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 December, 2022
Europe must exploit its fossil fuel resources or face economic relegation to second world status
As Europe faces its worst energy crisis in living memory, Net Zero Watch has warned ministers and MPs in London and Brussels that they have a choice between exploiting Europe’s untouched fossil fuel resources or inevitable relegation of the continent to second world status.
It is matter of real concern that most MPs and ministers still oppose drilling for gas and oil in European waters and the North Sea, and even more importantly, still reject shale gas exploration, blocking a vital energy resource for Europe’s and the UK’s future.
Europe’s fossil fuel resources are the subject of a new paper published today by Net Zero Watch. The paper surveys the scale of resources and concludes that they are large enough to make a significant difference to both price and energy security, opening up the path to a more secure future.
Europe’s energy resources are far from trivial, with coal reserves amounting to nearly 13% of the global total, sufficient to support current levels of production for nearly 300 years.
According to the European Commission, technically recoverable shale gas resources in Europe amount to some 14 trillion cubic metres, between four and five times greater than the proven reserves of natural gas. In other words, shale gas would be sufficient to support current levels of European gas production for more than 50 years.
In 2014 the European Commission concluded that ‘the volumes produced will not make Europe self-sufficient in gas, but could help to reduce prices’. That conclusion is obviously correct, and applies with equal force to coal, oil, and conventional natural gas resources.
Dr John Constable, the report’s author, said:
Europe’s fossil fuel resources will not deliver self-sufficiency – for that we need nuclear energy – but they reinforce our energy security and promote the economic prosperity that we require to move towards a high energy nuclear future.
It is alarming that there are still parliamentarians who believe that more renewable energy is the solution, when this will only deepen the current crisis and make recovery still more difficult. Only the physically superior energy from fossil fuels is able to help us out in this desperate situation.”
See: "European Fossil Fuels: Resources and Proven Reserves" (pdf)
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UN Secretary-General António Guterres Falsely Claims Weather Disasters Have Increased 500% in 50 Years
Last September, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres claimed climate, weather and water-related disasters had increased by 500% over the last 50 years. According to the political and environmental science writer Professor Roger Pielke this is “pure misinformation“. He goes on to suggest that “you will never find a more obvious and egregious wrong claim in public discussions from a more important institution”. Matters were made even worse, in Pielke’s view, because the false notion was “legitimised” by none other than the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), one of the founding bodies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Of course 2022 is not fully complete, but total disasters will be around the 330 mark, and this will be similar to the average for the last decade. Compared with the 2000s, the numbers are about 10% lower.
Based on these data, said by CRED to be reliable since 2000, Pielke notes there is no evidence that the number of global and climate disasters is increasing. “That means that – undeniably – there is no evidence to support another false claim by the UN that, ‘The number of disaster events is projected to reach 560 a year – or 1.5 each day, statistically speaking – by 2030’.”
Preliminary estimates suggest that around 11,000 people lost their lives this year as a result of weather and climate-related disasters, a figure around the average for the last decade. The overall death rate was about 0.14 people per million, and was one of the five lowest annual death rates since data were compiled. Pielke ventures that the figure is the lowest in all recorded human history. Just two decades ago, the figure was 20 times greater at 2.9 per million. The diminishing human impact of disasters is a science and policy success that is “widely under-appreciated”.
In fact, as the Daily Sceptic has repeatedly shown, such inconvenient facts are largely ignored in most mainstream media, as individual weather events are relentlessly catastrophised in the interest of upending society, via the Net Zero political project. Weather catastrophisation is now the main climate propaganda tool since global warming went off the boil over two decades ago. Pielke noted that he had spent 30 years working to understand trends in disasters. “Along the way, I’ve observed a concerted and successful effort by climate advocates to create and spread disinformation about disasters, knowing full well that virtually all journalists and scientists will stay silent and allow the false information to spread unchecked – and sometimes they will even help to amplify it,” he wrote.
“I am curious. When are journalists going to start reporting the facts about disasters, and call out disinformation,” he asked.
Don’t hold your breath just yet Professor, might be the reply. On September 14th, the Daily Sceptic reported that four leading Italian scientists had undertaken a major review of historical climate trends, and concluded that declaring a ‘climate emergency’ was not supported by the data. Our report went viral, was viewed over 25,000 times, retweeted over 9,000 times, and eventually made its way into other media outlets.
It led to the inevitable ‘fact-check’. State-owned Agence France-Presse reported that “top climate experts” said the paper “cherry picked” data. One of the experts was Friederike Otto who works out of Imperial College London, and is at the forefront of the pseudoscientific ‘attribution’ of single weather events to humans allegedly causing the climate to change. She said that “of course” the authors were not writing the article in good faith. “If the journal cares about science they should withdraw it loudly and publicly, saying that it should have never been published,” she said.
As a result of this pressure, the publisher of the paper Springer Nature made the following announcement: “Readers are alerted that the conclusions reported in this manuscript are currently under dispute. The journal is investigating the issue”. Of course all science is “under dispute” (except, it seems, the ‘settled’ science of climate change), but that is not the reason why this shameful announcement was made. It remains on the paper to this day.
Pielke concludes that planet Earth is a place of extremes. Hurricanes, floods, drought, heatwaves and other types of extreme weather are normal and always have been. The ability of societies to prepare and recover from extreme events is a remarkable story of policy success – deaths related to disasters have plummet from millions per year a century ago to thousands per year over the past decade.
“Unfortunately nowadays, every weather and climate disaster becomes enlisted as a sort of ‘poster child’ for climate advocacy. Every extreme event and associated human impact is quickly turned into a symbol of something else – such as failed energy policies, rapacious fossil fuel companies, evil politicians, or callous jet-setting billionaires. It is a simple and powerful narrative, and one that is also incredibly misleading,” he concluded.
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2022: The year ESG fell to Earth
The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: a year that saw the end of the post–Cold War era and the return of geopolitics; the first energy crisis of the enforced energy transition to net zero; and the year that brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%.
The three are linked. By restricting investment in production of oil and gas by Western producers, ESG increases the market power of non-Western producers, thereby enabling Putin’s weaponization of energy supplies. Net zero—the holy grail of ESG—has turned out to be Russia’s most potent ally.
It wasn’t only a bad year for ESG on the stock market. Earlier this month, Vanguard announced that it was quitting Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (NZAM), set up by former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney a little over a year ago. “We have decided to withdraw from NZAM so that we can provide the clarity our investors desire about the role of index funds and about how we think about material risks, including climate-related risks,” the world’s second-largest asset manager said.
Two months ago, Alex Edmans, coauthor of the latest edition of the standard textbook on the principles of corporate finance and professor of finance at the London Business School, published a paper titled “The End of ESG”—without a question mark. Edmans criticizes what has become the primary justification for ESG: the claim that business can generate higher returns for investors by tackling climate change. Since governments are democratically elected by a country’s citizens, they are best placed to address externalities, whereas investors disproportionately represent the elites. “If ESG is pursued for its externalities, companies and investors should be very clear that it may be at the expense of value,” Edmans says.
October also saw the publication of Terrence Keeley’s Sustainable, where the former BlackRock senior executive penned what amounts to a requiem for ESG. Rather than “doing well by doing good,” the logic of Keeley’s case, as I reviewed for RealClear Books, is that investors in conventional ESG investment products are likely to end up not doing very well and leave investors feeling good, not doing good.
It has not all been going one way. In May, HSBC terminated Stuart Kirk, its global head of research at HSBC’s asset-management arm, for voicing some hard truths about ESG. Earlier this month, HSBC announced that it will stop financing new oil and gas fields, putting the West’s third-largest bank on Putin’s side in Russia’s energy war on the West.
What is now a negative factor disadvantaging the West in a world increasingly characterized by East–West geopolitical tensions originated after a period when the United Nations had been fostering a horizontal global division between a rich North and an exploited South. As University of Pennsylvania’s professor Elizabeth Pollman records in her June 2022 paper “The Origins and Consequences of the ESG Moniker,” through the 1970s and early 1980s, the UN promoted the New International Economic Order that called for the regulation of transnational corporations on the alleged grounds that they were widening the gap between developed and developing countries.
After Kofi Annan became secretary-general in 1997, the UN shifted from a strategy of confrontation to co-optation. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 1999, Annan launched a Global Compact between business and the UN. In 2004, the Global Compact’s financial-sector initiative published a report titled “Who Cares Wins”—a rip-off of the British special-forces SAS motto “Who Dares Wins”—arguing for “better consideration of environmental, social and governance factors” in investment appraisals, claiming that this would both improve outcomes for investors and help the UN achieve its sustainable development goals.
ESG means different things, depending on whom you’re talking to. Is it about risk disclosure? Or about factors driving long-term shareholder value? Or is it about society holding business to account? One thing is clear: ESG’s unsustainable dual mandate of boosting shareholder returns and at the same time making the world a better place— “doing well by doing good”—was present at the creation of ESG. It was a masterstroke by ESG’s designers to incorporate “G” for governance. No investor can be against improved governance, and it helped mainstream ESG, whereas previous iterations, such as Socially Responsible Investing (SRI), remained niche.
The 2008 financial crisis subsequently turbocharged the uptake of ESG. Having caused the financial crisis, Wall Street was going to redeem itself by saving the world from a planetary catastrophe. Without climate change, ESG would have vastly less salience. Although marketed as a climate risk analysis tool, ESG is no such thing. In reality, it’s about investors and debt providers driving the decarbonization of Western companies and sunsetting its oil and gas companies.
According to ESG doctrine, there are two types of climate financial risk—physical risk and transition risk—and it’s straightforward to demonstrate that both are spurious. Take the Bank of England. For its climate stress tests, the Bank of England uses a scenario derived from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) extreme and physically implausible RCP8.5 climate scenario. Roger Pielke, Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado–Boulder, and Justin Ritchie have documented how use of the RCP8.5 scenario represents “a stubborn commitment to error,” with its absurd projection of a sixfold growth in per-capita coal consumption to 2100, based on erroneous reports in the late 1980s of virtually unlimited coal deposits in Siberia and China. The Bank of England compounds implausibility with impossibility by taking the RCP8.5 pathway of 4 degrees by the turn of the century and telescoping it into a 3.3-degree Celsius rise by 2050. Central banks resorting to these types of games constitutes strong evidence that climate physical risk is a nonissue for financial stability.
When he was governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney gave an agenda-setting speech alleging a tragedy of the horizon as the catastrophic impacts of climate change will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors. Climate catastrophes are presumed to be triggered by tipping points, one of the earliest being the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. In its sixth assessment report, the IPCC declared that with sustained warming, there was limited evidence that the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets would disappear “over multiple millennia.” That is some time horizon. Despite the best efforts of central bankers, geologic timescales of millennia and human timescales of decades are completely out of whack.
Similarly, climate transition risk and the stranded assets trope defy economic and financial logic. If you restrict the flow of capital into a sector producing stuff that people want and are willing to pay for, the price of the output of a capital-embargoed sector will rise, as will the value of its invested capital. This, in essence, is what has been happening in energy and capital markets over the past year and explains why ESG as an investment strategy does not work. In the absence of draconian government policies to suppress demand for oil and natural gas, ESG policies strangling the supply of capital to Western oil and gas producers have two effects: they push up the price of hydrocarbons; and they displace supply from Western producers to neutral or hostile ones, with major detriment to the economies and security interests of the West.
Although the disintegration of ESG as an investment strategy became unmistakable in 2022, its existence as a political doctrine will continue until it is challenged and defeated politically. This is already happening in Red states such as Florida, Texas, West Virginia, and Utah. It also requires concerted leadership at a national level to get central bankers and financial regulators to quit playing covert climate policy and to shame banks such as HSBC into switching their support from Russia in the energy wars by dropping their anti–oil and gas financing policies. Defeating ESG not a case of “who cares wins” but “who fights wins.”
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/12/27/2022_the_year_esg_fell_to_earth_872040.html
************************************************Tesla chaos strikes: Long Christmas holiday queues for charging station reveals the harsh reality of owning an electric vehicle in Australia
The people caught out must be either gullible or a bit dim. Electric vehicles are just not suitable for long-distance travel
Australian Tesla drivers have been forced to wait in 90-minute queues at charging stations as thousands take to the roads over the holiday period.
Queues for charging stations have been spotted nationwide, including in Victoria and NSW.
The huge queues have angered Tesla owners, with many blasting Australia's lack of electric vehicle infrastructure.
ABC reporter Phil Williams shared a video of the electric cars all lined up at a charging bay in Wodonga, on the border of Victoria and NSW on Wednesday. 'Wodonga Tesla charge points overwhelmed with wait times around 90 mins,' he said.
In the footage, Tesla owners can be seen aimlessly standing around their cars as they wait for a charge before getting on their way more than an hour later.
There were similar scenes at a Coffs Harbour charging point in northern NSW on Wednesday, with Teslas stretching through the carpark as drivers waited their turn to power up.
Many Aussies were quick to call out electric vehicles after seeing the footage. 'Think I'll stick to a petrol powered car. Takes less than 5 minutes to fill up my car's tank, pay for the petrol and to then be on my way again,' one said.
'Why anyone would want an electric car that can take up to an hour to fully recharge is beyond me,' another declared. 'They obviously have way too much time on their hands to just wait either waiting to recharge or recharge!'
'So how do you travel during peak periods in an EV? Just be prepared to add 3 hours to your trip? That won't help with the take up of the technology?' a third said.
'I'm an expat Australian and this is the reason I left. We're 10 years behind the rest of the world with EV and innovation,' added another.
Others called for an expansion of the charging network across Australia to solve the problem of long wait times.
'There are eleven petrol stations in Wodonga, multiple outlets for every major brand, and only one place to charge EVs which is just outside the council offices.'
Another suggested: 'Every petrol station should have to fit charging points.'
Others suggested the long wait times were due to the Christmas holidays, while some said it was likely the scenes in Wodonga were from a Tesla club meet-up.
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29 December, 2022
Oh, So That's How USPS Plans to Go Green By 2026
Monkey see, monkey do—that’s what the United States Postal Service is going regarding its delivery fleet. They’re going to blow some $11 billion on electric vehicles after a push from the Biden administration. It won’t be immediate, but the goal is to have 66,000 cars delivering mail by 2026. Also, in that same timeframe, USPS hopes all purchases of future vehicles will carry zero emissions (via WaPo):
The U.S. Postal Service will buy 66,000 vehicles to build one of the largest electric fleets in the nation, Biden administration officials announced Tuesday, turning to one of the most recognizable vehicles on American roads — boxy white mail trucks — to fight climate change.
Postal officials’ plans call for buying 60,000 “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles” from defense contractor Oshkosh, of which 45,000 will be electric, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told The Washington Post. The agency will also purchase 46,000 models from mainstream automakers, of which 21,000 will be electric.
The Postal Service will spend $9.6 billion on the vehicles and associated infrastructure, officials said, including $3 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden and congressional Democrats’ landmark climate, health-care and tax law.
By 2026, the agency expects to purchase zero-emissions delivery trucks almost exclusively, DeJoy said. It’s a major achievement for a White House climate agenda that leans heavily on reducing greenhouse gases from vehicles.
“It’s wonderful that the Postal Service will be at the forefront of the switch to clean electric vehicles, with postal workers as their ambassadors,” said John Podesta, White House senior adviser for clean energy innovation. “It will get people thinking, ‘If the postal worker delivering our Christmas presents … is driving an EV, I can drive one, too.’”
No one looks to their local postal worker to gauge what's hot regarding car sales. No one is going to say, 'look, the postal guy or gal is driving an EV'; I need one too,' that's ridiculous.
The USPS should post profits before blowing billions on a fleet that will probably cause more problems than it solves. Second, it’s not green since it uses fossil fuel to charge its batteries. Do liberals think an energy wizard resides within the power stations for these cars? There are logistical issues as well, especially post offices in rural areas. Reports of electric vehicles are conking out as the power station infrastructure remains underdeveloped. That’s all an aside; the USPS should have to post consecutive years of profit before this Democrat-led boondoggle project gets the green light. Blowing $11 billion on electric cars isn’t going to help bring this struggling agency to solvency.
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ESG’s Perverse, Narrowly Focused Ethics
As most people know, ESG stands for Environmental protection, Social justice, and Governance of corporate and societal affairs. They’re all noble-sounding causes. However, under ESG they’re centered around progressive, woke agendas, with the prevention of “manmade climate cataclysms” uppermost. Fund assets are used to drive “net zero” climate agendas and punish or de-fund fossil fuel companies.
That narrow focus creates serious problems. Those trillions of dollars are supposed to be passively invested in the index and other funds, under fiduciary obligations to secure maximum returns in support of the state, local, corporate and personal retirement and investment accounts. Under ESG, however, strong returns are too often sacrificed to serve politicized agendas, often in collusion with governments, activists, and other financial institutions, and thus also in violation of antitrust laws and basic ethical principles.
That’s why Asset manager Vanguard recently left the UN-sponsored “Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.” Meanwhile, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, and other states are pulling tens of billions of dollars out of BlackRock, State Street, and other Wall Street asset management firms, for violating fiduciary duties.
A second ESG ethical dilemma arises from the way practitioners employ narrow definitions of ES&G to virtue-signal, pontificate, and impose prescriptive agendas. When the “existential threat of manmade climate change” is the primary arbiter, enormous problems associated with replacing fossil fuels with “clean renewable energy” are simply ignored, suppressed, and censored from the analysis.
Here are some of the people and planet realities that must be included in any ESG analysis.
Environmental protection. Rather than looking only at the temperatures, storms, droughts, rising seas and other environmental costs that climate models falsely blame on fossil fuel emissions – any accurate and honest ESG scorecard must also assess the ecological impacts from the wind-solar-battery (WSB) energy systems that will supposedly replace oil, gas, and coal.
WSB systems and associated transmission lines do not appear spontaneously, via Materials Acquisition for Global Industrial Change (MAGIC). They require mining on unprecedented scales. President Biden’s initial batch of offshore wind turbines alone would require 110,000 tons of copper, refined from 25,000,000 tons of ore, after removing 40,000,000 tons of overburden – plus millions of tons of iron, manganese, aluminum, nickel, concrete, plastics, and other materials ... from billions of tons of ores.
Replacing all U.S. coal and gas electricity generation with WSB – plus gasoline vehicles and gas stoves and furnaces – would require tens of thousands of wind turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of battery modules for vehicles and backup electricity storage, and thousands of miles of new transmission lines. Has BlackRock calculated the ore body and mining requirements for that? For a global transition?
All those turbines, panels, modules, transmission lines, mines, processing plants, and factories have to be located somewhere. Have the ESG potentates determined in whose backyards they will go? (Probably not Larry Fink’s or John Kerry’s.) Have they assessed the impacts on scenery, habitats, and wildlife? the air and water pollution from the mines and other operations? Did those operations get ESG scores?
Social justice. ESG theology holds that the poor and people of color suffer most from climate change. In reality, they benefit most from having abundant, reliable, affordable fuels and electricity – for cars, jobs, modern homes, cooking, heat, and air conditioning. The poor and people of color are not faring all that well in Britain and Europe, where the “transition to green energy” is well underway.
Over seven million British households have fallen into “fuel poverty” this winter, and special “warm rooms” have been set up to help people survive freezing weather. Recent headlines warn that Britain could have nationwide blackouts and extensive factory shutdowns and layoffs this winter. In Germany, families are stocking up on candles, so that they can at least read while they shiver in their homes.
Developing countries desperately need dependable, affordable electricity to create jobs, lift families out of poverty, modernize homes, schools, and hospitals, provide clean water, and replace wood and animal dung for cooking and heating. Even today, millions of parents and children die from respiratory and intestinal diseases that are unheard of in wealthy countries.
ESG scoring ignores all of this, actively stymies investment in fossil fuel power plants in Africa and other countries, and attempts to limit financing to wind and solar energy and whatever jobs and living standards this limited, weather-dependent energy can support. That’s hardly ethical or socially responsible.
Governance of corporate and societal affairs. ESG activists and financial institutions coopt and collude with corporate, federal, state, and local governments to serve the climate crisis agenda, and drive investment out of fossil fuel endeavors and into “renewable” energy. In essence, this is fascism, an economic system in which government doesn’t own the means of production but controls them through laws, policies, and arrangements with financial institutions, corporations, activists, media, and academia.
Equally troublesome, ESG inevitably results in modern industrialized nations de-developing, as their factories and jobs migrate to China, India, and other countries that are not obligated under climate agreements to reduce their coal and natural gas use anytime soon, have no intention of doing so and are burning record amounts of coal to ensure reliable and affordable electricity.
This also raises disturbing national security concerns, as the United States and its allies become ever more dependent on China and Chinese-controlled supply chains for wind, solar, battery, transformer, communication, computing, healthcare, and even defense/weaponry raw materials and technologies.
ESG advocates minimize these concerns, even as they ignore how soaring raw material demands under Net Zero plans would trigger skyrocketing prices for increasingly scarce commodities, and thus imperil the economies of nations across the globe.
The words scam and fraud come to mind. But an even better term is Shanghaied: using trickery, intimidation, or violence to force someone to serve your navy ... or company. In this case, ESG pressures are forcing investors, companies, and countries to serve the interest of China’s government and corporate sectors, which control supply chains and manufacturing for technologies of every description, especially in the energy sector.
This Christmas or Hanukkah, let’s all give the gift of wise, honest, accurate, and insightful Environmental, Social, and Governance principles to our friends, relatives, and financial institutions.
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It is Fossil Fuels that Keep Us Warm and Secure During Winter Months
As a historic bomb cyclone ravages much of the country, this extreme weather event has killed at least 20 people and put travel at a standstill.
And it doesn’t help those in distress –or without power – feel secure when many in the media fear-monger about climate change correlating with winter weather.
More reassuringly, however, conditions aren’t worse. Why? Continued reliance on fossil fuels keeps us warm and provides energy security.
Much to the Biden administration’s dismay, net zero policies will make extreme winter events difficult to weather.
The North American Reliability Corporation (NERC) issued its 2022-2023 Winter Reliability Assessment, warning, “The capacity of the natural gas transportation infrastructure could be constrained when cold temperatures cause peak demand for both electricity generation and consumer space-heating needs. Potential constraints on the fuel delivery systems and limited inventory of liquid fuels may exacerbate the risks for fuel-based generator outages and output reductions that result in energy emergencies during extreme weather.”
Per the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA)’s, the daily electricity generation mix map shows consumers are using natural gas (39%), coal (24%), and nuclear (16%). Where do solar and wind fall? At a paltry two percent and seven percent, respectively.
In 2020, fossil fuels accounted for 80% of U.S. energy consumption and 80% of energy production.
In 2018, the Department of Energy (DOE) explained continued reliance on oil, coal, and gas keeps Americans thriving and warm during winter months: “This increased demand requires a steady and reliable energy supply, and fossil fuels play an important role in meeting that demand…This need for more heating and electricity can put a strain on the electric grid—especially during extreme weather events. But, fossil fuels provide a stable source of power generation to keep the grid up and running.”
With Winter Storm Elliott plaguing at least 60% of the U.S., our electric grid is vulnerable if we move away from fossil fuels.
The White House desires an “economy-wide” transition to faulty renewables like solar and wind by 2050.
As of this writing, 13 states comprising the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast–including Virginia–are currently at risk of rolling blackouts this past holiday week. Ironically, many of the states affected belong to the flawed carbon market and 11-member Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) that has encouraged going net-zero.
But don’t be surprised to see Biden and company double down on net-zero.
Coupled with this is a push to phase out gas-powered cars by arbitrary deadlines to push Americans to an entirely electric vehicle fleet.
Imagine driving in atrocious winter weather in an electric vehicle–unreliable vehicles forced on consumers and mandated by the government (federal or state).
During a January 2022 winter storm that paralyzed drivers on I-95 in Virginia, Washington Post columnist Charles Lane reminded readers that an entirely EV fleet would have made that situation more dire.
Lane observed, “If everyone had been driving electric vehicles, this mess could well have been worse.”
“All else being equal, though, cars and trucks with internal combustion engines (ICE) would have the advantage in coping with a sudden challenge such as the I-95 fiasco. It is much easier to rehabilitate a disabled ICE vehicle. Rescuers can deliver gallons of gas in convenient jugs; gas stations are still far more numerous than EV charging stations; and ICE car batteries can be jump-started in minutes. Absent some breakthrough in mobile charging technology, out-of-juice EVs in out-of-the-way places will need a tow. If Monday’s nightmare had been an all-electric affair, they might have littered the highway for miles,” he added.
He’s correct.
Naturally, climate alarmists are blaming arctic warming for these cold blasts.
A Washington Post headline reads, “Scientists say Arctic warming could be to blame for blasts of extreme cold.” The tagline added, “Research suggests that climate change is altering the jet stream, pushing frigid air down to southern climes more frequently. But the scientific jury is still out.”
Ryan Maue, meteorologist and former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) chief scientist under the Trump administration, tweeted, “Climate change doesn't make nasty winter storms or cold more frequent.”
Michael Shellenberger, environmentalist and author of Apocalypse Never, observed in his Substack newsletter, “In other words, the underlying reason for the electricity emergency is the lack of natural gas, nuclear, and coal, which can provide reliable electricity in all weather conditions, unlike solar panels and wind turbines. It’s true that solar panels and wind turbines can still operate in cold weather. There is often still sunlight and wind when it is cold. Snow can be brushed off of solar panels, and it is possible to de-ice frozen wind turbines. But the sun often doesn’t shine during the hours people most need electricity and wind is not reliable enough to provide electricity during the winter.”
What’s the lesson here? Let's not bite the hand that feeds us.
There’s no practical reason to trade reliable, cheap, fossil fuels and nuclear energy for more costly and unreliable energy sources.
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Iced out! Furious Tesla owners share videos of their cars failing to work in harsh winter snowstorm as arctic temperatures freeze doors shut
Furious Tesla owners have complained about being locked out of their car after their door handles froze shut during a massive winter storm in Canada and the US.
Rachel Modestino, a meteorologist from Ontario, was unable to get into her sleek black Tesla when her door latch wouldn't budge on December 23 when temperatures hit a low of five degrees Fahrenheit.
Modestino posted a now-viral video with more than 10.1 million views of her struggle as the car was partially covered in ice.
'Bet ya didn’t think of ice in the Tesla design,' Modestino wrote in the Tweet.
Modestino was quickly met with Tesla critics coming to her aid to complain about her problem while others offered her advice on how to open her car, including using an app on her phone that will unlatch the door for her.
'You shouldn't need to use Twitter to learn how to use your expensive car,' one person wrote.
'You shouldn't need a car cover to get into your expensive car. Every other car company has had this figured out for decades but people just keep making excuses for Tesla because they're in the cult of Elon. '
The meteorologist responded to the contentious anti-Elon Musk and Tesla thread to clarify she was simply showing off her dilemma rather than critiquing Musk.
'OKAY, this went off... Not meant to dig Elon (I love my car),' Modestino wrote. 'Only tweeted because I thought it was a silly flaw for the price.
'I learnt: unlatch capability, defrost longer, be less gentle with your 2nd baby & car covers. Ty for the help, be kind, Merry Christmas.'
Meanwhile, other people took an aim at criticizing Modestino for paying nearly $50,000 for a car but not having a garage to put it in.
'If you have a tesla you should have enough money to have it in a garage,' one person wrote.
To which Modestino responded: 'Okay but I don’t.'
Meanwhile, Modestino wasn't the only Tesla owner struggling with her vehicle during the Christmas holiday.
Domenick Nati, 44, Tesla owner in Virginia, was forced to cancel his Christmas plans with his son after his electric vehicle failed to charge during the winter storm.
Nati told Business Insider how he plugged his Tesla S into a supercharger in Lynchburg on Friday as temperatures hovered below 20 degrees Fahrenheit.
But as the hours went by, the percentage charge dipped as the temperature got lower, before the car stopped charging altogether.
He then tried again on Christmas Eve, but after a few hours of nothing happening, he decided to abandon his car at the lot and get a ride home.
Nati tried to charge his Tesla S at home, but had no luck there either.
So he went back out on Christmas Eve, and posted a video to TikTok of his efforts to get the car to charge.
Nati said he tried to contact Tesla for help, but did not receive an answer.
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28 December, 2022
Climate sensitivity, agricultural productivity and the social cost of carbon in FUND
I have reproduced below only the concluding section of the academic journal article, as the careful statistics would be impenetrable to most readers here. Basically, the article is a complex "proof" of the statement that the likely benfits of global warming outweigh the costs. Global warming is good for us!
By Kevin D. Dayaratna, Ross McKitrick & Patrick J. Michaels
Environmental Economics and Policy Studies volume 22, pages 433–448 (2020
Discussion: IAMs as if–then statements
IAMs cannot provide a single, canonical social cost of carbon. As Weyant (2017) notes, they are best thought of as elaborate “if–then” statements. Researchers must decide on their preferred premises, and the IAMs provide the implied SCC range. As shown herein, user judgment is unavoidable, and a researcher prescribing an SCC for policy purposes must be able to defend the “if” statements that give rise to it.
It is already well known that if the appropriate discount rate is 5% or higher, then the SCC will be relatively small compared to 2.5% or 3% cases. We do not propose to resolve herein the ethical arguments over time preference; instead, we note that once climate sensitivity is changed to an empirically constrained distribution, the choice of discount rate matters a lot less.
While some studies have considered ranges of ECS values, the IAM literature as a whole has been wedded to climate model-based distributions with modal values around 3 °C and thick upper tails extending above 6 °C. However, there is now a substantial climatological literature showing that distributions with modal values below 2 °C and small upper tails match historical (post-1850) data better. The debate over which distribution best describes the real climate system must ultimately be resolved within the climatology literature, but economists need to be aware that it exists and the outcome has significant ramifications for SCC estimates. If ECS values like those estimated in Lewis and Curry (2018) turn out to be approximately correct, then the FUND model indicates that CO2 is for all practical purposes not a negative global externality through mid-century. Even if we consider possible catastrophic tipping points, the possibility of reaching such a threshold any time in the next 1000 years diminishes substantially.
IAM practitioners should therefore study the empirically constrained ECS estimates rather than relying exclusively on model-derived distributions. Kiehl (2007) noted the puzzle that climate models can differ in their implied ECS by a factor of 3 yet all fit the historical surface temperature record equally well. One of the compensating parameterizations emphasized by Lewis and Curry (2018) is aerosol cooling: a model with high ECS paired with strong aerosol cooling fits the surface trend as well as one with low ECS and weak aerosol cooling. The Lewis and Curry (2018) empirical ECS distribution is conditioned on the IPCC’s updated estimates of observed historical aerosol forcing, lending it increased credibility. Specifically, the IPCC’s preferred estimate of aerosol forcing (cooling) has declined over time, which leads to a lower preferred ECS estimate in empirical energy balance models. The methodology of Christy and McNider (2017) provides an independent and model-free check on this approach. Also, while climate models with high ECS values can be made to fit the surface warming trend, they have shown demonstrably excess warming elsewhere, especially in the troposphere over the tropics (Fu et al. 2011; McKitrick and Christy 2018). We therefore believe that the LC18 results in Table 2 are more credible than the ones conditioned on the Roe–Baker distribution.
Another if–then statement concerns CO2 fertilization of agriculture. If adding CO2 to the air has no effect on plant growth, then the assumption in DICE and PAGE that the effect is non-existent is appropriate. However, there is overwhelming evidence that CO2 increases do have a beneficial effect on plant growth, so models that fail to take these benefits into account overstate the SCC. Indeed, the initial studies on which the FUND parameterizations were based cautioned against ignoring this line of benefit (Kane et al. 1992; Tsigas et al. 1997). The recent literature on global greening and the response of agricultural crops to enhanced CO2 availability suggests that the productivity boost is likely stronger than that parameterized in FUND. If the effect is 30% stronger, and if the Lewis and Curry ECS distribution is valid, then the mean social cost of carbon is negative even at discount rates as low as 2.5% at least through mid-century.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10018-020-00263-w
**********************************************GLOBAL COOLING?
It's certainly a lot more harmful than global warming
Parts of the US brace for another 12 inches of snow as a 'ferocious' winter storm has left at least 60 dead with 'hospitals full of bodies' and more frozen corpses feared.
In Buffalo, 50 inches of snow have been measured and emergency services have gone 'car to car' searching for survivors.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz described the blizzard as 'the worst storm probably in our lifetime', warning: 'This is not the end yet.'
He added: 'We've had so many bodies that various hospitals are full and we're just having to go through and determine if the individuals have died from a blizzard-related death.'
In New York state, authorities have described ferocious conditions, particularly in Buffalo, with hours-long whiteouts.
People have reportedly died from a host of causes as a result of the extreme weather, such as a woman from Wisconsin who fell through river ice.
In Niagara County, New York, a 27-year-old man suffered carbon monoxide poisoning after snow blocked his furnace, in Ohio, a utility worker was electrocuted, and Kansas saw a deadly homeless camp fire.
A falling branch killed a Vermont resident, while least six people have been killed in car crashes in Missouri, Kentucky and Oklahoma.
Some have died from cardiac stress while shovelling snow, others when emergency crews could not respond in time to medical crises.
The National Weather Service said Monday that up to twelve more inches of snow could fall in some areas today.
Buffalo mayor Byron Brown described the heartbreaking task of retrieving storm victims from cars, homes and streets.
'Our police officers are human. It is painful to find members of your community that are deceased,' the mayor said, adding the blizzard's victims 'were trying to walk out during storm conditions, got disoriented and passed away out in the street'.
At least 60 lives have been lost in weather-related incidents nationwide, according to an NBC News tally.
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NYC Says New Electric Garbage Trucks Are No Match for Wicked New England Weather
As the Buffalo, New York, region digs out following a historic snowstorm, lessons are coming in from across the state suggesting that despite advancements in electric vehicles, the future of snow removal is probably diesel.
New York City has set a goal of transforming its fleet of municipal vehicles to be fully electric by 2040, but the 2022 blizzard is sending a reminder that electric vehicles can’t yet do every job.
The commissioner of the New York Department of Sanitation, Jessica Tish, said during a City Council hearing last month that the city’s new electric garbage trucks will not be able to keep up with their diesel predecessors in their secondary function as snowplows.
“In our test of the non-diesel rear-loaders, we found that they could not plow the snow effectively,” Ms. Tish said. “They basically conked out after four hours — we need them to go 12 hours.”
The city has ordered just seven such electric garbage trucks — they cost just more than $500,000 each — a small fraction of the sanitation department’s 2,100 garbage trucks and 6,000 total vehicles. Under the city’s long-range plan to combat climate change, the council has ordered that the vast majority of those vehicles be “clean” energy versions by 2035, with a total conversion to electric vehicles by 2040.
According to the department’s tests, the electric garbage trucks are only able to operate for about four hours when plowing snow, while diesel trucks are able to plow for around 12 to 24 hours at a time.
“Given the current state of the technology, I don’t see today a path forward to fully electrifying the rear-loader portion of the fleet by 2040,” Ms. Tish said.
“Now, things could change, the technology could develop and advance, but I don’t want to sit here and say to you that I see it in my crystal ball today,” she said.
While the Niagara Frontier Transportation Authority, the public transit authority for the Buffalo region, put into use its first electric buses in 2022, neither the Nickel City nor Erie County has announced similar plans.
The reason likely boils down to some of the limitations of electric vehicles — at least in their current state. Despite general advancements in the technology, they underperform in cold weather.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which is overseen by the Department of Energy, predicts that heavy electric vehicles will reach “total-cost-of-driving parity with conventional diesel vehicles by 2035.” The laboratory, however, acknowledges that these predictions are subject to change as electric vehicle technology advances and the cost of fossil fuels fluctuates.
The lab says its predictions are “sensitive to technology improvement trajectories, adoption decision-making, and uncertain assumptions about future freight demand, logistics, and vehicle use.”
What the prediction of “total-cost-of-driving parity” doesn’t address, though, are certain applications for heavy vehicles, like snow removal, which appear unlikely to go electric for the foreseeable future.
Part of the problem is that the range and reliability of electric vehicles suffer in cold temperatures, in part because of the chemistry of the batteries and in part because of the demands of heating the cabin and defrosting windows.
While New York City’s sanitation department found that its heavy electric trucks could only run for about a third of the time of the diesel trucks, all electric vehicles seem to suffer performance-wise in the cold.
A Consumer Reports test of two electric vehicles from 2019 found that electric vehicles had about half of their estimated range in temperatures between 0° F and 10° F. Consumer Reports tested a Tesla Model 3 and a Nissan Leaf in such conditions and found that they used 121 miles and 141 miles of their estimated ranges, respectively, to complete a 64-mile trip.
A senior analyst at the automotive research firm Navigant, Sam Abuelsamid, told Consumer Reports that range reductions in electric vehicles are “largely a factor of increased electrical loads on the battery.”
“Breathing means condensation on cold glass, which requires use of electric defoggers,” Mr. Abuelsamid said. “Longer nights mean more use of headlights. And cold tires, snow, and slush will increase rolling resistance, all of which will reduce range.”
With the shorter range of electric vehicles and the need for specialized chargers, like those used for New York City’s electric garbage trucks, charging could present another challenge for electric plows.
The New York State Thruway Authority, which is responsible for maintaining about 570 miles of thruways across four divisions — New York, Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo — could run into issues with charging its fleet, were it to be electrified.
The authority operates 11 tow plows, 260 large plows, and 142 small plows. Currently, there are no plans to electrify the fleet.
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Austraia: Fossil-fuel enmity cutting back investment in natural gas mining
Future gas and LNG projects valued at $32bn are under threat of having investment stalled or pulled under the Albanese government’s “hostile attitude to Australia’s resources sector” after the Gina Rinehart-backed Senex paused its $1bn Surat Basin expansion project.
Up to 12 gas projects listed in the government’s resources and energy major projects investment pipeline report on Monday are considered to be facing “significant uncertainty” following the government’s crackdown on gas companies.
Amid industry concerns over the government’s one-year $12-a-gigajoule gas price cap, mandatory code of conduct on gas producers and tougher environmental approval regulations, there are rising fears that other companies could suspend projects.
Senex’s decision to halt work on its coal seam gas projects is the latest hit to Queensland’s resources industry, where coalminers Glencore and BHP have shelved or frozen investment amid a running brawl with the state’s Labor government over a shock royalty hike announced in its July budget.
Opposition resources spokeswoman Susan McDonald said “more than $15bn in future east coast gas projects are under a cloud of uncertainty due to Labor’s hostile attitude towards Australia’s energy resources sector”.
Nine projects planned to supply east coast domestic gas, and another three LNG projects that could supply gas to the east coast, are valued at $32bn.
Senex, jointly owned by POSCO and Ms Rinehart’s Hancock Energy after they sealed a $900m takeover of the ASX-listed company in March, announced the $1bn coal seam expansion project four months ago around the same time the federal government was drafting its plans to combat high domestic gas prices.
The coal seam expansion was aimed at pumping more gas into the domestic market by lifting its Atlas project to 60 petajoules within two years.
Senex has left open the possibility of returning to the $1bn expansion if the federal government rethinks its gas industry plans. However, it has paused recruitment and spending on long lead items “pending the outcome of the Albanese government’s mandatory code of conduct consultation process” on February 7.
A spokesman for Resources Minister Madeleine King said the government was “confident Senex will continue to engage constructively with the government as they design and implement the gas code of conduct”. He said the government’s gas price cap applied only to existing projects and not “new projects like Atlas”.
“The government wants to design a measure that does not have a chilling effect on investment, and ensures investment continues to flow to new products,” Ms King’s spokesman said.
“The gas code of conduct, once it enters into force, is not about stripping profits off producers. It’s about ensuring that where gas enters the domestic market, Australian households and businesses are not subject to the exponentially skyrocketing prices that we have seen throughout the course of this year. “That’s not on, and the code will prevent those runaway prices that we have seen previously.”
Acting Treasurer Katy Gallagher this week authorised the gas price cap to begin from Friday, with the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission tasked with “closely monitoring” the east coast gas market and enforcing the cap.
Senator Gallagher said without capping gas and coal prices, “the average family would be paying $230 more on their electricity bill next year”.
Senator McDonald said the government was “joining forces with the Greens to implement unprecedented price controls, hand over more power to unions, increase environmental red-tape and fund anti-mining lawfare groups”.
“Coal and gas alone are forecast to earn Australia $223bn but under Labor’s war on conventional energy commodities, 18 coal and gas projects have been reopened for environmental assessment after already receiving approval, and 43 oil and gas projects have been required to redo their consultation,” Senator McDonald said.
“Our regional partners, like Japan and Korea, will be very concerned about Australia’s approach to providing the energy commodities they need to power their economies. All this sends strong signals to international companies that they are not welcome here, so we can expect them to consider halting their investment.”
Liberal Senator Paul Scarr says “basic economics” is all it takes to realise imposing gas price caps at “less than… the market-prevailing price” will create a shortage of investment and, consequently, energy reserve. “It’s an investment-killing concoction,” Mr Scarr told Sky News host Gary Hardgrave. “The consequences are disastrous, especially More
In the government’s major projects report, prepared before the national cabinet slapped a $125-a-tonne price cap on coal, 33 coal projects were stalled in the feasibility stage as lenders and investors, led by pension and equity funds, pull finance for thermal coal projects.
Global mining giant Glencore earlier this month pulled the plug on plans to build its $2bn Valeria thermal coalmine, citing Queensland’s royalty rate increase as a major cause. BHP is also considering the impact of the royalty rate hikes on the life of its Queensland coal operations.
The mining giant has already said it will not invest in Queensland growth projects while the windfall royalty rates are in place, and set aside $US750m in its annual financial accounts for potential early closure and rehabilitation costs.
Australian Petroleum Production & Exploration Association chief executive Samantha McCulloch said the Senex decision highlighted risks involved with the Albanese government’s gas market intervention.
“No new gas supply means no downward pressure on prices and an increased risk of future gas shortages,” Ms McCulloch said.
“Without this kind of investment, Australia misses out on crucial new gas supply to ease east coast energy system pressures as well as substantial economic returns including hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars of local investment in regional communities.”
Opposition treasury spokesman Angus Taylor said market interventions were “adding to red tape and complexity for investors both domestically and abroad”.
“The billions of dollars of projects on hold or under question shows that when we are in a global race for capital, more regulation leads to less investment, which means fewer jobs, less work for small businesses and a slower economy,” Mr Taylor said.
After the Office of the Chief Economist on Monday revealed that resources and energy export earnings will fall by $68bn in 2023-24, down from a record $459bn this financial year, Mr Taylor said it was imperative for the budget bottom line to avoid future slides.
“This makes it all the more alarming that the government is cutting funding support for our resources sector and making extreme interventions that energy experts are warning will cool investment and decrease supply,” he said.
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23 December, 2022
More on the screech by Princetown climate missionaries
Lord Monckton has written a reply to the juveniles at the Princetonian
On climate change, as on all else, hear both sides
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, special to The Daily Princetonian
The English-speaking jurisdictions recognize just two principles of natural law. One of these is audiatur et altera pars: let both sides be heard. On the climate question, though, the promoters of the official narrative are strikingly – and revealingly – intolerant of dissent.
Recently, in this column, two climate campaigners were allowed to attack three eminent Princeton-bred professors, the late Fred Singer, the late Fred Seitz and Professor Will Happer. I had the honor to know Professor Fred Singer, an exceptional rocket scientist and founder of the U.S. Satellite Weather Service. I had the further honor of working with him on a paper discussing the intersection between chaos theory and climate prediction. It was one of the last papers he wrote.
And I have the honor to know Will Happer, a formidable radiation physicist, exceptionally well qualified to write about the influence of heteroatomic molecules on global temperature. Will has published a string of distinguished papers on the subject in recent years.
The climate fanatics described the three professors as having used Princeton’s “name and prestige” to “open doors, grab headlines, mislead the public and grant legitimacy to their climate-denial claims … helping put us on the pathway to today’s existential global crisis”. Oh, pur-leaze!
The editors of this journal should in future eschew such hate-speech terms as “climate denial” or “denier” or “denialist”. None of the three professors denies that there is a climate, or even that we are capable of influencing it. Fred Singer’s paper on chaos theory pointed out that, precisely because the climate behaves as a mathematically-chaotic system, even a small perturbation, whether natural or anthropogenic, might cause unforeseeable effects. But it is the property of a chaotic object that, unless the initial conditions are known to a precision that is and will aye be unattainable in climate, the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible. In this, Professor Singer swam in the mainstream: IPCC says the same.
Will Happer’s recent detailed paper studying the radiative effects of greenhouse-gas enrichment, far from “climate denial”, powerfully endorsed the conclusion that that enrichment – beneficial though it is for the net primary productivity of plants (their total global green biomass has increased by 15-30% in recent decades thanks to CO2 fertilization detectable from space as chlorophyll fluorescence) – will cause about 2 degrees’ global warming per doubling of concentration, a value within the official uncertainty interval.
All three professors were and are right to point out that the mildly warmer worldwide weather that is occurring does not and will not pose any “global existential threat”. Such childish, anti-scientific slogans, bandied about by the extremist classes, are devoid of meaning and should be forsworn forthwith and for aye. The OFDA/CRED international disaster database shows that, despite a tripling of global population, weather-related deaths have plummeted throughout the past 100 years. And a string of learned papers in the medical journal The Lancet establishes that in all regions deaths from cold outstrip deaths from heat tenfold.
Finally, let us hear no more nonsense about such towering professors as these “preventing climate action”. For such action would expensively do far more harm than good. Since 1990 our influence on climate has increased linearly at 1 unit per decade, driving 0.4 degrees’ warming. Even if the whole world were to move linearly to net zero emissions by 2050, only half the next unit would be abated by then, preventing just 0.2 degrees’ warming.
The cost of global net zero, according to McKinsey Consulting, will be $275 trillion in capex alone. Even ignoring opex, typically at least twice capex, and even allowing for no price increases in the desperately scarce techno-metals needed to reach net zero (one would need 67,000 years’ worth of the entire 2019 global annual production of vanadium, for instance, so good luck with that), each $1 billion spent on attempted mitigation would prevent less than a millionth of a degree of future warming. Value for money it isn’t. And the climate won’t notice either way.
Like it or not, it is legitimate for men of learning gently to correct the moralizing screechers by drawing their attention to elementary, verifiable facts such as these. As it is, only the West is making any attempt to attain net zero. But the net effect of our supererogatory sacrifice of our own workers’ jobs is to price our energy-intensive manufacturing industries out to far Eastern nations whose emissions per unit of production are considerably above ours. Climate campaigners, then, are adding to the very non-problem they are clamoring to solve. Making things in China rather than Chattanooga is good for Communism but bad for the planet.
So let the skeptical scientists be fairly heard, and let us cease to turn universities like Princeton into mere pietistic indoctrinators. Learning advances not by cloying “consensus”, roundly and rightly rejected by Aristotle 4500 years ago, but by diligent research, free publication and open debate. It is only those who know they would lose a debate who seek to silence their opponents. The hysterical malevolence of the screaming campaigners shows the world they know full well that they would lose. Indeed, they have already lost.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, a Cambridge alumnus and former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, is the author of two dozen learned papers on climate sensitivity and mitigation economics.
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Antarctica's emperor penguins could be extinct by 2100 – and other species may follow if we don't act
And penguins might fly
Greater conservation efforts are needed to protect Antarctic ecosystems, and the populations of up to 97% of land-based Antarctic species could decline by 2100 if we don’t change tack, our new research has found.
The study, published today, also found just US$23 million per year would be enough to implement ten key strategies to reduce threats to Antarctica’s biodiversity.
This relatively small sum would benefit up to 84% of terrestrial bird, mammal, and plant groups.
We identified climate change as the biggest threat to Antarctica’s unique plant and animal species. Limiting global warming is the most effective way to secure their future.
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New Zealand's amended cow burp tax plans still stink, say farmers
New Zealand's government has amended controversial plans to tax the greenhouse gas emissions from farm animals. ©AFP
Wellington (AFP) - New Zealand's government on Wednesday outlined changes to controversial plans to tax the farts and burps of livestock, but a leading farmers group said it was still opposed to the emissions reduction scheme.
New Zealand is planning a "world first" levy on emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, produced by the nation's six million cows and 26 million sheep as a step towards tackling climate change.
Under the proposed scheme, farmers would have to pay for gas emissions from their animals.
The plans have caused uproar in New Zealand's agricultural community and sparked nationwide protests.
Farmers have demanded Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern's centre-left government ditch the tax, which they warn will make food more costly and could put livelihoods at risk.
The changes outlined Wednesday include allowing farmers to use on-farm forestry to offset their carbon emissions, and a promise to keep emissions pricing low.
"Our shared goal is supporting farmers to grow their exports, reduce emissions, and maintain our agricultural sector's international competitive edge," Ardern said in a statement.
"With or without the government's proposals, New Zealand needs to be at the front of the queue to stay competitive in a market that is demanding sustainably produced products," she warned.
Ardern hopes her cabinet will make a final decision on pricing for the agricultural emissions scheme in early 2023 with a five-year pricing scheme due to start from 2025.
The head of New Zealand's leading agriculture advocacy group said the amended plans still stink and criticised the government's "unrealistic timelines".
"Everyone else is talking about food security and working with farmers to develop practical on-farm solutions," Andrew Hoggard, president of New Zealand's Federated Farmers, said in a statement.
"Only New Zealand is taking the punitive step of taxing efficient, unsubsidised food production, even if it comes at huge costs."
While Ardern wants "an emission reduction system set up that lasts", Hoggard accused her government of making "vague promises of an obscure future review with unknown terms of reference".
"The response is so high level, we may not be able to clearly understand the detail until we actually see it when introduced as legislation next year," he warned.
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Green Britain: Warm banks help thousands survive cold snap as millions of households fall into fuel poverty
Even with government support, some 6.7 million UK households are now in fuel poverty
Until a month ago, Julie, a single mother with three children, was just about making ends meet. But as the UK experiences its first cold spell of the winter, she found herself turning to her local community hub in south London for help.
Most days after doing the school run she comes to the Oasis Centre, a “social living room” set up in the capital to help those struggling with their food and fuel bills. “I’ve never known my flat to be this cold,” she said.
With a weather front this week bringing widespread snow and temperatures as low as -15C to the UK, local councils and charities across the country are providing so-called “warmth banks” to help families caught in a growing cost of living crisis.
“Everyone who comes will see it through their own lens. We don’t call it a warm centre because it’s not just a warm centre,” said Steve Chalke, a Baptist minister who founded the Oasis Trust in 1985. The charity now operates in 36 communities across the UK and in the last six months it has given away over one hundred tons of food.
With the war in Ukraine causing a sharp increase in energy prices, the UK government has moved to cushion the impact on families. In October, the Treasury launched an energy support scheme that provided a one-off £400 energy discount for all households and will cap energy bills for typical households at £2,500 this winter, rising to £3,000 in April.
However, for many, these measures are not enough. Even with government support, some 6.7mn UK households are now in fuel poverty, according to estimates from National Energy Action, a pressure group — 2.2mn more than a year ago.
https://www.ft.com/content/6a7be4e3-d35f-419d-9dc4-2cab788fc06e
***************************************22 December, 2022
Princeton must face its legacy of educating climate deniers
I am not sure that the agonized cry (below) from two climate activists is worth noting here but some of my fellow climate realists have noted it so I thought I should say something about it.
The Daily Princetonian is a student newspaper so is expected to be unscholarly but this particular rag is well-produced and apparently attracts some attention.
But its unscholarly nature is manifest nonetheless. The authors take the Torquemada-like approach of making clear that they have the unquestionable truth and heretics need only to be attacked, not taken seriously.
So they speak as if global warming were a revealed religion that needs no defence. Not the slightest attempt to show why the global warming critics are wrong is attempted. "Climate" has become a new religion in possession of unquestionable revealed truth.
Like all religion, however it has its competitors. The religion that seems to be getting all the press today is trangenderism, with rather frightful penalties sometimes imposed on doubters. The climate warriors are in other words now rather old hat, a bit like the Episcopalians, so I think the latest sermon will bore unbelievers and do nothing more
“Princeton will have the most significant impact on the climate crisis through the scholarship we generate and the people we educate,” University President Christopher L. Eisgruber ’83 was quoted as saying in Princeton’s announcement that the school would divest from 90 fossil fuel companies.
Over the past decade, Eisgruber has repeated versions of this sentiment many times to discredit divestment activists and justify Princeton’s refusal to disentangle itself from the fossil fuel industry.
It’s true that the University goes out of its way to position itself as a climate leader; indeed, Princeton has educated many who have contributed to the scientific consensus on the climate crisis and are fighting for a liveable planet. But if the University wants to rest its climate legacy on those alumni that have fought for the climate, we also have to reckon with the alumni that have advanced climate denial.
We have already written about the relationship the University has with family foundations determined to thwart climate action, including the Bradleys, Scaifes, and Davises. Though we do not know the extent of the Tiger Dark Money web, we know that there are high-profile Princeton alumni whose careers have undermined climate policy since the 1970s, including through these foundations. However, there’s more to the picture. Three people who bear responsibility for the planet being set to surpass 1.5 degrees are Fred Singer GS ’48, Frederick Seitz GS ’34, and William Happer GS ’64, all graduate school alumni of Princeton. Despite being born decades apart, their paths intersected, and together, they helped bring us to this point of existential crisis.
Singer and Seitz are identified by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their book, “Merchants of Doubt,” as two of the most influential and effective climate deniers in the world. Singer undermined the Kyoto Protocol and its ratification by the U.S., effectively setting back American climate policy by decades. He also worked closely with the Heartland Institute, a conservative, industry-funded think tank, publishing reports that were sent to teachers and continue to circulate widely, misleading enough to create a new generation of climate crisis deniers. One of Singer’s works, “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate,” had a foreword written by Seitz.
Seitz founded the George C. Marshall Institute in 1984 to defend President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” initiative but a few years later, his focus shifted to climate change denial. In addition to being funded by the fossil fuel industry, the Institute took money from the tobacco industry to deny the dangers of smoking. Despite Seitz having been president of the influential and prestigious National Academy of Sciences (NAS), NAS published a clarification to unequivocally disavow Seitz’s climate denial, stating that the notorious Oregon petition, which Seitz helped organize, deliberately attempted to undermine support for the Kyoto Protocol. The George C. Marshall Institute closed in 2015 and was replaced by the CO2 Coalition, co-founded by Happer.
Happer, a Princeton alum and professor, has made a career out of climate denial. He was director of the Office of Energy Research under President George H.W. Bush. From 1987 to 1990 he served as Chairman of JASON, a group of scientists who advise the government on energy policy issues. Most recently, he served on President Donald Trump’s National Security Council to block efforts to curb global warming and ensure the United States left the Paris Agreement. In 2015, as Seitz’s George C. Marshall Institute folded, Happer co-founded the CO2 Coalition to take over its work and “advocate for carbon dioxide.” With a Princeton banner behind him, Happer said on CNN in 2017, “There’s this myth that’s developed around carbon dioxide that it’s a pollutant, but you and I both exhale carbon dioxide with every breath.”
To understand the power of Happer’s work in blocking climate action, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito ’72 promoted Happer’s disinformation in another 2017 speech, stating, “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. Carbon dioxide is not harmful to ordinary things, to human beings, or to animals, or to plants. It’s actually needed for plant growth. All of us are exhaling carbon dioxide right now. So, if it’s a pollutant, we’re all polluting.”
In 2015, employees at Greenpeace — an environmentalist group that uses “non-violent creative action” — posed as representatives of a Middle Eastern Oil Company and had Happer agree to write a paper espousing the benefits of oil and gas and downplaying the impacts of CO2 emissions. Happer agreed to write the paper as a professor emeritus at Princeton without disclosing the source of funding. He advised the undercover employees that the paper would not pass peer review and so proposed alternative publishing options. Happer remains a Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, allowing him to continue to use his professional title.
Happer, Seitz, and Singer are not just the products of a Princeton education; they have actively taken advantage of their associations with Princeton, using its name and prestige to open doors, grab headlines, mislead the public, and grant legitimacy to their climate denial claims. For years, they intentionally discredited serious climate scientists and prevented climate action, helping put us on the pathway to today’s existential global crisis.
If Princeton wants to trumpet its alumni and faculty who champion climate solutions, then it must also reckon with the loss and damage caused by its own alumni and faculty.
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Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than estimated
Isn't a new model a wonderful thing? Sure beats observation of actual reality
Greenland's glaciers are melting 100 times faster than previously calculated, according to a new model that takes into account the unique interaction between ice and water at the island’s fjords.
The new mathematical representation of glacial melt factors in the latest observations of how ice gets eaten away from the stark vertical faces at the ends of glaciers in GGreenland. Previously, scientists used models developed in Antarctica, where glacial tongues float on top of seawater — a very different arrangement.
"For years, people took the melt rate model for Antarctic floating glaciers and applied it to Greenland's vertical glacier fronts," lead author Kirstin Schulz, a research associate in the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement. "But there is more and more evidence that the traditional approach produces too low melt rates at Greenland's vertical glacier fronts."
The researchers published their findings in September in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
Researchers already knew their Antarctica-based understanding of Arctic glaciers was not a perfect match. But it's hard to get close to the edges of Greenland's glaciers, because they're situated at the ends of fjords — long, narrow inlets of seawater flanked by high cliffs — where warm water undercuts the ice. This leads to dramatic calving events where chunks of ice the size of buildings crumble into the water with little warning, creating mini-tsunamis, according to the researchers.
Researchers led by physical oceanographer Rebecca Jackson of Rutgers University have been using robotic boats to get close to these dangerous ice cliffs and take measurements. They've done this at Alaska's LeConte Glacier as well as Greenland's Kangerlussuup Sermia. (An upcoming mission led by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin will send robotic subs to the faces of three west Greenland glaciers.) Jackon's measurements suggest that the Antarctica-based models massively underestimate Arctic glacial melt. LeConte, for example, is disappearing 100 times faster than models predicted.
The mixture of cold fresh water from the glaciers and warmer seawater drives ocean circulation near the glaciers and farther out in the ocean, meaning the melt has far-reaching implications. The Greenland ice sheet is also important for sea-level rise; Greenland ice holds enough water to raise sea levels by 20 feet (6 meters).
The new model uses the latest data from near-glacial missions along with a more realistic understanding of how the steep, cliff-like faces of the glaciers impact ice loss. The results are consistent with Jackson's findings, showing 100 times more melt than the old models predicted.
"Ocean climate model results are highly relevant for humankind to predict trends associated with climate change, so you really want to get them right," Schulz said. "This was a very important step for making climate models better."
https://www.livescience.com/greenland-glacier-melt-model ?
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EU Announces Agreement to Reform Europe’s Carbon Market, Cap Natural Gas Prices
The European Union announced on Dec. 18 a provisional agreement that reforms the bloc’s carbon market, successfully expanding a crucial component of the region’s broader green agenda.
After a 30-hour session, representatives of the 27 member states and the European Parliament agreed to apply the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) to heating, road transportation, and maritime shipping. Officials also plan to use the agreement to accelerate requirements on companies to reduce pollution, whether they produce power or manufacture steel.
The latest reforms are a part of the EU’s broader “Fit for 55” initiative to slash emissions by a minimum of 62 percent from 1990 levels by 2030. The bloc wants to reach net-zero by 2050.
“The agreement on the EU Emissions Trading System and the Social Climate Fund is a victory for the climate and for European climate policy,” Marian Jurecka, Czech minister for the environment, said in a statement. “This will allow us to meet climate objectives within the main sectors of the economy, while making sure the most vulnerable citizens and micro-enterprises are effectively supported in the climate transition.
“We can now safely say that the EU has delivered on its promises with ambitious legislation and this puts us at the forefront of fighting climate change globally.”
The European Council and the European Parliament have yet to formally endorse and adopt the agreement.
Inside the Climate Change Package
The first key measure in the comprehensive package is creating a second Emissions Trading System (ETS) for road transport, buildings, and shipping. This feature will slap a price on emissions from these sectors by 2027, although the fee could be postponed by a year if energy prices in Europe remain elevated.
Another critical change is mandating that 10,000 factories and power plants purchase permits for emissions. Experts say this will nudge businesses to install greener technologies to reduce their carbon footprints. The plan will phase out free CO2 licenses by 2034.
EU states will be forced to measure, report, and verify emissions from municipal waste incineration installations beginning in 2024. The European Commission intends to include these installations in the ETS starting in 2028.
“Installations that will benefit from free allocations will need to comply with conditionality requirements, including in the form of energy audits and for certain installations climate neutrality plans,” the report reads. “Additional transitional free allocations can be granted under certain conditions to the district heating sector in certain member states, in order to encourage investments into decarbonising that sector.”
EU leadership will finance the shift to green technologies by tapping into and increasing allowances to climate-related funds.
The first step is raising the allowance of the Innovation Fund to 575 million euros ($610 million) from the present 450 million euros ($478 million).
The Modernization Fund also will be bolstered by auctioning 2.5 percent of allowances allocated to nations that maintain a gross domestic product per capita lower than the bloc’s average. This money will be monitored to ensure it’s assigned toward climate-related efforts.
Despite the European Union recently changing its mind and labeling natural gas as green energy, “natural gas projects will in principle not be eligible for” Modernization Fund money. However, officials noted that “a transitional measure will allow the current beneficiaries of the fund to continue time-limited financing natural gas projects under certain conditions.”
Finally, the bloc intends to establish an 86.7 billion euro ($92 billion) Social Climate Fund that will help vulnerable transit users, households, and small businesses endure the cost of emissions trading. This fund would be created from 2026 to 2032, and members may be eligible as early as Jan. 1, 2026.
“Each member state would submit to the Commission a ‘social climate plan,’ containing the measures and investments they intend to undertake to cushion the impacts of the new emission trading system on vulnerable households,” the European Council noted in the announcement. “Such measures could include increasing the energy efficiency of buildings, the renovation of buildings, the decarbonization of heating and cooling in buildings and the uptake of zero-emission and low-emission mobility and transport, and measures providing direct income support in a temporary and limited manner.”
Natural Gas Price Controls
Soon after the EU unveiled the latest green agenda development, the bloc approved a measure to institute a limit on natural gas prices to mitigate the energy crisis.
The latest policy directive, which the energy ministers describe as a market correction mechanism, will be activated on two occasions. The first is if front-month gas contracts top 180 euros ($191) per megawatt hour on the benchmark Dutch Title Transfer Facility (DTTF) for three consecutive business days. The second is if the price is 35 euros higher than a reference price for liquid natural gas on international markets during the same span.
“We have succeeded in finding an important agreement that will shield citizens from skyrocketing energy prices,” said Jozef Siklea, Czech minister of industry and trade. “We will set a realistic and effective mechanism, which includes the necessary safeguards that will steer us clear from risks to security of supply and financial markets stability. Once again, we have proved that the EU is united and will not let anybody use energy as a weapon.”
The measure is scheduled to go into effect on Feb. 15, 2023.
However, not everyone is on board with these price controls.
The European Central Bank (ECB) stated that such a measure might “jeopardize financial stability in the euro area.”
“The mechanism’s current design may increase volatility and related margin calls, challenge central counterparties’ ability to manage financial risks, and may also incentivise migration from trading venues to the non-centrally cleared over-the-counter (OTC) market,” the ECB wrote in a report (pdf). “These considerations, relevant to the stability of the financial system, should be taken into account by the Council in its deliberations on the proposed regulation.”
Germany and the Netherlands also have shared concerns about potential market disruptions.
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Australia: No greenhouse gas limits for Victoria's coal-fired power plants as Supreme Court rejects challenge
Victoria's coal-fired power stations will not face new limits on how much greenhouse gas pollution they can emit, after the Supreme Court today rejected a challenge brought by an environmental group.
The plaintiff, Environment Victoria, argued the state's environmental regulator had failed to properly consider climate change law when reviewing the operating licences for the state's three coal-fired power stations.
Environment Victoria argued the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) had an obligation to impose limits on the amount of greenhouse gas pollution the plants could emit.
Victoria's Climate Change Act 2017 requires people making certain decisions to consider the effects of climate change.
But in his written decision, Justice James Gorton said he rejected Environment Victoria's argument that the EPA had failed to do so.
He found that the EPA had considered climate change when it decided not to set a target.
Community expectations 'shattered'
Environment Victoria policy and advocacy manager Bronya Lipsi said the decision showed the state's climate laws needed to be fixed.
"I think it sends a message that the Climate Change Act in Victoria is not living up to community expectations," Ms Lipski said.
"We have an expectation that our climate laws will mitigate climate change and reduce carbon pollution."
She said the decision "shattered" community expectations and Environment Victoria would consider the judgement before making a decision about whether to appeal.
In a statement, the EPA thanked the court for its decision and said it was also considering its next steps.
"We have already taken steps to strengthen our processes and ensure climate change is demonstrably considered in all our regulatory decisions," a spokesperson said.
"Scrutiny from organisations like Environment Victoria can only make us better."
Energy Australia, which owned the Yallourn power station, said it welcomed the decision.
AGL, which owns the Loy Yang A plant, and Alinta, owner of Loy Yang B, did not respond.
Plants headed for early closure
Grattan Institute energy program director Tony Wood said it would not have been possible to cheaply curb the station's greenhouse gas emissions if the court had ruled the other way.
He said Victoria's energy policy was already geared towards the early closure of the three coal-fired plants to address climate change.
"If you look at the Victorian government's most recent policy positions, before and after the most recent election, you will conclude that these power stations will all be shut down in about 10 years' time, maybe even earlier," Mr Wood said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-21/supreme-court-rules-on-victorian-coal-pollution/101796702
***************************************21 December, 2022
Europe’s Energy Crisis Is Just Getting Started
Despite successfully filling its gas storage ahead of winter this year, Europe’s energy crisis is far from over. The situation for Europe could, in fact, be worse next winter when Russian pipeline gas supply will be down to a trickle, at best.
European households and businesses have already seen a rise in total energy costs by $1.06 trillion (1 trillion euros), according to estimates by European economic think-tank Bruegel published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to Bruegel’s analysts, if governments in Europe do nothing except offer financial support, and if they cover the price increases, this sum would represent a massive 6% of the annual GDP of the EU.
“Massive government support could delay adjustment to a new price equilibrium and create the need for even more support,” Bruegel’s experts say.
Instead, the EU needs a “grand bargain” to encourage savings and increase supply at the same time.
The next 12 to 24 months will determine whether Europe will be able to cope with the energy crisis without having to resort to mandatory rationing or without losing too much industry competitiveness.
Europe’s energy systems were already put to the first real test this month amid an Arctic blast that swept through most of northwestern Europe, bringing freezing temperatures, snow in the UK, and depressing wind speeds in Germany.
Natural gas storage sites in the EU started to drain, with storage at 84% as of December 17, according to Gas Infrastructure Europe. Inventories are higher than at this time last year, but the true test for Europe will come next year when it will have to refill gas storage sites adequately enough to meet the 2023/2024 winter demand.
This is where the planning becomes trickier, depending on how low inventories will be after this winter and whether the EU has the capacity to haul in continued record volumes of LNG and continue outbidding Asia, especially if demand in China rebounds after a reopening from strict Covid curbs.
With lower gas consumption and not much Russian gas flowing via pipelines, the EU has continued to cut its dependence on Russia, from around 40% of imported gas supplies before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to less than 9%, according to EU figures from September.
However, the significant drop in Russian gas supply this year occurred only in June.
Ahead of winter 2023/2024, the gap in gas supply in Europe will be much wider without Russian gas. Europe will not be importing much Russian gas—or none at all if Russia cuts off deliveries via the one link left operational via Ukraine and via TurkStream—compared to relatively stable imports from Russia in the first half of this year before Moscow started gradually cutting volumes via Nord Stream in June and then shut down the pipeline in early September.
According to a recent report from the IEA, if Russian gas supply drops to zero and Chinese LNG demand rebounds to 2021 levels, the EU could have a gas supply-demand gap of 27 billion cubic meters in 2023.
With the plunge in Russian pipeline gas deliveries, Europe will need “huge volumes” of LNG next year, commodity trader Trafigura said earlier this month.
“Looking forward, we expect gas and LNG markets to remain volatile,” Trafigura said in its annual report for the year to September 30.
“While Europe should avoid a blackout this winter by drawing on inventories and cutting demand, it will need to import huge volumes of LNG in 2023 given the massive reduction in flows from Russia,” Trafigura said.
Natural gas prices in Europe will have to remain elevated so that the continent can continue to attract most of the LNG cargoes in competition with the other key demand centers, according to Trafigura. The commodity trader expects Europe to prioritize the security of supply “through next winter and beyond.”
Huge uncertainties with weather and the EU’s ability to compete with a potential increase in LNG demand in Asia will determine how Europe will fare next winter.
“Behind us now are two months of ‘buyer’s market’ with peak inventories, warm weather, a long queue of LNG ships, and depressed TTF prices,” commodity analysts Ole Hvalbye and Bjarne Schieldrop of SEB Bank said in early December.
“Ahead of us is the huge Q1 uncertainty and at least 12 months of ‘seller’s market’ as the race is on to fill EU nat gas inventories to a satisfying level by October 2023.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Europes-Energy-Crisis-Is-Just-Getting-Started.html ?
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The Cold, Windy Voyage to Alternative Energy
This column has been making the case that replacing efficient forms of reliable energy with politically favored intermittent power sources is not as easy as it looks. Some jurisdictions seeking to replace fossil fuels and/or nuclear plants with wind power may not have adequately considered the costs and benefits.
Perhaps no political class outside of California has been as hostile to cost/benefit analysis as the elected officials of Massachusetts. Now Jon Chesto reports for the Boston Globe:
In September, chief executive Pedro Azagra said Avangrid would postpone construction of Commonwealth Wind, which could eventually provide enough power for up to 750,000 homes, by pushing its completion date out to 2028, and would need to rewrite the contracts because of a sharp increase in commodity costs. With Friday’s move, Avangrid has given up on those renegotiation efforts.
Some readers may feel like they’ve been hearing about how close wind power is to commercial viability for virtually their entire lives. Regardless, this seems to be another reminder that the desires of politicians cannot change the underlying physics and economics. The Boston Globe report continues:
This move just adds to the pressure on policy makers. Offshore wind power is considered crucial for Massachusetts to meet its ambitious goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 from 1990 levels. Representatives for the Baker administration and Governor-elect Maura Healey expressed disappointment with Avangrid’s decision.
This broad spectrum of disappointment brings us to another lesson: the fact that an idea is bipartisan does not mean it will work.
Another lesson that must constantly be taught to policy makers is that every method of producing energy brings with it some kind of environmental footprint, some costs along with the alleged benefits. There is no free lunch.
Even before the team behind Commonwealth Wind acknowledged their problem with economics, some of the locals were focusing on the footprint. Heather McCarron reported last month for the Cape Cod Times:
To the residents of Osterville, Dowses Beach is perfect: A place of refuge for people, a sanctuary to a variety of wildlife and a delicate landscape that needs to be handled with extra special care. The beach, with its sweeping view of Nantucket Sound, is also perfect for offshore wind developer Avangrid Renwables... Avangrid is eyeing the beach to land three power cables – that will transmit a total of 1,200 kilowatts of electricity – from its Commonwealth Wind project, one of several commercial-scale, offshore wind projects with a lease to harness the winds south of Martha’s Vineyard.
... Meanwhile, a number of the residents are circling their wagons, worried about the impacts the project could have on Dowses Beach – an estuarine environment they think is too fragile to carry such a large project... The group pointed out that the Dowses Beach estuarine system shelters at least two species of vulnerable birds – plovers and the least tern.
As for the economics, Commonwealth is not the only wind project under scrutiny. Alex Kuffner reported last month for the Providence Journal:
Rhode Island utilities regulators are considering suspending Mayflower Wind’s application for transmission cables that would run up the Sakonnet River to the former site of the Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset after the developer raised questions about the financial viability of the first phases of the $5 billion offshore wind project it has proposed off Massachusetts.
The state Energy Facility Siting Board has ordered the company to demonstrate why the proceedings shouldn’t be stayed until the questions surrounding financing of the first 1,200 megawatts of the project are resolved.
It’s beginning to seem like replacing cheap and reliable energy production is complicated and costly. But politicians have made promises and of course not just in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
The Garden State’s liberal electorate has been choosing politicians promoting allegedly green policies for years. Therefore purveyors of alternative energy might have expected nothing but warm greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
Yet down the shore many residents aren’t eager to have massive metal virtue signals rising out of the water, even if they are 15 miles offshore. Amanda Oglesby recently reported for the Asbury Park Press on local opposition, including among residents of Long Beach Island:
... Save LBI, a group that opposes offshore wind farms close to shore, said wind turbines off New Jersey would harm endangered North Atlantic right whales. Ocean surveying, installation of wind turbines and the noise created by the operations would create unacceptable levels of noise for the whales, according to a Save LBI news release issued Monday.
The population of North Atlantic right whales has declined to fewer than 350 members, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The whales are vulnerable to ocean noise pollution, vessel strikes, shifts in prey locations, and habitat degradation, according to NOAA.
In October, NOAA released a draft strategy aimed at reducing harm to North Atlantic right whales from offshore wind development, while advancing the Biden Administration’s goals of expanding ocean wind development. The draft calls for species observers and acoustic monitoring to try and build the projects quietly and avoid noisy work when endangered species are nearby.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cold-windy-voyage-to-alternative-energy-11671487811
*******************************************How Billionaires Fill the Media With Climate Fear and Panic
The popular prints are flooded with climate and weather misinformation. Net Zero, seen by increasing numbers of people as a looming disaster, is lauded to the skies. Few journalists investigate the ‘unsettled’ science behind unproven claims that humans cause most, if not all, changes in the climate. To point out that there are not enough minerals in the ground to make batteries to power humanity’s basic transportation needs, let alone store the energy required to keep us all alive in the cold when renewables go on strike, is simply not allowed.
Needless to say, as we have seen in a number of recent Daily Sceptic articles, this absurd state of affairs is partly the product of a carefully-curated public discourse targeting cash-strapped news rooms and funded by a vast supply of dark, green money.
Recently I reported that the Mirror had run a nonsense story about much of London disappearing beneath the waves within 80 years. I noted that this was not the handiwork of a crack team of investigative reporters, but rather the placed work of a U.S. green activist group called Climate Central. This operation specialises in ready-to-publish climate change material highlighting local landmarks allegedly due to disappear beneath the waves.
Similar tactics are used by another activist group spreading fear and alarm called Covering Climate Now (CC Now). This operation is run out of the Columbia Journalism Review in New York, and is backed by the Nation and the U.K. Guardian. Both operations rely heavily on large gifts from Left-leaning U.S. foundations.
CC Now was started in 2019 and claims to feed over 500 media operations with written stories and climate narratives. Its “partners” include some of the biggest names in news publishing such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Agence France-Presse (AFP), CBS News, ABC News and MSNBC News. Leading journals are said to include Rolling Stone, Huff Post and Teen Vogue. The founders seek a “reframing” of the way journalists cover climate change. What this means in practice is amplifying an invented ‘climate emergency’ by constant story catastrophisation, while denying any inconvenient science. The political aim is the promotion of the command-and-control Net Zero agenda.
There is plenty of advice for tame journalists aiming to ramp up climate hysteria. “The fastest way to catch up is to emulate outlets that are already covering climate change well. You can’t do better than the Guardian,” CC Now suggests. But what to do about the problem that paying readers tend to disappear when fed a diet of spun political messages? “Foundations like Knight, Ford, McCormick and Emerson Collective are rightly increasing their support for local news organisations,” it adds.
Relentless catastrophising of individual weather events is the favoured weapon to spread climate fear among the wider population. Using the recent experience of the Covid pandemic, activists have been emboldened to spread panic and alarm in controllable media to achieve their wider political aims.
Despite oft-made claims, it is impossible to use models to ‘attribute’ single weather events to long term changes in the climate. CC Now skirts this obvious problem by providing a number of helpful explanations for gullible journalists to copy-and-paste. “Climate change isn’t solely to blame for extreme weather, but… it stacks the deck against us… it’s baked in with our weather and often a key ingredient in the outcome… it supercharges normal weather patterns, like steroids.” Journalists are told to emphasise the human impacts of extreme weather, noting that it affects “the poor, communities of colour, and indigenous groups first and foremost”.
All this sterling work, of course, deserves prizes. The 2022 CC Now Journalism Awards “honoured” writers producing the “strongest coverage of the onrushing climate emergency and its abundant solutions”. Winners are said to have come from the Guardian, AFP, Al Jazeera, PBS NewsHour and the Los Angeles Times. Journalist of the Year was Time Senior Correspondent Justin Worland. The judges singled out for particular praise an article he wrote ahead of COP26 titled, “The Energy Transition in Full Swing. It’s Not Happening Fast Enough“.
Billionaire-run foundations are spending enormous sums promoting junk alarmist science, in addition to funding on-side academic institutions and other influential bodies. Both Climate Central and CC Now are funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, while Climate Central takes support from the Grantham fund. This latter foundation is connected with the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham, and also partly funds three U.K. university institutes. At the LSE, this operation provides material that supports the Net Zero initiatives.
Jeremy Grantham is a long-time promoter of Net Zero and a future based on renewables. But it is not only journalists he has in his sights. Speaking in 2019 to a group of business people in Copenhagen about the approaching apocalypse, he asked rhetorically, “What should I do, you say”? His suggestion: “You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.”
The science writer and climatologist Dr. Judith Curry has become increasingly concerned about the effect of all this propaganda on children. In a recent essay, she wrote that it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that children are being used as tools in adults’ political agenda surrounding climate change. This is having adverse impacts on the mental health of children, she warned. The apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the climate ‘crisis’ has numerous victims, she added. “Children and young adults rank among the victims of greatest concern.”
Children and young adults are being used as tools in national and international political campaigns, continued Dr. Curry. “Blaming this unfortunate situation of psychological stress on a changing climate is incorrect, and the use of the situation to achieve political goals is reprehensible behaviour that is acting to reinforce the children’s psychological injuries,” she charged.
Your correspondent’s advice: When you next see an identikit climate Armageddon story in the mainstream media, just laugh. You will be the sanest person in the room.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/12/20/how-billionaires-fill-the-media-with-climate-fear-and-panic/
*********************************************Green Britain: Brits face forced entry to their homes by energy firms to fit prepayment meters
Energy firms are being handed the right to force their way into thousands of customer homes without justice officials knowing why the warrants are being granted, it can be revealed.
An investigation by i has discovered how magistrates are batch-processing hundreds of warrants in just minutes to allow debt agents acting on behalf of suppliers to force entry into homes to fit controversial prepayment meters.
The Ministry of Justice has now admitted it has no record of why access to homes has been sought, whether to forcibly install the meters or for other reasons.
It also said that, once inside a customer’s home, the energy firm could “exercise any other right of entry while there”.
The admission has raised further doubts about the level of oversight for warrants being issued by courts to energy firms to force entry into properties. It has also prompted accusations of a legal “wild west” leaving some of the UK’s poorest families at risk of having no gas or electricity this Christmas.
MPs have urged the Government to halt the forced installations this winter, telling the Commons in a two-hour debate they fear a “conveyor belt” of warrants is leaving vulnerable customers in the cold and dark – including terminally ill people returning home to die.
Caroline Lucas MP said: “These court warrants en masse are being carried out with disgraceful lack of due diligence and care.
“Ministers have serious questions to answer. What specific reasoning is behind each of these forced-entry warrants, why they’re being rushed through at breakneck speed without proper verification and how on earth they have been allowed to happen in the first place?
“These court warrants amount to a mass exploitation of the vulnerable and the voiceless – and they must be banned immediately.”
Simon Francis, co-ordinator of the End Fuel Poverty Campaign, said: “It is deeply concerning to hear there is confusion at the heart of Government and the courts about what these warrants are for and why they are being secured.
“The Government needs to very quickly get a grip of this legal wild west, which is spiralling out of control while companies are continuing to force the poorest people in society onto these more expensive meters.”
Industry insiders have told i the process has gone “beyond rubber stamping” as thousands of warrants are “nodded through” each week in “huge batches” of up to 700 at a time.
The College of Policing has issued new advice after some police officers doubted the validity of the “extremely sparse” warrants, which are being granted over the phone by magistrates in a digital format with “wet ink signatures” no longer required.
A new system allowing firms to request these digital warrants over the phone was introduced in 2019, with the college telling officers: “The reasoning is to allow companies to produce the warrant on a tablet or other device if needed, instead of having to possess a paper copy.
“The original digital warrant was extremely sparse and stated only the very barest essentials, leading to some officers to doubt its validity. It has now been updated.”
i told earlier this month how magistrates at one court in northern England granted 496 utility warrants in just three minutes and 51 seconds as a debt agent representing several major energy firms dialled in by telephone.
Prepayment meters are controversial because they are a more expensive way to buy energy and can leave customers facing a choice between self-disconnecting their gas and electricity or being pushed deeper in to debt.
One woman has described how her daughter awoke with cold hands and had the worst asthma attack of her life as she struggles to feed their prepayment meter to keep it going.
The Ministry of Justice told i in a Freedom of Information response in November that courts had issued nearly 500,000 entry warrants in England and Wales since July 2021 specifically to allow firms or their agents to forcibly install prepayment meters.
But in an apologetic updated response after i‘s investigation was published, it has admitted it holds no data specifically on warrants granted for the installation of the meters.
It said: “The figures provided are for warrants of entry granted on behalf of energy companies but the reason for each cannot be broken down further.
“Warrants do not record the purpose of the entry, so we do not have recorded information as to the purpose of the warrant or the purpose for which the provider wishes to enter – and in any event the provider might enter with one intention, but could exercise any other right of entry while there.”
Industry sources, however, insist that the vast bulk of all domestic forced entries are for fitting a prepayment meter.
One industry source with knowledge of the warrants system told i: “The court system is centralised. They are done in huge batches. There are hundreds if not thousands a week from different suppliers. The courts are stretched. I’m not sure there is significant scrutiny of the cases. If there are no objections, they are just nodded through.
“The worry, the big risk, is that the people in the most debt who do not engage with the process, who don’t open that letter about the court case, are usually those who are the most vulnerable.”
Another source said uncontested cases are being heard hundreds of miles from where people live, adding: “It can be four hours away. Literally, a warrant officer picks up the phone and says, ‘I’ve got some warrants’ and the magistrates say ‘OK’.
“They used to pull some out of the file and quiz the warrant officer. Now, it’s done over the phone and it’s even worse. It’s gone beyond rubber stamping. They don’t even stamp them anymore. Warrants are sent out electronically without even a signature and are not even printed out.”
Glasgow North East MP Anne McLaughlin urged the Government to halt self-disconnection for people on prepayment meters in a Commons debate she tabled on the issue last week, adding: “I am desperately worried that people are going to die - people who would have lived had this awful practice been outlawed.”
Ofgem says forced entries “should only ever be a very last resort” and “suppliers’ obligations are clear”. It is urging customers to check they are on their suppliers’ priority services register.
Energy UK, the industry trade body, says suppliers face “difficult decisions” in dealing with customers in debt and the warrants are a last resort after “exhausting all other options” and after vulnerability checks are carried out.
A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice said: “Energy companies are required to provide evidence on whether customers are vulnerable under oath when applying for a warrant and there are penalties for giving false information.”
https://inews.co.uk/news/prepayment-meters-energy-crisis-poverty-court-warrants-2037815
***************************************20 December, 2022
Climate Lockdowns Coming to a City Near You?
Recently a claim has gone viral about a decision by the Oxfordshire, England county council to divide the city into sectors that can be traversed by walking in 15 minutes or less, and then restrict residents’ travel from one sector to others to no more than 100 days a year—except by special permit available by application and at a price.
The actual facts of the plan are, frankly, difficult to ascertain. The council has placed a formal document about it online. The document is nearly impenetrable. No wonder reports are highly conflicting—and, I’m pleased to say, generally exaggerated.
There are in fact some problems with the plan, but some reports misrepresent it. The website Joannenova.com.au, generally a reliable site about climate-change-related science, ran a piece headlined “Climate lockdowns coming? You will be tracked in your suburb and happy about it.”
WattsUpWithThat.com, another site that runs lots of reliable information about climate science, ran a piece by Eric Worrall quoting Nova’s report at length. Those sources said the plan would “lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming,” adding that this “latest stage in the ‘15 minute city’ agenda” would “place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighborhoods.” Residents would “need permission from the Council” for more travel within the city.
Now, there really is such a thing as a “15-minute city” concept. Wikipedia describes it as “a residential urban concept” linked with the “new Urbanism” of the 1980s” aimed at making it so “most daily necessities can be accomplished by either walking or cycling from residents’ homes.
But, is that what’s really up in Oxford, England—home of the venerable Oxford University? No. (As an aside, it’s not coincidental that this arises in a town dominated by a university. Academia tends to be about as far removed from the real world and its practical problems as can be imagined. I speak from experience after 25 years as a student, Kindergarten through Ph.D., and 16 as a professor.)
Okay, as best I can understand it, relying on a fact check by the Associated Press, what Oxford’s council intends to impose, beginning in 2014, is a plan that will limit drivers, between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., to 100 trips per year through “traffic filters”—not “gates,” electronic or otherwise, but license plate recognition cameras—between their own “15-minute” sectors and neighboring sectors. But the sectors are defined not by 15-minute walking distance (about 6 tenths of a mile to a full mile) but by 15-minute driving distance (about 7.5 miles assuming an average of 30 miles per hour).
By application, drivers will be able to get more trips—at a charge. They can still access any part of the city by car without added charges, or fines, if, instead of going directly from their own sector into another, they can use a different route or first drive out to the “ring road” surrounding the city and then back in via another route—thus taking them out of the most heavily congested areas. They can also go through the “traffic filters” more than their allotted 100 times, though they’ll pay a fine unless they have first filed an application and paid a fee. Further, as one city official put it, contrary to claims that the new plan would confine people to within their sectors, “Everyone can go through all the filters at any time by bus, bike, taxi, scooter or walking”—just not by private car. Oh, and commercial vehicles, vans, motorcycles, disabled drivers, and first responders will be exempt from the rules.
Without excessive length, that’s about as accurate a summary as I can figure for the plan. It isn’t a “lockdown,” and it doesn’t appear to built, explicitly or implicitly, on desires to fight climate change by limiting how much people drive—though it’s likely that such desires lurk in the shadows. Instead, the primary aim seems to be traffic management: giving people incentives not to drive during periods of highest congestion, so those who most need to do so are less hindered, and those who don’t need to have an incentive to enter covered areas in times of less congestion.
That’s no different in principle from what many people already experience in urban areas: HOV (high-occupancy vehicle) lanes and express lanes, some with tolls varying by time of day. In principle, that’s just good economics: prices are higher when products are scarcer and lower when they’re less scarce.
However, such policies inconvenience poorer people more than richer people. Poorer people can’t afford the tolls, or in the Oxford plan’s case, the fees or fines, as well as richer people can. It’s a bit ironic, then, that such a plan would arise in a city, and country, whose political leanings are considerably more socialist/egalitarian than capitalist/meritocratic.
The law of unintended consequences kicks in, too.
Suppose your elderly parent wants to stay in her own home but needs daily assistance with household and hygiene functions. You’re glad to give, but she lives in a different sector. To give her the care she needs every day, you must apply and pay for 265 additional trips per year. What does that do to family ties? It will raise your incentive to hire professional caregivers—care sellers, really—because their vehicles will be defined as “commercial,” but yours won’t. It will be one more pressure on the God-ordained, natural family. Alternatively, you can walk or ride a bike, both requiring more time than driving—and money is time in foldable form. Or, you can take a taxi—which will cost more than driving your own car. Or ride a bus, taking more time but less money.
Oxford’s congestion-reduction plan is not the draconian “climate lockdown” plan some people have claimed it is. By raising the cost of driving at times of highest congestion, it will reduce congestion. In principle, there’s nothing wrong with it. Some people will gain, some will lose. That’s not unusual in civil society. What’s irksome is when the gains and losses are determined not by people’s free choices but by largely unaccountable bureaucrats.
When He started His public ministry, Jesus cited the words of the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:18–19). Those words “to proclaim release to the captives” and “to set free those who are oppressed” are relevant here. Christians should seek ways to reduce, not increase, unnecessary restrictions on freedom.
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British steel production halting due to rising energy costs
Steel production has been forced to halt temporarily this week due to the spiralling cost of energy.
UK Steel, the trade body for the sector, warned that production could decline further next year if the government does not extend and improve its support for businesses’ energy costs.
The current Energy Bill Relief Scheme is set to expire in March and an announcement is due in the coming weeks about what will follow.
UK Steel director general Gareth Stace said: “Electricity prices are at 30 times their historical average this week, forcing some steel companies to cease production at key times during the day. This is simply not sustainable for the steel sector. A long-term solution will be found in infrastructure investment and fundamental market reform, but in the interim we need a bridging solution that ensures UK steel producers can make steel at the same cost as their European competitors.”
Steel prices in the UK soared during 2022, beginning at about £350 per tonne and peaking at more than £1,200 in April, prompting warnings from the likes of HS2 about the project risks brought about by material price inflation. The cost of energy inputs during production is one of the main factors determining its sale price.
Stace noted that the German government’s support package for 2023 guarantees wholesale electricity prices at €130/MWh (£113), well below the UK’s current cap of £211/MWh. “The UK government should match this to ensure our industry’s ability to compete,” he said.
“Without the continuation of the [scheme], our estimates show electricity prices being double those of the German industry’s next year, leading to reduced production, shrinking market share and increased imports. Prolonged and frequent halts to production could become the norm, negatively impacting productivity and leading to a decline in steel production in the UK.”
He added that if the scheme is not extended, the UK sector will be “wholly exposed to the ravages of volatile energy markets with predictably grim consequences”.
A UK government spokesperson said it remained committed to delivering a more affordable, secure energy system through its Energy Security Bill, which will implement a long-term plan to grow low carbon and UK-based energy sources.
The spokesperson pointed out that a support package for energy-intensive industries was expanded in April, and its Energy Bill Relief Scheme meant firms were paying less than half the predicted wholesale cost of energy this winter.
They added: “We know this is a difficult time for factories and heavy industry, and we remain firmly on their side.”
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Australia's price cap on natural gas offers a political sugar hit, until reality kicks in
The fact that the government was able to pass its incoherent energy measures last week came as no surprise. After all, they were a response to a demand posed in panic: don’t just stand there, do something. The trouble is that doing something generally makes things worse, particularly down the track.
The legislation also goes to the heart of this Labor government’s approach to policymaking – delivering on promises made to key stakeholders. In this case, one of the most important stakeholders is the Australian Workers Union, whose membership is quite small overall but relatively strong in parts of the manufacturing industry. You may have noticed Dan Walton, national secretary of the AWU, speaking on the issue and demanding lower gas prices as well as a gas reservation scheme.
There are some manufacturing processes that must use gas directly, with no cost-effective alternative technologies currently available. In the case of the larger firms, you would expect them to enter into longer-term contracts with the gas producers at an agreed price. That some of these users have dragged their feet can be explained by an expectation that the government would intervene to get them a better deal. So much for free enterprise.
For smaller users, they can only access their gas supplies via retailers. This is a key point because, notwithstanding the government’s far-ranging anti-market interventions, there are no controls imposed on retailers. It’s entirely possible retailers will see an opportunity to extract higher margins so the net impact of the price caps on gas will be entirely (or more than) offset. Mind you, imposing price caps on retailers runs the risk of sending some of them broke quite quickly.
There are very strong parallels here with the introduction of Wayne Swan’s Resource Super Profits Tax in 2012. During the consultation period – which by the standards of this recent intervention was lengthy – it became clear the Treasury officials designing the new tax didn’t have the faintest clue about the key features of the resources industry. It was truly embarrassing.
Fast-forward and nothing has changed. Officials were unable to answer some key questions about key terms in the proposed legislation, particularly the definition of a new gas field.
The Australian Competition & Consumer Commission has a long history of failing to understand the key features of the gas industry, likening it to some sort of infrastructure model. Having said this, the ACCC supported netback domestic pricing – effectively world parity pricing – until very recently.
The AWU quickly realised price caps and the ongoing “reasonable price provision” would not guarantee supply. Hence the powers in the legislation for the Treasurer to demand the companies supply certain quantities of gas. It’s at this point geological and engineering reality collides with Marxist dreaming.
The sad fact is that the rate at which the Bass Strait reserves are depleting is extremely rapid. To be sure, the Kipper field is a bit of help, but it’s small. On one estimate, there will be a fall of close to a quarter in the reserves in the Bass Strait by the end of next year. By the early 2030s, it will be all gone, although extracting from such small reserves will probably be suspended well before then.
But here’s the problem: there is gas in Queensland and most of this is used for the export market, bringing substantial economic benefits to the country. Note here these Queensland fields would never have been developed had it not been for the exporting opportunity. Many of the export contracts are locked in for years into the future.
But even if the government or the ACCC decides more gas is needed in the south, which it will be, there are capacity constraints on the pipelines that were designed for south-to-north transfers. It is simply not possible to rectify this problem quickly.
Australia's coal and gas exports are expected to face up to a $68 billion hit due to a slowdown in global demand… and reduced supply chain disruptions
One solution always was for LNG to be imported into Victoria or NSW – two sites had been identified – to make good this shortfall, particularly at certain times of the year. The irony is that the government’s measures are likely to kill off this solution as the business cases that would justify the investment are weakened.
Sensing perhaps that the package would still not satisfy the AWU’s demand for lower gas prices and plentiful supply – sadly, Santa doesn’t exist in the real world – Anthony Albanese abruptly raised the issue of a gas reservation policy for the east coast. He spoke favourably about the policy that exists in Western Australia.
What the Prime Minister didn’t mention was the fact that a reservation policy in respect of the Queensland fields was explicitly rejected by Labor when it was last in government. That’s right – it was a Labor government that decided against such a policy. There was a (reasonable) fear it would deter investment.
Most economists don’t have a problem with a reservation policy as long as it is determined before the event, when investors can take into account the policy requirements. But it is a serious problem involving sovereign risk after projects have commenced.
In the case of WA, there are immense reserves of gas and the 15 per cent domestic requirement has never been used in full – until recently, at least. It has enabled the state to have low domestic gas prices and there have been some investments, including current ones, spurred by this. Nonetheless, the WA government has so mismanaged its electricity grid that there are now serious problems. The exit of coal generation has been badly bungled and there is even talk of blackouts. Cheap gas is not a cure-all.
Interestingly, the developer of the Narrabri gas field in NSW, which has been many years in the making, has always offered up the gas for 100 per cent local consumption within the state. This offer has never been accompanied by a willingness on the part of the NSW government to facilitate the completion of this project – indeed, quite the reverse.
The recent energy measures demonstrate clearly the lessons of bad approaches are never fully learnt. We are about to repeat the policy mistakes of the 1970s when price caps seemed like a seductively simple remedy. Ironically, these mistakes were recognised by the Hawke/Keating government. The argument for world parity pricing of our resources was until recently regarded as unchallengeable; this is no longer the case. The politics may work for a while but the economics certainly won’t.
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19 December, 2022
Jamie Dimon Is Right: ‘We Need Cheap, Reliable, Safe, Secure Energy’
Although I don’t agree with JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon all that often given his general affinity for more government oversight as the typical solution to social and economic problems, I absolutely agree with his stance on the self-induced energy crisis that is currently plaguing the United States, our European allies, and most of the developing world.
In early December, Dimon appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” wherein he made this commonsensical statement, “We need cheap, reliable, safe, secure energy, of which 80 percent comes from oil and gas. And that number’s going to be very high for 10 or 20 years.”
To be clear, Dimon is not a shill for the fossil fuel industry, as the record shows that he is a full-fledged member of the “climate change is an existential crisis” club.
However, unlike most of the narrow-minded zealots who constitute the vast majority of the “global warming is going to destroy the planet” gang, it seems as though Dimon is at least conceding the fact that for the foreseeable future, it would behoove humanity to not completely abandon the backbone of our energy and transportation systems: oil and natural gas.
“Higher oil and gas prices are leading to more CO2. Having it cheaper has the virtue of reducing CO2, because all that’s happening around the world is that poorer nations and richer nations are turning back on their coal plants,” Dimon added while on CNBC.
Such is the case in Germany, which recently renewed five licenses for coal-fired power plants that were scheduled to be retired this year.
Germany, which went all-in on the renewable energy panacea decades ago, received a big slap of reality when its historical enemy Russia decided to turn off the flow of natural gas to mainland Europe after the Ukraine invasion.
By its own doing, Germany put itself in a very untenable position by placing its energy grid at the mercy of mercurial Vladimir Putin and uber-unreliable and uber-expensive renewable energy.
Even hard-core environmentalists agree with the decision to keep Germany’s coal-fired power plants operating. “We can understand the government restarting coal-fired power plants in Germany,” admitted Greenpeace Germany’s Karsten Smid.
Yet, while Germany serves as a prime example of why it is a very dumb idea to abandon fossil fuels while relying on unreliable renewable energy, the geniuses in Washington, DC seem to have missed this somehow.
Earlier this year, Dimon made it clear to Congress that the United States (and the world, for that matter) is not ready to shun fossil fuels in place of not-yet-ready-for-primetime renewable energy sources.
When Dimon was asked to take a pledge to stop funding fossil fuel companies by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Dimon responded to the inane request by stating that doing so “would be the road to hell.”
And it surely would be. Were the United States to stop investing in fossil fuels, our standard of living would plummet. Not only that, our entire economy would come to a screeching halt as society would devolve into a state of total chaos.
If you think the U.S. economy is struggling now with high inflation and an out-of-synch labor market, you can’t imagine the horror show that would ensue if we were to instantly cut-off funding for fossil fuels.
Like it or not, advanced societies depend on fossil fuels. In fact, the advent of fossil fuels has lifted more people from abject poverty than any other human technological feat or endeavor in modern times.
Fortunately, for now, it seems like some sane, rational people like Jamie Dimon are finally standing up against the insane, irrational calls for across-the board fossil fuel prohibitions. I just hope as time goes on that Dimon’s views on fossil fuels become more representative of the mainstream, and that those calling for an immediate end to fossil fuels are rightfully lambasted as the heretics that they are.
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Incoherent energy policy will poison Britain’s future
With one hand the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is banning exploration for natural gas onshore in the UK, and with the other he is encouraging further development of physically inferior energy sources such as wind and solar. It seems that the government does not understand the importance of thermodynamic quality in energy supply, and has misdiagnosed the causes of the present energy supply and cost crisis.
Britain’s energy crisis is the result of decades of failing renewables-centric energy policy, policy which has eroded energy security and left the country vulnerable to events such as Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.
The Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, is reportedly considering reintroducing policy support for onshore wind. Many media sources are misreporting this as the lifting of a “ban” on this technology, though in point of fact there is no such ban preventing the building of wind farms. The then Prime Minister, David Cameron, removed subsidies for onshore wind, and thus reduced development interest, since the technology, like nearly all renewables, remains fundamentally uneconomic due to its inferior physical properties.
Whether Mr Sunak will reintroduce direct income support subsidies or provide non-market support through other routes such as tax breaks and favourable Power Purchase Agreements with government bodies, or “must buy” status with the increasingly nationalised retail markets, remains unclear. But such measures will be necessary since wind cannot compete as a pure merchant generator due to the penalties that it would face for non-delivery caused by unpredictable intermittency.
Inevitably, such policy support for onshore wind must be paid for by burdening the consumer with additional costs at some point in the electricity supply system.
In parallel with this blunder, and compounding it, Mr Sunak’s government is dragging its feet in preventing developers of solar photovoltaic installations from covering quite literally hundreds of thousands of acres of British farmland with PV generation, thus swapping food production for low grade electricity.
Weak planning guidance has permitted and even encouraged development on Agricultural Land Class 3b, which is by no means bad land, and thus incentivised the misrepresentation of higher classes of land. It should be emphasised that all farmland is a national asset that should not be wasted by development as malinvestment in solar, or indeed as wind “farms”.
The situation suggests that Mr Sunak’s government is poorly informed and acting irresponsibly. Neither wind nor solar is thermodynamically competent, the fuels being of high entropy and of little intrinsic value. No capable government would encourage them. And no capable government would discourage exploration for high quality fuels such as natural gas, but this is precisely what Mr Sunak’s government is now doing with the ban on hydraulic fracturing.
Dr John Constable, NZW’s energy director, said:
"To continue intellectually bankrupt and counterproductive policies in the middle of an energy crisis of unprecedented magnitude suggests that the machinery of government in Westminster has ceased to work, and that rational analysis can no longer effect a change of course. The outlook for the consumer and the country as whole is very bleak.”
Contact:
Dr John Constable
e: john.constable.1837@gmail.com
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Biden Starts a Climate Trade War
Wasn’t President Biden going to end Donald Trump’s destructive trade wars against allies? Apparently not. His “super aggressive” climate protectionism—to quote French President Emmanuel Macron—is infuriating U.S. friends and may set off a subsidy and tariff war.
U.S. allies are upset about the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous subsidies for domestically manufactured green technologies. In his trip to Washington last week, Mr. Macron said the U.S. subsidies may “perhaps fix your issue but you will increase my problem.” They’re really a problem for everybody.
The dispute involves tax credits for electric-vehicle and battery production. The IRA’s $7,500 consumer tax credit are restricted to EVs assembled in North America. Most foreign auto makers make EVs abroad and export them because the global and U.S. markets are still small. They can’t tap the consumer tax credit unless they invest in American production. But making EVs in the U.S.—or Canada or Mexico—may be more costly and could render their cars less competitive in other export markets.
Half of the U.S. $7,500 tax credit is also contingent on an increasing share of the vehicle’s battery minerals being extracted or processed in the U.S. or a country in which the U.S. has a free-trade agreement—starting at 40% in 2023 and increasing to 80% in 2027. The other half will be available only to EVs whose battery components are mostly made in North America, starting at 50% in 2023 and reaching 100% by 2029.
No auto maker is expected to qualify for the full $7,500 tax credit next year, but Tesla and GM may be eligible for half. Foreign auto makers will become less competitive in the U.S. and struggle to meet stringent fuel-economy mandates. The upshot? They will have to buy regulatory credits from Tesla and GM.
The law also offers generous tax credits for domestic EV battery production, including a $35 per kilowatt-hour credit for U.S.-made battery cells, plus $10 per kilowatt-hour for domestically produced modules. These credits are expected to shave the cost of producing an EV battery by 30% to 40% and reportedly prompted Tesla to reconsider plans to make battery cells in Germany.
The biggest winner of Mr. Biden’s climate protectionism may be GM, whose joint venture with LG Energy Solution this summer received a $2.5 billion federal loan guarantee to build three U.S. battery factories. RBC Capital Markets has estimated that GM could pocket $3 billion from the battery tax credit in 2025. GM recently projected the IRA tax credits will add $3,500 to $5,500 in profit to each EV.
The law also includes up to $40 billion in loans to build new EV and battery factories. Oh, and don’t forget the manufacturing tax credits for wind turbines, solar panels and other CO2-reducing technologies. “The U.S. has turned on a shop vac to suck up incentives and we’re standing here with a dust buster,” a Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters official said last month.
A Toyota spokesman in Canada spoke the truth: “While the IRA is being presented in many quarters as key legislation to fight climate change, in reality it is an act of trade protectionism.” The Canadian Steel Producers Association has warned that U.S. steel producers would also indirectly benefit from the climate subsidies without incurring carbon costs.
Ah, yes—carbon costs. Complaints by European and Canadian leaders would merit more sympathy if they hadn’t handicapped their own manufacturers with renewable subsidies that increase energy prices. Many European manufacturers are shifting investment from the Continent because of surging energy prices. Cap-and-trade systems in Europe and some Canadian provinces have also raised the cost of energy and manufacturing.
As for “climate protectionism,” Europeans also play the game. Europe is planning to implement a carbon border adjustment tariff on imports produced in countries with higher CO2 emissions, including possibly the U.S.
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European leaders are threatening to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization if the Biden Administration doesn’t rewrite the IRA to extend subsidies to foreign EVs and green technologies. But the latter would compound the policy felony by forcing U.S. taxpayers to subsidize foreign-made cars. Europe could also impose subsidies for domestic manufacturers or tariffs against U.S.-made EVs.
The West’s climate policies are already harming consumers and slowing economic growth by raising energy prices and distorting investment. Now they are threatening a trade war that will cause more harm. The new climate protectionism won’t end well.
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Final 2022 Hurricane Season Results Disappoint NOAA’s Gloomy Forecast
While the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) held firm to its prediction of an above-normal hurricane season – despite zero hurricanes at the halfway mark – the 2022 season proved to be nothing out of the ordinary.
Hurricane season, which runs from June through November annually, turned out to be pretty average this year, NOAA’s end-of-season report reveals.
There were just two “major” hurricanes (categories 3-5), below the annual average of three and less than NOAA’s prediction that there would be 3-6. The eight total hurricanes (categories 1-5) this year falls dead-center in NOAA’s forecasted range. And, the total count of named storms (which had hurricane-potential) barely hit the lowest number in NOAA’s forecasted range:
Hurricanes Forecast: 6-10; actual: 8; average year: 7
Major Hurricanes Forecast: 3-6; actual: 2; average year: 3
Named Storms Forecast: 14-21, actual: 14; average year: 14
Two of this year’s hurricanes made landfall, with one hitting twice. NOAA does not forecast the number of hurricanes that will hit a U.S. coast.
Despite the mundane final results, NOAA characterizes the 2022 hurricane season as “unique”:
“This unique season was defined by a rare mid-season pause in storms that scientists preliminarily believe was caused by increased wind shear and suppressed atmospheric moisture high over the Atlantic Ocean.”
After June through August proved to be the slowest start to a hurricane season in 30 years, NOAA issued a minor revision to its forecast:
“NOAA forecasters have slightly decreased the likelihood of an above-normal Atlantic hurricane season to 60% (lowered from the outlook issued in May, which predicted a 65% chance).”
“NOAA still expects above-normal Atlantic hurricane season,” the revised forecast insisted.
But, not all experts have been quick to embrace NOAA’s gloomy forecast, or to attribute any increase in hurricane activity to climate change.
“[D]espite what you may have heard, Atlantic hurricanes are not becoming more frequent. In fact, the frequency of hurricanes making landfall in the continental U.S. has declined slightly since 1900, Hoover Institution Visiting Fellow Bjorn Lomborg noted in a piece published by The Wall Street Journal.
As Hot Air has reported, the “Number and strength of hurricanes stubbornly fail to increase.”
“There is no global trend in the number of tropical storms or hurricanes during the past 50+ years,” Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue agrees.
As for the effect of climate change, a study by The Global Warming Policy Foundation concluded that “[T]here is little evidence that global warming has resulted in more hurricanes, or more intense ones in recent years.”
“On the contrary,” the study finds: “available evidence confirms that hurricane and major hurricane frequency has been similar in many prior periods.”
Nonetheless, national media, like Reuters, that publish apocalyptic warnings about climate change, steadfastly continue to promote claims that blame climate change for hurricane frequency and intensity.
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18 December, 2022
Computer modelling predicts climate change causing cascading animal 'co-extinctions'
Computer modelling is a wonderful thing. You can get so many things out of it. I am wondering if this is called the "pigs might fly" model
Computer modelling has shown the variety of vertebrate animal species found in locations across the globe could be cut by 27 per cent by the end of the century.
The simulation conducted on one of Europe's most powerful supercomputers also found that one extinction caused a cascade of extinctions that have been coined "co-extinctions".
The tool found that under the worst climate change prediction, 34 per cent more species would become extinct than would be predicted when not considering co-extinctions.
The study by European Commission scientist Giovanni Strona and Flinders University professor Corey Bradshaw was published on Saturday in the journal Science Advances.
Predictions for climate change caused by carbon emissions were put into the computer model, along with forecast land use changes.
Professor Bradshaw said it was clear from the research that carbon emission reduction policies needed to focus on the planet as a whole.
"Biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation really go hand-in-hand," he said.
"It also works the other way round: if we save more species, we're going to have more capability in reducing climate change over the next century or so."
Professor Bradshaw said neglecting the effect of co-extinctions had caused people to be overly optimistic about how many species would be lost.
"We have to be realistic about what our trajectories are suggesting," he said.
"Now we’ve given that framework that scientists can use to look at whether or not a particular policy is going to save more species versus another one."
To produce the study, the scientists created synthetic Earths complete with virtual species and more than 15,000 food webs to predict the interconnected fate of species.
The modelling found the areas of the world with the most biodiversity now — such as South America, Africa and Australia — would suffer the most from the effects of climate change and land use changes.
Carnivores and omnivores would be particularly affected by the loss of other species where they live.
The study did not look at insects or plants.
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John Podesta Made a Fortune Consulting for Green Energy Billionaires. He Now Oversees a Federal Fund That Could Make Them Rich
John Podesta, the powerful Democratic consultant who President Joe Biden tapped to oversee a multibillion-dollar climate investment fund, discussed those investments with an environmental group that had him on the payroll just months before, according to a new financial disclosure.
Galvanize Climate Solutions, a green energy investment firm founded by billionaire Tom Steyer, participated in an Oct. 31 meeting with Podesta and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to discuss how to best use the $369 billion in federal funds. Galvanize paid Podesta $84,000 in advisory fees from December 2021 through August 2022, financial disclosures show. Ethics watchdogs say Podesta hasn’t technically violated any laws but hosting his former employer at the meeting was ethically dubious.
"Alas, it's a similar story these days, sophisticated players checking the necessary boxes to avoid clear violations while still appearing to advance the interests of former employers and clients," said Michael Chamberlain, the director of the ethics watchdog group Protect the Public’s Trust.
Podesta’s net worth has skyrocketed since he last served in the White House as counselor to former president Barack Obama. His net worth ranged between $4.6 million to $9.2 million in 2014, according to his financial disclosure that year. By 2022, his net worth ballooned to between $9.3 million to $28.4 million, according to a copy of his latest financial disclosure obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Steyer was jubilant after Biden tapped Podesta to lead the $369 billion fund, which was created as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. The billionaire said Podesta was the perfect choice to "champion" the climate investment fund in a gushing statement issued Sept. 9. Days later, on Sept. 13, Steyer said the fund represented a "transformative, revolutionary, unprecedented" investment opportunity for the clean energy industry.
Steyer isn’t Podesta’s only billionaire patron with a stake in the green energy industry. He reported receiving payments from the HJW Foundation, a private foundation established by Swiss billionaire Hansjorg Wyss. Wyss has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to leftist groups in the United States, including dark money juggernauts the Sixteen Thirty Fund and New Venture Fund. Wyss is also a founding member of the Center for American Progress, a leftwing think tank Podesta founded in 2003 and chaired from 2017 through September 2022.
It’s not clear exactly how much Podesta received from Wyss’s foundation before joining the Biden administration. While Podesta identified the HJW Foundation as a source of compensation exceeding $5,000, he didn’t disclose the exact amount he received from the Swiss billionaire.
Podesta also raked in $140,000 in consulting fees from the Sandler Foundation, a charity founded by multibillionaire banker Herbert Sandler that funds leftwing groups including Podesta’s Center for American Progress, the ACLU, Earthjustice, and the Sierra Club. Sandler died in 2019.
China hawks on Capitol Hill have raised concerns that Podesta could steer resources from the climate fund to America’s top adversary. Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Ted Cruz (R., Texas) have noted that Podesta has urged the United States and China to "align" on renewable energy policy, and that the longtime Democratic consultant once urged Chinese businesses to directly invest in the American economy.
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Biden Undertakes 'Greatest Regulatory Overreach in American Maritime Law' -- to protect whales
President Joe Biden’s administration has done plenty of federal overreach in the 50 states and numerous territories under U.S. control. Now, he’s extending the long arm of bureaucracy to the high seas.
According to Fox News, the Biden administration is proposing limiting the speed of certain motorboats along the Atlantic coast in what one boating expert called “the greatest regulatory overreach in American maritime law.”
The move is intended to protect an endangered species of whales — although federal officials admit only five of those whales have been killed by boats covered under the regulation in the past 15 years.
As per an October news release from the National Marine Manufacturers Association, “the proposed rule would broaden the current 10-knot (11.5 mph) speed restriction to include vessels 35 feet and larger (down from 65 feet); expand the go-slow zones from discrete calving areas to essentially the whole Atlantic Coast and out as far as 90 miles from shore; and extend these zone restrictions for as long as seven months a year.”
The area covered by the restriction would reach from Florida to Massachusetts. Fox reported the proposal was “put forward by the U.S. Commerce Department under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.”
“This would be the greatest regulatory overreach in American maritime law,” said Frank Hugelmeyer, president of the NMMA. “Not only are they creating a serious safety issue, they are creating a massive negative economic impact.”
As for the safety issue, Chris Edmonston, president of the Boat Owners Association of the United States, said boats usually can’t get on what’s known as a “plane” if they’re under 10 knots.
Being on a plane means the bow of the boat can lower and pass through waves — at a fast enough speed, of course. Under that speed, the boat is tossed about.
“The boats are designed to ride on top of the waves,” Edmonston said. “This is going to make them wallow in the waves — up and down, side to side, pitching. … It’s going to be hard to maintain control. You can take waves over the side.”
Also, larger boats covered by the restrictions will have issues going through channels near the shore. “They can’t maintain steerage [at 10 knots],” he said. “If you’re going that speed you’re going to [run] aground.”
As for the economic impact, pilot boat captain Trey Thompson said it will back up port traffic and render boats unusable.
“The crew will be thrown around, tossed around, injured,” Thompson said, speaking from the stern of one of his pilot boats — traveling at 35 knots. “If we run at slow speeds, any side swell is going to make these boats roll.”
It’s one of two 64-foot boats Thompson said he has purchased in the past year — both of which would be unusable under the new Biden administration restrictions.
And then there’s the question of traffic. “The port will be closed any day it’s rough [or] windy. Not just this port. All the ports on the East Coast,” Thompson said.
So, why enact a policy with so many downsides? It has to do with the endangered right whale, which, according to an NOAA spokesman, only has an oceanic population of 350.
“This rule is designed to reduce the risk of mortalities from vessel strikes and afford the species a greater opportunity to recover,” the spokesman said.
The problem? Only five of the whales have been killed in collisions with the vessels covered by the restrictions in the past 15 years.
“It’s stupid,” said Jeff Angers, president of the Center for Sportfishing Policy. “It’s not what government is supposed to do.”
“This overreach is going to basically all but halt fishing off the East Coast of the United States,” said Glenn Hughes, president of the American Sportfishing Association. “It will just keep people from fishing.”
“Instead of getting to a [fishing] destination in an hour, you’re talking about something that’s going to take three to four hours both ways,” he added, making day fishing trips “impossible.”
And then there’s the boat-building industry, which Pat Healey, owner of Viking Yachts, says would be “devastate[d]” by the regulations; all but one of his boats would be affected.
“It’s going to have a tremendous impact on our employment,” he said. “1,600 boat builders. It’s going to wipe them out.”
But what do you expect?
With the stroke of a pen, Biden killed the Keystone XL Pipeline. He tried to wipe out billions in student loan debt, leaving those who paid their loans or never took them out in the first place to foot the bill.
Do these people think trifles like their livelihoods and safety will stop the Biden administration? Get real.
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More big batteries storing renewable energy to be built around Australia
A joke. They run for a couple of hours and then go flat. So what use are they in any serious power shortage?
It is estimated the batteries will lead to a tenfold increase in storage capacity, with Mr Bowen saying it would revitalise the energy market.
"Some people say the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow and that's true, but we can store renewable energy for when we need it," he told reporters outside the Transgrid battery in Western Sydney.
Where will the battery projects be located?
The batteries will come online by 2025 and together would be big enough to power Tasmania for about three hours.
Three will be in Victoria - at Gnarwarre, Moorabool and Mortlake - while one will be at Liddell in NSW.
Queensland will be home to two, at Mount Fox and Western Downs, while South Australia will also have two, at Bungama and Blyth.
They range from 200-300 megawatts each and will have grid-forming inverter technology, which provides stability to the grid usually offered through coal and gas.
The government estimates the total value of the projects at $2.7 billion.
Mr Bowen said the projects would be some of the biggest batteries rolled out in Australia in the near future. "Renewable energy is the cheapest form of energy, the more renewable energy we have in the system, the cheaper bills will be," he said.
ARENA CEO Darren Miller said the batteries could underpin the transition to renewable energy in Australia.
"This pipeline of grid-forming projects will help move us closer to an electricity grid that can support 100 per cent renewable energy in the (National Energy Market)," he said.
Energy price relief bill passed by parliament
15 Dec 2022, 6:00 pm
Energy price relief bill passed by parliament
It came as the federal government unveiled further details about 58 community batteries to be rolled out in regional and urban areas, worth up to $500,000 each.
Electricity providers will use them to store energy generated by solar panels on residential homes, which could then be used by other nearby households.
An extra 342 will be rolled out after consultation.
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16 December, 2022
Coal deliveries surge 77pc as Britain turns to fossil fuels
The amount of coal transported on Britain’s railways has increased by more than three quarters as the country turns to fossil fuels to keep the lights on this winter.
Some 120m net tonne kilometres of coal were moved by rail in the three months to the end of September, an increase of 77.5pc compared to a year earlier, according to official figures.
The steep rise was due to a need for extra fuel at power stations in West Burton, Lincs, and Ratcliffe, Notts, which are being paid by the National Grid to provide backup electricity generation this winter.
This has led to more coal being transported on freight trains from ports including Grimsby and Immingham, Lincs, the Office for Rail and Road (ORR) said on Tuesday.
It comes after the National Grid briefly put the country’s coal power stations on standby to fortify the electricity grid in the face of a cold snap.
Energy supplies have been stretched globally in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has roiled oil and gas supplies and triggered sanctions by Western countries.
But as wind generation dwindled this week due to the weather conditions, the Grid was forced to rely more heavily on gas-fired plants, with more than 60pc of electricity generated that way on Monday.
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‘Endangered’ Listing for Nevada Wildflower Threatens Proposed Lithium Mine in Nevada
America needs lithium mines to compete with China’s dominance of the electric vehicle battery chain, but environmentalists are suing to block those mines.
American wildlife officials declared a Nevada wildflower endangered on Wednesday at the only place it’s known to exist — on a high-desert ridge where a lithium mine is planned to help meet growing demand for electric car batteries.
The Fish and Wildlife Service’s formal listing of Tiehm’s buckwheat and its accompanying designation of 910 acres of critical habitat for the six-inch-tall flower with yellow blooms raises another potential hurdle for President Joe Biden’s “green energy” agenda.
With an estimated remaining population of only about 16,000 plants, the service concluded that Tiehm’s buckwheat is on the brink of extinction.
“We find that a threatened species status is not appropriate because the threats are severe and imminent, and Tiehm’s buckwheat is in danger of extinction now, as opposed to likely to become endangered in the future,” the agency said.
The proposed mine is not the only threat facing the flower. It also is threatened by road-building, livestock grazing, rodents that eat it, invasive plants and climate change, the service said. It said an apparent, unprecedented rodent attack wiped out about 60 percent of its estimated population in 2020.
Lithium is a critical component in modern batteries, especially those for the electric vehicles that many environmentalists are urging more Americans to embrace in the name of combating climate change.
Despite being home to three percent of the world’s reserves, America has only one active lithium mine and is dependent on Chinese supply chains for batteries built from the metal. Several projects aimed at correcting that problem have been hamstrung by lawsuits from environmental groups.
Ioneer, the Australian mining company that’s been planning for years to dig for lithium where the flower grows on federal land halfway between Reno and Las Vegas, says it has developed a protection plan that would allow the plant and the project to coexist.
The listing under the Endangered Species Act, however, subjects the mine to its most stringent regulatory requirement to date. It also underscores the challenges facing the Biden administration in its efforts to combat climate change through an accelerated transition from fossil fuels to renewables.
“Lithium is an important part of our renewable energy transition, but it can’t come at the cost of extinction,” said Patrick Donnelly, Great Basin director for the Center for Biological Diversity, which petitioned for the listing in 2019 and sued last year to expedite the plant’s protection.
Ioneer said the decision “provides further clarity for the path forward” and is “fully in line with Ioneer’s expectations” for development of the mine site at Rhyolite Ridge in the Silver Peak Range west of Tonopah near the California border.
“We are committed to the protection and conservation of the species and have incorporated numerous measures into our current and future plans to ensure this occurs,” Ioneer managing director, Bernard Rowe, said in a statement.
“Our operations have and will continue to avoid all Tiehm’s buckwheat populations,” he said.
The service’s final listing rule will be published Thursday in the Federal Register.
The conservationists who sued to protect the plant insist that Ioneer’s mitigation plan won’t pass legal muster. They pledge to resume their court battle if necessary to protect the buckwheat’s habitat from the rush to develop new lithium deposits.
The flowers are found on a total of just 10 acres spread across about three square miles. Federal agencies are prohibited from approving any activity on federal lands that could destroy, modify or adversely affect any listed species’ critical habitat.
Mr. Donnelly said the company’s latest operations plan for the first phase of the mine proposes avoiding a “tiny island of land” containing 75 percent of its population — surrounded by an open pit mine and tailings dumps within 12 feet of the flowers.
The Bureau of Land Management is reviewing the environmental impacts of Ioneer’s latest operations and protection plans.
Mr. Donnelley noted that the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated in Wednesday’s final listing rule that the proposed scenario would “disturb and remove up to 38 percent of the critical habitat for this species, impacting pollinator populations, altering hydrology, removing soil and risking subsidence.”
“Ioneer’s ‘Buckwheat Island’ scenario would spell doom for this sensitive little flower,” Donnelly said.
The mine is among several renewable energy-related projects facing legal or regulatory challenges in Nevada. They include another lithium mine proposed near the Oregon border and a geothermal power plant where the Dixie Valley toad has been declared endangered in wetlands about 100 miles east of Reno.
“Now that the buckwheat is protected, we’ll use the full power of the Endangered Species Act to ensure Ioneer doesn’t harm one hair on a buckwheat’s head,” Mr. Donnelly said.
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EU becomes first major economy to legislate ‘green tariffs’
The European Union has struck a political deal to impose carbon tariffs on the importation of polluting goods such as steel and cement, in a world-first scheme that aims to support its domestic industries against those from countries with weak climate laws.
The 27-member bloc proposed a law to impose a green levy from 2026 on steel, cement, fertilisers, aluminium and electricity imports last year.
After an all-night sitting of the European Parliament measures will now also apply to imported hydrogen, and some downstream products such as screws and bolts and similar articles made of iron or steel.
The scheme, known as the carbon border adjustment mechanism, has been criticised by countries with high-carbon exports including Australia, China, Turkey, India, as a protectionist measure, although Brussels has said exporting countries could be exempted if they have a domestic carbon price akin to the EU’s, or similar climate change targets. The EU’s target under the Paris Accord is to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 per cent on 1990 levels by 2030.
The measure comes amid heightened trade tensions with the United States over its Inflation Reduction Act’s subsidies for green technologies, which the EU has said could disadvantage European firms.
Brussels argues the new scheme is designed to be in full compliance with World Trade Organisation rules and plans for it to apply from October 1 next year, with a transition period, where the obligations of the importer shall be limited to reporting.
Before the end of the transition period the European Commission will assess whether to extend the scope to other goods at risk of carbon leakage, including organic chemicals and polymers, with the goal to include all goods covered by the current European emissions trading scheme by 2030. They will also assess the methodology for indirect emissions and the possibility to include more downstream products.
Companies importing goods into the EU will be required to buy certificates to cover their embedded carbon emissions. The scheme is designed to apply the same carbon cost to overseas firms and domestic EU industries – the latter of which are already required to buy permits from the EU carbon market when they pollute.
Mohammed Chahim, European Parliament’s lead negotiator on the law, said the border tariff would be crucial to EU efforts to fight climate change.
“It is one of the only mechanisms we have to incentivise our trading partners to decarbonise their manufacturing industry,” he said. “On top of this, it is an alternative to our current carbon leakage measures, which will allow us to apply the ‘polluter pays’ principle to our own industry. A win-win situation.”
Some details on the law, including its start date, will be determined later this week in related negotiations on a reform of the EU carbon market.
Australian industry players have said the country had little to fear in the medium term from implementable border adjustments by the EU because only 0.25 per cent of trade with Europe was affected by the current proposal.
However, the scheme will likely expand and similar schemes in the United States, Japan or other economies could affect much more trade.
Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade has said it would examine the EU’s proposal to see whether it is WTO compliant.
The department said it was committed to participating in multilateral discussions that promote trade, build sustainable supply chains and share knowledge.
Charity groups have criticised the EU for introducing the measure without lifting climate funding to developing economies, which will likely be hit hardest by the scheme.
Oxfam EU Tax expert Chiara Putaturo said Europeans were responsible for double the carbon emissions as the poorest half of the world.
“Yet, the EU just agreed to pass the buck to those least responsible by forcing them to pay a tariff despite being hardest hit by the climate crisis. EU countries did not even accept to channel revenues to climate finance funds,” she said.
“The EU and EU countries need to increase climate finance funds, especially now that poor countries are going to bear the cost of the carbon tariff.”
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Britain braces for winter of factory shutdowns as freezing conditions strain energy crisis
Amid staggeringly high energy costs, sub-zero temperatures are posing a huge threat to the industrial sector which has already been struggling to keep its head above water, with shutdowns looming. As the cold snap hit Britain, wholesale energy costs soared as firms raced to secure expensive supplies amid the price spike. Brought on by a period of cold, dry days, with very slow winds, power output plummeted while demand soared. Worryingly, the challenges have already forced some factories to slam the brakes on production.
Gareth Stace, director of industry association UK Steel, told the Telegraph that the eye-watering wholesale electricity prices on Monday forced all his members to shut down some production until rates went back to normal.
He said: "We're just priced out of the market. There would be no point in the energy companies telling our members to turn off, because they know that they will. You just couldn't keep going, you just lose money for every tonne of steel you make with [energy] prices at these levels."
But while the steel industry may recover in the coming days, the high prices are threatening shutdowns across a number of other industries that fear they will not be able to cope with the devastating combination of high energy prices and poor weather conditions.
Back in September, MakeUK, a manufacturing lobby organisation, warned that 42 percent of manufacturers have seen their electricity bills soar by 100 percent in 12 months from September 2021, while 32 percent have seen their gas bills double.
It said that 13 percent of manufacturers had to reduce their hours of operation, while 12 percent were forced to make cuts as a direct result of the surging costs energy bills. The large bulk of businesses have warned that if bills continue to rise this year and by over 50 percent, closures and redundancies "will become inevitable".
On Monday, the lobby downgraded its outlook for the sector, warning of a steep recession-driven in part by the high energy costs. The difficulties have come after Russia's weaponization of wholesale gas supplies and his war in Ukraine laid bare the UK's exposure to the volatile fossil fuel markets.
Heading into the winter, there are fears that a further gas cut and a failure to shore up enough energy imports from Europe could leave Britain seriously tight on supplies. So much so, in fact, that National Grid has drafted an emergency plan in its Winter Outlook which would see Britons subjected to three-hour rolling blackouts during the coldest months of the year.
Fears the "unlikely worst-case scenario" was coming closer to fruition deepened this week after National Grid put two coal units on standby at the Drax power station in Yorkshire. However, the request was later cancelled and the operator said people should continue to use energy as normal.
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15 December, 2022
A Test for You
There were two extended periods of warming in the 20th century: 1910-45 and then 1976-98. Bear in mind that the earlier warming was necessarily 100% natural while the latter is alleged to have been caused primarily by our sins of emission.
Which is which? (same scale)
The one on the Left one was the most recent
https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Carbon-Taxes-and-a-Test.html?soid=1101509381788&aid=1qEfqSjIPYw
***************************************************Will nuclear fusion power save us?
“Nuclear fusion breakthrough,” are the world’s headlines today. Eventually we will have free, pollution-free energy. No CO2 emissions, we will be saved. I have lived with the promise of nuclear fusion all my life and it has always been decades away. It’s become something of a bad joke amongst the science community that fusion is always decades away.
Nuclear fusion liberates energy by combining light atoms – isotopes of hydrogen – rather than by using the radioactive decay of large atoms such as uranium and plutonium – nuclear fission. It could have many advantages; the reaction can be switched off (not possible with fission), it uses water as a fuel and produces very little waste. The question is how do you fuse atoms?
Obviously it isn’t easy. Every star in the Universe generates its energy this way but stars are big and places of great pressure and temperature, unlike the Earth. One way is to generate a hot gas of hydrogen isotopes – 100 million degrees or so – and confine it so that the hydrogen nuclei (for it will be ionised) fuse. The heating is done by microwaves and the confinement by a magnetic field, for anything physical would melt. The problem is that the plasma is unstable and so far the reactions are fleeting.
This is the basis of the major multi-national project to develop fusion, the $22 billion International Thermal Experimental Reactor (ITER)project (China, India, Japan, Korea, Europe, US) which is under construction in France and hopes to start tests in 2035 as part of developing the expertise to build a commercial fusion reactor presumably in the unspecified following decades.
Flash and Burn
Yesterday’s announcement involves a different technique. The US National Ignition Facilityfocuses a burst from a multitude of high-powered lasers on a grain-sized target that compresses to initiate fusion. The announcement by US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was hailed by the world’s media as a great breakthrough in the developing technique of fusing atoms together, limitless, cheap, green were the adjectives used.
The announcement itself is a puzzle and had the feeling of being some much needed good news to announce. In reality although the experiments referred to took place a few months ago the “breakthrough” results were reported a year ago with the major advance being published in the Journal Nature in 2014. By one analysis 2.05 MJ of energy pumped into the pellet produced 3.15 MJ of energy. This does not include the 322 MJ needed to run the 192 lasers. So the story wasn’t a real breakthrough, just an advance. In any commercial development of this laser technique millions of fuel pellets would be needed for each reactor a year. At present they are tailor-made and cost almost $1 million each.
So why did the story lead some news bulletins? Given the announcement by Granholm it was clearly a story and in the main its coverage was good though some specialist correspondents clearly didn’t know the background and one science editors analysis of the event was puerile. I’ll leave it for an exercise for the reader to decide who I refer to.
Green Energy
But should nuclear fusion be part of the green energy debate? It is certainly not going to rescue us anytime soon. But I suppose linking fusion to green energy and the climate debate will help funds flowing.
Some would disagree with me and point to the many small, private companies that want to develop smaller-scale fusion reactors much sooner. They have acquired significant investment, some 30 firms have raised a total of $2.4 billion and General Fusion of Canada says it hopes for a viable reactor in the 2030s. CEOs of such companies see a payoff within a decade but to me it sounds like a sales pitch to attract further investment. Experts will privately say this is very wishful thinking.
In the mid-1990s I gave an after-dinner speech to a society of nuclear fusion scientists. I wondered out loud if the arrival of the first commercial fusion power would be as far in the future as the first hits of the Beatles were in the past. It took 50 years from the steam engine to trains and the same time between the internal combustion engine and cars. Nuclear fusion is a lot more difficult that such simple thermodynamic engines. Perhaps the desire for this energy coupled with advances in artificial intelligence analysis and control systems will speed up its development and the equations of history will be superseded.
A modern society needs high energy density power production systems. Without energy storage renewables are limited. We need fusion energy which has been promised for so long but I think humans will have walked on Mars long before we get commercial fusion power.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/will-nuclear-fusion-power-save-us/
************************************************All Biden’s Green Job Losers
President Biden sold the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as a giant climate jobs program, but then how does he explain what happened Friday at the Stellantis Jeep Cherokee plant in Belvidere, Illinois? Some 1,350 workers are losing their jobs so the auto maker can finance its government-mandated and subsidized electric-vehicle expansion.
Stellantis broke the news to workers on Friday that it will idle the Cherokee plant in February, citing “the increasing cost related to the electrification of the automotive market.” Merry Christmas! The Jeep Cherokee has been a popular model, though the plant has cut shifts since 2019.
But Stellantis, which formed through the merger of France’s PSA Group and Italian-American Fiat Chrysler, needs to come up with money to finance the more than $35 billion that it plans to invest in EVs over the next few years. Government industrial policy doesn’t give the company much of a choice.
Europe and several U.S. states have announced plans to ban the sale of new internal-combustion engine vehicles by 2035. Stellantis spent $2.4 billion to buy regulatory credits from Tesla between 2019 and 2021 to comply with green mandates. The Biden fuel economy mandates could force it to spend more unless it ramps up EV production.
The Inflation Reduction Act’s generous credits for battery production and EV buyers are modestly easing the costs of this government-forced transition. Many auto makers currently use profits from gas-powered SUVs and trucks to subsidize EVs that are losing money. They hope that sweetened government subsidies will eventually make EVs profitable, but in the meantime companies need to choose where to make investments and where to cut back.
Liberals pretend that the transition to EVs won’t come at a cost to workers or businesses. But taxpayers won’t foot the entire bill, which could cost hundreds of billions of dollars industrywide. Workers at Stellantis’s Cherokee plant are the collateral damage of this government-forced reallocation of capital. We’re waiting for Sens. Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders to plead for the workers here.
The United Auto Workers is denouncing Stellantis for laying off workers. “Not allocating new product to plants like Belvidere is unacceptable,” UAW President Ray Curry said. What did he expect? The union backed stricter fuel economy mandates and the IRA subsidies, even though its own studies showed the shift to EVs could cost 35,000 jobs.
Technological change disrupts markets and leads to some job gains and losses. But the problem here is that government is overriding market forces and picking the winners and losers. Auto makers’ enormous investments in EVs are largely being driven by political choices, not consumer choice. Politicians in Washington and state capitals, not business owners or executives, are calling the shots.
Labor dislocations caused by government climate subsidies and mandates will play out across the economy in the coming years. At least in the current tight labor market, most workers who lose their jobs can probably find new ones, though they may be lower-paying or require moving. But when government picks winners and losers, there are almost always more of the latter. The politicians don’t tell you about those.
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Beware ESG ‘Wacktavism’ as Investment Funds Push Leftist Goals
State officials are pulling billions of dollars out of Wall Street asset managers like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, citing ESG’s lousy returns and strong-arming of corporations that don’t bow to the left-wing agenda.
There’s no such thing as blue money or red money. Only the green stuff will pay bills.
Friday, North Carolina’s state treasurer, Dale Folwell, became the latest of many officials from nearly half the states across America — including Florida, Texas, Kentucky, Missouri, Arizona and West Virginia — to protest Wall Street’s blue investment strategy, also called ESG.
What is ESG? “E” stands for environment, “S” for social justice and “G” for corporate governance. ESG funds invest in companies that oppose fossil fuels, push for unionization and stress racial and gender equity over merit in hiring and board selection.
That’s a partial definition because at least a dozen rating firms tag companies with an ESG score, often based on subjective and somewhat secret criteria, even including a company’s stance on abortion rights.
State officials are pulling billions of dollars out of Wall Street asset managers like BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard, citing ESG’s lousy returns and strong-arming of corporations that don’t bow to the left-wing agenda.
Pay attention to what these officials are warning because small investors are also getting hurt by ESG. In fact, even if you don’t invest at all but you pay taxes, ESG puts you at risk. You’ll be on the hook when states invested in ESG funds incur losses and have to come to taxpayers for more money. New York City taxpayers beware.
Mr. Folwell calls ESG “wacktavism,” warning that “a focus on ESG is not a focus on returns.”
Here’s proof: Last week, Bloomberg reported that the eight of the 10 largest ESG funds by assets have underperformed the benchmark S&P 500 so far in 2022. Ouch! The cost of being woke.
It shouldn't be a surprise. In August, a Harvard Law School symposium on ESG fund performance found no support for hyperbolic claims that investing in “social good” benefits the bottom line.
Overall, the relationship between ESG and financial performance is “uncertain.” Several studies found ESG funds “underperform,” especially in market downturns — like now.
New York City has incurred sizable losses. Taxpayers will have to cough up billions to replenish the city’s Retirement Systems, according to the city’s comptroller, Brad Lander.
Instead of being remorseful, Mr. Lander is pressing Vanguard and BlackRock — the two biggest asset managers of city retirement funds — to double down on their climate commitments. Meanwhile, taxpayers can pound salt.
It’s hard not to apply the word “scam” to aggressive ESG marketing, especially to millennials. Asset managers charge a whopping 40 percent more to manage money in these funds than non-ESG funds. For what? That’s the question the Securities and Exchange Commission is asking.
“In response to investor demand, advisers like Goldman Sachs Asset Management are increasingly branding and marketing their funds and strategies as ‘ESG,’” said the SEC Enforcement Division’s Sanjay Wadhwa. On November 22, the SEC slapped Goldman Sachs with a $4 million penalty.
Making ESG claims without backup is so common now, it has a name: “greenwashing.”
Chief executive Stefan Hoopes of Deutsche Bank AG’s investment unit, which is also under SEC investigation, says it’s time to dial back the “exuberant marketing.”
Amen. But there’s a bigger danger: financial strong-arming. Wall Street asset managers are putting capital in companies with woke policies and choking off capital from companies that don’t bow to their ESG agenda.
Sounds like the Chinese Communist Party, not America. In the United States, access to bank loans and investment capital shouldn’t hinge on your political views.
The chief executive of BlackRock, Larry Fink, denies that ESG is political, but key staff managing his ESG operations previously worked in the Obama administration and donate to Senators Warren and Sanders.
On December 1, Governor DeSantis yanked $2 billion of state money from BlackRock. Florida’s chief financial officer, Jimmy Patronis, said, ‘If Larry, or his friends on Wall Street, want to change the world — run for office. Start a non-profit. Donate to the causes you care about.”
He added: “Using our cash, however, to fund BlackRock’s social-engineering project isn’t something Florida ever signed up for.”
ESG is thuggery, using financial clout to accomplish what Americans would never approve at the ballot box. The danger isn’t just to your wallet. It’s to our nation.
https://www.nysun.com/article/beware-esg-wacktavism-as-investment-funds-push-leftist-goals
***************************************14 December, 2022
The Night the Lights Went Out in Europe
Politico Europe, a publication marinated in green politics, has named Russian President Vladimir Putin as one of its "power players of the year" -- for, in the publication's words, "advancing Europe's green agenda."
"By invading Ukraine and manipulating energy supplies to undermine European support for Kyiv, Putin has achieved something generations of green campaigners could not -- clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security," the news outlet explained approvingly.
It went on to note that Putin "invaded Ukraine after the EU had spent two years laying the foundations of its Green Deal program for zeroing out emissions by 2050. That meant the policy machinery for a total remake of the European energy economy was already moving. All it needed was a nudge."
You would have to be pretty severely afflicted with Climate Change Derangement Syndrome to celebrate a silver lining in Putin's murderous attack on Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Europe has sprinted so far ahead of the United States in its quest to end the use of fossil fuels that many U.S. politicians, environmentalists and media voices look on with envy.
But how is Europe's Green New Deal going now that Putin has given it "a nudge"?
So far, the results are, to say the least, unencouraging. Euroland has been thrust into an epic energy crisis with electricity rationing, power outages, $10 a gallon gas and citizens encouraged by governments to use candles for lights and burning wood for heating purposes. Germany is reopening shuttered nuclear plants to avoid perpetual blackouts. It's a return to the Dark Ages in Europe -- and the climate change lobby is loving the return to chaos and mayhem.
This might be a slight exaggeration, but not much of one. The government in France has now warned of acute energy shortages this winter with drastic steps to conserve. As one publication put it, Paris, the City of Lights, may have to turn off the lights in the weeks and months ahead if it's a cold winter.
Officials in Paris have decreed that local authorities must prepare power outage plans "that would reduce consumption of electricity by up to 38%." Wait, there's more: "The French government said it was working alongside the Ministry of Education to develop plans to close schools in the mornings if the area is to be impacted by rolling blackouts." It sounds to me like climate change is the new COVID-19 for militant lockdowns and curfews.
Germany's energy shortage is so severe that one of the fastest-growing energy sectors is coal. That's because the Germans have declared war on natural gas, so because of the self-inflicted energy crisis, they are forced to use an energy source that emits more greenhouse gases. Wood is also becoming a major source of heating homes. The Dark Ages are back.
Then there is the calamity that is unfolding in Switzerland. This is a country that is anything but a heavy-handed socialist state, but now thanks to the "energy state of emergency," which is the norm in Europe, the Swiss government has announced it will ban the use of electric cars for "nonessential" journeys. At the same time, it is encouraging people to take the train to shop for their groceries, but it has admitted that train service may also be disrupted.
That's not all. The government is also drawing up plans for dealing with blackouts that include reducing store hours by up to two hours per day, heating systems in nightclubs to be turned off and other buildings to be heated to no more than 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Online streaming services and game consoles could be banned. Christmas lights might be turned off, and all sports stadiums and leisure facilities could be closed.
Is Europe turning into a third-world banana republic?
All of this brings us to a stark reality. Europe has gone all-in on wind and solar power, and the experiment has failed miserably. These fringe energy sources don't work and aren't scalable for industrial economies. And the more it doesn't work, the more it requires police state interventions with fascistic controls over the economy and personal behavior. All of these assaults on freedom and prosperity are in the name of saving the planet. One wonders if this is the real endgame objective. The old saying that the greens are the new reds (communists) is proving to be all too true. It's a future that only tyrants like "man of the year" Putin could love.
Worst of all, President Joe Biden's administration and green groups look to Europe as a sterling silver model for America. Biden's climate henchmen even want to move to the left of Europe on climate change controls on our economy. Biden boasted at the climate conference in Egypt last month that he wants the U.S. to sprint ahead of the Europeans on climate controls as if there is virtue in imposing pain and lowing living standards on the public.
In other words, we are speeding over the same cliff of energy poverty, power outages and climate lockdowns that have crashed and burned everywhere else. The calamity is staring in front of us. And the Biden administration is saying faster, faster.
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Electric car demand falls for first time since pandemic as electricity prices soar
Demand for electric cars is falling for the first time since the pandemic as soaring electricity costs make the vehicles increasingly costly to run.
Fewer than one in five car buyers were hunting for an electric vehicle in November, according to data from AutoTrader, down from 27pc in June.
Interest is waning as petrol prices fall and surging energy bills make the cost of running battery powered vehicles more expensive.
The Government has also withdrawn subsidies for electric cars. In June, ministers scrapped a £1,500 grant and in November Jeremy Hunt announced that EVs would be subject to road tax from 2025.
Demand for electric cars is now falling for the first time since the pandemic, AutoTrader said, declining 12.6pc over the last 12 months.
The drop off in interest comes as National Grid was forced to fire up Britain’s coal power stations on Monday in order to stave off fears of a blackout, highlighting the tightness in the energy market that is driving electricity prices higher.
The grid operator put two Drax coal-fired power stations in North Yorkshire on notice to provide power as snow covered the South East of England. The coal generators were later stood down as the acute crunch passed.
The scramble for power delivered a windfall for power generators and traders. Commodities broker Vitol SA was at one point being paid £4,000 per megawatt-hour in National Grid’s balancing market, Bloomberg reported, compared to around £250 per megawatt-hour paid by the grid this time last year.
Back-up coal plants came close to being called upon for the first time this winter as subzero temperatures led to surging demand at the same time as renewable energy generation collapsed. Wind provided just 2.7pc of the energy produced in Britain on Monday, down from an average of 28.5pc over the past year.
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‘Like an oilwell in your back yard’: Irish people turn to cutting peat to save on energy bills
This was supposed to be the year Ireland got serious about protecting its bogs but some of those hopes are wafting up in smoke as households burn peat to save on energy bills.
The soaring cost of oil and gas has reinvigorated the ancient practice of cutting and burning turf, a fuel that hurts the environment but can save a family thousands of euros, especially as temperatures drop to freezing.
Earlier this year the government introduced curbs to peat cutting to protect Ireland’s bogs – which are important carbon sinks and sources of biodiversity – but Europe’s energy crisis has boosted what is supposed to be an anachronism. It costs approximately €500 to heat a household with peat for a year versus several thousand euros for more climate-friendly sources of energy.
“People are glad to have turf. It’s like having an oilwell in your own back yard,” said Michael Fitzmaurice, an independent member of parliament and chair of the Turf Cutters and Contractors Association. An average household that relies on peat consumes 10 to 12 tonnes per year, he said. “It’s security of energy.”
Niall Ó Brolcháin, a researcher at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at the National University of Ireland, said consumers faced a pinch point. “The financial factor is a much stronger motivation than saving the planet. People are facing an immediate crisis.”
Meanwhile people across Europe are turning to solid fuels, with Germany experiencing a wave of thefts of trees and woodpiles in forests.
In Ireland, anecdotal evidence suggests there has been a sizeable increase in the use of so-called turbary rights which allow people to cut peat, said Ó Brolcháin, a former mayor of Galway city. “In many cases turbary rights had lapsed but people are using them again all of a sudden. There is plenty of evidence of people selling peat door to door. It’s quite understandable, given the economics.”
Ireland’s rural inhabitants survived for centuries by draining bogs and using peat as fuel. A semi-state company, Bord na Móna, cut turf on an industrial scale. Storytelling by a blazing hearth embodied the national identity.
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A Sydney climate protester who halted freight trains by suspending herself above a rail line has had her most serious charges dropped
Emma Dorge was arrested in March after participating in one of a series of unauthorised actions by environmental protest group Blockade Australia to disrupt a freight line to Port Botany.
The 26-year-old was arrested after she suspended herself from a pole above the line to draw attention to climate change.
Police charged the activist on four counts including endangering safety of a person on a railway, inciting others to commit a criminal act, remaining on private land without a lawful excuse and refusing to comply with police directions.
Prosecutors agreed to drop the more serious charges of endangering safety and incitement given the activist pleaded guilty to the two lesser charges, Dorge's lawyer Mark Davis told AAP.
Before her hearing on Wednesday in Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court, Dorge told AAP she stood by her actions in April and believed the NSW government had passed the "draconian" protest laws as a result of how effective the campaigns were.
"I'm really more concerned about runaway climate change. They can't throw the floods and the wildfires in jail," she said.
"The courts are just another kind of violent mechanism that the state uses to repress us."
Dorge is among a number of climate activists who have faced court this week charged over disruptive actions after the state government passed laws to punish disruptive climate protests earlier in the year.
Activists convicted under the laws face fines of up to $22,000 and two years in prison.
The construction workers' union has announced it will campaign to end the "anti-democratic" laws that criminalise protest in NSW.
"The CFMMEU will not sit by while any government in this country seeks to remove one of the cornerstones of our democracy," union national secretary Christy Cain said in a statement.
"If these laws are allowed to stand no worker, no citizen, no member of the community will be safe from the threat of government overreach."
Dorge's action went viral after Seven Network's Sunrise host David Koch suggested authorities cut the rope while she was suspended from the pole during a live interview.
The case has been adjourned to December 22 and Dorge is out on bail.
https://au.yahoo.com/news/sydney-climate-protester-enters-plea-011237542.html
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ESG Advocates Have Unhinged Priorities
Without quick action, environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scoring frameworks will become hopelessly embedded in our daily lives, and the people who push ESG don’t give a hoot about our well-being.
To those still unfamiliar with the ESG movement, it is, at its core, a mechanism by “which a cabal of ideologically aligned influential interests working through unelected supranational organizations are attempting to ‘reset’ the global financial system to their advantage.” Circumventing national sovereignty, free markets, and individual rights, global government organizations, the embedded bureaucrats staffing them, and the governments that fund and compose their membership are working with international corporations and financial elites to alter traditional financial methods of assessing risk and allocating capital and credit. Under an ESG system, companies, and likely soon individuals, will be assigned arbitrarily determined ESG social credit scores, which financial institutions, investment portfolio managers, and Big Tech could use to guide investment choices, decisions about who can participate in banking or get business licenses, and who can engage on social media platforms. Basically, ESG is a backdoor to a social credit score, encouraged by government, and typically imposed through regulations.
ESG is particularly interested in social justice and fossil fuel divestment, and a score can be given to your business whether you want one or not.
Companies (and eventually individuals) that do not achieve a high ESG score can be punished; banks may refuse to provide loans to, or limit capital investments available to the company. There may also be limited access to tax credits, insurance, grants, and other kinds of contracts. People with low ESG scores could also be banned from social media outlets.
Although the ESG investment framework is pitched as a caring, environmentally conscious alternative to traditional revenue-focused investment, it is actually a weapon of the deranged, prioritizing the pursuit of “woke” political ends over advancing human welfare.
Take, for example, the reaction of one analyst of a “risk intelligence” company called Maplecroft, to a recent violent coup attempt in the small island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. In an interview with Rigzone, the analyst said “[t]he coup attempt is incredibly damaging for the country’s political and ESG credentials, and will likely deter investors in the nascent oil and gas industry[.]”
Four people are reported dead, the coup was thwarted, but an investment fad is at the top of some experts’ minds.
To regular people, this is insane—but to world leaders in government and CEOs of multinational corporations, ESG is the future. At the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), the message was clear: fossil fuel use in particular has to go, and financial institutions should enforce it.
Fossil fuels and their derivatives have lifted much of the world out of extreme poverty, have vastly improved crop yields, help get clean water and transportation to the most remote regions, aid in developing medicines, provide inexpensive and clean heating, air conditioning, and thousands of other things that we take for granted. More than 4,000 items and products in everyday use in developed, and many developing countries alike, either contain fossil fuels as a necessary component, or are wholly derived from fossil fuels. Even for essential products not derived from fossil fuel, they are often developed, manufactured, and delivered through technologies that rely on fossil fuels. A strictly enforced ESG effort would halt this opportunity and development for poor nations, regardless of their political stability.
However, the damage borne by ESG won’t stop in poor nations. By limiting investments for oil and gas operations domestically, it will also continue to keep energy prices high, undermine economic growth, and leave the United States dangerously dependent on foreign sources of energy and technology.
And it’s getting worse. New regulations from the Biden administration allow ESG considerations to be a factor in your 401(k) management, and your employer can invest your money into an ESG fund as the default option.
The vast majority of people who invest in the markets, whether as individuals or as part of a private or public pension, do so in the hopes of maximizing returns to provide for a secure retirement, one that provides them the ability to not simply survive but thrive and enjoy some modicum of freedom to pursue their post-retirement dreams. By allowing ESG to be a consideration in banks, investment managers, and stock portfolios goals, the government is sanctioning these financial elites to use other peoples’ money to pursue their self-selected social and environmental goals. Under ESG, the government is undermining the fiduciary standard of using clients’ money to pursue profit as the sole legal guideline in order to maximize return to their client investors; and replacing it with whatever social or environmental goals the banks and fund managers think people should be pursuing.
BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management company, with more than $10 trillion under its control, is just one of many companies pushing ESG. Some colleges are creating curriculum for aspiring sustainability busybodies. To give you an example of the kind of people these careers attract, one sustainability investment website put together a list of ESG jobs, including one that contains the telling opening line, “[h]ave you ever wanted to be a bodyguard but lacked physical strength? If so, an ESG career path may be your second chance.”
Fortunately, it is not all doom and gloom. Some states have passed laws barring financial firms that have an ESG-focus from doing business with state and local contracts. Best of all, it seems to be working. After several states pulled money out of BlackRock, the company’s stock price was downgraded, and it continues to face pressure from oil producing states that are not particularly thrilled by fossil fuel divestment schemes.
ESG is the psychotic bully of the investment world, its advocates use emotional blackmail and fear about climate change to get away with becoming corporate kingmakers, while forcing companies that aren’t in lockstep with a “stakeholder capitalism” agenda out of business. They do not care that it hurts families and the world’s poor. As such, we must not let them win.
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Wind turbines offer huge rewards to already rich landowners – but rather less for the rest of us
Is Rishi Sunak already a prisoner in Number 10? Twenty four hours after giving in to backbench rebels and abolishing house-building targets he has now given into the Tory wind farm lobby, too — lifting the moratorium on onshore wind farms imposed by David Cameron in 2015.
According to the rebels, led by former levelling-up secretary Simon Clarke, onshore wind is very popular with voters. A YouGov poll published at the weekend claimed that 64 per cent of Tory voters would support the construction of a wind farm ‘near’ their home, with only 30 percent against. The crucial word there is ‘near’. What does it mean? A hundred yards away, half a mile away, 10 miles away?
A lot of Tory voters live in urban areas where they know they are not going to get a wind farm at the end of their road. Perhaps they wouldn’t mind a wind farm built on farmland several miles away. But the real test will come once the planning applications start to roll in for real — and many voters realise they will be in the shadow of turbines which have roughly doubled in height since the moratorium has been in place. The tallest onshore turbine in Scotland — where there never was a moratorium — is 600 feet, roughly as high as the North Downs.
We are rapidly going to discover just how few potential wind farm sites there are in the South East which are more than half a mile from the nearest residential property. There are more sparsely-populated areas in the North, but many of those are within national parks.
Those familiar with rural politics know that there is virtually no development you can undertake in the English countryside without inciting a protest group — around my way there was even a protest against the creation of a nature reserve on the grounds it might create more traffic. Wind farms are not going to be an exception — once they start being built many of the rebel MPs will discover that what the public tell opinion pollsters does not necessarily coincide with what they think when they find developers on their doorstep.
If windfarm-supporting Tories are hoping that onshore turbines will help solve the energy crisis they will be disappointed in that, too. The idea that onshore wind is the cheapest form of energy only holds if you ignore the cost of coping with the intermittency of wind power. Britain already has enough wind and solar power — theoretically — to meet the average 38 GW UK demand for power. Yet on a calm night last week the contribution of wind and solar fell to less than two per cent. We have a tiny capacity for energy storage — equivalent to less than an hour’s national consumption.
The only reason we can cope with lulls in the wind is by firing-up gas stations at short notice. One of the reasons gas power seems so expensive at the moment is that the market has to pay through the nose to keep gas power stations on standby for use at short notice. If we used gas power to generate a steady baseload as we used to do it would be a lot cheaper per kWh.
The lifting of the moratorium on inshore wind will delight the Tory landowning interest, who stand to make fat sums from licenses to have turbines built on their land — David Cameron’s father-in-law, Sir Reginald Sheffield, was being paid £350,000 a year from turbines on his land. There is rather less in it for ordinary Tory voters.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/07/wind-turbines-offer-huge-rewards-already-rich-landowners-rather/ ?
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Climate activists "waging war on the mind"
A new paper from Net Zero Watch argues that climate alarmists are waging psychological warfare on the public.
Author Stephen McMurray says that professional psychologists are using fear as a weapon to manipulate public behaviour. McMurray says:
"Psychologists are saying, quite openly, that telling people facts doesn't work, and that psychological pressure should be brought to bear in other ways. Their professional bodies seem to have no interest in preventing this shameful and completely unethical behaviour."
McMurray says that the Government and Civil Service are also quite open about using psychological warfare against the population at large. Indeed, the view in Whitehall appears to be that fearmongering, as widely applied during the Covid pandemic, was a success, and should be seen as a model for use in the drive for Net Zero.
"Civil servants seem quite happy to treat the public as lab rats for them to experiment on as they see fit. They are out of control, and nobody in Government seems to have any interest in stopping them."
"Stephen McMurray: The climate change cult and the war on the mind (pdf)"
Contact
Stephen McMurray
e: s.mcmurray1@btinternet.com
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Australia's gas cap folly
If the threat of gas rationing and blackouts on the first day of winter this year taught us anything it is that maximising the supply of reliable and baseload power is the only way to ensure the lights stay on, right?
Australia is currently facing multiple economic crises on a number of fronts.
However, there are three that the federal government is seemingly determined to exacerbate, namely Australia’s gas supply shortage, rapid rises in the cost of living, and our record low private business investment as a percentage of the economy.
The cost of living crisis is a handicap on the quality of everyday Australian life, and if private businesses are not investing in the Australian economy, then that minimises the opportunities available to Australians to help offset cost of living pressures.
These three crises are all linked to the policy of Net Zero emissions by 2050, introduced by the former Morrison government in 2021 and legislated by the Albanese government in 2022. Net Zero, by design, requires the removal of gas from the national energy market to make way for ‘green’ energy such as wind and solar.
One of the first acts of the Albanese government, when elected in May, was to legislate the Net Zero target. This has accelerated the closure of coal projects across the country, expanded the scope of green activist lawfare against critical resource projects, increased power prices, and localised a global gas supply shortage, even though Australia is one of the most energy resource-rich countries on Earth.
The consequences wrought by the policy of Net Zero emissions by 2050 fuelled the energy crisis that the east coast continues to suffer through.
And the depths of this crisis cannot be underestimated. In the year 2022, how can it be that on the first day of winter this year, the Australian Energy Market Operator warned that gas rationing may be necessary to ensure that Australians could keep their lights and heaters on? This lack of supply made electricity prices surge.
In response, the Prime Minister recently floated imposing price caps on energy companies. This was a reactionary and short-sighted response. The proposal is also evidence the federal government does not have a cogent plan to get us out of the energy wilderness that is biting into the hip pockets of mainstream Australians.
Price caps will act as a direct deterrent for companies wanting to do business in Australia’s already over-regulated energy market, with Woodside Energy indicating they will no longer invest in projects along Australia’s east coast if this policy was adopted.
Woodside’s threat of withholding new gas investment on Australia’s east coast in response to the proposed price caps would worsen Australia’s record low private business investment and exacerbate Australia’s gas supply issues.
The vacuum created by private businesses deciding that investing in the Australian energy market is all too hard, opens the door for government agencies to fill the gap. You only have to look at the proposal to re-introduce the State Electricity Commission in Victoria, which is pursuing a renewable energy target of 95 per cent by 2035. It means instead of baseload power coming back into the market, even more taxpayer dollars will be used to push the ideological obsession with unreliable and experimental solar and wind energy, proven time and time again that it cannot deliver the power we need on scale.
The federal government should be fostering policies that increase the supply of gas. Increasing the supply of gas (and coal) is the only way to meet demand, and to drive down record energy prices.
These policies include repealing the Climate Change Act 2022, saying no to Net Zero, and exiting the Paris Climate Agreement.
Unfortunately, the far more likely outcome is that baseload power will continue to be forced off the national energy market in favour of unreliable solar and wind power leaving Australians with higher energy bills, insecure supply of power, and lower levels of employment.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/albos-gas-cap-folly/
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Is this the world's most pointless car?
Citroen has been building small cars for many decades, but the shortest of all went on sale only recently.
The all-electric Ami - named after, but not related to, another Citroen introduced in 1961 - is designed primarily for urban use, and measures only 2489mm (94.9in), which would have been considered modest even in the early 1900s. The Ami has space for two, a single-charge range of 46 miles, has a top speed of 28mph, and can be purchased from £8095 in the UK.
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Financially disastrous windfarms
When a hard-pressed local authority in southern England was looking to boost its finances, it turned to a novel idea: leveraged bets worth hundreds of millions of pounds on solar energy.
For Thurrock Council in the county of Essex, it sounded like a surefire winner. Instead, the gamble backfired spectacularly.
Last month, the council disclosed a £470 million ($572 million) loss for the current fiscal year after its various investments went wrong — about £2,670 for every one of the area’s 176,000 residents, who now face higher taxes while the local authority seeks a bailout from the national government.
The debacle highlights concerns about how some local authorities across the UK have invested taxpayers’ money in high-risk initiatives. It has also put a spotlight on the entrepreneur who owned the solar farms, Liam Kavanagh.
Following reports by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism about his business relationship with Thurrock, Kavanagh said in June 2020 that he was “never going to raise a pound from a local authority again,” according to recent court filings from a case in which the financier is suing his former chauffeur.
Kavanagh’s companies, which operated solar farms across the UK, had received hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of investment from Thurrock Council, which oversees a region along the River Thames east of London.
Two years on, Thurrock is stuck with a huge annual deficit and has been stripped of its financial powers. The former leader of the council has resigned.
Mark Coxshall, current leader of Thurrock Council, described its losses as “shocking” but added: “The first stage to creating a good plan for recovery is to understand the full extent of the problem.”
When the Sun Shines
The story dates back to at least June 2016, when Thurrock Council helped to finance the purchase of a solar farm in Swindon, England, through bonds marketed by Rockfire Capital, a company owned by Kavanagh. Over the following years, Thurrock helped to finance 53 solar farms across the UK, all of which went on to be ultimately owned by Kavanagh.
The arrangement was not without precedent. UK councils have been known to borrow money to invest in new projects, in an attempt to top up income squeezed in the years following the financial crisis. Now they face another squeeze, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cuts spending in an attempt to correct the calamitous seven-week reign of his predecessor Liz Truss.
Other investments have gone wrong. Last year, Slough Council, in Berkshire, was taken over by ministers after blowing a £100 million hole in its budget following a string of commercial acquisitions. In Spelthorne, in Surrey, the council used hundreds of millions from the Public Work Loans Board to buy commercial property — at one point borrowing £1.1 billion.
These councils were spurred on by the 2010-15 coalition government, which wanted local authorities to behave in a more businesslike way. In 2016, when Thurrock made its first solar farm investment, the local authority said it was a “pro revenue generating council,” and would “continue to look for similar opportunities.”
“People in Thurrock can rest assured that not only are we looking after their money, but we are also doing our bit to help protect the environment by reducing the amount of carbon produced by burning fossil fuels,” Shane Webb, a Tory councilor, said in 2016.
To go big on renewable energy, Thurrock borrowed £1 billion at low interest rates from more than 100 other local entities including the Greater London Authority, Cornwall and Leicester councils.
At one point its debts reached £1.4 billion, equivalent to almost 10 times its spending on local services.
The investments prompted John Kent, leader of the opposition Labour Party at the council, to write to the national government demanding an investigation.
“I, and other councilors, have been raising concerns about the council’s borrowing and investments strategy for over two years,” Kent wrote in July this year. “Throughout, we have been ignored, falsely reassured, fobbed off and misled.”
Toucan Energy
Some details emerged in a High Court judgment, published in April last year, concerning a dispute between one of Kavanagh’s companies, Toucan Energy Holdings Ltd., and another firm, Wirsol Energy Ltd., surrounding the construction and sale of 19 solar parks.
Toucan claimed approximately £30 million in damages as a result of alleged defects in the parks. Ultimately, the judge dismissed most of the claims.
While Thurrock was not a party to the case, its dealings with Rockfire Capital and Kavanagh were mentioned in the proceedings. The court heard that Rockfire Capital had approached Thurrock in 2018 with an opportunity to invest £145 million in bonds linked to the parks — on top of hundreds of millions it had already invested in the solar farms.
Kavanagh was a witness in the case, and not a party. During the case it emerged that a £5 million commission charged by Rockfire Capital to Thurrock was not included in a prospectus sent to the council. Kavanagh told the court that he saw no reason to include details of the fee in the document because all his business partners knew that Rockfire Capital “always charges a commission.”
The judgment also quoted Daniel Kirk, who worked at Toucan Energy, saying in a message to a colleague that he was “not working for someone who just treats us like a cashpoint for his own equity when [the] taxpayers and signed contracts [sit] above his equity.”
During the case he told the court that these comments were “more of a personal failing on my side at this point to properly manage and communicate with Mr. Kavanagh.” Kirk declined to comment when contacted by Bloomberg News for this article.
In another message quoted in the case, Kirk said that Kavanagh “was taking” two payments — claimed to be £350,000 and £650,000 — and complained: “those are designed to cover our costs not his cars.” The judge in the case, Justice Andrew Henshaw, concluded: “Mr. Kirk’s contemporaneous view that Mr. Kavanagh was extracting money from the business for his own benefit is plain.”
The Chauffeur
Kavanagh himself has taken to the courts to protect his reputation, bringing a case against his former chauffeur, Tony Tremlin, who is alleged to have given a copy of dash-cam footage to a journalist at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.
The court filings refer to footage in which Kavanagh allegedly complains about BIJ articles about him. Kavanagh says the dash cam was for vehicle safety, “not for obtaining and retaining surreptitious recordings” of his conversations.
The financier was captured on tape discussing how he planned to wind up one of his businesses: “You take risks, you get in and get out.” Bloomberg has seen a partial transcript of this recording in publicly available court filings.
The quotations attributed to Kavanagh in the filings include him saying that he needed to “protect everybody’s interests and the money” and “get rid” of Rockfire Capital in the wake of a BIJ story.
“I’m not bothered now,” he is alleged to have said. “I’m never going to raise a pound from a local authority again.”
Tremlin said in his defense filings that disclosing the footage was in the public interest. He accused Kavanagh of putting businesses — owing £655 million of public money — into liquidation, without Thurrock’s consent.
Kavanagh claims the information given to journalists was confidential, and that he “does not court publicity.” The case is ongoing, with Tremlin filing his defense in recent weeks.
Responding to Toucan Energy Holdings 1 Ltd. going into administration last month, Kavanagh said in an emailed statement: “I cannot comment on the decision to put the company into administration having had no role in that decision or indeed the management of the Toucan business. I installed a new management team in June 2022 and, as far as I am aware, the underlying business has traded strongly.”
In the statement, Kavanagh added “I am confident that this is a business with a positive future, particularly given the recent and current growth in the green energy market.”
Tremlin did not respond to a request for comment.
Emergency Bailout
Thurrock’s financial health has continued to crumble. In September, ministers stripped it of some powers and put Essex county council in charge of its finances. Thurrock was told to refinance its low-interest loans to pay back neighboring councils, and has borrowed money from the UK’s Public Loans Works Board at an interest rate of between 4% and 5%.
Rob Gledhill, former leader of the council, resigned. At the time, Gledhill said he welcomed support from the government but that the “political buck stops with him.” He declined to comment for this article. Sean Clark, a former corporate director of finance at Thurrock who was involved in investment decisions, was suspended from his role in September, the BBC reported. Clark did not respond to a request for comment.
On Nov. 10, Toucan Energy Holdings 1, the holding company owned by Kavanagh, went into administration. Interpath Advisory, a restructuring firm, was appointed to hunt for a buyer for the farms. Coxshall, Thurrock Council’s current leader, said in a statement that the move would “maximize recovery” for taxpayers.
Last month, the full scale of the potential losses to the taxpayer were laid bare. Thurrock revealed a £470 million deficit for the current financial year, and wrote off four investments at a cost of £275 million. It said it has made a further provision of £129 million made to cover other losses.
Thurrock has appealed to the national government for an emergency financial bailout, and has warned of further cuts and a likely sale of buildings, land and other assets — along with tax increases for local residents.
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Biden Environmental Policies Are Endangering Maine Lobstermen and Right Whales
The Maine lobster industry is a constant target of radical preservationist environmentalists. If their attacks persist, the industry is sadly at risk of going extinct.
That’s terrible for American conservation.
Earlier this fall, the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch “Red List” issued a warning to avoid eating American lobster on account of the alleged harm the industry causes endangered North Atlantic right whales.
By red listing American lobster, Seafood Watch tarnished the sterling reputation of workharding people responsible for harvesting 82% of the nation’s lobster catch. Prompted by this flawed decision, the Marine Stewardship Council also suspended the Gulf of Maine’s MSC certificate effective December 15th, 2022.
These attacks aren’t isolated. The Biden administration seeks to regulate the lobster industry on these grounds too. And in doing so, their actions will result in the endangerment of both lobstermen and rare North Atlantic right whales.
Ahead of last week’s State Dinner with French President Emmanuel Macron, Rep. Golden tweeted, “If the Biden White House can prioritize purchasing 200 Maine lobsters for a fancy dinner, @POTUS should also take the time to meet with the Maine lobstermen his administration is currently regulating out of business.”
Golden alludes to two Commerce Department, specifically the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), rule changes.
The first change, pertaining to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) Fisheries’ Biological Opinion (BiOp) Conservation Framework, urges 10 fisheries –including U.S. lobster – to adhere to a 98 percent risk reduction from the fishery by 2030.
Per the Maine delegation, this modification would be “a death knell for our nation’s lobster industry” since it already poses a low risk to right whales.
In conjunction with the Conservation Framework, NOAA Fisheries is set to implement an Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Plan “to reduce the incidental mortality and serious injury to North Atlantic right whales.” It went into effect in September 2022 and demands “at least a 90 percent risk reduction target” from the lobster industry.
Another right whale rule to be finalized by the Commerce Department next year would displace anglers and boaters from waters yet come with no benefit to the whale.
I elaborated on this in an earlier Townhall column, writing, “Radical preservationists similarly blame fishing vessels for contributing to the whale’s demise. In August, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) ceded to special interests by proposing changes to the North Atlantic Right Whale Vessel Strike Reduction Rule. They argue, “Reducing vessel speed is one of the most effective, feasible options available to reduce the likelihood of lethal outcomes from vessel collisions with right whales.””
Much to the chagrin of radical preservationists and their allies in the Biden administration, lobstermen aren’t foes of the North Atlantic right whale. On the contrary. They’ve made accommodations for the species–which is protected by both the Endangered Species Act and Marine Mammal Protection Act–and haven’t been responsible for gear entanglements in over 20 years.
Conservation stakeholders like Maine lobstermen can coexist with these whales.
But since destructive preservationist thinking dominates this White House’s environmental decision, Biden and company believe placing the whale ahead of lobstermen is practical. Instead, it’s counterproductive and antithetical to true conservation practices.
Maine lobstermen also note the Biden administration actively dismisses data showing right whales aren’t migrating to areas where they fish.
If this administration truly cared about the plight of North Atlantic right whales, why are they pursuing 10 large-scale offshore wind projects in the Atlantic Ocean region where these fragile creatures frequent?
As lobstermen and other conservationists don’t pose threats to these whales, what actually endangers the remaining 350 whales? As many of us suspected, it’s actually offshore wind turbines.
According to a bombshell Bloomberg report, a NOAA Fisheries scientist admitted these projects pose a credible threat to the species:
Both initial construction of wind projects and decades of expected operation threaten to imperil right whales in southern New England waters, Sean Hayes, chief of the protected species branch at NOAA’s National Northeast Fisheries Science Center, said in a May 13 letter to Interior Department officials.
Mr. Hayes warned Interior Department officials about greenlighting these, writing, “Additional noise, vessel traffic and habitat modifications due to offshore wind development will likely cause added stress that could result in additional population consequences to a species that is already experiencing rapid decline.”
The report added, “Wind turbines may disrupt the dense concentration of zooplankton that the whales depend on for sustenance, potentially forcing them to spend more energy and take more risks searching elsewhere for food, Hayes said.”
This very admission by a NOAA Fisheries scientist should put a dent in the Biden plan to deploy 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030.
True conservation preaches wise use of natural resources and coexistence between people and nature. Maine lobstermen steward their lot well–even against the backdrop of onerous, strict environmental regulations.
By imposing unreasonable risk reduction demands, the 4,500 people directly and indirectly employed by this $1.4 billion industry face displacement from the workforce— without any added benefit to the endangered North Atlantic right whale.
If lobstermen are regulated out of existence, kiss both this 150-year industry and the right whale goodbye.
Nevertheless, it shouldn’t come down to sacrificing one for the other. Let’s save the whales and equally protect Maine lobstermen too.
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John Kerry gets an easy ride from Britain's climate establishment
For climate campaigners, Donald Trump was the anti-Christ, pooh-poohing climate change and withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement. But what of the Biden administration – is it really going to make the climate lobby any happier?
Things may be a little clearer following the visit to Britain of John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, who gave the annual Fulbright lecture at King’s College London on Friday evening. He was certainly keen to assert that America is now wearing a different pair of boots than it was under Trump, telling his audience ‘you need guideposts, and unfortunately in my country many of those guideposts were torn down.’
Britain’s climate establishment appears to treat US Democratic politicians very differently to Britain’s Conservative government
Kerry is very good at evangelising, preaching that the world is in peril and that it is down to all of us to do something about it. I wonder how many of his audience even questioned his claim that 10 million people are dying annually from the heat – a statistic that he used to illustrate the urgency of action in what he referred to as the world’s hottest year ever (a premature claim given that there are another three weeks to go yet). Kerry didn’t tell us where his 10 million figure came from, but it is likely a garbled reference to an Australian study published in Lancet Planetary Health in July 2021, which was widely reported – and misreported – at the time. Actually, the study claims that 5 million deaths a year can be attributed to extreme temperatures – either high or low. In fact, in the study cold-related deaths were found to outnumber heat-related deaths nearly ten to one. The bias towards cold-related deaths showed up even in Africa – indeed, paradoxically, it was especially strong there, with 1.18 million deaths a year attributed to the cold and 25,500 attributed to the heat.
While the study found a slight increasing trend in heat-related deaths – up by 0.21 percentage points between 2000 and 2019, this was outweighed by a fall in cold-related deaths, which fell by 0.51 percentage points over the same period. One of the authors of the study, Professor Yuming Guo of Monash University in Melbourne, noted that while heat-related deaths would like continue to rise with global warming, the net result in the short to medium term is likely to be fewer overall temperature-related deaths as fewer people are exposed to cold extremes.
It is quite shocking to catch out the US climate envoy appear to give such a misleading impression of what the evidence tells us on heat-related deaths. But let’s leave that aside for the moment. If you are a representative of the US government preaching about the urgency of tackling climate change you might be expected to be able to announce some pretty drastic action on the part of your country in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. So what was Kerry able to announce? He talked of technologies to cut methane emissions and carbon capture and storage (CCUS) – which angers many climate activists because they see it as a means for fossil fuel companies to justify their continued existence. He praised Egypt for closing down gas power stations (the gas, he suggested, was going to go the Europe instead, making up a much-needed shortfall). He reiterated plans he had announced at COP27 in Egypt for an Energy Transition Accelerator, whereby developing countries would be paid to close down coal plants and invest in renewable energy instead. He spoke of America bearing this and other financial burdens, such as helping developing countries cope with extreme weather.
But there was a gaping hole in what he said, which became more glaring the more he went on. Here he was, addressing an audience in a country which has legally-committed itself to reaching net zero emissions by 2050 but representing a country which has made no such commitment, and, to judge by Kerry, doesn’t look like doing so, either. The most the US has done is set itself a target – not a commitment written in law – to reduce emissions by 50 to 52 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030. When you had, in 1990, among the highest per-capita emissions in the world, that it not the most exacting of targets. Even Donald Trump made significant progress towards this target thanks to shale gas continuing to displace coal during his time in office.
After Kerry had sat down, former Labour MP Baroness Hayman took to the stage to berate the UK government for approving Britain’s first coal mine (producing coking coal for the steel industry) in 30 years. But why didn’t she turn round and berate John Kerry for the US’s continuing expansion of its fossil fuel industry? The US government expects gas production to increase from 98.1 billion cubic feet a day in 2022 to 100.4 billion cubic feet a day in 2023. The US will also produce 592 million tonnes of coal in 2022.
Britain’s climate establishment appears to treat US Democratic politicians very differently to Britain’s Conservative government. Not, of course, that we should be ungrateful for America’s expanding shale gas industry: last week Joe Biden did a deal with Rishi Sunak to export more liquified natural gas (LNG) to Britain – a resource without which we would be pretty stuffed at the moment.
Kerry isn’t stupid. He knows that he would never sell Britain’s climate and energy policy to his own voters. The Biden administration’s climate policy seems pretty clear: it will continue to promote shale gas over coal, and to tackle fugitive methane emissions from the gas industry. It will also pay for developing countries to forego the opportunity to grow their own economies with cheap fossil fuels. It will offer subsidies to investors in green energy and to buyers of electric cars, on the condition that they are made in America – a provision in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA as Kerry unfortunately referred to it, forgetting what those initials tend to stand for in Britain.
But no, America is not going to eliminate its fossil fuel industry; it is going to grow it. And neither is it going to try to force itself down the rabbit hole of net zero. But if Britain’s self-denial in refusing to exploit its own fossil fuel reserves creates export opportunities for US producers, then so much the better. Before the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 the first President Bush made clear that the American lifestyle was not up for negotiation. That is still the position of Kerry and Biden. Were they British Conservative ministers they would be harangued at every opportunity by the same people who praise them now.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/12/john-kerry-gets-an-easy-ride-from-the-climate-establishment
*************************************************On potential energy solutions, too many Australians deny the facts on nuclear
Facts and truth are loose concepts in the climate alarmists’ arsenal. As we pass one “tipping point” declared a decade or two ago, we are warned of new tipping points a decade hence.
It is an endless campaign of urgency, more marketing than science. We muddled our way through the “critical decade” only to be galvanised for the “decisive decade” ahead.
The more you examine science, the more complex the unfolding patterns and policy responses become. The more you interrogate the facts, the more the catastrophist scenarios and simplistic solutions are exposed.
Just because climate scientists predict change does not give licence to journalists and activists to fit up normal weather events as proof of their mooted climate dystopia. Meanwhile the wildest claims of the climate alarmists pass unexamined.
Last Saturday Anthony Albanese visited Renmark, in South Australia’s Riverland, which is experiencing a major Murray River flood that could turn out to be the third worst of the past 100 years, matching 1974 but falling below the 1931 flood, and way short of the 1956 monster. Yet the Prime Minister used the current high river to push his alarmist message.
“Climate change is real,” he said, axiomatically. Then came the hyperventilation: “And I’ve witnessed since I’ve been leader of the Labor Party, I’ve visited areas of tropical rainforests that have never burnt before that have burnt during the bushfires, during the summer of 2019 and 2020, that came after, of course, a period of drought.”
This is a familiar routine of blaming recent natural events on climate change, suggesting this is all worse than it used to be, and boldly ascribing the same causal factor for droughts, floods and bushfires. Most media regurgitates this stuff; like pandemic paranoia, climate alarmism fits into that vortex where media and politicians find mutually beneficial hyperbole.
I asked the Prime Minister’s office which rainforest Albanese claimed had burned for the first time, and it did not answer. Back in that terrible summer there were two prominent references to “unprecedented” burning of rainforests, both of which were quickly debunked when I checked the record.
Guardian Australia ran Australian National University climate academic Joelle Gergis in September 2019. “I never thought I’d see the Australian rainforest burning. What will it take for us to wake up to the climate crisis?” wrote Gergis, a member of the Climate Council. “As a scientist, what I find particularly disturbing about the current conditions is that world heritage rainforest areas such as the Lamington National Park in the Gold Coast hinterland are now burning.”
Soon enough media was alive with the horror of rainforest burning for the first time. Yet in October 1951 The Cairns Post had reported, “A bushfire in Lamington National Park today swept through a grove of 3000-year-old Macrozamia palms … The fire has burnt out about 2000 acres of thick rainforest country.”
So, nearly 70 years earlier, before global warming, rainforest burned in Lamington. Why would media run with fantasy over reality?
Around the same time climate activist and former NSW fire commissioner Greg Mullins told ABC regional radio: “There are fires breaking out in places where they just shouldn’t burn. The west coast of Tasmania, the world heritage areas, subtropical rainforests, it’s all burning. And this is driven by climate change, there’s no other explanation.”
A few minutes of online research put the lie to that. The South Australian Chronicle reported in February 1915 about lives lost in the “most devastating bushfires ever known in Tasmania sweeping over the northwest coast and other districts. The extent of the devastation cannot be over-estimated”. And The Canberra Times in 1982 reported a “huge forest fire” burning out 75,000ha of dense rainforest on the northwest coast.
This fudging in favour of catastrophism is the rule rather than the exception. The lack of curiosity or scepticism from media is astounding, but then even the weather bureau plays along.
In early 2019 when the Bureau of Meteorology proclaimed a new national record for the highest overnight minimum of 35.9C it was dramatic news around the nation. But neither the BOM nor anyone else in the media bothered to reveal that the weather station, at the western NSW location of Noona, had been in place for little more than a year – so all we really knew was that it was the hottest night in Noona for about 18 months.
That same year on January 24 the BOM proclaimed the hottest maximum ever recorded in a capital city – 46.6C in Adelaide. Again, it was big news around the country, but the weather bureau failed to mention the same site had measured a maximum a full degree higher in 1939. The only reason the 2019 record beat the 1939 reading was because the BOM’s temperature “homogenisation” had revised the early record downwards by more than a degree. You do not have to question the BOM’s methodology to wonder why it is not forthcoming with these relevant facts when it announces its new records.
Examples abound. We are constantly told Pacific Islands are about to be swallowed by the ocean when studies show the landmass of islands is growing, both through natural processes and human intervention.
The bracing predictions of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth are conveniently left unexamined – remember sea levels were to rise 6m, hurricanes were going to be more common and snow would retreat from Kilimanjaro – these and other predictions remain stubbornly unfulfilled.
Never mind, because politicians and media leap on every storm, drought, flood and fire as evidence we are experiencing these dire predictions already. This aversion to reality or disdain for truth extends to the energy policies proposed to deal with climate by reducing emissions.
There is a pretence being perpetrated on the public that this nation can power itself, affordably and reliably, on renewable energy plus storage. Worse, it is often insinuated that Australia’s efforts to reduce our 1 per cent share of global emissions can somehow change the weather, even though global emissions continue to rise.
Addressing the energy cost and supply crisis this week, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said: “This crisis is caused by coal and gas prices, anybody who says it’s caused by renewables is lying, and that needs to be called out, renewables are the solution to this crisis, not the cause.”
He had better tell Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe, who had this to say last month: “It is difficult to make predictions here, but it’s probable that the global capital stock that is used to produce energy will come under recurring pressure in the years ahead. If so, we could expect higher and more volatile energy prices during the transition to a more renewables-based energy supply.”
Sounds a hell of a lot like the transition to renewables is putting upward pressure on prices. This is obvious when you consider the massive investment required in intermittent generation, regulated transmission and storage, all of which need to be funded by taxpayers and consumers.
This was made plain by Alinta Energy chief executive Jeff Dimery last month when he predicted price rises of at least 35 per cent for consumers. “The cost of the transition is going to be for a raft of reasons more expensive than it otherwise would have been a few years ago, and we need to make the public aware of the cost of transition,” he told Ross Greenwood on Sky News.
Are Lowe and Dimery telling lies? I think not. Bowen wants to pretend that a trillion-dollar transition away from fossil fuels to a renewables-plus-storage model will be cheap and painless.
In fact, the evidence suggests it is impossible. The International Energy Agency says almost half the reductions to get to net zero by 2050 globally will have to come through “technologies that are currently at the demonstration or prototype phase” – you only have to look at the energy crises facing every economy going down the renewables path to see this reality playing out.
Yet even on potential energy solutions, too many deny the facts. Bowen, Albanese and even modern Labor’s nuclear energy realist, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas, argue a domestic nuclear energy industry would be uneconomic – “the most expensive form of energy” – for Australia. This too, flies in the face of verifiable facts. The IEA’s 2020 analysis of electricity generation costs found that “electricity from the long-term operation of nuclear power plants constitutes the least cost option for low-carbon generation”. The politicians cite “most expensive” when the apolitical global experts talk about “least cost” – yet our national debate fails to interrogate these issues.
On current technology the great advantage of nuclear, despite considerable capital costs, is reliability, durability (a new plant will last at least 60 years) and the leveraging of existing transmission infrastructure. By comparison, renewables require massive overbuilds (so capacity triples demand to cover intermittency across different locations), battery storage (which is inadequate and prohibitively expensive), firming generation (probably gas) and at least 28,000km of transmission lines to link generation projects across vast distances. Additionally, solar panels and wind turbines will need to be replaced every 15 to 20 years.
So the initial capital cost of wind generation needs to be multiplied four or five times before it can be compared to nuclear. And nuclear is getting cheaper and easier with the development of small modular reactors.
If we have regard for the facts, and we want to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, no politician ought be able to reject nuclear on cost grounds. But there is far too little focus on reality right across this debate.
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11 December, 2022
The Pentagon Marches Off to Climate War
The war in Ukraine is draining U.S. arms stockpiles while geopolitical risks grow. Yet the Biden Administration is worried about—you can’t make this up—the climate impact of U.S. weapons and wants to impose costly green mandates on federal contractors.
A little-noticed rule-making proposed by the Department of Defense, NASA and the General Services Administration last month would require federal contractors to disclose and reduce their CO2 emissions as well as climate financial risks. The rule would cover 5,766 contractors that have received at least $7.5 million from the feds in the prior year.
Smaller contractors would have to publicly report their so-called Scope 1 and 2 emissions—i.e., those they generate at their facilities and from the electricity and heating they use. Firms with larger contracts would also have to tabulate their upstream and downstream Scope 3 emissions, including those from customers, suppliers and products used in the field.
For example, weapons manufacturers would have to quantify and disclose the amount of CO2 generated from their own facilities; manufacturers that produce steel, computer chips and motors used in their weapons; propellants and fuel; and even munition storage areas. It’s unclear if CO2 emissions will influence procurement decisions.
Large contractors would also have to publish an annual climate disclosure and develop “science-based targets” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with the goals of the 2015 Paris agreement. That means contractors will have to aim to zero out emissions and possibly require their contractors to do so.
Will Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Technologies have to redesign weapons systems and aircraft to be powered by lithium-ion batteries? China mines and processes the critical minerals used in batteries and other green technologies that will be required to meet these “science-based targets.”
The proposed rule would also apply to non-defense contractors, including pharmaceutical, shipping and tech companies, though it curiously exempts universities, nonprofit research institutions and state and local governments. These exemptions are a concession that the rule imposes costly burdens.
But the very point of the rule is to force CO2 emissions reductions across the private economy by leveraging $650 billion in annual federal contracts. By covering Scope 3 emissions, the rule would sweep in tens of thousands of non-federal contractors, including many small businesses.
“Public procurement can shift markets, drive innovation, and be a catalyst for adoption of new norms and global standards,” the rule-making says. The climate conditions on contractors “will give visibility to major annual sources of GHG emissions and climate risks throughout the Federal supply chain and could, in turn, provide insights into the entire U.S. economy.”
In other words, this is a back door for the Administration to force businesses across the economy to report and reduce their CO2 emissions. It goes even further than the Securities and Exchange Commission’s proposed rule requiring publicly traded companies to report Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions.
The rule-making claims that federal contractors will benefit from climate mandates by “increasing senior management attention and funding for investing in GHG reduction projects.” Great. As the U.S. military faces strained budgets and growing threats, climate will be a costly new priority in national defense. The People’s Liberation Army must be dumbfounded by its good luck.
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Vanguard quits climate alliance in blow to net zero project
Vanguard is pulling out of the main financial alliance on tackling climate change at a time when Republicans in the US have stepped up their attacks on financial institutions that they say are hostile to fossil fuels.
With $7.1tn under management and more than 30mn customers as of October 31, Vanguard is the second-largest global money manager after BlackRock. The group said on Wednesday that it was resigning from the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, whose members have committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Vanguard, which mainly manages passive funds that track market indices, said the alliance’s full-throated commitment to fighting climate change had resulted “in confusion about the views of individual investment firms”.
“We have decided to withdraw from NZAM so that we can provide the clarity our investors desire about the role of index funds and about how we think about material risks, including climate-related risks — and to make clear that Vanguard speaks independently on matters of importance to our investors,” the Pennsylvania-based company said in a statement.
NZAM was founded in December 2020 and had 291 members managing $66tn in assets as of November. Last year NZAM joined an umbrella climate finance organisation, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (Gfanz) upon its launch last year under Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor. Vanguard will exit both groups.
In a statement, NZAM said Vanguard’s decision was regrettable.
“It is unfortunate that political pressure is impacting this crucial economic imperative and attempting to block companies from effectively managing risks,” said Kirsten Snow Spalding of Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmental groups and also a founding partner of NZAM.
Most of the largest global asset managers belong to NZAM, including BlackRock, State Street, JPMorgan Asset Management and Legal & General. Notable holdouts include Fidelity Investments and Pimco, both based in the US.
Vanguard said the move had been in the works for several months. It will continue to offer products that use environmental, social and governance investing factors and net zero products to investors who want them. Vanguard will also still ask the companies it invests in how they plan to address climate risks.
Last month, a group of Republican attorneys-general asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission not to renew Vanguard’s authorisation to buy shares in US utilities. They cited its NZAM membership as evidence that it was trying to influence corporate policy rather than being a passive investor.
That move is part of a larger attack by Republicans on ESG investing. Several Republican states have pulled cash management and other investment accounts from BlackRock, which has under founder Larry Fink been outspoken about the need to take into account climate change in investing. Texas comptroller Glenn Hegar said NZAM membership was one of the factors he used to compile a list of organisations he accused of “boycotting” fossil fuels.
Republican state attorneys-general have also demanded that Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo turn over information about their involvement in the banking arm of Gfanz.
Environmental groups accused Vanguard of duplicity after its announcement.
“Vanguard has never been serious about mitigating climate risk,” said Jessye Waxman, an official with the Sierra Club’s fossil-free finance campaign. For Vanguard, “joining NZAM was just an exercise in greenwashing”.
At least two pension funds, Cbus Super and Bundespensionskasse, have left the asset owner section of Gfanz, while investment consultancy Meketa has left another section. Several Wall Street banks including JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America threatened to pull out over the summer because they were concerned that they could be sued over increasingly stringent decarbonisation commitments.
Gfanz responded by weakening its alignment with UN climate goals that called for members to roughly halve the emissions they are responsible for by 2030.
https://www.ft.com/content/48c1793c-3e31-4ab4-ab02-fd5e94b64f6b
***********************************************************Do Some Climate Alarmists Wish Us All Dead?
What is the end-game of some extremists who believe in the threat of catastrophic, man-made climate change? The end of humanity.
In contrast, the founders of America operated out of a Judeo-Christian framework. The Bible was by-far the most widely read and studied book during America’s founding.
The framers declared that it is self-evident that we have been created equal and have been endowed by our Creator with certain key rights---first listed amongst them is the right-to-life.
But some of today’s climate alarmists want to see a global change to pull the plug on that right---not just for our country, but basically for humankind. And they certainly want to put the kibosh on the Biblical command to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with humans.
Why do some climate alarmists essentially wish us all dead? Because they think people are bad for the earth. They don’t believe in God. They claim to believe in science. But what is the evidence that people are supposedly bad for the earth
The Atlantic recently had an article (January/February 2023 issue), focusing on this idea that some experts today are promoting human extinction, for the sake of the planet.
They write: “From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on Earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it…. It is a rejection of humanity’s traditional role as Earth’s protagonist, the most important being in creation.” [emphasis added]
They call this view “transhumanism”---that we should get beyond humanity, and we should engage in “drastic forms of self-elimination.”
As noted, this contrasts sharply with the Biblical command that humanity should be fruitful and multiply. Argue the transhumanist “experts” quoted in The Atlantic: “But if being fruitful and multiplying starts to be seen as itself a form of killing, because it deprives future generations and other species of irreplaceable resources, then the flourishing of humanity can no longer be seen as simply good.”
The New York Times features an article on a 75-year old man who promotes a similar message: “Earth Now Has 8 Billion Humans. This Man Wishes There Were None.”
They write: “For the sake of the planet, Les Knight, the founder of the Voluntary Human Extinction movement, has spent decades pushing one message: ‘May we live long and die out.’”
Knight often spreads the message, “Thank you for not breeding.”
They add, “Mr. Knight is among those who believe that overpopulation is a main factor in the climate crisis.” The article notes that “a 2020 poll found that one in four Americans who had not had children cited climate change as a reason.”
Ideas have consequences. What begins as a discussion of hypotheticals in the faculty lounge may eventually become policy somewhere. These are worldviews in conflict.
I remember years ago, one Christian speaker made this observation:
-In the 18th century, the Bible was killed. (Higher critics beginning in Germany attacked the Scriptures and postulated that they couldn’t be trusted.)
-In the 19th century, God was killed. (Darwinism supposedly eliminated the need for the “God hypothesis.”)
-In the 20th century, Man was killed. (Nazi Germany’s Holocaust and the Communists’ murder of some 100 million persons are two prominent examples.) And now some of these climate alarmists are arguing that even more human beings should willingly die out…for the sake of the planet.
I reached out to author Wesley J. Smith, the Chair of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Human Exceptionalism, for a comment on this idea. He told me, “The Human Extinction Movement is a form of nature worship, expressing the belief that the world will be pristine without us. But why will that matter? No one will be around capable of appreciating nature’s wonder.”
I also asked for a reply from Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, the president of the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, who is a major critic of the unproven hypothesis of man-made, catastrophic climate change.
Beisner noted, “The proposal is absurdity in the extreme. Even the scenarios for the future in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scientific reports, exaggerated as they are, don’t depict human-induced global warming as an existential threat or even a great crisis. Such claims come only from the UN’s and various nations’ political leaders, environmental activists, and the mainstream media.”
And he added, “The hope for human extinction is nothing more than anti-human. Christians, who recognize that people are the image of God, will recognize it as attacking God in effigy."
Beginning with a dubious premise, the alarmists have reached a dubious conclusion. This relatively new push for no more humans reminds me of the verse in the Bible where God’s wisdom says, “All who hate me love death.”
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The coming crash of the climate cult
Viv Forbes, writing from Australia
The Climate Cult worships two green idols – electric vehicles and wind-solar energy. This is part of a futile UN scheme promoting ‘Net Zero Emissions’ which aims to cool the climate of the world by waging war on CO2 plant food.
Green worship is the state religion of all Western nations. It is promoted by billionaires with other agendas, and endlessly repeated by the UN, the bureaucracy, all government media, state education, and most big business leaders.
The promotion of electric cars and trucks will cause a great increase in the demand for electricity to replace diesel, petrol, and gas.
We live beside a major highway connecting Ipswich and Boonah in Queensland and we can hear the roar of the traffic.
The road is quiet at night, but as day dawns, the real workers start moving – big diesel trucks off to pick up the day’s loads of gravel, machinery, cattle, tanks, pipes, hay, timber, bricks, and concrete. Then comes the traffic that sustains urban life – meat vans, milk tankers, and refrigerated trucks of produce to fill supermarket shelves every day. Around sunrise come the commuters heading for city jobs, and the city’s electric trains, lifts, and escalators start to run. Then kids are delivered to school and sirens announce the occasional passing of ambulances, fire engines, and police bikes and cars. Finally, the tree-change bureaucrats cruise past in their electric cars heading for their leisurely staggered starts. By 9 am the traffic falls off.
To achieve Net Zero nirvana, all of this early morning traffic rush must be battery-powered. Untold thousands of batteries will need to be fully charged overnight – well before the vast paddocks of Chinese solar panels can deliver one amp of green electricity.
Listen here to Australia’s new Prime Minister during the recent election campaign explaining how roof-top solar will charge all those Tesla batteries overnight…
Australia’s reliable coal/gas power stations could charge batteries overnight, while city demand for electricity is lower, but the green religion demands closure and demolition of anything using hydro-carbons. But Green engineers have the solution – intermittent wind power plus big batteries will re-charge millions of vehicle batteries before dawn.
But what keeps trains, lifts, hospitals, and refrigerators going if we have a still night followed by another cloudy day? More batteries or Snowy 9 Pumped Hydro? And if the still cloudy weather continues, what will re-charge the Big Batteries and re-pump the hydros? And will Greens apply the same conservation standards and delaying tactics to wind, solar, hydro, and power line construction that they now apply to coal mines?
The Queensland Premier has a $62 billion green plan to close all coal power stations, cover the countryside with wind/solar clutter, plan whole cities of battery charging stations, build the ‘world’s biggest’ pumped-hydro batteries (net CONSUMERS of electricity) and become a world leader in ‘green hydrogen’ (huge CONSUMERS of electricity and water). Soon after the last coal power plant is demolished, in a snap of still, cold, cloudy weather the lights will go out, electric trains will stop, and battery-powered food deliveries to the cities will falter. There will be uproar in Parliaments, and all Green/Teal/ALP governments will fall. The ABC will blame ‘climate change’.
Energy Realists will take over. They will immediately place orders for dozens of modular nuclear power plants.
But this energy reality will come too late. Long lines of city dwellers with bicycles, wheel-barrows, and old diesel utes will flee from the hungry cities.
Some of these power refugees may get jobs harvesting potatoes and onions with digging forks, milking cows by hand, or plucking and cleaning chooks.
Re-powering and re-building will take decades.
All this for zero climate benefits – the world has passed the peak of this interglacial and the next long glacial cycle is edging closer.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/12/the-coming-crash-of-the-climate-cult/
***************************************9 December, 2022
Why you cannot trust your weather forecaster
Even if you did know the address of Ed Maibach’s office, you could walk right past it without a second thought. It’s in an anonymous-looking building in a perfectly ordinary stretch of the Virginia suburbs. The indistinct setting suits Maibach, who—due to the nature of his work—doesn’t list its physical location on his website. “Simply because,” he says, “there are a lot of crazy people out there who have a lot of anger and feel entitled to express their anger in really inappropriate ways, and sometimes really dangerous ways.”
Maibach’s professional endeavors are similarly discreet. Though he labors each day to alert Americans to the dangers of climate change, you won’t find him waving a NO FOSSIL FUELS banner from atop a tall building or protesting outside a congressional lawmaker’s home. Instead, this George Mason University professor deploys a behind-the-scenes strategy that would impress the savviest operators on K Street. Except rather than shilling for tech giants or Big Pharma, he works on behalf of the Earth.
About 13 years ago, Maibach identified a TV meteorologist in Columbia, South Carolina, who was willing to use his airtime not just to provide tomorrow’s forecast but to show viewers how climate change was impacting their local community. Over the next decade, Maibach would expand this experiment into what you might call a weather underground—a coast-to-coast network of TV weathercasters who believe that educating their audiences about global warming is as crucial as telling them when to bring an umbrella. The initiative, known as Climate Matters, has forced Maibach to confront a series of entrenched problems inside the broadcast-meteorology community, including alarming levels of climate denial and skepticism, fears about alienating audiences, and the occasional harassment of participating weathercasters. Yet by the end of 2021, the Climate Matters network of meteorologists had penetrated into nearly every media market in the country, and Maibach had pioneered a promising new approach to a complex crisis.
Truth is, if you’ve recently watched the weather report on the local news in the Washington area, there’s a decent chance you’ve seen Maibach’s handiwork—the Climate Matters network now includes weathercasters at NBC4, WUSA9, WJLA7, and Fox 5. But like local-news consumers across the country, you wouldn’t have known that behind that telegenic meteorologist are a social scientist in his sixties and a team of academic researchers, data crunchers, and ex-weathercasters. “To a lot of our viewers, it’s lost on them how much work Climate [Matters] really is doing,” says Kaitlyn McGrath, a meteorologist at WUSA9. “But it is so far from lost on us.”
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New coal mine for Britain
The government has been condemned for approving a new coal mine in Cumbria – Britain’s first in generations.
The Woodhouse Colliery project, near Whitehaven, has sparked fierce opposition from locals and environmentalists.
Levelling-up secretary Michael Gove has granted permission, saying the coal will be used for the production of steel and not for power generation.
But the government’s own independent adviser on climate change has condemned the decision, which will allow extraction of the fossil fuel until 2049 – a year ahead of the UK’s legally binding target to achieve net zero carbon emissions.
The Conservative former minister Lord Deben, chair of the Climate Change Committee, said it would undermine UK efforts to reach net zero and “diminish” the country’s global influence on carbon.
Under development by West Cumbria Mining since 2014, the undersea mine will be the first deep pit to open in England since 1986. It is projected to increase UK greenhouse gas emissions by 0.4 million tonnes a year, the equivalent of around 200,000 cars.
The approval was branded “shameful” by countryside charity CPRE, while Friends of the Earth said it was “a misguided and deeply damaging mistake that flies in the face of all the evidence” on climate change.
Shadow climate change secretary Ed Miliband said Rishi Sunak had been exposed as a “fossil fuel PM in a renewable age”, who had “given up on all pretence of climate leadership”.
And Lord Deben said: “This decision grows global emissions and undermines UK efforts to achieve net zero.
“It runs counter to the UK’s stated aims as Cop26 president and sends entirely the wrong signal to other countries about the UK’s climate priorities. The UK’s hard-fought global influence on climate is diminished by today’s decision.”
The developers say it will create 500 jobs providing coking coal for the steel-making industry, which has previously been heavily dependent on Russia.
But a wave of objections following its approval by the county council in 2020 resulted in the plan being “called in” last year for a final decision by the communities secretary.
Today’s decision by Mr Gove brings an end to the planning wrangle but will spark renewed protest in the area
Green groups warn that the new pit will damage the UK’s reputation internationally and undermine its ability to persuade others to make sacrifices to tackle global warming.
Friends of the Earth energy campaigner Tony Bosworth said the decision was a “significant” setback for the UK’s efforts to meet legally binding targets to achieve net zero carbon emissions.
“This is an appalling decision,” said Mr Bosworth. “Approving this mine is a misguided and deeply damaging mistake that flies in the face of all the evidence. The mine isn’t needed, will add to global climate emissions, and won’t replace Russian coal.
“The market for this coal is rapidly disappearing as UK and European steelmakers recognise that green steel is the future, and this mine risks becoming an expensive stranded asset.”
Greenpeace UK policy director Doug Parr said the decision came just weeks after Mr Sunak stated his aim to make Britain a “clean energy superpower”.
“The UK government risks becoming a superpower in climate hypocrisy rather than climate leadership,” said Dr Parr.
Lord Deben warned there may be no domestic use for Woodhouse coal after 2035, while International Energy Agency projections predict an 88 per cent decline in demand for the product globally by 2050 if emission reduction plans succeed.
But Woodhouse’s annual contributions to UK emissions will exceed the total projected from all open UK coal mines to 2050, he said.
Locking in the use of coking coal sends a strong signal to the market that low-carbon steel production via direct hydrogen reduction of iron is “not favoured by government”, narrowing the UK’s options for climate action, said Lord Deben.
The former chief executive of British Steel Ron Deelan agreed: “This is a completely unnecessary step for the British steel industry, which is not waiting for more coal as there is enough on the free market available.
“The British steel industry needs green investment in electric arc furnaces and hydrogen, to protect jobs and make the UK competitive.”
The CPRE’s interim CEO Tom Fyans said the decision was “out of touch” with the needs of Cumbria, the country and the planet.
“This absurdly retrograde decision will shackle us to the past at the precise moment the steel industry is transitioning to an environmentally sustainable future,” he said.
“Instead of grasping the opportunity to lead the world in a clean and green industrial revolution, here we are clinging onto the dirty coal that powered and poisoned the Victorian era. This shameful decision beggars belief. It will degrade the countryside, pollute the atmosphere and makes a mockery of the government’s legally binding climate commitments.”
The decision risks a fresh Conservative split, with Tory MPs including senior former ministers Kwasi Kwarteng, Robert Buckland and Tobias Ellwood having already voiced their opposition.
But at least 31 MPs from the party’s Northern Research Group signed a letter last year demanding the mine go ahead, including local MPs Trudy Harrison, Mark Jenkinson, Simon Fell and John Stevenson.
NRG chair Jake Berry hailed the green light for Woodhouse as “good news for the North and for common sense”.
“We must decide policy on the facts and it’s clear here we have made the correct decision,” said Mr Berry, the MP for Rossendale and Darwen.
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/cumbria-coal-mine-gove-climate-b2240672.html
**************************************************Chicken Little Propaganda Dressed As Science Permeates New Climate Report
The Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO have delivered their biennial dose of depression about the climate in their latest State of the Climate report.
The climate has warmed by 1.5C and there is barely a single benefit – it is all disaster.
It is often said, “if it is too good to be true, it probably is” and you are being conned. What about too bad to be true? Can a gently warming climate have no significant benefits at all?
The only marginally encouraging part of the report is about northern Australia. There might have been a slight reduction in cyclone numbers, and there has been a bit more rain in recent decades.
Apart from that, the report reads like the Book of Exodus – one disaster after another. Only the frogs and boils are missing.
But it is significant that the period when Egyptians were building pyramids, which was hotter than today’s climate, is often called the Holocene Climatic Optimum.
The word “optimum” was an indication that scientists working in the era before climate alarmism could see some advantage of a warmer climate.
A sure sign that the report tries too hard to find disaster is when it discusses coral bleaching and the Great Barrier Reef.
It stresses that there have been four bleaching events in the past six years, which it implies were devastating. But for some reason, the report fails to mention that this year the reef recorded its highest amount of coral since records began in 1985.
This proves that all the hype about coral loss from bleaching was greatly exaggerated. But the report writers were obviously untroubled by the contradictory evidence.
They ignored it.
And they also ignore the fact that corals grow about 15 percent faster for every degree temperature rise, and that almost all the corals on the reef also live in much warmer water near the equator.
We should expect better coral, and it should extend further south. That is not too bad, is it?
Why doesn’t the report mention that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere improves the water utilization efficiency of dryland plants, which occupy most of Australia, and that this has caused plants to thrive?
According to NASA satellites, there is a “greening” of Australia of at least 10 percent. Overall, the world has seen the area of green leaves expand by the equivalent of twice the area of the United States in just 35 years.
In a changing climate, there will be winners and losers, and it might be that the net effect is a major problem. But if the report writers will not even mention the good bits, how can we have any confidence in its findings?
The latest report should ring alarm bells – but not just about climate. Is this an excellent tool of propaganda, or is it a scientific statement?
We should all worry about whether groupthink has taken hold of the BOM and CSIRO.
We should worry when the BOM says it has recently adjusted all the temperature records, reducing the temperatures a century ago by up to a degree. Can we have any confidence they did this with good scientific reason?
And we should worry about the BOM’s claims that the fire seasons are now much worse than in 1950. Why is all the information on huge bushfires before 1950 ignored – like the devastating 1851 Victorian bushfire and the 1939 fires?
It is not like there is no data before 1950.
Did they ignore that data for a good reason? Is this similar to the US fire statistics, which are often reported by authorities as having a major increase in fire acreage burnt since the early 60s, but fail to mention that there was almost 10 times more acreage burnt in the “dust-bowl” period in the 1930s?
In the next decades, Australian governments plan to spend hundreds of billions attempting to prevent climate change. Before we do that, maybe we could spend a few million doing an audit of BOM and CSIRO reports.
Maybe we would find that adapting to a changing climate is by far the best way to proceed. We might even find that some of what we have been told is wrong.
Why will the conservative parties not commit to an audit? Who would argue against a bit of checking of the science, when the Great Barrier Reef statistics prove scientists got something badly wrong?
And the latest report is a sure sign that the BOM and CSIRO are drifting into political advocacy rather than science, observation, and objective prediction.
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ESG superannuation funds are bad investments
This year Australian ESG superannuation funds lost over 10 per cent of their members’ wealth.
Business, where the profit motive is explicitly dominant and where the hundreds of millions of direct and indirect owners want to see it remain the crowned ruler, might be expected to reject spending that syphons off profits to political causes… And yet, nearly every firm funnels funding to politically acceptable causes, in the main involving those of a social and environmental nature.
Sometimes, pressured by governmental regulatory stances, like the soon-to-be mandatory reductions on the top Australian emitters, a growing number of firms also engage in expenditure that replace fossil fuel derived energy with more expensive wind and solar. Also important is the avoidance by superannuation fund managers of investments in firms deemed to be involved in globally harmful activities within the ‘Environment, Social and Governance’ (ESG) framework. Once targeted at avoiding gambling, tobacco, and alcohol, the hallmark of these causes is now environmentalism, particularly avoiding fossil fuel producers.
Stocks favoured by sentiment will see their values rise in relation to their underlying earnings. But can this persist indefinitely without it being matched by increased profits?
Canstar and Chant West are among the organisations that monitor superfunds’ performances. About half of the funds scrutinised adopt the contemporary ESG doctrine that involves seeking to exclude firms producing fossil fuels from within their portfolios.
For many years, firms following this approach could offer credible claims that they were also performing well in terms of their overall returns. This is no longer the case. The following table draws from the superannuation fund monitors to show the ten worst fund performers in 2022, alongside the funds’ average performances over the past five years and their ESG status.
The six funds having performed worst are all ESG oriented, avoiding investments in firms mining coal and other hydrocarbons. This year they lost over 10 per cent of their members’ wealth. Those ESG funds that previously had strong performances were heavily invested in tech and property stocks, which had experienced above average gains. Tech stocks have now seen falling prices; this may also be true of property but most property funds have extensive holdings of un-listed investments (Virgin Money is one property fund that exclusively invests in listed property and showed an 11 per cent fall in value this year). Added to this is another factor: the recent buoyancy of the coal, gas, and oil stocks that the boycotting of which leaves ESG funds disadvantaged compared to funds that are more purely focused on returns.
Most funds’ marketing material includes words that warn that past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance, while extolling their past success. Thus Unisuper, which has divested from coal stocks, still has on its site that it led the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) pack in terms of returns as at August 2021. But during 2022, Unisuper has lost 4.4 per cent of its members’ wealth. Similarly, with remarkable chutzpah, having this year lost 15 per cent of its members’ funds, Australian Ethical is running a TV promotional campaign featuring outlandish characters extolling the fund’s virtues, ‘Because I want my environment like I want my stocks – THRIVING!’
As a consumer protector, APRA has the power to force chronic under-performing funds to merge with a better-performing fund; four were forced to do so this year. However, now that the ESG funds have become demonstrably vulnerable to this sanction, industry bodies are calling for its dilution – even to prevent the under-performers being named, ‘If linked to deliberate strategies for climate change or other ESG issues.’ To buttress this protection of ESG under-performers, the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors is seeking to intensify ESG reporting requirements, the objective of which is to ensure few stand-outs. ESG reporting is already mandatory in the UK, EU, New Zealand, and Canada.
The share of wind and solar in global electricity supply has risen from zero at the turn of the 21st century to 10 per cent today (22 per cent in Australia with policies aiming at over 80 per cent). These are intrinsically high cost and low reliability energy sources. But private sector subsidy-seekers and institutional support on the back of the confected climate scare together with government subsidies have underpinned their growth. How will this be affected by newly evident financial realities in a competitive market for superannuants’ savings, where the savers’ prime concern is the returns they receive?
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/esg-climate-virtue-bleeding-super-dry/
***************************************8 December, 2022
What poor nations need is wealth, not climate reparations
by Jeff Jacoby
THERE IS a lot to dislike about the climate reparations deal hammered out last month at the United Nation's climate summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Under presidents of both parties, the United States had for years firmly opposed the idea. Heading into the conference, US climate envoy John Kerry insisted that any deal "tied to compensation or liability [is] just not happening." But in the end, succumbing to pressure, delegates from the wealthy countries agreed to compensate developing nations for the costs of coping with storms, heat waves, and droughts worsened by climate change. The plan to create what the conference called a "loss and damage fund" was greeted by supporters as a "new dawn for climate justice." Cynics called it a "Sharm el-Shakedown."
Scientists say carbon dioxide emissions from the advanced industrial world may contribute to an increase in extreme weather events like the recent terrible flooding in Pakistan. But the notion that wealthy countries, by using fossil fuels, have made life worse or more dangerous for residents of poorer countries doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Through the burning of petroleum, coal, and natural gas to generate energy, the industrialized nations have improved the quality of human existence — not just within their own borders but everywhere — to a degree that would have been inconceivable in the 19th century. Of course the spread of carbon-based industry has generated costs, some quite serious — air pollution and mining accidents, for example. So did the gift of fire that Prometheus, in the ancient Greek legend, turned over to human beings. But just as the benefits of fire enormously outweigh its drawbacks, so do the benefits of fossil fuels.
Since the rise of the industrial revolution made possible by oil, coal, and gas, billions of people have been liberated from destitution. The energy derived from fossil fuels has been a feedstock for fertilizers that massively increased the world's food supply. It has facilitated the building of modern infrastructure — paved highways, modern hospitals, well-built homes and schools. In countless ways, it has made the lives of human beings today safer, healthier, and longer than ever before.
The gains from fossil fuels have been especially dramatic when it comes to protecting societies from natural disasters. Writing in Foreign Policy about the UN climate summit, Ted Nordhaus, Vijaya Ramachandran, and Patrick Brown of the Breakthrough Institute observe that people now are more than 90 percent less likely to die from floods, droughts, storms, or other extreme weather events than in the 1920s.
"Well into the 20th century, annual death tolls from climate-related natural disasters numbering in the hundreds of thousands or even millions were routine," the authors note. The death toll in the 1931 Yangtze-Huai River floods in China, to cite one horrific example, may have been as high as 4 million. Tropical cyclones in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh frequently left tens of thousands dead. Millions died in famines. Today, however, deaths in China from flooding number fewer than 500 each year, cyclone fatalities across the subcontinent are numbered in the hundreds, and China has not suffered a famine in decades.
What made those tremendous global gains possible was modern industrialization in the wealthy nations. That economic growth would have been impossible without extensive use of affordable fossil fuels. And it is the energy from those fuels, not reparations, that offer the best chance for the developing world to catch up to the wealthier nations.
Rising CO2 levels are not the greatest handicap faced by the world's most vulnerable countries. Poverty is. Poverty makes every problem worse, including those caused by climate change. The premise of the UN's new reparations fund is that it is up to the West to compensate poorer nations for damages due to climate change. At the same time, those nations are encouraged to shift away from using fossil fuels.
But that is exactly the wrong approach. What poor countries need above all is to climb out of poverty. They require more growth, more technology, more infrastructure — all of which require more access to the fossil fuels that remain, overwhelmingly, the source of the world's energy. The surest way to expand resilience to climate change is to first expand economic development. The United States today leads the world in reducing carbon emissions in large part because it earlier led the world in building an industrialized economy.
That is the pattern for the developing economies to emulate. First let them work on getting rich. Then they can work on getting to zero emissions.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26615/what-poor-nations-need-is-wealth-not-climate
********************************************************Jane Fonda: climate change and the UN’s ‘racial sacrifice zones’
Actress Jane Fonda is trending on social media for the hilarious anti-science belief that racism and misogyny are causing climate change.
Today’s trend was sparked by a video on MSNBC in which Jane Fonda said: ‘If there was no racism, there’d be no climate crisis. If there was no misogyny, there’d be no climate crisis. It’s part of a mindset.’
At which point she holds her fingers against her head, pointing at her mind. ‘It’s the mindset that looks at a woman and says, “Nice tits!”’
As Tucker Carlson says on Fox News following the video: ‘In other words… “My ex-husbands caused climate change!” In addition to everything else, it’s all about her.’
We shouldn’t be surprised.
These are not original scripts penned by Fonda, they are lines recited from the United Nations who have put out headlines like: The global climate crisis is a racial justice crisis: UN expert in which the article says:
There can be no meaningful solution to the global climate and ecological crisis without addressing systemic racism, and particularly the historic and contemporary racial legacies of colonialism and slavery, a UN human rights expert warned.
“Climate justice seeks historical accountability from nations and entities responsible for climate change and calls for a radical transformation of the contemporary systems that shape the relationship between humans and the rest of the planet. The status quo is that global and national systems distribute the suffering associated with the global ecological crisis on a racially discriminatory basis,” said Tendayi Achiume, UN Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, in her report to the General Assembly.
Which is obvious nonsense. Where’s the justice for victims of third-world perpetrated slavery and human rights violations going back before the dawn of the West? Where’s the global justice for Asian, African, and South American nations which rank as the world’s worst climate polluters? Their actions aren’t a result of ‘colonialism’ – they were made by governments in full control of their actions looking for a moral escape for their ‘climate crimes’ that doesn’t involve personal responsibility.
It’s worth reading just how depraved the thinking at the United Nations is, because this is what our Prime Ministers and Presidents are nodding along to on their five-star private jet climate conferences.
The UN expert said that “global ‘sacrifice zones’ – regions rendered dangerous and even uninhabitable due to environmental degradation – are in effect, ‘racial and ethnic sacrifice zones’.” It is the peoples and territories who have been subject to the worst forms of historical and contemporary racial and ethnic subordination that are the primary inhabitants of these sacrifice zones. These are the same peoples most affected by climate-induced migration, and who are confronting, in the case of Small Island Developing States, impending disappearance of their entire territories.
‘Global sacrifice zones’ – tell me again this isn’t a death cult. The UN expert describes sacrifice zones in the report more formally as:
“Sacrifice zones,” as illustrated in this report, are more accurately described as “racial sacrifice zones.” Racial sacrifice zones include the ancestral lands of indigenous peoples, territories of the Small Island Developing States (SIDS), racially segregated neighborhoods in the Global North, and occupied territories facing drought and environmental devastation. The primary beneficiaries of these racial sacrifice zones are transnational corporations that funnel wealth, towards the Global North, and privileged national and local elites globally.
Can you imagine Anthony Albanese or Peter Dutton standing up before the people and admitting that they follow the UN science and now believe in sacrifice zones? Who knows, maybe that is on the agenda for 2023. We might see supporters of the Voice (aka those who want to enshrine racial supremacy into Parliament) classifying Australia as a racial sacrifice zone in order to extract reparations, as the UN report recommends.
The Tendayi Achiume UN report lists the ‘racist colonial foundations of the ecological crisis, transnational environmental racism, and climate injustice’. If Achiume had looked further, far from ‘race’ being the cause of poverty and poor land management, what these governments have in common is collectivism – be they socialist, Marxist, or communist. And if they’re not collectivist governments destroying the prosperity of the third world – the remainder are made up of hyper-religious Islamic military despotic tyrannies. There is definitely a common link to poverty and pollution, but it’s not race – it’s despotism.
Celebrities in the West are affluent and vacuous enough to buy into this UN emotional blackmail, which forms the perfect marriage between the two great religions of the West: Woke and Climate Catastrophe.
One is revamping of last century’s ‘feel good’ racial supremacy which the media and celebrity class embraced (only this time, instead of white supremacy we have black supremacy duct-taped to a modern ‘white saviour complex’). The other is a death cult that uses fear of an existential crisis (although the ‘experts’ can’t decided if the world is going to end in a flood, ice age, or with a Biblical fire and brimstone affair) and then offers salvation to the guilty so long as they advocate for policies that make life miserable for the poor.
Given the saturation of the West with these twin idiocies, it was only a matter of time before they were short-handed by celebrities looking to resurrect their careers with a bit of cheap social virtue.
On December 6, Fonda shared a video of herself ‘rocking the climate boat’ by standing in front of various Greenpeace paraphernalia in an outfit that’s probably worth more than the average third-world mother makes in their lifetime. It’s part of Jane Fonda’s three years of Fire Drill Fridays in which she demands Joe Biden lean heavily into the rhetoric of climate emergency.
‘Organising does not stop after an election, does it? We must hold the folks we got into office accountable to us, not to oil companies, because the fossil fuel industry does not stop, so we can never stop.
‘Time is running out. Scientists are telling us we are in our last decade of action. What we do or fail to do in the next 8-10 years to cut our fossil fuel emissions in half will determine how much of a livable future we have.’
Obviously, no one has told Jane Fonda that over 95 per cent of the medical and pharmaceutical industry is directly reliant on fossil fuels via petroleum products and if she gets her wish to ‘end oil and gas’ she’ll effectively ‘end modern medicine’.
Or perhaps she missed the memo that the renewable energy industry is built on the bones of coal, where hundreds of tonnes of coal is used to build wind farms, in addition to the largest mining boom in modern history – which includes tearing the ocean floor apart in pursuit of rare earths for batteries and solar panels.
This sort of celebrity lop-sided science is rotten to its core, fashioned out of a few activist hashtags and propped up by people who have money to burn in exchange for the last fleeting look at the camera before irrelevancy sinks in. Meanwhile, third-world regimes are cashing in on climate money, pretending to wallow on the edge of ‘apocalypse’ while quietly lining their Swiss bank accounts with gold.
Jane Fonda is right about one thing, time is running out for the third-world – but only because of the United Nations Sustainability Goals which demand an end to modern agriculture, forcing nations to massacre their farming sectors, swiftly creating an artificial global famine.
No doubt, the United Nation will blame this in-house famine on ‘climate change’ and demand more money to fix it.
‘They chose pollution of their children. They chose profits over our future,’ screeched Fonda, whose politics will ensure that tomorrow’s children are fed a steady diet of cockroaches and lab-printed meat.
But if you were hoping for citizens to judge Fonda’s words on merit, rather than celebrity nostalgia – you’d be wrong. Veterans are prepared to go along with Fonda, regardless of the obvious failings in her logic, because they enjoyed her political views in the 70s.
Fonda, who keeps getting arrested and warned over disruptive climate protests, appears to relish the attention. And that is the problem. Climate activism has become a performance, frequented by actors and social media influencers who’d rather stick themselves to things or throw soup over artwork than go out and spend a few months planting trees on a farm.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/jane-fonda-climate-change-and-the-uns-racial-sacrifice-zones
**********************************************************Texas Takes Action to Expose ESG-Pushing Asset Managers
Republican legislators in Texas are taking action to get to the bottom of the world's largest asset management firms' work to advance ESG — environmental, social and governance — policies to the detriment of their customers and the larger economy.
The latest development in the right's fight against woke policies being forced via firms like BlackRock and Vangaurd comes from Texas State Senator Bryan Hughes, who is now issuing subpoenas for information the firms have withheld in previous disclosures and announced a hearing to require an explanation from representatives from the firms trying to enact their will by circumventing the will of Americans.
"In August, the Senate Committee on State Affairs asked four financial firms, BlackRock, State Street Global Advisors, The Vanguard Group and Institutional Shareholder Services, to produce specific documents related to their ESG practices," Hughes explained this week. "The Committee needs these documents to uncover the extent to which these firms have been playing politics using Texans’ hard earned money," he added.
"Next week we will hold a hearing where each firm will appear and give account to the people of Texas," Hughes continued. "While each firm has produced documents, some have provided more than others. BlackRock in particular has refused to provide documents it considers internal or confidential," he noted. "Accordingly, we have issued a subpoena to BlackRock for the production of additional documents the committee needs to complete its work. We will not allow these firms to continue to use Texans’ money to force a narrow political agenda," Hughes pledged. "They have a legal duty to put their investors’ interests first, and we intend to make sure they do."
The push for accountability from Texas legislators comes as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, and other ESG-advancing asset managers come under increased scrutiny and face divestments ordered by state financial officers in Missouri, Louisiana, Florida, and other places.
"We are witnessing a reckoning for these asset management firms that have until recently thought they could take hardworking Americans’ money and use it to drive their progressive agenda, and in some cases send those dollars to the Chinese Communist Party, with no consequence for their malfeasance," observed Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers' Research. "Now you can’t turn on the TV or read the news without BlackRock claiming to be a good steward of the assets they’re mismanaging via their ESG charade," he noted. Indeed, BlackRock especially has been running aggressive TV advertisements across cable news channels including Fox News.
"It is clear they’re on the ropes, and it’s leaders like Sen. Hughes that are going to make all the difference by doing what’s right for the American people and standing up to megalomaniacs like Larry Fink," Hild added. "This action from Texas will uncover much of what these firms have tried to hide – their agenda is driven by politics, not profits."
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Solar panels are eating up huge Expanses of Farm Land
Wedged in the southern flank of Virginia, Charlotte County is home to some 11,500 people who live amidst rolling hills and family farms, pastures and sawmills, a historic Civil War battlefield, and four townlets tinier than many suburban subdivisions.
But this pastoral tableau will be swept up in the green revolution when construction begins here on the nation’s largest solar power facility east of the Mississippi River. The planned 800-megawatt Randolph Solar Project in Charlotte County will replace a commercial lumber farm of loblolly pines with 1.6 million photovoltaic panels covering an area equivalent to seven square miles.
State and federal officials see in solar energy the potential to counteract global warming with an infinite natural resource. With the 2020 passage of the Virginia Clean Economy Act, the Old Dominion is among a growing number of states committed to “decarbonizing” its power grid by replacing natural-gas and coal-fired power plants with solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage.
Federal policy is about to inject a massive funding to incentivize similar transitions nationwide. The New York Times characterized this year’s omnibus Inflation Reduction Act as the “the largest package of subsidies ever granted to the industry” – a $220 billion package of tax breaks, subsidies, and other incentives for the electric utility sector to invest in solar power, battery storage systems, and other carbon-free technologies.
The momentum behind solar energy could make sunshine the nation’s dominant source of electricity, supplying up to 45% of the nation’s electricity by mid-century, from a meager 2.8% of U.S. electricity generation now, according to a Department of Energy forecast.
But converting to solar has ancillary costs that will become more apparent as time passes. Solar energy facilities require vast stretches of land, converting farms and fields into geometric rows of indigo panels. The South Atlantic region has led the country in newly installed solar generating capacity for the past three years, according to a study from Virginia Commonwealth University, but little information is available on how these facilities are altering the landscape.
And the rapid buildout exposes a moral paradox for the climate change movement: Although done in the name of fighting global warming, some amount of deforestation will be the inevitable result of clearing land for ground-mounted solar panels. Environmental groups say they hope to steer solar farms to disturbed land and rooftops, but those options are often expensive and impractical.
“We’re going to change the character and characteristic of rural Virginia if this goes unchecked,” warned Martha Moore, senior vice president of governmental relations at the Virginia Farm Bureau. “My main concern is the long-term viability of the agriculture and forestry industry in the state of Virginia.”
Moore pointedly avoids using the euphemism solar “farm” when referring to a solar energy facility. She is concerned that replacing agriculture with sprawling solar projects will not only take out valuable land from production but also undercut local farming by reducing business for local sawmills, livestock markets, and farmers’ cooperatives.
This year the American Farmland Trust said that expanding solar power could gobble up as much as 3,900 square miles nationwide, and predicted that many Eastern states could lose between 1.5% and 6% of their undeveloped land to solar facilities – mostly on farmland that’s flat, cleared, and near to existing transmission infrastructure. A Princeton University study this year forecast that achieving a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050 could directly impact a cumulative land area the size of Virginia, with forested lands the most directly impacted by solar deployment in Eastern states.
The environmental groups that have launched waves of lawsuits and press releases to fight oil and gas pipelines, natural gas fracking activity, and power plant ozone violations have largely been absent on this issue.
Instead, solar land conversions have triggered local resistance and lawsuits in Charlotte County and other communities in an attempt to stall or block the projects. Local governments in nearly every state have enacted restrictions, moratoriums, or bans on renewable energy facilities, according to a 2021 study by Columbia University Law School. A study this year on opposition to renewable energy said the most common concern is environmental impacts, including harm to wildlife. As an example, the researchers cited the denial of a state permit to a proposed solar farm in Maryland that would have required clearing trees in an area over 200 acres, or 1/3 square mile.
Virginia will likely require 200 to 250 square miles of land for solar development, based on projections by the state’s two utilities, to add more than 16,000 megawatts of solar power. While that’s not a huge amount of real estate for a state of nearly 43,000 square miles, solar development is often clustered in areas where land is available and farmers are eager to trade up from harvesting soybeans to sunbeams.
Sunny Money
John “J.A.” Devin, whose family holdings and relatives will lease land for the Randolph Solar Project, said he could lease for $35 to $40 per acre to a farmer growing soybeans, or as much as $100 per acre to a farmer growing corn. Instead, the Devins are opting to go with solar developers who pay landowners between $800 and $1,000 per acre, with a 2% annual escalator.
“You can’t argue with economics – it’s just so much more money,” Devin said. “I told my brother: We’ll put solar panels on this land, and we’ll take that money and turn around and buy some more land. We’ll take advantage of this solar while we can.”
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7 December, 2022
‘Reparations’: The Latest Ploy in the Climate Change Hustle
This is all about money. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of government handouts
STEPHEN MOORE
I’ve made the case in previous columns that the climate change movement is mostly a climate change hustle. Let’s be real. None of this is about changing the temperature of the Earth. Even the most naive environmental activist can’t really believe that building windmills and driving Teslas is going to cool the planet. This is all about money. Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of government handouts.
That was never more blatantly transparent than at this year’s sham COP 27 climate conference in Egypt, which was attended by more than 20,000 delegates and activists from more than 100 countries. The only agreement that the delegates could reach was a hollow “commitment” from the rich Western nations — by that they mean the United States — to give “reparation” money to the poor nations of the world.
If you’ve never heard of this loony concept before, the theory is that America owes the rest of the world money for burning fossil fuels over the last hundred or so years.
Huh? These were the fossil fuels that provided America with the energy to save humanity from fascism and communism during World War I, World War II and the Cold War.
These energy sources are what have powered the industrial age, bringing light, heat and air conditioning. And they have powered our infrastructure, factories, an abundant food supply and a technology revolution. Add to that our drugs and vaccines, which have saved many hundreds of millions of lives globally.
It was the fossil fuel energy revolution of the last century that supplied America with the wealth and financial resources to provide some half a trillion dollars of disaster and foreign aid to seemingly every area of the rest of the world. And now, President Biden’s dunces are agreeing with foreigners that we owe them money? America should be getting reparation payments. Not the other way around.
Oh, and did I mention that China and India skipped out on the conference this year? These are by far the two largest polluting nations, and they want no part of this global handshake “agreement.” This would be like celebrating that we have reached a peace agreement during World War II, except the bad news is that Germany and Japan aren’t on board.
The sliver of good news here is that Republicans are about to run the House of Representatives, and one of their first policy declarations will be to declare we are not sending a penny of climate foreign aid to other nations when we have mammoth problems here to solve at home.
It’s almost sinister that at a time when many third-world countries lack basic health care, adequate food production, clean water, affordable/reliable electric power and basic schooling for the young (especially girls), the European and American delegation is giving sermons on the dangers of climate change.
With a fraction of the money the climate fanatics want to spend on green energy, the world could save millions of lives simply by ensuring the poor have access to clean drinking water and save millions of lives over the decades to come.
What all of this means is that America is under no moral or legal obligation to pay reparations to any nation. The United States is running a $1.2 trillion budget deficit, so there is no extra money in the bank vaults to spend right now on foreign aid. Perhaps when we’ve balanced the budget and we have surpluses. That would be around the third Wednesday of never.
https://www.nysun.com/article/reparations-the-latest-ploy-in-the-climate-change-hustle
******************************************************Green Energy Cabal Blind To Africa’s Medical Horror Show
Those discouraging the use of ‘fossil fuels’ in Africa in favor of wind and solar have played a direct role in high morbidity and mortality rates on the continent.
Homes without electricity for lights and refrigerators, businesses without sufficient power to improve productivity, and millions languishing in abject poverty — all due to a lack of energy that otherwise would be available from the much-demonized fuels of coal, oil and natural gas.
Approximately half of Africans cannot get electricity when they want it. Only 14.3 percent of people in the Central African Republic have access to electricity.
The combined production of power of 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa equals the production of a single western economy like Spain.
The most devastating effect of this energy poverty is felt in health care centers, 60 percent of which in sub-Saharan Africa do not have electricity. According to the United States Agency for International Development, 100,000 public health facilities in the region have no access to reliable electricity.
“In 2012, 150 babies on oxygen concentrators at a hospital in Jinja died after utility company UMEME Uganda Limited turned off the electricity with no prior notice. In 2015, Kiboga District Hospital was without power for over a month,” reports an article from the Center for Health, Human Rights and Development in Uganda.
“Doctors said they were unable to provide even basic first aid such as sutures because they could not sterilize tools,” the article continues. “Vaccines and blood went bad because of the lack of refrigeration. Laboratories could not perform diagnostic services without power. The maternity wing was in complete darkness, and Cesarean sections could not be performed. Mothers died on their way to the capital Kampala or private clinics to access emergency obstetric care.”
This situation is not unique to the sub-Sahara. Even the advanced economy of South Africa has faced regular power blackouts and load shedding due to mismanagement by the state utility ESKOM, whose policies are now influenced by the climate movement’s hostility to ‘fossil fuels’.
In South Africa, most of the 420 hospitals and 3,000 clinics – all state-run – do not have reliable backup generators.
The chairman of the South African Medical Association said, “(T)here is a huge possibility that vulnerable people going into (an operating room), having a child at a hospital or in ICU could face serious complications because of load shedding.”
One hospital in July put all surgeries on hold because of an unstable supply of electricity.
Doctors are using lights from their phones to perform surgeries and procedures in case of emergencies.
“In cases where there is a power outage, they will do their level best if they are in the middle of a procedure so that a patient can survive, especially when it is obvious that the patient’s life can be compromised if they don’t intervene and electricity won’t come back,” says Sibongiseni Delihlazo, spokesperson for the Democratic Nursing Organization of SA.
But why rely on backup when the state electricity utility ESKOM can utilize coal? Because ESKOM has committed to abandon coal in the name of ‘climate change’.
Africa’s crisis cannot be addressed without affordable and reliable energy. “Nearly $20 billion are required for universal electrification across Sub-Saharan Africa, with about $10 billion annually needed for West and Central Africa,” says Riccardo Puliti, World Bank vice president for infrastructure.
The problem is that new investments are being directed to expensive and unreliable wind and solar projects when coal is the obvious solution to Africa’s energy poverty.
The African Development Bank has stopped new fundings for coal projects. So have dozens of other aid agencies based in Europe and North America.
Africans need electricity now. Not someday in the future, after their chance to survive a hospital surgery is denied by a policy maker enamored with fanciful visions of a ‘carbon-free’ world.
https://principia-scientific.com/green-energy-cabal-blind-to-africas-medical-horror-show/
******************************************U.N. Can’t Quit The Climate Apocalypse
Michael Shellenberger
Last summer, scientists announced that they had discovered more coral on the Great Barrier Reef than at any other point in the 36 years since they started measuring it.
It was an awkward moment for those who had been prematurely proclaiming the Reef’s death for over three decades.
Well, the apocalyptic powers-that-be weren’t having it.
Yesterday, a United Nations report announced that science schmience, the Reef was “in danger” and had to be protected from… the Australians.
“The mission team concludes that the property is faced with major threats that could have deleterious effects on its inherent characteristics, and therefore meets the criteria for inscription on the list of World Heritage in danger,” said the U.N. report authors.
Declaring the Reef a “World Heritage in danger” is viewed by many Australians as a pretext for the U.N. to demand control over it.
Naturally, they objected to the U.N. designation.
“Yes, climate change is a risk to ecosystems like the Great Barrier Reef,” said its environment minister, “but that means it’s a risk to every reef globally. There is no need to single the Great Barrier Reef out in this way.”
The U.N. is quickly turning into a Bond movie villain. It spreads misinformation about climate change.
It is trying to get rich nations to pay poor nations not to develop.
And it is trying to rapidly slash the use of nitrogen fertilizer around the world.
It’s enough to make one wonder what beneficial purpose the organization, beyond the Security Council, actually serves.
https://principia-scientific.com/u-n-cant-quit-the-climate-apocalypse/
*************************************************Australia: National cabinet walking a tightrope on energy policy
This week’s national cabinet meeting is one of the most dangerous gatherings of national leaders in recent times. Inexperienced in energy complexities, politicians and public servants could easily plunge the east coast of the nation into chaos, especially as the industrial relations legislation has destroyed business trust in the Albanese government. The first energy plan that was proposed, a price cap, may be rejected on the grounds of state opposition. But those state objections were almost irrelevant: the “cap” was a recipe for chaos.
Now a tax is being proposed on energy producers, where the revenue will somehow be diverted to help industrial and domestic consumers. That proposal has less risk and some advantages but again has the potential to create chaos. To help readers understand the dangers facing the nation I will first detail what is likely to happen if there is a price cap and then look at some of the potential repercussions of a tax.
I strongly urge all the ministers and public servants in the national cabinet to study the research work of Commonwealth Bank energy economist Vivek Dhar, which I have found invaluable.
Each east coast state is different. We start with NSW. Purely on the basis of cash production costs, and ignoring their enormous capital costs, renewables are the cheapest form of energy. Accordingly, in a price cap regime, as the lowest cash cost source of electricity, renewables will take the first slab of demand – assuming the wind is blowing and the sun is shining.
On the basis of a proposed cap of between $11 and $13 a gigajoule, the next lowest cost level is gas-fired power stations. Unless there is some form of complex quota, gas power stations will therefore run flat out as a baseload operation, creating gas shortages.
Then comes black coal generators which, because of the gas price cap, suddenly become the highest cost power provider. But black coal power generation needs constant output and is extremely expensive and dangerous if it is forced to be the swing producer. It is a recipe for chaos in the generation of power in NSW. Queensland will be affected in a similar way but not as severely. Then comes poor old Victoria and its infamous energy policy, partly based on preserving ALP inner city lower house seats.
Victoria is more dependent on gas than any other east coast state, and the energy regulator says that Bass Strait will go into steep decline in about three years. Woodside and Exxon are prepared to spend large sums trying to extend the output for a few more years.
The WA-based Woodside has been blunt: if there is a low price cap that money will not be spent. Victoria can swing.
Victorian government politicians scoff and demand that gas should be piped down from Queensland and NSW at the low cap price. It’s nonsense, of course. Even if such a supply is legislated, the pipe network was designed to send gas north, not south and although changes can be made to improve the “south delivery”, there will be a massive shortfall for Victoria – especially as NSW and Queensland power stations will be absorbing as much gas as possible.
Daniel Andrews’ decision not to develop Victoria’s large onshore gas fields which don’t require fracking has worked: there was no green decimation of ALP inner-city seats in the recent election.
Without the Woodside/Exxon “rescue” expenditure, Victoria has the choice of developing its onshore gas or suffering huge shortfalls in about three years’ time, when the next election is due. The inner-city green seat issue remains. Victorians voted against gas development, so can’t complain if they are hit hard by the repercussions of any price cap.
The alternative of a profits tax creates even greater complexity.
Any extra profits-tax calculation somehow or other must adjust for different cost structures in different areas. It is highly likely to put out of business the wrong energy producers. And again, almost certainly, Woodside will tell the government to jump into Bass Strait if taxes are boosted.
And then comes the issue of who in the community receives the “subsidy” benefit funded by the tax. Small business is probably the most likely to benefit, but the industrial legislation has an employment definition that is problematic and will not stop carnage. It is possible the distribution of the tax will be based on a green agenda. There may be a delay between revenue collection and money distribution, which will hit both enterprises and consumers.
There is no way anyone will be happy. To try and sort out this mess we must start with the basics.
If the politicians and public servants in Canberra are prepared to do their homework between now and the cabinet meeting, they will discover that the ideal way to operate a non-nuclear power system like Australia is to have renewables and coal providing the base power loads. Gas and hydro cater for demand swings. Over time the coal runs down, replaced by extra renewables, including hydro.
And in time gas will be reduced by batteries, extra hydro and other means. Carbon-based power generators can be encouraged to engage in regeneration agriculture and growing saltbush and other plants whose root systems store carbon in the soil.
Of course, even better, maybe we boost power supplies via smaller nuclear power units — but that is hard for politicians to endorse. Nevertheless, their back is to the wall and nuclear technology is improving. The old waste problems are rapidly diminishing.
But again, there is no trust because of industrial relations. So where there is lack of trust combined with inexperience there is grave danger of a total mess.
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6 December, 2022
Can the Green/Leftists recognize the difference between fact and falsehood?
I was inspired to write the question above by a recent edition of the once-scientific "Scientific American". It long ago became a Leftist organ, with an interest only in the bits of science that Leftists like. Behold below the cover of the October "Special" edition:
And when cornered in an argument, Leftists often try to get out of jail free by saying "There is no such thing as right and wrong". And I think they do believe that. Calling somthing true has propaganda value for them but they don't really care if it is truth or not. There are certainly some philosophical difficulties with truth claims but denying the possibility of truth is denying the possibility of discourse, which is a dead-end if ever there was one.
Anyway, I decided to have a look at what the lavishly produced and illustrated "Special" edition had to say. I have a hard copy of it. Leftists avoid hearing conservative arguments like the plague but some of us have no fear of what both sides of an argument may have to reveal.
So I turned to the section about climate, a Left/Right touchstone if ever there was one. Getting the story right there would be very central to establishing the truth in current politics.
One reason why I turned to that section is that the statistics about climate are widely available and well agreed on among those who talk about the "science" of climate change. The statistics are there. It is only the construction you put on them that varies
In the hard copy of the magazine, the relevant section is headed: "Climate Miseducation". On reading such a heading, one would have thought that the first step would be to look at the climate statistics. Surely the debate cannot proceed until we do that.
But there is nothing like that in the article. The article is just a typical Leftist rave about evil oil compnies and such bugaboos. Oil companies are often very profitable so there is no way they can be anything but evil in Leftist eyes. So, far from looking for the truth, the article was just a whine
No mention that for 30 years between 1945 and 1975 atmospheric CO2 levels shot up but there was NO corresponding rise in global average temperature -- a 30 year period when the global temperature did not do what it should have. The industrial buildup of the immediate WWII postwar period was what was supposed to usher in global warming. Except that it didn't. A huge and very adverse truth about global warming was not even considered.
I read no more in the magazine. I binned it. I am too interested in truth to waste time reading drivel.
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The nitrogen craze
The fact that we swim at the bottom of a sea of nitrogen seems to be overlooked somehow
The Dutch Minister for Nitrogen, Christianne van der Wal, announced that 3,000 farms will be forced to sell their properties to the government for immediate closure after ‘voluntary’ measures failed.
Christianne van der Wal, who incidentally is a member of the Freedom and Democracy party, does not understand that if a person is offered two choices that both end with the government snatching their farm – there’s nothing ‘voluntary’ about the outcome.
Chairman Mao did a similar thing in China during his ‘Great Leap Forward’ and it ended with citizens eating their children. His regime forced collectivised farming across China, promising that it was ‘fairer’ and more ‘community-minded’ than all that self-interested private agriculture.
Learning nothing from the deaths of 45 million Chinese, the Dutch Minister for Nitrogen moved closer to the limelight and allure of giddy, climate-worshipping reporters.
‘For agricultural entrepreneurs, there will be a stopping scheme that will be as attractive as possible.’
This is the villainous conclusion to the Dutch Net Zero scandal that forms part of an approaching global food shortage manufactured entirely by the United Nations and its unsustainable ‘sustainability goals’. Other victims include Net Zero poster child Sri Lanka which collapsed earlier this year and was all-but erased from the Climate Cult hive mind.
In addition to the Dutch government demanding 30 per cent of livestock in the Netherlands to be (literally – not figuratively) burned at the stake of Net Zero, Christianne van der Wal went on to offer ‘peak polluters’ a future involving a torture chamber of tailor-made permits and taxes.
These ‘peak polluters’ are better known as essential manufacturers and suppliers. They include Tata Steel, which announced that it would ‘become a world leader in decarbonization for the third time’ and intends to switch to hydrogen steel production, even though the industry is not expected to become competitive until 2035-50 (maybe) and requires huge amounts of power (which Europe no longer has).
Let’s be fair, ‘green hydrogen’ production, storage, and use is an energy black hole. Fellow battered company Ford has agreed to buy ‘green steel’ from Tata – assuming it manages to make any – for its cars that no one will be able to afford because of ‘15-20 minute cities’ like Oxford which want to trap people in tiny car-free bubbles.
None of these green-agreements with the government saved Tata Steel from a criminal investigation held by Dutch prosecutors into alleged pollution from two of their plants. According to AP News, ‘Prosecutors said that their investigation was into alleged “intentional and unlawful introduction of hazardous substances into the soil, air, or surface water”.’
The problem is not nitrogen or carbon dioxide – but an actual pollutant, lead. Creating steel causes vast quantities of emissions. There’s no irony in steel plants working overtime to create ‘Net Zero’ technology, polluting small villages so that rich celebrities can fly over North Sea wind farms and marvel at the ‘clean’ technology.
Tata Steel’s Port Talbot plant in Wales, for example, created hundreds of tonnes of steel to build the world’s largest offshore wind farm, the Dogger Bank Wind Farm. ‘Huge amounts of steel will be needed to help the UK achieve its Net Zero goals – to build everything from renewable energy and low-CO2 transportation to hydrogen production and distribution.’ Virtuous climate warrior Tata owns coal mines in Jharia and West Bokaro but also managed to buy 75,000 tonnes of Russian coal during the Ukraine-Russia conflict and has large holdings in North America and Australia.
Over a decade ago, Tata purchased a 5 per cent interest in the Queensland Carborough Downs Coal Project for a 14-year initiative involving 58 million tonnes of coal with options to delve into the 100 million tonnes of unexplored coal sitting in deeper seams. Tata now says it is ‘willing to underwrite coal developments in Queensland to spark a resurgence in investment and development it needs for its booming steel industry’.
Tata is frustrated by the Labor government in Queensland demonising coal which has led to a severe lack of investment. Tata managing director TV Narendran said that this soft environment of investment stems from the conflation of thermal coal and coking coal. This is not surprising given the rhetoric of the Left dumbing it down to ‘coal’. Coking coal remains the only industrially viable way to make steel for pesky things like wind turbines, but you won’t hear a Labor premier say they ‘heart’ coal.
‘One thing I hear from industry is that there is a bit of concern about the increase in royalties, which obviously has come up and that it will eat into profits and hence investments. The second concern is the questioning of the future of coal and not distinguishing between thermal coal and coking coal. Given coal is such an important part of the economy in Queensland I think there is an opportunity for industry and government to work together.’
Narendran’s comments don’t bode well for Queensland.
‘We are not looking at investments in Australia, but we are happy to underwrite capacity.’ He added, ‘The company [Tata] bought about $4 billion a year in coal from Australia and there was an expectation that it would double over the next decade. I think it’s not about anything specific that the government has said … if Australia was not seen as a stable reliable supplier, then Indian suppliers would be forced to go to places like Russia.’
Mate, you’re barking up the wrong tree. Didn’t you see the Labor, Greens, and Teals’ election messages? Queensland is completely abandoning coal and instead spending billions on wind farms which require – oh… Coal.
Today’s politicians are some of the most ‘pro-coal’ in decades, the difference is that they hide their love of coal beneath words like ‘wind turbines’ and ‘renewable’ while presiding over the largest mining boom in a century. They’d also rather the coal come from the third-world where no one can see it being mined. Guilt-free ‘out of sight, out of mind’ bird mincing machines delivered in time for the next election…
While there is a lot of money running around in the ‘green’ industry, somehow these places are still crying poor with their paws out for public money. For example, despite the Netherlands Tata site being instrumental in providing steel to high-demand ‘renewables’ projects, Tata steel ‘threatened to shut down the operation unless it received a 1.5 billion pound subsidy to build two electric arc furnaces’.
‘Green steel’ is many things – economically ‘sustainable’ is not one of them.
It is not only the world’s energy sectors that are stuck in an idiocy feedback loop. The same government order in the Netherlands Parliament that threatened to kill steel production has also made thousands of private farms ‘illegal’ overnight.
The Dutch people are living through a nightmare pseudo ‘nitrogen futures trading scheme’ where farms are killed to allow the government to build ‘900,000 desperately needed homes with wind farms’ without exceeding EU-mandated nitrogen emissions.
Who is going to feed all these people?
That’s a problem for tomorrow. As for closing farms to improve ‘biodiversity’ – how’s that biodiversity look in the middle of the 900,000 new homes? Or is that mostly concrete and steel…? Imagine being a farmer, dragged from green fields and told that the grey, lifeless city is the climate virtuoso.
Our children have been taught by publicly-funded teachers that the farms that feed them are ‘evil’ and the city is ‘sustainable’ – that giving up meat in exchange for bugs and lab-printed food is ‘healthy’ – and that cows are a bigger threat than billionaires counting their money on private islands that (somehow) haven’t been inundated by the same water that Pacific Islands use to blackmail Australian taxpayers.
Ralph Schoellhammer, Webster University assistant professor, spoke to Spectator Australia editor Rowan Dean on Outsiders about the convulsions of madness running through Western governments.
‘The Dutch are doing to their agricultural sector what the Germans did to their energy sector – and we all saw the consequences there. We get the promises that ‘Oh, this is not going to be a problem… we can move to alternative modes of production!’ and in the end they never work,’ he said.
‘In Germany, it is even more insane. They want 30 per cent of their agriculture to go organic, which means that they would turn from a net exporter of agriculture to a net importer of agriculture. During times of global food insecurity, it is complete insanity.
‘The Dutch are doing the same thing. These 3,000 farms are just the beginning – and the Dutch government is saying this.
‘It has to be stressed for your viewers that Nitrogen is a crucial ingredient for synthetic fertiliser and without synthetic fertiliser we could not feed the world. About four billion people simply would have no access to food.
‘This is a war, in many ways I would argue, against humanism – against humanity.
‘The dominant ideology – I am tempted to call it the cult-ish ideology – tells us that if you don’t change now, the world is going to end in ten years. Which, of course, it’s not.
‘This is part of a larger story.
‘Remember Sri Lanka… If you go back two years, everybody was cheering them on. “Ah, Sri Lanka! They show the way forward! Sri Lanka knows how to do it! They proved to the world that in fact, you don’t need fertiliser. You don’t need any kind of synthetic materials to feed your population!” And then it all broke down in a very short order. Because you cannot feed your people. Modern agriculture is an absolute necessity given the population numbers that we have.
‘I think this is overall a larger part of a kind of auto-immune disease that the West is afflicted by where we turn against everything that made our civilisation powerful.’
This is not the first time that socialism, in one form or another, has been described as a disease that attacks weak minds – and our civilisation has certainly grown physically and intellectually lazy after generations of easy-living.
When asked if Climate Change and Net Zero are a breed of Marxism – a common accusation – he replies:
‘For me, it’s less Marxism then it is a kind of secular coming of a new form of reformation. If you listen to how they talk. It’s about, you know, “society needs to be cleansed”. We need to change our ways of life. This sounds more like the Puritans would argue than the Marxists
‘It’s about “we need to eat less meat” and “we need to take fewer showers”. It’s all about society needing a baptism of fire to cleanse ourselves from the sins of the past. It’s a quasi-religious movement.’
Rowan Dean adds, ‘It’s also fascism if you ask me. Fascism is the marriage of authoritarian governments and big business.’
It could be both… Eco-fascism with a state religion.
A generation lacking morality and told to feel guilty about everything – including the colour of their skin – has found salvation in Climate Puritanism. It is the misguided belief that they are saving the world by turning celebrities, politicians, and bureaucrats into a pantheon of gods to which they offer grand sacrifices – such as liberty and prosperity – to appease ‘the greater good’. They want to pass through the needle of social media approval and enter the Utopia of #ClimateJustice where everything is free.
They fail to realise that Climate Change is a death cult, ruled by demons and attended by corruption – of the Earth, of our wallets, and of our civilisation’s future. After all, what ideology could be more evil than a one that denies the basic human rights of the individual and seeks power through ruin?
https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/the-green-leap-forward/
***************************************************European grid operators are sounding the alarm over coal supplies in Germany and Poland
Poland faces greater risks toward the end of the season, European grid group Entsoe said in its winter outlook published on Thursday, suggesting that coal stocks there should be carefully assessed throughout the winter and not overused.
Germany has also been burning more coal for electricity lately -- due to low wind generation -- and the country will need to depend on coal even more after April, when it will completely turn off its nuclear plants. Even before that point, nuclear capacity will decline as fuel elements become exhausted during extended operation, Entsoe said.
Europe’s fragile energy systems are seeing their first winter test as colder weather kicks in. Leaders have been urging consumers to conserve energy in an effort to get through the season, and for now gas stockpiles are still close to full, despite a few weeks of net outflows. Entsoe hadn’t identified the risk to coal in a preliminary report in October.
In one of its scenarios, Entsoe expects an increasing share of electricity supply to be provided by gas-fired plants. It also said that net power exports from Poland may be limited during the winter due to the limited supply of coal.
The main system test, however, remains in Ireland, France, Southern Sweden, Finland, Malta and Cyprus, according to the European grid group. The European network will face the most stress in January and February, but France and Ireland could see issues before that, Entsoe said.
The slow revamp of nuclear capacity, mainly in France, but also a loss of nuclear capacity in Sweden and Finland, is challenges those countries’ power supply. However, France has lately been able to gradually bring back some of its reactors.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-01/european-grids-see-mounting-coal-supply-risks-in-germany-poland ?
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Australia: The wave of investment into renewables could bring forward the closure of coal plant by up to a decade
This guy is a loon. He proposes to replace dispatchable coal power by new dispatchable gas-fired generation. What a waste of capital investment! It won't please the Greenies as gas is a "fossil fuel" and it will create a huge cost burden on already high gas prices. New demand must push gas prices higher. Maybe they are banking on Russian gas becoming available again. We can hope.
Power giant EnergyAustralia has revealed plans to spend $10bn over the next decade building new electricity generation as part of a broader industry push on green spending, a move that may hasten the departure of NSW’s last coal plant by up to a decade.
Ahead of a planned intervention into Australia’s domestic energy market, the nation’s third-largest electricity retailer and generator set out the new investment target to be split across renewables, storage and solar and battery systems in households.
The wave of investment required to hit Labor’s aim of tripling renewables capacity to 82 per cent by 2030 could also bring forward the closure of EnergyAustralia’s Mt Piper coal plant by up to a decade.
The Mt Piper facility was expected to be the final NSW coal plant to shut in 2040, but that timeline may jump forward by as much as 10 years depending on how quickly replacement generation is installed in its place.
“I‘m worried more about closures happening faster than new entry at the moment,” EnergyAustralia managing director Mark Collette told The Australian. “There’s a lot of modelling out there that shows a lot of closures coming. Historically, Australia’s had maybe three big coal closures in the past 10 years, with Australia facing something like 15 in the next 15 years.”
Asked if an expected wave of green investment would accelerate the exit of Mt Piper, Mr Collette said: “All of the coal-fired power stations in the country, I’d expect all of them to be gone as soon as there’s replacement technology available.
“So for Australia, the challenge is long duration storage. At the moment, coal and gas form that insurance for the system, so we can get through all weather conditions. The date at which coal closes is purely about how quickly we can have replacement from those sorts of services.”
The September quarter produced “a massive acceleration” in the timetable for closure of coal-fired generation on the east coast, according to consultancy EnergyQuest.
EnergyAustralia’s $10bn spending plan over the next decade mirrors a plan by Canada’s Brookfield to invest an extra $20bn in Origin Energy through to 2030 to build new renewable and back-up energy capacity should it prevail with a live takeover bid under way.
The nation’s other big player, AGL Energy, has also said it would need to find up to $20bn to accelerate its exit from coal generation, after announcing plans to bring forward the closure date of its Loy Lang A power station in Victoria.
EnergyAustralia has been in talks with investors to help fund its multibillion-dollar pipeline of projects, with the company’s parent, Hong Kong-listed CLP, previously pointing to a deal with pension giant CDPQ for its Indian business as a potential model it would consider for Australia.
“Our primary areas to invest in are behind the meter to bring the best of small-scale energy technology with grid technologies for customers. And then in flexible capacity, which is the reliable capacity that underpins a very high concentration of renewables and brings it to life,” Mr Collette said.
The company plans to install a giant battery at Wooreen in Victoria’s Gippsland region, a gas-fired power station near Goulburn in NSW, Lake Lyell pumped hydro in NSW along with the Tallawarra B gas plant.
“We can quite clearly see that for our market share it’s quite easy to get to investments of $10bn over the next 10 years. The energy transition is quite expensive and like all players, we’re working on the best ways to fund that transition,” Mr Collette said.
The energy industry is bracing for an expected intervention, with the Albanese government prepared to intervene in South Australia and Victoria on a gas price cap at $11-$13 a gigajoule amid a stoush with states on imposing coal price caps to lower bills.
EnergyQuest said targeting temporary financial support for consumers who are most vulnerable to energy price shocks would be a far better solution.
“Moves to cap gas prices would not only increase east coast gas demand and reduce supply, but it would also amount to a whopping and inefficient fossil fuel subsidy of over $20 a gigajoule,” EnergyQuest chief executive Graeme Bethune said.
“The Treasurer is getting $50bn of windfall gains to his budget through the increases in company tax and Petroleum Resource Rent Tax from the spike in fossil fuel prices. The states already have a mish-mash of energy grants for energy cost relief that could be much better targeted through the Commonwealth welfare payment system.”
Large manufacturers are being offered gas contracts for 2023 at rates up to five times the level being offered last year, with the government warning factories will shut down unless it makes an urgent market intervention to cut prices.
Oil and gas industry sources, who are concerned about Jim Chalmers expanding the petroleum resource rent tax to subsidise retailers and households, have said the government would face constitutional issues if it imposes price caps on east coast gas producers and not WA producers.
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5 December, 2022
The Tories’ wind power delusion
A very strange parliamentary rebellion has been taking place with Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and dozens of other Tory MPs demanding an end to the ban on onshore wind farms. Wind power is cheap and getting cheaper, they argue. And surely, if we’re engaged in an energy war with Russia, we need all the power we can get?
It’s an argument that is wrong several times over. There is no ban on wind farms – it is actually a bog-standard planning requirement that they be confined to areas designated for that purpose and with community support. Nor do they offer a cheap solution: the costs are high and rising. In fact, relying on the wind for power would guarantee that electricity is expensive for ever, because wind’s unreliability poisons the market, driving up the price of gas-fired power too.
This week the prices offered to anybody – anybody! – who could guarantee to supply power on the chilly, windless evening of 29 November shot up briefly to about £1,100 per megawatt-hour (MWh), more than ten times the normal rate. Demand was forecast to peak at 41.2 gigawatts, supply at 40.7. In the words of Mr Micawber: result, misery. At such a price, enough supply did indeed come out of the woodwork, but not from the wind industry, which can’t just turn on the wind when it wants. Growing reliance on unreliable wind has left Britain paying sky-high prices on still, cold days. Remember when the secretary of state for business used to pose for the cameras while blowing up old coal power stations? They would be handy this winter.
The Ukraine war has driven gas prices higher, but, says Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch, it would be daft to assume that this is a permanent state of affairs and design a policy on the assumption that wind will be cheaper than gas in the future.
Claims that onshore wind is cheap come thick and fast from politicians in thrall to the most well oiled of crony-capitalist industries, the wind merchants. The claims are not supported by the accounts of onshore wind farms, which indicate a breakeven cost of around £80/MWh for the very cheapest farms. And this, note, is for the efficient wind farms with 200-metre turbines (twice the typical height), located in the windiest sites and spaced at least 1,200 metres apart so they don’t they steal each other’s wind. The cost estimate doesn’t even count the need to carefully manage backup power generation for those times and places where the wind is not blowing hard enough, or blowing too hard. Nor does it count the cost of building and running transmission lines from remote wind farms to places where people actually live.
Wind farm accounts also show that this cost is rising, not falling, presumably due to such grid constraints, the fact that the best sites have gone, and the rising costs of steel, concrete, copper and neodymium making new machines pricier. Yet even £80/MWh is nearly double the cost of gas-fired power at the long-term average price of gas.
But that is if gas is allowed to supply electricity continuously without much interruption. If you keep telling gas power stations to switch off because the wind is blowing, as we do, then they will have to (and do) charge more to cover the inefficiency of heating up and cooling down the gas turbines. The more wind we add, the higher the price of gas-fired power. In this way, wind locks in high electricity prices, hastening the deindustrialisation of Britain, or what’s left of it.
And hey presto, wind farms can charge these same high prices as gas, delaying the start of the ‘contract for difference’ they signed to supply at lower prices. Why? Because this document is a thing of beauty for the wind farm operators: it’s not a contract to supply power at all, but an option to do so whenever the zephyrs of the gods play ball. The government, in its infinite stupidity when Lib Dems were in charge of energy, gave wind farms the right to supply power (with bonus payments if the grid cannot cope on a very windy day) but did not hold them to the price they quoted. At least not without a trivial penalty. Incredible? If only.
The ‘contracts for difference’ that were put in place not only transfer the costs and risks of all the uncertainty to the rest of the system, but are ditched at the first sign of a better deal. Hornsea 2, the world’s largest offshore wind farm, began operation this year. Orsted, the developer, signed a contract for difference in 2017 to sell its power at £57.50/MWh. In the event, it delayed the contract until next year and sold power at between four and ten times that, costing the consumer hundreds of millions of pounds a year. See what I mean about business plans based on spot prices?
The best thing about wind farms, as far as city spivs are concerned, is that they transfer money from poor to rich. The costs are borne by electricity bill payers – and power absorbs twice as much of the monthly budget of a poor person than a rich person. The rewards are trousered by the wealthy: landowners, private equity investors, lobbyists, Chinese mine owners.
Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University told me how the market could and should be reformed. If anyone wants to be serious about onshore wind, he says, let them sign guaranteed supply contracts to provide power on demand for at least 20 years – with serious penalties if they cannot deliver. So the wind farm would be combined with enough battery or other backup capacity to be as reliable as a gas power plant.
This would force the industry to build, say, a 100-megawatt wind farm, but only guarantee to deliver, say, 40 megawatts to the grid, storing the surplus in batteries for when the wind farm is producing less than 40. The true cost of wind would probably be more than £200 per megawatt hour.
Talking of batteries, wind energy’s fans (no pun intended) were excited on 21 November when Harmony Energy opened Europe’s largest battery farm near Hull. ‘But what happens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine blah blah bl – oh right, we now have industrial-scale batteries,’ enthused David Shukman, former science editor of the BBC.
Consisting of about 50 container-lorry-sized Tesla megapacks parked on a site the size of a football field, the plant will be capable of storing enough electricity to keep just 1 per cent of Britain’s grid going for, er, four minutes. Electricity just isn’t like carrots or coal – storing it is immensely expensive.
But think how lucrative it will be to do so. When the wind drops on a cold November evening just as Harry Kane and co are kicking off, the grid (on your behalf) will pay well over the odds for stored electricity. This is why the high costs of wind are a bug, not a feature, as far as the industry is concerned. High prices are passed straight on to the consumer. The more problems wind farms cause, the more rewarding wind farms become. The bigger the projects are, the more attractive they are for ministers to cut their ribbons.
Notice these are purely economic arguments. I have not even started on the environmental drawbacks of wind farms. They need huge quantities of concrete and steel, both made with coal; they kill rare birds of prey, especially eagles; they slaughter bats; they obtrude on scenic landscapes; their magnets require rare earth minerals mined in China in hugely polluting ways.
Wind is a very low-density form of energy, so you need a very large number of wind farms to make any significant contribution to UK generation capacity: hundreds of square miles per gigawatt of capacity. A gigawatt of fossil fuel or nuclear power takes up a tiny fraction of the space and even less of the sky. In Scotland, where most onshore wind farms are proposed, this means turning almost all upland areas into what is called by planners a ‘wind farm landscape’. Enjoy the view.
Then there’s the question of how much carbon dioxide is really saved by wind farms. True, when spinning they don’t generate emissions, but in their construction they generate a lot: the mining, manufacture and transport of their concrete bases, steel towers, carbon fibre blades and metal-rich turbines. That means for the first few years of ‘green energy’ a wind farm is merely paying back what it has emitted. Meanwhile its sporadic power is destabilising the grid, destroying the economics of near zero-emission nuclear and requiring backup from less efficient sources such as open-cycle gas turbines, so add in some more years before you break even on carbon dioxide.
These are fiendishly difficult calculations to make, but it’s not impossible that some wind farms, sited in less windy areas, take ten years to save any carbon dioxide at all. How long do they last? Repairs start to get uneconomic at some point, maybe as little as 20 years into the lifetime of the wind farm. The thing has to be dismantled and disposed of. Now do the arithmetic: wind generated about 4 per cent of our total energy in 2020 (people find this number hard to believe, but it’s true: not electricity, note, energy). But only in the second half of its life is a wind farm saving emissions. So all the UK’s wind farms are reducing the nation’s emissions by just 2 per cent, or 0.02 per cent of global emissions.
If you think net zero matters – and even if you don’t – all this is crucial. Why don’t Tory MPs know this kind of stuff? The one thing the wind industry is really, really good at is selling itself. It never mentions intermittency and hides the scale of its contribution to decarbonisation by talking about ‘powering a thousand homes’, a meaningless metric. Somehow the wind farm has become the symbol of environmental virtue as potent as the crucifix. And we are all paying the price.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-tories-wind-power-delusion/
********************************************************France refires coal plant amid energy woes
The end of France’s coal era seemed so certain last year that the operator of one of the country’s last coal-burning plants posted an upbeat educational video on YouTube titled “Let’s visit a coal plant that's going to be destroyed!”
The plant in the northeastern town of Saint-Avold indeed halted coal production as scheduled earlier this year — but not for long. This week, its workers were back at the controls, transporting coal from storage heaps and refiring furnaces, as part of emergency efforts to keep the heat and electricity on this winter.
The energy crisis across Europe unleashed by Russia’s war in Ukraine has paved the way for coal’s comeback in some regions, to the dismay of politicians and activists who warn this endangers climate goals, the climate itself and public health.
“Working here we know the negative impact of the coal plant, but nonetheless we see it as a necessary evil," said shift supervisor Thomas About at the Emile-Huchet Power Plant in Saint-Avold.
“Given the current state of the electrical network, I nonetheless fear greatly that this production tool is necessary in the medium term," he told The Associated Press.
Nearby, wheel loaders scooped mounds of coal and dumped it onto conveyor belts, and gray fumes rose from the plant's smokestacks.
In France the return to coal is surprising because the country started phasing it out decades ago and relies heavily on nuclear power instead. But this year, on top of Russia largely cutting off natural gas to Europe, nearly half of France’s nuclear reactors shut down for maintenance or corrosion and other problems.
Facing a worst-case scenario of rolling power cuts to households, the government issued a decree in September to allow Saint-Avold to start again and continued activity at another coal plant in western France, citing the “exceptional” and “unforeseeable” context of energy supply challenges.
President Emmanuel Macron had initially vowed to close all coal-burning plants in the country by the end of this year due to climate-related concerns.
The impact of the backtrack will largely be felt locally, since coal plays only a minor role in France's energy mix nationwide. The two coal plants produced a maximum of 3% of France's electricity Tuesday, according to the national grid operator, compared to some 60% from nuclear plants.
The government has called on the French for a 10% reduction in energy use in the coming months, including by limiting heating, to avoid the risk of rationing and cuts this winter. Government spokesperson Olivier Veran said Wednesday that people reduced on average their electricity consumption by 5% in October.
The government insists the return to coal will be temporary.
The company that operates the Saint-Avold plant, GazelEnergie, is continuing its work to transition the site to the “post-coal” future, with projects for biomass and hydrogen-based energy.
Workers like About hope that future comes soon.
“This page will be turned one day," he said. “Let’s hope it will be turned quickly, so that this unit produces as little as possible.”
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/evil-france-refires-coal-plant-amid-energy-woes-94210436 ?
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Renewables have become the West's new blood diamonds
Wealth, with no ethical or moral standards for those of lesser means, can be dangerous and fatal to the cheap labor of disposable workforces.
We have seen the effects on the disposable workforce when Qatar “needed” to build seven stadiums in a decade to be ready for the 2022 World Cup. The World Cup in Qatar kicked off on Nov. 20 at Al Bayt Stadium, but the “acceptable” toll of more than 6,500 migrant laborers who died between 2011 and 2020, helping to build World Cup infrastructure with a cheap, disposable workforce, will provide viewers and participants with many lingering questions about our ethical and moral beliefs resulting from the grim toll.
Decades ago, it was sweatshops in the textile industry that grabbed the world’s humanitarian attention. Today it is the green movement, which is dominated by poorer developing countries mining the exotic minerals and metals that support the wealthy countries that are going green at a great cost to humanity.
The wealthy countries understand that developing countries have virtually no environmental laws or labor laws, which allows those locations unlimited opportunities to exploit people with yellow, brown and black skin and inflict environmental degradation on their landscapes.
Showing no moral or ethical concerns for the disposable workforce, wealthy countries continue to encourage subsidies to procure electric vehicles and build more wind and solar energy infrastructure. Those subsidies are providing financial incentives to the developing countries mining for those green materials to continue their exploitation of poor people and environmental degradation of their landscapes.
The 2021 Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations” reveals the lack of transparency regarding the green movement’s impact on humanity. Exploitation is occurring in developing countries that are mining the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green energy.” In these developing countries, mining operations exploit child labor and are responsible for egregious human rights violations of vulnerable minority populations. These operations are also directly destroying the planet through environmental degradation.
Last month, President Biden provided validation to the book’s message when his administration declared that batteries from China may be tainted by child labor, a move that could upend the electric vehicle industry while giving fresh ammunition to critics of the White House’s bizarre climate policies.
The Department of Labor said it would add lithium-ion batteries to a list of goods made with materials known to be produced with child or forced labor under a 2006 human trafficking law. The decision was based on many batteries using cobalt, a mineral largely mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children have been found to work at some mining sites. The department released the list in the form of a report that excoriated “clean energy” supply chains for using forced labor. It grouped Chinese batteries together with polysilicon — a key material used in solar panel cells — made in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Whatever the plan to satisfy our sports entertainment values and “green” environmental policies, our political leaders best not forget that they have ethical and moral responsibilities to continue to address the quality-of-life needs of those 8 billion on this planet now.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/nov/30/exploitation-of-green-energy/
**************************************************Australia: The Energy Minister's timetable for solar panel and giant wind turbine installation has collided with the roadblock of cold, hard reality
The good news is that the green jobs revolution we were promised in Labor’s Powering Australia plan has begun. The bad news is that most of the new jobs are in China, where a third of a million workers are employed manufacturing panels alone.
China controls 95 per cent of global photovoltaic panel production and its grip on the market is increasing. Manufacturing clean-energy units is a dirty business requiring a lot of energy, 60 per cent of which comes from coal. The International Energy Authority estimates that global production of solar panels is responsible for 51 mega tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions a year, some 60 per cent more than Australia’s entire industrial manufacturing sector.
Four out of 10 solar panels are manufactured in Xinjiang, the home of the Uighur ethnic minority, an estimated million of whom live in concentration camps. The US Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which came into force this year, creates a presumption that anything made in Xinjiang uses modern slave labour and cannot be imported into the US without clear and compelling evidence to the contrary.
That ugly debate has barely surfaced in Australia where the virtue of Labor’s legislated targets is simply assumed. Energy Minister Chris Bowen has faced next to no scrutiny from the gallery about his failure to deliver cheaper electricity or the wisdom of relying on brutish communist China for our future energy security.
Buried in the fine print of last week’s first annual progress report to parliament by the Climate Change Authority is a warning that our dependence on China for renewable energy infrastructure leaves us vulnerable to a geopolitical shock not unlike that European nations now face because of reliance on Russian gas and coal.
High commodity prices and supply chain challenges have increased the price of solar panels by 20 per cent in a year. There are similar rises in the price of batteries and, while Australia might benefit in the short term as one of the world’s largest sources of lithium, most of it is processed in China.
Bowen said last week that the Climate Change Authority’s warning will “need to be an ongoing focus”, which is some way short of saying he is taking it particularly seriously.
The authority’s statement to parliament exposes the modelling Labor relied upon for its Powering the Nation plan as worthless. A year ago, Anthony Albanese claimed the Reputex modelling was “the most comprehensive modelling ever done for any policy by any opposition in Australia’s history since Federation”. Now we learn its key objective, a 43 per cent emissions cut by 2030, won’t be achieved with the current settings.
The forecast of a $275 decrease in household energy bills in Labor’s first term went out the window long ago. Treasury forecasts energy bills will rise by 56 per cent in the next two years.
The promise of green jobs will be partly fulfilled, but it seems highly unlikely there will be anywhere near the 600,000 Labor promised or that many of them will continue beyond the construction phase.
Our reliance on the Saudi Arabia of solar panels is only one of the risks that makes the fulfilment of Labor’s grand plan highly improbable. The authority notes community acceptance, or social licence, cannot be taken for granted.
Australians may be in favour of clean energy in theory but they don’t want a wind or solar mega-plant in their backyard. Nor do they welcome the new transmission lines that connect them. Opposition is growing in regional and rural communities from Tasmania to Townsville.
In summary, Bowen’s timetable of installing 670,000 solar panels and 40 giant wind turbines every month from now until the end of the decade has collided with the roadblock of cold, hard reality. The only way to make the grid accommodate 82 per cent of greenish energy in the mix will be to hasten the exit of coal and gas and shut down heavy industry.
Rather than admit its pre-election modelling was wrong or bow to the economic reality that the huge capital investment in wind, solar, storage and transmission will push up the cost of energy, the government is resorting to coercion. If the markets won’t conform to the government’s perfect plan, they must be forced to do so.
Placing a ceiling on the price of coal and gas is one of the crudest forms of economic interventions known to humankind. Rather than address the shortage of supply, the government plans to add another disincentive to new investment.
Milton Friedman said the surest way to turn tomatoes into scarce commodities was to pass a law to prevent them being sold for more than two cents per pound. “Instantly you’ll have a tomato shortage,” he said in 1978. “It’s the same with oil or gas.”
Rising coal and gas prices are not the fault of Vladimir Putin, greedy energy company boards or a shortage of investment in wind, solar and batteries. They are the predictable consequence of placing unreasonable financial and regulatory burdens on the investment of capital in new and expanded resource extraction.
The distortions are already apparent. Woodside Energy is threatening to withhold new gas investment on Australia’s east coast, where the shortage of gas is most keenly felt. Who can blame it if the size of the return on its capital will be determined by political decisions made in Canberra.
Bowen, sadly, is not the kind of person to reach for a plan B, even if he had one. Those who have dealt with the minister say he does not welcome contrary advice. Just ask Paul Broad, the former chief executive of Snowy Hydro, who resigned after falling out with Bowen over the technological readiness of so-called green hydrogen.
Friedrich Hayek could have been thinking of Bowen when he described the mindset of the central planner: “The man of system … so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.”
The Prime Minister would do well to use his Christmas break to consider an early cabinet reshuffle.
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4 December, 2022
Swiss look to ban use of electric cars over the winter to save energy
The useless just became even more useless
The European Union jumped on the electric vehicle craze well ahead of other parts of the world, particularly after the Paris climate accord. But in typical socialist fashion, they weren’t content with simply encouraging people to switch to EVs. Many European countries almost immediately started making plans to ban gas-powered cars and trucks and make EVs mandatory. Lots of Europeans wanted to get out ahead of the curve and began snapping the newer models up.
But then came the start of the war in Ukraine, cutting energy supplies just as Europe was trying to wean itself off of fossil fuels.
Now, in a rather embarrassing reversal, Switzerland is considering legislation that would ban people from driving electric vehicles except in urgent conditions over the winter because there simply might not be enough juice on the grid to recharge them. (From Der Spiegel. Original is in German but Google Translate can convert it for you.)
Switzerland could be the first country to impose driving bans on e-cars in an emergency to ensure energy security. Several media report this unanimously and refer to a draft regulation on restrictions and bans on the use of electrical energy. Specifically, the paper says: “The private use of electric cars is only permitted for absolutely necessary journeys (e.g. professional practice, shopping, visiting the doctor, attending religious events, attending court appointments).” A stricter speed limit is also planned highways.
Most of the electricity in Switzerland comes from hydropower. However, the country also imports electricity from Germany and France . If there are bottlenecks there, electricity could also become scarce in Switzerland. Energy security in Europe is considered endangered because of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine
Switzerland has various “escalation levels” for its energy crisis. The ban on recharging electric vehicles would only go into effect when they reach level 3 according to the draft copy of the legislation that reporters obtained. Prior to that, the government would impose limits on how hot the water can be in washing machines (yes… seriously) and they would ban the use of leaf blowers and seat heaters in chair lifts. Bizarrely, they will also limit videos from streaming services to only be shown in SD resolution. (Huh?)
So much the same as we saw in California earlier this year, the government pushed everyone to switch over to electric vehicles to save the planet. But now they’re warning them that they won’t be able to recharge their vehicles except for “urgent travel requirements.” The crazy part of all of this is that the major energy corporations have been warning everyone about this for several years. The power grid doesn’t produce endless electricity by magic. You have to produce enough energy to power it or it fails. But nobody wanted to listen.
To put this story in context, consider the fact that in June of this year, the EU proposed a ban on new gas-powered cars by 2035
From 2035, newly registered cars and light goods vehicles will no longer be allowed to emit greenhouse gases. The decision was approved on June 29 by the 27-member group. The ban on internal combustion engines voted by the European Parliament – which the EU member States still have to approve – effectively marks the end of petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles, as well as hybrids, which are currently experiencing a boom. In future, only new electric or hydrogen-powered models will be able to be sold.
2035 is only a little more than a decade away. If this proposal passes, Europe won’t even allow hybrids to be sold. Only fully electric vehicles or hydrogen-powered ones. Good luck finding a hydrogen recharging station, by the way. And unless they get their energy grid back under control, there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to drive your car anywhere.
I was under the impression that Europe was a collection of first-world countries. Perhaps I was mistaken.
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More problems with EVs: 'They Get Hot When They're Stored, Not Just When They're Charging'
The Biden administration’s pipedream of an electric vehicle-dominated future for the United States continues to crumble with each passing day.
Among the mountain of problems associated with EVs are spontaneous battery fires, charging headaches, exorbitant car prices and an outsized environmental impact in their manufacturing process.
H. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute, who is the managing editor of Environment & Climate News and director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, told CBN News on Tuesday that one of the major issues is that the lithium-ion batteries used to power electric cars are a safety hazard — even when the cars are not in use — because they generate a lot of heat and can spontaneously combust.
“The safety implications are the fact these batteries get hot,” Burnett said. “They get hot when they’re stored, not just when they’re charging – just when they’re sitting there stored. They combust.”
During Hurricane Ian, some EV owners in Florida were forced to get rid of their cars after the lithium-ion batteries burst into flames because of saltwater damage.
“Junkyards filled with water-damaged cars strategically displayed gas-powered cars squeezed together and electric cars spaced far apart — in case one spontaneously caught fire,” CBN News reported.
“Firefighters say it takes about 1,000 gallons to put out a normal car fire and ten times that for an electric vehicle.”
The hazard was so alarming that Florida State Fire Marshal Jimmy Patronis wrote a letter to Tesla CEO Elon Musk asking him to address the fire risk.
Musk has not responded, according to CBN News.
However, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration did reply to Patronis, saying “lithium-ion battery fires have been observed both rapidly igniting and igniting several weeks after battery damage occurred.”
Another issue is the relative dearth of EV recharging stations across the country. Right now, most of the 53,000 charging stations in the United States are in big cities.
This charging nightmare has been well documented, with numerous anecdotes of drivers spending hours trying to find a charging station, only to wait a long time to fully charge their vehicle.
Those who are able to find a station often encounter long lines.
Ironically, another major drawback of electric vehicles is how environmentally costly it is to produce them.
While left-wing activists claim EVs are better for the environment because they supposedly generate zero carbon emissions, their environmental impact is immense.
Physicist Mark Mills, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told CBN News the supply chain that markets the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries is “utterly dominated by China.”
As a reminder, China is the world’s biggest carbon polluter that’s notorious for its lax environmental policies.
“Like any vehicle – they have to mine materials to make the car,” Mills said. “You have to mine a lot more materials, metals, to make an electric vehicle than you do a conventional vehicle. By about 1,000 percent on average.”
He explained that miners must use heavy machines that burn diesel oil to dig up 500,000 pounds of earth to make a single, 1,000-pound EV battery.
“All those emissions from all that energy usage to dig those materials up cause carbon dioxide to be emitted somewhere else,” Mills told CBN News.
“So when the electric vehicle is delivered to your driveway, it’s already arriving with massive emissions of carbon dioxide that you eventually pay off,” he said. “It’s kind of like an inverse mortgage by driving that instead of an internal combustion engine.”
When you add the high prices of EVs to the environmental damage caused by their manufacturing process to the many inconveniences of recharging them, it’s no wonder that some Americans are hesitant to jump on this bandwagon.
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"Dunkelflaute" in Germany: Lack of sunshine and wind lull reveals renewables' worst nightmare
Germany has twisted itself into a pretzel with its attempts at climate righteousness
It is the worst case imaginable for the energy-transition nation Germany: Because of a cloudy November dims the sun and a lull in wind it is primarily coal-fired power plants that have to make up for the energy shortage.
The first winter crisis since the outbreak of the Ukraine war has not even really begun. But it is already clear how serious the consequences are for Germany's energy supply - and CO2 emissions - especially in the dark winter season. Since Tuesday, the first real dark calm of the year has prevailed in Germany: There is hardly any sunlight at the end of November while at the same time there is almost no wind. It is the worst case for a country that wants to focus primarily on renewable energy sources.
Gas and coal-fired power plants then have to compensate for the small amounts of wind and solar power. But because gas is a scarce commodity this year and probably next year, more coal-fired power plants (which emit even more CO2 than gas power plants) have been fired up again.
According to "Electricity Maps" which collects and compares electricity generation data from around the world Germany ranked 160th out of 177 global regions in the past few days in terms of CO2-Emissions per kilowatt hour. On Wednesday morning the value was 726 grams of CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity in Germany, only one European country had an even worse balance: Poland. There is even more reliance on energy from coal, which drove CO2 emissions to almost 950 grams per kilowatt hour.
At the same time, other countries, especially in Scandinavia, generate their electricity in a much more climate-friendly way. Sweden, for example, only came up with a value of 21 grams per kilowatt hour. In addition to a lot of energy from hydropower, the country's nuclear power plants also contributed more than a quarter of the required amount of electricity.
In Germany, too, the three remaining nuclear power plants deliver more than 3.8 gigawatts on Wednesday morning, and thus not just more than five percent of the total electricity. Due to the dark doldrums, more nuclear power was produced in Germany than with solar panels and wind turbines. During the same period, wind energy only supplied 3.3 gigawatts, while solar energy contributed 3.1 gigawatts to the German electricity mix.
The last three nuclear power plants are to be shut down by April next year at the latest, so the lack of energy during such dark wind lulls next winter would have to be compensated for by even more electricity from gas and coal-fired power plants, and CO2 emissions could increase accordingly.
The role that the weather currently plays is also shown by how little of the maximum available capacity of the wind and solar energy systems could be used. The German wind turbines were actually able to generate just five percent of the maximum capacity, and the share of solar energy was just under five percent.
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Climate change pest who blocked the Sydney Harbour Bridge is JAILED for her 'selfish and childish' stunt
A protester who blocked the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a protest over climate change has been sent to prison after a magistrate slammed her for her 'childish stunts' and 'selfish emotional' actions.
Magistrate Allison Hawkins sent Deanna 'Violet' Coco to prison for a minimum of eight months after she pleaded guilty to seven charges, including using an authorised explosive not as prescribed, possessing a bright light distress signal in a public place, and interfering with the safe operation of a bridge.
The 31-year-old sat at the front of the public gallery at Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court on Friday, wiping tears from her eyes as she held hands with her mother and another female supporter.
At 8.30am on April 13, Coco drove a large hire truck along the Cahill Expressway on the Sydney Harbour Bridge and purposefully blocked a lane during peak hour, the court was told.
While the truck was obstructing traffic, she stood on top of it, held a lit emergency flare and livestreamed the event.
After 25 minutes, police arrived and forcibly removed the protesters from the iconic Sydney landmark, with Coco resisting arrest.
Defence lawyer Mark Davis told the court a 'salient fact' in Coco's case was that she only blocked one lane on the Sydney Harbour Bridge when there were five.
'One lane was blocked ... it was a deliberate decision to only block one lane,' Mr Davis said.
'To put it simply, the traffic may have still been moving, there was no suggestion there was backup of traffic.'
The court was told Coco suffered from 'serious anxiety surrounding climate change' and her actions were personally motivated, as her boyfriend had been arrested for a similar protest on a football field.
Mr Davis said his client was in a 'high state of emotion' and would not have ordinarily conducted the offence.
Ms Hawkins questioned Mr Davis´ defence: 'Normal members of the community going to work and going about their ordinary business are not entitled to being disrupted because she´s in a high state of emotion.'
The defence lawyer said climate change anxiety was the 'most prevalent anxiety' in Coco´s generation.
'There may be an overwhelming threat of doom, they sense they aren´t being heard, the government isn´t doing enough, it´s leading to these types of actions,' Mr Davis said.
Ms Hawkins found there was an 'intended element of planning' in Coco´s offending.
'You stopped during peak-hour having obtained a flare and truck, and the banners and glue, to halt peak-hour traffic in the city at that particular time with the aim of gaining maximum exposure,' the magistrate said.
'You knew this was illegal, you knew you would be arrested and you knew there would be consequences.'
Ms Hawkins told Coco she let an 'entire city suffer' due to her 'emotional reaction' and failed to take into account the other people she affected.
She said the 31-year-old´s actions deserved condemnation from both the court and the community.
'You do damage to your cause when you do childish stunts like this. Why should they be disrupted by your selfish emotional actions?' Ms Hawkins said.
'You are not a political prisoner, you are a criminal.'
Coco was convicted and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment with a non-parole period of eight months.
She hugged her mother and friend before she was handcuffed and led out of the court by two corrective services officers.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
2 December, 2022
Snow Extent in the Northern Hemisphere now Among the Highest in 56 years
Global cooling?
Snow extent in the Northern Hemisphere at the end of November represents an important parameter for the early winter forecast. This year snow extent is running much higher than average and according to existing global estimates, it is now beyond the highest ever observed so far. Winter forecast, especially in its early phase and in Europe, might be strongly influenced by such a large snow extent, although many other factors need attention.
Northern Hemisphere snow extent is currently indeed very high, now at about 41 million square kilometers, according to the NOAA/Rutgers Global Snow Lab.
Looking at the below Rutgers Daily Snow Extent map, it is clearly noticeable how Russia is completely covered in snow now. Snow is also seen overwhelming all of Canada, and Alaska, as well as a good portion of the Lower 48. This is an important parameter for the early winter forecast.
You could probably forecast a colder-than-normal winter based on Autumnal Northern Hemisphere snow cover extent alone. It’s the largest snow extent in decades. Having so much snow on the ground means any arctic outbreak is going to be a little bit colder. But why should be like this?
In North America snow extent for the end of November is more south than normal, especially in the North West and North East sectors of the U.S: Small and scattered negative anomalies are less significant in the picture, mostly affecting central Mongolia, North East China, and the central U.S.
According to the Finnish Meteorological Institute, also the total snow mass for the Northern Hemisphere is tracking comfortably above the 1982-2012 average. This result is based on the current Northern Hemisphere snow-water equivalent relative to the long-term mean and variability.
Snow extent grew pretty fast in the last 30 days, as it should generally be in this period of course, but 2022 is setting a clearly very favorable season for snow on the ground. In the video below you can see how fast the snow extent increased in the last 4 weeks.
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Incoming Missouri State Auditor Outlines Plans to Combat ESG Policies
A newly elected official in Missouri says his emphasis in his role as state auditor will be to focus on combating left-wing “environmental, social, and governance”—or “ESG”—policies with respect to investments.
“Well, as the state treasurer, I’ve gained … a lot more exposure to ESG issue than pretty much anybody in elected office in Missouri. So, I will try to at least use that knowledge that I’ve gained, and that experience that I have being on the board of the [state] pension plan and working on these issues, to help,” Missouri State Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick, who was elected this month as the state’s next auditor, told The Daily Signal. He will take his new office on Jan. 9.
“There’s going to be legislation in Missouri this coming session dealing with ESG issues and proxy voting, and things like that. So, as somebody who’s been very involved in that conversation at the board level on a pension plan, as well as having been exposed to it a lot through my engagements with the State Financial Officers Foundation, with [The Heritage Foundation], with you guys, the stuff that I’ve been able to learn, I’m going to be a part of that legislative process in helping develop that legislation,” Fitzpatrick said. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
The incoming Missouri state auditor explained why he’s against the use of environmental, social, and governance policies.
Fitzpatrick explained:
Essentially, the reason I am against ESG being used as a tool for investing purposes is because it prioritizes nonfinancial factors in investment decisions, and how you’re managing people’s investments, over those financial—or what we call pecuniary—factors that should be the priority when you’re managing somebody else’s money and have a responsibility to them to generate the best return possible on their investment.
Fitzpatrick, a Republican, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss why he is against those environmental, social, and governance policies; how he will continue his work combating those policies as state auditor; and why he thinks he was able to flip the auditor’s seat, which had been held by a Democrat for nearly seven years.
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Germany’s Largest State Declares Emergency Amid Energy Crisis
North Rhine-Westphalia, the biggest state in Germany in terms of economy and population, has declared an emergency situation amid the energy crisis in order to be allowed to take on more debt.
North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), home to 20 of the 50 largest German companies, declared an “extraordinary emergency situation” to be able to access more loans which would otherwise be denied to the state because of a rule on how much debt a state can borrow, German broadcaster WDR reports.
NRW has decided to borrow another $5.2 billion (5 billion euros) to cope with the energy crisis after declaring the emergency situation that allows the state to take on more loans. The state’s government is redrafting the 2023 budget and has planned to allocate $3.6 billion (3.5 billion euros) to energy relief measures from loans previously taken for Covid relief that haven’t been used.
NRW’s regional economy has more than 700,000 small and medium-sized companies, the state said in a presentation to investors this month.
The state’s GDP slumped by 2.8% in the third quarter of 2022, the worst reading of all states in Germany, according to the Ifo institute.
Germany’s federal government hasn’t declared an emergency situation, while only Bremen and Saxony-Anhalt – apart from North Rhine-Westphalia – have resorted to emergency situations in their 2023 state budget drafts.
With the cold weather Germany risks more emergencies this winter.
Germany may have to take drastic measures such as gas rationing if levels of gas in storage drop below 40% by February 1st next year, according to the German Federal Network Agency, which will enact such measures if necessary. If gas storage levels drop to below 40% by February 1, this would be considered a critical level, Klaus Müller, the president of the German Federal Network Agency, Bundesnetzagentur, said last week.
Germany is currently in a stage-two level of alert and could go into a level-three emergency if gas stocks fall to critically low levels
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Rio Tinto chief scientist Nigel Steward says hydrogen ‘hype’ faces tough tests in reality
Rio Tinto’s chief scientist has fired a shot across the bows of companies and governments banking on green hydrogen “hype” as a solution to global warming, saying the company does not see hydrogen as a serious alternative to fossil fuels as an export commodity.
Speaking at Rio’s London investor day on Wednesday, Rio chief scientist Nigel Steward said the company did not believe hydrogen could be used as an “energy carrier” in the near future, given its production costs and problems with shipping it around the globe.
“Hydrogen is much hyped, particularly as an energy carrier. We don’t see hydrogen as being used as an energy carrier,” he said.
Mr Steward’s comments fly in the face of the ambitions of Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group, which plans to spend billions in the hope of turning green hydrogen into a major seaborne commodity.
But the Rio chief scientist warned investors that recent research suggested that direct shipping of hydrogen at scale could even exacerbate global warming.
“If we want to use hydrogen as an energy carrier, and we‘re going to transport it around the world as liquid hydrogen, that’s problematic because 1 per cent of the hydrogen per day is lost to the atmosphere,” he said.
“Recent studies have shown that hydrogen actually has a global warming potential five to 16 times greater than carbon dioxide. So what this means is it is better to burn natural gas than it is to transport hydrogen around the world and then consume that later.”
Fortescue and other hydrogen hopefuls have said they plan to tackle the issue of energy loss in transporting liquid hydrogen by instead producing ammonia as a means to transport the commodity. But that would require additional chemical processes that would use even more energy, making its use less efficient.
Mr Steward said Rio believed hydrogen could have a major role to play in global energy transition, but said the mining giant believed it was best consumed where it was produced.
“We see hydrogen being used for its unique chemical properties. As a reducing agent for production of green steel, as a reducing agent for ilmenite in the smelting process to make iron and titanium, and also as a source of energy for calcining alumina in our refineries,” he said.
But even that would require a significant technological breakthrough to bring production costs down, he said, given hydrogen production requires significantly more energy to produce than even aluminium smelting.
“It’s a very, very energy intensive material. It requires four times the amount of energy per tonne to produce than aluminium – and we think of aluminium as being very energy intensive,” he said.
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1 December, 2022
Lack of energy storage makes renewables-only grids a pipedream
A new paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation warns that renewable energy policies being pursued around the world are unrealistic.
That’s because renewables-only grids require large amounts of electricity storage to make them viable. However, the world currently lacks any power storage technology that is both affordable and scalable.
As the paper’s author, Francis Menton explains:
“The amount of storage required is very large – perhaps as much as two months’ of average demand. The cost then becomes absurd: you could spend all of your GDP on batteries every year, and it would still not be enough. Hydrogen is better, but is still astonishingly expensive, because it’s so inefficient”.
In one of Mr Menton’s estimates, the cost of providing lithium ion batteries for a grid could be more than ten times GDP. Moreover, because the batteries wear out, the expenditure would need to be repeated every few years.
Despite this, policymakers are ploughing ahead with deployment of wind and solar, hoping that scientists will come up with something to save the day.
GWPF Director, Dr Benny Peiser said:
“The skyrocketing prices in UK electricity markets in recent days are a warning. Without economic forms of electricity storage, a drive for renewables is going to end very badly for consumers.”
Francis Menton: The Energy Storage Conundrum (pdf)
Contact
Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Global Warming Policy Foundation
e: benny.peiser@thegwpf.org
m: 07553 361717
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The U.S. EV charging network is a mess
Gas stations spar with utility companies, rural areas predict years of losses on chargers, spotty equipment threatens reliability:
The U.S. has just 11,600 points where any EV can charge quickly, according to the research group Atlas Public Policy.
The U.S. has just 11,600 points where any EV can charge quickly, according to the research group Atlas Public Policy
One of the biggest roadblocks to the mass adoption of electric vehicles is the troubled business model for the commercial chargers that power them.
The government is pouring billions of dollars into developing a national highway charging network. But businesses aren’t sure how they will make money, and the nascent industry looks messy.
Utility companies and gas stations are at war with each other over who will own and operate EV chargers. Rural states say some charging stations could operate at a loss for a decade or more. New companies that provide charging gear and services are contending with the equipment’s spotty reliability.
The network’s build-out has a chicken-or-egg quality: EV advocates say many drivers will only be comfortable purchasing vehicles if rapid charging is as easy as using a pump at a gas station. Yet businesses interested in offering charging say they can’t make money until more EVs are on the road.
Around 1% of U.S. drivers own EVs, but wait lists are growing and auto makers including General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. are expecting EV sales to keep rising. To overcome “range anxiety”—the fear that EV drivers will run out of power while traveling long distances—industry experts say the U.S. needs plentiful fast chargers. Fast charging can take 20 minutes to an hour depending on the vehicle.
There are more than 145,000 places to refuel a gas-powered vehicle. So far, the U.S. has 11,600 points where any EV can charge quickly, according to the research group Atlas Public Policy.
EV market leader Tesla Inc. built a private U.S. network of nearly 16,000 fast chargers for its own drivers starting in 2012, and its popular Superchargers have become a marketing tool for selling cars. Most other auto makers are relying on the government and private companies. In some cases, they are investing alongside charging companies.
The Biden administration and Congress want to speed the transition to electricity-as-fuel. This year’s climate and tax law, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, offers expanded federal tax credits to persuade more businesses to add chargers. Budget estimators expect around $1.7 billion in tax credits for chargers or other alternative-fuel equipment to be claimed over a 10-year period. States also are set to distribute $7.5 billion over several years from last year’s infrastructure law to increase the availability of chargers.
Tension has erupted between businesses such as gas stations, convenience stores and truck stops and utility companies over who gets to sell electricity to drivers and who foots the bill for the costly infrastructure to do so.
Many monopoly utilities want to own and operate chargers, extending electricity sales into a new market. They have a competitive edge because, with the approval of state utility regulators, they can pass on the cost of infrastructure and power to all rate payers, as they do for wires or new power generation.
In Minneapolis, Channing Smith, who owns a gas station and convenience mart called The Corner Store, said a utility proposal threatens to squeeze out charging competition. Xcel Energy has asked regulators to let it build, own and operate 730 fast-charging sites by 2026—about 45% of Minnesota’s’ projected fast-charging market. The $193 million cost would be paid for by its rate payers.
“For them to take taxpayer money to create a network removes the private sector completely,” Mr. Smith said. He said he would like to install fast chargers, but not if he has to compete directly against the company selling him electricity.
Xcel says a dearth of public chargers is hindering EV adoption in Minnesota, which has just 55 or so non-Tesla locations for fast charging, according to government data. “We have not seen the market fill in key gaps regarding necessary public charging,” Xcel told regulators in August.
Lacey Nygard, an Xcel spokeswoman, said the company would support retailers or communities whether they wanted to own or simply host chargers on their property.
Tim Echols, an EV advocate and a Republican who serves on Georgia’s utility commission, said utilities will have to own and operate some equipment. “If it’s going to be in an area that’s never going to make money, then who else is going to put it there?” Mr. Echols asked.
In the past year, utilities have been approved or have pending requests to spend more than $1.4 billion on charging, according to Atlas Public Policy.
Another point of contention comes in how utilities charge businesses for electricity. The highest 15-minute period of power consumption each month makes up a large chunk of commercial billing. Because an EV charging session requires a surge of power, gas station owners say their monthly bills are spiking unpredictably, by hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
Shameek Konar, chief executive of Pilot Co., which has more than 800 truck stops and travel centers across North America, said he understands the need for such fees, which pay for upgrades to electric infrastructure. But Pilot expects chargers to draw twice as much power as the rest of a truck stop. He said he thinks high fees should be phased in, and that state or federal officials should help set common rates with the patchwork of America’s nearly 3,000 utilities.
Pilot and GM plan to add fast-chargers at 500 of the travel center company’s Pilot and Flying J locations starting next year.
“We’re going to have to work with 300 utilities to come up with rate structures,” Mr. Konar estimated.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/ev-charging-stations-electric-vehicles-11669737656
**************************************************There Are 8 Billion People. We Should Celebrate Superabundance, Not Lament ‘Overpopulation’
Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people: as of today, there are eight billion of us. Contrary to what the environmental movement tells us, that eight billionth person is a blessing, not a curse.
We should be celebrating. Person number eight billion brought another mouth to feed, it’s true, but she also arrived with nimble hands and, most importantly, one of those wonderful little idea factories that we call a brain.
In the very short run, our eight billionth neighbor puts at least some pressure on our stock of proved resources. By buying her diapers, her parents are calling resources like adhesives and polymers out of other uses. Prices rise just a little. In the long run, however, necessity is the mother of invention. People find new, innovative ways to economize on the resources we know about, and they find new, innovative ways to find new resources.
This is what the economist Julian Simon thought, and more importantly, it’s what he demonstrated in a body of research that, in my opinion, should have won him a Nobel Prize. The human mind, Simon argued, is The Ultimate Resource, and when people are free to invent, innovate, and try new things, they create new possibilities.
As my friend and coauthor Deirdre McCloskey as put it, every new product—and every new resource—begins as an idea. More people means more brains. More brains means more ideas. As McCloskey and I argue in our book Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: How the Bourgeois Deal Enriched the World (which I discuss here and here, and which is available in paperback this month), economic liberty and social dignity for innovators and entrepreneurs put those minds to work and led to the cornucopia we enjoy today.
Simon demonstrated this by looking at the data. He showed that in the long run, resource prices tended to fall. This is consistent with his thesis that more brains are a blessing, and it flatly contradicts the popular-but-wrong idea that there are too many people and that we have exceeded the world’s carrying capacity. Others have followed in Simon’s footsteps and expanded on his argument. Just one contribution to this tradition is Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet by Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Pooley. I reviewed it for the American Institute for Economic Research, and it’s a book everyone should have on their bookshelf—or as I do, in their Kindle library.
Today marks a momentous occasion that should be cause for dancing, not mourning. We should welcome our new neighbors, not reject them or worry that they’ll somehow leave us worse off. If we embrace creativity and innovation, like Julian Simon suggests, every new person is a small step toward a better and brighter future for all of us.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14343&omhide=true&trk=rm
*******************************************Worldwide Record Cold Challenges Climate Rhetoric and Risks Lives by Complacency
By Vijay Jayaraj
I live in Bengaluru in southern India. This month, the city recorded the coldest temperature in 10 years for the month of November. So has been the case in my country’s capital New Delhi where extreme winters have become a norm in recent years.
A small percentage of India’s 1.3 billion population has access to electrical heaters. However, a majority must burn a variety of fuels for fire to stay warm, making many people susceptible to surprise cold events. Why are cold events considered a surprise and not a normal part of weather? Is it because the public mind has been made complacent about cold by the fearmongering of global warmists?
The reality is cold events have become common not just in India but across the globe. Since 2017, there have been regular incidences of below-average temperatures in both winter and summer. What can be inferred from these cold spells and what do they suggest about the apocalyptic rhetoric of the climate cult?
The November 18 snow event at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport is the earliest snowfall in recorded history since 1898. Just an isolated event due to a regional storm? Well, think again.
The past few months witnessed unusual cold spells in the U.S. and Canada. Buffalo registered one of its highest snowfalls for November while Vancouver saw unusual early winter snowfall.
On November 20 and 21, hundreds of daily all-time low temperature records were registered across the U.S. as Arctic air swept through the North American continent. There have been extreme cold events in other parts of the world too.
In August, China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang experienced surprise summer snowfall. South America, Europe, Asia and Australia registered record low temperatures in recent months.
In Greenland – often a subject in the climate-change debate – the surface mass balance (SMB) of ice sheet this year is at one of its highest levels since 1981 and is set to increase further in the winter season. Greenland has been registering a consistent growth in ice sheet SMB since 2016.
As Electoverse writer Cap Allon notes, “(S)ince 2016, Northern Hemisphere (NH) snow mass seasons have been holding well above the 1982-2012 average, and the 2022-2022 season is proving no different — as of the latest datapoint (Nov 19), the ‘Total snow mass for the NH’ chart, which comes courtesy of the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), continues to ride above both the multidecadal average and the standard deviation.”
The “Dangerous Warming” Rhetoric
So, do these record snowfall events and record low temperature events mean that there is no increase in global average temperatures? Certainly not! There has been a warming trend since the Little Ice Age began to lose its grip in the 17th century, but never has there been a dangerous general warming – and there is none now.
The claim that global warming has made our summers hotter and winters milder is certainly wrong. As evidenced in the last five years, both extreme cold and extreme warmth have been common.
Until the climate debate took over our media, these thermal ups and downs were known as weather variations. However, in the age of climate apocalypse, every extreme weather event is a catastrophe. Even unusual snowfall and cold are considered sour fruits of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide.
This pseudoscience and outright distortions of media and political elites are harmful. The most vulnerable in our world are more exposed to the risks of cold because of an exaggerated concern about warming.
More than 500 million Indians still use open fire to warm themselves while cold kills more people than heat. In some parts of India, winter temperatures can reach as low as -20 Celsius/-4 Fahrenheit. Even in a developed nation such as Germany, climate complacency has led to unpreparedness for winter energy needs and the government officials are now asking citizens to heat just one room in their homes!
It is the cold that kills. If anything, the warming of the past three centuries has been extremely beneficial to mankind, helping us achieve unprecedented progress in human health, living standards, food production and technological achievement as we utilize earth’s resources ever more efficiently
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