supply is constrained." It adds that inadequate infrastructure to transport natural gas — a major power source in New England — harms natural-gas-fired plants' ability to get the fuel they need to perform, creating an "energy-security risk."
The operator declined to comment on Granite Shore Power's coal plant closures.
"The shutdown of Merrimack and Schiller Stations is a major step backwards for New England's energy consumers, who need a mix of baseload energy sources, including coal, to ensure electric reliability," Michelle Bloodworth, president and CEO of America’s Power, a coal power trade group, told Fox News Digital.
"Their closure will leave families at greater risk of power outages and more dependent on natural gas, further exposing them to volatile electricity and natural gas prices," she continued. "Amid rapidly increasing demand for electricity, these shutdowns run directly contrary to [ISO-New England] guidance and will undermine electric reliability and affordability."
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7 April, 2024
Early bloom of cherry blossoms another marker of climate change
What presumptuous rubbish! How do they know it is an effect of global warming? They don't. It could be an effect of higher rainfall brought on by changing ocean currents. And the article itself suggests urban heat island effects increased by growing urbanization. The heading above is faith, not science
Climate change is causing Japanese cherry blossoms, a famous symbol of spring, to burst into peak bloom early. From Tokyo to Paris and Washington DC, nature’s calendar has been disrupted by unprecedented warm weather that could ultimately prove detrimental to one of the world’s most admired flowers.
A marker of seasonal change, cherry blossoms are profoundly symbolic in Japanese culture – representing both rejuvenation as well as the fleeting beauty of nature.
The centuries-old tradition of hanami – “flower viewing” – has been adopted in many countries, with crowds gathering for yearly scenic picnics beneath the fragrant pink sakura.
Forecasting the annual bloom is important business in Japan. Since 1955 the weather agency has calculated the precise moment of peak flowering for the 84 cherry tree hotspots up and down the country.
A tree is deemed to be blossoming once five or six flowers have opened. When 80 percent of it has flowered, it is in full bloom.
Blooming early
The average blossom start date has moved forward by 1.2 days per decade since Japan began keeping records in 1953, said Daisuke Sasano, a climate risk management officer at the Japan Meteorological Agency.
Between 1961 and 1990, cherry trees in Tokyo on average began blossoming on 29 March – but that date moved up to 24 March between 1991 and 2020.
Last year’s blossom in Tokyo began on 14 March – the earliest on record. Sasano puts this down to “global warming compounded with urbanisation”.
Over the past century Tokyo has warmed by 3C.
The biggest threat to the trees, however, are not springs that are too hot – but winters that are not cold enough.
“This is because the winter frost signals to the cherry trees that it’s time for them to wake up and start preparing their buds for spring,” Sasano said.
“Without this cold trigger, the cherry trees will spend the entire winter sleeping. Then in spring they will not flower because they have no buds.”
Fear of frost
Some 11,000 kilometres away, in Washington DC, cherry trees are also an iconic part of the springtime cityscape. Three-thousand sakura were given to the US capital as a gift of friendship from Japan in 1912.
On 17 March, the trees saw their second-earliest peak bloom on record – flowering almost a week before they were expected to.
Early blooms make cherry trees vulnerable to sudden cold snaps, which still happen despite the overall warmer spring temperatures.
The last major incident was in 2017, when half of DC’s Yoshino blossoms were lost due to a late frost that came in the middle of March.
This year's peak bloom happened so soon that it preceded the official start of DC's National Cherry Blossom Festival on 20 March.
From December to February the entire northern hemisphere notched up its warmest winter on record – reducing the exposure to the sort of cold weather a tree requires during its winter dormancy in order to be able to wake up and flower.
Disconcerted by the milder conditions, some wilful cherry blossoms burst open over Christmas in France’s Maulévrier Oriental Park, home to Europe’s largest Japanese garden.
"That's really not normal,” head gardener Didier Touzé told RFI, adding that those flowers were then damaged by ensuing frost.
Despite the startling discovery, Touzé hasn't observed any major fluctuations in bloom dates over the years in the garden, which has drawn in tens of thousands of visitors every spring since its first hanami festival in 2017.
Errant blossoms aside, the trees' normal bloom still took place in March – albeit about a week early. Touzé said another variety of cherry tree is on track to bloom in April, its normal flowering period “give or take a few days”.
Organisers of the park's annual hanami are toying with the idea of starting the event a little sooner to account for potential early blooms.
"But the risk is that we'll then end up having a colder winter followed by a later bloom – so we won't have gained anything," Touzé said.
https://www.rfi.fr/en/environment/20240406-early-bloom-cherry-blossoms-japan-marker-climate-change
******************************************GOP State AGs Urge SCOTUS to Reject Hawaii Climate Change Lawsuits Targeting Fossil Fuel Companies
A group of 20 Republican state attorneys general filed a legal brief on Monday, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene in favor of fossil fuel companies facing civil liability in Hawaii for their alleged role in causing global climate change.
In an amicus curiae “friend of the court” brief organized by Republican Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, 20 state attorneys general argued that efforts by the City and County of Honolulu to sue dozens of fossil fuel companies are “an affront to the equal sovereignty” of the various other states. The effort is supported by the attorneys general of Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming.
Fossil fuel companies have faced several lawsuits in Hawaii’s state court system, alleging they have misled the public for decades about the dangers of climate change. In October, the Hawaii state Supreme Court ruled that the lawsuits could proceed, rejecting arguments from the fossil fuel companies that such litigation is preempted by federal law because it seeks to regulate interstate emissions and commerce.
In recent weeks, Sunoco LP and Shell PLC have petitioned the Supreme Court to review their case.
Now, the amicus brief from the 20 Republican state attorneys general urges the Supreme Court to take up the petition by the fossil fuel companies, arguing their states also have a vested interest in the outcome.
The Republican attorneys general note the litigants suing fossil fuel companies through the Hawaii state court system are seeking to stop those fossil fuel companies from promoting the sale and use of their fuel products, even in other states. The attorneys general argue such a ruling from the Hawaiian court system “would imperil access to affordable energy and inculpate every State and every person on the planet.”
“If Hawaiians want to rely on solar power, I have no problem with that,” Mr. Marshall said in a Monday press statement. “But Honolulu cannot force its views onto Alabama—or any other State. Major decisions about our national energy policy must be made at the federal level, not dictated by one lawsuit brought by one city in its own courts.”
The plaintiffs in the Hawaii cases argue their lawsuits narrowly target harmful marketing practices, the amicus brief from the Republican attorneys general argues the lawsuits in Hawaii are necessarily about interstate emissions.
“The case is about more than ’torts committed in Hawaii.‘ If the allegations are true, Honolulu’s injuries stem from ’global warming,‘ global emissions, and the global use of energy and fuel products. As Honolulu admits, ’it is not possible to determine the source of any particular individual molecule of CO2,‘” the amicus brief states. “Thus, the only way for energy companies to avoid potential liability is to cease the production and sale of their products everywhere. And any ’equitable relief, including abatement,' would need to reach conduct everywhere to redress the alleged injuries.”
Several other groups submitted amicus briefs on Monday also supporting the fossil fuel companies and urging the Supreme Court to grant their petition to review the Hawaii state cases. Amicus briefs were filed by the Atlantic Legal Foundation, the American Tort Reform Association, the Washington Legal Foundation, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and a group of fossil fuel industry associations.
Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Richard Myers and U.S. Navy Adml. Michael Mullin, both of whom served stints as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also filed an amicus brief on Monday, arguing the legal case implicates national security.
“As federal courts have recognized, petroleum products have been ‘crucial to the national defense,’ including but by no means limited to ‘fuel and diesel oil used in the Navy’s ships; and lubricating oils used for various military machines,’” reads the brief by the two retired U.S. military officers.
In response to a request for comment from NTD News, a spokesperson for the City and Council of Honolulu said they will respond to the arguments from the petitioners in court and declined to comment further on the matter.
The City and County of Honolulu is expected to file its response by May 1.
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Britain's nuclear industry reboot takes a step forward as project to build reactors in Hartlepool receives multimillion pound cash boost
Britain's nuclear industry reboot has taken a massive step forward after a project to build reactors in Hartlepool received a multimillion pound cash boost.
In January, plans to build a major new nuclear power station were launched just weeks after Boris Johnson told Rishi Sunak to 'get on with it'.
The Government said it was committed to 'exploring' the possibility of a reactor as large as the under-construction Hinkley C and Sizewell C powerplants.
The proposal was included in a Civil Nuclear Roadmap which set out ways in which UK nuclear power can be quadrupled by 2050 - the biggest expansion for 70 years.
Now, Hartlepool looks set to host a fleet of mini-nuclear reactors within a decade after the Government's multimillion-pound grant which it awarded to engineering group Babcock to explore the project's feasibility, the Telegraph reports.
X-Energy and Cavendish Nuclear also won funding from the Future Nuclear Enabling Fund, and they will develop advanced nuclear power plants known as small modular reactors (SMRs).
In total, the government has now earmarked more than £1bn for the Sizewell C project, building on its original £700m stake as part of its plan to rapidly expand the UK's nuclear energy sector.
The government is exploring plans to build a new large-scale nuclear plant, despite concerns about delays to existing projects.
Ministers say the project would be the biggest expansion of the sector in 70 years, reducing reliance on overseas supply.
The new plant would quadruple energy supplies by 2050, they say.
In total, the government has now earmarked more than £1bn for the Sizewell C project, building on its original £700m stake as part of its plan to rapidly expand the UK's nuclear energy sector.
Mick Gornall, managing director of Cavendish Nuclear, told the publication: 'A fleet of Xe-100s can complement renewables by providing constant or flexible power and produce steam to decarbonise industry and manufacture hydrogen and synthetic transport fuels.
'Deployment in the UK will create thousands of high-quality, long-term jobs across the country.'
The Government also gave the companies £3.34m to explore the plans, with X-energy investing the same amount.
In April last year, Boris Johnson shelved plans to double the number of wind turbines in the countryside and instead approved plans for up to seven new nuclear reactors.
The former PM rejected ambitious targets presented by Kwasi Kwarteng to double the UK's onshore output to 30GW by 2030.
Instead, Tory opposition in the party's shire England heartlands and within the Cabinet means that new atomic power sites in rural areas were likely to get Government backing.
This led to Johnson visiting Hartlepool nuclear power station, which began producing electricity in 1983.
It was one of eight sites the government set its sights on for future nuclear energy plants.
Current PM Sunak said: 'Nuclear is the perfect antidote to the energy challenges facing Britain - it's green, cheaper in the long-term and will ensure the UK's energy security for the long-term.
'This is the right long-term decision and is the next step in our commitment to nuclear power, which puts us on course to achieve net zero by 2050 in a measured and sustainable way.
'This will ensure our future energy security and create the jobs and skills we need to level up the country and grow our economy.'
Energy Security Secretary Claire Coutinho added: 'Strengthening our energy security means that Britain will never again be held to ransom over energy by tyrants like Vladimir Putin.
'British nuclear, as one of the most reliable, low-carbon sources of energy around, will provide that security.
'We're making the biggest investment in domestic nuclear energy in 70 years.'
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There has never been a worse time to invest in solar panel production. But we’re wasting $1b on it
Australian Leftist site "Crikey" gets some things right
As we’ve been writing for a while now, the last thing Australia needs is to invent new industries to employ workers, who are becoming an increasingly scarce commodity. Both sides of politics want us to get into building and crewing nuclear submarines. Peter Dutton wants a whole new nuclear power industry. And Labor is now throwing $1 billion at manufacturing solar panels — all part of our effort to be a “renewable superpower”, and also because, apparently, Australia invented the solar panels before losing control of the technology, so we’re really just bringing solar panels “home”.
The $1 billion price tag is small compared to the tens of billions Dutton’s nuclear fantasy will cost and insignificant compared to the waste of money involved in AUKUS, but Albanese’s solar panel investment might be the dumbest of the lot.
Why? Because other, much bigger governments, especially China, are also subsidising solar panel production — resulting in a huge production glut right at the time when Australia, belatedly, is joining in the stupidity.
A fortnight ago there was a rush of reports about massive job cuts at the world’s biggest solar panel maker, LONGi Green Energy Technology of China — perhaps up to one-third of its workforce. LONGi rejected the reports and said it was only planning to cut 5% of its total headcount of 80,000. The reason is the surge in global supplies of solar energy cells.
As the Financial Times noted, LONGi was part of Xi Jinping’s quest for self-sufficiency and even mastery of crucial renewable technology sectors. As protectionism always does, that has prompted China’s competitors, the European Union and the United States, to hit back both with their own subsidies and with blocks on Chinese exports, although these appear to be doing little to curb China’s growing dominance of the solar panel sector. But there is now a massive global oversupply of solar panels.
As a result, there’s never been a better time to buy solar panels — and never been a worse time to get into the production of them.
If, as Albanese says, the expenditure in solar panel manufacturing is about securing supply chains, that could easily be accomplished by redirecting that $1 billion to buying up Chinese solar panels so cheap they’re now being used as garden features, and storing them for use on Australian rooftops. But that lacks the political appeal of last week’s announcement in the Hunter Valley.
So what will we do with all the Australian-manufactured solar panels? Force the local industry to use them, pushing up the costs of renewables at a time when they should be falling?
Labor’s obsession with manufacturing — one that the Coalition for the most part shares, despite Tony Abbott chasing the car industry out of Australia — continues to reflect both the power of the (climate denialist) Australian Workers Union on the right of the party, and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union on the left. It also reflects the mindset of many not just within the union movement or Labor, but more broadly, that manufacturing is somehow a more real economic activity than services industries or extractive industries.
The story of the Australian economy over the past 30 years has been the rise and rise of extractive industries and service industries. Our mining industry is very, very efficient, and the iron ore industry is cutting edge technologically: it is far advanced in areas like remote-controlled trains and autonomous vehicles compared to other countries — though that doesn’t stop it from being derided as merely “ripping dirt out of the ground”. Our agricultural industry, while not producing anywhere near as much in terms of export values, has enjoyed massive productivity growth and now exports and produces far more, with far fewer workers and less water per unit of production, than it ever used to.
And our services industries in areas like education and tourism are also massive export earners, reflecting Australia’s natural advantages in education and lifestyle.
Meanwhile, like every other western country, the proportion of the economy and workforce devoted to services has grown massively, with the new frontier of employment being caring services, from early childhood to old age and everywhere in between — all heavily feminised workforces.
But ignore all that, Labor is saying let’s invest more in traditional male-dominated manufacturing, despite Australia being hopelessly uncompetitive in production costs and scale, and not having enough workers for the rest of the economy let alone new industries.
And all of this, despite this being literally the worst time in history to invest in solar panel production. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/04/04/solar-panel-investment-albanese-waste-money/
***************************************4 April, 2024
The PFAS boogeyman again
The scare meisters will never let this one go, regardless of the repeated findings that PFAS is NOT harmful to humans in concentrations normally encountered. Even water can kill you if you have enough of it and PFAS is about as toxic as water. As ever, the toxicity is in the dosage
Oscar-nominated actor Mark Ruffalo will feature in a new Australian documentary exposing the multibillion-dollar David and Goliath battle to hold the world’s largest chemical companies to account for decades of toxic contamination.
Revealed: How To Poison A Planet exposes the shocking extent to which man-made “forever chemicals” used in dozens of household products from school uniforms and contact lenses to make-up and cookware have spread globally and can now be found in the bloodstream of 98 per cent of the world’s population.
“There were companies and people that knew the nature and extent of this threat but did it anyway,” Ruffalo says in the documentary. “This is so incredibly evil.”
The documentary, which will screen on Stan, is an investigation by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age journalist Carrie Fellner in collaboration with director Katrina McGowan of iKandy Films. Stan and this masthead are owned by Nine Entertainment Co.
The trailer for the documentary was released on Thursday after a US court finalised the details of a $US12.5 billion ($19 billion) settlement to be paid by chemical giant 3M Company, one of the world’s largest forever chemicals manufacturers.
The funds will go towards compensating thousands of drinking water providers across the United States for the contamination of their supplies with forever chemicals contained in a firefighting foam sold by 3M.
The per- and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals, also known as PFAS, were invented in the 1930s and became a billion-dollar industrial powerhouse because of their stain, water and oil-repelling properties.
They are called “forever chemicals” because they never break down in the environment and linger for years in the human body.
The documentary chronicles a years-long crusade for justice as tens of thousands of communities worldwide discover their blood, properties and water supplies are contaminated with PFAS.
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Defueling the US Navy: The Story of Red Hill
On March 28, the Department of Defense announced that it had completed the defueling of the U.S. Navy’s Red Hill bulk oil storage tanks for the Pacific fleet.
It did so six months early.
The permanent closure of Red Hill was a thrilling achievement, said many—Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, Pentagon and Navy spokesmen, Hawaiian officials, environmental groups, and the chemistry-terrified citizens of Hawaii.
Mr. Austin, a retired army general, said, “The Department of Defense and the United States Navy remain deeply committed to protecting the public’s health and preserving the environment.”
He also said they are committed to continuing to rebuild trust with Hawaii.
“This is the right thing to do,” he said. “It likely made sense in 1943, when [it] was built ... a lot less sense now.”
Why Did the US Build Red Hill?
The United States was blind lucky the Japanese failed to target oil tanks at Pearl Harbor. So, since 1943, at Red Hill in Oahu, Hawaii, the oil reserves of the Seventh Fleet were located in 20 underground steel-lined concrete reservoirs safer from enemy attack than aboveground tanks.
What was once the U.S. Navy’s fuel supply to defeat the Japanese in World War II is now denied the U.S. Navy as it faces the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rapidly enlarging and newer Navy.
How did the unilateral surrender of fuel necessary for the U.S. Navy to cross the Pacific Ocean occur?
The Sierra Club
The Sierra Club’s end objective at Red Hill was Water Justice—“fighting against the military industrial complex and capitalist corporate-controlled industries.”
In December 2012, the Sierra Club, among others, alleged that there were 5,000 ill persons and 3,000 families displaced at the Pacific fleets’ oil reserves at Red Hill.
The Sierra Club stated that it wanted to end “an existential and unprecedented threat.”
“Millions of gallons of fuel still sit in the Red Hill fuel tanks directly above the aquifer, continually threatening to poison our water again,” it stated.
The Sierra Club was allied with Shut Down Red Hill Coalition, Water Protectors Rising, Water Protectors Legal Collective, One Health Pacific’s Sustainability Pledge, Hawai’i Workers Center, and Hawai’i Alliance for Progressive Action.
Demon Oil
Underground oil and gasoline tanks and their owners have been under regulatory attacks for decades. In California, regulators closed an estimated 170,000 leaking underground gasoline storage tanks. Very few family-owned, independent gasoline stations survived.
In perspective, the present danger is an aggressive, militarized CCP, not a chemical present in water in parts per trillion killing an unknown number of people, if any, decades later.
The math of correlations is not causation; it is mere association, a matter of serious interest, not proof.
Overall, there were very precise measurements of substances in parts per million, billion, and trillion to discover the last scary molecule on earth.
While measurement is precise, and enforcement is heavy and ever expanding, the science of health effects is largely politically mobilized, declared, presumed, or speculated.
The dangers of trace elements of asbestos, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), perchlorate, heavy metals, and solvents in petroleum are exaggerated. They smell bad, but there is little evidence that their concentration in water is a health risk in parts per billion and trillion. They are everywhere but are not proven dangerous to human health.
For example, the federal standard of danger from PFOA of 20 parts per trillion is equivalent to waiting 32,000 years for 20 seconds to pass.
In telling contrast, the CCP’s cyberattacks travel 186,000 miles a second. They are a nanosecond away and are happening every day. Similarly, a nuclear armed hypersonic missile at Mach 10, 7,000 miles per hour, takes only 30 minutes to travel from coast to coast.
In 2022, President Joe Biden, trying to lower the price of gasoline before the midterm elections, sold off hundreds of millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve, reducing it to a forty-year low. At least a million barrels of American oil was sent to oil-poor China, fueling China’s promised and rehearsed Taiwan invasion as early as 2024.
Complicit in reducing oil reserves was Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who spoke twice with China National Energy Administration Chairman Zhang Jianhua, a senior member of the CCP, before the White House announced selling off emergency oil stocks.
In late October 2022, America’s top brass arrived in Hawaii to discuss “The Red Hill Defueling, Closure, and Health Response Plan.” Among them were Mr. Austin as well as the Secretary of the Navy, the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, the Chief of Naval Operations, the INDOPACOM Commander, and finally Joint Task Force Red Hill Commander Rear Admiral John Wade.
Mr. Wade stressed protecting the population and the environment and closing Red Hill, but not fuel oil for his own Pacific fleet.
The Coal Option
While China consumed over 4 billion tons of coal in 2022—more than the rest of the world combined—U.S. environmentalists instead focused on hysterical attacks on capitalists and military bases. While coal prepared the CCP for war, U.S. environmental regulations harmed the national security of the United States.
Similarly, the environmentally enlightened state of Hawaii stopped coal shipments and shut down Hawaii’s last coal power plant. Fossil fuels for Hawaii’s citizens and the Pacific fleet are radically reduced.
The U.S. Navy was left to compete for a share of oil from leaking tankers, an environmental risk far worse than Red Hill’s dribbling underground tanks.
U.S. Navy environmentalists had accelerated the defueling of Red Hill, while the Biden administration was slow-walking prepaid military aid to Taiwan. Also neglected were trade and military sanctions on China.
In Defense of Red Hill
The level of water contamination from a 2014 leak from one of the fuel tanks was in compliance with federal and state concentrations for drinking water.
Indeed, the USEPA website on Red Hill still concluded in July 2022, “All drinking water supplies in the vicinity of Red Hill continue to meet all federal drinking water standards.”
Angering the zealous and hysterical mob was the U.S. Navy’s claim that its investigations had yet to find health consequences.
Effectively equivalent to an order from the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army, in January 2022, for lack of “trust,” the Honolulu City Council sent a letter to Mr. Biden threatening to throw all of America’s 14 military operations permanently out of their seven-year land leases in Hawaii.
In February 2022, the Navy, claiming that the Hawaii Department of Health (DOH) was overstepping its emergency powers, filed a lawsuit opposing the DOH’s order to suspend operations at the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility.
On Nov. 20, 2021, an aboveground fire suppression, a PFA drain line, released water a quarter of a mile downhill of the Red Hill fuel tanks, contaminating the Red Hill Shaft, a single water well. This aboveground leak triggered the mobilization of hysterical fears about poisoned water coming from underground tanks rather than the actual aboveground source.
Civilians and the Navy compete for oil tankers.
Former Maersk executive Steve Carmel stated in a gCaptain editorial, “The Department of Defense is projected to need on the order of one hundred tankers of various sizes in the event of a serious conflict in the Pacific. … The U.S. … has no identifiable roadmap to obtain it.”
Few oil reserve locations remain.
As long ago as February 1998, the Department of Energy (DOE) sold the 47,000-acre Naval Petroleum Reserves in the Elk Hills and Buena Vista oil fields in Kern County, California to Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum.
Armand Hammer, a capitalist friend of Lenin and Stalin, was a go-between for five Soviet general secretaries and seven U.S. presidents and won the Soviet Union’s Order of Friendship of Peoples.
Communists and their friends understood the strategic value of oil storage.
What Will the Navy Do Now?
The Pentagon’s fabricated answer is a new “distributed” strategy of storing fuel at various points around the region, as well as “afloat locations” aboard unavailable tankers. It declared that the new plan would provide “resilience” and flexibility.
Contracted private tankers removed fuel from Red Hill and redistributed it to West Oahu facilities run by Island Energy Services at Campbell Industrial Park as well as to San Diego, Singapore, and Subic Bay.
Good luck with that!
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/defueling-the-us-navy-the-story-of-red-hill-5620204
*********************************************************Biden Administration Approves Major Offshore Wind Project In Massachusetts
The Biden administration has given the green light to a new offshore wind project off the coast of Massachusetts that promises to provide more electricity than the state's former coal-fired generating station. Avangrid’s New England Wind project is set to become the eighth large offshore wind project in the United States to be approved and is one of the largest projects to date.
While the project was initially planned to have a maximum capacity of 2,600 megawatts, it is now expected to generate around 1,900 megawatts due to a reduction in the number and size of turbines. This output could power up to 1 million homes and businesses in southern New England, making a significant contribution to the region's clean energy goals.
Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind is another major project on the horizon, with a capacity of 2,600 megawatts and plans to be located off the coast of Virginia Beach, Virginia.
The closure of the last operating coal-fired power plant in Massachusetts in 2017 marked a shift towards cleaner energy sources. The former Brayton Point plant, which produced 1,600 megawatts of electricity, will now be repurposed to support the offshore wind industry.
Ken Kimmell, Avangrid’s chief development officer, emphasized the significance of the New England Wind project, highlighting the need for clean energy to replace retiring coal and nuclear plants. He described the approval as a major milestone that will help meet the region's energy demands.
The project will be located south of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, and will be constructed in two phases. Avangrid is also involved in the construction of the Vineyard Wind project, which has already begun delivering electricity to the grid and will eventually power 400,000 homes and businesses in Massachusetts.
The Interior Department has been actively approving clean energy projects, with over 10 gigawatts of offshore wind energy approved in less than three years. This progress underscores the growing importance of renewable energy sources in meeting the nation's energy needs.
With the approval of projects like New England Wind and others, the transition to cleaner energy sources is well underway, signaling a shift towards a more sustainable energy future.
https://gcaptain.com/biden-administration-approves-eighth-offshore-wind-project/
***************************************************Solar Panel Waste Predicted to Hit 1 Million Tonnes by 2030: Australian Research
The volume of solar panel waste is rising rapidly in Australia, predicted to reach 280,000 tonnes within one year and one million tonnes within a decade.
According to a new study by the Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, led by experts from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), the challenge of dealing with significant levels of solar PV waste would come within the next two or three years.
A photovoltaic (PV) cell, also called a solar cell, is a non-mechanical device that converts sunlight into electricity. It is the basic building block of a PV system and typically produces one to two watts of power.
The study showed that the cumulative volume of end-of-life solar panels would reach 280,000 tonnes by 2025, 680,000 tonnes by 2030, and a “significant milestone” of 1 million tonnes between 2034 and 2035.
“This finding contradicts earlier forecasts, which predicted significant volumes of PV waste would not appear until post-2030,” the researchers said.
Researchers also noted that by 2030, more than 80 percent of the discarded solar panels will come from small-scale distributed PV systems, due to the earlier evolution of Australia’s residential PV market.
Meanwhile, on an annual scale, the waste volume in Australia is expected to exceed 50,000 tonnes in one year, and reach 100,000 tonnes from 2030 to 2035.
“This projection is four times higher than earlier predictions because it accounts for the pre-mature decommission of residential solar panel systems,” the study noted.
The solar panel waste is predicted to mainly concentrate in major Australian cities, including Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide.
However, from 2030, the waste volume of PV is expected to accelerate in regional and remote areas as large-scale PV systems reach their mid- or end-of-life cycle.
The Challenge Of Recycling Solar Panel Waste
Like most electronic waste, solar panels are made from potentially reusable materials such as glass, aluminium, and copper. However, due to the amounts of heavy metals it contains, solar panel waste could become hazardous waste and contaminate the environment if left in landfills to degrade.
The UNSW researchers noted that there is a lack of financial incentive to recycle solar panels. For example, it costs about $20 to recycle a typical 20-kilogram solar panel, and about $2 to send a panel to a landfill.
“Recyclers face slim margins due to intricate technology, insufficient material returns to offset costs, especially when operating at a small scale,” the study noted.
Finding markets for recycled solar panel materials is also a challenge, as up to 70 percent of solar panels are made of glass—an extremely low-value material.
“The challenge extends beyond glass, as the highly mixed nature of the components makes it challenging to find markets for their use.”
The researchers also noted the logistical difficulties of transporting separated materials to distant waste management infrastructures.
“This includes utility-scale solar farms in regional and remote areas. Coordinating collection points and recycling facilities to take into account the widespread distribution of panels across the country will be a significant barrier.”
The paper proposed a 12-year industry roadmap to tackle the challenges. This includes building a “national product stewardship scheme” that defines management structures, optimising waste logistics by creating a streamlined network to transport waste efficiently, investing in full-recycling technologies, and establishing large-scale PV waste treatment in major Australian cities.
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3 April, 2024
Met Office Uses Junk Temperature Measurements to Fill “World Treasure” 350-Year Temperature Record
This is pretty obnoxious
In Climate: The Movie, William Happer, the former physics professor at Princeton, describes the Central England Temperature (CET) record as a “world treasure” since it provides continuous recordings from 1659 – over 350 years. It shows a rise just over 1°C from the depths of the Little Ice Age to the present day. These days, the CET is under the control of the politicised Met Office, keen to catastrophise weather and climate in the interest of promoting Net Zero.
Recent revisions have retrospectively cooled the near past and boosted readings from the last 20 years. In addition, the Daily Sceptic can reveal that two of the three measuring stations currently used to add to this scientific treasure are taken from near-junk class 4 sites that come with official ‘uncertainties’ of up to 2°C.
Class 4 site Pershore College was added in 2006 and joined Stonyhurst, also class 4. The other site Rothamsted is a pristine class 1 site and is deemed to provide an accurate reading of the surrounding air temperature away from natural and artificial heat corruptions. Classification and ‘uncertainties’ by class are set by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
Quite why the Met Office can’t find three class 1 sites in the whole central England area is a bit of a mystery, although a clue might be provided by the recent freedom of information request the Daily Sceptic made to the organisation. We discovered that nearly eight out of 10 Met Office measuring stations across the United Kingdom were sited in near-junk class 4 and junk class 5. The latter class comes with WMO prescribed ‘uncertainties’ up to 5°C. Class 1 sites number just 24 and make up only 6.3% of the total.
At the very least, given the scientific importance of the CET, the Met Office could at least move the stations to more suitable nearby locations away from the disqualifying heat corruptions.
But if adding near-junk figures to the collection is not bad enough, the investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.
As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.
But explanations from the Met Office are thin on the ground. It continues to promote a 60 second spike to 40.3°C at RAF Coningsby at 3.12pm on July 19 in 2022 as a U.K. temperature record, despite the known presence of three typhoon jets attempting to land around the same time. The record has become a national joke, even more so after the Daily Sceptic revealed that Coningsby is a class 3 site with an ‘uncertainty’ of 1°C. All that can be said is that at least Coningsby replaced the previous class 5 record set at Cambridge Botanic Gardens in 2019.
Last month, the Daily Sceptic analysed all the heat records declared by the Met Office since 2000 and found that all bar two should be disqualified. Many of them had been set in junk class 5 and most of the rest were in class 4. Using its highly compromised data with massive ‘uncertainties’ rife throughout the database, the Met Office publicises precision down to one hundredth of a degree, declaring, for instance, that last year was only 0.06°C cooler than the ‘record’ year of 2022. Paul Homewood suggests that if the Met Office wants to continue using its existing station measurements, it should show a warning that the margin of error is so great, “that they have no statistical significance at all”.
The Met Office refuses to return all calls from the Daily Sceptic. We would be more than happy to report any explanations it might have, and discuss its work, if required, in public. Alas, to date, communication has been brief and, frankly, a bit childish. Last December, we reported on a Met Office proposal to ditch a 30-year temperature trend in favour of a Net Zero-supporting merger of 10 years’ past data with 10 years’ future model predictions. Thus, it would be easier to spot when the 1.5°C threshold was crossed, it was argued.
Noting that we had taken three weeks to report the plan, Professor Richard Betts, lead author and head of climate impacts, tweeted: “I suppose our paper does use big words like ‘temperature’ so maybe they had to get a grown-up to help”.
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Why The Wind And Solar Racket Is The Green New Scam On Steroids
A strange thing happened the other day. A large-scale solar panel farm in Fort Bend County, Texas, thousands of acres right in the middle of oil country, experienced a rough hailstorms. That’s not entirely unusual for the region.
I grew up in Texas, and it was always astonishing to have life going on as normal only to have golf ball-sized ice cubes rain down from the heavens seemingly out of nowhere, doing enormous damage to cars and homes.
Well, in this case, the storm utterly destroyed the entire solar panel farm of thousands of acres.
“They look like somebody took a shotgun and blasted it into the air and let the pellets fall down and shatter holes all in them,” a resident told the local news.
So much for the great innovation. So much for cheap energy from the sun. So much for the wonderful technological revolution. It is a pile of worthless glass and steel now.
The most immediate concern is not just the enormous loss of energy. It is the cadmium telluride inside the panels that could leak into the ground and water supply, potentially poisoning the entire community.
Now, you might ask yourself: why didn’t the builders and owners of this boondoggle think about this possibility? The answer is always the same: federal subsidies. They have encouraged the conversion of hundreds of miles of ranch, farm, and drilling land in Texas to become solar farms.
None of this would even exist without this artificial prodding from our central planners.
They are all at risk for the same destruction. In fact, the same thing happened in West Texas a few years ago. It’s a guarantee that in the life of these huge farms, some storm will come along every few years and likely wreck everything. By now we should know that.
It’s not only that: there is a danger that comes with sandstorms too. Years ago I was flying into Las Vegas and flew over one of these large fields with solar panels that were entirely covered in sand.
The sun could not get anywhere near the panels. My first thought: someone was going to need a very large broom.
But it’s not only huge blowers and suckers that are necessary. Cleaning them requires vast water usage, water not used for farms, lawns, showers, and other purposes that serve mankind.
Texas must also deal with the preposterous miles of wind turbines throughout the state that utterly wreck the landscape. You can hardly see the gorgeous mountains and rock formations in portions of Southwest Texas due to these bird-killing monstrosities.
You drive by miles and miles of these ghastly things while your car is literally riding right above oceans of oil that are sitting there waiting to be drilled and put to human use.
What the heck is going on? There is one answer: federal restrictions on drilling and refining plus federal subsidies for breezes and sunbeams.
It all stems from some weird ideology that says that drilling oil and gas is somehow dirty and unsustainable whereas sticking up fancy windmills and sucking down sunrays is sustainable.
They call oil and gas “fossil fuels” though that is heavily in dispute. Oil might be just as renewable as the sun or wind. We don’t even know how much there is, only that there is more than enough to power the whole of human activity on the planet as far as we can see into the future. Maybe it never runs out.
Governments of the world have somehow decided that one form of energy is bad and the other form is good, even though once you balance out all the costs of the two, it is not even clear that oil and gas are less to be desired by the standards of resource use. They might be more desirable.
We know precisely how to dig up and refine oil and deploy it for human use. We’ve known for centuries and it was this discovery that enabled the building of the modern world.
Then in the 21st century, a bunch of crazed government bureaucrats, scientists on the dole, and politicians allowed a fantasy to seize their brains only to force other solutions on us.
The propaganda against oil and gas is so overwhelming—kind of like COVID fear—that it is hard for an entire generation to think outside the box and ask the fundamental question about whether this is really a good idea after all.
We are finding out from bitter experience that the utopian dream bumps into hard reality and then shatters to bits. All the while, we are experiencing ever more energy uncertainty.
Particularly in Texas; a few years ago, the wind turbines froze and millions found themselves without heat in the dead of winter.
This one is personal to me: my mother in central Texas nearly froze to death. I spent two full days on the phone with her making sure she was okay. She found enough blankets and got by but I will forever blame the Green New Deal for nearly killing her.
This whole craze for renewables over fossil fuels, both misnamed, is out of hand and threatens to wreck civilization as we know it. Consumers all over the world are right now rejecting electric vehicles as anything other than vanity purchases for urban consumers in warm climates.
But the Biden administration is forcing manufacturers to make even more of them anyway even though the consumer marketplace for them is rapidly drying up.
The grid cannot handle much more in the way of plugged-in cars, and the highways cannot withstand the weight. The heck of it is that most electricity in this country is right now provided not by sunbeams and breezes but rather by coal, which also qualifies as a “fossil fuel.”
Just you wait: once we are all in EVs, the government will announce more restrictions on coal too.
Then comes the rationing. You can only drive two days per week and only so far. This will be enforceable by forcing the software managers to shut down your car. You will no longer [be free] to drive where you want much less go on a spontaneous road trip.
The very definition of the postwar good life will end, thanks entirely to the weird reality that a generation of bureaucrats got consumed by a freaky ideology.
Of course, much of this fanaticism traces to the frenzy about “climate change.” Some lunatic teenager lectured the world’s elites about this and they believed her.
Guess what? The climate is changing. It has never not changed. It changes whether we drive or not or what we drive. It changed before the Industrial Revolution and it will change after.
It also turns out that discovering whether the temperature is changing depends entirely on what you measure and how long you measure it.
Yep, you know this game. It’s called lying with statistics at taxpayer expense. If you don’t believe the claims, you are called very nasty names.
https://principia-scientific.com/why-the-wind-and-solar-racket-is-the-green-new-scam-on-steroids/
**********************************************Sydney's One Central Park 'green' skyscraper pulled up over defects which could risk 'death or serious injury' to pedestrians
Sydney's One Central Park building, which is adorned by vertical gardens, has 'serious defects' that pose a 'risk of death or serious injury' to pedestrians because its external planter boxes fail to meet building standards, NSW Fair Trading said.
The building in the inner Sydney suburb of Chippendale is owned by Frasers Property, which was served with a building rectification order by Building Commission NSW director Matt Press on January 16.
This followed an emergency order issued on December 11 after the property was inspected on December 6.
A temporary rope support system has been put in to support the planter boxes.
Frasers Property must submit a structural engineering report and rectify the defects by March 2026.
An inspection found that the T-Bolts securing the planter boxes were randomly distributed, with some fracturing and failing.
The inspector also said the planter boxes failed to drain storm water sufficiently and would fill and overflow.
'This dramatically increases the weight of the planter boxes and the treated planter box water consequently damages glass windows and awnings,' Fair Trading stated, according to the Daily Telegraph.
It also posed the risk an overloaded planter box could fall on pedestrians below with potentially serious consequences.
Construction of the building finished in 2013.
The building also houses Central Park Mall as well as featuring the world's highest floating garden.
The landmark was given a a five-star green rating, which made it the largest multi-residential building at the time to receive the top mark for being environmentally friendly.
Under the modification order the developer has been directed to erect either hoarding or a temporary structure on the north-east and west of the building while work is being done.
The planter boxes must be redesigned by a 'registered structural and hydraulic engineer'.
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Amusing: Single picture of queuing Teslas perfectly illustrates the problem Australia will face ditching petrol cars
At least 10 electric vehicles were seen lined up in the rural town of Keith, in South Australia, with drivers waiting to use public charging stations.
One TikTok user shared a video which showed the cars lined up with the caption: 'Buy a Tesla they said.'
Bernhard Conoplia, head of public charging at charging company Evie, told Yahoo News the charging stations would have been up to four time as busy over the long weekend versus a normal weekend.
She said that simple steps, such as leaving home with a full battery, would go a long way, but it seems these Tesla owners may have learned the hard way.
For a Tesla Model 3 sedan it takes at least 20 minutes to fully charge at a Supercharger station, meaning some owners could have potentially waited hours before they were able to hit the road again.
There are around 198,000 electric vehicles driving on Australian roads, but currently only 3,000 public charging stations nationwide.
The government claims it is working quickly to increase the availability of fast chargers, with the number of sites forecast to double this year.
A report by consulting firm Next System also found that even though Tesla dominated electric vehicle sales it was Chargefox that provided the greatest share of charging sites.
The findings came after record sales of electric vehicles, and despite concerns from some potential buyers that Australia's charging network was not large enough to support the technology.
The Public Fast Charger Network Report found Australia had seen another 397 car-charging sites and 755 new charging points built during 2023, but predicted that number would rise significantly higher in 2024.
Next System founder Daniel Bleakley said the analysis showed charging stations were already planned for another 470 locations throughout Australia and a total of 900 new charging sites could be expected during the year.
'After a slow start, growth in Australia's public EV fast charger network is clearly accelerating,' Mr Bleakley said.
'Lack of public fast-charging infrastructure is often quoted to be a major barrier to electric vehicle uptake in Australia, however our report shows the EV-charging network is actually now growing faster than the Australian EV fleet.'
The report found local firm Chargefox had installed the greatest number of electric chargers in Australia, operating more than one in three charging sites, followed by Evie Networks with 23 per cent of the market, and Tesla with 10 per cent.
Jolt and NRMA followed in fourth and fifth spot, while electric car charging stations from traditional petrol retailers BP and Ampol claimed sixth and seventh positions as their national rollout ramped up.
US automaker Tesla offered the greatest power through its electric chargers, however, with its Supercharger network representing almost half of Australia's charging network's capacity, according to the report.
The findings come after Australians purchased more than 87,000 electric cars in 2023, according to the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, representing more than seven per cent of all new vehicles and more than double the number sold in 2022.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13262449/Tesla-charging-que-Australia.html
***************************************2 April, 2024
Election of Donald Trump ‘could put world’s climate goals at risk’
Another reason to vote for him
Victory for Donald Trump in the US presidential election this year could put the world’s climate goals at risk, a former UN climate chief has said.
The chances of limiting global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels are already slim, and Trump’s antipathy to climate action would have a major impact on the US, which is the world’s second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and biggest oil and gas exporter, said Patricia Espinosa, who served as the UN’s top official on the climate from 2016 to 2022.
“I worry [about the potential election of Trump] because it would have very strong consequences, if we see a regression regarding climate policies in the US,” Espinosa said.
Although Trump’s policy plans are not clear, conversations with his circle have created a worrying picture that could include the cancellation of Joe Biden’s groundbreaking climate legislation, withdrawal from the Paris agreement and a push for more drilling for oil and gas.
Espinosa said: “We are not yet aligned to 1.5C. That’s the reality. So if we see a situation where we would see regression on those efforts, then [the likelihood of staying within 1.5C] is very limited. It would certainly be a much bigger risk.
“We could see a slowdown, an even bigger slowdown [in action to reduce emissions], which would unfortunately probably take us to an even more terrible scenario, unless we see strong leadership coming from other places, [such as] Europe.”
She said other countries must continue with climate action even if the US were to renege on its goals under Trump, but the absence of the US would be a significant blow. “What happens in the US has a very big impact in so many places around the world,” she said.
It is not all gloom, however. Espinosa was the executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, parent treaty to the 2015 Paris agreement, in 2016 when Trump was elected president. She said that if other countries put up a united front in favour of strong climate action, it could help to counteract the absence of the US.
“When President Trump announced that they would withdraw from the Paris agreement, there was a certain fear that others would follow, and that there would be a setback in the pace of the climate change process. Not only did that not happen but some countries that had not yet adhered to the Paris agreement did so,” she said.
If Trump were to take the US out of Paris in a fresh term, she does not believe others would follow suit. “As of now, I don’t see countries really going back. I think that the process will continue.”
On the contentious issue – particularly for the US – of climate finance, Espinosa said Biden was now facing difficulty in getting climate finance commitments through a hostile Republican Congress.
“We are seeing a lack of leadership, including in the big countries that can make contributions,” she said. “[In the US] I think there is a willingness but there are also limitations. In the EU there has been a long period where they have been discussing the internal frameworks [for climate finance]. At the same time, we have been seeing a reduction of funds going in general to the global south, and very little is going to climate change. It’s really a question of giving it priority.”
She is also concerned that too much of the focus of climate finance and efforts to reduce emissions so far has been on shifting from a reliance on fossil fuels to renewables.
“We are now realising that nature will make or break net zero – decarbonising the energy sector will not be enough,” Espinosa said, calling for more emphasis on the role of nature, to halt deforestation and transform food production, which accounts for about a third of global emissions. “The 1.5C economy can only be achieved by ending deforestation and accelerating the transition to sustainable agriculture and food systems this decade.”
In 2024, most of the world’s population will go to the polls in elections, in the US, Russia, India, the UK and scores of other countries. Climate action will be a contentious issue in many of these elections, as some parties are arguing for stronger policies based on stark scientific warnings, while others oppose such action.
Espinosa warned of the opposition to climate action that is being orchestrated around the world. “In the US, we see a very well organised and very strong campaign intending to reduce the perception of the critical nature of action that needs to be taken.”
To combat this, she called for businesses to play a greater role in pushing for a low-carbon economy. “We need to work closely with the private sector, make them aware of the important opportunities that the new [low-carbon] economy provides. There are profitable investments that protect nature and innovate technologies
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/31/election-donald-trump-world-climate-goals-at-risk-un-chief#:~:text=Victory%20for%20Donald%20Trump%20in,UN%20climate%20chief%20has%20said .
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“I Was Wrong About Renewables,” Says Former Green Energy Executive
Renewables will make electricity so cheap that they’ll pay for themselves, explained the news media to the public over the last decade. Electric cars will replace internal combustion vehicles and drive down oil use. And poor nations will “leapfrog” into being rich with solar panels and batteries.
However, a different picture has emerged over the last three years. Rather than renewables paying for themselves, President Joe Biden and Congress passed legislation in 2022 that could result in an astonishing $1 trillion of taxpayer money for renewables, efficiency, and electric cars.
Despite that investment, the US generated less electricity from renewables in 2023 than it did the year before. Meanwhile, oil consumption continues to rise, the market for electric cars is oversupplied, and automakers have slowed electric vehicle spending as demand has slowed.
It’s true that the overall decline in electricity generated from renewables is relatively small at 0.8%, and most of the reduction is due to a decline in power from hydroelectric dams. Electricity from utility-scale solar farms rose 14%. And the US still reduced carbon emissions in 2023.
However, hydroelectricity wasn’t the only renewable energy source that declined. Wind did as well, by 2%, despite an increase in the number of turbines.
Hydro and wind problems are fundamentally the same: they depend on the right weather. The sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind doesn’t always blow. As a result, wind and solar energy rely on backup energy sources like coal and natural gas.
The yearly unreliability of renewables is matched by their daily unreliability, which raises electricity generation costs and makes electric grids unreliable. Wind and solar advocates claim that sun and wind are free, but they don’t discuss all the infrastructure needed to manage this unreliability. As such, places with solar and wind mandates have higher-than-average electricity costs.
The decline in emissions was due mostly to cleaner natural gas replacing coal. As such, what happened in 2023 debunks the Big Lie that we don’t need fossil fuels, that fossil fuels can’t reduce carbon emissions, and that renewables are always the better option.
The New York Times blames the supposedly unanticipated higher electricity usage from the servers needed for AI, but the fundamental problems with renewables have been known for decades. They simply don’t produce enough cheap and reliable energy.
Indeed, electric grids across the Western world are in jeopardy due to the high use of unreliable renewables. In the UK, the Prime Minister has called for emergency natural gas plants to meet rising demand, and many experts believe the same could happen in the US.
The UK plans to spend billions of pounds annually over the next three decades to cut CO2 emissions. But even with all that spending, the UK isn’t on track to hit net-zero goals.
And the UK is a wealthy country. Poorer countries are just trying to survive. They don’t have the luxury of thinking about carbon emissions when low-cost energy is their only hope of improving food production, health care, housing, sanitation, water quality, transportation, and economic opportunity.
I Was Wrong
I used to think that wind, solar, and electric vehicles were the best ways to protect our environment. I went into the business of renewables and efficiency because I believed that they would result in a better world.
I was wrong. It took twenty years of working in the energy industry promoting these technologies to realize they don’t solve climate problems.
Just look at Germany. Over the past two decades, it poured an estimated $500 billion into wind and solar power, restricted oil and gas development, shut down all its nuclear power plants, and increased its dependence on Russian gas. The results? German households saw their energy bills double between 2010 and 2020.
And that was before Russia invaded Ukraine, and somebody blew up the pipeline that brought natural gas to Germany. Germany is in a rapidly accelerating downward spiral driven by a lack of energy.
Manufacturers of car parts, chemicals, fertilizer, and steel are struggling to survive and have been forced to shut down plants, lay off workers, and even file for bankruptcy. German taxpayers had to fork over another $500 billion in 2022 alone to cushion households and businesses from hard-hitting energy costs and another $230 billion to bail out a giant energy company.
The collapse of German industry has the potential to bring the rest of Europe down with it. Bankruptcies are skyrocketing across the European continent.
In response to the failure of renewable energy, Europe demands that poor and developing nations follow its lead. But no country on earth has ever climbed out of energy poverty using wind and solar. Prosperity and growth depend on energy-intensive industries, and they require reliable, cheap, and reliable 24/7 power. China gets this: its coal industry is growing at about two new coal plants per week.
https://public.substack.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-renewables-says
***********************************************Energy Department loans $1.5B to restart Michigan nuclear plant
The Department of Energy offered a $1.5 billion loan to restart a nuclear power plant in Michigan. The energy company Holtec International bought the decommissioned plant in 2022 and plans to restore it and resume operations by late 2025.
If successful, it will be the first nuclear power plant to be successfully restarted in U.S. history.
The plant was shuttered in 2022 because of financial difficulties
Provided through the Inflation Reduction Act, the loan will enable the plant to generate enough power annually to power 800,000 homes
The plant is expected to reopen in late 2025
“Nuclear power is our single largest source of carbon-free electricity, directly supporting 100,000 jobs across the country and hundreds of thousands more indirectly,” U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm said in a statement.
The Palisades Power Plant was shuttered two years ago because of financial difficulties. Holtec International purchased the plant in June 2022 — shortly before President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law.
The Holtec loan is offered through the Inflation Reduction Act’s Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program, which finances projects to retool, repower, repurpose or replace energy infrastructure that has stopped operating or to enable energy infrastructure that avoids or reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
The Palisades plant will operate through at least 2051 if the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves licensing. It is expected to prevent 111 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions over 25 years, according to the DOE — the equivalent of taking 970,000 gasoline-powered cars off the road.
The DOE said the Palisades plant could double its electricity output with the addition of two more smaller nuclear reactors that will be financed separately.
The United States is the world’s biggest producer of nuclear power, generating about 30% of what is generated globally, according to the World Nuclear Assn. About 19% of the country’s electricity is generated with nuclear power, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. There are currently 54 commercially operating nuclear power plants in the country operating in 28 states.
Still, in 2023, 41 nuclear reactors permanently shut down in the United States — the largest number worldwide. Falling natural gas prices are largely the reason.
Spurring the development of new reactor technologies domestically “is critical to combatting the climate crisis,” according to the DOE. Nuclear power is a cornerstone of the Biden-Harris administration goal of 100% clean electricity generation by 2035.
The 800-megawatt Palisades Nuclear Plant will employ 600 people and generate enough electricity to power 800,000 homes, according to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Once reopened, it will drive $363 million of regional economic impact and help “Michigan lead the future of clean energy,” Whitmer said in a statement.
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Bloomberg: Wind and solar will need subsidies indefinitely
Bloomberg recently ran a very interesting interview with Brett Christophers about his new book The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet.
In the interview, Christophers argues there’s a widespread misconception about what’s needed to expand the deployment of renewables and transition away from fossil fuel generation.
Christophers states there is a widespread argument that the economics of renewables work and that the only remaining significant obstacles are political and in the planning realm around permissions. However, his book pushes back quite forcefully against that argument and suggests that that’s a very partial and misleading perspective on the economics of the transition.
The basic argument is simple, and it’s something that the world doesn’t want to admit: The business of developing and owning and operating solar and wind farms and selling electricity is kind of a lousy business.
Whether new solar or wind farms get built is ultimately about the expected profitability of those assets. Even though the generating cost aspect has become increasingly beneficial over time that doesn’t necessarily mean that the expected profits are going to be there.
Generating costs are only part of the costs that a company that owns and controls a solar or wind farm, and sells the electricity, incur. There are also costs associated with delivering that power to where it gets consumed.
For renewables the delivery costs tend to be higher than they are for conventional power plants because conventional power plants on average tend to be located closer to centers of demand.
That’s because unlike conventional power plants, renewables like solar and wind farms require huge amounts of land to produce significant amounts of power.
Unless governments are willing to either assume the burden of renewables development through public ownership…they will have to keep subsidies and tax credits in place indefinitely or else renewables investment will collapse because of the unfavorable economics.
The author obviously favors wind and solar and later advocates for a tax on carbon dioxide emissions. However, it is interesting that he acknowledges there is no economy-wide business case for wind and solar without government support.
https://www.americanexperiment.org/bloomberg-wind-and-solar-will-need-subsidies-indefinitely/
***************************************1 April, 2024
The State of the Climate 2023
In his annual review of the state of the global climate, Professor Ole Humlum reviews last year’s key data and observations in the context of long-term climate trends.
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.
Professor Humlum draws attention to two oceanographic events that are likely to have driven up global temperatures in 2023:
“While global average surface air temperatures in 2023 were at record highs relative to long instrumental records (since 1850), they were driven up as a result of the still ongoing El Nin?o warming episode. In contrast, the two previous years, 2021 and 2022, were influenced by a cold La Nin?a in the Pacific Ocean. Thus the global surface air temperature record in 2023 continues to be significantly influenced by oceanographic phenomena.”
The influence of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption on 2023 meteorological conditions is still uncertain. The eruption, which occurred in the southern Pacific Ocean in January 2022, released an enormous plume of water vapour into the Stratosphere, but there is still uncertainty whether this event had any influence on atmospheric temperatures.
Professor Humlum said:
“The global climate system represents a multifaceted system, involving sun, planets, atmosphere, oceans, land, geological processes, biological life, and complex interactions between them. Many components and their mutual coupling are still not fully understood or perhaps not even recognised.
Believing that one minor constituent of the atmosphere (CO2) controls nearly all aspects of climate is naïve and entirely unrealistic. The global climate has remained in a quasi-stable condition within certain limits for millions of years, although with important variations playing out over periods ranging from years to centuries, or more, but the global climate has never been in a fully stable state without change. Modern observations show that this normal behaviour is also characterising recent years, including 2023, and there is no observational evidence for any global climate crisis.”
https://mailchi.mp/82c3fc2cd96c/the-state-of-the-climate-201516?e=cc88839e92
***************************************************Joel Kotkin: Joe Biden’s climate plan is a threat to democracy
In the future, people could find themselves in violation of the law if, for example, their cars report too much mileage, while their energy use will be both closely monitored and rationed. Such policies would require a permanent mobilisation of executive power, making democracy necessary roadkill on the road to an imagined green utopia.
For a policy that requires sacrifice, at least for the masses, the climate agenda lacks one critical element: public support. Even in ultra-green Europe, there is a growing resistance among politicians and the public towards extreme climate policies. In America, too, climate scepticism is growing. Given that Joe Biden rolled out new pollution standards for non-electric cars last week, this public shift should provide discomfort among the Democratic establishment.
While most Americans concede that climate change is real, it’s not much of a priority: only 2% rate it as their major concern, according to Gallup, well below the figures for immigration, inflation, government competence and reducing poverty. These sentiments are even more pronounced among working-class voters: even as the Biden administration expends hundreds of billions in taxpayer funds to ‘green projects’, the average American doesn’t want to spend more than $2.50 a week to combat climate change.
Now, instead of mobilising the masses, the climate lobby increasingly rejects the idea of popular consent. In the EU, the US and individual states such as California, vague legislative goals are left to ‘experts’ for implementation. Aware they are unlikely to get public backing for such things as electric car mandates, consistently higher energy prices or the removal of gas stoves, the climate lobby seeks to employ the bureaucracy — in concert with academics and nonprofits — to impose policies which lack public support.
Some climate activists see the Covid-19 lockdowns as a ‘dry run’ for future action. Officials at the United Nations endorse this concept, embracing the pandemic as a ‘fire drill’ for what must happen to meet climate goals.
But perhaps the more relevant model may be that of the ‘corporate state’, most associated with the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. Some might see Donald Trump as the poor man’s Il Duce, but the powerful alliance of the executive branch with a handful of ultra-rich, ultra-powerful companies is more reminiscent of the corporate state.
In 2020, Biden raised record sums from the corporate elite, notably the tech oligarchs and their Wall Street allies. This year will likely bring unprecedented financial support from these same players to the President’s campaign. This interplay between big corporate interests and activist bureaucracies now constitutes what Bjørn Lomborg has labelled the ‘climate-industrial complex’.
Once re-elected, Biden (or his advisers) may try to push this agenda without much concern for public opinion. He could implement what Eric Heymann, a senior executive at Deutsche Bank, calls ‘a certain degree of eco-dictatorship’. This reflects a change in elite opinion towards what two German observers describe as a ‘political ideology that questions the foundations of pluralism and democracy’, and which instead favours a post-national ‘politics of identity and minority entitlements’ and a global green regime.
To achieve their goal, climate activists can employ technological weapons not available to Mussolini in his failed efforts to get Italians in line with his appetite for war. Already some websites censor or discredit even the most credentialed and moderate climate sceptics, who question the climate change narrative much as they did during the pandemic. Climate activists, funded by billionaires, are even pressuring television stations to censor ads criticising Biden’s electric car mandate.
In the future, people could find themselves in violation of the law if, for example, their cars report too much mileage, while their energy use will be both closely monitored and rationed. Such policies would require a permanent mobilisation of executive power, making democracy necessary roadkill on the road to an imagined green utopia.
https://unherd.com/newsroom/joe-bidens-climate-plan-is-a-threat-to-democracy/
**************************************************UK: The smart meters scandal is about to explode
It would not be much of a surprise if Ed Miliband, as energy minister, introduces some form of energy rationing
The technology doesn’t work as planned. The numbers don’t add up. And ordinary people may have their lives ruined by a system that barely even recognises they exist. If ITV is looking for a follow-up to it’s hit drama about the Post Office scandal its producers and script writers do not have to look very far. It is playing out in real-time right now. In reality, the smart meter fiasco risks turning into the next Horizon scandal.
Like so many government-backed technologies, it was sold as a way of making the system more efficient, with the added benefit of helping us hit our net zero targets. Smart meters installed in our homes would give us more accurate readings of how much electricity we were using, while the little monitors in the corner might gently nudge us towards consuming a little less (which would be helpful, given that the Government has woefully failed to make sure we have enough power to keep the lights switched on).
What’s not to like about that?
Well, quite a lot as it turns out. According to the latest figures from the Department for Energy, Security and Net Zero, of the 30 million meters installed in British homes, almost four million are not working properly. The estimate was 2.7 million in June last year, but has now been revised dramatically upwards.
The results of that can often be painful. Households may well have been overcharged for the energy use, and at a time when many are already struggling to pay their energy bills. Some households might now have to go back to manual readings if they want to question their bill, but the technology can make that difficult, too.
There is a depressingly familiar pattern starting to emerge. The computer system doesn’t work as it should. There is plenty of buck passing, with people initially denying there is anything to worry about, then blaming someone else for the problems, and finally denying that anything can ever be done to fix the problem. It seems that no one has learned anything from the Post Office scandal. Instead, ministers will grimly press ahead with a technology that clearly doesn’t work, and if people are forced to pay an inflated sum, then it will simply be brushed under the carpet.
Even more terrifyingly, the meters may eventually be used for ‘time-of-day’ charging. It would not be much of a surprise if Ed Miliband, as energy minister in a government led by Sir Keir Starmer, introduces some form of energy rationing. After all, there seems to be little hope of ever hitting our net zero targets without it. Your smart meter might then decide when you can and can’t boil the kettle, regardless of whether it works properly – and if it doesn’t work well enough, that’s tough.
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Car makers losing $6000 on every electric car they sell
Car manufacturers are losing $6000 on every electric car they sell, according to a new report from the United States.
The study, undertaken by the Boston Consulting Group study, found that motorists toying with the idea of going electric for their next vehicle purchase want three main things: short charging times, a 560km-plus driving range, and to pay roughly $US50,000 ($AU76,000).
On that basis, the Group estimates most automakers lose around $US6000 ($AU9000) on each electric vehicle they sell for $US50,000, after accounting for customer tax credits.
Using US pricing, only one electric model available today is ticking most consumers' boxes – the Hyundai Ioniq 6, which starts from $US42,450 before on-road costs. The Tesla Model 3 runs a close second.
The Boston Consulting Group warns if manufacturers can’t turn a profit from this generation of electric vehicles (EVs) then there will be trouble ahead.
"If [original equipment manufacturers] can't make money in this next generation [of EVs] … something's going to have to change," senior partner Andrew Loh told Automotive News.
There are, of course, some exceptions to this rule. Tesla has been profitable for many years, and even Chinese newcomer BYD is making money now.
According to Inside EVs, historically the average level of profitability from mass-market internal combustion-engined vehicles (ICE) is around 10 per cent, but add in other costs such as an EV’s battery, the e-powertrain and additional electronics and upgrading factories and quickly that number starts to fall into the red.
In other words, high capital costs in the early stages of EV development, being built at operations that aren't yet fully at scale, are to blame, and to survive partnerships across automakers and suppliers to split costs are critical for EV profitability.
“There's too much upfront investment, and there's too much individual model risk for both vehicle manufacturers and suppliers to incur on their own," Brian Collie, global leader for Boston Consulting Group's automotive and mobility practice, told Automotive News.
"Partnerships and joint ventures are the way to drive greater scale."
Automakers can also close half of the cost gap with effective technology choices, such as higher-density batteries, more efficient electric motors and better battery management software. They should also identify efficiencies in EV and internal combustion vehicle production, Boston Consulting Group said.
Even so, the study revealed carmakers are still likely to lose about $US3000 on every $50,000 EV they sell.
In the US last year, many car firms predicted a 70 per cent sales growth based on sales virtually doubling from 2020 to 2022, however growth in fact only reached around 50 per cent in 2023.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/car-makers-losing-6000-on-every-electric-car-they-sell-report/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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