GREENIE WATCH -- by Dr. John Ray

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

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. My Home Page. My Recipes. My alternative Wikipedia. My Blogroll. Email me (John Ray) here. NOTE: The short comments that I have in the side column of the primary site for this blog are now given at the foot of this document.

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31 March, 2020

Humpback whales spout out slow, but steady recovery

Humpback whales are one of nature’s most majestic animals. Usually identified by their enormous size, curious songs and aerial acrobatics, they were once in numbers approximating 200,000 in the southern hemisphere alone.

Today its numbers have been reduced to about 16,200, due primarily to unrestricted hunting that took place in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Fortunately, humpback whales are making a comeback south of the equator. One such place where progress is being made is at the Francisco Coloane Marine Park near the southern tip of Chile. There, the humpback whale population has risen dramatically — from 40 individuals in 2003 to 190 in 2019.

What are the reasons for its success? As reported in Mongabay:

“There are several reasons for the whales’ recovery. Humpbacks have been globally protected from commercial whaling since 1966 (although the Soviets continued to catch large numbers of them in secret until 1973), and commercial whaling of all species has been banned since 1986. Furthermore, the creation of marine parks [like Francisco Coloane] along the Pacific coast of the Americas has conferred extra protection.

… Based on the number of whales identified up until now and the low rate of recapture, this population unit of whales [at the marine park] is in the middle of experiencing a period of post-whaling recovery and is probably much greater in size than current estimates indicate,” the Chilean Antarctic Institute (INACH) said in a 2014 report(PDF).

Nevertheless, their recovery is still in its early days, in part due to humpbacks’ slow rate of reproduction. A female gives birth to a calf once every two to three years, so the population is still well below the numbers recorded before commercial whaling. ‘We are probably somewhere between 20 and 25% of what it is thought there was before commercial whaling began, so we are relatively far off the initial population size but much better than we were 40 years ago,’ [wildlife expert] Capella said.”

SOURCE

Toyota partners with Hino to develop hydrogen-powered truck

Toyota has announced it will partner with commercial vehicle-builder Hino to develop a hydrogen-fuel-cell truck as part of a joint initiative to reduce emissions

Built on the foundations of a Hino Profia, the companies say they will optimise the truck’s chassis to package hybrid and hydrogen fuel-cell technology. The result will be a claimed 600km of zero-emissions driving range.

Toyota and Hino state that heavy-duty trucks account for approximately 60 per cent of total commercial vehicle CO2 emissions in Japan, and that the fuel-cell Profia will form part of the companies’ ‘Environmental Challenge 2050’ plans.

The sees both brands cut their average CO2 emissions from new vehicles by 90 per cent by 2050.

SOURCE

Fast Charging Stations Damage Tesla Car Batteries In Just 25 Charging Cycles

What Does Elon Musk Have to Gain From Giving Away Tesla's ...
A new paper shows that a selling feature of electric cars, fast-charging stations along highways, actually subject batteries to high temperatures and high resistance that can cause them to crack, leak, and lose their storage capacity.

What is needed is a method for charging at lower temperatures and therefore less risk of catastrophic damage and loss of storage capacity. A recent experiment did just that.

Scientists charged one set of discharged Panasonic NCR 18650B cylindrical lithium-ion batteries, found in Tesla cars, using the same industry fast-charging method as fast chargers found along freeways.

They also charged a set using a new fast-charging algorithm based on the battery’s internal resistance, which interferes with the flow of electrons.

The internal resistance of a battery fluctuates according to temperature, charge state, battery age, and more. High internal resistance can cause problems during charging and the UC Riverside Battery Team charging method is an adaptive system that learns from the battery by checking the battery’s internal resistance during charging. It rests when internal resistance kicks in to eliminate loss of charge capacity.

For the first 13 charging cycles, the battery storage capacities for both charging techniques remained similar. After that, the industry fast-charging technique caused capacity to fade much faster; after 40 charging cycles the batteries kept only 60% of their storage capacity. Batteries charged using the internal resistance charging method retained more than 80% capacity after the 40th cycle.

At 80% capacity, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries have reached the end of their use life for most purposes. Batteries charged using the industry fast-charging method reached this point after 25 charging cycles, while internal resistance method batteries were good for 36 cycles.

Worse, after 60 charging cycles, the industry method battery cases cracked, exposing the electrodes and electrolyte to air and increasing the risk of fire or explosion. High temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius/140 degrees Fahrenheit accelerated both the damage and risk.

“Capacity loss, internal chemical and mechanical damage, and the high heat for each battery are major safety concerns, especially considering there are 7,104 lithium-ion batteries in a Tesla Model S and 4,416 in a Tesla Model 3,” said Professor Mihri Ozkan of UC Riverside.

SOURCE

Covid-19 Shows There Won’t Be Global Action on Climate Change

Pretty much Jason Bordoff’s headline in Foreign Policy magazine today, except I left out the “Sorry”. And that’s because I’m not.

Sorry, but the Virus Shows Why There Won’t Be Global Action on Climate Change

Bordoff believes in what is laughably called the scientific consensus on climate change but he seems, to his credit, to be an honest policy wonk. Here are some highlights.

To slow the spread of COVID-19, governments are clamping down to force collective action when individuals fail to follow guidelines. Cities across the world are shutting down businesses and events, at great cost. Yet the effectiveness of any one government’s action is limited if there are weak links in the global effort to curb the pandemic—such as from states with conflict or poor governance—even if the world is in agreement that eradicating a pandemic is in every country’s best interest. Climate change is even harder to solve because it results from the sum of all greenhouse gas emissions and thus requires aggregate effort, a problem particularly vulnerable to free-riding, as my Columbia University colleague Scott Barrett explains in his excellent book Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods. And whereas governments can force people to stay home, there is no global institution with the enforcement power to require that nations curb emissions....

While public concern with climate change is rising, there remains a long way to go. Only half of Americans believe climate change should be a top priority for the federal government, and the figure is far lower on the Republican side of the aisle.

Indeed, COVID-19 itself may actually erode public support for stronger climate action, as the pace of climate ambition wanes during times of economic hardship.....

A huge hit to economic growth would likely mean carbon emissions will fall in 2020 for the first time since the Great Recession of 2008.

That may seem like good news, but it is not. First of all, economic contractions are not a desirable or sustainable way to curb emissions; emissions rebounded sharply after 2009. More importantly, the fact that it takes severe economic slowdowns like the Great Recession or COVID-19 to bring emissions down serves as a reminder of just how strongly tied emissions remain to economic growth—and thus how hard it is to lower them.

That is why energy from renewable sources can grow as rapidly as it has over the past decade and yet fossil fuel use can keep rising at the same time as total energy use rises around the world, especially in fast-growing economies like China and India.....

Policymakers have spent trillions of dollars and passed countless regulations, standards, and mandates to spur clean energy. That it takes a pandemic-induced economic standstill to actually bring emissions down should be a sobering reminder of just how hard addressing climate change will be.

COVID-19 may deliver some short-term climate benefits by curbing energy use, or even longer-term benefits if economic stimulus is linked to climate goals—or if people get used to telecommuting and thus use less oil in the future.

Yet any climate benefits from the COVID-19 crisis are likely to be fleeting and negligible. Rather, the pandemic is a reminder of just how wicked a problem climate change is because it requires collective action, public understanding and buy-in, and decarbonizing the energy mix while supporting economic growth and energy use around the world.

On his penultimate paragraph

COVID-19 may deliver some short-term climate benefits by curbing energy use, or even longer-term benefits if economic stimulus is linked to climate goals—or if people get used to telecommuting and thus use less oil in the future.

the Democrat attempt for the “economic stimulus [to be] linked to climate goals” was blown out of the water, quite rightly, by President Trump. But people getting used to telecommuting is definitely one possible positive, for all of us. Especially for those climate scientists and activists who up to now have had to do massive conferences all together in places like Bali. It so went against everything they believed. And the answer for their uneasy consciences is now being made clear.

But it’s bigger even than that. Much bigger.

SOURCE

How coronavirus has changed the climate war

The COVID-19 pandemic has added fresh rancour to the climate change debate.

“Dear Greta,” former television meteorologist and popular US climate change blogger Anthony Watts began in an open letter to teenage climate campaigner Greta Thunberg last week.

“So you got what you wanted. System change & economic slowdown is a real thing now. Airplanes, industry, jobs, restaurants, recreation, and schools are all shut down. Instead we have fear, poverty, misery, joblessness, economic ruin, and a bleak future. Happy now?”

On the other side, Spanish climate activist, astrophysicist and philosopher Martin Lopez Corredoira observes the world economy has been turned upside down in a matter of weeks.

“Neither Greenpeace, nor Greta Thunberg, nor any other individual or collective organisation (has) achieved so much in favour of the health of the planet in such a short time,” Lopez Corredoira wrote in a Science 2.0 blog post earlier this month.

“Venice … is now deathly silent. What a respite for the Venetians! What good news for the ecologists and tourist-haters!

“This positively affects the reduction of CO2 emission and … the destruction associated with holiday and professional conference tourism. It is certainly not very good for the economy in general, but it is fantastic for the environment.”

Lopez Corredoira said he did not wish ill on anyone but added: “Let us view the circumstance from an objective sociological point of view, without taking individuals into account, and think about the changes that are being produced in the world owing to the rise of this coronavirus.”

This is the emergency climate response that Extinction Rebellion has repeatedly been told was not possible. Yet the pandemic raises challenging questions for all sides of the environmental debate.

It piques strongly held positions on controversial topics — overpopulation, the treatment of wild animals, the politics of authoritarian rule and the role of technology,

The crisis provides a test bed to assess the impact on climate and broader environmental health of reducing industrial emissions for an extended period.

Already it has forced businesses to push harder on technologies to work remotely, communicate digitally and cut down on air miles and lunch.

Former UN climate leader Christiana Figueres says there is a silver lining to the challenge. “If we really sustain several months of reduced travel we may realise that we don’t have to travel as much,” she says. “Can this have actual behavioural change impacts … maybe, and let’s hope.”

The internet is full of memes celebrating a form of nature’s revenge on humans.

But UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has made clear that tackling the coronavirus pandemic, not climate change, is now the world’s top priority. Guterres is still urging countries not to lose sight of the global warming challenge and the Paris climate accord but says all resources for now will be directed toward tackling the COVID-19 crisis.

China’s communist regime has been able to force obedience from citizens but a core weakness has been exposed in the capacity of others to trust information and statistics from the state.

Highlighted, too, has been the extraordinary extent to which the developed world has outsourced its industrial production to China.

These realities could have big implications for how the world might view China, including on the issue of climate change action, in future.

In tackling COVID-19 and climate change, the US is more likely to embrace technology and private industry for answers. Electric carmaker and space enthusiast Elon Musk has quickly thrust himself into the role of industrialist troubleshooter.

The teams of engineers assembled by Musk to inject his brand into the rescue of Thai students from flooded caves in 2018 have been told to turn their expertise to making ventilators for US hospitals.

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio responded directly to Musk on Twitter last week.

“New York City is buying!” de Blasio said. “Our country is facing a drastic shortage and we need ventilators ASAP — we will need thousands in this city over the next few weeks. We’re getting them as fast as we can but we could use your help! We’re reaching out to you directly.”

We’re at war and ventilators are our ammunition.

The speed and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic has left the otherwise most vocal climate change groups unsure where to turn. Europe is winding back the pace of green measures and it looks increasingly likely that what was supposed to be a groundbreaking global climate change meeting in Glasgow in November will be postponed or cancelled.

The default position of renewable energy campaigners has been an attempt to make a virtue of the COVID-19 crisis.

International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol says he is working to influence world leaders to ensure their stimulus programs are rich with green initiatives.

“I am telling them that we can use the current situation to step up our ambition to tackle climate change,” Birol said last week.

“This is a historic opportunity for the world to, on one hand, create packages to recover the economy but, on the other hand, to reduce dirty investments and accelerate the energy transition.”

Closer to home, Australia’s Climate Council says now “is exactly the right time to be spending on renewable energy infrastructure and zero emissions technology”.

Another key message has been that leaders should trust the scientists on climate change, just as they are on the pandemic.

Not everyone is convinced this is a fair comparison. US climate scientist Judith Curry says she does not accept that COVID-19 shows us how and why we need to act urgently on climate change. “The main similarity between climate change and COVID-19 is they are both situations of deep uncertainty,” she says.

“Apart from the brainwashed Extinction Rebellion folk, no one feels the urgent visceral need to drop everything and ‘act’ on climate change.

“The reason for that is that the potential adverse impacts of climate change have a long time horizon (decades to centuries), there is no simple ‘action’ that will reverse climate change, and premature actions could lock us into infrastructure that is not in our best long-term interests. And finally, diversion of all our resources to the climate change problem could make us more vulnerable to more urgent problems such as COVID-19.”

Curry says it remains to be seen what lessons will eventually be learned from the pandemic.

But there will be a new understanding of the loss of productivity from unnecessary business travel and a new questioning of international cruising.

There also may be some new data on the impact on climate of depressed economic activity.

NASA scientists have been able to track the steep decline in nitrogen dioxide levels over China in January and February to coincide with the lockdown of Chinese production because of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan.

The decline in pollution levels began over Wuhan and then spread across the country.

As lockdowns spread in Europe and North America, the impact on industry will mirror the 2008 global financial crisis, which resulted in a significant fall in global greenhouse gas emissions.

The shutdown of international air travel will allow a more thorough test of studies conducted after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the US.

Those studies claimed a temporary stop to air flights over North America had a noticeable impact on climate.

A reduction in vapour trails, or contrails, it was claimed, had been responsible for a greater subsequent spread in temperatures between day and night.

In 2004, NASA scientist Patrick Minnis wrote that “increased cirrus coverage, attributable to air traffic, could account for nearly all of the warming observed over the United States for nearly 20 years starting in 1975”.

The warming effect happened because the high-altitude clouds that contrails created tended to trap warm air, Minnis wrote. On balance, though contrails can both warm and cool, there is more of a warming effect.

Last year, Scientific American said the contrails left by aeroplanes were now so widespread that their warming effect was greater than that of all the carbon dioxide emitted by aeroplanes that had accumulated in the atmosphere since the first flight of the Wright brothers.

Meanwhile, studies already are under way to see if the shutdown in industrial production will have a measurable impact on atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in the northern hemisphere.

Not so far.

Many will be hoping the bigger environmental impact will be on the illegal trade in bush meat and a greater preservation of wildlife.

There is a long history of Chinese abuses of the pangolin, or scaly anteater, a living dinosaur and the likely host to the COVID-19 virus.

Pangolin scales traditionally have been cooked in oil, butter, vinegar, boys’ urine or roasted with earth or oyster shells to cure a variety of ills, including excessive nervousness and hysterical crying in children, women possessed by devils and ogres, malarial fever and deafness.

According to an article in the journal Nature in 1938 that described the uses, pangolin numbers already were in peril because of Chinese demand.

Russian billionaire and British media owner Evgeny Lebedev has said it would be sweet irony if the COVID-19 virus were the saviour of the world’s most highly illegally traded animal.

Lebedev is patron of the conservation organisation Space for Giants and has visited wet markets such as those in Wuhan where COVID-19 is believed to have bred from bats, through pangolins, to become a threat to humans.

US environmentalist Michael Shellenberger agrees. “Who would have thought that the wet live markets in China would be a major source of global chaos and economic challenge and mass death, but that is the reality,” Shellenberger says.

“The animals are on top of each other and they are very unsanitary. Experts have been warning about those markets for two decades now.

“One of the things that ought to come out of this is that there ought to be some effort internationally to make sure countries get rid of these markets that are breeding grounds for these viruses and help countries move to more modern forms of meat production.

“The truth is that economic growth and lifting people out of poverty has been the most important way to reduce air pollution and negative impacts on the environment.”

The success of the developed world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic has significant implications for how the world will deal with climate change into the future.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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30 March, 2020

Fight the virus, not carbon

Often obsessive focus on climate wastes scarce money and distracts from real health crisis

Paul Driessen and David Wojick

The many trillions of dollars proposed to be spent under dubious “green new deals” should be spent instead (effectively and within reason) on health care, especially virus prevention, protection and cures. This is the gist of an “Open Letter to World Leaders” from the Climate Intelligence Foundation.

The Foundation, or CLINTEL, makes this clear right up front: “Your Excellencies, compared to COVID-19, climate change is a non-problem! It is based on immature computer models, and it looks into the distant future. In the current health emergency, however, your attention to the peoples’ needs is today! Please, don’t continue pushing your zero carbon emission ambition in a time that the world is dealing with a deadly global crisis. Yes, there is an emergency, but it is NOT climate.”

CLINTEL specifically speaks to the leaders of the UN and EU, saying “People need an inspiring narrative that promises them a hopeful future. Today, for instance, it is totally inappropriate that the billion-dollar Green New Deal focused on climate is still on the agenda of leaders such as Mr. Antonio Guterres of the UN and Mr. Frans Timmermans of the EU.” We do not have a manmade climate and weather crisis.

In the EU, green funds could begin flowing to the virus crisis almost immediately, by reprogramming €100 billion ($110 billion) of European Green Deal money. The GED has a Just Transition Mechanism to “help mobilise at least €100 billion over the period 2021-2027,” by way of “financial support and technical assistance to help people, businesses and regions that are most affected by the move toward the green economy.” All they have to do is replace the Mechanism’s “green economy” with “corona crisis.”

All the EU has to do is abandon its compulsory transition to a so-called “green economy,” which would in reality be very poor and uncompetitive, with tens of millions unemployed. The European Green Plan (EGP) proposes spending a trillion euros on a foolish attempt to control the global climate, even as China, India and other emerging economies build hundreds of new coal and gas-fired power plants, hundreds of new airports, thousands of fossil fuel-based factories, and millions of internal combustion vehicles.

CLINTEL says it would be far wiser to spend that money on improving health care, with priority to virus protection. Far more necessary, too. Anyone following the coronavirus news out of Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Britain and other EU countries, knows CLINTEL is right. Awake EU leaders know it too.

In the United States, President Trump has signed into law Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act, the $2.2 trillion emergency relief bill, the largest such package in US history. It will help hospitals and state and local governments, assist with critical medical needs, and provide relief for small businesses and furloughed workers. It eliminated most of the liberal wish list items in an earlier bill.

(By contrast, any European Green Deal would cost many trillions of dollars, as would the US Green New Deal endorsed by Democrat presidential candidates, to address conjectural future risks. Candidate Bernie Sanders pegs his pet version at “just” $11 trillion, while other estimates run as high as $93 trillion!)

Some of that spending should go to upgrading the health care system, testing people and getting COVID patients respirators and medicines that work, conducting clinical trials to evaluate anecdotal evidence about various treatments, and saving lives! Other spending should assist families whose breadwinners have been laid off by the lockdowns and quarantines, and businesses that have been closed down.

Right now, some 15 million workers are unemployed in the restaurant industry alone, plus millions more in restaurant support industries. If the business lockdown continues another month or so, some 75% of independently owned restaurants will never reopen, business insiders say. Moreover, across the USA, it is minorities who are most seriously harmed by the shutdown, since they dominate worst-affected sectors.

(A suggestion: Order an occasional takeout-pickup meal from local eateries – and leave a generous tip.)

The rest of the money should simply not be spent, especially since it’s mostly more government debt. Spending it would further damage the economy and future taxpayers, in Europe and the United States.

Any thinking legislator should endorse CLINTEL’s call for action, instead of foolish green new deals.

But instead, the manmade-climate-crisis-obsessed United Nations continues to pressure all nations to adopt expensive zero-carbon-dioxide plans, preferably as soon as its Glasgow climate summit in November. That underscores how wrongheaded and intransigent the UN has been for decades. No. The world needs to fix the current virus problem – and prepare for the inevitable next ones.

The economic crisis due to the corona pandemic will hit all countries, including those with relatively small virus outbreaks at the moment or in the future. With proper prevention and response systems in place, there is no reason these economic disasters should escalate. But those systems will not be in place in impoverished nations – largely because UN, EU, climate and other eco-imperialist activists for decades have prevented those countries from building fossil fuel, nuclear and even hydroelectric generating plants, forcing them instead to be content with minimal, unreliable, habitat-destroying wind and solar power.

CLINTEL’s strong advice to the world’s leaders is spot-on: “To revive the global economy, don’t further increase government debts. Instead, apply the money intended for your costly Green New Deal to the present needs of people and society. Call it the COVID-19 RECOVERY PLAN. Be aware that, in today’s crisis, the conjectural policy of CO2 reduction is highly counterproductive!”

The letter’s eloquent summary statement says it all: “The world is moving to an open global economy of ten billion people. Top priority must be given to significant investments in a global health system that makes any pandemic less catastrophic. Considering COVID-19, climate alarmists and climate critics should admit that global warming is a non-problem. Therefore, stop fighting, step over your own shadow and work together against the deadly virus. In this tough battle we need each other!”

Imagine what would happen if abundant, reliable, affordable electricity from fossil, nuclear and hydroelectric were replaced by expensive, limited, intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar power. The impacts on our coronavirus response, healthcare, living standards and life spans would be horrific.

Without reliable, on-demand energy sufficient to power modern, industrialized society – which neither wind nor solar power can provide at current levels of technology – hospitals could not maintain sterile conditions. Food and vaccines could not be grown, developed, preserved or transported. Protective equipment to safeguard front-line health care workers from COVID-19, and respirators for critically-ill patients, could not be delivered where they’re needed, let alone manufactured in the first place.

We would not even have clean water or reliable sanitation systems. We would not have jobs, industries, decent living standards, or anything approaching a vibrant, functioning, job and tax-generating economy.

That’s the situation African and other impoverished nations found themselves with Ebola – and will find themselves if (when) COVID-19 reaches them. It is where a GED or GND would take the United States.

President Trump is absolutely right. We need to fight the coronavirus and keep it from spreading. But we also need to begin soon to balance the virus threat against threats created by our response to the virus: deaths from COVID-19 itself (which could be overstated) versus deaths due to mass unemployment and recession because of the shutdowns: from stress, depression, despair, strokes, heart attacks, suicides and murder-suicides ... amid bankruptcies, loss of life savings, and destruction of years’ of work and sacrifice.

And yet there are some who applaud the corona-economic recession for driving down fossil fuel use and CO2 emissions – or want more wind and solar mandates and subsidies built into any corona response plans.

Our health and economic emergency is real and immediate. The manmade climate emergency is years or decades away – if it even exists outside the realm of computer models that generate worst-case scenarios but cannot even forecast average global temperatures accurately ... and pseudo-scientific studies that blame every observed (and imagined) temperature shift, climate fluctuation and extreme weather event on fossil fuels.

Fight the virus, not carbon.

Via email

Media Lies Debunked: Coronavirus, Pandemics, and Climate Change

Climate alarmists and major media outlets are deceitfully exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to tell the public lies that climate change makes pandemics more likely and severe. In reality, the evidence is quite clear that warmer temperatures make pandemics and underlying outbreaks of viruses like the flu less frequent and severe.

In a March 24 editorial in The Hill, Vinod Thomas, former direct-general of the Independent Evaluation Group at the World Bank Group, writes, “There is a link to pandemics, like COVID-19, and a warmer world….”

Thomas’s claim follows many others in the media. For example, a recent Time magazine article states, “I have no evidence that climate change triggered this particular virus to jump from animals to humans at this particular time, or that a warmer planet has helped it spread. That said, it’s pretty clear that, broadly speaking, climate change is likely to lead to an uptick in future epidemics caused by viruses and other pathogens.”

Both writers know or, at least should know, that they are telling lies. Numerous studies demonstrate that transmissible diseases like the flu and the coronavirus are far more prevalent and deadly during the late-fall, winter, and early spring, when the weather is cold and damp, rather than in the summer months when it is warm and dry. That is a reason the flu season runs from fall through early spring, and then peters out. And colds, while not unheard of, are less common in the summer as well.

Chapter 7 or the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change’s report of Climate Change Reconsidered: Biological Impacts details the results of dozens of peer reviewed studies and reports showing premature deaths from illness and disease are far more prevalent during colder seasons and colder climate eras rather than during warmer seasons and warmer climate eras.

In 2010, British Broadcasting Channel’s health correspondent Clare Murphy analyzed mortality statistics from the UK’s Office of National Statistics from 1950 through 2007 and found, “For every degree the temperature drops below 18C [64 degrees Fahrenheit], deaths in the UK go up by nearly 1.5 percent.”

U.S. Interior Department analyst Indur Goklany studied official U.S. mortality statistics and found similar results. According to official U.S. mortality statistics, an average of 7,200 Americans die each day during the months of December, January, February, and March, compared to 6,400 each day during the rest of the year.

In an article published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2004, W. R. Keatinge and G. C. Donaldson noted, “Cold-related deaths are far more numerous than heat-related deaths in the United States, Europe, and almost all countries outside the tropics, and almost all of them are due to common illnesses that are increased by cold.”

More recently, in a study published in the Lancet in 2015, researchers examined health data from 384 locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths—a huge sample size from which to draw sound conclusions—and found cold weather, directly or indirectly, killed 1,700% more people than hot weather. No, that is not a typo – 1,700% more people die from cold temperatures than warm or hot temperatures.

Contrary to the fear-mongering assertions in The Hill and Time, the overwhelming scientific evidence shows it is cold, not heat, that kills. Therefore, a modestly warmer world, with shorter, less severe winters, should result in fewer premature deaths from disease, viruses, pandemics, hunger, and other natural causes.

SOURCE

Even coronavirus couldn't stop the climate madness

Fear of the coronavirus has taken over the world – but some people are determined to promote lies and propaganda even in the midst of the pandemic.

Climate doomsayers recently held a protest in Brussels despite the coronavirus fears. On Twitter, some doomsayers, stuck in oblivion, continue to preach climate change as the planet's most imminent threat. Are they so blinded by their ambition to create climate fears that they undermine imminent health threats?

Yes.

Though the media have exaggerated coronavirus' risks, the virus is not to be taken lightly. It can live up to nine days on metal, glass and plastic surfaces, according to recent scientific studies. Scientific evidence suggests that containment and precautionary measures in the early stages of an outbreak can significantly reduce the number of infections and deaths. Precaution, not panic, is the right way forward.

One of the key ways to stop the spread of the virus is to avoid mass gatherings. A public rally at a time like this was foolish. If one protester is infected with the coronavirus, then the protest jeopardizes the health of all the other protesters and all the people to whom they go home – and all the people with whom they, in turn, come in contact.

The most dangerous part is that not everyone infected will show signs of infection in the early stage. An individual who appears completely healthy can be carrying the virus. Unless every individual is tested, there is no way of knowing if people are infected or not. To make things more complicated, people who have tested negative have turned out be positive within a couple of days, which was the case with a Google employee in India.

So a public rally in the name of climate alarmism endangers lives and does nothing to save the planet or its environment.

The protesters think climate change is as dangerous as coronavirus. "It's pick your evil. Do you want to die from global warming or from coronavirus?" a protester commented at the Brussels rally, led by Greta Thunberg.

But this dismal attitude is not limited to rally organizers. Doomsday activists like Greta continue to preach about the dangers of climate change, calling it the biggest crisis we have faced.

People are free to preach their own opinions. However, no one should be selling fake climate-crisis news when a medically verified pandemic is threatening to sweep the world.

Climate has always changed. In the past, cold climate caused a global emergency during the Little Ice Age in the 16th century.

In the past seven decades, there have been hardly any scientific indications that the climate is in crisis. Scientists have even acknowledged a slowdown of warming during the first 14 years of this century.

Despite the El-Niño driven warmth in 2016 and other years, the last two decades have shown no signs of crisis. Agricultural outputs have increased in the past 55 years, societies have had higher life expectancies, and there has been global progress in reducing poverty.

Preaching about a non-existent climate threat during times of real health emergency is ironic, and it exposes the doomsday obsession of climate alarmists.

Once the coronavirus outbreak is over, climate doomsayers will restart their decades-long propaganda. Soon we will have a dozen hypotheses about how man-made climate change helped spread the coronavirus. They have done this blame game with other issues like the ongoing migrant crisis in Europe.

Meanwhile, stay safe!

SOURCE

Can History Cast Doubt on the Evidence of Global Warming?

A recent article in Commentary informs its readers that, “there has been no increase in average temperatures in the continental United States over the last 14 years…. If anything, overall temperatures are slightly cooler than they were.”

These are not the ravings of a “climate change denier.” This information comes from an agency of the United States Government called the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). The USCRN collects data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). These findings are reported by “Real Clear Energy.”

Unlike the “settled science” of former Vice-President Al Gore, this information is not garnered from computerized “climate models.” USCRN bases its conclusion on real data, gathered over the last fourteen years.

Reasons to Distrust the Data

The study behind the Commentary article provides ample reason to doubt the conclusions of the global warming alarmists.

The article’s author is the financial historian John Steele Gordon, who is no right-wing extremist. On his resume is staff work for two members of Congress, both New York Democrats, and frequent appearances on PBS and NPR.

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Mr. Gordon points out a severe problem with many of the 1221 weather stations NOAA uses to collect weather information. He raises a hypothetical case – one with many real-world counterparts. Many weather stations have big problems for these reasons:

“While they haven’t changed appreciably over the years, the land around them has changed, often profoundly, with the great growth in urban and suburban areas. The weather station that was put, say, in the middle of a Nassau County, Long Island, potato field in 1923 is still in the same spot. But the potatoes are long gone, and now it’s behind a strip mall, twenty feet from the kitchen exhaust fan of a Chinese take-out joint.”

For comparisons of weather over time, the station needs to remain in the same location. Moving it will not work since no two places are exactly alike. However, a weather station set up in a small forest in the early twentieth century will record very different information when that location has become the roof of a convenience store. The cool of the forest has been replaced by a hot roof that receives unfiltered sunlight for an average of twelve hours a day.

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Mr. Gordon’s article refers to a study conducted by Anthony Watts in 2009. It reveals that, “89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source. The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.”

The Arrogance of Scientism

Those who sustain the theory that man-made global warming is an “existential threat” dismiss such information. Mr. Gordon’s analysis is that of a historian. It is anecdotal, even though it points to the failure of a system, it is not per se scientific. This attitude is the product of a mistaken idea called scientism – the idea that only science can determine truth.

However, both historians and scientists are on different searches for the same truth. Anything that is scientifically true must also be historically accurate. A historically false proposition can never be scientifically true.

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The Plight of the Non-Scientist

Most people are not scientists. For at least thirty years, climate experts have claimed that non-scientists cannot have valid opinions about global warming. If people are to appear intelligent, they will jump on the solar-powered bandwagon, abandon fossil fuels and renounce cows and other producers of “greenhouse gases.” Those with contrary opinions are simply disregarded.

However, as Mr. Gordon’s article proves, the scientists base themselves upon a minimal amount of real data. In addition, the National Weather Service was only established in 1890. Its methodology and systems of recordkeeping developed over time. At most, there is only a century of real data. The rest is computer-generated projections.

The “scientific” data used by the climate alarmist scientists is thus questionable. The dire warnings are dubious. If a gradually warming climate cannot be proven by unquestionable “scientific data,” there must be other means to look at the record to reach conclusions. That other means is found in history.

The Little Ice Age

History offers an alternate explanation to the “man-made global warming” phenomena that is no less true that real science.

This author’s grandfather, born in 1899, used to say that winters were colder when he was a child. He was right. His youth began shortly after the end of the Little Ice Age. Some specialists speculate that it started about 1400 A.D. It lasted until the late nineteenth century. The twentieth century ushered in a period of gradually increasing temperatures.

Therefore, the Weather Service’s data, beginning in 1890 would logically show that winters are growing warmer. However, the data cannot conclude that the world was considerably warmer between A.D. 1000 and 1400, reaching a peak sometime during the late twelfth century. Historic accounts however do record this “Medieval Warm Period” when food became more plentiful, and travel became more comfortable. Such weather was a blessing upon the Christian civilization that was then reaching its peak.

The Danger of Incomplete Information

In comparison to the historic record of the world, the century of scientifically collected data is ridiculously small. The climate experts feed that minimal data, their biases and politically correct narratives into computers to predict the long term future. They blithely disregard other forms of evidence that contradict their idea of “science.”

It is like moaning that you are going to die when you catch the ghastly flu. If you extrapolate that evidence to predict the future, then you appear to be declining and will soon die. Of course, the week of the flu represents the downhill slope of a natural process. In another week, you will feel better.

SOURCE

Trump wants prime-time climate science challenge — Happer

President Trump wants a climate science review where he might take center stage as host in front of a prime-time television audience, a former adviser said yesterday.

Trump is also interested in bringing back a hostile review of climate science if he wins reelection, but he's concerned that it would affect him in the general election, according to William Happer, a former senior director in the National Security Council. The emeritus Princeton University professor worked for months to promote a hostile review of climate science.

Happer told E&E News he's interested in a purely academic challenge to the National Climate Assessment, while Trump wants a televised event.

"The biggest audience, which is the average American public, has to be informed, and he thinks he's better at doing that than I am. I'm sure he's right," Happer said. "He would prefer it be on prime time, maybe with he himself participating, who knows, but it's impossible to make much of an impact on the scientific community that way."

Happer said Trump was already familiar with his view of climate science, which holds that the world needs more carbon dioxide, before they met in the Oval Office with former national security adviser John Bolton and acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney. In those early days of his White House tenure, in the fall of 2018, the climate science review seemed a certainty. Happer said Trump was receptive to his scientific claims but that the president already had his own ideas about climate.

Happer, who left the White House last September, said he stressed to the president that there was no urgency to address climate change.

"I don't think I told him anything that he didn't really know. I continually stressed that he's not really dealing with so much with science as with a popular movement," he said.

Happer said that in subsequent meetings, Trump would engage with the idea of the review but was largely focused on his political fortunes.

"When you talk to him, he is interested, but his main focus is politics, how's the next election going," he said. "It's hard to distract him too long from his main focus. I don't think I was with him, I think ever, when at some point in the conversation, some political issue would come up, how's the latest hearing, how is such and such Democratic candidate looking in the polls."

NASA, NOAA and the world's top science agencies have all warned that humans are warming the planet at an unprecedented pace and that, absent significant mitigation, the world is on pace to experience changes with dire consequences for humanity.

Happer spoke to E&E News on the sidelines of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in suburban Washington. He participated in a panel on the "debate" around climate science, which also included a panelist, Alex Bozmoski of RepublicEn, a conservative group that pushes for climate action, who criticized Happer's version of science. In previous years, CPAC events were critical of climate science.

Trump campaign officials worked to block the climate review because polling shows it's a vulnerability for the president in districts he must win to stay in the White House.

In the panel, Happer criticized Republican women, who polls show are increasingly concerned about climate change and have weakened in support for Trump.

"Let me say a little about Republican women and housewives: They've been brainwashed," he said.

"What are they supposed to believe?" he added. "They've got Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore and other great scientists explaining this and Bill Nye the Science Guy, well, what else do you expect them to think, and so we've done this to ourselves."

Happer said Trump supported his planned science review and approved it to go forward but that it was sabotaged by "carefully orchestrated delays" from White House and campaign officials who didn't want it to proceed. He said Trump told him it was "too close to the election" to do the review this year but that it could happen if he wins a second term.

"He was very apologetic and said there is a time for everything, and this is just the wrong timing, this is on hold, we're not going to abandon it," he said. "He's a politician. So what do you expect a politician to say?"

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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29 March, 2020

No Green New Deal in stimulus: This time

The Senate passed a two trillion dollar stimulus bill designed to provide economic relief in response to the coronavirus crisis.

Despite efforts by radical greens to ram the bill full of climate “pork,” it looks like their expensive wish list didn’t make the cut.

This is good news, thanks largely to the President and many Senators who called out their crafty attempts to sneak in a radical wish list that has nothing to do with the virus into the bill.

Of course they have to pass it for us to see everything that’s in it… just as the founders intended.

“[The Democrats said] ‘We want green energy, let’s stop drilling oil’ — they had things in there that were terrible…Windmills all over the place and all sorts of credits for windmills — they kill the birds and ruin the real estate. A lot of problems,” President Trump explained during a town hall style broadcast.

Just because America has dodged one Green New Deal bullet, don’t think the climate radicals won’t be back.

Presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden had this to say, “we’re going to have an opportunity, I believe, in the next round [of economic aid] here to use…my Green Deal to be able to generate both economic growth as consistent with the kind of infusion of monies we need into the system to keep it going.”

Really, Joe? Do you truly believe shoveling money into the Big Green wood chipper is the smartest way to shelter a great nation from depression and despair?

A record three million people filed for unemployment in the most recent jobs report. The businesses forced to close their doors by government at every level have been shown no clear path as to when they might reopen.

Uncertainty destroys.

Unless we identify those portions of the economy that can operate safely and target them to reopen, our two trillion dollars will be consumed without stimulating anything.

The call for another stimulus bill will be shrill. Expect the Left to push harder to force their climate wish list in. They must be opposed.

Ironically, the Left’s push to shoehorn radical climate and environmental policy into government stimulus plans seems to be running afoul of the author of the Green New Deal himself.

Saikat Chakrabarti, former Chief of Staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said in a tweet when referring to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proposal to tie any airline aid to emissions restrictions:

“I helped write the #GreenNewDeal and I think this is ridiculous. The tiny little emissions standard increase doesn’t even do anything meaningful to stave off climate change…”

Hard to believe it, but maybe Congress should actually listen to the author of the Green New Deal – this time anyway.

SOURCE

Biden exploits pandemic to push Green New Deal

Joe Biden made a public splash this week on various news outlets. The Atlantic magazine will be glad to know he is alive.

We sincerely wish Mr. Biden well, but he would have done better staying off the air.

The former Vice President and presumptive presidential nominee said if there is another coronavirus relief bill coming out of the U.S. Congress, he wants it to include a blizzard of irrelevant policies which have nothing to do with helping Americans overcome the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. These policies include parts of the “Green New Deal” that were proposed by Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, such as imposing limits on carbon emissions in airplanes and more tax credits for wind and solar energy development.

After three days of haggling, the Senate rejected these and most of the other last-ditch House proposals by omitting them from the just completed $2 trillion legislation that is being passed into law this week.

Joe Biden wants to try again next time. He told the News Hour on Public Broadcasting: “we’re going to have an opportunity I believe in the next round here to use the, my green economy, my Green Deal to be able to generate both economic ground and consistent with the kind of infusion of money as we need into the system to keep it going.”

There you have it; or, to coin a phrase, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

Mr. Biden gave a series of interviews this past week to remind the country that he’s running for president. It’s not easy getting attention these days when you have no official role in fighting the coronavirus that has afflicted tens of thousands of Americans, and so far killed well more than 1,200 people in the country.

The Congress and the President agreed on this $2 trillion legislative package to keep the U.S. economy from collapsing into a depression, as much of the workforce remains at home, and a growing number of employees lose their jobs. More than 3 million Americans, and counting, have been added to the unemployment rolls.

Rather than sustain American jobs and businesses, Green New Deal mandates and added costs on traditional energy would ensure the economy’s collapse. Oil and natural gas are the lifeblood of the American economy, which is teetering on the biggest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

The Green New Deal from Joe Biden or anyone else is a bad idea at any time. It is a worse idea now – like rubbing salt in a metastasizing economic wound and public health emergency, with each producing real victims.

Health care, law enforcement and other front-line workers do not have enough masks, ventilators and other needs to care for people stricken by the virus. What if they have insufficient energy when the next pandemic hits because too much fossil fuel has been shut down and renewables can’t cut it, thanks to a Green New Deal?

Mr. Biden’s incoherent interviews to promote counterproductive policies was ill timed. As he tries to get attention, he continues to fumble not merely on policies themselves, but on his presentation. More are questioning his staying power in the presidential race, and contrasting him with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been in full command as he leads his state’s response to the coronavirus. New York State by far has been the hardest hit of any state with COVID-19.

Whether Joe Biden can go the distance, or is somehow replaced by another presidential candidate at the Democratic Party’s national convention this summer, others can—and will— speculate. From a policy standpoint, whoever is the Democratic nominee will seek to impose the Green New Deal on the country, the central premise of which is the immediate demise of fossil fuels and the associated jobs of Americans in related industries.

The debate will continue in America about our energy future and how we get there. Technological ingenuity and development will bring about new energy sources to gradually supplant oil and gas to some degree, without having a Green New Deal to outlaw their use or make them prohibitively costly. Doing so would only hurt the livelihoods of American workers and industries in the process, especially in this and certain future national emergencies.

SOURCE

The Guardian’s biases produced bogus COVID-19 claims

By Paul Driessen

The Guardian (a very liberal London newspaper) does some excellent reporting – about 40,000 children slaving and dying in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) of Central Africa, mining cobalt for cell phones, laptops, Teslas and Green New Deal technologies, for example. But other stories are a bizarre mix of fact, fake news, junk science, random conjecture and utter nonsense.

A case in point is its recent attempt to blame the coronavirus crisis on human activities that The Guardian and its writers tend to detest, even though they are essential for modern civilization and living standards: road building, mining and logging. “Is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?” the headline blares, adding “As habitat and biodiversity loss increase globally, the coronavirus outbreak may be just the beginning of mass pandemics.”

The article opens with the tragic story of an Ebola-traumatized village in Gabon, west of the DRC on Africa’s west coast. Villagers had gotten the disease from eating a wild chimpanzee. Many had died.

The ensuing eco-proselytizing took a page out of ancient religious lore, which attributed calamities to mankind’s sins against gods, God – or in this case Gaia. Some vague “number of researchers” in the new academic “discipline” of “planetary health” now believe it is “humanity’s destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as COVID-19.”

Humans “invade” wild landscapes where animals and plants live that harbor unknown viruses, says one supposed expert. “We disrupt ecosystems and shake viruses loose from their natural hosts.”

“Research suggests” that outbreaks of diseases crossing over from animals to humans “are on the rise,” the article continues. While rabies and bubonic plague “crossed over centuries ago,” it’s getting much worse: Marburg, Mers, Nipah, SARS, Zika and West Nile, for example. Or the Asian flu and AIDS. These “zoonotic” diseases are “increasingly linked to environmental change and human behavior,” such as human population growth, urbanization and the “disruption of pristine forests,” says another “expert.”

It sounds plausible, for those without scientific, medical or analytical background. It definitely appeals to those who dislike these activities (and humanity). But it ignores history, reality, and the anti-technology ideologies of those who say we are “sinning against Gaia the Earth Mother.”

Malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness are also mentioned. Yet what about cholera, polio (which I had as a child), smallpox, measles, multiple plagues in various cities and countries through the ages, and countless iterations of influenza? We don’t know where they come from, and many mutate frequently, defying our best efforts to eradicate them or find vaccines and cures.

Many were brought from distant shores to Europe or the Americas, Russia or other lands by sailing ships – to populations that lacked natural or built-up immunities. Today’s emergent diseases can travel far more rapidly and widely, thanks to trains, cars, ships and planes. Add the billions that live today in crowded cities, often facilitating rapid transmission of virulent or novel diseases, even with modern clinics, hospitals, vaccinations, medicines, antibiotic soaps and proper hygienic practices.

Those life-saving modern technologies and buildings didn’t just happen. They are the product of mining, logging, roads, drilling, fossil fuel and nuclear energy, and modern agriculture, communication and transportation – which enable innovation to thrive, help keep Nature’s wrath and fury at a safer distance, and helped extend average American life spans from 40 in 1800 to 47 in 1900 and 78 today. (My colleagues and I discuss that here, here and elsewhere. This penicillin story is also fascinating.)

The Guardian has it completely backward. Utilizing Earth’s surface and subsurface bounties – God’s blessings – did not unleash COVID-19 and other viruses, bacteria and diseases. It helped save us from pestilences that have ravaged humanity throughout our time on this planet. It still does so today.

Diseases will always be with us. They will evolve, mutate, cross over from animals to humans, and try to ravage us for as long as we inhabit this magnificent planet. Never forget that it was the fossil fuels that so many detest which enabled so much of humanity to escape the deprivation, starvation and disease that kept human, health and civilizational progress to a barely measurable minimum until about 1800.

Imagine what would happen if abundant, reliable, affordable heat and electricity from fossil, nuclear and hydroelectric were replaced by limited, intermittent, weather-dependent, expensive wind, solar and battery power. The impacts on our healthcare and living standards would be horrific. Try to picture life in African villages and cities, where electricity, clean water, sanitation and healthcare are still almost nonexistent.

Imagine what our planet would look like, if we had to replace relatively few fossil, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants with millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of backup batteries, sprawling across hundreds of millions of acres. We would have to open or expand thousands of mines, to provide the metals and minerals required to manufacture all that pseudo-renewable energy.

Disruption of ecosystems and destruction of biodiversity would multiply by orders of magnitude.

The Guardian article subtly but harshly criticizes hunting chimpanzees and other wild animals. But why do African villagers do that? It’s not rocket science. They are hungry! Living on the edge of survival.

And yet UN and EU agencies, eco-imperialist pressure groups, anti-development banks and divestment campaigners demand that they compound the misery of living without electricity, clean water and healthcare – by turning their backs on modern seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and tractors.

Instead, Africans are supposed to survive on whatever meager crops they can harvest using agro-ecology: primitive subsistence farming – and whatever might survive droughts and locust plagues. They’re also supposed to be content with bed nets and avoid using insecticides to kill insects that carry diseases like malaria, dengue and sleeping sickness.

The article next cites “disease ecologists” who claim these diseases increasingly come from “wet markets” that have recently “sprung up” to provide fresh meat for large urban populations. Wet markets have certainly been tied to the coronavirus. But they have been around for centuries, due to culture and tradition, as places to meet and gossip, as symbols of wealth, reflecting the belief that the meat is more natural and healthy. The reality that there is not enough farm-raised meat because agricultural practices in much of Asia and Africa are still antiquated.

In a final bit of absurdity, the author says the solutions to this modern crisis of disease outbreaks “start with education and awareness” – like the junk science, fake news and half-baked ideas thrown about in his article. Then the newspaper weighs in, railing that under the Trump administration “anger and cruelty disfigure public discourse and lying is commonplace.” But with financial help from readers, The Guardian can “keep delivering quality journalism” – like this story.

One has to wonder. If we can close restaurants and parks, and ban gatherings of more than ten people, can’t we quarantine nonsense about disease, mining, and wild ecosystems disrupted because we haven’t sufficiently adopted “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” wind, solar, battery and biofuel alternatives?

SOURCE

Covid-19: a glimpse of the dystopia greens want us to live in

Greens just can’t help themselves. As the rest of us do what we can to tackle or withstand the Covid-19 crisis, they treat it as a sign, a warning from nature, a telling-off to hubristic, destructive mankind. The speed with which they have folded this pandemic into their misanthropic narrative about humanity being a pox on the planet has been shocking, but not surprising.

Right from the top of the UN, they have been promoting their backward belief that this virus is a reprimand from nature. Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, says ‘nature is sending us a message’ with this pandemic and other recent disasters, including bushfires in Australia and locust invasions in Kenya. Of course nature is doing no such thing, because nature is not a sentient being, however much the new religion of environmentalism might fantasise that it is.

The Guardian reports that Andersen thinks humanity’s ‘destruction of the natural world for farming, housing and mining’ is making pandemics more likely. In short, human growth, modern society itself, is now getting its comeuppance. We think we can farm and mine and, erm, build houses as we see fit, but here comes nature with her punishment: a terrible disease. This is positively Biblical. Gaia is God in this scenario, coming to punish us for our sins.

A group of scientists agrees with Andersen. They describe Covid-19 as a ‘clear warning shot’ from nature, telling human civilisation that it is ‘playing with fire’. This is the political exploitation of a horrible disease to the end of winding back human industry: what a low trick.

Britain’s chief bourgeois misanthrope, George Monbiot, was hot on the heels of the UN’s eco-medievalists. He says Covid-19 has shattered humanity’s self-serving myth that it has achieved ‘insulation from natural hazards’. There is a grotesque glee in the way Monbiot describes what Covid-19 has unleashed – ‘the membrane has ruptured’, he says, and ‘we find ourselves naked and outraged, as the biology we appeared to have banished storms through our lives’.

Monbiot also views this pandemic as a lesson from nature. The headline to his piece says: ‘Covid-19 is nature’s wake-up call to our complacent civilisation.’ And what is the content of nature’s violent lesson to disgusting mankind? It is to remind us that, for all our arrogance, we are actually ‘governed by biology and physics’.

There is something profoundly ugly in this. Monbiot and other greens seem to view Covid-19 as a disaster that will have an upside: it might roll back the Enlightenment-era belief that humankind can exercise dominion over nature and remind us that actually we are at nature’s mercy. They hope this disaster will restore nature’s power over the humanised world.

This is also why so many greens online have been sharing images of dolphins swimming near Venice or an absence of airplane trails over California. Because to them, these are signs of a benefit from Covid-19: the humbling of humankind, the reining in of our industrial and technological activity, and the reassertion of nature’s awesome power. If you see a disease as a political statement, as an opportunity to pursue your pre-existing misanthropic agendas, there is something very wrong with you.

Even though all of this is morally perverse, it is not surprising. For a long time, greens have viewed human beings as a pox, a virus in our own right, doing untold damage to the planet. Green god David Attenborough has said humans are ‘a plague on the planet’. Even when greens don’t use such explicitly hateful language, they constantly promote a view of human production and development as toxic and destructive.

And they latch on to everything from bushfires to floods, from plagues of locusts to melting ice-caps, as signs from nature, lessons from a furious Gaia. When religious crackpots blame floods on gay marriage, claiming God is punishing us for losing the moral plot, we rightly mock them. Yet greens offer merely a secular version of such backward, apocalyptic claptrap.

The truth is that if the Covid-19 crisis has shown us anything, it is how awful it would be to live in the kind of world greens dream about. Right now, courtesy of a horrible new virus, our societies look not dissimilar to the kind of societies Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion, green parties and others have long been agitating for. Fewer flights, industry halted, huge infrastructure projects put on hold. Less driving, less travelling, less human interaction. Over the past few weeks, as a result of our response to Covid-19, the ‘human footprint’ will undoubtedly have shrunk. And what an awful world it has become: smaller, quieter, more atomised.

We are all happy to make some sacrifices during this crisis. We are staying home, observing social distancing, and of course, most of us are not working or travelling. But we cannot wait to go back to a world in which factories crank back to life, airplanes scrawl their lines in the sky, and people can go anywhere and work, socialise, buy and eat to their heart’s content. Greens really should be careful when they talk about Covid-19, because it won’t be long before more and more people realise that this unpleasant emergency we are living through is just like the warped dystopia greens want to build.

SOURCE

Fossil Fuels, Not the Green New Deal, Improve Human Welfare

For millennia, most humans toiled in a Hobbesian state of nature: Their lives were poor, nasty, brutish and short. People lived chronically at the brink of starvation, and they suffered through numerous pandemics, as well as with high infant mortality rates and a short life expectancy.

But then, something remarkable occurred: Mankind learned how to use fossil fuels, spurring the Industrial Revolution. “First coal in England, soon followed by natural gas, and then crude oil in the early twentieth century,” Steve Moore explained in his compelling book, Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy.

As Moore notes, thanks to fossil fuels, production per capita soared, as did life expectancy and human population.

“Average real income per capita — on a global basis — is now 10 to 20 times higher than at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,” Moore added. “Each variable (GDP per capita, life expectancy, human population, carbon dioxide emissions), shows an advance of approximately sixteen-fold over the past one hundred years … with world economic product increasing from $2 to $32 trillion.”

Fossil fuels and the flowering of the modern world provided the tools needed for reducing world poverty and hunger. And we could be making significantly more progress too, if it weren’t for the fact that the world is burdened today with ignorant warnings about human extinction and the imminent end of the world caused by the very same fossil fuels that have unquestionably improved human life for more than a century.

Alarmists tell us the oceans are rising at a frightening pace and will soon engulf major cities and coastal shores all over the world — despite ample evidence that such fears are not warranted.

These assertions are often nothing more than politically motivated fearmongering. In many cases, it seems unlikely the alarmists actually believe their own dire warnings.

Take Barack Obama, for example. He recently invested $11.5 million in a Martha’s Vineyard estate so close to the ocean you can actually throw a football from his backyard into the sea.

Obama isn’t alone, of course. Coastal real estate markets, many of which are located in deep-blue parts of the country full of people who supposedly believe climate change is on the verge of destroying the world, reveal the absurdity of alarmist sea-level claims. Despite the alleged “existential crisis” of climate change, coastal property values are rising dramatically.

Despite all the erroneous and misleading claims, as well as the hypocrisy, the left continues to promote policies that will “fix” the present climate crisis—all while conveniently giving them the power they have always craved.

The best example of these policies is the Green New Deal (GND), which would replace fossil fuels with more expensive, less reliable renewable energy sources, at a cost of many trillions of dollars. If enacted, the GND would completely decimate the U.S. economy. The stock market would collapse, and America would fall back into recession. Unemployment would soar, millions of jobs would be lost, and wages would plummet.

Just as importantly, the environment would be wrecked as well. A new study published by the Heartland Institute and authored by Paul Driessen, a senior policy analyst for the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, documents that replacing fossil fuels and nuclear energy with wind power “would require 2.12 million (wind) turbines on 500,682 square miles (equivalent to) the states of Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and much of West Virginia.” This would not only destroy habitats for countless animal species, it would also kill millions of innocent birds and bats.

Unfortunately, the wanton environmental damage wrought by a switch to wind and solar power does not end there. The mining of toxic rare earth minerals that are necessary for wind and solar equipment is among the most environmentally destructive activities on the planet.

Further, the necessary construction of thousands of miles of new transmission lines needed to bring power from remote wind and solar farms to urban population centers would cause additional habitat destruction and spark wildfires like the ones that recently ravaged California.

Making matters even worse, the wind power industry has yet to devise an acceptable plan to recycle or dispose of the monstrous-sized wind turbines when no longer usable.

In the end, the Green New Deal would destroy both the environment and the economy. The only “good” it would ultimately provide is for the ruling class in Washington, DC, whose power would be greatly enhanced, and their buddies in the renewable energy industry, who would receive bucketloads of taxpayer cash to prop up their ordinarily unprofitable businesses.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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27 March, 2020

Virtue Signaling of Plastic Bag Ban Ends Quickly in a Pandemic

Mindless virtue signaling doesn’t fare well in a real crisis.

As the nation and the world confronts a deadly pandemic, and citizens, businesses, and governments do all they can to tamp down the spread of the coronavirus, some useless measures instituted in less turbulent times will go by the wayside.

One of these useless measures is plastic bag bans, which have been proliferating in recent years with the aid of environmentalist activists.

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu issued an order Saturday telling all grocery and retail stores to move away from reusable bags and transition to disposable plastic and paper bags.

“Our grocery store workers are on the front lines of #COVID19, working around the clock to keep NH families fed,” Sununu, a Republican, said on Twitter. “With identified community transmission, it is important that shoppers keep their reusable bags at home given the potential risk to baggers, grocers, and customers.”

This comes just over two months after the New Hampshire House of Representatives passed legislation to ban plastic bags in the state. The legislation remains in committee in the state Senate.

New Hampshire is not alone.

New York state has put its recently passed ban on plastic bags on hold for now.

In fact, states and cities around the country have been suspending their plastic bag bans too. And there is a growing call for places that still have the bans in place to bring them to an end during the outbreak.

These actions reveal the fact that not only are the bans marginal or even detrimental in their environmental impact—more on that later—but they are also a public health hazard.

Reusable plastic tote bags are a good carrier for bacteria and viruses, the coronavirus included. As John Tierney wrote for City Journal, numerous studies have provided evidence that reusable bags are unsanitary.

In one study that Tierney highlighted, published in the Journal of Environmental Health in 2018, researchers planted a surrogate virus on the bags of three shoppers who went into grocery stores. After they bought their groceries and checked out, researchers found the virus “on the hands of the shoppers and checkout clerks, as well as on many surfaces touched by the shoppers, including packaged food, unpackaged produce, shopping carts, checkout counters, and the touch screens used to pay for groceries.”

This is a scary prospect as countless Americans have their only contact with the general public when they go to grocery stores, making the efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19 much more difficult.

Of course, some climate activists aren’t going to be dissuaded, even at this time.

Larissa Copello de Souza, a campaigner at Zero Waste Europe, said, according to The Wall Street Journal: “We cannot forget and disregard the other big current challenges we are also currently facing.”

By this she means climate change and plastic buildup.

“Promoting the use of reusables is certainly one of the greatest practices we can have to address those issues,” Souza said.

The problem with this mentality, beside perhaps misplaced priorities, is that the plastic bag bans are ineffectual even if the primary concern is the environment.

A study in Australia by University of Sydney economist Rebecca Taylor demonstrated that bans on plastic shopping bags do not significantly cut down on waste; more people buy thick garbage bags to line their trash cans after the bans are put in place.

The bottom line is, the current crisis has revealed the misguided nature of plastic bag bans, and now cities and states must move quickly to prevent these bans from exacerbating the coronavirus pandemic.

In the coming days, Americans will have to take many actions and adjust their lives to stop the spread of COVID-19. Serious times and serious matters will force us to abandon virtue signaling and restore common sense.

Suspending bans on plastic bags is a good sign that’s happening already.

SOURCE

Dead weight: The problem with plug-in hybrids

The batteries and electric motors in hybrids are HEAVY so damage fuel economy if little used

Plug-in hybrids took a blow recently when the government included their like, as well as conventional hybrids, in the 2035 ban of petrol and diesel-powered vehicles. Is the inclusion fair?

In terms of what they actually emit in so-called ‘real-world conditions’, quite possibly, in spite of the technology. New research has suggested that PHEVs emit as much as three-times their homologated figures for CO2, and consume three-times as much fuel, in ‘real-world’ conditions.

When it comes to petrol and diesel vehicles, ‘real world’ emissions and efficiency figures can be compared with figures reported from lab tests that are used to homologate them. Typically, those real-world figures are a small degree worse than those obtained in testing, due to varying conditions, performance and driving habits. That degree is a curiosity, rather than a serious issue. Indeed, some drivers can achieve better figures through careful driving.

In the case of PHEVs, the difference between testing and real-world figures can be stark. New research by The Miles Consultancy (TMC) indicates that the most popular PHEVs can triple the severity of their stated emissions and fuel consumption figures. Likewise, testing by Emissions Analytics, found alarmingly high consumption and emissions figures from PHEVs whose batteries were not charged.

“On the evidence of our sample, one has to question whether some PHEVs ever see a charging cable,” Paul Hollock, TMC’s managing director commented. “In a lot of cases, we see PHEVs never being charged, doing longer drives and this is not a good fit for a lot of car users.”

Imagine a driver of a conventional car had the option of tripling its efficiency but didn’t, either through laziness or a lack of awareness. This is more or less what is happening with many PHEVS. Using the plug-in element of a PHEV, keeping the battery charged to get those superb efficiency and emissions figures, is optional. Not charging doesn’t mean you’ll be stranded, so people can neglect to do so.

The problem is with driving habits and not the technology. Plugging in is an option, and one that isn’t always taken. Worse still, when it isn’t taken, you end up with an internal combustion vehicle, with the same or a similar engine as non-hybridised variants, lugging the extra weight of a hybrid system not in use.

“This is all very confusing for motorists,” said Nick Molden, chief executive of Emissions Analytics. “The problem is the official figures are very sensitive to assumptions about how PHEVs are being charged and driven.”

Proprietors of popular plug-in hybrid models responded to scepticism around their vehicles. A spokesman from Mitsubishi UK cited a survey of Outlander owners that found 96 percent charged at least once a week, and 68 percent charged every day. Even so, Mitsubishi itself recently announced a scheme to incentivise owners to plug-in, offering 10,000 free electric miles’ worth of charging.

Kia, meanwhile, has emphasised that ultimately, ”responsibility lies with the owner, but used correctly, a PHEV will improve fuel economy and reduce tailpipe emissions”.

Ultimately, be it an issue of education or laziness, the fact that PHEVs give drivers the option of not running them at maximum efficiency compromises their effectiveness. Their potential to offer a great compromise is known. If you’re a PHEV owner and you’re hot on plugging it in, then you’re doing it right. Unfortunately, the unpredictable human element is where they fall short.

In 2020, as the offering of competent viable longer-range fully electric vehicles flourishes, the question of PHEV’s real-world relevance to the cause of emissions and consumption reduction burns ever-more.

“By the end of the year, most new models of fully-electric vehicle will be able to cover 150 miles on a single charge, and the need for plug-in hybrids will inevitably decline”, said Ewa Kmietowicz, transport team leader at the Committee on Climate Change.

Whether their inclusion in the ban is fair or not perhaps isn’t the question. For now, their effectiveness remains in doubt, given that the problem with plug-in hybrids is people.

SOURCE

Migratory Bird Treaty Act reform will clarify longstanding confusion

A century-old statute enacted to protect birds that cross international boundaries has become the object of conflicting legal interpretations, sowing confusion over what kinds of acts leading to the injury of death of a protected species can be punished by a fine or even a prison sentence.

Now, the Trump administration’s Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS), a division of the Interior Department, is stepping in to define the scope of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) to provide regulatory certainty to the public, industries, states, tribes, and other affected parties.

By proposing to codify FWS’s existing interpretation that the prohibitions of the MBTA only apply to actions “directed at” migratory birds, their nests, or their eggs, FWS is taking a significant step toward clarifying confusion that has resulted from no fewer than five recent conflicting circuit court of appeals decisions on the scope of the MBTA, as well as conflicting interpretations by the Obama administration and the Trump administration..

The muddled legal interpretation of what constitutes a “take” of a protected bird under the MBTA has opened the door to protracted litigation as the public has struggled to understand what the law actually says.

Obama vs. Trump Interpretations

On Jan. 10, 2017 – ten days before the Obama administration left office – the Solicitor General at the Obama Interior Department issued a legal opinion, according to which any act that takes or kills a migratory bird – regardless of the violator’s intention or state of mind – falls within the scope of the MBTA as long as it results in the death of a bird. But on Dec. 22, 2017, the Trump administration issued its own Solicitor’s Opinion concluding that an otherwise lawful activity that results in the incidental take of a protected bird does not violate the MBTA.

In its proposed rulemaking, FWS codifies the Trump Solicitor’s Opinion. As pointed out in CFACT’s public comments submitted to FWS on March 18:

The proposed codification differentiates between wanton acts of destruction and criminal negligence, on the one hand, and the accidental or incidental take of a protected bird, however regrettable, on the other. U.S. law has long differentiated between harm caused by intent and harm caused by accident. The proposed rulemaking extends that practice to the MBTA.

The rulemaking would also change how FWS administers the MBTA by determining that an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is the most efficient and comprehensive approach for considering the potential impacts of this action on the environment. Until recently, such a proposal would have been a fool’s errand because of the extraordinary delays long associated with the NEPA process. However, with the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) having recently proposed a long-overdue streamlining of the NEPA process, CEQ’s rulemaking – assuming it survives legal challenges – compliments what the Service is proposing to do with regard to the MBTA.

Court Battles Loom

Both the Trump administration’s clarification of the MBTA and its reforms of the National Environmental Policy Act will be challenged in court by environmental groups. If they survive those challenges, at least some of the litigation and red tape that have surrounded environmental policy for decades will be trimmed back.

SOURCE

California Would Have Low-Cost Housing If Government Allowed It: The Mortenson Experiment

Predominantly environmental building codes prevent it

Chris Mortenson, a San Diego developer, hired an architect to find out what type of SRO (single-room-occupancy) building he could develop for very low-income people, many of them homeless, if unnecessary state and local regulations were ignored. SROs are basically apartment buildings that typically have rooms without kitchens and shared bathrooms at the end of hallways. SRO units are no-frills, but they are safer and cleaner than the streets.

Here’s what the architect came back with:

* A four-story building
* 10-by-12-foot units (about half the size required by the existing building code)
* Microwave in each unit
* Sink in each unit
* Toilet in each unit (partitioned, but not separated)
* Communal showers at the end of each hall

Remarkably, San Diego waived its building code, and the building was built for less than $15,000 per unit, allowing people to rent each room for $50 per week. The building was immediately filled with grateful occupants.

Mortenson conducted his experiment in the late-1980s. Today, the inflation-adjusted costs would be about $34,000 per unit to build and $110 per week to rent ($440 per month), still a bargain. The cost to build one apartment unit to code in San Diego County ranges from $192,000 to $375,000, according to an analysis by Xpera Group. The average monthly rent in San Diego for a one-bedroom apartment is $1,808, according to RentJungle.com.

Mortenson showed that it is possible to build affordable, yet profitable, SROs if the government gets out of the way. Government is the root cause of unaffordable housing in California (for more on this topic see How to Restore the California Dream: Removing Obstacles to Fast and Affordable Housing Development).

The San Diego experiment was discussed in the book The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America by Philip K. Howard, who wrote that building codes “dictate minimum room dimensions, require that bathrooms and kitchens be separate from rooms for every other use, and mandate hundreds of other details. Good ideas and technological advances fill every page of the code book. Who can object to any of this? No one, provided society can afford it.” Low-income people, however, cannot afford it, resulting in more homelessness as building codes make it impossible to build inexpensive housing in California.

Building codes have eradicated low-cost housing for decades. Sold by politicians as “getting rid of substandard housing” and “improving the lives of poor people,” William Tucker explains in Housing America: Building Out of a Crisis, “buildings are condemned as ‘firetraps,’ for not having adequate ventilation, not providing kitchen or bathroom facilities, and for not offering people ‘a decent place to live.’” Too often, the streets become the next home for people forced out of low-cost housing by burdensome, idealized codes.

Politicians and bureaucrats argue that “it’s in the best interests of poor people” to have their apartments “upgraded to code” lest they live in “crowded unsanitary substandard deathtraps.” The problem, of course, is that every so-called “improvement” will price many people out of a home, pushing some to the street. Howard notes that “the virtual extinction of single-room-occupancy buildings illustrates the side effects of this drive toward mandated perfection.”

In addition to building codes, some cities have eliminated SROs using density limits, occupancy restrictions, or “urban renewal” projects that raze entire neighborhoods, often targeting minority communities. (Walter Thompson wrote an excellent historical series on the disgraceful Fillmore project in San Francisco: “How Urban Renewal Destroyed the Fillmore in Order to Save It” and “How Urban Renewal Tried to Rebuild the Fillmore.”)

Philip K. Howard reminds us that,

Real people tend to have their own way of doing things—a little borrowed, a little invented, and so forth. Law, trying to make sure nothing ever goes wrong, doesn’t respect the idiosyncrasy of human accomplishment. It sets forth the approved methods, in black and white, and that’s that. When law notices people doing it differently, its giant heel reflexively comes down.

Inexpensive housing would be built in California if government allowed it. Instead, streets teem with 151,000 homeless people, a human and moral tragedy caused, in part, by government barriers to housing development in California.

SOURCE

Australia: Inland mineral bonanza on hold

MAJOR projects across out-back Queensland worth almost $3 billion — which could create jobs and change the fortunes of hard-hit country towns — are sitting on the drawing board, a major pipeline report has revealed. Outback Queensland covers two-thirds of the state but has just a few hundred million dollars of funded infrastructure projects, the annual report card by the Queensland Major Contractors Association and the Infrastructure Association of Queensland says.

But with the global heat on to move to renewables, outback Queensland and its 82,513 residents could be sitting on a new-age gold mine with "significant mineral resources and value-added processing which would support global efforts to move to a clean energy economy including bauxite/alumina/aluminium, nickel, copper, cobalt, silver, lead, zinc and rare earths metals, particularly in the North West Minerals Province centred around Mount Isa and Clon-curry", the report says.

It is also the site of some of the state's biggest planned renewable energy projects, including the Aldoga Solar Farm, worth $120 million. While the solar farm is funded, a long list of big projects are still on the drawing board, including the Kidston Solar Project Stage 2 ($140m), Kidston Transmission Project ($100m) and the Kidston Pumped Hydro Storage Project ($200m) along with the massive Copperstring Transmission Line worth $1.5 billion.

QMCA boss Jon Davies said a big impediment to developing the North West Minerals Province was the State Government-owned rail line which is susceptible to floods.

"There's big opportunities for developing the North West Minerals Province," he said. "There are plans to upgrade (the rail line). That is an area that the government could look at expediting."

Without government support, the huge swath of state remains captive to the mining and commodities market, with 94 per cent of projects unfunded. "In 2019-20 there is only $70m in funded activity, while $225m remains unfunded," the report says.

"Funded activity only peaks at $82m in 2022-23, supported by a section of the $238m Mount Isa to Rockhampton Corridor Upgrade and the $120m Aldoga Solar Farm,"

The report says the outback region has the lowest ratio of "funded to unfunded" major project work in Queensland. "Ninety-four per cent of activity in the pipeline is currently unfunded," it says. "The negative outlook ... is further highlighted by the proportion of unfunded project activity which is considered 'unlikely' — more than 50 per cent of the $3bn unfunded total."

From the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" of 22.3.20

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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25 March, 2020

UK: Almost 3m elderly people turn off heating as ‘they cannot afford energy bills’

Around 2.8 million people over the age of 65 are set to ration their energy usage out of worry that they cannot afford their energy bills, according to new research by Compare The Market.

A further 84% think the cost of energy presents a ‘real threat’ to elderly people living in the UK.

Although a minority, 8% of respondents admit that their health suffers because they limit the amount of heating they use during the winter and 17% say they eat less or buy cheaper food to offset the cost of energy bills.

Findings of the research also suggest 18% of people over 65 are on ‘uncompetitive’ Standard Variable Tariffs, equating to 2.1 million elderly people who are currently on more expensive deals.

It said the cost of energy has increased by £106 in the last year – the average energy bill now stands at £1,813, up from £1,706 in 2018.

Peter Earl, Head of Energy at Compare The Market, said: “These findings should make sober reading for policy makers and energy company chiefs alike.

“We hear a lot of commentary about how today’s over 65s are more financially secure than previous generations, but such a broadbrush perception risks leaving millions of elderly people out in the cold and overpaying for their energy in silence.”

SOURCE

Perspective: Are wind farms better in theory than they are in practice?

Wind turbines. Some people love ‘em, some people hate ’em. Environmentalists love them, so do people who rent land to energy companies and receive a regular check. People who live close without a paycheck, and who have their viewshed filled with towering machines — not so much love.

But wind energy keeps growing. CNBC business news reported in February that “Wind has become the ‘most used’ source of renewable electricity generation in the US.” The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports wind capacity totaled 103 gigawatts (billion watts) at the end of 2019. Generation from those windmills reached 300 million megawatt hours (one megawatt hour is one million watts for one hour), 26 million more than hydro production. Over the next few years the industry is expected to invest $62 billion or more into new projects.

But all this investment comes at considerable cost to taxpayers. For the first 10 years of production, wind energy producers get paid federal production tax credit (PTC) worth $23 for each megawatt-hour they produce. In some markets, that subsidy can exceed the wholesale price of electricity. When subsidies, grants, and tax credits given by states are added to the federal subsidies, turbines can sometimes be installed and operated nearly free. Warren Buffett, whose companies build and operate wind farms, has said, “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the reason we build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

The average house uses about one kilowatt (1000 watts) of electrical energy every hour. A 1000 megawatt (million watt) dam is said to power one million homes. A 1000 megawatt wind farm, on the other hand, is said to power 300,000 homes, because the wind, on average, only blows 30 percent of the time. A more accurate statement would be to say it powers one million homes 30 percent of the time. The other 70 percent of the time, hydro, fossil fuel, or nuclear is supplying the power. When Amazon, or Facebook, or any other company says they buy all “green power,” that’s not what they get. When the wind farm they bought the power from is idle, they get whatever the grid is supplying, and the wind farm buys grid power to meet its obligations.

Before wind turbines, Northwest dams provided 98 percent of needed power for Northwest homes and industry.

“Only about 15% of the wind power in the [Columbia] Gorge is used locally, the rest is shipped south,” Gretchen Bakke said in her book, The Grid. “The high voltage DC line that carries electricity from the Gorge has a capacity of 3100 megawatts, half of L.A.s peak capacity. When the wind is blowing hard, this line won’t carry it. May 19, 2010. 1000 windmills were lazily spinning on the Columbia Rim Gorge. In an hour, they were at full throttle as a storm rolled out of the East. Suddenly almost two nuclear plants worth of power was added to the grid—the largest spike the Northwest had ever experienced…in May the dams are at capacity. Spilling water was the only option. And that option kills fingerling salmon. … The balanced power system in the Northwest that has taken a century to build is now out of kilter because of wind and solar.”

Wind now provides about 7 percent of the electrical energy in the Northwest. That is not an increase in renewable power because it only subtracts from hydro. Fossil fuel and nuclear stay the same because they cannot ramp up and down rapidly to compensate for wind generation. Some years, spring runoff is so great dams can’t curtail production and still meet spill requirements for salmon. In 2011 Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) had to cut off coal, natural gas, and wind generators to prevent overloading the grid. Federal power was supplied to them for free to serve their customers. That was OK for fossil fuel users, but wind generators were unhappy because they lost kilowatt-hour production subsidies from Uncle Sam. So they went to court, and when reductions were mandated again in 2012, BPA paid renewable producers $2.7 million for 47,000 megawatts of power not produced. You can see the problem with Northwest wind: It blows in the spring when hydro is abundant, and is often idle during summer heat and winter cold.

Nevertheless, we have it, and I decided to check the nuts and bolts of winds farms near me. Some of my friends say they produce no usable power because the wind is too slow and infrequent. Wind farms also use power from the grid when the wind is not blowing, and some say they never break even on power used vs. power produced. My clue that this was important is the fact that for at least three Public Utility Districts in nearby counties with wind farms, the farms are their biggest customers. But getting exact information on grid use by wind farms proved elusive. Turbine manufactures and wind farm operators don’t know or don’t want to release that information. One study from the University of Minnesota concluded grid consumption was about 50 kilowatts for a Vestas V82 1.65 megawatts turbine, or about 8.3 percent of its reported production.

Puget Sound Energy has a wind farm, Hopkins Ridge, in Columbia County, Washington, and an office in Dayton. So I sent them a long list of questions. The farm consists of 87 turbines, with a total nameplate capacity of 156.7 megawatts. Their website claims an annual output of 404,000 megawatt hours, or 29.4 percent of nameplate capacity. That seemed high to me, considering all that I had heard about low wind speeds and idle machines from residents. So I challenged that figure. The comeback was, “During the period 2006-2018, Hopkins Ridge generated 179 times more power than was consumed as station (grid) power.” So whatever the grid use is, it seems insignificant compared to power produced. It should be noted that all generating facilities use grid power when not generating, to run lights, heating and cooling, computers, etc.

At Hopkins Ridge, the turbine generators turn on a ratio of 111 to 1, meaning at the governed blade speed of 16 rpm, the generator is at full capacity — 1800 rpm. What wind speed is required for full production? Recently I went to Hopkins Ridge with a stopwatch to measure turbine speed. Surface wind speed was about 15 mph. Most turbines were turning at maximum, 16 rpm. Blade speed is governed by pitching the blades according to wind speed. Grid power is used to pitch the blades and power the magnetic field of the generator.

Presently there are 4714 wind turbines installed in the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, with a nameplate capacity of 8281 megawatts. These overwhelm the grid at times, but when they are most needed — late summer, fall, foggy and cold winters — they often stand silent. Too much power when we don’t need it; no help when water supplies run low. In my opinion we should stop installing them and shift subsidies to grid improvements and power storage projects.

SOURCE

Germany Proves How Essential Natural Gas Is

No country ever has spent more money forcing the adoption of renewable energy than Germany. Passed in 2010, Germany’s Energiewende is an “energy transition” based on relentlessly installing as much wind and solar power capacity as possible, with little to no consideration to cost.

The Energiewende demanding the use of renewables could ultimately cost the country as much as $4 trillion by 2050. Already costing hundreds of billions of dollars, wind and solar now generate just ~18% and ~8% of Germany’s electricity, respectively, and still account for just a small fraction of total energy needs

Yet, the reality is that natural gas is also quickly becoming an even more important source of energy in Germany. Not just as a vital standalone energy source providing 25% of all energy consumed, gas is the backup fuel needed for intermittent wind and solar. As the energy policy advisor to the U.S., Germany, and the other 34 developed, rich OECD nations, the International Energy Agency (IEA) touts gas as the backbone of the electric power system, to have a flexible, reliable grid where gas supports renewables.

In fact, Germany is now looking at building LNG (liquefied natural gas) import facilities to loosen the grip of heavily resourced Russia, which supplies 50-60% of Germany’s gas. The ruling CDU, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) have a coalition agreement to build LNG infrastructure.

Germany wants to add three or four terminals to help expand Europe’s total LNG import facilities to nearly 35, a “dash to gas” that is extremely telling for a continent that has deployed massive funding and policy support to force more wind and solar into the system. IEA’s message is simple: LNG is becoming increasingly essential to help stop Vladimir Putin’s goal energy hegemony to exploit Germany’s energy unrealism that “only wind and solar” are required.

Amid energy hemming and hawing, Germany has already been forced to construct the nearly completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline to link even more to politically risky Russia. The U.S. remains confident, however, that its current sanctions on Nord Stream 2 will block the project from being completed.

Indeed, Germany offers a number of lessons for the U.S. and the world – a series of energy warnings that we must heed. Illustrated by Germany’s plan to eliminate both coal and nuclear, which effectively is happening here in the U.S., gas only becomes more essential.

Further, massive payouts to force more wind and solar power into the system can only last for so long, and there are physical and cost limitations that not even rich countries can ignore forever. To illustrate, as tax breaks run out, opposition grows, barriers to new power lines persist, and construction approvals slow, there is a major shortage of new wind projects: “Germans fall out of love with wind power.”

Many though probably see this slowdown in German wind as a positive, financially drained of the levies to pay for renewables subsidies. The “renewables only” tunnel vision has helped soar Germany’s electricity prices for families to being three to four times more expensive than they are here in the U.S.: “If Renewables Are So Cheap Why Is Germany’s Electricity So Expensive?”

After Denmark, Germany has had the highest electricity prices in the world. In fact, ridiculously high energy prices have sadly created a new term in Germany: energy poverty, “Renewable Energy Mandates Are Making Poor People Poorer.”

In contrast, global natural gas prices today are the lowest they have been in over 10 years, strengthening the economic argument for switching to gas. The U.S. has been at the forefront of an LNG export boom that continues to make gas more viable for rich and poor countries alike. LNG is the fastest-growing traded commodity in the world because natural gas is the world’s go-to fuel.

U.S. LNG must help lower Germany’s over-dependence on Russia, especially important now since other traditional suppliers Denmark and the Netherlands face major production problems of their own. The U.S. has been touting its “Freedom Gas” for Germany and the rest of Europe.

Starting in 2016 and soaring to third place last year, the U.S. is set to become the world’s top LNG exporter within four or five years – that is how fast our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants the industry to grow.

And this makes also makes perfect sense from an environmental perspective. Not just backing up wind and solar, the International Energy Agency specifically credits more gas usage as to why the U.S. has been cutting CO2 emissions faster than any other country – in “the history of energy.”

That is crucial enough to repeat: the shale gas revolution and the free market of the U.S. has us slashing emissions faster and much more cheaply than the renewables and regulation obsessed nations like Germany. Indeed, “U.S. Department of Energy’s Winberg: Tech will solve CO2 emissions.” Even Germany’s goal for more hydrogen means more natural gas: production processes center on pulling it from methane – or, natural gas itself.

But what does Germany’s requirement for more natural gas really say about the energy needs of the fast-growing poor countries, and the expectations that we wealthy Westerners should have for them?

After all, Germany is a rich country, has had almost no population growth for many decades, and has low incremental energy needs – the exact opposite of the 85% of the global population that still lives in undeveloped nations.

Just think about it: despite years of promises to effectively “get rid of them,” oil (33%) and gas (25%) still supply almost 60% of Germany’s primary energy needs (not all that surprising since wind and solar are strictly sources of electricity, a secondary energy source that accounts for just 20-30% of all energy demand).

If Germany cannot survive on just “wind and solar” how are the poor countries supposed to?

Unlike Germany (ditto California, New York, New England states), these still developing nations must put low costs – and the desperate need for more energy-enabled human development – at the forefront. It is just too bad that this is apparently so inconvenient for some of us most fortunate.

SOURCE

Greta Thunberg self-isolates with coronavirus symptoms

Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate change activist, has revealed that she has self-isolated after showing coronavirus symptoms.

Where a member of a household has displayed symptoms, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, has said all residents should self-isolate for 14 days. Elsewhere, foreign governments have issued similar guidance.

Having travelled around central Europe, visiting Brussels and Hamburg to lead school strike events, Ms Thunberg, 17, decided she should stay at home.

She took to social media to urge young people in particular to take the virus seriously, noting that she did not feel particularly ill.

While Ms Thunberg has not been tested for coronavirus, because her home country of Sweden does not currently test for it outside hospitals, she said it is "extremely likely" she has had it.

In an Instagram post, she wrote: "The last two weeks I’ve stayed inside. When I returned from my trip around Central Europe, I isolated myself (in a borrowed apartment away from my mother and sister) since the number of cases of Covid-19 (in Germany for instance) were similar to Italy in the beginning.

"Around 10 days ago I started feeling some symptoms, exactly the same time as my father – who travelled with me from Brussels.

"I was feeling tired, had shivers, a sore throat and coughed. My dad experienced the same symptoms, but much more intense and with a fever. In Sweden you can not test yourself for Covid-19 unless you're in need of emergency medical treatment.

"Everyone feeling ill is told to stay at home and isolate themselves. I have therefore not been tested for Covid-19, but it’s extremely likely that I’ve had it, given the combined symptoms and circumstances.

"Now I’ve basically recovered, but – and this is the bottom line – I almost didn’t feel ill. My last cold was much worse than this! Had it not been for someone else having the virus simultainously (sic) I might not even have suspected anything.

"Then I would just have thought I was feeling unusually tired with a bit of a cough. And this it what makes it so much more dangerous.

"Many (especially young people) might not notice any symptoms at all, or very mild symptoms. Then they don’t know they have the virus and can pass it on to people in risk groups.

SOURCE

Smoke from Australia's bushfires killed far more people than the fires did, study says

Smoke is particulate pollution and the study below looked at a standard measure of that pollution: PM2.5. And there is a great deal of prior research on pollution of that sort.

The conventional assumption is of course that inhaling such pollution is bad for you. The Australian experience would however seem to show that is is NOT very bad for you. Australians were not dying like flies while experiencing it. They seemed to be going about their business in their usual way, in fact.

So how have the authors below got their apparently alarming findings:

Modelling garbage. They had no real data on the health of Australians at the time at all. They just used conventional assumptions to estimate what the effects would have been. But the conventional assumptions are crap, to use a technical term. The existing research on particulate air pollution (PM2.5.)shows effects that range between no effect and effects that are so weak that no confidence can be placed in them. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here

The conventional assumptions take the occasional tiny effects that turn up in some research to build a great castle on, if you will forgive my prepositional impropriety. So you get statements that pollution causes such and such an ailment, without mentioning the very fragile evidential basis for such a posited effect.

So after that useless modelling it will be interesting if the authors do something more useful in the future -- such as comparing actual recorded deaths and morbidity during the smoke affected period with the same period in the previous much clearer year. My hypothesis -- based on the actual prior research -- is that deaths and disease in the same period of the two years will differ trivially, if at all.

The "study" is just a grab for government funding

Smoke pollution that blanketed Australia’s south-east for many months during the bushfire crisis may have killed more than 400 people, according to the first published estimate of the scale of health impacts – more than 10 times the number killed by the fires themselves.

The figures, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, are “definitely alarming”, according to Chris Migliaccio, who studies the long-term effects of wildfire smoke at the University of Montana in Missoula and was not involved in the research.

Lead author Fay Johnston, an epidemiologist at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, estimates 80% of Australia’s population of about 25 million was blanketed by smoke this summer.

“The fires were unprecedented in Australia’s history, in terms of vast amounts of smoke, the huge populations affected by the smoke and the long duration,” she said.

Sydney experienced 81 days of poor or hazardous air quality in 2019, more than the total of the previous 10 years combined.

“When you’re affecting millions of people in a small way, there are going to be enough people at high enough risk that you’re going to see really measurable rises in these health effects,” Johnston said.

As data on hospital admissions, deaths and ambulance callouts was not yet available to researchers, Johnston and her team instead modelled the likely medical consequences of the pollution, which is the “the only other way to get a quick ballpark idea of the health impacts,” she said.

To come up with a picture of the overall health burden of smoke exposure, they looked at existing data on death rates and hospital admissions to get a baseline. They then modelled how the known levels and extent of smoke exposure across the southeast, during the height of the crisis from 1 October to 10 February, would have affected these.

Their results estimate that over this period there were 417 premature deaths, 3,151 extra hospitalisations for cardiorespiratory problems and 1,305 additional attendances for asthma attacks. This compares to 33 who reportedly died as a direct result of the bushfires.

Many of the deaths and hospitalisations are likely to have been older patients with heart disease or lung problems, such as chronic bronchitis or emphysema – but severe asthma attacks will likely have resulted in deaths in younger people too, Johnston said.

In patients with pre-existing cardiorespiratory issues, smoke exposure promotes inflammation, stresses the body and makes blood more likely to clot, increasing the risk of a heart attack. “In someone at high risk, subtle changes due to stress … can be the precipitating factor for a very serious or terminal event,” she said.

Guy Marks, a respiratory physician and epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney who was not involved in the research, said the findings “highlights the importance of the health consequences” and is useful in estimating fire-related deaths that may not have been recognised as the result of smoke exposure.

The findings concur with previous studies of the health consequences of wildfire smoke in North America, but the numbers “are more drastic, potentially as a result of the unprecedented nature of the exposure,” Migliaccio said. He added that while previous studies found increases in hospital visits, the addition of large numbers of premature deaths in the Australian study is significant and disturbing.

Migliaccio said that due to climate change increasing the frequency and severity of wildfires “these types of exposures are increasing in number and intensity, making this kind of research vital.”

To look into just such effects, a consortium of 10 air pollution researchers from across Australia, led by Marks and including Johnston, have already put up their hands for $3m in government funding, which became available in the wake of the crisis.

The research proposal, funding of which has yet to be confirmed, aims to plug significant gaps in knowledge about the health impacts of bushfire smoke and how these might be mitigated.

Marks says that questions he and his colleagues hope to address include whether there is anything unique about health effect of air pollution caused by bushfires, what the long-term effects of exposure are, and what the effects might be on newborn babies and pregnant women.

The researchers – all members of a collaborative consortium, The Centre for Air Pollution, Energy and Health Research (CAR), funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council – also hope to study whether it’s possible to filter air to make indoor refuges safe from pollution, and if public health advice can be improved.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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25 March, 2020

Plastic bags and the coronavirus

"The eight states where lawmakers have imposed plastic bag prohibitions are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon and Vermont, according the National Conference of State Legislatures," columnist Patrick Gleason writes. "Six of those statewide bag bans were enacted as recently as 2019. Hundreds of cities, towns, and counties have also imposed a bag ban or tax. All of these laws seek to force or encourage the use of reusable shopping bags, which pose a public health risk at any time and especially during the current pandemic."

Not just during a pandemic. A 2011 study was undertaken by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University. They collected reusable bags at random from grocery shoppers in California and Arizona, after which they conducted interviews with their owners.

What they discovered was problematic, to say the least. First, most owners seldom, if ever, washed their reusable bags. Second, many used them for multiple purposes.

The result of such practices? "Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half," the research stated. "Escherichia coli were identified in 8% of the bags, as well as a wide range of enteric bacteria, including several opportunistic pathogens. When meat juices were added to bags and stored in the trunks of cars for two hours, the number of bacteria increased 10-fold, indicating the potential for bacterial growth in the bags."

It gets worse. A 2012 study revealed that nine members of a soccer team contracted the norovirus, described by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as a "very contagious virus that causes vomiting and diarrhea" simply by touching a reusable bag, or eating the food contained in it. In what might be seen as the essence of unthinking behavior, the bag had been stored in a bathroom. "That might seem like an outlier," columnist Angela Logomasini explains, "but people cart these bags all over the place, touching surfaces on public transportation, taking them into public bathrooms, and other places, creating lots of opportunities for the bags to pick up bacteria and viruses."

Such opportunities were not limited to picking up bacteria and viruses. A 2018 study published by the National Environmental Health Association used a non-infectious proxy virus to assess the probability of norovirus transmission related to reusable bags. It revealed that shoppers with such bags transmitted that virus all over the store, including high concentrations of it on the hands of the shoppers themselves, as well a grocery checkout clerks.

According to the 2011 study, washing such bags would remove more than 99.9% of the bacteria on them. A survey conducted at the University of Arizona, however, revealed that only 3% of bag owners ever wash them.

Now add coronavirus to the mix. Any questions?

New York has seen the light — sort of. The ban the state enacted has been pushed back from the initial enforcement date of April 1 to May 15. Yet almost unbelievably, there is resistance to the idea from the state's Department of Conservation commissioner Basil Seggos. "DEC continues to encourage New Yorkers to transition to reusable bags whenever and wherever they shop and to use common-sense precautions to keep their reusable bags clean," Seggos. "We have consistently said since the beginning of our outreach campaign that we will focus on education rather than enforcement."

Such zealotry is unsurprising. The entire environmentalist movement has a cultish aspect to it, which brings us to the central aspect of that cult, namely global warming. For decades, a transnational movement promoted by elites as "settled science" and aimed at supplanting national governance has morphed into a full-blown campaign replete with the hysterical prediction that the world has less than a dozen years left between now and planetary armageddon.

Whether that brand of hysteria will take a back seat to the current pandemic remains to be seen. Yet all along, the underlying assumption of this movement is that higher global temperatures will be catastrophic. That many of the movement's predications have yet to materialize is largely irrelevant. Yet perhaps even more inconvenient, it is quite possible that it might be our best hope for containing coronavirus.

A study posted on March 10 and revised on March 20 asserts that "high temperature and high relative humidity significantly reduce the transmission of COVID-19, respectively, even after controlling for population density and GDP per capita of cities."

It's only one study, and pushback will be inevitable as such assessments are antithetical to the globalist agenda. Thus, entities like the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate that climate change will cause about 250,000 additional deaths per year by the 2030s. That would be the same WHO whose dubious relationship with China likely exacerbated the spread of coronavirus. Instead of holding the ChiComs accountable for their pathetic and secretive response, the organization's director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, praised Chinese President Xi Jinping's "political commitment" and "political leadership."

That would be the same Dr. Tedros who tried to appoint former Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe as one of the organization's ... goodwill ambassadors.

The real tell regarding this seemingly corrupt group of bureaucrats? As reported by NBC News, WHO spends more money on travel, including first class and business flying, than the combined budgets for tuberculosis, AIDS, and malaria. "This may just speak to how misplaced international priorities are, that WHO is getting so little for these disease programs," stated Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.

Moreover, here's a question few ever ask: How many lives will be saved by global warming? Studies conducted in the UK in 2009 under the aegis of Professor William Keatinge of the University of London revealed more people die from excess cold than excess heat, yet such studies are rarely, if ever, part of any debate about global warming. Moreover one rarely hears about studies that show global warming could increase the amount of arable land for farming.

Proof positive? Certainly not, but one should be quite suspect of any agenda aimed at concentrating power beyond national borders to organizations accountable to no one but themselves.

Speaking of borders, an agreement between the United States and Mexico on banning all nonessential travel between the nations was implemented last Friday. Illegals attempting to cross the border will be returned — even those asking for asylum. Apparently both nations now recognize the necessity of border enforcement. So does the European Union, which not only has closed national borders, but erected barriers in an effort to contain the virus.

However the latest crisis plays out one thing is certain: We will never be the same nation again, and all agendas will be reassessed. Here's hoping those which elevate politics — especially transnational politics — above all other considerations will be the first casualties.

SOURCE

"Clean, renewable" energy is neither

Eco-warriors are besotted with the myth that energy can be clean and renewable. The truth is that any "renewable" energy requires massive environmental impacts.

These impacts consume enormous amounts of environmental resources, which would make the most ardent environmentalist blush with shame if they only knew about them. Greens have so ensconced themselves in a humongous bubble of ignorance that it's doubtful if any but a handful know what I'm about to tell you.

And if that handful does in fact exist, they are keeping what they know to themselves as a closely held secret. Because if the truth got out, it would be the end of the environmental movement.

The vision of environmentalists is a peaceful, harmonious world in which human beings tool along on wind and solar energy alone, burn not an ounce of fossil fuel, and leave no human imprint on the environment at all. It's a beautiful, serene picture which has absolutely nothing to do with reality.

In this mythical world, the energy of the wind and the sun is captured and stored in batteries. There's your first problem, right there. As Mark Mills and Alexander Ackley write in The International Chronicles, "A single electric-car battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving and processing more 500,000 pounds of raw materials somewhere on the planet." If, however, you burned gasoline, you could deliver the same number of vehicle-miles over the battery's life span of seven years at 1/10 the total tonnage.

The green machines at some point must be decommissioned, which will generate millions and millions of tons of waste. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that disposing of old solar panels alone will constitute more than double the tonnage of all today's global plastic waste. And waste is the word. A solar or wind farm that stretches as far as the eye can see can be replaced by a handful of gas-fired turbines, each about the size of a tractor trailer.

Both wind and solar require far more in the way of materials and land than fossil fuels. Just one wind turbine takes 900 tons of steel, 2500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of plastic THAT CANNOT BE RECYCLED. Wind turbines last about 20 years, and since there is no way to recycle the materials, they have to be dumped in landfills. And with blades that are 120 feet long, they're too big for convenient disposal even there.

A wind farm in Minnesota trucked more than 100 of these monster blades to the Sioux Falls Sanitary Landfill in South Dakota. But the director of the Sioux Falls Public Works Department says they're done. "We can't take any more unless they process them before bringing them to us. We're using too many resources unloading them, driving over them a couple of times, and working them into the ground."

If a wind farm includes 100 turbines, that means there are 500 million pounds of concrete which has been poured into what used to be farmland. How is that concrete going to be disposed of?

There is not even a moderately inexpensive way to get the energy that wind farms generate to the cities which need them. Cities are built near flat farmland, while the wind blows on high ridge lines.

And there are health hazards to these giant bird blenders. Germany, which is shifting radically to wind, has discovered these wind farms produce so much noise that, according to one poor unfortunate soul, it "drives you insane at night." Germany is actually now paying hush money to people who live near these farms. They're getting direct handouts from the government essentially to keep quiet. So the turbines can keep making noise, but the people can't.

Building enough wind turbines to supply one-half the world's electricity needs would require nearly two billion tons of coal to make the concrete and steel, and two billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades. We'd consume immense amounts of hydrocarbons in a radically stupid attempt to avoid consuming hydrocarbons.

Well, at least that leaves solar as an environmentally friendly, sustainable, and renewable source of energy. Except of course for the MINING of silver and indium, which will jump 250% and 1200% respectively in the next several decades. Demand for rare earth minerals required for the manufacture of solar panels will rise 300% to 1000% by 2050 to meet the goals of the Paris Accords.

The production of electric cars will require a 2000% percent increase in the production of cobalt and lithium. This will require mining operations in remote wilderness areas with a high degree of undisturbed biodiversity, which is where the cobalt and lithium are found.

One of the dirty secrets is that wind farms must be heavily propped up with taxpayer subsidies because no one in his right mind would build one otherwise. Warren Buffet, for instance, owns MidAmerican Energy. Said Buffett, "On wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."

Engineers joke about discovering "unobtanium," a magical energy-producing element that "appears out of nowhere, requires no land, weighs nothing, and emits nothing."

Bottom line: "clean, renewable" energy is neither. It's an environmental disaster. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are readily accessible, affordable, and have a much, much smaller environmental footprint than all renewables. Gentlemen, start your engines.

SOURCE

Renewable Energy Industry Seeks to Scam Public During Health Crisis

A coalition of House Democrats, environmental advocacy groups, and renewable energy trade associations are looking to take advantage of the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by sneaking several renewable energy tax credits into an economic stimulus bill.

Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether or not such stimulus packages are actually effective. The idea that renewable energy tax credits have anything to do with responding to the COVID-19 situation is, on its face, ridiculous. The focus of public policy in the wake of an extreme economic shock should be on allowing price signals to properly convey information to energy producers and consumers and on eliminating regulatory barriers that might prevent economic actors from adjusting to the changing circumstances presented by COVID-19.

But, it appears that House Democrats will instead use this situation to once again hand out favors to the renewable energy industry. Unsurprisingly, House Democrats plan to provide this support by promoting several tax credit provisions that they, along with environmentalists and renewable energy groups, failed to codify during the 2019 end-of-year funding package. These tax credit provisions would likely:

Provide batteries and electricity storage systems the same investment tax credit currently offered to PV solar

Extend the investment tax credit for solar

Extend the current production tax credit for wind

Extend the investment tax credit for offshore wind

Increase the number of vehicles that are available the electric vehicle tax credit

Of course, the renewable energy industry has a long history of taking advantage of economic stimulus bills. In the wake of the financial crisis in 2009, the renewable energy industry lobbied hard for the introduction of new tax credits, most of which were eventually included in the 2009 stimulus bill.

It should be obvious to any outside observer what this pattern says about the nature of the renewable energy industry. Although people in the industry often claim that renewable energy does not need the support of the government, we continue to see the renewable energy industry take advantage of every opportunity to benefit from government handouts.

As IER has explained in the past, renewable energy tax credits distort energy markets in several ways that ultimately raise energy prices for consumers. Lawmakers should therefore reject the renewable energy industry’s attempt to take advantage of another economic downturn.

SOURCE

Eleven million jobs at risk from EU Green Deal, labor unions warn

The European Green Deal risks deepening economic and social divisions between east and western EU countries, trade unions say, warning the 27-member bloc risks imploding before it reaches its 2050 climate neutrality goal.

Trade unions have stepped up warnings that the Green Deal put forward by the European Commission in December last year will put millions of jobs at risk, without any assurances that workers in affected industries will have a future.

“We are talking about almost 11 million jobs directly affected in extractive industries, energy intensive industries and in the automotive industry,” said Luc Triangle, secretary general of IndustriAll, a federation of trade unions.

“Those jobs won’t necessarily disappear,” Triangle told EURACTIV in an interview. “But there needs to be a future perspective for jobs in these industries,” which is currently not clear, he said.

Last week, the European Commission tabled a groundbreaking EU Climate Law, aimed at putting into hard legislation the EU’s goal of becoming the first climate-neutral continent in the world by 2050.

The EU executive is now expected to follow-up with an industrial strategy on Tuesday (10 March), outlining new growth areas for Europe as it moves towards a greener and more connected future.

But while the draft strategy places great focus on digitalisation, it contains little for traditional manufacturing sectors like steelmaking, automotive and chemicals, which are expected to be hit hardest by the transition to net-zero emissions.

“It’s easy to say we need to reach ambitious climate targets by 2050 and 2030,” Triangle said. “But the industrial strategy should give the answer on the ‘how’ we will get there. And at the moment, we don’t have those answers yet”.

Green transition will require ‘Herculean effort’, EU admits
The European Union will need to “re-orient most, if not all” of its policies in order to protect vulnerable regions and workers in industries affected by the transition to a green economy, the EU Commission’s vice-president Frans Timmermans has said.

A new migration wave from Eastern Europe

Trade unions are particularly worried about the social and economic divisions that the green agenda risks creating between poorer eastern EU countries and their richer western neighbours.

According to Triangle, the green transformation “will be much easier in Nordic or western European countries” than in poorer EU member states like Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, where employment in some regions can be entirely dependent on a single, heavily-polluting industry.

“This could have a major impact on internal migration inside the European Union,” Triangle pointed out, saying “close to 22 million people” have already left Eastern Europe to find work in richer western and Nordic countries over the last 20 years.

“Well, this will only increase if we don’t manage this transition right,” he warned.

Politicians in Eastern EU member states have stepped up warnings that the green transition risks deepening divisions inside the EU. Traian B?sescu, a former Romanian President, said the European Green Deal “will definitely create tensions” between east and western EU countries, which have other economic priorities than the green transition.

Such economic and social discrepancies “are likely to generate huge tensions inside the EU, which could lead to some countries considering the possibility of leaving the Union altogether,” he told EURACTIV in a recent interview.

Basescu: European Green Deal risks pushing 'two or three countries' towards EU exit

The European Green Deal “will definitely create tensions” inside the EU, and risks pushing “two or three countries” to leave the Union altogether, warns former Romanian President Traian Basescu, saying the real priority in Romania is to build new infrastructure like motorways and exploit natural gas resources from the Black Sea.

EU risks disintegrating before reaching climate goals

Triangle echoed those warnings, saying the Green Deal risked putting the entire EU project in jeopardy if it ignores the social aspect of the transition.

“The divisions within Europe are already such that if the European Green Deal neglects the social dimension, there is a serious risk to see the EU disintegrate before it is decarbonised,” he warned.

According to trade unions, there is a genuine risk that the Green Deal ends up putting entire industrial sectors on their knees, and discredit EU climate policies in the eyes of the general public.

“Climate policies will only fly if you can sell them to the public opinion, if you can do that without social disruption in the industries and in the regions concerned,” Triangle said. “The social dimension is hugely important in order to make this whole climate policy sellable,” he said.

The European Commission is highly aware of the social aspects of the Green Deal, and insisted repeatedly that the transition to a climate-neutral economy should leave no-one behind.

But it is also convinced that a green industrial revolution is underway and that future growth lies in low-carbon industries. Last year, the executive calculated that the EU’s GDP will increase by 2% by 2050 if the bloc slashes its emissions to a net-zero level.

“The European Green Deal is our new growth strategy,” said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen after winning a confirmation vote in the European Parliament last November. “Our commitment is that no-one will be left behind,” said Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans when asked about worries over the costs of the transition in Eastern EU countries.

New EU chief flags climate policy as Europe’s 'new growth strategy'

The new President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, cited climate policy as the most pressing issue facing her new executive team, which was officially confirmed by a vote in the European Parliament on Wednesday (27 November).

Where is the money?

However, those promises are insufficient for trade unions who say the EU also needs to put money where its mouth is.

“It’s clear that our industries want to make the step to net-zero emissions. But there is a need for financial support. Without financial support and real investments, we will not be able to make that leap forward,” Triangle said.

According to estimates, European industries need to invest €250 billion on an annual basis for the next ten years if in order to stay on track with the 2050 climate neutrality objective.

“Where is the money for those investments?” Triangle asked. True, the European Investment Bank will be turned into a climate bank, with 50% of lending dedicated to climate objectives as of 2025. And there is a reshuffling of the EU budget, with 25% dedicated to the climate, trade unions admit.

But there is hardly any new funding to support the green transition, Triangle said, pointing to the “discrepancy between the high level of ambition on climate targets” and discussions over the EU’s next long-term budget, which some countries want to cap at 1% of their Gross National Income.

According to Triangle, the investment funding issue is particularly acute for energy-intensive industries, like steel and chemicals, which are hardest to decarbonise.

“That’s the problem for us with the 2030 targets: If we want to increase the objective to a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, I can assure you that energy-intensive industries will not be able to deliver. The technologies will be ready for commercialisation only after 2030, for example on low-carbon steel, which is only at pilot stage,” Triangle said.

This is where the industrial strategy could help, trade unions believes.

“For us it is important to keep an integrated industrial value chain in Europe. In the future, we will continue to need steel and chemicals produced in Europe,” Triangle said.

“We are expecting a lot from this industrial strategy”.

A European Green Deal with justness for all?
A fund originally conceived to convince Poland to sign up to the EU’s 2050 climate target has now turned into one of the most contentious aspects of both the Green Deal and the long-term EU budget.

SOURCE

Turbine battle heating up in Beeville, TX

BEEVILLE – As one side fights to have the county offer a tax abatement to a proposed wind farm in north Bee County, another said that these towers will only benefit the few who have them built on their property.

During Monday’s court meeting, March 9, more residents showed to plead their case to commissioners.

Austin Brown, landowner in northwest Bee County, reminded that the wind farms proposed by Orsted affect more than the property where each is built.

“Do you want to live in a county that has these 400- to 600-foot towers flickering day and night and causing noise?” he asked.

Brown, a certified ranch real estate appraiser, said property values decrease 25 to 40 percent where the wind farms are located.

“Those wind towers will not be on my property, but they may be on the property adjoining my property,” he said. “Do you want to have the basis of the underlying tax value of this county depleted in that manner?”

As a certified ranch manager, he is also worried about the aesthetics of the towers.

“You are to be commended for the stand you have taken on this project,” he said referring back to the court’s recent decision not to create the reinvestment zone that would make an abatement possible. “This is one of the prettiest counties in Texas.

“This county needs to decide if it wants to be turned into an industrial wasteland.”

Mark Uhr, property owner in Bee County and real estate broker in Rockport, said that he has seen the affect these turbines have on the value of property.

“And now my people that live in the backside of Copano, they can see 400 blinking lights all night long, and it has depreciated the value of that waterfront property.”

Eric Barnett, with Lincoln Clean Energy and Orsted, said during a previous meeting that the towers proposed have sensors that only flash when aircraft are near.

Both Charlie Westmoreland and Garrett Tindol, with Tindol Construction, countered saying that the wind farm companies leave the county in better shape than before they arrive.

“... the revenue and the just goodwill that was brought to these communities with the wind farm coming in was just astronomical,” Westmoreland said, referring to his west Texas experiences. “Not only did it benefit the sheriff’s office, the police departments and the local EMS, it also benefited the road and bridge department.

“When these projects come into town, they’re bringing in 80-foot wind turbines, and the infrastructure has to be upgraded to accommodate this.”

When the county departments cannot keep up with the work, Westmoreland said, the wind farm company pays to have a contractor repair the roads.

“And when the project is completed and the wind turbines are in operation, basically the wind farm turns over these roads to the county in excellent condition,” he said. “And there’s also normally a maintenance agreement of about a year where the contractor goes in and just maintains these roads to make sure everything’s good to go.”

Tindol, co-owner of Tindol Construction which has contracted for construction of wind farms in other parts of the state, said, “We have had success adding new businesses and jobs in the area with all the activity at Chase Field.

“But do we really feel that is enough?

“With (Texas Department of Criminal Justice), one of the largest employers in the county, and now with one of those prisons closing, we need the Helena wind project to help us pick up the slack more than ever.”

The court has not had the abatement back on their agenda since it was denied last month.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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24 March, 2020

Plastic pollution. Is recycling the answer?

Plastic rubbish on land and sea is a big problem. You can pick it up but what do you do with it then? That all discarded plastic should be recycled seems to be an article of faith -- as we see below. But nobody is saying why it should be recycled. What is wrong with just dumping it in landfill? Digging a hole and filling it in again is not rocket science. Most plastic ends up in landfill anyway, so I am not proposing anything radical, unusual or outlandish.

But how many holes can we dig for landfill? What happens with all that landfill eventually? Again the answer it not outlandish. There is a fair chance that you are living on top of landfill already if your house is a recent newbuild. As good urban land for home building becomes scarce, developers buy holes -- valleys in the landscape. And they then fill up the holes to create flat land.

And what do they put in the holes? Garbage, some of which will be plastic. They then put in a layer of rocks to hold it down and then a layer of soil on the very top to facilitate people growing things in a garden. They will usually have to wait a year or two for everything to settle and then the "For sale" signs will go up.

It is a normal item in the precautions of conveyancing for buyers to hire a geologist to certify that the ground has settled into a stable state but the developers know that so will be sure to have sent in their own geologists before releasing the land for sale.

And the old method of dealing with garbage is still sometimes used -- particularly in small towns and cities. The local authorities find a hole or small valley, use it as a general garbage dump and top it off with rocks and soil when it is full. And what do they use the newly created flat "land" for? It becomes parks, sportsgrounds and playing fields. You would be surprised at how many of your local recreational areas originated that way. A dump I used to go to is now a sportsfield.

So holes will become a valuable asset and urban areas will slowly become flatter. That is the only penalty for putting plastic waste in landfill.

Plastic recycling enjoys ever-wider support among consumers: Putting yogurt containers and juice bottles in a blue bin is an eco-friendly act of faith in millions of households. But faith goes only so far. The tidal wave of plastic items that enters the recycling stream each year is increasingly likely to fall right back out again, casualties of a broken market.

Many products that consumers believe (and industries claim) are “recyclable” are in reality not, because of stark economics. With oil and gas prices near 20-year lows—thanks in large part to the fracking revolution— so-called virgin plastic, a product of petroleum feedstocks, is now far cheaper and easier to obtain than recycled material. That unforeseen shift has yanked the financial rug out from under what was until recently a viable recycling industry. “The global waste trade is essentially broken,” says Graham Forbes, head of the global plastics campaign at Greenpeace. “We are sitting on vast amounts of plastic, with nowhere to send it and nothing to do with it.”

This gargantuan overload is creating a conflict that industry and government can no longer ignore—one that pits the profitability and usefulness of plastic against its threat to public health and the environment. There are few places where that conflict is more visible than in Malaysia. Here, rock-bottom wages, cheap land, and a still-evolving regulatory climate have enticed entrepreneurs to build hundreds of factories in a last-ditch bid to stay profitable. The real economic and environmental costs of plastic recycling are on vivid display, as I discovered traveling across the country with photographer Sebastian Meyer. Over the course of 10 days, we visited 10 recycling factories—some of them, including Biogreen Frontier, operating without official registration, under threat of a shutdown—as they grappled with waste shipped by the boatload from across the world. And we saw how the consequences of the broken plastics economy spill over into waste dumps, container dockyards, private homes, and out into the ocean.

FOR HALF A CENTURY, plastics have seen rocketing growth, for good reason: They are cheap, lightweight, and virtually indestructible.

“There’s a great future in plastics,” a nervous young Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) is told by a would-be mentor in the 1967 movie The Graduate. Acting on that tip would have yielded spectacular returns. Global production soared from 25 million tons a year in 1970 to more than 400 million tons in 2018.

Behind this polyethylene deluge is an economic colossus: a global plastics market worth about $1 trillion last year, according to U.K. data analysts the Business Research Co. Demand for plastics has doubled since 2000 and could double again by 2050. “We have a growing middle class around the world that needs to improve their quality of life,” says Keith Christman, managing director of plastic markets for the American Chemistry Council, an industry organization whose members include major producers like Dow, Dupont, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil. “Plastic is a part of that.” You can find plastic not just in your water bottles and sandwich bags, but in sweatshirts and wet wipes, home insulation and siding, chewing gum, tea bags, and countless other items.

The durability that makes plastic so appealing, it turns out, also makes it an environmental time bomb. An estimated 90.5% of all the plastic produced since 1950 is still in existence, according to analysis by Roland Geyer, an industrial ecology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science &Management. Only 8.4% of plastic waste in the U.S. was recycled in 2017, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. An additional 15.8% was burned to generate energy; the rest wound up in landfills. Recycling rates are even lower in parts of Asia and Africa. Even Europe, with its stringent environmental laws, recycles only about 30% of plastics.

For decades, plastics producers and their biggest customers—consumer-goods giants like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Pepsico, and Procter & Gamble—have argued that improving these recycling numbers is the solution to the plastic-waste crisis. They frame the problem as one of behavior—ours. “It’s a knee-jerk reaction to say the problem is with plastic,” Tony Radoszewski, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, tells me. “The culprit is the consumer who does not dispose of products properly.”

It’s true that recycling rates are low. But to blame that fact on consumers alone is disingenuous. The bigger problem is a huge shift in energy markets. Prices for oil and natural gas have plummeted over the past decade. That in turn has made it far cheaper for petrochemical companies to produce virgin plastics than for factories to create recycled plastic. And with big profits to be made, companies have sharply increased virgin production, further driving down prices. Recycling used plastic is labor- intensive and therefore expensive—and the shifting economics now work against recycling in much of the world.

In 2018, this ecosystem endured another major blow when China halted the importation of almost all plastic scrap, saying that its own recycling industry was becoming an environmental hazard. The decision has caused chaos in the world’s plastic-resuscitation economy. Up until then, for example, the U.S. had been sending about 70% of its plastic waste to China. Now, “recycling is on life support,” says Mike Engelmann, solid waste coordinator for Smithtown, N.Y., a town of 120,000 people on suburban Long Island.

“Hopefully things will turn around. But I am not sure how.”

SOURCE

Greenland lost 600 BILLION tons of ice last summer raising global sea levels by almost 0.1 inches in two months as the Arctic experienced its hottest year on record

Note the dog that didn't bark below: No claim that the melting was the rsult of global warming. Both poles are subject to extensive subsurface vulcanism, which is why the warming is both uneven and out of sync with the rest of the world. As usual, the Antarctic melting was in coastal West Antarctica only

Greenland lost 600 BILLION tons of ice last summer raising global sea levels by almost 0.1 inches in two months as the Arctic experienced its hottest year on record.

In Antarctica, meanwhile, ice has continued to melt from both the Amundsen Sea Embayment and the Antarctic Peninsula.

However, the southernmost continent also saw some relief in its eastern side, with levels of snowfall increasing in Queen Maud Land.

Changes in the ice volumes were measured by two twin gravity measuring satellite missions operated by NASA and the German Aerospace Centre.

'We knew this past summer had been particularly warm in Greenland, melting every corner of the ice sheet, but the numbers are enormous,' said paper author and earth scientist Isabella Velicogna of the University of California, Irvine.

In fact, Greenland shed more than twice the ice last summer than it did each year on average between 2002–2019 — a period in which it lost 4,550 billion tons.

For context, the whole of Los Angeles County only consumes around one billion tons of water a year.

'In Antarctica, the mass loss in the west proceeds unabated, which is very bad news for sea level rise,' Professor Velicogna said.

'But we also observe a mass gain in the Atlantic sector of East Antarctica caused by an increase in snowfall.

This, she explained, 'helps mitigate the enormous increase in mass loss that we've seen over the last two decades in other parts of the continent.'

In their study, Professor Velicogna and colleagues studied data from NASA and the German Aerospace Centre's late Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, as well as their successor, the GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission.

The GRACE satellites — which operated as a pair — took extremely precise measurements of changes in Earth's gravity from March 2002–October 2017, operating for 15 years longer than they were originally intended to.

These readings have allowed scientists to monitor the planet's water reserves, including polar ice, global sea levels and groundwater.

The twin GRACE-FO craft — launched May 2018 — were based on similar technology, but incorporated an experimental laser interferometry device to gauge any minute changes in the distance between the two satellites, rather than using microwaves.

The gap in time between the operation of the GRACE and GRACE-FO missions meant that Professor Velicogna and colleagues had to undertake tests to see how well the data gathered by the different missions matched up.

'It's great to see how well the data line up in Greenland and Antarctica, even at the regional level,' Professor Velicogna said. 'It's a tribute to the months of effort by the project, engineering and science teams to make the endeavour successful.'

SOURCE

The real reasons Africa has another locust plague

The UN, environmentalist pressure groups and their financial backers have a lot to answer for

Paul Driessen

The ChiCom coronavirus and COVID-19 outbreaks, deaths and responses continue to dominate US, European and Asian news. Meanwhile, a very different infestation is devastating East African crops and leaving tens of millions at risk of starvation and death. If COVID hits these weakened populations, amid their malaria and other systemic diseases, it would bring tragedy on unimaginable scales.

“Across Somalia, desert locusts in a swarm the size of Manhattan have destroyed a swath of farmland as big as Oklahoma,” the Wall Street Journal’s Nicholas Bariyo reports. “In Kenya, billions-strong clouds of the insects have eaten through 800 square miles of crops and survived a weeks-long spraying campaign. They have “swept across more than 10 nations on two continents.” In parts of East Africa they “are destroying some 1.8 million metric tons of vegetation every day, enough food to feed 81 million people.”

East Africa has a Desert Locust Control Organization. But it, the region and the individual countries were totally unprepared for the onslaught, unaware the hordes were coming, irresponsibly underfunded, with almost no pesticides or aircraft to spray them. By the time they acted, it was too little, too late.

The massive swarms are hardly unprecedented. Locusts “covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they ate every herb of the land and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left. So there remained nothing green on the trees or on the plants of the field throughout all the land of Egypt.” [Exodus 10:15] Locusts pillaged long before that, and have returned hundreds of times since.

The 1986-87 plague was calamitous. As the late entomologist Dr. J. Gordon Edwards noted in 1988, four major locust species hatched simultaneously in 15 countries, and the crops were so totally devastated that the UN Food and Agricultural Organization predicted 50 million Africans and Asians might starve to death. Malnourished survivors would suffer reduced mental capacity and have greater susceptibility to diseases. Other near-biblical infestations have ravaged Africa with predictable regularity and results.

The obvious, burning, essential question is this: In this era of amazing modern agriculture, aviation and pest control technologies, how could Africa have reached this frightening precipice yet again?

These 2019-2020 swarms originated in the vast deserts of Oman, Somalia and Yemen, parts of which are lawless and war-torn. That made it difficult and dangerous to monitor them for the emergence of billions of “hoppers,” following tumultuous downpours two years ago – or to spray them with insecticides when they were most vulnerable, before their wings matured and they could fly thousands of miles. But it also means East African countries needed to work together, despite these obstacles, to prevent such plagues.

These are horrifically poor countries, where bureaucrats live relatively well largely on outside donor funds, often corrupt top-gun politicians live very well on the same money, and some 90% of the people exist on a few dollars a day, on the edge of starvation and debilitating disease, tilling tiny patches of land.

Too often their governments’ ability to plan for recurring crises like this are minimal, their priorities are skewed to whatever the donors want, and funding for insect control is minimal at best. Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda didn’t even pay their Locust Control membership dues for years, or decades – much less acquire the aircraft and pesticides they would need for the inevitable next locust plague. Their focus was on elections (getting reelected), essential or just showy infrastructure projects, and climate change.

Indeed, it seems nothing will be allowed to get in the way of the UN, EU and environmentalist obsession with climate change as the single greatest threat facing humanity and planet. But climate cataclysms exist in models and headlines, are decades away, are hardly unprecedented for East Africa, and can hardly be worse than these recurring locust cataclysms. But UN, EU, World Bank and eco-centered foundation money drives the agenda and pays Africa’s leaders and bureaucrats. So recurring real-world crises get short shrift.

When it comes to insect control, the driving force is aid money totally skewed to agro-ecology and its perverse focus on “food sovereignty,” and “traditional subsistence farming” with wood plows and oxen, “in harmony with nature,” free from Western seeds, fertilizers, tractors and, above all, pesticides.

The new moniker is clever, but the ideology and donor-driven attitudes are nothing new. Dr. Edwards documented them in his 1988 article. The FAO, USAID, USEPA, World Bank, Environmental Defense Fund and other organizations were pushing “all-natural, biological, integrated pest management” practices back then, too. They were totally opposed to the use of dieldrin and other insecticides that actually work. They keep families, communities, clinics and hospitals dependent on minimalist wind and solar electricity.

Just as today, their focus back then was on alleged, possible side effects from modern insecticides, which used properly by trained applicators are safe for people, livestock, wildlife and most non-target insects. The key is having the necessary staff, equipment and chemicals ahead of time. Under pressure by all these external forces, East Africa failed to do that – and now it is reaping the proverbial whirlwind.

The donor agencies and pressure groups’ attitude is akin to demanding that chemotherapy for cancer be banned, because the chemicals impair patient’s immune systems and cause hair to fall out. Saving their lives is inarguably far more important than these side effects – just as saving millions from starvation and associated diseases, and preventing total crop and habitat annihilation, is inarguably far more important than the temporary loss of some insects or even slight risks to cattle, wildlife or people from the sprays.

(An upcoming article will document who is behind the eco-manslaughter today, and who is funding them: from US, EU and UN organizations to their Swiss, Swedish, pseudo-African and other counterparts.)

Back in 1987, Dr. Edwards noted, Senegal requested and received the loan of four American DC-7 transport aircraft that could hold 18,400 pounds of cargo (8.4 metric tons). They sprayed two million acres and killed 95% of that country’s immature locusts. But elsewhere FAO anti-pesticide ideologies prevailed, and billions of locusts matured, flew off, mated and produced tens of billions of locusts the following year. They destroyed croplands, wildlife habitats, communities and lives in a dozen other African countries.

This year’s efforts are far too little, far too late. Kenya has eight small crop-spraying aircraft operating around the clock; the Locust Control consortium has four antiquated little planes. They’re apparently spraying fenitrothion (an effective locust killer), pyrethroids (somewhat effective) and malathion (also somewhat effective though it breaks down within a few hours under Africa’s hot, humid conditions).

But they didn’t get the hoppers. They waited until swarms the size of Manhattan were upon them. Against those countless billions of voracious locusts, ground-based equipment is useless. A dozen small crop dusters makes almost no difference. And traditional methods like banging on pots are a sick joke.

However, there could still be hope. A single Lockheed KC-130 Hercules tanker plane equipped with Modular Aerial Spray Systems can cover up to 150,000 acres a day. Each plane can carry 2,000 gallons of the most appropriate pesticide-water mixture. The benefits would be immediate and tremendous.

President Trump could order the Air Force to provide a KC-130 or two and enough fenitrothion, Lorsban or other effective insecticide for a few weeks of locust-eradication spraying. He could save millions of lives – and help change attitudes, policies and practices across Africa and the world.

The President could also order his US Agency for International Development (USAID), State Department and other agencies to end their funding of climate and agro-ecology programs, and start making the East Africa Desert Locust Control Organization the forward-thinking, effective operation it was meant to be.

He could have blunt discussions with the heads of EU nations about their agro-ecology, anti-pesticide and anti-biotechnology policies, funding practices and import restrictions toward Africa – which are an undeniable crime against humanity. Finally, he could direct the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service to review (and terminate) the tax-exempt status of organizations and foundations engaged in lethal, eco-imperialistic lies and pressure campaigns in Africa, Asia and South America.

The locust plagues, starvation and deaths from readily preventable diseases like malaria must end – now. The poorest people in these impoverished countries should not be the ones paying the price, too often with their lives. This president is one of the very few politicians who could make these changes happen.

Via email

Banning Fracking Would Be Bad News for Ohioans

A report released in December 2019 by the Global Energy Institute at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce details how a ban on hydraulic fracturing (colloquially known as “fracking”) would have devastating consequences for the Ohio economy and would displace “hundreds of thousands of jobs” throughout the state.

According to the study, if a fracking ban took place, the Buckeye State would experience the cumulative loss of 700,000 jobs thanks to higher residential and business energy costs and upstream production losses, as well as $245 billion in lost gross domestic product (GDP) and a $20.6 billion loss in state and local tax revenues by 2025. Over that same period, Ohio households would experience a $119 billion loss of income and Ohioans would suffer a per capita cost-of-living increase of $5,625.

These losses would naturally begin taking effect immediately. In 2021 alone, the study estimates 155,000 job losses, $18 billion in lost GDP, $1.49 billion in lost state and local tax revenue, and a $9 billion loss in household income.

A 2020 report from the American Petroleum Institute (API), with modeling data from the consulting firm OnLocation, has unemployment numbers in Ohio due to a fracking ban that mirror GEI’s study, with 500,000 lost jobs in 2022 alone.

The development of the Utica shale play in Ohio has turned the state into the fifth-largest producer of natural gas in the United States. This massive increase in domestic shale development, led by fracking, has caused natural gas prices to plummet in Ohio, saving state residents and businesses more than $40 billion from 2006 to 2016, according to a September 2018 study from the Consumer Energy Alliance. This is backed up by a September 2019 report prepared by Kleinhenz & Associates for the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program, showing total savings thanks to fracking for Ohio residents from 2008 to 2018 amounts to $45 billion.

Additionally, the oil and natural gas industries supported more than 262,000 jobs in Ohio in 2015, according to a 2017 API study prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Hydraulic fracturing activity delivers $1,300 to $1,900 in annual benefits to local households, including “a 7 percent increase in average income, driven by rises in wages and royalty payments, a 10 percent increase in employment, and a 6 percent increase in housing prices,” according to a 2019 study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Princeton University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hydraulic fracturing enables the cost-effective extraction of once-inaccessible oil and natural gas deposits. These energy sources are abundant, inexpensive, environmentally safe, and can ensure the United States is the world’s largest energy producer well beyond the 21st century. Therefore, Ohio policymakers should refrain from placing unnecessary burdens on the natural gas and oil industries, which are safe and positively impact the Buckeye State economy.

SOURCE

WaPo Fact Checker: Biden ‘Misspoke’ About His Fracking Ban

A Washington Post fact-checker ruled Thursday that Joe Biden hadn’t lied when he said he supported a fracking ban during Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate. Rather, Biden had simply “described his fracking stance inaccurately.”

The Post gave Biden “Zero Pinocchios” for saying during the most recent Democratic debate that he opposed fracking entirely.

Instead, the paper pointed to the Biden campaign’s explanation that the candidate had “misspoken” and that “his position was the same as ever,” opposing fracking only on public lands.

Meanwhile, the Post criticized those who quoted Biden’s remarks verbatim. “Critics pounced,” the fact-checker wrote.

“Republican operatives cut a short video of Biden’s remarks, to use as a cudgel in races against moderate House Democrats. Sanders supporters accused Biden of misleading voters about his policy, which doesn’t ban fracking outright, as Sanders would.”

During Sunday’s debate, Sanders said that he was pushing for a ban on future fracking. “So am I,” Biden responded.

“Well, I’m not sure your proposal does that,” Sanders replied. Later, the Vermont senator said, “You cannot continue, as I understand, Joe believes, to continue fracking.”

“No more—no new fracking,” Biden said in response.

“The Trump campaign also used a Biden video snippet from the debate in a tweet claiming he would ‘ban fracking,'” the Post complained. “Right-wing media outlets including the Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Caller and Fox News all reported on Biden’s remarks as though he had adopted a tougher line.”

The Free Beacon article quoting Biden’s remarks, to which the Post did not link, covered Biden’s statement during the debate that there’d be “no more drilling” under his administration and only mentioned the fracking comments as an aside.

The Free Beacon accurately wrote that “Biden, confronted by Sanders for not taking dramatic enough steps to combat climate change, also said there would be no ‘new fracking’ and ‘not another coal plant will be built’ under his administration.”

Biden’s drilling comments, another instance of the candidate “misspeaking” in a way that made his environmental platform more palatable to his party’s left-wing base, was not acknowledged in the Post fact-check.

Biden previously said he “misspoke,” avoiding a bad rating from the Post fact-checker, after he was caught falsely claiming on two separate occasions that he opposed the Iraq war from the moment it started.

“Regular readers know that we withhold Pinocchios when a politician admits error. Biden was on his way to Four Pinocchios until his staff acknowledged that he misspoke,” the Post wrote. “So we will leave this unrated and let readers make their own decision.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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23 March, 2020

Containing methane and its contribution to global warming

This is pure modelling with no reality contact at all. That methane might produce different effects in our actual complex atmosphere is not considered. Methane in the laboratory is as close to reality as they get. That other gases have similar absorption spectra as CH4 appears not to be taken into account

Summary:

Methane is a gas that deserves more attention in the climate debate as it contributes to almost half of human-made global warming in the short-term. A new study shows that it is possible to significantly contribute to reduced global warming through the implementation of available technology that limits methane release to the atmosphere.
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Methane is a gas that deserves more attention in the climate debate as it contributes to almost half of human-made global warming in the short-term. A new IIASA study shows that it is possible to significantly contribute to reduced global warming through the implementation of available technology that limits methane release to the atmosphere.

According to the study published in the journal Environmental Research Communications, it is possible to achieve reduced global warming in the near term by targeting methane through the fast implementation of technology to prevent its release to the atmosphere. This could mitigate some of the otherwise very costly impacts of climate change that are expected over the next few decades. To achieve the significant reductions in methane emissions caused by humans needed to meet the Paris Agreement, we however need to know exactly where and from what sources emissions are emitted so that policymakers can start developing strategies to contain methane and its contribution to global warming.

"To develop policy strategies to mitigate climate change through reductions of global non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions like methane, we need detailed inventories of the sources and locations of current human-made emissions, build scenarios for expected developments in future emissions, assess the abatement potential of future emissions, and estimate the costs of reducing emissions. In this study, we looked at global methane emissions and technical abatement potentials and costs in the 2050 timeframe," explains study lead author Lena Hoglund-Isaksson.

Using the IIASA Greenhouse Gases -- Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) model, the researchers endeavored to find out how well the GAINS bottom-up inventory of methane emissions at country and source-sector level between 1990-2015 match top-down estimates of the global concentration of methane measured in the atmosphere. In addition, they wanted to see how much methane would be emitted globally until 2050 if we take no further measures to reduce emissions.

The results show that at the global level, the GAINS methane inventory matches the top-down estimate of human-made methane emissions' contribution to the atmospheric concentration of methane quite well. A reasonable match between bottom-up and top-down budgets, both at the global and regional levels, is important for the confidence in bottom-up inventories, which are a prerequisite for policy strategies to be perceived as "certain enough" by stakeholders in climate mitigation.

The authors' analysis revealed a strong increase in emissions after 2010, which confirms top-down measurements of increases in the atmospheric methane concentration in recent years. According to this study, these are explained by increased methane emissions from shale gas production in North America, increased coal mining in countries outside of China, for instance, Indonesia and Australia, and increased generation of waste and wastewater from growing populations and economic development in Asia and Africa. In addition, the findings showed a small but steady increase in emissions from beef and dairy production in Latin America and Africa, highlighting how different the distribution of emission source sectors are across different world regions.

The findings further show that without measures to control methane emissions, there would be a global emission increase of about 30% until 2050. While it would technically be possible to remove about 38% of these emissions by implementing available abatement technology, it would still mean that a significant amount of methane would be released between 2020 and 2050, making it impossible for the world to stay below 1.5°C warming.

With that said, the researchers point out that technical abatement potentials can still be used to achieve considerable reductions in methane emissions in the near-term and at a comparably low cost. Between 30% and 50% of future global methane emissions can be removed at a cost below 50 €/t CO2eq. The use of fossil fuels will however also have to be phased-down to really make a difference. Technical abatement potentials are particularly limited in agriculture, which suggests that these emissions must be addressed through non-technical measures, such as behavioral changes to reduce milk and meat consumption, or institutional and socioeconomic reforms to address smallholder livestock herding as a means of risk management in Africa and South-East Asia.

"There is no one-size fits all solution for the whole world. In the Middle East and Africa, for instance, oil production is a major contributor to methane emissions with relatively extensive potentials for emission reductions at low cost. In Europe and Latin America, dairy and beef production are the main sources with relatively limited technical mitigation potentials, while in North America it is emissions from shale gas extraction that can significantly contain emissions at a low cost. Our study illustrates just how important it is to have a regional- and sector-specific approach to mitigation strategies," concludes Hoglund-Isaksson.

SOURCE

The myth of climate-change refugees

Climate change has become an excuse to abandon people living on the coast.

Much of the Welsh village of Fairbourne lies between just one and three meters above sea level. It was built on a salt marsh in the 19th century behind two metre-high sea walls to protect the settlement from the waves. Now climate change seems to threaten the village.

Local-authority planners say it would cost too much to extend the Victorian sea defences and the village must be abandoned – the homes will be dismantled and the land will be returned to the marsh. Headlines excitedly proclaim that, in three decades’ time, the inhabitants of Fairbourne will be ‘the UK’s first climate-change refugees’. Really?

Sea-level rise (SLR) is no doubt a problem. But the connection between sea levels and global warming or CO2 emissions is uncertain. There is good evidence that SLR is a phenomenon that long predates industrial society, and the notion of anthropogenic ‘acceleration’ is at best controversial. It is certainly not, as is so often claimed, a subject where there is a definitive scientific ‘consensus’. There is evidence to support both sides of this argument. And different approaches to measuring SLR, between tide gauges and satellites, produce different results, each confounded by many technical complexities. Tide-gauge records are sparse and inconsistent. The satellite era began only very recently in geological terms – in 1992. There is no clear picture and global estimates of SLR vary between 1mm and 3mm per year.

Overall, scientists expect sea levels to rise between three and nine centimetres between now and the mid-century. The consensus view provides a range of SLR between 28 and 82 centimetres by the end of the century, with worst-case scenarios projecting rises of as much as three metres. Moreover, this range of estimates, clouded by uncertainty, should be seen in the context of the science’s history, which has been drenched in alarmist prognostications.

Far from being a new phenomenon, rising tides, sinking lands, storms and erosion have claimed many of Britain’s coastal towns and villages through the centuries. And plenty of settlements along Britain’s coastline still stand at the literal and figurative cliff edge. The notion that sands don’t shift, that the natural landscape is immutable, and that houses stand forever may reflect the longings of the human psyche, but these are not facts about the natural world. And while salt marshes at the feet of mountains make for pretty locations, that does not make them safe. With or without man-made global warming, coastal settlements are at much greater risk than inland towns and villages – they always have been and always will be. Climate change increases that risk but by how much is hard to detect and to isolate from the risk that has existed throughout history.

One thing that has undoubtedly changed the risks for the inhabitants of Fairbourne is the policy decision to stop building coastal defences. This is framed in terms of climate policy – a framing which is totally helpful to the people of Fairbourne. The 460 homes in the sea’s way have lost half of their value following Gwynedd Council’s decision to ‘decommission’ the village. ‘I’ve lost £100,000 on this house’, said Bev to BBC filmmakers.

Coincidentally, £100,000 is approximately the cost that will fall on the average household as a consequence of the government’s ‘Net Zero’ agenda. And like Gwynedd Council’s incautious decision, this will create a constellation of unintended consequences, which rather than serving the public interest or protecting people is likely to do great harm.

For instance, according to the ‘wisdom’ of environmentalists, climate change is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. One piece of evidence for this seems to be the threat posed by the rising seas for some small coastal communities. Yet the 460 homes in Fairbourne that lie in the path of the Irish Sea are less than the number of homes that are repossessed each month in England and Wales. The threats of illness, unemployment or substantial increases in the cost of living – often caused by ideologically blinkered policymakers – are a far more present and manifestly real threat to people living both inland and on the coasts than the angry waves could ever be.

None of which answers the question of what can be done for the people who live in places that are vulnerable to the sea. First, we cannot let any politicians or officials use climate change as an excuse or as cover for their rank incompetence and indifference to these communities. Second, given the costs that the government wishes to impose on the entire population in the name of fighting climate change, why can we not find the money to relocate people inland? If a suitable location were found for new houses, it would even be possible to keep communities intact. This will certainly be a lot cheaper than the trillions currently earmarked for a climate-change agenda that will produce net-zero benefit.

Climate campaigners have long sought climate victims. But this desire for puppets to act out a green morality play means that problems which require public debate are removed from their wider context, or are framed so as to preclude any solution. The people of Fairbourne have been swept up in journalists’ and politicians’ green hyperbole, and have been used to further an agenda that has done nothing for them and is indifferent to their plight.

Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the scientific consensus – offers a far more sober perspective than the media. It advises that ‘the use of the term “climate refugee” is scientifically and legally problematic’. Moreover, it adds that ‘current alarmist predictions of massive flows of so-called “environmental migrants” are not supported by past experiences of responses to droughts and extreme weather events, and predictions for future migration flows are tentative at best’.

It is safe to say that the views of scientists have been a huge disappointment to green campaigners, who have gone in search of stories about ‘climate refugees’ all the same.

SOURCE

Global warming does something useful

The motivation behind the technology below is dubious but the products could still be useful

On the CES floor in Las Vegas this past January, I saw dozens of companies showing off products designed to help us adapt to climate change. It was an unsettling reminder that we’ve tipped the balance on global warming and that hotter temperatures, wildfires, and floods are the new reality.

Based on our current carbon dioxide emissions, we can expect warming of up to 1.5 °C by 2033. Even if we stopped spewing carbon today, temperatures would continue to rise for a time, and weather would grow still more erratic.

The companies at CES recognize that it’s too late to stop climate change. Faced with that realization, this group of entrepreneurs is focusing on climate adaptation. For them, the goal is to make sure that people and the global economy will still survive across as much of the world as possible. These entrepreneurs’ companies are developing practicalities, such as garments that adapt to the weather or new building materials with higher melting points so that roads won’t crack in extreme temperatures.

One of the biggest risks in a warming world is that both outdoor workers and their equipment will overheat more often. Scientists expect to see humans migrate from parts of the world where temperatures and humidity combine to repeatedly create heat indexes of 40.6 °C, because beyond that temperature humans have a hard time surviving [PDF]. But even in more temperate locations, the growing number of hotter days will also make it tough for outdoor workers.

Embr Labs is building a bracelet that the company says can lower a person’s perceived temperature a few degrees simply by changing the temperature on their wrist. The bracelet doesn’t change actual body temperature, so it can’t help outdoor workers avoid risk on a sweltering day. But it could still be used to keep workers cooler on safe yet still uncomfortably warm days. It might also allow companies to raise their indoor temperatures, saving on air-conditioning costs.

Elsewhere, Epicore Biosystems is building wearable microfluidic sensors that monitor people for dehydration or high body temperatures. The Epicore sensors are already being used for athletes. But it’s not hard to imagine that in the near future there’d be a market for putting them on construction, farm, and warehouse workers who have to perform outside jobs in hot weather.

Extreme temperatures—and extreme fluctuations between temperatures—are also terrible for our existing road and rail infrastructure. Companies such as RailPod, as well as universities, are building AI-powered drones and robots that can monitor miles of roadway or track and send back data on repairs.

And then there’s flooding. Coastal roads and roads near rivers will need to withstand king tides, flash floods, and sustained floodwaters. Pavement engineers are working on porous concrete to mitigate flood damage and on embedded sensors to communicate a road’s status in real time to transportation officials.

There are so many uncertainties about our warming planet, but what isn’t in doubt is that climate change will damage our infrastructure and disrupt our patterns of work. Plenty of companies are focused on the admirable goal of preventing further warming, but we need to also pay attention to the companies that can help us adapt. A warmer planet is already here.

SOURCE

Thawing Permafrost Is Unlikely To Increase Global Warming, Scientists Find

As Earth continues to warm, scientists were wary about the impact melting permafrost would have in furthering greenhouse gas warming. Recent research suggests that melting permafrost may not have a significant impact on increasing temperatures.

The primary concern was associated with methane gas release into the atmosphere, which is a much more potent heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide.

The research study focused on two types of permafrost, frozen soil and frozen methane hydrates in the soil underneath the world’s oceans.

Permafrost on land is predominantly found in Siberia, Alaska, and Northern Canada. As plants, algae and animals die in these regions significant amounts of the carbon are not decomposed but buried in frozen soil. This “locks away” this organic matter from the global carbon cycle.

As temperatures warm the soil begins to melt, introducing liquid water and oxygen to the organic matter and thus allowing bacteria to break it down and potentially release methane into the atmosphere.

Methane hydrates, the other main concern for permafrost melting, are a combination of water ice and methane trapped in frozen ocean sediment below the ocean floor. Similar to permafrost on land, as oceans begin to warm these hydrates will begin to melt and release both water and methane.

In both scenarios, the concern is that a warming planet will cause a sudden release of significant amounts of methane into the atmosphere, thus causing positive feedback and warming the planet more.

Recent research, published in the journal Science, looked at small trapped gas bubbles in ice cores to see what the atmosphere looked like on Earth for the past 15,000 years.

By analyzing the gas bubbles, which were sequentially trapped through time and represent past atmospheric conditions, the team believes methane release from permafrost did not play a significant role in warming during past warming events.

The scenario they used was from the last glacial period to modern times, analyzing how permafrost played an impact on a warming planet.

The team found that signatures of methane gas were small during these past warming periods and that methane release from permafrost likely did not cause a large warming event.

In the case of land permafrost, in most scenarios the bacteria decomposed the organic matter through organic respiration, releasing carbon dioxide as opposed to methane. While the carbon dioxide released does add to warming, as we stated earlier, each molecule of CO2 is less potent than a molecule of methane (CH4).

When looking at methane hydrates in the ocean sediment, the team found that a significant amount of the methane released never makes it to the ocean surface. It simply dissolves into the ocean water as trapped gas or is oxidized by microbes in the ocean.

SOURCE

America shows the way

It achieves Greenie goals through the effects of capitalism, not anti-capitalism

The last year has been tough for climate activists around the world. The United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement, protests by Extinction Rebellion generated publicity but not much else, and the United Nations Climate Change Conference ended in failure. This helps explain why the bombshell report by the International Energy Agency which found carbon dioxide emissions related to energy did not increase last year was a much needed morale boost for those people intent on halting global warming.

However, this is not a rallying cry for the environmentalists to redouble their efforts. A closer look at the numbers shows that the conventional approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which relies on heavy regulation and government direction, is a dead end. But there is still hope. The International Energy Agency data identifies proven and successful models that any country can adopt to reduce emissions and slow global warming. They just are not in vogue right now. Globally, the amount of emissions stayed at the 2018 levels, but this was not a team effort. The European Union led the way cutting 160 million tons of carbon dioxide, then the United States at 140 million tons, and Japan at 45 million tons. That had been just enough to offset “the rest of the world” combined.

Since the European Union made the greatest cuts, it is tempting to think that other countries must adopt its regulatory heavy approach that most climate activists favor, however, this would be a mistake. Unfortunately, that model is nearing its limits, and even Europeans are starting to push back. The European Union announced with great fanfare that it planned to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, or rather, every country except Poland, which abstained from the deal. Despite this refusal, Poland is still set to receive more than a quarter of the 100 billion euro fund with which the European Union will grease the skids toward a lower emitting economy.

Although paying off uncompliant countries may work for the European Union, it simply could not work as a solution for the world. According to International Monetary Fund data, there are more than 130 countries with lower gross domestic product per capita than Poland, and among them are nine of the 10 most populous countries in the world. If Poland needs help to buy expensive and unreliable renewable energy, then those other countries will too. Does anyone really think that the United States and the European Union could subsidize all of them into true carbon neutrality?

By striking contrast, Japan cut 4 percent of its greenhouse gasses largely after it started back into operation its nuclear energy industry, which had been severely curtailed after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. This is good for Japan as well as for the environment, as overreactions to the reactor accident, such as unnecessary evacuations and policies that drove up the cost of energy, almost certainly killed more people than the radiation did.

Countries such as Germany that followed Japan in shuttering their nuclear industries had to switch back to coal to maintain the reliable power grids. Even now, the European Union climate fund will not pay for nuclear power despite its safe use across France. Despite its earlier mistakes, Japan has bowed to the basic reality that any realistic carbon neutral society needs lots of reliable energy, which only nuclear fission can supply enough of.

Despite ambivalence on nuclear power and an uncoordinated approach to reducing emissions, the United States capped off an extraordinary stretch of two decades in which it reduced emissions by almost one billion tons, more than any other country. Last year, the United States nearly matched the European Union emissions reductions without an overarching strategy for greenhouse gasses, while still growing its economy at nearly double the rate of the eurozone. This is largely due to private sector success like natural gas getting cheap enough and widely available to supplant coal.

Developing countries can learn from American and Japanese success to grow their economies with environmentally friendly methods. The climate change movement has no hope of succeeding without finding a way to make this happen moving forward. There are more than six billion people in countries that the International Monetary Fund classifies as “emerging market and developing economies.” These people want and need access to safe reliable food, water, clothing, housing, medicine, and sanitation that development brings, not to mention other advances that a modern society offers. While the approach of the European Union might work for it, developing countries that need to dramatically raise their standards of living would be better off studying how the United States cuts emissions without sacrificing growth and how pragmatism in Japan works as well.

Next time Greta Thunberg criticizes the United States, American officials should not respond defensively as they have before. Instead, they should invite her over to show her how the United States is getting her what she wants. Just be sure to send her along something to read on the boat ride

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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22 March, 2020

Coronavirus could help push us into a greener way of life

Yes. A Greener way of life could mean losing your job, being unable to buy a lot of grocery basics and being unable to dine out. Very Green

By the time this horror ends, it might have changed our way of life. Already, the coronavirus has achieved something that government policies and moral awakening couldn’t: it is pushing us into green living.

The nature of work, commuting and shopping changed this month. If that transformation sticks, then one day we’ll have happier and more productive societies, and we’ll look back on December 2019 as the all-time peak in global carbon emissions.

First of all, the pandemic may show that offices are an outdated way to organise work. This is something I have suspected since my three-year office experience in the 1990s. I was amazed at the inefficiency of the set-up: people spent much of the day distracting each other by gossiping, flirting, bitching about the boss or complaining about that morning’s commute. I’ve worked happily alone for 22 years now.

Offices exist largely so that bosses can check whether workers are doing the work (or at least putting in face-time). But nowadays, data can do much of the monitoring. Meanwhile, improved workplace software such as Slack and Zoom lets employees collaborate from home.

The tech may actually outperform real life: a professor who has hurriedly learnt Zoom told me he liked the way the software can instantly create small break-out groups of students to work on a problem. In an auditorium, everyone has to pack their bags, find a room and grab a coffee on the way.

Now that entire countries are learning to work from their bedrooms, many employers may end up concluding that they can ditch expensive office space. That wouldn’t merely reduce emissions, and liberate metropolitan workers from ghastly commutes (the daily round trip averages well over an hour in cities such as New York, Chicago and London).

The shift would also reduce urban house prices, as some offices get converted into homes, and some workers are freed to leave the city. In the next year or two, virtual-reality software will let the boss (or at least the boss’s avatar) step into underlings’ home-offices to root out shirking.

In short, work could follow dating, shopping and game-playing in going virtual. That would make life greener but also more isolated. To compensate, neighbourhoods will need more communal spaces. Already the death of bricks-and-mortar retail has allowed coffee shops and co-working spaces to take over high streets. But we’ll also have to build more playgrounds (with some for adults), community centres and parks.

Another benefit: the pandemic may help stop the decades-long rise in business travel. I discovered last week that each time a trip was cancelled, I mostly felt relief. I know the benefits of business travel: the two books I’m currently writing both came out of meeting someone while at a conference. So did my previous book.

However, most trips probably cause a net loss of productivity. While you search for the one or two useful people to talk to amid the 300 carbon-emitting duds at a disappointing conference, you’re missing work at home. Moreover, most conferences feature a lot more wannabe sellers than buyers.

Nowadays it’s quicker to find the perfect counterpart on LinkedIn. As for content, well-made virtual conferences could be as compelling to watch as good TED talks or TV — and more so than the endless panels of executives talking their own books.

As for shopping, even before the coronavirus we were shifting towards a world where the shop comes to you. That movement just accelerated, possibly for ever. It’s much greener for a supermarket to send an electric van (or a cargo-bike) to 100 homes in a neighbourhood than for all those people to drive to the supermarket. Some could ditch their cars.

Even in the very short term, the green lining to this pandemic is surprisingly large. Air pollution kills about 1.1 million people in China alone every year. The fall in pollution during the country’s lockdown in January and February “likely saved 20 times more lives in China than have currently been lost due to infection with the virus in that country”, calculates Marshall Burke of Stanford University’s Department of Earth System Science. He adds: “The fact that disruption of this magnitude could actually lead to some large (partial) benefits suggests that our normal way of doing things might need disrupting.”

That’s particularly true since climate change makes pandemics more likely. It expands the natural habitat of infectious insects such as mosquitoes, while reducing the habitat of animals, with the effect of pushing both into closer contact with humans.

Governments need to make good use of the current pandemic. Many states are preparing a fiscal stimulus. Donald Trump wants to bestow much of it on the carbon emitters that could go bust in the incipient recession: airlines, cruise ships, oil producers and his beloved hotel industry (which lives off travellers’ emissions). Forward-looking governments will instead prioritise green industries, while helping workers who lose their fossil-fuel jobs.

It turns out that developed countries (except possibly the US) can still do collective government-led wartime-style mobilisation. It’s a muscle we’re going to need.

SOURCE

Scientists Acknowledge Ocean Currents Not Slowing

Scientists are admitting ocean currents have been speeding up in recent years, dealing a stunning blow to ‘consensus’ climate science claims. For the past 20 years, climate alarmists and the alleged scientific consensus have claimed ocean currents are slowing down, causing harmful and potentially disastrous consequences, and that global warming is to blame.

In the February 5 issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Science Advances, a team of scientists documented the recent acceleration in ocean currents. The article, titled, “Deep-reaching acceleration of global mean ocean circulation over the past two decades,” reports “a statistically significant increasing trend in the globally integrated oceanic kinetic energy since the early 1990s, indicating a substantial acceleration of global mean ocean circulation.”

The article and related media coverage claimed global warming is the reason for accelerating ocean currents. This directly contradicts what they have been claiming for the past two decades.

Climate alarmists have long stated their computer models have consistently predicted global warming would slow down the ocean currents. Hollywood presented the slowdown theory, along with predicted catastrophic consequences, in the 2004 movie, The Day After Tomorrow.

A December 2009 Scientific American article observed, “Most climate change models predict global warming will slow these flows, in part by altering a key component of the Atlantic’s circulation, called deep-water formation.”

The 2009 Scientific American article reported scientists believe a slowdown in ocean currents “will alter African and Indian monsoon rainfall as well as hurricane patterns in the South Atlantic, resulting in ‘a profound impact on the global climate system.’”

Even very recently, alarmists have been repeating, and sensationalizing, their claims of an ocean current slowdown. National Public Radio (NPR) published an article in April 2018 titled, “Atlantic Ocean Current Slows Down To 1,000-Year Low, Studies Show.” The article claimed melting ice from Greenland was the culprit.

The NPR article quoted University College London geologist David Thornally claiming, “The only thing we really can do is obviously try and prevent global warming because that’s the root cause of why we think it’s weakening now with increasing temperatures.”

The NPR article claimed, “scientists agree that [the asserted ocean current slowdown] could have a dramatic impact on ocean ecosystems, such as coral reefs and deep-sea sponge grounds.”

Business Insider published a May 2019 article making similar claims. The article, titled, “The film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ foretold a real and troubling trend: The ocean’s water-circulation system is weakening,” claimed ocean currents are currently moving slower than at any time in the past 1,600 years. The article quoted a scientist claiming, “We are definitely going into a world where AMOC [Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation] is getting weaker.”

Now, these same publications are reversing course, apparently hoping people will have forgotten their previous claims about global warming slowing ocean currents.

Scientific American published a February 6, 2020, article claiming, “Climate change may in part be spurring the acceleration, which could change how heat and nutrients are pushed around the oceans.”

The 2020 Scientific American article claims, “[M]odels suggest that continued global warming may have a growing effect in the future. More climate change may mean a greater strengthening of ocean winds, and potentially even faster ocean circulation.” This is exactly the opposite of what we were previously told models predicted.

Nevertheless, the topic of ocean currents consistently illustrates one truth – climate activists will blame everything on global warming, even if they have to reinvent history and their computer models in the process.

SOURCE

Cognac Production Sets New Records, Despite Media Climate Scare

I pointed out recently that the French wine scare was a lot of hokum

The establishment media is claiming climate change is decimating French cognac production, yet French cognac production and exports have risen for five consecutive years, setting multiple new records.

A favorite tactic of climate alarmists is to identify something that people enjoy and then claim climate change is destroying it. This week, alarmists are targeting Remy Martin, Hennessy and other cognacs. Cognac is a fine brandy produced from grapes grown in a small region in France.

On March 15, the UK Guardian published an article titled, “Climate change forces cognac makers to consider other grape varieties.” The theme of the article is that global warming is decimating the Ugni blanc grape, which dominates grape production in the Cognac region of France.

According to the Guardian, global warming is causing cognac grapes to ripen later, jeopardizing production. Also, “Extreme and unpredictable weather has blighted the region: in 2018, powerful hailstorms caused serious damage to 3,500 hectares of vineyards in the Cognac area. Hail and heavy rain also reduced the 2016 harvest, while 2017 was marred by frost.”

If climate change is decimating the Ugni grape and cognac production, however, you would never know it from the production numbers. Cognac exports rose last year for the fifth year in a row, setting new records. Exports account for 98 percent of cognac sales.

It’s not just cognac and cognac grapes that are doing so well as the climate modestly warms. Overall sales of French wines and spirits also set a new record last year.

SOURCE

Extinction Rebellion hopes to move climate activism online in wake of coronavirus

What do you do if you have a climate activist group whose basic strategy is to create a public spectacle but suddenly a dangerous virus is keeping everyone home? The plan for some of these groups, including Extinction Rebellion, is to move the activism online.

The coronavirus outbreak has prompted climate activists to abandon public demonstrations, one of their most powerful tools for raising public awareness, and shift to online protests…

A coalition of climate movements had planned huge protests around commemorations for the 50th annual Earth Day in April. Those have now been canceled or moved online. One group, Earth Initiative and March for Science New York City, plans to live-stream speakers and performers at an online event.

Greta Thunberg has also moved her activism online in light of the virus:

But not everyone is convinced the online activism will have the same impact:

Some experts, however, said reaching world leaders and the general public would be more difficult now as the pandemic shuts down large parts of public life.

“What you’re going to end up doing is amplifying within an echo chamber, which is really different from what the movement wants,” said Dana Fisher, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland whose research focuses on activism

But Extinction Rebellion is trying to keep its supporters optimistic about online activism:

VIRTUAL PROTEST: Ask those who in normal times would have attended the protest to write a sign and take a photo of themselves (w friends and/or family). Organizers can print out all the photos and attach to cardboard to display publicly. For example, they could be laid out in front of a Chase bank or other target, possibly with a chalk outline of a person around it. Your group could also make a sign explaining that for public health reasons people are protesting at home…

SOCIAL MEDIA BARRAGE: people may have more time to be on a computer and post negative reviews of your target’s products. Organize a coordinated take-down of various publicly reviewed products and brands to apply pressure on your target.

I’m not convinced they are going to get the same level of public attention with this sort of thing, which happens online all the time, as they have been with stunts like digging up the lawn at Trinity College.

The whole energy behind Extinction Rebellion was the idea that the kind of climate extremism we routinely see online was entering the real world. Taking that activity back to digital space seems like a retreat. I suspect it won’t be as successful, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

SOURCE

Australian State poised for power revolution

This is all theory with no consideration of cost or practicality

QUEENSLAND has the chance to shore up the 32,000 jobs that rely on mining and energy generation by digging up the ingredients for renewables, a report produced for the state's biggest construction and infrastructure companies says.

The 2020 Major Projects Pipeline Report released yesterday by the Queensland Major Contractors Association and the Infrastructure Association of Queensland warns changing global attitudes and climate change represents a risk to the state's biggest industries. But it also says Queensland is "extremely well-placed to benefit from movements towards environmental sustainability and a zero-carbon economy".

"Queensland can leverage from its own natural and comparative advantages in the green economy including its world leading solar resources, access to 'next generation' commodities including copper, lead, zinc, silver, phosphate and rare earths to build new industries that will help drive down carbon emissions, and the development of new 'green' energy from renewable sources including hydrogen.

"Supporting the global effort to reduce emissions will benefit very important industry sectors in Queensland tourism and agriculture —- which are highly susceptible to climate change impacts.

"Increasing climate activism, both in Australia and globally, presents structural risks to traditional Queensland industries such as coal mining and fossil fuel power generation which directly provide employment to up to 32,000 Queenslanders, particularly in regional towns."

Coal tips $4.2 billion a year into the Queensland Government coffers in royalties, the report says. "Environmental sustainability provides Queensland with a massive economic opportunity which is potentially far greater than the fossil fuel industry," the report says.

The Queensland Mayor Projects Pipeline 2020 report shows significant projects such as Inland Rail, Gold Coast Light Rail Stage 3, Cross River Rail, Brisbane Metro and upgrades to the MI, Bruce Highway and essential water infrastructure developments are all underway or close to starting, but private investment is badly lagging and with it the 6600 extra construction jobs riding on megaprojects.

The report says there are 222 projects worth at least $50 million each across the state, totalling $50.6 billion in the pipeline from 2019-20 to 2023-24.

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 19.3.20

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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20 March, 2020

Banning plastic grocery bags spreads disease

Environmental virtue signaling and folly continues apace, the latest example of which is New York State’s ban on plastic grocery bags that went into effect earlier this month.

Count on at least two results from the outlawing of plastic grocery bags: increased energy use and environmental cost to produce more paper grocery bags; and increased spreading of germs from reusable tote bags at grocery stores, which is especially worrisome with the coronavirus pandemic.

New York last year became the second state after California to ban single-use plastic grocery bags, though there are some exceptions allowed. There are now approximately 400 local jurisdictions in the United States with such bans.

The primary reason for banning plastic grocery bags is to reduce litter, yet only 0.5 percent of U.S. municipal waste is comprised of plastic bags. Plastic bags are not biodegradable and can end up polluting waterways, but they are recyclable. It is axiomatic that litter is a bad thing, but banning such bags is still more harmful than positive. Plastic grocery bags also have a secondary use as garbage pail liners, carrying other items, and for various household purposes.

Rebecca Taylor, an economist at the University of Sydney, Australia, has studied the effects of banning plastic bags and concluded such laws increase greenhouse gas emissions based on the substitutionary effects of plastic garbage bags and paper.

The absence of plastic grocery bags means more paper bag usage, which further studies show is worse for the environment. More paper bags means more trees cut down to produce them, which requires more energy and chemical use in the process. Though paper bags are biodegradable, they can still end up as litter and take up more landfill space than plastic grocery bags.

In locations with bans on plastic grocery bags, Taylor found that plastic garbage bag sales sharply increased since they can substitute for the outlawed bags for groceries and secondary use. Plastic garbage bags also are thicker than the banned grocery bags, which diminish the erstwhile benefit of banning them.

Then there are the germs from reusing cloth tote bags for groceries in the absence of plastic grocery bags. Viruses and bacteria that linger in and spread from these reusable tote bags are a hazard to merchants and shoppers who touch items and surfaces that become infected.

A study by the University of Arizona found that reusable bags that were collected from shoppers were rarely cleaned from prior use and that “large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags.” This was especially true for bags that contained meat juices.

Compounding the risk is that bacteria and pathogens like coronaviruses can linger on surfaces for up to nine days.

Journalist John Tierney who writes for the City Journal summed it up well: “disposable plastic is the cheapest, simplest and safest way to prevent foodborne illnesses.”

This obvious truth seems not to penetrate those self-proclaimed environmentalists who are committed to banning plastic grocery bags and impervious to the boomerang effects.

The downside of the alternatives to plastic single-use grocery bags beg the questions: will policymakers reconsider the bans in place; or will efforts continue to enact new bans? Environmental religiosity is hard to overcome no matter how many facts come to light on issues including carbon emissions, man-made global warming, nuclear energy, or plastic grocery bags.

Plastic itself faces continued hostility from some environmental quarters for the growing problem of litter, particularly its baleful effect on oceans, but also for the simple fact that it is derived from fossil fuels. Plastic waste indeed is a problem – a crisis – but banning its use, especially for single-use grocery bags, is not the way to address it. There are other means underway to deal with the larger issue of plastic waste, as CFACT has reported.

The environmental cost of alternatives to plastic grocery bags should cause policymakers to resist further bans on them and to reconsider existing bans. More so, the spread of coronavirus and other bacteria demands the repeal of the bans on plastic grocery bags.

SOURCE

Fear of (everybody else) flying

Air travel worsens climate crisis – unless passengers are climate activists and wealthy elites

Duggan Flanakin

Just over a year ago, newly elected U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and U.S. Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) shocked the world by proposing a Green New Deal. One of its more controversial provisions was a proposal to build high-speed rail at a scale that would make air travel unnecessary.

In 2013, Elizabeth Rosenthal told New York Times readers that air travel is the “most serious environmental sin” for many Americans. A single round-trip flight from New York to Europe or San Francisco adds 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per passenger to the atmosphere, she claimed. Air travel emissions are rising, because the volume of air travel is increasing much faster than gains in flight fuel efficiency.

The website Green Choices calls air travel “one of the most greenhouse-gas-rich forms of transport in existence,” and laments that the lack of fuel taxes on aviation fuel is a subsidy that makes air travel “surprisingly” (and unacceptably) cheap. In addition to carbon dioxide, air travel generates nitrogen oxides and water vapor that also contribute to the greenhouse effect. In the view of allegedly Green Choices, aviation industry growth is incompatible with efforts to combat climate change.

The European Union brought aviation into its emission trading system in 2012. However, protests from China, the USA and other countries confined that program to intra-EU flights through 2024. Transport & Environment, which bills itself as “Europe's leading clean transport campaign group,” claims the aviation sector has a climate impact that “continues to spiral out of control,” with “no sign of abating.”

Over in the United Kingdom, which just left the European Union and supposedly left EU climate doctrines behind, decades-old plans to build a third runway at London’s busy Heathrow Airport ran into yet another roadblock, as the UK’s Court of Appeal ruled that the runway proposal was “illegal” because it did not take into consideration the government’s own climate change commitments.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan and his environmentalist allies cheered the decision, which Heathrow Airport Holdings (but not the British government) promises to appeal to the country’s Supreme Court. Khan has long condemned the third runway plans, calling them “the wrong decision for London and the whole of Britain,” and claiming its construction and the increased number of flights it would allow would be “devastating for air quality across London.”

The much-needed runway would increase airport capacity from 85.5 million passengers a year to 130 million and increase annual total flights from 474,000 to 740,000. It would result in up to $228 billion in economic growth across the United Kingdom and create up to 180,000 new jobs nationwide – all at a cost estimated at under $20 billion.

Even if Heathrow ultimately wins the right to build its third runway, the delays brought about largely by Britain signing the Paris climate agreement will surely raise the price of construction, hugely inconvenience travelers, and postpone much needed revenues from landing fees and commerce.

The Confederation of British Industry in June 2018 had lauded the decision by then-Prime Minister Theresa May and her full cabinet to approve the airport expansion. But current Prime Minister Boris Johnson does not favor it. CBI Deputy Director-General Josh Hardie has said, “Our aviation capacity is set to run out as early as 2025, so it’s crucial we get spades in the ground as soon as possible.”

Those who hope we can replace jet engines with “clean” energy will be sad to learn that, while there are solar airplanes, they are slow (maximum speed 100 kilometers or 65 miles per hour), unable to carry passengers, and dependent on good weather. They also provide very narrow margins of error for pilots.

As Dan Reed explained in a 2019 Forbes op-ed, applying the Green New Deal just to air travel would devastate the U.S. economy, while addressing only the 3.5% of greenhouse gas emissions attributable to air travel. Severe cutbacks in air travel would eliminate many of the nation’s 700,000-plus airline jobs (average 2016 salary $86,000), and severely impact industry vendors, airports, cargo hauling companies, hotels, other travel-related companies, and all who rely on goods and services – including I would add flu and COVID test kits, cures and vaccinations for every corner of America and the world.

Such an action by the United States would also threaten U.S. dominance in aircraft manufacturing, advanced aviation and aerospace technology, as well as aircraft design and production, Reed noted.

Meanwhile, UN climate conferences involve thousands of activists, bureaucrats, politicians and reporters, who fly to distant places, stay at 5-star hotels and eat lavishly, while hectoring us average citizens about our travel and emissions, and devising new agreements to rule humanity with an iron fist. (Why do so many have to attend these gabfests, and why can’t they conduct these meetings via videoconference?)

Meanwhile, Prince Charles and his entourage of family, servants and security staff tour the realm and planet by private jetliner, to warn us that climate change and lost biodiversity are “the greatest threats” humanity ever faced. Former President Obama and his family and entourage still enjoy Hawaiian vacations.

Al Gore and Leo DiCaprio are (in)famous for using private jets, SUVs and limousines to get to climate events, where they lecture us lesser mortals on what we must do to protect Planet Earth from catastrophic warming caused by (other) humans (than themselves). Ultra-billionaire Mike Bloomberg tries to justify his use of private jets and helicopters by explaining that they are essential if he is to continue his global quest to eliminate fossil fuels (and fossil fuel jobs) and end the supposed climate crisis.

None of them have any intention of ending their private travel extravagances. They just think we should end our modest and occasional use of commercial travel. They’re not afraid of flying. They’re afraid of everyone else flying. Or more accurately, they don’t think the rest of us deserve the opportunity, joy or necessity of flying for vacation, business or any other matter. They are privileged. We are not.

Instead of airplanes flying overhead through the atmosphere – and landing at airports near urban centers large and small – they want hundreds of new rail lines, with thousands of miles of track slicing through forests, grasslands, farmlands and backyards, put there largely through powers of eminent domain, however much locals might object. (The trains would be electric, of course, powered by “clean, green,” intermittent, unreliable wind and solar power, and requiring vastly more mining, wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and child labor.) The impacts on property rights and biodiversity would be significant.

Meanwhile, in 2018 China announced plans to build 216 new airports by 2035, almost doubling the number of airports in that country today, to meet “the growing demands for air travel.” China had 552 million air passengers in 2017 and wants to connect its far-flung cities and people more quickly and efficiently. COVID-19 may have delayed those plans, but it will be fixed and will not “derail” the plans.

India has launched a truly ambitious plan to build 100 new airports by 2024, to spur economic growth. The plan will also double the domestic aircraft fleet and upgrade existing runways, many of which date to World War II. Just four years ago, only 75 of India’s 450 runways were operational.

These are important issues. But will air travel bans and a Green New Deal benefit people and planet?

As my CFACT colleague Paul Driessen has pointed out (here, here and here) the GND would require mining on massive, unprecedented scales. It would blanket hundreds of millions of acres of cropland, scenic areas and wildlife habitats with wind turbines and solar panels. The impacts on wildlife, biodiversity, living standards and human rights would be monumental and catastrophic.

For the USA to shutter its airline industry is highly unlikely. However, 67 Members of Congress cosponsored the Green New Deal plan, including Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Sanders later introduced his own (slightly scaled-down) GND to transform America – away from modernity and prosperity and back to the pre-reliable-electricity “good old days” when living standards were a fraction of today’s.

Meanwhile, climate and extreme weather patterns will continue doing what they always have: change. In fact, the worst of all possible outcomes would be a cooler planet, with less atmospheric carbon dioxide, combined with organic and subsistence farming. Biodiversity loss and starvation would be rampant.

Via email

Greta preaches many of the first Earth Day’s failed predictions

More than three decades before Greta Thunberg was born — the Swedish environmental activist on climate change, diagnosed with Asperger’s — more than 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970.

We now look back at quotes from Earth Day, Then and Now,” by Ronald Bailey, Reason.com. May 1, 2000 of the spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions from Earth Day 1970.

Considering the current doomsday predictions scaremonger activists are verbalizing about global warming that will result in the demise of civilization within the next decade, many of those unscientific 1970 predictions are being reincarnated on today’s social and news media outlets.

Many of the same are being regurgitated today, but the best prediction from the first earth day five decades ago, yes 50 years ago, was that the “the pending ice age as earth had been cooling since 1950 and that the temperature would be 11 degrees cooler by the year 2000”.

The 1970’s were a lousy decade. Embarrassing movies and dreadful music reflected the national doomsday mood following an unpopular war, endless political scandals, and a faltering economy.

The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970— okay, “celebrated” doesn’t capture the funereal tone of the event. The events (organized in part by then hippie and now convicted murderer Ira Einhorn) predicted death, destruction and disease unless we did exactly as progressives commanded.

Behold the coming apocalypse as predicted on and around Earth Day, 1970:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” — Harvard biologist George Wald

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” — Washington University biologist Barry Commoner

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” — New York Times editorial

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” — Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich

“Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born… [By 1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.” — Paul Ehrlich

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” — Denis Hayes, Chief organizer for Earth Day

“Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions…. By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.” — North Texas State University professor Peter Gunter

“In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution… by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half.” — Life magazine

“At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

“Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” — Paul Ehrlich

“By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate… that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, ‘Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, ‘I am very sorry, there isn’t any.'” — Ecologist Kenneth Watt

“[One] theory assumes that the earth’s cloud cover will continue to thicken as more dust, fumes, and water vapor are belched into the atmosphere by industrial smokestacks and jet planes. Screened from the sun’s heat, the planet will cool, the water vapor will fall and freeze, and a new Ice Age will be born.” — Newsweek magazine

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” — Kenneth Watt

History seems to repeat itself as there will be a disproportionately influential group of doomsters predicting that the future–and the present–never looked so bleak. I guess we’ll need to critique the 2020 doomsday predictions in the year 2050 and see if they were any better than those from the first Earth Day 50 years ago.

SOURCE

Corona virus is not a climate event

As predictable as the morning sunrise, we are hearing that the spread of the Corona Virus is enhanced by “climate change”. No proof of that for one, and for two it runs counter to the fact that life THRIVED in warmer times. You have seen this chart many times so here it is again:

They are called optimums because life thrives more when its warmer. One may argue that a virus is a living organism, but the point is that in previous times if viruses thrived when it was warmer, plant and animal life which includes humans, thrived more.

Over the years, after studying all of this, I have made no secret that I believe the climate change agenda is a smokescreen for other agendas. One of them is driven by the idea that there are too many people on the planet, using too much of the resources of the planet. This apparently flies in the face of the “be fruitful and multiply” which of course does not say be stupid and trash the planet. Then again, it does not imply that there is a set limit on what man can do with free will and a head turned toward the higher calling, something beyond the state.

Yet when I look at some of the statements by prominent people that are on the climate change bandwagon, I realize there is a link to population control. There is that word, control, the idea that one person knows better than another person what is good for the society as a whole. Like it or not, Socialism/Marxism is not at all about equality for all but is a top-down form of government control where the vast majority of the people do not have a chance to rise into the upper echelon unless pledging loyalty to that doctrine. In essense the destruction of free will, which if you believe in God the way I do, runs counter to God’s gift of free will.

Basically it comes down to, you can make the choice vs someone else will make the choice for you.
But where is the evidence for this, I think a few choice quotes will make my point.

How about this from none other than Ted Turner.

Quote by Ted Turner: “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

Now here are some real nice ones:

Quote by Paul Ehrlich, (former) professor, Stanford University: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer.”

Quote by John Holdren, President Obama’s science czar: “There exists ample authority under which population growth could be regulated…It has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.”

Quote by Christopher Manes, a writer for Earth First! journal: “The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.”

How about these:

Quote by David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!: “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”

Quote by David Brower, a founder of the Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”

Quote by Club of Rome: “…the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million people but less than one billion.”

Quote by Susan Blakemore, a UK Guardian science journalist: “For the planet’s sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we’re doomed.”

A wish for a flu to reduce population:

These are but a few choice ditties to make you aware that there is more than the increase of 1C in the temperature of the planet, for whatever reason, than meets the eye. An exhaustive list of quotes that will scare the daylights out of any rational (keyword rational) human being can be found here:

https://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html

I will end with the challenge I always do for people who have open minds and hearts. Don’t believe me, if it is important go look for yourself. Don’t believe what you are told. If it is important to you, you must do the research and come to your conclusion. That is what freedom is all about and believe me given the nature of what we are seeing today there may come a time when what you can look at will be out of your control.

Remember the words of HL Mencken:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”, “The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.”

SOURCE

Earth Is Greening From Rising CO2, Expanding Planet’s Carbon Sink

Another of those good old corrective feedback loops again

In a break from the deflating global news of viral infections and rising death rates, a groundbreaking new study (Haverd et al., 2020) affirms the “beneficial role of the land carbon sink in modulating future excess anthropogenic CO2 consistent with the target of the Paris Agreement” via the fertilization effect of rising CO2.

There has been a 30% rise in global greening since 1900. CO2 fertilization is the “dominant driver” of these greening trends, with an additional positive contribution from climate warming.

When CO2 levels double (to 560 ppm), this CO2-fertilization-greening effect is expected to increase to 47%.

Growth in the land’s carbon sink – absorbing excess CO2 emissions – will reach 174 PgC by the end of the century.

This is the equivalent of eliminating 17 full years of human CO2 emissions.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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19 March, 2020

Amusing: High Temps, Humidity Reduce COVID-19 Transmission

Paper by four Chinese professors concludes that high temperatures and high relative humidity significantly reduce the transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus.

This conclusion is based on a study of all 100 Chinese cities with more than 40 cases of the virus.

The professors found that a one degree Celsius increase in temperature and a one percent increase in relative humidity lower “R” by 0.0383 and 0.0224, respectively.

“R” is the effective reproductive number of the virus. As I understand it, if that number drops below 1.0, it means the virus is dying off faster than it is reproducing.

The authors note that their findings are “consistent with the fact that the high temperature and high humidity significantly reduce the transmission of influenza.”

They conclude that “the arrival of summer and rainy season in the northern hemisphere can effectively reduce the transmission of the COVID-19.”

The study is also consistent with the findings of a paper I wrote about here. That study looked at average temperatures in areas across the globe that the virus was hitting at the time.

The Chinese study is a city-by-city comparison in the same country that controls for population density and GDP per capita.

SOURCE

Mandy Gunasekara Sworn in as EPA Chief of Staff

This week, Mandy Gunasekara began her tenure as Chief of Staff to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Andrew Wheeler.

“I am pleased that Mandy Gunasekara has rejoined us here at the Environmental Protection Agency to serve as our Chief of Staff to further our mission of protecting human health and the environment,” said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler. “I am honored to have her join our team and help me lead the agency. I am confident that she will be a great success as we work to advance the Trump Administration’s environmental goals.”

“I am grateful for the opportunity to join a highly-effective team of experts. Continuing our nation’s environmental and public health progress is of the utmost importance. I intend to use my time, energy and resources helping Administrator Wheeler and President Trump achieve this noble goal,” said EPA Chief of Staff Mandy Gunasekara.

Mandy Gunasekara is a veteran Republican strategist and communicator with extensive experience in environmental issues. Most recently, Mrs. Gunasekara founded the Energy 45 Fund, a Jackson, Mississippi-based non-profit dedicated to informing the public about the energy, environmental and economic gains made under the Trump Administration.

Prior to Energy 45, Mrs. Gunasekara served as EPA’s Principal Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation. While at EPA, she spearheaded many of the Trump Administration's greatest energy and environmental policy achievements, including the Affordable Clean Energy rule. Mrs. Gunaskera also previously served as Majority Counsel for Chairman Inhofe, where she led committee actions and policy development on Clean Air Act and climate change issues.

A native Mississippian, Mandy earned a J.D. from the University of Mississippi School of Law and a B.A. from Mississippi College.

Widespread Praise for Mrs. Gunasekara’s Appointment:

U.S. Senator James Inhofe (OK): “Mandy Gunasekara did a fantastic job working for me on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee during my tenure as Chairman and she is a superb choice for EPA Chief of Staff. Not only does she bring her years of experience on environmental issues to the table, but she also has a heart for public service that is hard to come by. She will be a great asset to EPA Administrator Wheeler and the Trump Administration in this new role.”

SOURCE

Czech PM Urges EU To Ditch Green Deal, Focus On COVID-19

The Czech premier, whose country depends on nuclear energy and coal, said Monday (16 March) the European Union should ditch its landmark green law seeking carbon neutrality as it battles the novel coronavirus.

“Europe should forget about the Green Deal now and focus on the coronavirus instead,” Prime Minister Andrej Babiš told reporters, without explaining how the two are connected.

“Europe is now the biggest epicenter of the coronavirus in the world,” the billionaire populist added.

The EU unveiled a draft of the Green Deal earlier this month, mandating members to achieve net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.

But ex-communist EU members like the Czech Republic have announced much less ambitious plans as their energy sectors are still largely dependent on coal.

The Czech Republic has registered 344 cases of COVID-19, including three recovered patients. No one has died of the disease in the country of around 11 million people.

The Czech Republic recently closed its borders as well as schools, most shops, and cultural facilities and restricted free movement.

Earlier Monday, the government sent a special military plane to China to collect coronavirus test kits, and Babiš said another seven planes should follow suit.

He praised China for its handling of the contagion.

“Now that the epidemic is nearly over in China, the country is once again the biggest producer of medical material and the entire planet is going shopping in China,” said Babiš.

“We really have a lot to learn from China.”

SOURCE

UN should change course on climate

The UN’s climate action machinery is on the verge to collapse, beginning this November in Glasgow, Scotland. This time the annual climate summit, called COP 26, is most likely to end in complete disarray, even more than COP 25 did last year in Madrid, Spain.

The failure of COP 25 was widely noted with sadness, but Madrid was a minor COP, with little of substance on the table. In contrast COP 26 is hugely important. When it fails, the UN has to rethink its entire approach to climate action.

One of the six principles stated in CLINTEL’s World Climate Declaration captures the situation very succinctly. It says “Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities.” If it does not, such a policy must fail. See https://clintel.org/world-climate-declaration/.

The scientific reality is that, as CLINTEL emphasizes, there is no climate emergency. The radicals insist that there is, but their claim has no basis, not even in alarmist science. The so called Climate Crisis is an emperor without clothes. It exists in computer models only.

The major economies, developed and developing, are simply not going to announce drastic new actions at COP 26, which is what the radicals are demanding. But in reality the reason is economic, which means political. Drastic action is both expensive and intrusive, requiring huge new taxes and unpleasant regulations, both imposing on how people live. No major government is in a position to do these things without showing its citizens clear benefits. Instead they are setting token targets decades away.

Aside: the U.S. Democrat presidential candidates are promising various drastic actions but it is not in the President’s power to take them. That is up to Congress and they are not that naive. Congress often ignores the President’s agenda.

There are several big issues that make COP 26 a super-COP, which is why it will fail. First, it is being hyped that the major economies will table bold new plans for cutting emissions under the Paris Accord. The EU might do this but that is all, and even that is uncertain if we take into account the fierce protests in their member states.

China and India have said they will not do it. The U.S. will have quit the Accord by then. Russia has no interest and Japan is busy building coal fired power plants to replace its mothballed nukes. Boris Johnson has said nothing about new immediate UK actions. He is fixated on 2050. Brazil has a populist president like Trump. And so it goes down the list of majors. There is no one there.

This lack of bold new actions is sure to enrage the radicals, just as it did in Madrid, only more so because Glasgow is being falsely billed as decisive. The radicals are likely to react by paralyzingly the process. It’s their way or no way.

But there is more, much more actually. The Paris Accord was adopted globally based on the promise of riches for the developing world. Specifically, a whopping one hundred billion dollars a year was supposed to start flowing in 2020, paid by the developed countries (especially America) to the developing ones.

It ain’t going to happen. America is out and nobody else has that kind of money. Obama promised it and he is long gone.

This failure makes a huge difference, because all of the present developing country plans for cutting emissions under the Paris Accord are specifically contingent on this money coming. If the developing countries cancel their plans, due to non-payment, then the Paris Accord is sunk. Instead of more ambition there will actually be a lot less. The climate machine collapses.

If this collapse occurs, which seems likely at this point, then the UN led alarmist establishment may be forced to rethink its direction.

Cutting emissions is called “mitigation” in UN-speak. There are three potential “tions” in climate policy — mitigation, compensation and adaptation. When compensation goes, mitigation goes with it.

CLINTEL’s stated position is that the climate science is far from settled and that climate change policy should focus on adaptation not mitigation. Adaptation always works, whatever the causes of change are. This is where the UN should go.

We all agree that there will always be floods, droughts, wildfires, heat waves and hurricanes, so the moderate skeptics can join with the moderate alarmists on this policy. It does not matter what causes the extreme weather, let’s just get ready for it. Same for modest sea level rise.

All things considered the collapse of COP 26 could be a wake up call for alarmism. The solution is already there: Think adaptation!

Time will tell.

SOURCE

Australia: Victoria lifts moratorium on onshore gas, but permanently bans fracking

The Andrews Labor government in Victoria has announced it will lift a moratorium on the exploration of onshore conventional gas reserves, but will enshrine a permanent ban on fracking and coal seam gas exploration in the state’s constitution.

The Victorian government will introduce two bills to parliament, with one effectively lifting a moratorium and allowing for a restart of onshore conventional gas exploration from 1 July 2021.

The second bill will seek to amend the Victorian state constitution, enshrining a permanent ban on fracking and coal seam gas exploration. Such amendments can be passed by the Victorian parliament, and it may not be necessary to be put to a vote by Victorian electors.

In lifting the moratorium, Victorian premier Daniel Andrews said his government is responding to scientific findings, as well as delivering on an election promise to include fracking ban into the state’s constitution.

“We’re backing the science to create jobs, boost energy supply and support regional communities across the state,” Andrews said in a statement.

“We promised to enshrine our historic ban on fracking in the constitution and we’re delivering – to protect farming communities, and our huge food and fibre sector.”

Adding to this, Victorian minister for resources Jaclyn Symes said that the decision had followed an evaluation of scientific research on the environmental impacts of gas exploration which confirmed the need to lock in a ban on fracking but supported a restart to conventional gas exploration.

“Three years of research shows securing local gas supply for Victorians will not come at the cost of the state’s groundwater supplies, agricultural industries or our farming’s clean and green reputation,” Smyes said.

The Victorian government placed a moratorium on fracking within the state in 2017, which has attracted criticism from Coalition governments at both State and Federal levels, which have advocated for a ramping-up of Australian gas exploration.

The announcement follows the release of findings from a three-year study into Victoria’s gas resources, which concluded that the recommencement of onshore conventional gas exploration would not have “any material impact on ground and surface water quality or quantity.”

Additionally, the report found that ” the minimum, low and medium scenarios” for gas development would “have no material impact on existing farm industries, food and biosecurity” but may have a slightly negative impact under a “high” gas development scenario.

The assessment completed by the Geological Survey of Victoria estimated 128 to 830 petajoules of onshore gas reserves have been identified across Victoria. The extraction of this gas would be expected to contribute an additional 0.1 to 0.3 per cent to Victoria’s greenhouse gas emissions, not accounting for emissions released through the use of the gas itself.

Federal energy minister Angus Taylor has said that a boost to Victoria’s gas production would be a core demand of any bilateral deal struck between the federal and Victorian governments on energy investment.

The NSW government has already struck such a deal, securing $1 billion in federal funding towards energy developments, and in return agreed to boost gas production by up to 90 petajoules a year.

“We would like to replicate [the NSW bilateral deal] in other states and Victoria is one we would like to do it with. I mean we’ve been very clear about the prerequisites for that but it is a deal we want to do. I’ve spoken with the Victorian Minister about it,” Taylor said.

“There’s been no secret that we want to see more gas in the system in Victoria.”

The lifting of Victoria’s moratorium on onshore conventional gas opens the door to Victoria striking a similar compromise with the federal government, which may see an increase in gas production facilitating federal government co-investment in clean energy projects.

The Energy Users Association of Australia welcomed the announcement and called on both the State and Federal governments to now boost the support of natural gas.

“While just supplying more gas isn’t a silver bullet that will solve all the issues in our gas markets, the increased competition and availability of supply is a critical step in the right direction,” EUAA CEO Andrew Richards said.

“State and Federal Governments must now move quickly to accelerate development of Victorian conventional gas reserves. We encourage them to work proactively together to ensure we not only get more gas flowing but enhance competition by supporting diversity if suppliers.”

The Victorian Greens labelled the decision to recommence onshore gas exploration as “disaster capitalism”, claiming that the Andrews government was using the coronavirus outbreak as an excuse to backtrack on the gas bans.

“It is truly appalling that the Victorian Labor Government is trying to pull the wool over our eyes by making this disastrous announcement in the middle of a pandemic. Opening up more drilling for gas is terrible for our farmers, environment and climate,” Victorian Greens environment spokesperson Ellen Sandell said.

“What kind of future is Dan Andrews planning for us?”

This was a criticism echoed by the Doctors for the Environment, who said that now was not the time to be rolling back environmental protections.

“As a health professional the timing of this announcement is entirely inappropriate. Gas is a polluting fossil fuel that puts Victorians’ health and safety at risk,” Doctors for the Environment spokesperson and GP Katherine Barraclough said.

“We’re facing an unprecedented health crisis at the moment with COVID-19, and the medical profession is stretched to the limit. Backpedalling on the onshore gas drilling ban at this time is an highly irresponsible move by the Andrews Government.”

Environmental groups likewise slammed the decision, saying that the lifting of the moratorium would work to undermine Victoria’s efforts to date to address climate change.

“Climate science makes it abundantly clear we need to keep most fossil fuels in the ground if we are to have a chance of avoiding dangerous climate change,” Friends of the Earth’s campaigns coordinator Cam Walker said.

“Today’s decision is a profound lapse of judgement by the Andrews government. One that undermines their other achievements on climate and energy policy”.

The moratorium was set to expire on 30 June of this year, and the Victorian government has said it will now commence work on the development of consultation guidelines and processes for the gas industry to engage with communities.

The Andrews government expects that the lifting of the moratorium could help generate more than $300 million in economic activity and support the creation of up to 6,400 jobs.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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18 March, 2020

Joe Biden Promised to Destroy the Oil Industry Last Night

In an effort to gain support on the far-left flank of the Democratic Party Sunday night, former Vice President Joe Biden vowed to stop oil drilling in the United States and said he would implement a ban on new fracking.

"No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends," Biden said. "No new fracking."

This translates to massive job losses for millions of Americans, not to mention how Biden's policy would create an unaffordable increase in energy prices.

Industry supports 9.8 million jobs or 5.6 percent of total U.S. employment, according to PwC. In 2012, the unconventional oil and natural gas value chain and energy-related chemicals activity together supported more than 2.1 million jobs, according to IHS – a number that’s projected to reach 3.9 million by 2025.

Rapid growth in oil production from shale using advanced hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling is creating high-paying jobs and boosting personal incomes in states like North Dakota and Texas.

The U.S. manufacturing sector is being revitalized because of the shale energy revolution, with manufacturers gaining an edge for products made domestically from the use of affordable natural gas and associated feedstocks. The development of America’s vast shale natural gas reserves could add more than 1 million U.S. manufacturing jobs by 2025, according to PwC. A Reuters analysis indicated that low-cost natural gas made a $2.08 trillion contribution to the U.S. manufacturing sector in 2013 alone.

Politically, it's really stupid. Biden needs to win blue collar gas workers in Pennsylvania to beat President Donald Trump.

SOURCE

Will global warming erode our beaches away?

Life is a beach – until half of them disappear by the turn of the century in 2100, we’ve just been told, thanks to global warming.

According to research by “climate experts” published earlier this month by the journal Nature Climate Change, global warming-caused sea level rise “could result in the near extinction of almost half of the world’s sandy beaches by the end of the century.”

Then again, maybe not.

Notice the sensational claims mixed with weasel words by these researchers. Beaches “could” be “near extinction” eighty years from now when everyone older than a newborn will be an octogenarian or dead. The study’s lead author Michalis Vousdoukas claimed that half the world’s beaches will erode “more than 100 meters” and that it is “likely that they will be lost.” More weasel words, as in “likely.”

The study outlined different temperature warming scenarios, including an increase of 2.4 degrees Celsius and higher that would contribute to wiping out half the beaches. Mr. Vousdoukas further claimed that a moderate reduction in greenhouse gas emissions could prevent 40 percent of the projected diminution of shoreline.

There you have it. Cut carbon emissions presumably by killing fossil fuels, and our future lineage can still enjoy the sand and surf!

Count this as one more study in the spirit of Paul Erlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, which predicted mass global starvation within a decade. The difference in this case is the prediction for losing half the world’s beaches is made to occur eight decades from now when the authors will be dead, and thus spared the embarrassment when it doesn’t come to fruition.

The truth is, the authors of this study and so many others with sensationalist, un-provable claims for the next century are merely throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks, if anything. Perhaps beach erosion may be 50 meters by 2100. Does Mr. Vousdoukas and his co-authors really know? They don’t.

What if the world climate instead cools by 2100? Can we still go to the beach?

It is astounding to me how many media outlets picked up this study and parroted its findings, uncritically.

As CFACT has reported, changes to the world climate are ongoing and influenced by multiple factors far beyond carbon emissions from fossil fuel use. Sunspot activity–which indicates global cooling may be in the near future–along with water vapor, ocean currents and so much else, affect the climate – today. Eighty years from now, these multiple factors also will affect the climate, with no way to pin down future temperatures.

Since the end of the Little Ice Age in the late 1800’s, the planet has been warming moderately, and we still have lots of beaches, including on all those vacation islands with ads on television that show gorgeous humanoids in paradise. Yet, we are suppose to believe that in less time in the future, half the beaches will be gone?

Global warming or not, beaches do not remain stagnant, as coastal erosion and replenishment is a natural process. Coastal development such as building houses and roads too close to the water has more to do with erosion than climate change.

Restricting future development further from the shoreline will do more to allow beaches to naturally maintain themselves, along with backfilling lost sand, than reducing carbon emissions. These and other approaches over time are far better and cheaper solutions than destroying the fossil fuel industry on the theory that the climate will stop changing.

According to a study last year by the University of Delaware, federal homeowner buy-out efforts have resulted in more than 40,000 homes purchased to allow flood plain restoration and open space in more than 1,100 counties spread across every state except Hawaii.

Studies of this kind about “extinction” of beaches I suspect are designed to affect people emotionally to fulfill a political agenda. After all, who doesn’t enjoy the beach? No one wants to them to disappear. The message is: get on board the global warming train and demand the (unrealistic) replacement of fossil fuels from our lives and economy so we can enjoy the beach!

Beware of alarmism. If we are good stewards of the Earth, we need not wreck our standard of living to enable our descendants to enjoy the beaches, even as the temperature changes naturally.

SOURCE

Will humanity survive self-hatred?

Most Americans today are focused on how to survive the CoVid 19 coronavirus – the latest in a long line of promised plagues that when the dust had settled took far fewer lives than the panics that accompanied them.

Politicians as prominent as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tell us that the future of civilization is at stake from this latest virus, whose kill rate to date is maybe 2 percent of those infected – except for the very elderly and infirm, with many also hit by other influenza and pneumonia viruses.

It is highly unlikely that CoVid 19 will come anywhere near infecting 300 million and killing half a million Europeans, Americans, or even Chinese – as malaria does every year in sub-Saharan Africa. CoVid 19 is not likely to be as deadly as its sister viruses, SARS and MERS, which took 10 and 35 percent, respectively of those infected.

Yet, to those with pure green hearts, these viruses are pikers. As noted by Matt Cardin, novelist William Burroughs, in his 1981 novel Cities of the Red Night proclaimed that, “Self-identity is ultimately a symptom of parasitic invasion.… Strands of alien DNA unfurl themselves in our brains, just as tapeworms unfurl themselves in our guts. Not just language, but the whole quality of human consciousness … is basically a virus mechanism.”

Fast forward to 1999, and the world premiere of The Matrix. As Cardin reminds us, the Wachowskis “presented a dazzling vision of a dystopian future in which intelligent machines have enslaved the human race to use them as an energy source.”

In the movie, the sentient computer program known as Agent Smith makes the bold statement: “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed, and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague. And we are the cure.”

Today’s Far Left is heavily influenced by Deep Green ecology – the foundation of the fear of climate change. In 2007, Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, claimed that, “Humans are presently acting upon [the earth’s ecosystem] in the same manner as an invasive virus with the result that we are eroding the ecological immune system. A virus kills its host and that is exactly what we are doing with our planet’s life support system.”

BUT NOT TO WORRY! There is a solution. A risky one, but with great promise!!

We are, it is said, on the very cusp of a self-learning artificial intelligence – like Piper (and others) in the recent ABC TV series Emergence. And many in our society literally worship technology. As billionaire Michael Bloomberg said in 2016, “The information economy is built around replacing people with technology.”

[Maybe the decarbonization movement really IS about preparing our AI creations for the day when all carbon-based life forms will be designated for extinction? Why else would they call it a “carbon” tax, rather than a carbon dioxide tax?]

On the other hand, humans have long shown a propensity for self-improvement by artificial means, whether it be plastic surgery or even transgenderism. And the quest for immortality is as old as civilization. But now Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov has created an organization – the 2045 Initiative – in hopes of making immortality a reality.

Itskov recruited several top Russian scientists in the fields of robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, neural-computer interface, and artificial organ engineering to join his project. The idea is that by 2035, it should be possible to control a robot with an artificial brain modeled after the human brain. This brain will be imprinted with an existing human personality to create perfectly cloned intelligences – a human brain with a body that can be updated infinitely.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, transhumanist proselytizer Zoltan Istvan [Gyurko] ran for President in 2016 on the Transhumanist Party ticket. Istvan promised to end death as he drove across the country in the “immortality bus” designed to look like a coffin. Transhumanism holds to the faith that technology is a means of achieving “the long-held human dream of immortality and the more modern yearning for radical individual bodily self-transformation.”

As Wesley Smith tells us, “Transhumanism predicts that these dreams will come true when a crescendo of unstoppable technological advances — known as ‘the Singularity’ — unleashes the power to transform humanity into a “post-human species.” But what if the artificial intelligence gets smart enough to determine that it does not need the brain of a flawed human?

In Mark de Castrique’s 2016 thriller novel The Singularity Race, billionaire Robert Brentwood builds an artificial intelligence laboratory in North Carolina. Brentwood predicts a potential bad outcome for humans should AI become effectively a new, silicon-based species (replacing carbon-based humans) without a human-shaped moral code. [Remember HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey?]

Brentwood posits, “If Apollo (the AI) determines on his own that the greatest threat to the Earth is climate change brought about by greenhouse gases and a destroyed ozone layer, and the unbiased conclusion is that the greatest accelerant of these phenomena is humankind, what’s to stop this super intelligent computer from wiping our species off the face of the Earth?”

To which scientist Lisa Li responds – I believe if we create an artificial intelligence with imagination and wisdom, we can’t avoid the development that logically follows – artificial consciousness. And like any conscious entity, he’ll have a desire for self-preservation.”

So there you have it. Our doom and gloom friends from the Deep Ecology movement – who still want to ban natural gas, nuclear energy, internal combustion engines, air travel, high-rise buildings, eating meat, plastics, and a much longer laundry list of “evils” created by that human-shaped virus known as ingenuity — may indeed one day “save” the Earth from humanity, if only by making the planet so unlivable (for creative humans, at least) that we just give up.

But never fear – we may be creating an entirely new species – silicon-based life forms – that will find ways to survive and even thrive in a carbon-free world. On the other hand, while these new sentient beings will be safe from biological viruses, their less developed forebears are already quite susceptible to OTHER viruses.

SOURCE

Australian PM told to act on greenie ‘lawfare’

The shire of Broome is calling on Scott Morrison to crack down on activist charities that are “destroying existing industries” and blocking job-creating resources projects in Western Australia.

The council, which is located in the Kimberley region wants regulatory changes to give “accountability requirements” to charities that are using regulatory measures to delay or deter new projects.

Under the changes proposed by the council, activist charities that engage in misleading and deceptive conduct should either lose their charitable status or face being fined.

Charities would also be required to declare their expenditure on political activities; the remuneration of management; their top 20 donors; all government grants received; and any financial support given to other organisations involved in political advocacy.

The council passed the motion in late February, calling on its chief executive, Sam Mastrolembo, to make the demands in a letter to the Prime Minister.

“They are able to engage in unethical conduct because there is very little regulation holding them to account,” the council wrote in its draft letter.

“Should a public company or pastoralist act in the same manner and spread false information to the public, there would be considerable financial penalties and reputational damage. Not so for these charitable groups.”

The Australian revealed last week that “green” activists had used environmental laws to delay about $65bn worth of projects since 2000. The legal proceedings from conservation and green groups have forced companies into court for more than 10,000 days in the past 20 years.

In the past four years, the activist groups have used the federal environmental protection act to cause delays to seven major projects in regional areas, including the $16.5bn Adani coalmine in Queensland.

Resources Minister Keith Pitt told The Australian he would support any move to stop green groups using excessive legal claims to delay projects.

“People in regional areas are sick of seeing significant, job-creating resources projects delayed by court action launched by activists with no connection to their area,” he said.

The development of the $31bn Browse Basin has faced delays for more than seven years after the Supreme Court of WA upheld legal protests from the Wilderness Society.

The development of the massive gas field is unlikely to start until 2021.

The council’s draft letter says activist charities are causing unemployment by “destroying legitimate industries that are the lifeblood of regional towns”.

“These activists are causing tax collection to decrease by destroying existing industries and preventing new tax-paying industries from being created,” the draft letter says.

“These groups are funded by faceless, unaccountable billionaires and millionaires, many of whom don’t live in Australia.

“Those whose livelihoods the activists destroy or disadvantage have no means to see who pulls the strings in the background.”

SOURCE

Australia: Turn down tap on "environmental" water to save agriculture, say experts

Governments should slow down taking "environmental" water from the Murray-Darling Basin to save taxpayers $4bn and avoid further disrupting local communities, the head of a government-appointed panel says.

Farmer and agribusiness consultant Robbie Sefton said the inter-government agreement to take another massive slice of water from users to feed into the environment was beyond the capacity of local communities to absorb.

“If we slow it down, then communities can recover,” she said.

“Governments should match the pace of all further water recovery to the capacity of the system and basin communities to absorb and adjust to change.”

Ms Sefton said some scenarios modelled by experts appointed by the panel suggested a reduction in irrigation water usage could see dairy production in the southern basin decrease by 55 per cent, and rice fall by 32 per cent.

Her remarks came as Water Minister Keith Pitt released the panel’s draft report on social and economic conditions in the basin.

Ms Sefton’s views present a challenge to the government, which has until now said it wanted to proceed with all aspects of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in time for completion in 2024.

The report says plans to take more water from users in the Murray-Darling Basin to restore to the environment should proceed only if local communities supported them. It also calls for more funds for research and development, warning that productivity in some sectors of agriculture was declining.

Last year, then water minister David Littleproud commissioned the panel following widespread anger over the adverse impact of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

Under the plan, the federal government has bought back water entitlements from irrigation farmers to restore to the environment, leading to a fall in agricultural production and causing economic decline in some towns.

An estimated 25 to 30 per cent has been taken from the available pool of water for irrigation.

The draft report, which followed extensive local meetings in the basin, found that current conditions were extremely challenging for many irrigation industries and dependent communities.

The report casts doubt on whether going forward with the plan would achieve its objectives.

“The panel considers there is insufficient evidence that future water recovery is being implemented to deliver water in the places needed to effectively achieve enhanced environmental outcomes, working river systems, and improved social wellbeing in the basin.

“There is growing recognition that the overall target for water recovery of 2750GL per year plus 450GL per year of efficiency measures cannot be achieved by 2024 without significant cost to the Australian taxpayer, and significant basin community disruption,” the report says.

With the price of irrigation water very high, recovering the additional 250GL would cost more than $4bn, it says.

“We are certainly saying slow down the 450GL,” Ms Sefton said.

The report says there have been different social and economic outcomes across different parts of the basin. “Many smaller communities have less economic diversity and higher reliance on agriculture, and are more susceptible to shocks (such as drought) as a result,” it says.

Mr Pitt said while the government “remains committed to the Murray-Darling Basin Plan”, it would be “constantly monitored throughout its implementation”.

After seeking further input from interested parties, the panel will deliver its final report to Mr Pitt on April 30.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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17 March, 2020

France: Warmists lie in their teeth

According to the guff below, climate change is making French wine districts warmer than they used to be. We've been hearing this for a number of years. Global warming is supposedly messing up your wine. So how come France as a whole is cooling? IF the areas concerned ARE getting warmer, it's not because of global warming. See the official graph below

France Average Temperature (1996-2016)

Cognac makers are considering overturning longstanding tradition and turning to new grape varieties, as the main cultivar required to make the spirit struggles with the effects of global warming.

Cognac’s star grape, Ugni blanc, which accounts for 98% of the vines in the Cognac region, is ripening quicker and losing acidity as summers become hotter and drier.

The rules that govern the French brandy are among the strictest in the drinks world, and are subject to controlled appellation of origin (AOC) specifications.

Each stage of the spirit’s production, including the types of grapes that can be used, is outlined in its AOC. Cognac can only be made in one 78,000-hectare area of France, using grapes grown in six regions, or crus. This means distillers cannot move production to another part of the country to escape rising temperatures.

The spirit is, broadly, made from wine that is distilled into a liquid called eau-de-vie and aged in oak casks, often for decades. The result is cognac, with Hennessy, Martell, Courvoisier and Rémy Martin among the best known brands.

These brands, and many more, are now working to find sustainable solutions to manage the effects of climate change. Extreme and unpredictable weather has blighted the region: in 2018, powerful hailstorms caused serious damage to 3,500 hectares of vineyards in the Cognac area. Hail and heavy rain also reduced the 2016 harvest, while 2017 was marred by frost.

“There is more extreme weather in Cognac than there used to be,” said Patrick Raguenaud, president of the BNIC, the governing body of Cognac. “We would sometimes have hail, but not this big.”

The changing climate has also thrown out the timings of production. “The grapes are ripening much sooner than they used to,” said Baptiste Loiseau, cellar master at Rémy Martin. “What is key is the balance between sugar and acidity. In cognac we need a lot of acidity to maintain the conservation of the wine because we are not using sulphur.”

Winegrowers have shifted harvest dates forward, and Cognac’s grapes are now removed from their vines in September rather than October. However, this raises concerns that other key flavour characteristics risk being lost. “When we harvest early, we are able to have a correct level of acidity and … sugar,” said Pierre Boyer, deputy cellar master and estate manager at Hine. “But the problem is we are going to have less aromatic components in the grapes.”

Cognac houses and their partner winegrowers are seeking longer-term solutions. According to Loiseau, while Ugni blanc has been the best grape variety for Cognac for more than a century, this may not be the case in the coming decades. “We have to prepare the future for the next generation, to allow them to take the right decisions depending on the conditions of weather,” he said.

A number of estates across the region, overseen by the BNIC, are testing grape varieties that are not currently permitted under the AOC to see if they prove more resilient to global warming and resistant to disease.

Rémy Martin is working with the Monbadon cultivar and, five years ago, planted vines in test sites. After two harvests, Loiseau notes that the grape’s ripeness develops at a slower pace than the Ugni blanc vines, which have been planted in an adjacent plot.

“The role of the trial is to have these two plots and see how they behave year after year, vintage after vintage,” said Loiseau.

Martell, meanwhile, has partnered with the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) to create new cultivars through natural breeding. “We have fantastic small new vines, which are quite promising,” said Pierre Joncourt, vice-president of cognac at Martell Mumm Perrier-Jouët. “They are definitely resistant to the disease so far, and they have slower growth.”

Likewise, the BNIC is naturally engineering completely new varieties of grapes with the help of the INRA, using different plants to Martell.

“We need to prepare as an industry to be resilient and we need to manage long-term actions – we need to experiment,” said Joncourt. “Then, we need to engage all the stakeholders, all the winegrowers … to … do something really consistent at a regional level.”

SOURCE

I'm skeptical about climate alarmism, but I take coronavirus fears seriously

by Jeff Jacoby

A FRIEND asked me the other day if I didn't think the agitated media coverage of Covid-19, the coronavirus disease, was getting out of control. She knows that I have long been skeptical of the shrill alarmism that has become inseparable from public discussions of climate change. Isn't this pretty much the same?

It isn't, I said, and explained briefly why the two cases strike me as very different. But I've been reflecting on her question. Perhaps a longer explanation might be useful.

The first and most obvious difference between climate panic and the mounting anxiety over coronavirus is that there is a long history of viral epidemics, plagues, and pandemics. There is nothing speculative or theoretical about the murderous efficiency with which new diseases can burn through societies encountering them for the first time. The Plague of Justinian that erupted in Constantinople in 541 is estimated to have killed at least 25 million people as it spread across Asia, North Africa, Arabia, and Europe. The Black Death in the 14th century wiped out one third of the population of Eurasia. The most lethal pandemic of the 20th century, the Spanish flu outbreak at the end of World War I, sent more than 50 million victims to early graves — more than all the soldiers and civilians killed during the war.

The horrors of pandemics have been documented and depicted often. Yet while climate activists have been forecasting world-ending doomsday scenarios since the 1960s, the apocalypse never seems to materialize.

Although climate is always in flux, unmitigated anthropogenic warming would doubtless lead to cataclysm. But human societies have a genius for mitigating and adapting their way out of existential threats. Which is why it's dangerous, as climatologist Michael Mann has written, to overstate the science of global warming "in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability, and hopelessness."

By contrast, worrying about the devastation of an active viral epidemic is not merely a matter of "trusting science" or "waking up" to an inconvenient truth. Plagues are real. They have erupted with deadly effect in the past, just as Covid-19 is erupting in the present.

Italy, the first European country to experience the disease, went from no cases to more than 12,000 in just three weeks. On Wednesday alone, Italy's death toll from the coronavirus rose from 631 to 827. In Iran, well over 11,000 people are reported to contracted the disease, of whom 514 had died, as of Friday morning. But dozens of senior regime officials are among the afflicted, which strongly implies that the disease is far more widespread than Tehran is acknowledging. As I write, the numbers in the United States are far lower, but they won't be for long. Governments and industries are putting up once-in-a-generation firewalls to create the social distancing that can break the chain of viral transmission and "flatten the curve" of the epidemic's growth — banning flights from Europe, suspending the NBA season, cancelling marathons and major parades.

All this is in keeping with scientific principles that are well-known, empirically confirmed, and grounded in experience, not politics.

This is not to suggest that the Covid-19 crisis hasn't been infected by politics: Of course it has. Like so much else these days, this crisis has been turned into political fodder — on the right no less than the left. Whenever something bad happens, partisans try to score political points or cast political stones.

By and large, however, the health and public-policy response to the coronavirus has been focused on the practical and the here-and-now: gathering data, prioritizing research, developing a vaccine, readying medical facilities — and communicating to the public in temperate language and timely fashion the most practical means of mitigating the expected harm. Experts have stuck, for the most part, to known knowns and known unknowns, even as they have candidly made clear that the contagion is certain to get much worse before it gets better.

The contrast with the debate over climate change could hardly be more pronounced.

On the basis of computer models whose results have repeatedly missed the mark, climate-change crusaders, including many in the media, fervently insist that "the time for debate is over," that "97 percent" of scientists share their view, and that anyone skeptical that catastrophe looms is the moral equivalent of a Holocaust denier. With intolerant zeal, they declare that contrary opinions must be silenced.

Nothing like that can be seen amid the mounting anxiety over Covid-19. Indeed, as Larry Kummer points out at the geopolitics blog Fabius Maximus, statements from the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization have been "explicit and specific about the uncertainties in our knowledge about the coronavirus epidemic. . . . The scientists of WHO and the CDC have conducted their campaign without attacks, let alone smearing, of those experts who disagreed with them (and there are many areas of disagreement)."

But maybe the most significant difference between the coronavirus and climate cases is this: No one is turning coronavirus into a culture-war battlefield. The disease is not being exploited to demand a drastic overhaul of modern life. There is nothing punitive about the extreme steps now being undertaken — quarantines, school closures, shutting the US Capitol, the lockdown of an entire European country. Harsh as they are, their sole purpose is to slow a contagion, not to radically transform society in keeping with environmental activists' utopian notions.

Apart from some politics around the edges, everything being said and done in connection with the coronavirus is geared to saving lives. The coverage may be a little breathless, and panic is never helpful, but this is no ideology-driven overreaction. The next few months are apt to be terrible. I'm often skeptical, but not about this.

SOURCE

How exactly do they plan to replace fossil fuels?

They want to ban coal, oil and gas. Exactly how will they replace them? Who wins? Who loses?

Paul Driessen

Berkeley, CA, Takoma Park, MD and other cities; California, Connecticut, New York, Virginia and other states; Germany, England and other countries; the European Union – all plan to banish oil, natural gas and coal within 10, 20 or 30 years. A number of US states have joined Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiatives and proudly say We Are Still In ... the Paris climate treaty, no matter what President Trump says or does.

Forget the headlines and models, and look at hurricane, tornado, sea level and other historic records. There is no crisis, no unprecedented warming or weather events, certainly nothing that proves humans have replaced the powerful natural forces that have always driven climate changes and weather events.

But for now, let’s just examine their zero-carbon plans. How exactly will they make this happen? Where do they plan to get the turbines, panels and batteries? the raw materials to manufacture them? How do they plan to function as modern societies with pricey, erratic energy and frequent power disruptions?

How would they – or America, if the entire USA goes Green New Deal – handle a COVID-27 outbreak? How would they manufacture cars, airplanes, wind turbines, toilet paper, pharmaceuticals or much of anything else with intermittent energy? It hasn’t worked in Europe (see below), and it won’t work here.

Moreover, it’s not just replacing today’s coal and gas power plant megawatts. It’s doubling today’s electricity generation, because Green New Dealers want to replace all fossil fuel use: gasoline and diesel cars, trucks and buses, home and water heating, factory power, hospital emergency power, and more.

It’s tripling current megawatt generation, because they don’t like nuclear or hydroelectric power either, and they’ll need far more electricity to charge enough batteries to ensure backup power for all the fossil and other power they want to eliminate. That will require a lot of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries.

Where do they plan to put all of them? Some of those states and countries have lots of rural land, wildlife habitats and shallow waters off their coasts that they can turn into huge industrial energy zones. But what are those self-righteous cities going to do? Where within their city limits do they plan to put dozens of 650-foot tall turbines and tens of thousands of panels? Or do they plan to just impose those facilities on their rural neighbors? Or tap into regional power grids and use electricity that someone else is generating – with coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, and maybe wind or solar? How will they separate “good” and “bad” electrons?

All of these GND cities and states will have to deal with frustrated rural families who don’t want the ruined scenery, desecrated ridge lines, dead birds and bats, maddening light flicker and excruciating infrasound that towering turbines would bring. Don’t want millions of rural acres blanketed with solar panels. Don’t want hundreds of miles of new high voltage transmission lines crossing their backyards. Don’t want their lands seized via eminent domain, virtually at the point of a gun if they still resist.

They don’t want the 25-50-100% higher household electricity bills, the soaring price tags for products and services that go with soaring electricity costs for every business, farm, factory and hospital. They don’t want more good manufacturing jobs destroyed by skyrocketing energy prices – and sent overseas.

Do Green New Deal politicians have the foggiest idea how many turbines, panels, batteries and miles of transmission lines they will need to replace all fossil fuels? How few years those energy systems last before they have to be replaced? Do they have any idea what they’re going to do with the defunct turbine blades and solar panels that can’t be recycled or burned? How many cubic miles of landfills they will need? Will communities want those landfills? Will urban pols just employ more eminent domain?

It would take hundreds of 850-foot-tall 12-MW offshore turbines to supply the green new world electricity demands of a major city – or thousands of 2- or 3-MW onshore turbines. Tens of millions of solar panels. Millions of acres of former crop, scenic and wildlife habitat land would be impacted. They’d need millions of half-ton 85-kWh Tesla battery packs as backup for a week of windless or sunless days.

Where do they intend to get the millions of tons of steel, copper, cobalt, lithium, aluminum, rare earths, carbon-fiberglass-plastic composites, limestone and other raw materials to build all those electricity generation and storage systems, and all the new transmission lines? Will they now support opening more US lands to mining? How do they plan to owHo

mine and process the materials without fossil fuels?

If the mining is not to take place here in United States, under our tough laws and regulations – then where exactly will it be done? In China and Russia? or maybe in Africa and South America, where many mines are operated by Chinese and Russian companies that don’t give a tinker’s damn about child labor, slave labor, workplace safety, air and water pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, mined land reclamation – or the soaring rates of lung, heart, skin and intestinal diseases, osteoporosis, cancers and other maladies.

All these squalid places and horrific stories are far away – out of sight, out of mind. Environmentalists love to say: Think globally; act locally. This would be a good time to start practicing that ethical code.

The more honest politicians promoting a GND future admit it would eliminate a lot of oil, gas, coal, petrochemical, manufacturing and other high-paying jobs. But, they claim, their (pseudo-)renewable energy world would create millions of new jobs. A look behind The Great Oz’s curtain is very revealing.

Coal-fired power plants generate 7,745 megawatt-hours of electricity per mine and power plant worker; natural gas generates 3,812 MWh per oil and gas field and utility worker. That super high efficiency and resultant low-cost electricity sustain millions of jobs in manufacturing and countless other industries.

In stark contrast, wind turbines produce a measly 836 MWh for every employee, while solar panels generated an abysmal 98 MWh per worker. Put another way, it takes 79 solar workers to produce the same amount of electricity as one coal worker or two natural gas workers. Not only will this expensive, intermittent, weather-dependent electricity kill millions of good American jobs; the GND wind and solar jobs will mostly be lower-wage positions installing, maintaining, repairing and replacing turbines and panels, and hauling huge dilapidated blades, panels, hulks and concrete foundations to monster landfills.

Residential electricity prices are already outrageous in New York (17¢ a kilowatt-hour), California (19¢ per kWh), Connecticut (20¢) and Hawaii (31¢) – versus 9¢ a kWh in Arkansas, Georgia and Oklahoma. Going 50-100% wind and solar would send family rates skyrocketing to German levels: 37¢ per kWh.

At the 8¢ per kWh in 2019, Virginia’s Inova Fairfax Women’s and Children’s Hospital pays about $1.6 million annually for electricity (based on typical hospital costs per square foot). At California’s (15¢ per kWh), or Germany’s business rate (22¢), Inova would have to shell out an extra $1.4-2.8 million a year for electricity. That would mean employee layoffs, higher medical bills, reduced patient care, more deaths.

How is the vaunted transition to wind and solar actually working in Europe and Britain? In 2017, German families and businesses were pummeled by 172,000 localized blackouts. Last year, some 350,000 German families had their electricity cut off because they couldn’t pay their power bills. In Britain, millions of elderly people have to choose between heating and eating decent food; many spend their days in libraries to keep warm; and more than 3,000 die every year because they cannot heat their homes properly, making them more likely to succumb to respiratory, heart, flu or other diseases.

Across Europe, 11 million jobs are “at risk” because of an EU “green deal” that many say is suicidal. Meanwhile, China and India are still building coal and gas power plants, making products for the USA and Europe, creating jobs, building airports, and sending billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.

GND politicians have dodged these issues for years – while steering billions of taxpayer dollars to the green activist groups, crony capitalists and industrialist rent seekers that help keep them in office.

Even worse, they and their media allies neatly dodge the most glaring reality. The only way this energy and economic transformation will happen is through totalitarian government at the local, state and federal level: liberal urban voters and politicians against the rest of America. Those are the seeds of resentment, anger, societal division, endless litigation, and violence. We need to head that grim future off at the pass.

Via email

Like polar bears, coral reefs are doing fine

Corals are animals, actually closely related to jelly fish but of course differing in that they have a limestone skeleton made up of calcium carbonate. Their growth rates can be studied to give us knowledge of the ocean and its sea level over thousands of years.

They have lived throughout the oceans of our planet for many thousand years. Over those many years they have experienced both much warmer and much colder periods of geologic time. The bleaching that they have experienced in the view of many climate alarmists is not a sign of their destruction or in fact ill health. It is not a sign that the end of the world as we know it is in sight,

The simple truth is that when a coral experiences any number of environmental changes which could be the chemistry of its surrounding water or its local temperature, the algae that inhabit and feed a coral are likely to find the environment less suitable and leave for greener pastures.

The change in color of the coral which alarmists call “bleaching “ is a result of one group of bacteria leaving and then another group of bacteria taking its place. When the first resident group is leaving the coral becomes whiter and as a new group moves in the coral takes on a new color. This new color is often mistaken as the corals death knell. The algae that moves in not only provides it a new color but is also the corals source of the food it needs to live.

While the Polar Bear has been the face of the global warming delusion, coral reefs have been close behind as an animal that will eventually go extinct if we do not stop using fossil fuels, emitting carbon dioxide and warming the planet, its atmosphere and its oceans. The reality is anything but that.

The Great Barrier Reef, stretching 1400 miles along the coast of Queensland, Australia is also a prominent “poster child “ for the supposed damage mankind is doing to our Earth. It is actually composed of nearly 3000 separate coral reefs, can be seen from space and is perhaps Australia’s greatest tourist attraction. It’s ultimate destruction by man-caused global warming (now called Climate Change of course), is used regularly to pull at the heartstrings of those who sadly buy into the delusion.

In fact, it is probable that no reef has received greater scrutiny, and been the subject of more research than the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), especially since the clamor to save it hit warp speed.

The late Robert M. Carter, Emeritus Fellow of the Australian Institute of Public Affairs, who was considered the world’s leading expert on the reef, wrote extensively about it in Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts. He explained that to quantify the trend in live coral cover of the GBR between 1995 and 2009, which the International Panel on Climate Change contends was the warmest decade and a half experienced by the planet in the past thousand years, annual surveys were performed. Marine biologists surveyed coastal communities each year on 47 reefs in six latitudes across about 700 miles of the GBR. They took samples at varying depths between 20 and 30 feet.

They found that coral cover increased in about half the regions and decreased in the other half as one would expect when nature operates without human intervention. Overall they concluded that coral cover was stable and that there was no evidence of “consistent system-wide decline in coral cover since 1995”.

Other research throughout the world has confirmed that corals are capable of reproductive activities under extreme environmental conditions. There is now a growing body of evidence to support the notion that corals inhabiting more thermally unstable habitats outperform reefs characterized by more stable temperatures.

In sum and a little more erudite: coral bleaching is an adaptive strategy for shuffling symbiont genotypes to create associations better adapted to new environmental conditions, as opposed to a breakdown of stable relationships that serves as a symptom of degenerating environmental conditions.

In the words of the late Robert Carter “the Great Barrier Reef is in fine fettle”.

SOURCE

Australia: Leftist Premier of Victoria is baulking at the implications of the federal government’s royal commission into bushfires

The Victorian government is withholding support for Scott Morrison’s black summer bushfire royal commission, threatening the credibility of the inquiry and a nationally co-ordinated approach to natural disasters.

Constitutional lawyers said a refusal by a state to participate in the royal commission could prevent Air Chief Marshal Mark Binskin, who will lead the inquiry, from accessing that state’s documents and compelling high-level public servants to give evidence.

NSW and South Australia have already issued letters patent while Queensland and Western Australia have signed up and begun processes to deliver their letters patent as requested.

But Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews’s spokesman said: “We continue to consider Victoria’s involvement in the federal bushfire royal commission.”

Mr Andrews is concerned about the encroachment of commonwealth powers into areas of state responsibility.

Mr Morrison has asked the commission to look at whether the commonwealth should be able to declare a state of national emergency and be given clearer authority to take action.

He has also said hazard reduction, native vegetation management, building standards and planning laws should remain a state responsibility, but called for “national consistency” after the bushfires burned through states along the east coast.

Monash University constitutional law professor Luke Beck said the issuing of state letters patent meant the federal royal commission became a simultaneous state royal commission.

He said there was uncertainty over whether a federal royal commission could compel the handover of state documents and appearances of state witnesses without the letters patent being issued by all levels of government.

University of NSW constitutional law expert George Williams said it was likely Mr Morrison wanted the full co-operation of the states because a key component of the royal commission was looking into the responsibilities of and co-ordination between commonwealth, state, territory and local governments in preparing for and responding to bushfires.

“It’s hardly a good start if the states don’t sign on,” Professor Williams said.

“They (the federal government) don’t need (the states to sign on) to hold the royal commission, but they do need it if the commission wants to have credibility and to genuinely deliver a co-ordinated national plan or response.”

Mr Morrison took the unprecedented step of calling out 3000 ADF reservists on a compulsory basis to help the bushfire recovery in early January.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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16 March, 2020

Central bankers should stay out of the climate debate

Politicians have handed over too much power to unelected technocrats.

The claim that climate change is the most important issue facing humanity has become an article of faith for the political class. Yet at the same time, politicians seem strangely happy for unelected technocrats to make pronouncements and even to form policy in this area. Central bankers once did little more than act as behind-the-scenes advisers to governments on technical matters of monetary policy. So it is striking that they have now become prominent figures in the climate debate.

After almost seven years as governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney is about to become the United Nations’ special envoy on climate action and finance. From the early days of his time at Britain’s central bank, he played a key role in making climate change an area for central-bank policy. More recently, his counterparts at other central banks, including the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Federal Reserve, have followed his lead. Although their arguments are usually framed in terms of finance, they generally have far wider implications for policymaking.

Carney took up his role at the Bank of England in 2013 after occupying the equivalent position for five years at the Bank of Canada. In parallel with his two stints as a central bank governor, he was chair of the Financial Stability Board (FSB) – an international organisation set up by finance ministers and central-bank governors – from 2011 to 2018. He has been active in the policymaking debate on climate change for several years.

Carney’s interventions were low key at first, but not for long. Back in 2014, he got into a correspondence with the House of Commons environmental audit committee on the subject of ‘stranded assets’. The concept was introduced by the financial think-tank Carbon Tracker to warn about assets that would be unusable as a result of either climate change itself or of climate-change policy. In 2015, Carney warned publicly that investors could face ‘potentially huge’ losses due to climate change. The thrust of Carney’s argument was that tougher rules to curb climate change could make vast reserves of oil, coal and natural gas ‘literally unburnable’.

Carney’s statements are not detached observations. On the contrary, they are designed as a direct threat to energy companies in the here and now. They put pressure on investors, such as pension funds, to withdraw money from fossil-fuel firms or at least to threaten to do so. Carney’s threat had far-reaching economic consequences. And yet it was made by an unelected state functionary.

In 2015, Carney’s FSB was asked by finance ministers representing the world’s 20 largest economies to set up the Task Force on Climate-Related Disclosures (TFCD). The goal of the committee was to develop climate-related financial risk disclosures for use by companies. Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire US media mogul, was made its chair. Although its work was framed in technical terms, it was another initiative designed to pressure businesses to behave in particular ways.

Not long before the TFCD was officially established, the Bank of England governor outlined the role it could play. In a speech at Lloyds of London, Carney emphasised what he saw as a narrowing window of opportunity to tackle the threat of climate change. Again, this was coming from a technocrat with no democratic mandate.

As it happens, Carney has no scientific expertise in this area, either. Nevertheless, he returned to the theme several times during his time as governor. For example, in December 2019 he gave an interview to Radio 4’s Today programme in which he argued that the world will face irreversible heating unless companies shift their priorities soon. The episode was guest-edited by climate campaigner Greta Thunberg.

Carney now views climate change as an organising principle of finance. As a prelude to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in November (COP26), he made a speech declaring as a goal that ‘every financial decision takes climate change into account’. In practice, taking account of climate change will mostly mean curbs on economic activity, driving down living standards. Of course, politicians and campaigners should be free to argue for eco-austerity if they think it is necessary. But they should not be leaving it to technocrats to encourage cuts to investment without any public debate.

Where Carney leads, other central bankers are following. Christine Lagarde, the former IMF chief who now heads the ECB, has argued that climate change should be central to her new organisation’s role. Even the Federal Reserve, the US central bank, which has until recently shied away from the climate initiatives pushed by its peers, has accepted that it has a role to play in combating climate change. The chair, Jerome Powell, says it is only a matter of time before the Fed joins the Network for Greening the Financial System, an organisation of several central banks and financial supervisors dedicated to understanding climate change. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, one of the Fed’s 12 regional branches, held a major research conference on climate change in November last year.

Of course, climate change is not the only important area of public policy in which unelected central bankers have come to play an important role. Perhaps most notorious were Mark Carney’s claims around Brexit. In May 2016, before the referendum, he warned that a Leave vote could spark a recession. In 2019, he said a No Deal Brexit would result in an instant shock for the British economy. Carney would no doubt claim he was only giving his neutral view as a technical expert. But in both cases, whatever his intention, he was intervening in an important public debate.

In many respects, the growing role of central bankers in policymaking parallels developments with the judiciary. As spiked has argued elsewhere, judges have become increasingly involved in making the law rather than simply implementing it. In the case of central bankers, their role has moved beyond even economic policy. Until the 1990s, the key role of setting interest rates was the responsibility of the chancellor of the exchequer, with the Bank of England providing technical advice. Since then, the bank’s role has expanded beyond setting interest rates and economic policy to contentious topics like climate change and Brexit.

The broadening role of central banking and the judiciary can be seen as an extension of the phenomenon of ‘constrained’ or ‘insulated’ democracy. The defining characteristic of constrained democracy is that limits are placed on the decision-making power of elected representatives. Usually, as in the case of central banks, the main driving force is politicians who are happy to relinquish important areas of responsibility. The relinquishing of power even extends to climate change, despite the fact that politicians themselves define it as being of existential importance to the world.

For the sake of democracy, it is time to kick central bankers out of politics.

SOURCE

The green war on roads

Campaigners are determined to use the courts to crush new infrastructure projects.

On Monday, The Times reported that a major new plan to upgrade the UK’s road network has been put on hold, largely thanks to the Court of Appeal’s judgement in February on the government’s national airports plan. As expected, the court’s ruling that the airports plan must take into consideration the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, to which the UK is a signatory, has given green campaigners ammunition to stop any major infrastructure project that requires planning permission.

In their ruling, the three appeal judges argued:

‘We have not decided, and could not decide, that there will be no third runway at Heathrow. We have not found that a national policy statement supporting this project is necessarily incompatible with the United Kingdom’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change under the Paris Agreement, or with any other policy the government may adopt or international obligation it may undertake. The consequence of our decision is that the government will now have the opportunity to reconsider the ANPS [Airports National Policy Statement] in accordance with the clear statutory requirements that parliament has imposed.’

But despite their protestations, the judges were clearly deciding to give precedence to one decision of parliament – to ratify the general aim of reducing emissions contained in the Paris Agreement – over another – to give the go-ahead to Heathrow’s third runway.

Now that this pecking order has been established, any new government planning policy must take into consideration climate change. The Paris Agreement, says the court, trumps all other laws. That doesn’t mean that governments can’t approve a new runway or build a new motorway, but they must be seen to have considered the effect of those new developments on that overarching climate-change policy.

Which brings us to the second Roads Investment Strategy (RIS2). The plan was to expand over 100 major roads between 1 April 2020 and 31 March 2025. However, the Department for Transport has now pulled the document and is reconsidering it, all in the light of these climate-change commitments. Indeed, the government’s long-term infrastructure strategy, which includes not just transport but also housing and much more, has already been delayed for the same reason.

All this confirms that parliament’s climate-change virtue-signalling is starting to have a real impact. Politicians airily vote for plans to cut greenhouse-gas emissions but with little sense of what those plans actually entail. Then they vote to approve new infrastructure projects that will clearly blow those limits. It turns out – surprise, surprise – that ‘net zero’ and economic development are incompatible.

Building a new runway at Heathrow will clearly increase the amount of flights. Building new roads, in the absence of a fleet of electric vehicles, will tend to make driving easier and encourage more journeys. All of these projects now must be set against the goal of slashing emissions. Either this becomes a purely paper exercise, where planning strategy is ‘green washed’, or many projects will be under threat.

Yesterday’s announcement of more money for road-building and maintenance by the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is very welcome. But if the process of approving those roads is delayed due to endless court cases brought by green campaigners, we could end up with gridlock in the planning system as well as on our roads.

SOURCE

The rise of green conspiracy theories

Environmentalists’ opposition to modern farming techniques is based on junk science and madcap theories.

‘Farming looks mighty easy when your plough is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield.’ Those were the prescient words of US president Dwight Eisenhower. Today, debate about farming has been colonised by environmental activists with little regard for the realities of farming.

In January, the 11th Oxford Real Farming Conference was held just a few days after the Oxford Farming Conference. Ironically, while the Oxford Farming Conference features actual professionals from the farming, biotech and retail sectors, the Real Farming Conference objects to this approach. The ‘Real’ conference was established to fight against ‘industrial’ agriculture. Instead of ‘big business’, it hosts farmers alongside eco-alarmists and the likes of Extinction Rebellion. Extinction Rebellion also protested outside the regular Oxford Farming Conference, dressed in bright red, accusing the attendees of killing the planet.

Many eco-warriors take issue with any farming that is non-organic and, in particular, with the use of pesticides and herbicides. Farmers are using herbicides not to upset activists but in an effort to increase crop yields. These products are necessary and safe. They have been approved by medical agencies, food-safety authorities and governments around the globe.

What’s more, the kind of organic farming favoured by environmentalists is actually bad for the environment. As Chris Bullivant explains on CapX, organic farming produces more greenhouse gases than conventional farming – up to 58 per cent more, in fact.

Nevertheless, the Real Farming Conference promoted an ‘organic transition’ away from the use of copper, plastics and ‘other contentious inputs’. Instead of industrial farming, the conference promotes ‘agroecology’ and ‘peasant farming’ – a back-to-basics approach without synthetic fertilisers, pesticides, GMOs and herbicides.

An agroecological approach would be a disaster for our food supply. Agroecology researchers themselves admit that this form of agriculture would decrease agricultural production by 35 per cent. But no matter. The activists’ goal is the complete annihilation of conventional intensive farming at any cost.

Modern intensive farming techniques have successfully rid most of our farmland of invasive species and other pests. In the face of this obvious success, the opponents of modern farming have had to stoop to questionable science.

At an agroecology conference in Kenya last June, one of the featured speakers was conspiracy theorist Tyrone Hayes. His research gave rise to the conspiracy-monger Alex Jones’s infamous claim that atrazine, a widely used herbicide, ‘turns frogs gay’.

Also promoted as a top-tier speaker was Gilles-Eric Séralini, a French biologist and science correspondent for Le Monde (though he was, in the end, a no-show). Séralini is one of the world’s best-known opponents of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). A major anti-GMO study he authored in 2012 has since been retracted and debunked by four government-funded studies (three by the EU and one by France). The scandal became known as the ‘Seralini Affair’. The case against GMOs is based on pseudoscience, but this does not trouble the agroecology movement.

The unfortunate truth is that these agroecology activists are influential. For instance, the head of the UK Soil Association, Gareth Morgan, is regularly quoted in national newspapers. He is agitating for a ban on all pesticides and fertilisers and wants the government to endorse agroecology. Parliament already has an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agroecology. In 2018, Michael Gove, when he was environment secretary, spoke at the Real Farming Conference.

Farming and our food supply are far too important to be sacrificed to the pet projects of conspiracy theorists and radical environmentalists.

SOURCE

Crazy Joe to Fight Coronavirus by Rejoining Paris Climate Treaty

Former Vice President Joe Biden proposed his plan to combat the coronavirus outbreak on Thursday by rejoining the Paris climate treaty, contending that there is a “well-documented” link between climate change and public health risks.

Biden released his plan to fight the Wuhan virus outbreak and “prepare for future global health threats.” He added that climate change is a “driver of health threats.”

In his proposal, the former vice president promised to rejoin the Paris climate treaty “on day one” of his presidential administration” and “lead an effort to get every major country to ramp up the ambition of their domestic climate targets.”

However, it remains questionable how much good rejoining the Paris climate treaty will do ten months after the former vice president released his plan to combat the coronavirus outbreak.

“The link between climate change and health security is well-documented and will create a growing threat to Americans,” Biden wrote.

“As President, Biden will fully integrate climate change into our foreign policy and global health security strategies, and prioritize efforts to mitigate disease and migration challenges caused by a warming planet,” he said.

The former vice president also said that they would advance the Global Health Security Agenda “to respond to pandemic threats whether caused by natural causes and climate changes, bioterrorism, or laboratory accidents.”

Biden also promised to have health experts communicate with the public to combat alleged xenophobia that has followed since the coronavirus outbreak. During Biden’s speech on Thursday, he attacked President Donald Trump for spreading “xenophobia” for describing the coronavirus as a “foreign” virus.

“This communication is essential to combating the dangerous epidemic of fear, chaos, and stigmatization that can overtake communities faster than the virus,” Biden said.

“Acts of racism and xenophobia against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community must not be tolerated,” he added.

SOURCE

Oregon’s Dem Gov. Signs Exec Order On Climate, Bypasses Legislature

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown took a page out of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s playbook Tuesday as she signed a climate executive order [pictured] after GOP lawmakers fled the state to avoid taking action on a climate bill.

Brown’s order intends to reduce carbon emissions by 45% below 1990 levels within 15 years and an 80% cut by 2050.

The order also directs regulators to issue rules placing caps on emissions for the state’s fossil fuel industry, a move conservatives say would decimate rural parts of the state.

“I’ve heard it loud and clear from our young people in Oregon: climate action is crucial and urgent,” Brown said in a statement announcing the move. “If we adults don’t take action right away, it is the next generation that will pay the price.

“This executive order is extensive and thorough, taking the boldest actions available to lower greenhouse gas emissions under current state laws,” Brown said, adding that she made the decision to help set “Oregon on a path we can be proud to leave behind for our children.”

The Democrat’s maneuver also requires 20% of her state’s transportation fuels to come from electricity, natural gas, and propane within a decade, and 25% by 2035.

Brown’s EO comes less than a month after 11 Republican lawmakers walked out of the state capitol, preventing the majority party from reaching a quorum on a cap-and-trade bill.

They say making tracks for another state was one of their only options after Democrats won the majority in 2018.

Her decision was a long-time in the making. Republicans employed a similar tactic in 2019 when they walked out in June to prevent a quorum in protest against HB 2020, a cap-and-trade climate bill.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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15 March, 2020

Ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland increased sixfold in the last 30 years

The methodology used to arrive at this conclusion looks pretty shaky to me -- easily fudged. But for the sake of the argument let us assume it is solid gold. The question then becomes: What is the source of the heat?

The earth is not a perfect sphere. It is flattened at the poles. So the magma underlying the earth's crust is closest to the surface there. So upwelling magma -- volcanoes -- should be more frequent there. And it is. Subsurface volcanoes are amply documented at both poles. So volcanic heat will be an influence on polar temperatures. It will melt a lot of the ice above it.

And that factor explains why Arctic temperatures are often out of sync with global temperatures. But volcanic activity is erratic so Arctic temperatures will not be different in any regular way. And that is what we do see with the Arctic.

And there is no reason to believe that Arctic temperatures will even out over time. They may be higher in one time period than another. And that is what the article below reports.

So the report below tells us nothing about global warming. It tells us a bit about polar warming but offers no systematic explanation of it

Antarctica and Greenland are losing ice six times faster than in the 1990s, a pair of studies in the journal Nature show.

According to the international team of climatologists behind the research, the unprecedented rate of melt has already contributed 0.7 inches (1.78 centimeters) to global sea level rise in the last three decades, putting the planet on track for the worst-case climate warming scenario laid out in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) latest report. The dreaded scenario, which predicts a total sea level rise of 23.6 inches (60 cm) by the year 2100, would put hundreds of millions of people living in coastal communities at risk of losing their homes — or their lives — to flooding.

"Every centimeter of sea level rise leads to coastal flooding and coastal erosion, disrupting people's lives around the planet," study author Andrew Shepherd, a professor of Earth Observation at the University of Leeds in England, said in a statement. "If Antarctica and Greenland continue to track the worst-case climate warming scenario, they will cause an extra 6.7 inches (17 cm) of sea level rise by the end of the century."

"This would mean 400 million people are at risk of annual coastal flooding by 2100," Shepherd added.

For the new studies, a team of 89 scientists assessed ice loss data from 11 satellites that have been monitoring Antarctica and Greenland since the early 1990s. The data created a detailed picture of how much mass each region's glaciers have lost over the last 30 years, and showed how quickly the remaining ice is flowing into the sea.

The team found that Greenland and Antarctica have lost a combined 7 trillion tons of ice (6.4 trillion metric tons) from 1992 to 2017. Almost all of the lost ice in Antarctica and about half of the lost ice in Greenland is due to warming ocean waters melting the edges of glaciers, causing each region's ice sheets to flow more quickly toward the sea. The rest of Greenland's ice loss is due to warming air temperatures, which melt the ice sheets at their surfaces, the researchers said.

The rate of ice loss in each ice sheet also increased substantially over that period, rising from a combined 89 billion tons (81 billion metric tons) per year in the 1990s to 523 billion tons (475 billion metric tons) per year in the 2010s.

This sixfold increase in the rate of ice loss means that the melting polar ice sheets are responsible for a third of all sea level rise, the researchers said. (Thermal expansion, which causes water to take up more space as it warms, is responsible for much of the remaining sea level rise.)

The accelerated ice loss puts the planet well on the way toward the IPCC's worst-case scenario.

SOURCE

EPA Chief Andrew Wheeler Pulls Back His Agency’s Overreach

Andrew Wheeler recently completed his first year as the official administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and what a busy year it was.

The EPA now accounts for $6.5 billion in deregulatory savings achieved over the course of President Donald Trump’s administration.

A little more than a year ago, The Daily Signal published a piece by one of us about Wheeler’s pending confirmation by the Senate. It noted that the vote would occur as the country was being introduced to the left’s radical Green New Deal proposal.

Well, you don’t hear as much about the Green New Deal anymore. While a lot of that has to do with the absurdity of the proposal itself, from gassy cows to transoceanic trains, a good deal of credit is due to the practical success of the Trump administration’s environmental agenda.

On Feb. 28, Wheeler marked his first year as the Senate-confirmed administrator of the EPA. For those interested in an in-depth look at the EPA during 2019, we would refer you to the agency’s Year in Review, but here are a few highlights that we especially welcomed here at The Heritage Foundation.

Soon, the EPA will finalize a rule that rejects the regulatory games played by the Obama administration in pushing its Mercury and Air Toxics Standards rule, or MATS. Reducing emissions of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal- and oil-fired power plants costs more ($9.6 billion annually) than it provides in benefits ($4 million to $6 million annually).

The costs were as much as 2,400 times greater than the benefits, but the Obama administration went forward with the rule anyway, claiming that questionable secondary benefits unrelated to reducing mercury emissions exceeded the rule’s costs.

The Heritage Foundation’s Daren Bakst wrote that, among other problems, the level of overreliance on secondary benefits would make it possible for the EPA to avoid ever having to justify the purpose of its rules, such as reducing mercury emissions.

This new rule puts a stake in the ground to say such abuses will not be tolerated, and is another way the Trump administration and the EPA under Wheeler is stopping the overreliance on ancillary benefits.

Last August, the EPA published the notification of its decision to withdraw from an Obama administration determination that would have preemptively restricted Alaska Pebble Mine owners from even applying for permits to launch mining projects within this resource-rich area.

Once again, the restriction was chalked up as just another arbitrary regulation that puts the hammer down on opportunities for economic success.

“The decision was like a teacher failing a student before he or she even takes the test,” Heritage’s Nick Loris wrote.

Luckily, Wheeler’s notice to withdraw will lift the auto-block to natural resource development projects that would yield us rare earth minerals—a market that China is trying strategically to corner—that are used in both everyday devices and high-grade defense equipment. Shovel-ready progress on the mine still remains subject to litigation.

The EPA issued two new proposals to give states more control over coal-combustion residuals.

Also known as “coal ash,” this material is recycled and reused in a variety of products, such as cement, drywall, and bricks, and even to make plastics lighter. It can be found in major industrial projects across the United States, including the EPA’s own headquarters.

Unfortunately, under the Obama administration, the EPA imposed heavy-handed regulations on how to manage coal ash.

Wheeler’s proposed revisions to these regulations, Loris wrote, “provide the flexibility for utilities to safeguard against potential threats to human health and the environment while providing a sensible framework to allow for coal ash reuse.”

This could play a critical role in reducing the costs of many contemplated infrastructure projects.

In January, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers released the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which replaced the Obama-era Waters of the United States rule. The latter rule represented the worst parts of government, all wrapped up in one major example of massive overreach.

Essentially, it was a major power grab by the EPA and the Corps that created confusion and consequences for private land owners due to its overly broad and nonsensical definition of what constituted a “navigable water” and was thus subject to the EPA’s onerous regulations.

Upon issuance of the final replacement rule, Heritage’s Bakst said, “this new rule rightfully rejects the idea that Washington bureaucrats must regulate every drop of water in the country in order to effectively protect our nation’s waters.”

Wheeler’s second full year as the confirmed head of the EPA will be full of challenges and opportunities. They range from implementing the agency’s rule to combat past regulatory abuses to reining in its runaway Science Advisory Board and transparently refocusing it on science.

And, of course, the EPA likely will continue to be a major part of this administration’s deregulatory success.

SOURCE

46 “Climate Change” Denying Statements made by Former IPCC people

An enlightening list of comments from former IPCC contributors once they’ve eventually left the political organization and are no longer subject to any bullying and financial repercussions:

Dr Robert Balling: The IPCC notes that “No significant acceleration in the rate of sea level rise during the 20th century has been detected.” This did not appear in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.

Dr Lucka Bogataj: “Rising levels of airborne carbon dioxide don’t cause global temperatures to rise…. temperature changed first and some 700 years later a change in aerial content of carbon dioxide followed.”

Dr John Christy: “Little known to the public is the fact that most of the scientists involved with the IPCC do not agree that global warming is occurring. Its findings have been consistently misrepresented and/or politicized with each succeeding report.”

Dr Rosa Compagnucci: “Humans have only contributed a few tenths of a degree to warming on Earth. Solar activity is a key driver of climate.”

Dr Richard Courtney: “The empirical evidence strongly indicates that the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis is wrong.”

Dr Judith Curry: “I’m not going to just spout off and endorse the IPCC because I don’t have confidence in the process.”

Dr Robert Davis: “Global temperatures have not been changing as state of the art climate models predicted they would. Not a single mention of satellite temperature observations appears in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers.”

Dr Willem de Lange: “In 1996 the IPCC listed me as one of approximately 3000 “scientists” who agreed that there was a discernible human influence on climate. I didn’t. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that runaway catastrophic climate change is due to human activities.”

Dr Chris de Freitas: “Government decision-makers should have heard by now that the basis for the long-standing claim that carbon dioxide is a major driver of global climate is being questioned; along with it the hitherto assumed need for costly measures to restrict carbon dioxide emissions. If they have not heard, it is because of the din of global warming hysteria that relies on the logical fallacy of ‘argument from ignorance’ and predictions of computer models.”

Dr Oliver Frauenfeld: “Much more progress is necessary regarding our current understanding of climate and our abilities to model it.”

Dr Peter Dietze: “Using a flawed eddy diffusion model, the IPCC has grossly underestimated the future oceanic carbon dioxide uptake.”

Dr John Everett: “It is time for a reality check. The oceans and coastal zones have been far warmer and colder than is projected in the present scenarios of climate change. I have reviewed the IPCC and more recent scientific literature and believe that there is not a problem with increased acidification, even up to the unlikely levels in the most-used IPCC scenarios.”

Dr Eigil Friis-Christensen: “The IPCC refused to consider the sun’s effect on the Earth’s climate as a topic worthy of investigation. The IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change.”

Dr Lee Gerhard: “I never fully accepted or denied the anthropogenic global warming concept until the furore started after NASA’s James Hansen’s wild claims in the late 1980s. I went to the [scientific] literature to study the basis of the claim, starting with first principles. My studies then led me to believe that the claims were false.”

Dr Indur Goklany: “Climate change is unlikely to be the world’s most important environmental problem of the 21st century. There is no signal in the mortality data to indicate increases in the overall frequencies or severities of extreme weather events, despite large increases in the population at risk.”

Dr Vincent Gray: “The [IPCC] climate change statement is an orchestrated litany of lies.”

Dr Mike Hulme: “Claims such as ‘2500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous … The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was only a few dozen.”

Dr Kiminori Itoh: “There are many factors which cause climate change. Considering only greenhouse gases is nonsense and harmful.”

Dr Yuri Izrael: “There is no proven link between human activity and global warming. I think the panic over global warming is totally unjustified. There is no serious threat to the climate.”

Dr Steven Japar: “Temperature measurements show that the climate model-predicted mid-troposphere hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them.”

Dr Georg Kaser: “This number [of receding glaciers reported by the IPCC] is not just a little bit wrong, it is far out by any order of magnitude … It is so wrong that it is not even worth discussing.”

Dr Aynsley Kellow: “I’m not holding my breath for criticism to be taken on board, which underscores a fault in the whole peer review process for the IPCC: there is no chance of a chapter [of the IPCC report] ever being rejected for publication, no matter how flawed it might be.”

Dr Madhav Khandekar: “I have carefully analysed adverse impacts of climate change as projected by the IPCC and have discounted these claims as exaggerated and lacking any supporting evidence.”

Dr Hans Labohm: “The alarmist passages in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers have been skewed through an elaborate and sophisticated process of spin-doctoring.”

Dr Andrew Lacis: “There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department.”

Dr Chris Landsea: “I cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.”

Dr Richard Lindzen: “The IPCC process is driven by politics rather than science. It uses summaries to misrepresent what scientists say and exploits public ignorance.”

Dr Harry Lins: “Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now. The case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated.”

Dr Philip Lloyd: “I am doing a detailed assessment of the IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science. I have found examples of a summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said.”

Dr Martin Manning: “Some government delegates influencing the IPCC Summary for Policymakers misrepresent or contradict the lead authors.”

Steven McIntyre: “The many references in the popular media to a ‘consensus of thousands of scientists’ are both a great exaggeration and also misleading.”

Dr Patrick Michaels: “The rates of warming, on multiple time scales, have now invalidated the suite of IPCC climate models. No, the science is not settled.”

Dr Nils-Axel Morner: “If you go around the globe, you find no sea level rise anywhere.”

Dr Johannes Oerlemans: “The IPCC has become too political. Many scientists have not been able to resist the siren call of fame, research funding and meetings in exotic places that awaits them if they are willing to compromise scientific principles and integrity in support of the man-made global-warming doctrine.”

Dr Roger Pielke: “All of my comments were ignored without even a rebuttal. At that point, I concluded that the IPCC Reports were actually intended to be advocacy documents designed to produce particular policy actions, but not a true and honest assessment of the understanding of the climate system.”

Dr Paul Reiter: “As far as the science being ‘settled,’ I think that is an obscenity. The fact is the science is being distorted by people who are not scientists.”

Dr Murry Salby: “I have an involuntary gag reflex whenever someone says the science is settled. Anyone who thinks the science is settled on this topic is in fantasia.”

Dr Tom Segalstad: “The IPCC global warming model is not supported by the scientific data.”

Dr Fred Singer: “Isn’t it remarkable that the Policymakers Summary of the IPCC report avoids mentioning the satellite data altogether, or even the existence of satellites — probably because the data show a slight cooling over the last 18 years, in direct contradiction of the calculations from climate models?”

Dr Hajo Smit: “There is clear cut solar-climate coupling and a very strong natural variability of climate on all historical time scales. Currently I hardly believe anymore that there is any relevant relationship between human CO2 emissions and climate change.”

Dr Richard Tol: “The IPCC attracted more people with political rather than academic motives. In AR4, green activists held key positions in the IPCC and they succeeded in excluding or neutralising opposite voices.”

Dr Tom Tripp: “There is so much of a natural variability in weather it makes it difficult to come to a scientifically valid conclusion that global warming is man made.”

Dr Gerd-Rainer Weber: “Most of the extremist views about climate change have little or no scientific basis.”

Dr David Wojick: “The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates.”

Dr Miklos Zagoni: “I am positively convinced that the anthropogenic global warming theory is wrong.”

Dr Eduardo Zorita: “Editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations, even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed.”

The Anthropogenic Global Waming hoax is unraveling.

SOURCE

How Oil Saves the Whales (and May Save Us All)

Google the phrase “fossil fuels are killing us.” The search returns are a collection of wild alarmist claims, including everything from pollution is killing us to storms are killing us to angry mother earth is killing us because it hates us now.

Before the actual COVID-19 pandemic was declared, a European team declared air pollution a “pandemic” that’s killing 8.8 million people a year. Environmental factors such as air quality don't fit the definition of pandemic, which is a widespread disease, but never mind that. Expanding definitions are usually attempts to expand government power, such as the CDC's imperial march into gun control over the past decade or so. The Democrats are running on some variation on the theme, and say they will ban fracking and even fossil fuels themselves if they win, while claiming they're the party of science.

For years before the actual pandemic, fracking was keeping energy costs low and keeping the lights and the medical monitors on in just about every hospital in the country if not the world. Fracking, which has been around and proven safe for fifty years, was saving lives. But ok, try and ban it because reasons.

Meanwhile in reality, the pre-modern human lifespan was around 30 years. Now, in our supposedly polluted, oil-soaked industrial world, the average lifespan has shot up to more than 70 years. The world’s population has topped 7 billion and is growing. So...how is our use of fossil fuels killing us, exactly, when there are more of us now and we’re living longer than ever before? And when deaths from natural disasters, some of which are supposedly caused by climate change, have decreased by about 97% over the last 100 years?

COVID-19 didn't come from using fossil fuels. It may have come from old-school wet markets.

Not only are we living longer than ever while we’re using more fossil fuels than ever (and we have more proven reserves than ever), we’re now using petroleum and its by-products for everything from energy to medical devices and pharmaceuticals, to fabrics and plastics. And the rise of fossil fuels has demonstrably saved the whales the anti-fossil fuel activists claim to love.

History of Light

In 1859, America was on the eve of civil war. Industrialization had arrived, and with it the beginnings of mechanized warfare, mass cultivation and mass production. Our cities were growing and their needs were growing too. We needed power for our industries and we needed light for so many things.

The hunting and killing of whales, mainly right whales, had been around for thousands of years and was big business. Whaling fleets crisscrossed the world’s oceans seeking out whales to slaughter and bring back to the people on land. Whaling was America’s 5th largest industry in 1859. In 1853 alone, whalers killed 8,000 whales, threatening them with extinction. The global whaling industry spawned tycoons with mansions and their own fleets of ships, private navies built to find and kill these gigantic creatures.

Whaling was dangerous and expensive, as you needed ships and crews, but whales provided two major products: meat and oil. Meat could be gotten much more easily by ranching cattle, raising chickens and fishing for smaller sea creatures closer to shore, animals less likely to crush and sink the ships used to hunt them. But whale oil was practically irreplaceable. In 19th-century America, whale oil meant indoor light.

Humans have always had the need to light the night around us. Predatory animals see better in the dark than we do. Those same animals tend to fear fire and light. Lighting the night extends the day, extending hunting time and extending the time humans can use to do things.

We take indoor light for granted now, but in ages prior to ours, night light was far less common though it was needed. It meant keeping creatures and criminals at bay. It meant being able to study books at night, and it meant being able to write your thoughts down after sunset too. Light after darkness meant safety and science and progress.

Fuel for Progress

The means of lighting the night have changed over time. Oversimplifying things a bit, first we burned dung or wood. Ancient humans would chop down every tree around to support their construction and energy needs.

The Chinese are believed to have discovered and first used coal for fires about 3000 to 5000 years ago. Everyone else was still using wood or oils derived from wood or dung. In what became the United States, coal was discovered in 1679 and it and oil made from it soon became the fuel of choice.

Coal was a much better fuel than wood. It burned longer, it burned hotter and it burned more reliably. It was lighter than wood, so it was easier to transport. And as far as anyone knew, there was enough coal underground to burn forever. All we had to do was dig it up. Coal and coal oil was cheap but it was also dirty.

Like whale oil, coal created its own economy and its own classes of tycoons and workers, mansions and shacks. Coal allowed us to make stronger metals, giving rise to taller buildings, stronger ships and the railroads.

Coal saved the trees that we had been cutting down to burn to cook our food and light our nights. And as early as the late 18th century, whale oil began to displace coal for indoor lighting.

Whale oil was not the only source of fuel to burn lamps at night, but it was one of the best. There was also burning oil or camphene, which was made from trees and a mix of chemicals. Whale oil was more expensive but considered better as it was less likely to explode and set your whole house on fire. It was less smelly and burned better than oil derived from animal fat. It was less sooty than coal oil. Whale oil was expensive, at about $2 or more a gallon in the 19th-century economy, but it lit up the night.

And so whaling was big business right up until 1859. The world’s whale population was dwindling and there was a rising consciousness that these majestic creatures were more than mere things to burn. And as whales became more scarce, their oil became more expensive. Whaling became a less viable business, based on the economics.

Black Gold

In 1859, the creation of a different fuel changed the game. That was kerosene, and it was made from the fossil fuel oil we think of today. That oil had been known to exist for thousands of years but had not been discovered in sufficient quantities to spawn an industry. Slicks had been spotted in the oceans. Ancient peoples used it to patch up their boats. But it wasn’t able to power industry and change the world at scale. The invention of kerosene changed that. Not only was kerosene better than whale oil for most uses, it was also a lot cheaper and the discovery of more oil deposits in Pennsylvania, Texas and other states made that fuel less expensive while whale oil’s price was rising. You could buy about three gallons of kerosene for the price of one gallon of whale oil. Kerosene was the more affordable fuel and it won out. To be sure, government policies had a say, but economics was the real driver. Spindletop popped in January 1901, launching the oil age for good. The last American whaler set sail in 1927. The populations of many whale species have bounced back. Many species, including right whales, are still endangered but instead of hunting them, we now protect them.

Whales Saved

So the rise of fossil fuel oil helped save the whales. It allowed us to electrify the world. Petroleum powers your computer and many of the components are made from it, too. You’re probably wearing something that was made from fossil fuels and unless you’re seeing by candle or the fireplace at night, you’re burning dead dinosaurs. Even electric cars are powered mostly by oil, coal or natural gas, with a percentage of nuclear power in the mix.

And the world population has gone up from about 1.2 billion in 1850 to 7.7 billion in 2020. Petroleum became a major world thing in 1859. If fossil fuels are “killing us,” it’s difficult to see how or where.

Something may someday displace fossil fuel oil as our primary energy source. Maybe it will be cleaner for the air, but it will certainly dirty up something else. Economics will drive that change, not any government edict. We will turn to a fuel source that is more reliable and affordable than fossil fuels, if one exists. And whatever that next fuel source turns out to be, there will be no free lunch. Every fuel source requires something, either chemicals or materials, that have to be removed from the ground and re-purposed for our use. Windmills require steel and fiberglass, which require energy to produce, and plastics to coat the wires. Solar panels require metals and rare earth minerals. Both require batteries, which require chemicals. Where those things are located, under the ground and in which countries, who discovers them and who extracts them, will shape politics and the balance of power of the future.

For now, we’re dealing with the declared COVID-19 pandemic. How are we going to create medical devices from syringes to tubes and blood pressure monitors, how will we encase them in plastics, how will we secure them in cars and trucks and aircraft, and how are we going to move devices, drugs and patients to where we need them to be?

Petroleum and its by-products make all of this possible.

SOURCE

British budget hearts car drivers

The Budget unveiled by the government makes it more difficult for the UK to meet its net-zero carbon climate target, academics and environmentalists have warned.

The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, was accused of undermining the goal set by Theresa May just nine months ago after he froze fuel duty yet again – a policy that has cost a cumulative £50 bn since 2011.

As well as making it even cheaper to drive compared with public transport fares, the chancellor announced a £27 bn, 4,000-mile road-building program compared with just £1 bn for green transport.

Environmental groups said that the Budget on Wednesday was “truly awful” and that it “completely destroys any pretense of UK government leadership”.

The Budget comes just months before the UK is due to host the international COP26 summit, where other countries will be asked to make their own contributions to cutting their carbon emissions.

“It is a mistake to freeze the fuel-duty escalator for the 10th year in a row, threatening attainment of UK’s net-zero target, and damaging the UK’s credibility in advance of hosting the UN climate conference in December,” said Steven Sorrell, professor of energy policy at the University of Sussex Business School.

“Car drivers have enjoyed a large price cut in real terms since 2010 since the price of gasoline and diesel has not kept pace with inflation. At the same time, public transport fares have risen faster than inflation, and bus travel has declined.

“Cheap fuel prices have encouraged people to purchase gas-guzzling SUVs, which now account for one-quarter of new car sales. Carbon emissions from transport are rising, and cars now emit more CO2 than power stations. These trends are not sustainable.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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13 March, 2020

ESA Study reveals the 2019 “Horrific” Amazon Fire Season was actually inline with the 2001-2018 Average

Never has the phrase “don’t believe the hype” been so relevant.

Last year media outlet after media outlet pumped the horror of the fires in the Amazon: “The Earth is burning up – The Earth is burning up.” However, the latest study released from the ESA points to the fact that last year’s burn, although 70% up on the previous year, was in fact in line with the previous seventeen years of acreage burn figures.

“While forest fires are common in the Amazon, they vary considerably from year-to-year driven by changes in climate, as well as variations in deforestation and forest degradation,” the ESA wrote.

The 2019 fires triggered an international demand for updated information about active fires, most importantly in Brazil. However, these figures were never compared to the number of blazes over a longer time period, reads a watchers.news article.

Using information from ESA’s Fire CCI project, researchers studied fire-ravaged areas in South America in 2018 and 2019, then compared the data to the annual average from 2001 to 2018. The report indicated that the total burned area in South America was roughly 70 percent more in 2019 as compared to the same period of 2018– however, only a fraction more than the annual average over the previous 17 years:

The study also highlighted the need to look at the long-term trends and historical data concerning the seemingly unpredictable and fluctuating nature of these areas as well as the role of fire, human activity and climate change within the Amazon.

“These observations show the challenge we are facing – the processes on Earth and in the forests are very dynamic … satellite data is essential to get a clear and independent picture in order to also understand long-term trends,” said ESA’s Earth Observation Program director Josef Aschbacher.

So, Brazil’s 2019 fire season was inline with the average for the past 18 years, with no significant trend implied — yet still, the world’s media used it to obfuscate and confuse, and bang the climate catastrophe drum.

Is there an agenda here…?

This site receives ZERO funding, and never has. Any way you can, help us spread the message so others can survive and thrive in the coming times.

SOURCE

ESA article here

Getting Serious About U.S. Nuclear Power

While concern over climate change has spurred popular demand for more “clean” energy sources such as wind and solar, it has also provided an opportunity to highlight a technology with benefits yet to be fully appreciated — nuclear power. Demonized by ecofascists, nuclear power remains the cleanest, most efficient, and consistent means of meeting the growing power needs of the nation. Currently, nuclear power supplies 20% of America’s energy needs, but that percentage could easily be increased, benefiting both the environment and Americans’ power costs.

Unfortunately, leftist politicians like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for not only limiting nuclear power but eliminating it. Thankfully, this extremist position does not appear to be winning the day. In fact, under President Donald Trump’s leadership, America’s nuclear industry is getting a much-needed boost. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is now working to accelerate the development of advanced nuclear reactors.

Furthermore, as Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) writes at National Review, “In December of 2019, the NRC approved an early site permit for the Tennessee Valley Authority to build a small modular reactor at the Clinch River Site, in my district in Tennessee. In 2018, Congress passed and the president signed the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act, which eliminated financial and technological barriers that stood in the way of American nuclear innovation.”

Both China and Russia have been aggressively working to usurp American leadership on developing nuclear technology. Allowing either nation to become the world leader in nuclear technology would be a disaster for not just the U.S. but the world. Notwithstanding the Sanders-Warren-AOC trio, an encouraging development is growing bipartisan support in Congress for the U.S. to refocus efforts on maintaining our world leadership in nuclear development.

SOURCE

Draining the Juice From the Electric-Vehicle Dream

Are “emissions free” electric vehicles inevitable? No, they’re not. In spite of the propaganda, EVs have big problems. They may produce more emissions in their full lifecycles, are far more expensive than traditional cars and trucks, create environmental problems with toxic batteries, and they make us dangerously dependent on China. Whew! Who knew? Not many people. That’s the problem.

Electric cars, or EVs if you like, are the future, right? They will be less expensive, cleaner for the environment, slow carbon dioxide emissions, and we will be more secure because we won’t be so dependent on oil. These are the things we are being told by politicians and activists. But is any of this actually true?

I won’t say I’m sorry to drain the juice from this electric dream, because I’m not. We’ve got way too many supposed leaders selling us stories that are much more complicated than their simple talking points. Let’s begin with this idea that EVs are the next big thing.

There are currently 4 million of them on the road but there are 1 billion vehicles, so they aren’t even one-half of one percent of the market. EVs are currently 2 percent of auto sales, but that’s largely because WE ARE ALL paying for them through massive taxpayer subsidies. The U.S. federal subsidy alone is $7,500 per vehicle. When China cut subsidies in half in June of 2019, EV sales plunged.

And who is buying all these EVs? The wealthy are. The Congressional Research Service reports that 80 percent of EV subsidies were claimed by those with household incomes of more than $100,000. That means, the rich man’s Tesla is partially paid for by all the rest of us.

Operating and maintaining an electric vehicle is cheaper. But you’ll need to own it for many years before you make up the extra expense of the original purchase. But if those subsidies are taken away, you’re paying significantly more than if you bought a vehicle that runs on fuel. And who is going to pay to dispose of all the toxic batteries? Nobody knows. EV’s won’t meaningfully reduce our oil use either.

According to the Manhattan Institute’s Mark Mills, an all-EV America would barely trim 8 percent off world oil demand. Part of the reason is it takes a lot of oil-based energy to make batteries and much of our cars and trucks are made from oil and natural gas.

One thing many people are concerned about is carbon dioxide emissions. But EVs don’t help on that score either. Making batteries requires enormous amounts of mining and the construction of giant chemical factories. The CO2 produced making the batteries may actually be more than the CO2 saved by getting off gasoline and diesel.

China makes 60 percent of lithium ion batteries and will make 70 percent by 2021. As Mills points out, “Importing batteries manufactured on Asia’s coal-heavy grid means that consumers are just exporting carbon-dioxide emissions, along with jobs.” And don’t forget, the electricity used to power EV’s doesn’t just magically appear. In the U.S., fossil fuels generate almost 65 percent of electricity.

All of this comparing of EVs and traditional vehicles misses what is probably the most important factor in the electric vehicle discussion. China doesn’t just make most EV batteries. It also has a near monopoly on the entire supply chain used to make those batteries. It produces many rare earth metals and critical elements, and processes even more. Who thinks it’s a good idea to allow China to control world transportation?

We at CEA aren’t against electric vehicles. We just believe it’s important for people to consider the full picture. Massively ramping up the number of electric vehicles on the road doesn’t actually solve any problems, but it’s likely to create a few more that are much bigger.

SOURCE

Howls erupt over proposed removal of gray wolves from endangered species list

The proposal by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) last year to remove the grey wolf, or simply wolf (Canis lupus), from the Endangered Species List has encountered fierce resistance from environmental groups who insist that the apex predator still warrants protection under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA).

FWS, a division of the Interior Department, is expected to issue a final rule in the coming months declaring the wolf recovered in the Lower 48, a step that would remove its protections under the ESA. Since the wolf was reintroduced in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming in 1995, its numbers there and elsewhere in the U.S. have soared. According to FWS estimates, there are currently 6,000 wolves in the Lower 48. (There are another 8,000 – 11,000 in Alaska, but Alaskan wolves were never placed on the Endangered Species List.)

Widespread Recovery

In addition to the three states where wolves were reintroduced, wolf packs have also been identified in recent years in parts of California, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Indiana. The largest concentration of wolves can be found in the Great Lakes states of Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin, where their number are put at 4,400.

Despite the wolf’s rebound, environmental groups are threatening to take FWS to court over the delisting. When the delisting was first proposed last year, Collette Adkins, the Center for Biological Diversity’s (CBD) carnivore conservation director, said the move would be “a death sentence for grey wolves across the country.”

With lawsuits looming, the Washington Times (March 3) reports that some lawmakers want to avoid a protracted court fight by passing a bill delisting the wolf. The Times notes that the grey wolf was delisted in the Northern Rockies in 2011, but that was accomplished through a rider added to a must-pass budget bill in the Senate. The rider contained language saying the delisting “shall not be subject to judicial review.”

Identical language, barring court challenges, can be found is a bill co-sponsored by Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) and Rob Bishop (R-Utah) that would extend the delisting nationwide.

“Grey wolf populations have reached sustainable levels, and it is well past time to return authority over their management to the states,” Peterson said in a statement. “This bipartisan legislation will allow states to protect the livelihood of their livestock owners and preserve a health balance of wild animal populations.”

Peterson’s predominantly rural northwestern Minnesota district has experienced a surge in grey wolf populations, accompanied with growing attacks by the predators on livestock. The problem is widespread, but there is little farmers and ranchers can do to protect their livestock as long as the wolf enjoys the protection of the ESA.

“It’s time to allow farmers and ranchers to lawfully defend their livestock against predatory animals,” Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union, said in a statement.

In the United States, wolves typically dine on moose, deer, elk, beaver, bighorn sheep, and mountain goats, though not all these preys are available everywhere. But cattle, sheep, pigs, and other livestock can easily find themselves on the menu of a nearby wolfpack.

CBD and other environmental groups oppose steps that would return management of wolves to the states, arguing the predators could be subjected to hunting to cull their populations. Yet, as the Trump FWS points out, that under the ESA, the agency’s task is recovery, and no more.

Prevent Extinction and Recover

“The ESA is not designed to permanently protect individual animals from hunting or other active management,” the agency said in its proposed delisting Q&A. “The purpose of the ESA is to prevent extinction of Imperiled species and to recover them. Once the threshold of recovery has been met, we can – and must – return the management to state and tribal wildlife agencies.”

SOURCE

Fluorescent pink slug survived the Australian bushfires

A fluorescent pink slug, found only on a single mountaintop in northern New South Wales, has survived the bushfires that burnt through much of its alpine habitat.

Around 60 of the brightly coloured Mount Kaputar slugs, which can grow to a size longer than a human hand, were spotted by National Parks and Wildlife Service rangers after recent rainfall in Mount Kaputar national park.

The Kaputar fire burnt through the area for more than six weeks from October to December 2019, affecting more than 18,000 hectares of land.

The mountain was formed by a now-extinct volcano, and is home to at least 20 species of snails and slugs found nowhere else in the world. The area has been identified as an endangered ecological community, the first of its kind in Australia.

Some of the fluorescent slugs would have managed to survive the fire because they had “retreated into rock crevices” in the heat, the Australian Museum malacologist Frank Köhler said.

But around 90% of the slug population, which also hibernates in bark and trees, would have been killed in the fire, he said.

Much of the slug’s food sources – fungi, moss and mould – would also have been burnt by the fire, but Köhler said these species should recover relatively quickly.

In coming months the slug might be at risk of being seen more easily in the burnt landscape by hungry birds and mammals, said Köhler, but the bright colour could also act as a warning to dissuade the predators.

The unmistakable slug is a “poster boy for snails and slugs” because of its distinctive colour, Köhler said, “but it comes with a number of other species that are similarly threatened by the fires that don’t get the same attention”.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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12 March, 2020

Every Day 10,000 People Die Due To Air Pollution From Fossil Fuels

It's not established that ONE person dies of particulate pollution. I have reviewed many studies that purport to show more deaths as a result of PM2.5 pollution and all of them report very weak effects that are easily attributable to other causes

See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and
here

Climate change is not the only consequence of the burning of fossil fuels. A study published last week in the journal Cardiovascular Research estimated that in 2015, the deaths of more than 3.6 million people worldwide could have been avoided if air pollution from fossil fuels were reduced to zero.

These numbers are staggering. They equate to about 10,000 deaths per day, every day, under the study’s mean estimates. Excess deaths from fossil fuel air pollution comprises about 40% of all air pollution deaths. The estimates in this new study are about twice as large as past estimates of excess mortality from air pollution.

Overall, the authors claim that the loss of life expectancy globally “from air pollution surpasses that of HIV/AIDS, parasitic, vector-borne, and other infectious diseases by a large margin. It exceeds the [loss of life expectancy] due to all forms of violence by an order of magnitude and that of smoking by a third.”

The study finds that “the mortality from air pollution is dominated by East Asia (35%) and South Asia (32%), followed by Africa (11%) and Europe (9%).” China and India lead the way with an estimated 1.6 million and 700,000 deaths, respectively, in 2015. The United States ranks third, with almost 200,000 deaths in 2015. Europe, as a whole, had an estimated 430,000 deaths. Air pollution mortality is global, as air pollution occurs everywhere.

Air pollution is also a silent killer and thus easy to overlook. It ends life prematurely, particularly for those with heart or lung diseases. The study’s authors note that “Humans typically fear violence most, but rational evaluation shows that, only in exceptional cases (Syria, Afghanistan, Honduras, Colombia, and Venezuela)” is the risk of violence to human health greater than that of air pollution.

The burning of fossil fuels includes “includes emissions from power generation, industry, traffic, and residential energy use” but also includes the small-scale burning of biomass (like wood) and coal, particularly in residences in some parts of the world for cooking and heating. Modern society is built on fossil fuels, but fortunately technological and societal innovations have created alternatives for many of the applications of fossil fuels, including the production of electricity and many forms of transportation.

For most people, recognizing the large effects of air pollution on human health has no doubt been masked by the long-term trend of increasing human lifespans – which in no small part has been driven by energy consumption from fossil fuels. But as the paper notes, “The global mean life expectancy increased from 52?years in 1960 to 72?years in 2015 (and 80?years in high-income countries), but in many low-income countries, including sub-Saharan Africa, it is still below 60?years.”

The new estimates of mortality from air pollution due to fossil fuels reinforce another recent study which estimated the air pollution consequences of Germany’s nuclear phase-out. That study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, focused on the shut-down of 10 of Germany’s nuclear power plants from 2011 to 2017.

The NBER study found that “the switch from nuclear power to fossil fuel-fired production resulted in substantial increases in global and local air pollution emissions.” A key reason for the increased air pollution was that “lost nuclear production was replaced by electricity production from coal- and gas-fired sources in Germany as well as electricity imports from surrounding countries.”

The study concluded that “the phase-out resulted in more than 1,100 additional deaths per year” due to excess mortality from the consequences of increased air pollution. Since 2011 that totals more than 10,000 deaths, far more than all deaths attributable to nuclear power in history.

The study’s authors observe that the additional risks to human health created by the nuclear phase-out create tensions for policymakers, who must deal with public pressures on climate change at the same time that nuclear power is deeply unpopular in some places, like Germany. When it comes to energy technologies, there are no simple choices – trade-offs are inevitable.

The burning of fossil fuels has many consequences. The health effects of air pollution are often overlooked in policy debates over energy transitions in favor of the long-term consequences of climate change, which are often projected to the end of the century. But air pollution effects are a clear, short-term impact, scientifically well-supported, and without the political overlay that often accompanies debates over climate.

Consequently, the importance of reducing air pollution deaths might occupy a greater role in policy debates that are centered on climate change. Air pollution policies have in the past largely focused on making fossil fuel burning cleaner, but it may be time to include a focus on more rapidly phasing-out of fossil fuels as a central element of air pollution policies.

Consider that by 2030, based on a simple extension into the future of these new research results, more than 35 million people worldwide may die from air pollution-related health effects resulting from fossil fuel combustion. This is about the combined population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio San Diego, Dallas, San Jose plus the entire state of Colorado.

The question to ask is not whether the benefits of fossil fuel use exceeds its costs in terms of air pollution deaths. The more relevant policy question to ask is whether the benefits of transitioning off of fossil fuels exceeds the human costs of continuing to burn coal, oil and natural gas.

We do not need any other reason beyond the health effects of air pollution to more rapidly transition to cleaner sources of energy, including nuclear power, with far less human impact. If such a transition also reduces the risks of long-term climate change, so much the better. The mathematics here are simple: no air pollution from fossil fuels, no excess mortality.

SOURCE

Biden's radical climate plan would destroy US economy

From the get-go, Biden has built his campaign on the idea that although he agrees with many of his radical friends about the problems facing America, he doesn’t believe that we should completely abandon the free market for a socialist hellscape like Cuba or Venezuela.

Biden’s campaign slogan might as well be changed to: “Hey, at least I’m not a socialist!”

While it’s true he isn’t the Castro-loving Marxist that Comrade Bernie is, the media’s portrayal of Biden as the quintessential “moderate” Democrat couldn’t be further from the truth. Biden’s policies are unquestionably progressive, and far from anything resembling a moderate approach to governance.

Perhaps one of the best examples of Biden’s extremely liberal agenda is his climate plan. It isn’t on the same scale as the Green New Deal offered by Bernie Sanders and fellow socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., but it, too, would wreak economic destruction.

Although Biden has been vague about the details, he wants the United States to reach net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050, at the latest, by dramatically increasing regulations and taxpayer-funded renewable energy subsidies and by forcing people to buy “greener,” more expensive cars and homes.

One of the most destructive ways Biden plans to reduce CO2 emissions is by forcing “polluters” to “bear the full cost of the carbon pollution they are emitting.” This is political-speak for creating huge new taxes on energy-intensive businesses like manufacturers, who often can’t afford to spend significantly more to power their operations and don’t want to depend on less-reliable “green” energies like wind and solar.

According to Biden’s own estimates, his plan would cost a whopping $1.7 trillion in new federal spending over 10 years. But that’s only scratching the surface of the true costs of his radical proposal.

Biden says he will pay for his costly plan by increasing tax rates on corporations — some of the nation’s largest employers — from 21 percent to 35 percent, a move that could on its own reverse the tremendous economic growth that has occurred since Republicans and President Trump passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017.

Even if you believe that human-caused global warming is an existential threat to the world — a delusional belief that simply isn’t supported by the available data — there’s nothing the United States can do to meaningfully affect global climate over the next century, a fact Biden’s own campaign admits.

Additionally, because Biden’s plan — like all climate change proposals — would impose more expensive energy costs, economists have consistently found that productivity and total economic growth would be substantially reduced by even the most modest parts of his policy.

For example, part of Biden’s strategy for reducing CO2 emissions is to force the United States to re-enter the Obama-era Paris Climate Agreement, which would have required America to reduce its emissions by 28 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2030. (President Trump announced the removal of the U.S. from the Paris deal in June 2017.)

The Heritage Foundation estimates that by 2035 the Paris Agreement would create a loss of nearly 400,000 jobs, an average income loss of $20,000 for a family of four, and a $2.5 trillion reduction in U.S. GDP.

And what would Americans get in return for all of this economic chaos? Absolutely nothing.

Even if you believe that human-caused global warming is an existential threat to the world — a delusional belief that simply isn’t supported by the available data — there’s nothing the United States can do to meaningfully affect global climate over the next century, a fact Biden’s own campaign admits.

Breaking down the must-win states for Biden and SandersVideo
On Biden’s campaign website, he acknowledges, “The United States accounts for only 15 percent of global emissions, so we know we cannot solve this emergency on our own. Climate change is a global challenge that requires decisive action from every country around the world.”

This presents a massive problem for Biden and Democrats, because many of the world’s largest economies are significantly increasing their CO2 emissions every year, and there’s no reason to believe that trend is going to stop.

For example, since 1992, CO2 emissions in China have increased by 270 percent, and the country is increasing its reliance on coal by remarkable levels.

The Guardian (U.K.) reported in November 2019 that China has a pipeline of “coal plants that are either under construction or suspension but are likely to be revived … This is more than all existing coal plants in the EU combined and almost 50 percent higher than the … capacity planned in the rest of the world.”

Biden’s plan to deal with the rest of the world’s unwillingness to jump off the economic cliff by embracing expensive forms of energy is to spark a trade war with any nation that refuses to adopt his proposal.

According to Biden’s website, “As the U.S. takes steps to make domestic polluters bear the full cost of their carbon pollution, the Biden administration will impose carbon adjustment fees or quotas on carbon-intensive goods from countries that are failing to meet their climate and environmental obligations.”

These “fees” and “quotas” would raise the price of goods and services around the world, but especially here in the United States, crushing the economy and driving businesses overseas.

Biden might sell himself as a “moderate” to win back disaffected Midwestern voters, but nothing could be further from the truth, as his climate policies clearly illustrate.

SOURCE

EU official exploits coronavirus to push awful climate change legislation

We’ve been just waiting for the panic over coronavirus to somehow end up involving global warming. The Guardian finally delivered, courtesy of the ridiculous bureaucrats at the European Union. Here’s the March 4 headline: “Focus on coronavirus shows need for climate law, says EU official.”

The report explains:

Frans Timmermans, a European commission vice-president who leads on the climate emergency [sic], said the different crises facing Europe underscored the need for a climate law in order not to lose track of reducing emissions.
He’s touting the new EU climate law draft unveiled on March 4, its version of the “Green New Deal,” which will have to be approved by the European Parliament. It will be a heavier-than-normal lift to obtain the parliament’s rubber stamp because the law mandates that EU carbon dioxide emissions reach net-zero by 2050, a radical goal, and it’s legally binding. As the Guardian reports:

If an EU member state fails to make progress, the commission can take it to the European court of justice, which has the power to impose hefty daily fines for non-compliance.
Suppose bankrupt Greece isn’t reducing its emissions fast enough to meet the 2050 goal. Then the EU will throw “hefty” fines at it. Because Greece won’t be able to pay — being bankrupt, you know — the rest of the EU (read: Germany) effectively will have to pay. The proposed law is, therefore, a recipe for disaster that will increasingly rely on Germany to rescue other EU nations.

Back to the headline. What Timmermans is saying is that the European Parliament needs to pass its new climate law in short order so that it can be used to shape everything else. The draft legislation actually specifies that all subsequent legislation, say, on farming, labor, or coronavirus, will have to be consistent with the 2050 net-zero carbon emissions target.

Meanwhile, the new commission president, Ursula Von der Leyen, flanked by none other than teenage climate alarmist Greta Thunberg, elaborated: The new law “will be our compass for the next 30 years and it will guide us every step.”

Of course, there is no way that any developed economy will emit net-zero carbon dioxide in less than 30 years unless it turns to nuclear power, a path which European nations seem adamantly opposed to.

After all, Germany shut down its perfectly good nuclear reactors because of a one-off disaster in which a tsunami hit a Japanese nuclear plant where the emergency power generator was foolishly located. This stunning idiocy only led to increased German reliance upon coal-fired electricity, something that will be simply forbidden under the proposed law.

Alas, the EU’s mandated economic suicide still isn’t good enough for Thunberg, who calls it “a surrender” because it doesn’t ensure global temperatures will not rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above early 19th century values, a benchmark that is simply silly.

Global surface temperatures are around one degree above where they were in 1900, and it’s easy to show that a bit less than half of that rise happened before we had put enough carbon dioxide in the air to cause it. Since 1900, in the developed world, life expectancy has more than doubled. In the United States, per capita constant-dollar wealth increased drastically over that same time period. Anyone who thinks that raising the surface temperature a mere half-degree further will wipe out all of this and more is abandoning logic.

In reality, economically vibrant societies are increasingly immune to the vagaries of severe weather events. As convincingly shown by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr., weather damages as a percent of global GDP are going down, not up. Sure, dollar-cost damages are increasing, but only because we have more and more stuff to get hit.

Make no mistake: The proposed EU climate law will reverse a lot more progress and a lot more economic and environmental resilience than any probable climate change or, for that matter, coronavirus.

SOURCE

Federal Data Confirms Minnesota Solar Panels Don’t Work Well in Winter

Recently-released data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) confirms what many of us already knew, that solar panels don’t work well in our Minnesota winters. The data is interesting because this is the first time EIA has shown the productivity (or capacity factor) of solar panels on a monthly basis

While solar panels generated nearly 30 percent of their potential output in July of 2018, electricity generation from Minnesota’s solar fleet dropped to 5.6 percent by December.

There are multiple reasons for this. One, the days get a lot shorter in the winter time, thus providing less “fuel” for the panels to generate electricity with. Secondly, snowfall greatly diminishes the productivity of solar panels because the color white reflects light, and according to Ralph Jacobson, the Founder of IPS Solar, it is “too expensive” to clear snow off of the solar panels.

This should be a big red flag, because if it’s “too expensive” to operate your business when it snows, that business probably shouldn’t be operating in Minnesota. This begs the question, why are people building solar panels in Minnesota?

The answer boils down to federal subsidies, and Minnesota government mandates.

In 2013, the legislature passed the Solar Energy Standard, which mandated that 1.5 percent of the state’s electricity must come from solar energy by the end of the year 2020. This is why Minnesota has built solar panels, while other northern states with similar climates do not have nearly as many.

Center of the American Experiment has argued that solar panels have a big cost but only provide a small amount of electricity, and the federal data supports this position. Despite Minnesota’s terrible solar resources, Xcel Energy wants to spend billions of dollars building 4,000 MW of solar not because it’s the most productive way to generate electricity, but because it will get them the most government-guaranteed corporate profits.

SOURCE

Australia: Hydrogen test at Stanwell

This is a reasonable idea but cost is likely to be the killer

A SMALL-scale hydrogen power test station is on the cards for central Queensland to operate alongside one of the state's biggest existing power plants.

The Morrison Government will today announce $125 million to go towards a feasibility study for cutting edge renewable energy technology. It will go towards seeing if a hydrogen plant can operate alongside the Stanwell power station near Rockhampton and how it can benefit to the existing power grid.

The proposal would be the largest hydrogen electrolysis plant in Australia if it goes ahead.

Being located next to the power plant would allow it to be ramped up to generate hydrogen at peak times when there's an excess of solar power being generated. It could then be used to pump power back into the tern when needed.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor said hydrogen production could be a job creator as well as helping with the power supply.

Australian Renewable Energy Agency CEO Darren Miller said if it was feasible it could lead to more hydrogen plants across the country. "This will create opportunities across the domestic economy and help to position Australia to become a major renewable energy exporter!"

From the Brisbane "Courier Mail" of 11/3/20

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

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11 March, 2020

Electric car revolution almost here

The above heading is a prophecy of sorts but what the article reports is poor support for it. It says that a lot of car manufacturers are gearing up to make electric cars. Big deal! After the big goof Ford made with the Edsel we know that car manufacturers can guess wrong.

Battery cars are completely unsuitable for cold climates -- like most of Europe and North America. Northern heating requirements slash battery life to ribbons. Let us see you drive your battery car to work in a Winnipeg winter. Battery cars will only ever be toys

What is unusual about the changes in the car industry is that businesses know they are coming and they are so big that in the near future they will not be able even to sell the products that have brought them so much success. As Herbert Diess, chief executive of Volkswagen, told a collection of senior executives in January: “The time of classic manufacturers is over.”

One of the reasons that shares in Tesla have soared — they are still up almost 70 per cent in 2020, despite the coronavirus sell-off — is the recognition that the skill of developing an internal combustion engine and managing a traditional automotive supply chain is different from building an electric computer on wheels. Tesla has a clear head start. It sold 367,500 electric vehicles last year, compared with Volkswagen’s 79,000.

VW is investing $US30bn ($46bn) trying to catch up, while General Motors said last week it would spend $US20bn by 2025 after claiming to have made a breakthrough on the range and charging speed of its batteries.

Geely, the Chinese owner of Volvo, is developing satellites to support its autonomous and electric vehicles, while Toyota thinks hydrogen cars could be a big part of the future.

These are still early days in the revolution. Carlos Tavares, chief executive of PSA Group (formerly Peugeot Citroen), said last week the only people buying electric cars were “green addicts”. There are not enough charging points and the cars are too expensive.

However, change is happening; it’s just that predicting much else about the revolution is foolhardy

SOURCE

The Government’s energy policy could cripple global Britain

As Britain relaunches itself as an independent trading nation, its fate will depend on how competitive it is. We have lots going for us, but we also have a heavily regulated economy, high labour costs and low productivity, so we may be in for a shock. And there is one slug of self-inflicted burdens that we are in the process of making much worse, perhaps crippling: our energy policy.

Britain has uniquely legislated to reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions in 2050, which means going cold turkey on the 85% of our energy that currently comes from gas, oil and coal. That means finding ways to run not just the electricity grid, which is about 20% of our energy, without net emissions, but all our heating, transport and industrial processes too. Surprisingly, the Committee on Climate Change failed to produce a detailed costing of this ambition before recommending it, but reputable estimates put the cost at around £3 trillion in the absence of any breakthrough in nuclear fusion or carbon capture.

The cost of some existing policies is already being passed on to consumers at the rate of £10 billion a year. Subsidies for wind, solar and biomass electricity have made household electricity prices about 35% higher than they would otherwise have been, according to the government’s own estimates. The prices paid by businesses – which are also passed on to consumers in the prices of products and services – are more like 60% higher. Industrial electricity prices here are among the highest in the world. That is a big drag on competitiveness, and is a large part of the explanation of our falling within-country emissions. Carbon dioxide has been one of the most successful exports of the last decade.

The main beneficiaries from these policies are the renewable energy industry, and the government itself, which charges VAT on top of these subsidies. Fortunately for politicians the pain of these increases has been dulled by two factors: first, a fall in gas and oil prices during the past decade; and second, a decline in the quantity of electricity consumed. Had this not happened, as Professor Dieter Helm of Oxford University wrote in 2017, “there would then have been a serious capacity crunch and much higher prices.”

The world, and Asia in particular, is electrifying more and more processes, because it is such a versatile and efficient source of power, but we and the EU seem to be moving in the other direction. One of the reasons for the fall in electricity consumption is the emigration of industry to cheaper locations. An EU study published last year showed that industrial electricity in the EU28 is not only 50% more expensive than in the G20, it is actually more expensive than domestic retail electricity in the G20. No wonder factories are moving. We have already lost our aluminium industry and much of our steel industry. We still need these materials but we import them from countries with higher emissions, which makes no sense. Even our successful digital economy is not immune to energy costs: server farms are huge users of power. High energy costs are a non-tariff barrier against our own exports.

Energy is not just another raw material, like paper or cement. It’s the very source of wealth. An economy is a thermodynamic engine, creating useful structures and patterns by harnessing energy to undo entropy. High energy costs are extremely dangerous for an economy over time. They become embedded in the costs of the capital they create and they deter experimental innovation. The Germans are now recognising that their extremely expensive Energiewende has poisoned their export economy, and only an undervalued exchange rate is keeping the show on the road.

In the past few weeks, the government has made a string of announcements relating to energy, all attempting to appease the green lobby. Every single one will raise costs to consumers but reward special-interest lobbies of crony capitalists: building HS2 at public expense, complete with its own trackside wind farms; backing off Heathrow’s privately funded third runway; bringing forward the date of banning diesel and electric cars; banning coal and wet-wood stoves used by the less well off in rural areas; mandating the use of subsidised ethanol from wheat; reopening subsidy schemes to wind and solar power. In that last case, ministers argue that onshore wind power is now cheaper than fossil-fuel power and no longer needs subsidies, so they have reopened the subsidies for it. Eh?

The falling cost of offshore wind power is a big myth, by the way. The system cost, connections and back-up required to stabilise a grid relying heavily on intermittent energy is huge, growing and not included in the headline figure for wind subsidy. On top of that, two studies have now confirmed that capital expenditure per megawatt of new capacity in the wind industry has not fallen significantly. Gordon Hughes, CapellAris and John Constable presented public-domain data suggesting that capex in offshore wind was falling only slightly due to technical progress, and that this was completely offset by moving into deeper water. And economists at the University of Aberdeen used a different data set to come to almost the same conclusion, that it will still cost £100 per MWh to get electricity from UK offshore wind farms.

So why are the operators of offshore wind farms bidding lower prices than this? The subsidies take the form of “Contracts for Difference”, but these are misnamed. They are not binding futures contracts, obliging the generator to supply at a bid price. The penalty for non-supply is trivial. The CfDthus gives the generator an entitlement to a price, but puts them under no binding obligation to supply.

As John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation puts it: “Consequently, generators have bid very low in order to obtain an entitlement to a price, and an option for development. This option secures a market position, inhibits competition, and generates excellent public relations. In essence the generators are gambling on future market prices rising above the CfD for whatever reason, in which case they will bail out and take the market price.”

In the case of transport, fuel tax is already exceedingly high in this country, leading many hauliers who come here from the continent to carry extra diesel tanks so they don’t have to refuel while here. Insisting on biofuels will increase the underlying cost and that will be multiplied by Fuel Duty (is that the Chancellor’s cunning plan?). In any case, it takes almost as much diesel and gas to plant, fertilise and harvest a crop of wheat as you get ethanol out of it.

Britain deludes itself that it is setting an example to the world by decarbonising faster. But China, India and even Germany are still building hundreds of coal-fired power stations. The UK is unlikely to be able to manufacture attractive high-value exports if its energy costs are higher than the competition.

Nor can we sell the energy technologies themselves. The experience of Scotland clearly shows that even when government colludes with the renewables industry, there is almost no local employment in the manufacture of wind turbine parts, because renewables are already expensive, and insisting on substantial local content drives up costs still further. Wind turbines will not be made in the United Kingdom, unless labour costs are driven down, and the only way to do that is to force down living standards. Does that sound like good politics to you? Me neither.

The purpose of decarbonisation is to alter the climate for the better. Yet nobody in their right mind thinks that net zero emissions will prevent wet winters and flooding. Such bad weather happened in the past anyway, and flood prevention and mitigation would be necessary even if the climate ceased warming. Rather than wasting money on subsidies to renewables, how about some flood defences? They work!

Our energy policy is centrally planned but it resembles the practice under fascist regimes rather than socialist ones, because it rewards favoured private firms. As Dieter Helm wrote in 2017: “In the current decade, the government has moved from mainly market-determined investments to a new context in which almost all new electricity investments are determined by the state through direct and often technology-specific contracts. Government has got into the business of ‘picking winners’. Unfortunately, losers are good at picking governments, and inevitably – as in most such picking-winners strategies – the results end up being vulnerable to lobbying, to the general detriment of household and industrial customers.”

I fear that the Conservatives have fallen into the error of thinking of the nation as a business. This is both illiberal and makes the classic mistake of answering to the interests of producers rather than consumers. Businesses are command economies on the inside (which is why business people generally speaking do not make good politicians). But populations and the nation states they create to represent their common interests are not businesses: they are voluntary collaborations. The green agenda, as with any ‘crisis’, gives a pretext for the creation of a command economy. If we continue down this road it will not only make us uncompetitive, but also, like all the other corrupt and inefficient command economies before us, very, very dirty.

SOURCE

CO2 Coalition Member Craig Idso Files Petition to Repeal EPA CO2 Endangerment Finding

The Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (hereafter, Center) announces it has filed a petition with the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), asking it to repeal its Endangerment Finding for Greenhouse Gases Under Section 202(a) of the Clean Air Act (74 FR 66,496, Dec 15, 2009).

Over ten years have elapsed since the EPA Administrator made this judgment in its so-called CO2 Endangerment Finding. During that time a considerable amount of scientific research has been conducted on the potential impacts of rising greenhouses gases on humanity and the natural world. The additional knowledge obtained from such research and observations reveal quite clearly that rising greenhouse gases do not represent what EPA identified in 2009 to be a current or future threat to public welfare.

According to the Center's Chairman, Dr. Craig Idso, who is the lead author of the petition, "multiple observations made over the past decade confirm the projected risks and adverse consequences of rising greenhouse gases are failing to materialize. The truth is, in stark contrast to the Endangerment Finding, CO2 emissions and fossil fuel use during the Modern Era have actually enhanced life and improved humanity's standard of living. And they will likely continue to do so as more fossil fuels are utilized."

The 139-page petition by the Center highlights multiple peer-reviewed scientific studies in support of this thesis. In particular, the petition shows (1) there is nothing unusual or unnatural about Earth's current warmth or rate of warming, (2) historic and modern records of atmospheric CO2 and temperature violate established principles of causation, (3) model-based temperature projections since 1979 artificially inflate warming (compered to observations) by a factor of three, invalidating the models and all their ancillary claims associated with greenhouse gas-induced warming, and that (4) key adverse effects of greenhouse gas-induced warming, including extreme weather events, temperature-induced mortality and sea level rise, are not occurring despite EPA predictions they should be worsening.

The petition also presents compelling evidence that CO2 emissions and fossil energy use provide critical benefits that act to enhance health and welfare for humanity and the natural world. According to Dr. Idso, "Without adequate supplies of low-cost centralized energy derived from fossil fuels, few, if any, of the major technological and innovative advancements of the past two centuries that have enhanced and prolonged human life could have occurred. Additionally, without the increased CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use over the past two centuries, Earth's terrestrial biosphere would be nowhere near as vigorous or productive as it is today. Rather, it would be devoid of the growth-enhancing, water-saving and stress-alleviating benefits it has reaped in managed and unmanaged ecosystems from rising levels of atmospheric CO2 since the Industrial Revolution began."

Such demonstrable facts presented in the Center's petition provide clear evidence that EPA's 2009 Endangerment Finding is scientifically flawed. Consequently, the Center calls upon the EPA to overturn its 2009 Endangerment Finding.

The petition can be viewed or downloaded at:

http://www.co2science.org/articles/V23/mar/EPAPetitionCO2ScienceMarch2020.pdf.Questions

Via email

What 'Climate Change' Is Really All About

At the polls this year voters have a rare opportunity to slow or even halt the runaway scaremongering campaign of global warming, a.k.a. climate change. Or as yours truly refers to it, hucksterism by profiteers intent on separating people from their money.

As I’ve written for nearly a quarter of a century, global warming never has been about the globe getting warmer. It’s always been about control and money. Warmists’ control and your money.

It’s not difficult to discern a candidate’s stance on the issue. The warmists in particular are loud about their positions. If you’ve already been persuaded that man is creating unprecedented, dangerous increases in earth’s temperature, you’ve been misled.

The real science is clear. Man is not dangerously raising the planet’s temperature. Doom is not just around the corner. Don’t believe me? Check out the in-depth studies here.

Voters shouldn’t be stampeded into costly fixes for what’s not broken. What we should be asking is, “Why would anyone want me to believe something that’s not true?”

There are trillions of reasons. They’re called dollars. (See above: what global warming always has been about.)

Common sense helps cut through the clatter. What on earth do alarmists even mean when excitedly squalling about earth’s temperature?

Well, they don’t mean local temperatures. They’re up and down all the time.

No, like politics, the climate that really matters is local. Global “averages” are meaningless. The “average” human being has ½ penis, ½ vagina, one testicle, and one female breast. Average is a statistical caricature. It’s not real. It doesn’t exist except on paper — or in computer models in the case of global warming’s “settled science.”

Voters should also ask why environmental alarmists promote endless fear of any change in nature. By their logic, any warmer change automatically is man’s fault. Doesn’t it then follow that any cooler change means we should celebrate whatever we did to bring that about? Don’t count on it. In the 1970s, when things actually got cooler, the same breed of opportunists screamed that a new ice age was near, and man was to blame.

What’s a man to do? If it’s hotter, it’s his fault. If it’s cooler, ditto. Either way, guess who will be forced to pay to fix it? Yep. Man.

The reality is that climate has continually changed since earth’s first sunrise. It will continue to change as long as the planet exists. Greenland once grew grapes. London’s River Thames used to freeze over. Change is the constant. Unchanging climate exists in the same place as “average global temperature” — in the imagination. That’s also the only place you’ll find the predicted horrifically high temperatures.

But as long as “change” is considered the problem, these exploiters of fear will reap perpetual paydays. Here is what actually is settled about global-warming alarmism: Nothing will stop the pretend “problem,” no matter how much you pay in taxes, regulatory costs, penalties, and interest.

You’ll always be told, no matter how much you’ve already paid, that you must pay more. And more again, ad infinitum. It’s the perfect marriage of faux science badly applied and criminal shakedowns that would make the mob envious.

Regarding change, climate physicist/meteorologist Richard Lindzen said, “We are scanning for small changes … we are talking about tenths of a degree … and viewing them as ominous signs of something.”

Such infinitesimal differences are doubly absurd when you realize temperatures alarmists tout aren’t even real. They shamelessly “adjust” already dubious raw data, pushing earlier readings down and later readings up — and, voila! The numbers fall in line with their talking points. Like magic. Or something.

Global warming alarmism began with apocalyptic predictions of dying polar bears, mass starvation, and metropolis-submerging tidal waves. Four decades have passed. No such events have occurred. Yet every 10 or 12 years we’re told we have only 10 or 12 years left before “it’s too late!”

But Gaia-worshiping alarmists continually harp on “change” as if it were an evergreen hymn. Change itself has become the thing to fear, particulars aside. Who needs particulars when they’ve got taxes, regulatory costs, penalties, and interest?

If a purported “increase” of a few hundredths of a degree over decades justifies the current shakedown of hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide, imagine how much in taxes, regulatory costs, penalties, and interest climate-change cashiers will ring up if things actually do get warmer — say, by a whole degree or two.

When you cast ballots this year, don’t be duped. Global warming, or its alias, climate change, is not about you making the globe warmer. It never has been. Its motives are as old as politics.

In addition to the site linked above, you can catch up on the facts about the global warming controversy at www.CornwallAlliance.org. Enjoy and be enlightened.

But in this campaign year, as always, be leery of global warming advocates who stand to gain taxes, regulatory costs, penalties, and interest if they persuade you.

SOURCE

Minding the carbon offset gap: bringing net emissions down to zero

Australia’s carbon offset industry will need to grow exponentially if the country is to reach a net zero emissions target, underscoring the challenge facing policymakers trying to weigh up achieving climate targets while also sustaining lucrative coal, oil and gas industries.

Data released by the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources and the Clean Energy Regulator last week shows the massive gulf that exists between the volume of carbon emitted by Australia and the amount captured through abatement measures.

Less than 3 per cent of the nation’s emissions are being offset under the federal government’s emissions reduction fund.

Labor has adopted a target of Australia becoming carbon-neutral by 2050, with leader Anthony Albanese flagging that the coal industry could continue to exist under such a target because of offsets in the likes of forestry and agriculture.

But the latest data reveals the daunting scale of the task of relying on offsets to achieve the target, with the equivalent of 33 tonnes of CO2 emitted across Australia for every one tonne of CO2 captured through official offset programs.

The latest edition of the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory showed a slight fall in carbon emissions for the year to September last year, with the total falling 1.4 million tonnes, or 0.3 per cent, to 530.8 million tonnes.

That fall was achieved only as a result of the drought that crippled much of rural Australia last year, which reduced emissions by 4.1 million tonnes because of declines in livestock populations and a drop in fertiliser use.

Emissions linked to the oil and gas industry jumped significantly as new liquefied natural gas projects continued to ramp up.

The total emissions volumes dwarf the progress made under the federal government’s Emissions Reduction Fund, which Energy Minister Angus Taylor said this week had issued just under 15 million carbon credit units last year. Each credit is the equivalent of one tonne of offset carbon emissions.

Limited options

The carbon offset industry in Australia broadly revolves around planting trees and vegetation in areas degraded through historical agricultural practices, or preserving forest previously earmarked for clearing. Savanna fire management — in which areas of grassland are burnt off early in the dry season to avoid larger-scale fires from longer grass later in the season — also has become a significant area of activity. Offsets also involve investing in renewable energy projects.

Increasingly affordable renewable energy sources are forecast to make strong inroads into emissions associated with electricity generation — which is the largest single source of emissions in Australia, accounting for more than a third of all carbon pollution — in the years ahead.

But the path to offsetting the emissions of other sectors, such as the mining industry, oil and gas, transport and agriculture, is less apparent. Last Friday Taylor said the government would look at the “biological sequestration” techniques used in offsets as well as hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, lithium and livestock feed supplements as part of the government’s plans to reduce emissions.

While Taylor held fast against setting a 2050 emissions target, both the federal opposition and every state government have adopted net zero by 2050 policies.

And the Business Council of Australia, global mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto, and big oil and gas producer Woodside Petroleum have all put their support behind a target of net zero emissions by 2050.

The broadening support for a net zero emissions position means the role of carbon offsets is expected to grow significantly.

But the practice, which predominantly involves planting trees or preserving forests, has had a chequered history and has been a point of contention among environmental groups.

The Climate Council says “there is no room for carbon offsets” in meeting any net zero target, and instead says emissions need to be cut “deeply and rapidly at their source”.

Conservation Council of Western Australia executive director Piers Verstegen says scaling up the nation’s carbon offset industry to the level needed to offset large-scale emissions would be “problematic”.

Many of the easiest sources of abatement in Australia have already been tapped, he says, while looking overseas for offsets poses problems of transparency and credibility.

While Verstegen says an expanded carbon offset industry in Australia can be a big source of job creation and investment, the recent Black Summer bushfires showed the challenge of relying on planting trees to offset emissions.

“You can grow trees, but how can you guarantee they’re going to be there in five, 10, 20 or 50 years, particularly when we are facing changing climatic conditions and increasing bushfire risk which might make the offset impermanent?” he says.

No guarantees

Globally, the offset industry has been marred by problems of credibility and effectiveness.

US-based environmental advocacy group the Natural Resources Defence Council has warned of the perils of consumer-levels offset programs, noting there can be big differences in the quality of different offsets.

First, it says, the offset needs to be real, verified and enforceable — that the promised tree, for example, will actually be planted and that the company or individual responsible will be held accountable if it is not.

Even more difficult, the NRDC says, is ensuring the offset is permanent and additional. A tree that is cut down soon after it is planted is of limited value, as is any offset investment that was going to happen anyway.

Then there is the risk of “leakage” — paying an Amazonian farmer not to sell his plot to a logging company, the NRDC says, is cancelled out if the logging company just buys a different plot instead.

Room to expand

Looking overseas for offsets adds another layer of complexity, given the jurisdictional challenges of verifying them.

In Australia, the offset industry falls under the watch of the Clean Energy Regulator, which assesses the eligibility of projects and the methodology they use.

Brendan Foran, chief executive of established carbon offsets group Greening Australia, says there is enormous potential to expand the use of offsets in Australia.

There are 90 million hectares of cleared land across the country, he says, that could be tapped for offsets but the sector has been held back by constrained support. Foran says the industry typically has revolved around short-term funding and grants, which has limited its ability to execute the sorts of large-scale projects that would increase the amount of offsets and bring down their costs.

Foran is all too aware of the vast gap between emissions and offsets in Australia. “That’s basically the problem that I’m trying to solve at the moment,” he says.

He says he is starting to see some change because of moves in the corporate sector.

Last year Greening Australia struck a deal with Woodside, which has identified offsets as a key plank of its plans to be net zero by 2050.

That deal, Foran says, will see Woodside bring not only money but also the sort of large-scale project execution skills and data analysis needed to significantly expand Greening Australia’s operations and bring abatement costs down.

Globally, he says, there is a vast pool of money looking to invest in offset assets, but there is a shortage of suitable deals.

However, even with a significant growth in offsets, Foran says, there will need to be enormous cuts in the amount of emissions if the gap is to be narrowed.

“I’m not trying to create an impression here that planting native trees is the total answer. It’s just part of the answer,” he says.

“It’s not enough just to stop or reduce your emissions, we actually need to draw carbon out of the atmosphere as well.

“We need to do both.”

Foran also notes there is a wide range in the quality of offsets on the market. There is a big difference, for example, between simply planting one type of tree in continuous rows compared with Greening Australia’s approach of establishing biodiverse systems.

New technology

While the gap between offsets and emissions looks huge today, Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Leonard Quong says the world will be a very different place by 2050.

Factors such as the forecast improvement in offset technologies and processes, efficiencies in mining practices and the erosion of global demand for carbon-intensive commodities such as coal mean offsets are likely to make larger inroads into the world’s emissions by 2050.

Big miners increasingly are looking towards solar and wind to power their operations, global coal demand is already starting to ease, and hydrogen fuel technology is gathering pace and could well be a reality in 30 years.

There’s also potential technological leaps — such as in direct air capture that strips carbon dioxide out of the air — and further refinement of carbon capture and storage systems that could occur in the coming decades.

Those sorts of factors, Quong says, mean the pool of emissions requiring offsets in 2050 will be a lot smaller than it is today.

“Can you get today’s economy completely offset with today’s offset systems and practices? Probably not. But we’re not trying to do that and I don’t think anyone would seriously consider that,” Quong says.

“It’s a factor of everything moving — the economy, society and politically — and the abatement technologies that we apply to that.”

SOURCE

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10 March, 2020

Thank Trump for cutting the environmental red tape strangling infrastructure development

Cutting red tape is tough. President Trump deserves praise for his latest effort, which should end the choke hold that the environmental movement has placed on economic growth and jobs.

Ironically, the reforms proposed by Trump must now clear a unique hurdle: the additional red tape which surrounds every effort to change existing regulations.

Long-entrenched regulations have allowed the misuse of the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act. These abuses often block improvements to infrastructure.

Just ask eco-friendly Colorado about the 13 years it took to produce an environmental impact statement for widening super-congested Interstate 70 near Denver. The monster document required hundreds of public meetings and was 15,951 pages long. That much paper also kills a lot of trees.

Almost two-thirds of highway projects must wait six years or more for environmental reviews, and only 7% of reviews are done within two years, according to the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The council in January issued Trump's revised regulations to streamline the process of these environmental reviews.

The average impact statement now runs over 600 pages. The new maximum would be only 150 pages, unless "senior agency officials" approve 300 or more pages.

A new time limit is also set. Environmental assessments must be completed within one year, and environmental impact statements must be finished within two years (again, unless exceptions are granted by senior-level officials, who must be assistant department secretaries or higher).

Standardized NEPA policies are established to prevent rogue agencies from designing their own.

Also added is a new requirement saying, "These regulations do not create a cause of action or right of action for violation of NEPA, which contains no such cause of action or right of action," and "minor, non-substantive errors that have no effect on agency decision making shall be considered harmless and shall not invalidate an agency action."

Hopefully this will end lawsuits that use technicalities to block projects for additional years and waste millions of dollars.

But these and other reforms must survive a bureaucratic gauntlet before they go into force. A 60-day public comment period is underway until March 10. Then, unless the new rule is made final before the end of May, in 2021, the new Congress and president (should Trump not win reelection) would have time to block it under the Congressional Review Act.

Overzealous environmental pressure groups are trying to use the online public comment portal to raise questions and create delays. Already they have organized and posted over 11,000 complaints based on "climate change," more than 4,000 objections from people calling themselves a "national park lover," 3,000-plus protesting a "negative impact on birds," and over 12,000 who label the reforms as "misguided" or "dangerous."

The pro-growth forces are not nearly as well-organized as the green machine. But the red-tape delays can also hurt green causes:

Citing NEPA, activists have filed lawsuits halting a major wind energy site at Lake Erie. That type of lawsuit might not be possible under the proposed new regulations.
Of course, fossil fuel projects are also hampered by NEPA. So are many transportation projects. In addition to Denver's:

A new transit line in Maryland was delayed 14 years.
The Taos, New Mexico, airport had a 20-year delay.
Seattle's airport suffered a 15-year environmental review delay. The New York-New Jersey Bayonne Bridge had a 10-year wait.

There are many other examples and too many lawsuits. A Federalist Society report documents billions of dollars wasted and over 4,000 NEPA lawsuits against federal agencies, often with taxpayers footing the bill for lawyers on both sides.

Trump's proposal won't end environmental protections, but it will speed up the studies and cut out the nonsense. Winning this fight against the Red Tape Monster will benefit people all over the country.

SOURCE

The unholy crusade against gas appliances

Eco darling natural gas gives way to wind, solar and battery electricity – and slave labor

Duggan Flanakin

When Berkeley, California last year became the first U.S. city to ban the installation of natural gas lines to new homes, Mayor Jesse Arreguín proudly stated, “We are committed to the Paris Agreement and must take immediate action in order to reach our climate action goals. It’s not radical. It’s necessary.”

Phasing out natural gas-fired electric power generation by 2030 is bedrock dogma in the Green New Deal. In fact, it’s become an unholy crusade. So it should be no surprise that climate alarmists would jump at the chance to ban new natural gas lines. Many other cities in California have already followed Berkeley’s lead, as has Bellingham, Washington. More gas bans are in the offing nationwide. Connecticut lawmakers actually want a law that would pressure insurers to stop insuring homes that have gas appliances or heating systems!!

But Takoma Park, Maryland, which proudly bills itself as “the Berkeley of the East,” wants to go even further. City officials have proposed to ban “all gas appliances, close fossil fuel pipelines, and move gasoline stations that do not convert to electric charging stations outside city limits by 2045.” The Takoma Park proposal also mandates all-LED lighting by 2022 for all buildings, including single-family homes. Composting would also become mandatory.

For hardliners whose only focus is ridding the world of carbon (dioxide), the moves are obvious and necessary. With wind and solar prices dropping, they argue, natural gas is no longer needed as a “bridge fuel.” They envision an all-electric future, magically, right away, co-friendly, sustainable. Or not.

The price claim is nonsense. It’s based on comparing operating costs for wind and solar installations. It deliberately ignores the far larger capital investment and environmental costs: building thousands of wind turbines and millions of solar panels, hauling and installing them across millions of acres, connecting them to the grid, backing them up with batteries or pumped storage (or coal or gas power plants), replacing them far sooner and more often that we’d have to replace coal, gas or nuclear plants, and disposing of broken and worn out panels, blades and other parts that cannot be burned or recycled.

The phony price parity claim also ignores the massive amounts of overseas mining for metals and other materials, which are needed in far greater amounts per megawatt for wind, solar and battery power than for stand-alone gas, coal or nuclear plants. And that mining is done under horrific conditions, with little attention to air and water pollution, workplace health and safety, fair wages, or rampant child labor.

That’s reason enough to rise up in anger. But natural gas companies, gas appliance manufacturers, restaurants and ordinary citizens have additional reasons for not taking these radical demands lying down.

If implemented , the Takoma Park proposal would force those with gas stoves, hot water heaters, clothes dryers, furnaces, outdoor grills and propane heaters (for outdoor winter dining venues) to replace them with electric units. That could double electricity demand – and turbine and panel numbers and impacts.

Homeowners, landlords and businesses that currently rely on natural gas would have to upgrade their electrical systems to handle the additional load from going all-electric. Estimates run s high as $25,000 per resident (not household) to make the switch.

Last November The California Restaurant Association filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, claiming that Berkeley’s action violates “long-established state and federal law.” The CRA further claims the action is invalid and unenforceable under the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act and under California’s Energy Code and Building Standards Code, and that it is an unlawful to use police powers to amend state building codes.

A CRA press release further explained that the natural gas ban would force higher energy costs on businesses and consumers alike and, wurst of all, “effectively prohibit the preparation” of flame-seared meats, sausages and charred vegetables, and the use of intense heat from a flame under a wok (the essence of Chinese cooking). Top chef Robert W. Phillips explains: “An overwhelming majority of chefs and cooks are trained using natural gas stoves, with pots and pans over a flame produced by natural gas.”

SoCalGas, whose service area covers half the state, is also a strong opponent of building electrification.

Alarm over this fast-spreading virtue signaling has spread to Washington and Oregon, where the Seattle Times says gas companies are forming a coalition of unions, businesses and consumer groups to tout the benefits of natural gas and help “prevent or defeat” initiatives that would inhibit or prohibit its use.

Comparisons between electric and gas appliances show that gas appliances often cost more up front (especially if you have to run a gas line) but save money while in use. More important in many parts of the country is the fact that gas stoves can operate even when the electricity goes out – and a small generator will allow gas furnaces to continue operating during power outages. (Prolonged outages have become frequent in California of late, due to efforts to reduce catastrophic wildfires associated with power lines but caused by the state’s failure or refusal to thin and manage brush, grass and trees.)

Until now, people have been able to choose between electric and gas. One energy choice service notes that gas water heaters typically cost about $30 a month, while electric heaters cost $42 on average. Gas units also heat water more rapidly and provide hot water during power outages.

Gas dryers average about 8 cents less per load to run than electric units, partly because they heat up instantly, whereas electric units use a coil that can make loads take twice as long to dry. Electric dryers can also be harder on clothes because of their longer drying times. Electric dryers do not require a gas line, can be installed wherever there is a 220-volt power outlet, and do not require vents for carbon monoxide. On the other hand, an improperly grounded electric dryer can be dangerous.

Gas stoves provide instant heat for top burners, but gas ovens heat up more slowly, according to TopTenReviews. Gas stoves may be harder to clean, and there is a risk of fire from the open flame. Both gas and electric stovetop burners remain hot long after the knob is turned off. Most importantly, gas stoves are cheaper to operate, because gas prices have fallen some 85% since their historic high in 2006.

In sum, both gas and electric appliances have their pluses and minuses. However, “choice” (for women or men) is not high on the list for many virtue-signaling politicians today, except in one other acrimonious arena, which Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) recently addressed in the context of a pending Supreme Court case. They therefore push the envelope every time – and sometimes get their way. Yet in the process, they make new enemies of people who previously were not politically motivated at all.

In Takoma Park, which four decades ago became the nation’s first “nuclear-free city,” sustainability manager Gina Mathis says, “Yes there are ways that we could soften” these policies, “but we know that voluntary programs are not going to get us to net zero.” As in net-zero plant-fertilizing CO2 emissions.

The mandates tend to generate anger. According to the Washington Post, one Takoma Park resident complained that “the number of times the word ‘require’ is used in this [proposal] is stunning.”

It could get far worse. Socialist Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is committed to 100% “renewable” energy for electricity and transportation “by no later than 2030.” His plan would also take our entire energy system out of the private sector, and put it in government hands, with more mandates.

Meanwhile, China already has 900,000 MW of coal-fired power plants and has another 350,000 MW under construction or in planning. It’s also building or financing hundreds of coal and gas power plants in Africa and Asia. India likewise has hundreds of coal-fired units and is planning nearly 400 more. They will not stop using fossil fuels to build their economies, create jobs and improve living standards.

So even if manmade CO2 is a major factor in climate change, these scattered, silly natural gas bans might reduce future warming by 0.0001 to 0.001 degrees 80 years from now. But the con goes on.

Via email

Big firms good at talking Greenie talk but they don't walk the walk

Both in Australia and elsewhere

You've probably never heard of Rupert Read, the philosophy academic with a collection of colourful waistcoats working in the small British city of Norwich. He's the environmentalist who last month leaked an explosive report by JP Morgan that warned "life as we know it is threatened".

The report, Risky Business: The climate and the macroeconomy, was written by the investment bank's chief economist David Mackie and colleague Jessica Murray. It warned, in no uncertain terms, that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet on a trajectory that will cause famine, displacement, mass species extinction and economic collapse. "Something will have to change at some point if the human race is going to survive," the report said.

Although JPMorgan's brand is water-marked on each of the report's 22 pages, the $US350 billion ($530 billion) banking behemoth initially distanced itself from its findings. Yet only a few days later at its annual investor day in New York City on February 25, it promised to stop financing coal mining, coal power and Arctic oil and gas drilling. It would also offer $US200 billion ($302 billion) to support clean energy and other sustainable projects.

The pledge put the bank on a par with its peer Goldman Sachs, which in December became the first large US bank to rule out future financing of oil drilling in the Arctic and new thermal coal mines. Then in January, BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager said it would no longer actively invest in companies that generate more than 25 per cent of revenue from thermal coal.

As the world distances itself from the fossil fuel industry, Australia is stuck in a hard place. Oil and thermal coal account for about 80 per cent of our electricity generation and resources make up about one fifth of the ASX/200. Coal and iron ore remain two of the nation's biggest export earners.

This week, the $168 billion government-run Future Fund ruled out divesting from thermal coal. And the portfolio manager of the country's largest retirement savings fund, AustralianSuper, said there was no immediate plan to go fossil-fuel free. "The point is, it's easy if you're in New York. But it's Australia's second-biggest export so it's not a decision we can make lightly," senior portfolio manager Shaun Manuell told The Age and Sydney Morning Herald this week.

As the global fossil fuel divestment push gathers momentum, Australia's financial sector is being forced to re-evaluate its support for fossil fuels. But for an economy heavily dependant on resource extraction, this is no easy feat.

'Call it what it is'

While many major Australian companies are boasting of green futures and a willingness to do good by the environment the situation in the investment is more nuanced. The Age and Herald continue to expose underlying investments by major super funds that fail to live up to their green promises.

A similar dynamic is playing out in the US. Critics argue JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs can still fund major emitters – those involved in fracking, tar sands and liquefied gas terminals –under their policies. And they can still do deals with the biggest coal-mining companies and provide loans to oil and gas projects outside the Arctic, where the bulk of the resources lie.

BlackRock's thermal coal exclusion applies to less than a third of its total assets and the revenue cap means it can still invest in major coal-producing companies, including Glencore and BHP.

The chief executive of $US3.8 billion ($5.5 billion) sustainable asset management group Trillium Matthew Patsky, speaking from Boston, says the announcements sent a message to the community: "We're paying attention, we hear what you're saying and we're going to talk about it now" but fell short of committing to significant change.

"Some of this is unfortunately just that. It's marketing, public relations. You have to call it what it is," Patsky says.

Nonetheless, the concessions made by the financial giants has emboldened environmental activists to ramp-up pressure and refocused the discussion around the future of fossil fuel investing. "The last few weeks have proven that this will be a crucial year to end the age of fossil fuels," environmental activist group 350's website says.

Carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion contribute about 78 per cent of total greenhouse case emissions, according to the IPCC's most recent report, and there is overwhelming agreement within the scientific community that without additional effort to reduce these emissions, the world was bracing for irreversible change. The Paris climate agreement recognises that governments around the world must commit to keep the vast majority of fossil fuels in the ground.

Back home, the effects of climate change were brought into sharp focus after the unprecedented fire season that burnt an area the size of South Korea, roughly 12.2 million hectares, and killed 34 people and more than 1 billion animals.

Big four predicament

The big four banks have climate action policies and have thrown their support behind the Paris climate agreement's commitment to limit global emissions. The banks have unilaterally pledged to reduce financing of thermal coal projects within the decade and have varying ambitions around financing new fossil fuel projects. Westpac, National Australia Bank, ANZ and Commonwealth Bank declined interviews to explain finer details of these policies.

Research by shareholder activist group Market Forces, obtained exclusively by The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, claims the banks are breaking their own climate policies by lending to projects that expand the use of fossil fuels.

An analysis of company records, financial databases and public disclosures found the big four loaned more than $7 billion to expansionary fossil fuel projects between 2016 and 2019 and a further $6.8 billion to companies with business practices that contradict the Paris goals to reduce warming within the century by 2 degrees.

Julien Vincent and Will van de Pol lead Market Forces that has provided research to show the big four are funnelling billions into expanding fossil fuel production.
Julien Vincent and Will van de Pol lead Market Forces that has provided research to show the big four are funnelling billions into expanding fossil fuel production. CREDIT:JASON SOUTH

In September, CBA financed an American gas pipeline designed to transport up to 2 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day through Texas. According to scientific journal Nature, little or no carbon-emitting infrastructure can be commissioned to meet the Paris Agreement climate goals.

"This is significant for CBA," Market Forces executive director Julien Vincent says. "There are supposed to be compliance mechanisms and people held to account if their policies are not followed."

In a statement, CBA said it could not comment on individual customers, but its environmental and social policy had evolved "very significantly" over the last three years.

“The underpinning principle of our policy is to support a transition to net zero emissions, and to do that as quickly and efficiently as possible in the context of working with our customers," the CBA spokesman said. "As part of that transition approach, we regard gas, for example, as a transition fuel which enables substitution away from coal-fired power. That is a step towards lower net emissions and then ultimately to zero net emissions.”

Similarly, NAB's climate policy prevents it from financing new thermal coal projects. But in October 2018, after NAB pledged it would no longer finance new thermal coal mining projects, the bank co-financed a $720 million deal with Coronado Global Resources which owns Queensland's Curragh coal mine, a largely coking coal plant –coal used for steel making – that recently agreed to continue supplying Stanwell power station with thermal coal until 2038. In September last year, Market Forces claimed NAB committed to co-finance an additional $US200 million to fund the expansion of the Curragh mine.

In a statement, NAB said it could not comment on specific customers but said it was working to limit thermal coal exposure. "We are capping thermal coal mining exposures at current levels and reducing thermal coal mining financing by 50% by 2028 and intended to be effectively zero by 2035, apart from residual performance guarantees to rehabilitate existing coal assets."

Westpac and ANZ loaned a combined $258 million to ASX listed energy giant Woodside in October for development of the Burrup Hub in WA, which according to its website “could process more gas than the entire volume extracted from the North West Shelf since startup in 1984”.

ANZ said it will continue to reduce its thermal coal exposure over time but this "has not been in a straight line". The spokesman said the overall exposure had reduced by 50 per cent since the Paris Agreement and pointed to its work in funding green projects. "We have been working closely with a number of our customers in recent years to assist them with their plans to transition to a lower carbon economy."

Lending to the thermal coal industry is at its lowest point in four years, Market Forces found, but Vincent says the trend is partly due to the increasing use of non-disclosure agreements around financing fossil fuel projects.

Last March, Queensland's thermal coal company New Hope secured $900 million from Australian banks to expand its New Ackland thermal coal operation, but the company's chief executive declined to identify the lenders. This happened around the same time energy finance project Project Finance International reported potential lenders to Western Australia's Bluewaters coal-fired power stated were asked to sign non-disclosure agreements.

"The industry and the lenders know they're being watched," Vincent says. "It's reputationally risky to be seen lending to the coal sector and expanding it. So instead of trying to change behaviour, or operate more cleanly, the banks and companies are trying to keep this information from public view."

An analysis of the world's largest 100 banks by Moody's found the lenders had very limited information available on financed emissions, with fewer than a third of banks providing a description of their climate risk assessment and monitoring methodologies. "Most banks' climate risk management is at an early stage," Moody's vice credit officer Olivier Panis says. "The visibility for investors over the potential impact of climate risks and opportunities on banks' financial performance remains limited."

SOURCE

A Misguided Approach to Nuclear Power in ‘Energy Innovation’ Bill

Being “well intentioned” isn’t the same as doing well. Look no further than the recently introduced American Energy Innovation Act.

The bill proposes an extensive federally funded and directed research, development, and demonstration program for advanced nuclear technologies through the Department of Energy.

It’s Act 2 of the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act, the first half of which was quietly passed in December’s massive spending bill.

The proclaimed purpose is to help the nuclear industry innovate and compete, both now and in the future, and in competitive markets at home and abroad.

But rather than improving private-sector access to federal assets, reducing regulatory barriers, and addressing the political risks that nuclear energy faces, it quite literally proposes that the government do the work of private companies for them—to improve their product, acquire financing, and find potential customers.

Such a program is far outside the responsibility of the federal government—and of the federal taxpayer. But it could also erect new barriers for companies that don’t go through the Energy Department program.

In the end, it makes the nuclear industry politically dependent, and consequently politically vulnerable. But what’s worse is, we’ve tried this all before, and the track record isn’t good.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 set out on the same grand mission. In that not-so-distant past, Congress authorized, among many other favors for the nuclear industry, $1.25 billion for a public-private partnership, the Next Generation Nuclear Power Plant. Congress spent $528 million through 2010, only to abandon it in 2011 during the pre-licensing process.

The Energy Policy Act also created a subsidy for 6,000 megawatts from new nuclear reactors. Even with the enthusiasm of the hailed “nuclear renaissance” and an extension of the subsidy, we got less than that. Rather than fix underlying government-imposed issues challenging the nuclear industry, Congress subsidized two reactors that were half-built before being canceled and another pair that have doubled in cost and construction time.

In fact, one could argue that the industry is worse off because of the Energy Policy Act, having shaken customer confidence and convinced others that nuclear energy can’t be built affordably.

Instead of bringing about a “nuclear renaissance,” subsidies have tied nuclear energy investment and innovation to political whims rather than smart business decisions, common sense, and good ideas.

Additionally, the American Energy Innovation Act creates a program of the same flavor for existing light-water reactors (the class of reactors operating today around the U.S.).

For a few examples, the bill declares it the responsibility of the government (aka the taxpayer) to “enable the continued operation of existing nuclear power plants,” to “improve [their] performance and reduce operation and maintenance costs,” and to develop an “integrated investment strategy” for nuclear technologies and capabilities.

This is industrial policy, plain and simple.

On the whole, Congress did good work with the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act in 2018 and the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act in 2019.

What the American Energy Innovation Act proposes is a bridge too far.

Unfortunately, the bill totally ignores issues where congressional leadership is desperately needed and is uniquely suited to address.

If Congress were really interested in helping the nuclear industry—both existing nuclear power plants and the advanced reactors of tomorrow—it should address the regulatory burdens and uncertainties created by government itself.

One painfully obvious place for Congress to start is the nuclear waste impasse. That an “all-encompassing” energy bill misses such a critical issue for the industry, and a costly one for taxpayers, is baffling.

SOURCE

Australia: Public broadcaster seeks extra $5m for cynical campaign on climate

The delinquency of the ABC on climate issues knows no bounds and we must continue to call it out because if we don’t, who will?

The annual expenditure of more than $1.5bn of taxpayers funds in public broadcasting ought to be used to inform the public rather than to try to deceive them and campaign against their interests.

Not content with repeatedly and dishonestly asserting that global warming was the critical factor in our summer of bushfires, the national broadcaster has now been ghoulish and crass enough to try to use the tragedy of those fires, together with their disingenuous spin on climate change, to demand even more taxpayer largesse.

“We estimate it’s going to cost an extra $5m per annum from next financial year, where we’re going to have to build up our capacity to respond — this being the new normal,” said ABC managing director David Anderson before Senate estimates.

That the government has neither condemned this tactic nor ruled out this request speaks volumes about the Coalition’s crisis of conviction. But let me unpack some of the travesties in this request.

First, there is the false assertion the bushfires were somehow different or worse than fires or other natural disasters we’ve seen before.

Second, there is the false assertion, linked to climate alarmism, that we can expect this annually from now on.

Third, there is the outrageous proposition that an organisation generously funded by taxpayers to cover news is suddenly complaining that, because it covered bushfire news this summer, it requires more money.

Fourth, there is the rank opportunism of using the damage and deaths of the nation’s worst bushfire season for a decade to bolster its bid for extra cash.

Frankly, the ABC should have $5m stripped from its funding as a punishment for this effort. Instead, Communications Minister Paul Fletcher has asked the ABC to detail its case.

But back on honesty in reporting, readers of The Australian or viewers of Sky News will be aware the CSIRO was caught out burying a significant fact when it comes to bushfires and climate change.

In a recent two-page document, The 2019-20 Bushfires: A CSIRO Explainer, the organisation outlined the impact of weather and vegetation on bushfire behaviour, the need to better plan and prepare for them and said climate change was already making fire seasons longer and more intense.

But it did not include important information contained in the CSIRO’s technical report, Climate Change in Australia. That document is more than 200 pages long and on page 51 talks about increases in fire weather conditions but noted: “However, no studies explicitly attributing the Australian increase in fire weather to climate change have been performed at this time.”

This has only come to light because of questioning by Senator Matt Canavan in an estimates committee hearing last week. The embarrassing pauses and jumbled explanations from the CSIRO representative made for excruciating theatre.

Yet the story was not covered by the ABC. This is par for the course — inconvenient facts are censored and only the alarmist line or information to support it will be ventilated by the national broadcaster.

Remember, the ABC has failed to report and analyse the scientific conclusions of Professor Andy Pitman, the director of the ARC Centre for Excellence on Climate Extremes at the University of NSW, when it comes to drought.

His conclusion that there is insufficient evidence to directly link the current (almost past) drought to climate change has been studiously ignored by the ABC — except for pathetic attempts by Media Watch host Paul Barry to pretend his detailed findings were turned on their head by the ex post facto inclusion of one word; “direct link” rather than “link”.

This is crucial because it has been the drought-induced drying of vegetation that has helped create the bad fire conditions, along with the weather which delivered record highs in some bushfire-affected areas in early summer.

The science on all this is highly relevant and deeply interesting. The most recent peer-reviewed research says observational data reflects a higher frequency of fire weather extremes, but that it is too early to separate natural variability from climate factors.

“Impacts of anthropogenic climate change on fire weather extremes and fire season length are projected to emerge above natural variability in the 2040s,” says ScienceBrief Review’s summary.

Against this backdrop the ABC last week conducted a fact check on a crucial point made by Liberal MP Craig Kelly when he was engaged in a slanging match on British television in January over our bushfires and whether climate change was to blame. Kelly insisted that “the first 20 years of this century we’ve had more rainfall in Australia than the first 20 years of the last century”.

To those who have read a bit on these issues, this will not have been a surprising claim but the ABC and its fact-check partners, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, decided to test it.

They shared Bureau of Meteorology records and a graph showing a long-term average increase in Australian rainfall.

“Data collected by the Bureau of Meteorology shows an increase in Australia’s annual average rainfall for the first two decades of this century compared to the years 1900 to 1919,” the fact-check article duly reported.

In other words, the assertion made by Kelly was 100 per cent accurate — no ifs, no buts, just demonstrably correct.

So, what was the ABC/RMIT fact-check verdict? “Mr Kelly’s claim is flawed,” it declared. I kid you not. Flawed claim ... or flawed fact-checking?

This is how far from their charter the ABC has strayed; how far our universities have wandered from searching for truth.

These publicly funded institutions now demean the truth and seek to either hide it or mischaracterise it. They have arrived at a bad place and we all ought to be deeply concerned.

The justification for this “flawed” finding is that national rainfall averages, experts argue, are not the best way to measure climate effects because rainfall patterns vary region by region.

While the nation is receiving more rain, some parts are receiving less, others more, and others still, might be receiving less when they need and more when they don’t.

While these are facts — other facts and relevant facts — they don’t disprove, undermine or render “flawed” the empirical fact shared by Kelly. Introduce such facts into a debate to provide context or support your different conclusions, sure. But don’t pretend they render false or “flawed” other facts cited by others.

It is dishonest to take a known fact and pretend it is not correct. The only reason anyone would attempt to portray claims, data and facts in this way would be to deceive the public in pursuit of an ideological agenda.

Fact check that.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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9 March, 2020

A conservative Climate Change policy?

The article below is a proposal that we do not need to confront the Green/Left head-on. There is a hope that conservatives might be better accepted if they acknowledged the need for CO2 reduction and offered some proposals for action in that direction. How well-founded Greenie scares are is not addressed. The proposals are understandable but overlook two things:

1) There is no such thing as a happy Greenie. No matter how much we lean in their direction, they will still criticize and reject us. There is no get out of jail card other than complete surrender

2). Most of the political spectrum already has a much better way of dealing with Green/Left antagonism: They fudge. Even the ecologically holy Europeans do it. Germany is building new coal-fired power stations, for instance. They talk the Greenie talk but they don't walk the walk. It is precisely that which Greta Thunberg has noticed. She says the nations are offering only "beautiful words". She is the "fool" who speaks the truth that nobody wants to hear. She is too young to pretend that black is white.

Just about everyone in politics knows it is all a sham but very few see fit to say so. They don't want to risk breaking ranks. Only Donald Trump is a big enough man for that.

What an embarrassment that autistic girl is! We live in a world where it helps to be half-mad to speak the truth. A lot of politics is like that. Crenshaw is well-meaning but naive

It’s called the New Energy Frontier, and it’s a joint plan by Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who propose a free-market strategy to address the challenges posed by climate change. Crenshaw cogently observes that conservatives have all too often allowed leftists to put them on the defensive. Since conservatives reject leftists’ extreme solutions to a problem leftists artificially inflate into a crisis — a problem such as rising global CO2 levels — conservatives, Crenshaw says, are effectively labeled as “being too heartless or too stupid to solve the original problem.”

The plan “focuses specifically on carbon capture, a field in which there is already promising innovation,” Crenshaw explains. “For instance, the company NET Power, located near my district in Houston, has developed a natural-gas electricity plant that has the capacity to power 5,000 homes, while capturing and recirculating CO2 back through the plant via an innovative thermodynamic cycle. As a result, the system produces zero net emissions.”

Furthermore, the House GOP’s plan rejects the Democrats’ often-promoted carbon tax in favor of a carbon-capture tax credit that incentivizes technological development rather than penalizing industry. The U.S. leads the world in CO2 emissions reduction due in large part to the development of fracking technology that has led to our nation’s natural-gas boom. Leftists always resort to taxes, which suppress innovation. Crenshaw argues it’s time for a carrot instead of a stick.

Crenshaw asserts that “conservatives can either tackle the issue of carbon emissions sensibly by proposing workable solutions, or run the risk of allowing the Democrats to do it for us — with policies that would offer marginal environmental benefits at a devastating cost to the economy.” The Crenshaw-McCarthy bill is a welcome proactive approach.

SOURCE

One in five UK children report nightmares about climate change

One in five children are having nightmares about climate change, according to a British survey on Tuesday, as students globally stage protests over a lack of action to curb global warming.

About 17 percent of children in Britain said worries about climate change were disturbing their sleep while 19 percent said these fears were giving them nightmares.

The survey of 2,000 children aged eight to 16, conducted by pollster Savanta-ComRes for BBC Newsround, also found that two in five, or 41 percent, did not trust adults to tackle the climate crisis.

Over the past year, millions of young people have flooded the streets of cities around the world demanding political leaders take urgent steps to stop climate change, inspired by 17-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

Emma Citron, a consultant clinical child psychologist based in London, said young people were clearly fearful about climate change with the survey finding 58 percent were worried about the impact that climate change will have on their lives.

Read also: Eco-anxiety: Managing mental health amid climate change impacts

"Public figures like David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg have helped young people to voice their worries and we have to make sure that we as adults listen to them and ... help them become involved in positive change," she said in a statement.

"We all need to support them not to feel hopeless but rather to present to them hopeful and balanced messages about their futures and ensure that they get the right professional help if their anxiety is unduly high."

The American Psychological Association has said it was aware of reports of growing "eco-anxiety" in children, but research was needed to establish how common it was.

Britain's Oxford Dictionaries recorded a 4,290 percent increase in the term "eco-anxiety" in 2019, particularly among young people.

SOURCE

H/T Climate lessons

UK: Why the war on wood burners?

Boris Johnson’s government seems to be banning things first and looking for justifications later. Following on from its nonsensical plan to phase out diesel and petrol cars, it confirmed on Friday that it also wants to ban the sale of coal and ‘wet’ wood for use in domestic stoves and fires in England.

The press office at the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) declares that the government is taking ‘bold action to cut pollution from household burning’. It claims that wood-burning stoves and coal fires are ‘the single largest source of the pollutant PM2.5’ – that is, airborne ‘particulate matter’ with a diameter of less than 2.5 micrometres. For comparison, that’s tiny stuff that is about three per cent of the diameter of a human hair.

DEFRA says that domestic burning emits ‘twice the contribution of industry and three times the contribution of road transport’, adding that ‘these measures will help to tackle a form of pollution that penetrates deep into our hearts, lungs, and blood, and has been identified by the World Health Organisation as the most harmful air pollutant for human health’.

The new rules mean that the sale of traditional coal and wood that has not been dried will be banned. Bags of coal and smaller bags of ‘wet wood’ will be phased out by February 2021, with sales of loose coal direct to customers prohibited by 2023. Homeowners will be told to burn dry wood or smokeless fuel instead – both of which are far more expensive. Alternative fuels will only be permitted if they have a very low sulphur content and only emit a small amount of smoke.

While a ban on these ‘dirty fuels’ might sound like a positive thing, there are major problems with this policy.

First, the risk posed by air pollution is far less clear than campaigners would have us believe. There are recurring claims that tens of thousands of people die each year in the UK from air pollution. The best guess is that the risk of dying increases by six per cent per year for every 10 micrograms of PM2.5 per cubic metre you’re exposed to. But it really is an educated guess. The estimate hides enormous uncertainty. For example, the studies don’t measure individual exposure, but are based on snapshots of levels in different areas. So the risks of PM2.5 could be much higher or lower, and they could be greatly influenced by confounding factors. Are people who are exposed to more pollution also more likely to be poor, for example?

Second, the UK’s air quality hasn’t been this good for centuries. The decline of industry, the long-term switch to gas, improvements in car-exhaust emissions and more have meant a steady decline in pollution. DEFRA’s statistical release on UK air quality, published in 2019, suggests that stoves and open fires have had some impact on air quality, but it’s not enormous. Yes, there are bumps in pollution levels in the morning and especially in the evening, as those stoves and fires are lit, but the difference between mid-afternoon and mid-evening is not huge. The combined effect of other forms of pollution is clearly more important.

Why the war on wood burners?

The experience of the Great Smog in London in 1952 is testament to the fact that burning coal in large, dense urban areas can be a problem. As a result, it is banned in many cities in the UK. Extending that ban to wet logs might make some sense, too. But to ban the sale of these fuels completely, in a manner that will affect everyone in England – even in the majority of places where air quality is not a problem – is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

For some people, burning coal and wood is a necessity, as they are not connected to the gas network and heating their homes with electric heaters is too expensive. But even where a stove or fire is not essential, it is still a great pleasure for millions of people. Forcing people to use smokeless fuels, which are far more expensive and less aesthetically pleasing, should be justified with hard evidence.

Just for good measure, under this policy logs would need to have no more than 20 per cent moisture to be permitted for sale. That’s difficult to achieve by just leaving them to dry out in the air, so that means they will usually need to be kiln-dried. Sticking logs in a big oven to dry out is surely going to add to the UK’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Oh, the irony.

This ban is excessive and the evidence to justify it is weak. Ministers and civil servants must be too busy listening to the lobbying of NGOs to take account of the interests of wider society.

SOURCE

Extra emissions are the dirty little secret of electric cars

Bjorn Lomborg

If you listen to the media, a green automotive future has arrived and a tsunami of electric cars is outselling petrol and diesel around the world, transforming the planet and solving climate change.

We need a reality check. Battery-powered electric vehicles are fairly popular in urban China and California, as well as a few countries that heavily subsidise their drivers. But globally, fewer than 0.3 per cent of all cars are pure electric, and across Europe, BMW says, customers don’t want them.

Unsurprisingly given the price tag, electric cars are often playthings for rich people. One US study shows the richest quarter of people receive almost all the public money spent on electric car subsidies. Moreover, electric cars in the US are driven fewer kilometres on average each year than conventional vehicles: 11,200km compared with 16,400km for petrol and diesel-powered vehicles.

Combine this with the fact 90 per cent of households that buy an electric car also have a conventional car that is driven farther, and a clear picture emerges: most electric vehicles are a second car used for shorter trips such as shopping and small errands — and for virtue signalling.

But aren’t electric cars better for the environment? Barely. While no CO2 emissions come directly from driving electric vehicles, they are powered by electricity produced largely from fossil fuels in many parts of the world. More energy is also used to manufacture electric vehicles — and, in particular, their batteries — and this energy is usually reliant on fossil fuel.

Indeed, a new study from the International Energy Agency shows that an electric car with a 400km range and charged with electricity produced at the global average will have to be driven 60,000km just to pay off its higher CO2 emissions in production. That means a new electric car driven the average 11,200km each year will have paid off its carbon debt only after five years. The IEA hopes the world can reach 130 million electric cars in 10 years — a breathtaking ask given we have spent decades reaching just over five million. Even if we could do that, emissions would be reduced by only 0.4 per cent of global emissions. In the words of IEA director Fatih Birol, “If you think you can save the climate with electric cars, you’re completely wrong.”

The IEA finds a hybrid such as the Toyota Prius is as good for the climate as an electric car when measured on lifetime greenhouse gas emissions. A petrol-powered vehicle emits only nine tonnes more across its lifetime. We could have reduced a similar amount through the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cap-and-trade system in the northeast US, for only $US51 ($77.60).

Yet governments dole out lavish support for electric cars. The IEA estimates that each electric car on the road has cost $US24,000 in subsidies, R&D and extra infrastructure investment. We could have cut almost 500 times the CO2 if we’d spent the money cutting carbon through the RGGI cap-and-trade. Little wonder the Dutch Court of Auditors recently ruled The Netherlands was wasting taxpayer money on subsidies, calling them “an expensive joke”.

And surprisingly, more electric cars often mean more air pollution. In China, which is the world’s leading electric car market, a study reveals that because China’s coal power plants are so dirty, electric cars worsen local air: in Shanghai, pollution from an additional million electric-powered vehicles would kill nearly three times as many people annually as an additional million petrol-powered cars.

Nonetheless, governments increasingly are setting deadlines for when electric cars will take over the world. Norway ambitiously plans to prohibit petrol and diesel cars in 2025.

The Scandinavian nation has the world’s largest electric car market share, but this is propped up with enormous government support. Rules eliminating the costs of registration and sales tax can be worth up to $US70,000 for a single electric car.

Moreover, electric car owners save half, or about $US1000 a year, on congestion charges in Oslo. They also get to drive in bus lanes, which is great for them but leads to increased travel times for public transport users.

Additionally, the Norwegian state is investing heavily in charging infrastructure and grid upscaling, something Goldman Sachs puts at $US6 trillion for the world during the coming decades.

That is why in Norway a staggering 42 per cent of all cars sold last year were pure electric. But a new study for Norway shows how hard ending petrol cars will be and gives the lie to those who seek to transform the vehicle market. It finds that without Norway’s overgenerous subsidies, by 2030, only 9 per cent of all car sales will be purely electric. Even maintaining all the subsidies and dramatically increasing taxes on petrol cars while setting strict emission targets would be unlikely to allow Norway to reach its goals anytime before 2050.

The misconception that electric cars are close to taking over and will solve climate change is dangerous because it directs our attention away from the technological breakthroughs in green energy generation needed to reduce rising temperatures — and away from innovations needed to cut air pollution.

Electric cars are fun to drive and will likely be part of our future transportation solutions. But they will not be a major part of the solution to climate change or air pollution. Today, electric cars are simply expensive gadgets heavily subsidised for the wealthy to feel good while doing very little for the planet.

SOURCE

Green ‘lawfare’ a $65bn deal hit to projects

Comment from Australia

Green activists are using a back door on environmental laws to delay an estimated $65bn in projects ranging from dams to a salmon farm, with “lawfare” forcing companies into court for more than 10,000 days in total since 2000.

Conservation and green groups have used 11 new legal claims in the past four years to tie up seven projects in regional areas, including the $16.5bn Adani coalmine in Queensland, a new $140m port on Melville Island in the Northern Territory, Victorian government forestry and the $30m Tassal salmon farm in Tasmania.

The 11 new cases of environmental groups using secondary legislation since 2016 have resulted in seven major projects being delayed in court for a total of 2600 days, as business investment in Australia drops to its lowest level since the 1990s.

According to analysis from the free-market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, legal activism using the federal environmental protection act has put $65bn of investment at risk, with delays totalling more than 28 years in court.

The tactics of activist groups have delayed 28 projects between 2000 and 2019, with an estimated value of over $65bn.

The projects include six coal and iron ore mine projects, two dam construction projects, two dredging projects, forest and pest management, a tourism development, multiple road construction projects, the construction of a pulp mill, a desalination plant and a marine supply base.

After the election of the Morrison Coalition government, the Queensland Labor government fast-tracked final approval for the Adani coal project in the Galilee Basin, after a nine-year approval process and an extra 341 days in court after an Australian Conservation Foundation appeal started in 2016.

In 2017, a Bob Brown Foundation challenge against a salmon farm in Tasmania, to protect the southern right whale, was dismissed after 237 days in court but an appeal meant another 349 days in court.

According to IPA research fellow Kurt Wallace: “A small group of green activists are using a special legal privilege to delay and disrupt $65bn of investment, which is disproportionately damaging regional Australia.”

He said the disruptive litigation from environmental groups using a section of the act allowing conservationists to take companies to court was not leading to substantial changes in environmental controls on the projects. “Disruptive lawfare has not led to environmental improvements,’’ Mr Wallace said.

“Of the cases under section 487, 94 per cent have failed to bring about a substantial change to the original project which had been approved by the commonwealth Environment Minister.

“Section 487 has allowed the courts to be used as a strategic tool for environmental activism.

“Green groups, such as the Australian Conservation Foundation and Wilderness Society, are using legal challenges to delay and disrupt major projects with the goal of restricting investment in the resources sector by raising costs and uncertainty.

“Repealing section 487 would be a massive shot in the arm for investment in regional Australia and create an enduring stimulus for the Australian economy. (It) will not diminish the legal avenues available to farmers and private land owners who wish to take legal action against a mining project that could adversely affect their interests.’’

Disappointing news today. Equinor has announced that it won't be drilling for oil in the Bight. We desperately need to improve our oil security.

Former resources minister Matt Canavan said activists were exploiting environmental laws merely to delay projects.

“Every day that major projects are held up is another day that a desperate Australian family doesn’t have a job,’’ Senator Canavan said.

“Our environmental laws act as a big yellow light slowing everybody and everything down.

“We need laws that focus on protecting major environmental issues, not being an alternative avenue for radical green activists to pursue a political agenda.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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8 March, 2020

Polar Bear Scientists May Be Hiding Good News

A prominent Canadian zoologist has suggested that scientists may be hiding a spate of good news on polar bears.

In State of the Polar Bear Report 2019, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on International Polar Bear Day, Dr Susan Crockford explains publication of population counts for several Arctic regions have been long overdue.

Data on the body condition of female bears and survival of cubs in Western Hudson Bay have not been published in over 25 years, despite claims that these are key measures of the impact of climate change on bears.

According to Dr Crockford, this may well be because the data do not support claims of disaster for the bears.

Dr Crockford also says that sea ice conditions for Western and Southern Hudson Bay bears have been excellent in recent years.

“It can hardly be claimed that lack of sea ice is causing Western and Southern Hudson Bay polar bear numbers to decline as a result of poor cub survival and reduced weights of adult females when breakup and freeze-up dates have been so advantageous for the last three years,” Dr Crockford said.

The report also looks at recent incidents when two Russian Arctic towns were visited by polar bears, and suggestions that 2019 was the year of the polar bear ‘invasion’. The lives of local residents were certainly threatened by the congregations of bears, which numbered more than 50.

And as Dr Crockford explains, such large congregations of polar bears are likely to be an on-going problem because there are now so many polar bears roaming the Arctic and because virtually all communities still have open garbage dumps:

There is no evidence these 2019 ‘invasion’ incidents were caused by a local lack of sea ice or because the polar bears were starving. Right now, Arctic residents and visitors face a much greater risk of having a deadly encounter with a polar bear at almost any time of year than they did decades ago because polar bear populations are so much larger.

“Predictions of future calamity do not change the present reality that polar bears are abundant and thriving,” Dr Crockford said.

Key Findings

*   Reports have yet to be published for polar bear population surveys of M’Clintock Channel and Viscount Melville (completed 2016 and 2014, respectively), Southern Beaufort and Gulf of Boothia (completed 2017) and Davis Strait (completed 2018), yet several were promised for 2019 or sooner.

*   At present, the official IUCN Red List global population estimate (2015) is 22,000–31,000 (average about 26,000), but surveys conducted since then might raise the average to about 29,500.

*   Despite having to deal with changes in summer sea ice habitat greater than all other Arctic regions, according to Norwegian biologists polar bears in the Svalbard area of the Barents Sea showed few negative impacts from the low sea ice years of 2016 through 2019.

*   Despite repeated claims that the Southern Beaufort subpopulation is declining and nutritionally stressed, a summer survey of the coast of Alaska in 2019 documented 31 fat healthy polar bears onshore in July compared to only three in 2017, when sea ice retreat had been similarly early.

*   In 2019, and contrary to expectations, freeze-up of sea ice on Western Hudson Bay came as early in the autumn as it did in the 1980s (for the third year in a row); sea ice breakup in spring was like the 1980s too, with the result that polar bears onshore were in excellent condition.

*   If the public are to take seriously repeated claims of harm to polar bear health and survival due to climate change, data collected since 2004 on cub survival and weights of female polar bears in Western Hudson Bay must be made available: it has now been more than 25 years since data has been published on cub survival and weights of female polar bears in Western Hudson Bay but polar bear specialists continue to cite decades-old data to support their statements that lack of sea ice is causing declines in body condition and population size.

*   Since polar bear researchers acknowledge that there has been no negative trend in either freeze-up or breakup dates for sea ice in Western Hudson Bay since at least 2001, the failure to report current data on cub survival and weights of female bears suggests that body condition and cub survival have not declined over the last two decades as claimed.

*   Two separate incidents at opposite ends of the Russian Arctic at the beginning and the end of 2019 made this the year of the polar bear ‘invasion’. Belushya Guba in the Barents Sea over the winter of 2018/2019 and Ryrkaypiy, Chukotka in December 2019 were each besieged by more than 50 bears, which terrified local residents. Although tragedy was ultimately averted, this is likely to be an on-going problem for Arctic settlements in the future: not because there is not enough sea ice but because there are now so many polar bears roaming Arctic coastlines.

SOURCE

Dirty Secrets About the CLEAN Future Act

The Committee on Energy & Commerce recently released more details of the so-called “CLEAN Future Act,” which “formally adopts the goal of achieving of a 100 percent clean economy by 2050.” Besides the manipulative name, the proposal (a) doesn’t even bother trying to justify its central goal and (b) includes a grab-bag of proposals that progressive Democrats have always favored, regardless of climate change concerns, and many of which are very blunt instruments to reduce emissions even if the central goal did make sense. When a small group of officials declares what “the science” dictates in terms of government measures, the public should be very wary.

An Act By Any Other Name Would Be Less Loaded

Before moving on to more substantive matters, I do want to reiterate how absurd it is for the ostensible opponents of human-caused climate change to embrace the label “clean” for their proposals.

In the first place, carbon dioxide is not “dirty” or a “pollutant” in any normal sense of those terms. It is colorless and odorless, and plants breathe it. Nobody walks into a commercial greenhouse—which might maintain CO2 levels that are triple the current atmospheric concentration—starts coughing and exclaims, “Ugh, the air is so dirty in here, what’s with all the pollution?”

Indeed, even when websites caution parents about elevated CO2 levels in tightly insulated classrooms (which might crowd out oxygen and lead to fatigue or headaches), it reminds them, “As a colorless and odorless gas, indoor carbon dioxide is impossible to track on your own.” In contrast, if you visit Beijing you are well aware of the actual pollution and dirty air (though it’s gotten much better in the last 20 years). You don’t need a special monitor.

It’s not just that the so-called CLEAN Future Act is a loaded term; it’s the opposite of what it claims. In general, rapid economic growth is the key to rising living standards, which allows us the ability to afford continued environmental improvements. In the United States, the transition from horses to automobiles as the chief means of transportation certainly made our cities “cleaner”—no more manure in the streets. And in the developing world, the electrification of homes that currently rely on burning wood or dung is obviously a boon to air quality and health, even if the electricity is produced in a coal-fired power plant.

Physical Science Can’t Tell Us Proper Policy Goals

The official framework for the CLEAN Future Act repeatedly alludes to “the scientific consensus that all countries must shift to net-zero GHG emissions by 2050 to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change,” and it cites the UN’s IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C as the source for this claim. As this statement is the bedrock upon which the entire CLEAN Future Act rests, it’s worth analyzing.

In the first place, even on its own terms, and even if there were nothing misleading about it, the statement does not justify a policy of moving to net-zero GHG emissions by 2050. Don’t believe me? Consider this analogous claim: “The medical consensus is that Americans must stop driving motorcycles to avoid the most devastating consequences of traffic accidents.”

If we play with definitions, this claim about motorcycles is true. After all, “the most devastating consequences” of traffic accidents are that people die, and apparently you are 37 times more likely to die in a motorcycle accident than a car accident. So QED, we should ban motorcycles, right?

Most readers will probably disagree, or at the very least will understand that a mere statement about the downside of an activity—in my example, motorcycle riding—is not proof that it should be eliminated.

The same principle holds with respect to human-caused climate change. Even if we disregard the overstated confidence in modeling projections (which I documented in a 3-part series), and took everything the UN’s IPCC said about emissions and climate change at face value, it still would remain an open question about what we should do about it. After all, there’s a reason that humans rely so heavily on fossil fuels to produce electricity and move their vehicles. Switching to energy sources with lower carbon intensity will necessarily make energy and transportation more expensive and less convenient than they otherwise would be.

So it’s not enough to merely state that moving to net-zero GHG emissions by 2050 would “avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change.” To repeat, even if that were true, the advocates of this policy would still need to demonstrate that the costs of such a policy wouldn’t be even higher than the benefits.

SOURCE

Climate Religion versus Climate Science: Washington Post slurs legendary physicist, even in death

By Caleb S. Rossiter, Ph.D.

The Washington Post, the long-time leader of the Climate Religion media, seems to never pass up an opportunity to slip allegations of undefined "climate change" into every section of the paper - News, Metro, Sports, Travel...

Of course the Post bars any contrary analysis, either in these stories or in letters and opinion responses.

But the Post reached a new low by throwing its climate narrative into its obituary for physicist Freeman Dyson:

Here's how the Post slurred this towering figure in American, indeed global, science:

"His technophilia may explain his apostasy on global warming ... (H)e thought the environmental movement had overstated the threats to the planet: 'I just don't see any evidence that global warming is particularly dangerous.' That view is not shared by the overwhelming majority of scientists".

This last sentence is simply not true. The data generated to date by the world's scientists do not show any statistically significant increases in rates of extreme weather or sea-level rise as global average temperature increased by one degree over the past 120 years. And the UN IPCC, a political, not a scientific body, admits that the temperature increase was largely natural anyway, with only a quarter of a degree attributable to industrial emissions of the non-pollutant CO2.

The danger behind the controversial 2009 "endangerment" finding by President Obama's EPA has not occurred. It only lives on in the ever-extended projections of computer models of the climate.

Freeman Dyson knew John von Neumann, the father of climate models. Von Neumann wanted to use modeling as a Cold War military tool, to figure out how to create drought in the Soviet Union. The effort failed due to the complexity of the actual climate system, and Dyson often recounted von Neumann saying, "With four (free) parameters I can fit an elephant. With five I can make him wiggle his trunk."

By now, of course, climate computer models have thousands of free parameters, which are estimates that modelers enter to create a "backfit" where the model runs close to the actual historical temperature record. Dyson called these "fudge factors," much to the displeasure of the modelers. But the modelers are embarrassed whenever they run the models forward into the future, and watch them, as always, run far too hot.

Mother nature still isn't cooperating with the narrative of "dangerous warming" from CO2 emissions. Dyson was right, and the Post is still stubbornly wrong.

Via email from Dr. Caleb S. Rossiter, the Executive Director of the CO2 Coalition

The Shallow Symbolism of Fossil Fuel Divestment

Global divestment day coincides with Valentine’s Day, so February has become a favorite month for climate change activists to demand that universities divest from fossil fuels. There was no shortage of such demands on campuses this year. Students — and in some cases, faculty — at Brandeis, Harvard, MIT, Penn, Loyola, the University of Pittsburgh and a slew of other schools staged protests, passed resolutions, circulated petitions, and took to social media to pressure college administrators to stop investing in corporations that produce coal, oil, and natural gas. Most of the demands were politely brushed off. Harvard’s president, for example, promised to present the faculty’s call for divestment to the university’s top directors, saying he was “confident” it would receive “the thought and consideration it deserves.”

But some institutions gave in to the pressure. Georgetown University announced on February 6 that it will stop investing in fossil fuels within 10 years. Of course Georgetown’s trustees know that selling the university’s shares in publicly-held companies like ExxonMobil or Chevron won’t have the slightest impact on the price of the companies’ stock. Nor will it affect their ability to raise funds or supply energy to customers around the world. And it won’t reduce the world’s supply of fossil fuels by a single barrel of oil or cubic foot of natural gas.

The point is worth underscoring. Student activists may sincerely imagine that getting their school to divest from fossil fuel stock is an effective way to weaken fossil-fuel companies. But capital markets don’t work that way. Every share of ExxonMobil stock sold by Georgetown is a share simultaneously purchased by some other investor — almost certainly an investor with no desire to demonize or punish fossil fuel companies. As an ExxonMobil investor, Georgetown may have some leverage over company policies. As an ex-investor, it has none.

In financial terms, as Oxford professor William MacAskill observed in a New Yorker essay a few years ago, disinvesting because of ethical scruples about an industry creates buying opportunities for investors who don’t share those scruples. “The market price stays the same; the company loses no money and notices no difference,” wrote MacAskill, whose research focuses on effective altruism. “As long as there are economic incentives to invest in a certain stock, there will be individuals and groups … willing to jump on the opportunity.”

That may not matter to teenage activists filled with righteous indignation, but the savviest climate activists certainly know it. Bill McKibben, a longtime environmental campaigner and foe of fossil fuel companies, has acknowledged that divestment crusades aren’t aimed at “affecting share prices” of oil, gas, and coal companies. The goal, rather, is to “revoke the social license of these firms” and turn them into “pariahs.” In The American Prospect, divestment advocate Jennifer Stock made a similar point: “At its essence, divestment is a symbolic, culturally punitive act,” she writes. And such “symbols are powerful,” since they help “shape the narratives we espouse as a culture.”

Maybe so. But if the divestment movement is merely a form of hostile symbolism — if it asks of its adherents only that they join in stigmatizing fossil-fuel companies — does it really amount to anything more than moral preening? It’s easy for college students to march and picket and chant “Divest Now!” What are they prepared to do that isn’t so easy? Stop buying gasoline for their cars? Give up hot showers? Renounce their electronic devices? If it weren’t for fossil fuels and the corporations that extract, refine, and sell them, there would be no air travel, no central heating or air conditioning, no internet, no fresh produce in the middle of winter. Those things aren’t absolutely essential to life on earth; after all, human beings lived without them for millennia. But how many of those clamoring for divestment from fossil fuel stocks are willing to go beyond cost-free symbolism and actually divest themselves of the myriad benefits they reap every day from fossil fuels?

To be sure, there are sources of energy other than fossil fuels. But wind and solar power, the “greenest” renewables, account for only 8 percent of the electricity generated in the United States. Even if someday they account for all of it — which is likely only in the realm of science fiction — modern life would still be unthinkable without fossil fuels. Thousands of indispensable products, from plastic to asphalt to fertilizer, are derived from petroleum. No less than gasoline or jet fuel, they cannot be had without refining crude oil, and the carbon footprint that entails.

The benefits of fossil fuels have been incalculably vast. Thanks to coal, oil, and natural gas, billions of human beings live better, safer, healthier, cleaner, and richer lives than they otherwise would have. Certainly there is a case to be made that those gains have come at the cost of some negative environmental impacts. But those impacts will not be mitigated by getting colleges to sell off their shares in fossil fuel companies. If all you want to do is strike a self-righteous pose, a divestment campaign is the way to go. If you’re hoping to change the energy that makes the world go ‘round, divestment won’t accomplish a thing.

SOURCE

Australia: CSIRO omits a key finding which doesn't link bushfires to climate change

Senator Matt Canavan reveals during Senate Estimates that the CSIRO failed to include a finding that “there are no studies linking climate change to fire weather” in a bushfire ‘explainer document’.

During Senate estimates a CSIRO official failed to explain why a previous CSIRO finding which said there was no evidence to suggest a link between climate change and bushsfires was not found in the recent document explaining the “climate change and science about bushfires”.

Mr Canavan told Sky News host Paul Murray omitting such a finding is like “writing a report for a newspaper about a football match and not including the final score”.

Speaking about Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s net-zero emissions target by 2050, Mr Canavan said Mr Albanese “doesn’t understand what he’s signed up to will devastate Australian farming”.

This is unbelievable that a government or any opposition that’s going for election every three years would get away with making a promise that’s going to be at least ten elections away,” he said.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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6 March, 2020

How the plastic panic hurts us — and the planet

John Tierney joins Brian Anderson to discuss the campaign to ban the use of plastic products and the flawed logic behind the recycling movement—the subjects of Tierney’s story, “The Perverse Panic over Plastic,” from the Winter 2020 Issue of City Journal.

Hundreds of cities and eight states have outlawed or regulated single-use plastic bags. But according to Tierney, the plastic panic doesn’t make sense. Plastic bags are the best environmental choice at the supermarket, not the worst, and cities that built expensive recycling programs—in the hopes of turning a profit on recycled products—have instead paid extra to get rid of their plastic waste, mostly by shipping it to Asian countries with low labor costs. However, the bans will likely continue as political leaders and private companies seek a renewed sense of moral superiority.

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Coming up on today's show I'll be joined in the studio by John Tierney. John's here to discuss his latest feature essay for City Journal, which appeared in our Winter 2020 Issue. It's called “The Perverse Panic over Plastic.” It's a powerful essay that exposes some of the weak thinking behind the campaign to rid us of plastic bags, bottles, and straws. You can find it on the City Journal website, and we'll be sure to link to it in the podcast description. John also has a brand new book out, which we'll talk about toward the end of the interview, called The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. That's it for the introduction. We'll take a quick break and we'll be back with John Tierney.

Brian Anderson: Hello again everyone. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me in the studio is John Tierney. You can follow him on Twitter @JohnTierneyNYC. John is a Contributing Editor at City Journal, and before joining us he was a reporter and columnist for the New York Times. He's also a bestselling author. His latest book was just released at the end of the year. It's called The Power of Bad: How the Negativity Effect Rules Us and How We Can Rule It. It's coauthored with Roy Baumeister and you can find it on Amazon or wherever books are sold. We'll talk to John briefly about his new book later, but we were eager to get him on the podcast to discuss his latest essay for City Journal which is in our winter 2020 issue, called “The Perverse Panic over Plastic.” The essay was just adapted in the Wall Street Journal so you can check out a shorter version of the piece on their website if you're interested. John, thanks for joining us.

John Tierney: Thank you Brian.

Brian Anderson: So to start, I want to remind our listeners that you've been studying the question of recycling and environmentalism in America for decades now. Back in 1996 the Times published a seminal piece by you on the issue under the provocative headline, “Recycling Is Garbage.” In recent years it seems that the campaign against plastics has really grown. So hundreds of cities and now I think eight states have passed laws to ban or regulate single use plastics, plastic bags most notably. New York's ban on plastic bags is set to go into effect very soon on March 1st. But you write in this essay that if we really cared about the environment, we'd throw our plastics into landfills and incinerators rather than recycle them. And that the plastic bag ban in grocery stores and other retail outlets is going to be counterproductive. So what's the logic behind that position?

John Tierney: You know, it's very strange. I mean, the plastic panic, as I call it, is really even crazier than recycling. I mean recycling was an expensive and time-consuming way to accomplish very little. But the plastic panic is not only a waste of time and money, but it's actually bad for the environment. Because it increases carbon emissions and it actually increases ocean pollution too. The logic behind it, there really... I mean the basic explanation is that environmentalist for like 50 years, just have something against plastic. And they've been looking for one excuse after another to ban it. In the seventies and eighties they were saying that we're running out of petroleum so we can't use plastic. We have to save it. Then there were things that it was causing litter, clogging storm drains. And lately the excuse has been that it's a way to reduce carbon emissions. But if you look at the facts, it's the reverse.

Brian Anderson: Yes. Let's stop there for a minute. Why not just shift to, say, cloth bags?

John Tierney: The problem is, is the cloth bags, or any kind of reusable bag, is much thicker. It takes a lot more energy and resources to manufacture those bags. Also more energy to ship them because they're a lot heavier. So the green logic is well we'll just keep using these bags over and over again and that will save it. But in the real world, people do not use their bags that often. People forget them about half the time they go to the supermarket. The typical tote bag is used only about 15 times. And meanwhile these bags have much bigger carbon footprints than those really thin gossamer grocery bags that we get. And so to offset the initial carbon footprint of a cotton tote bag, you would have to use it 173 times, which nobody does.

John Tierney: To offset people switch to paper bags. Those things have a carbon footprint that are four times the size of a plastic bag. They also take up 12 times more room in the landfill. So basically by banning the thin plastic bags, people end up using thicker grocery bags. They also, because those single use plastic bags, they're called that, but most people actually reuse them to line their trash bins or pick up after their pets. So people do use them more than once. And when you ban them at the grocery store, people end up buying new plastic bags to make up for that, and they buy thicker ones. So again, you're basically increasing the carbon footprint. You're adding more carbon to the atmosphere.

MORE here

Former UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres: Coronavirus may a good thing

Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy asked Figueres: “Is there any sense that this could be self-controlling — that as we see economic growth possibly slowing down around the world, because of coronavirus — that’s actually good for the climate?”

Christiana Figueres replied: “Well, that is, ironically, of course, the other side of this — right? It may be good for climate. But I think — because there is less trade, there’s less travel, there’s less commerce.”

She appeared with her “strategic adviser” Tom Rivett-Carnac and was there promoting their new book ‘The Future We Choose’ about how to deal with the alleged “climate emergency.”

Figueres also praised China for its government structure.

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres lamented U.S. democracy as ‘very detrimental’ – Sought ‘centralized transformation’ – Lauded one-party ruled China for ‘doing it right’ on climate

Many other climate campaigners have also called for reduced economic growth to fight “global warming"

SOURCE

Virginia's 'Clean Economy Act' will have dirty results

Paul Driessen

Largely with party-line, urban-vs-rural votes, Virginia’s legislature is poised to enact a Clean Economy Act that would eliminate coal-based electricity generation, prevent construction of new gas-fired power plants – and replace reliable, affordable fossil energy with wind, solar and battery-backup power. The bill offers important cautionary lessons for voters, workers and consumers in Virginia and across the United States.

Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw has said Virginia has “a climate problem, and you can’t fix it for free.” However, the climate crisis is mostly exaggerated, imaginary or based on faulty computer models. Worse, the “fix” will be pricey on many levels, but won’t make an iota of difference to the global climate.

The USA has actually had fewer violent (F3-5) tornadoes the past 35 years than during the previous 35, and not one in 2018. Hurricane frequency and intensity has changed little since 1850 – except that the USA enjoyed a record 12-year absence of Category 3-5 hurricanes, 2005-2017. After rising some 400 feet since the last Ice Age, seas have been rising at just 7-12 inches per century for over 150 years, and a lot of apparent sea level rise is actually land subsidence, including around the Norfolk-Virginia Beach area.

Water, ice and water vapor have vastly greater influences on Earth’s temperatures, climate and weather than do carbon dioxide and all the other atmospheric gases combined, Greenpeace cofounder Patrick Moore notes. The oceans have 1,000 times more heat than the atmosphere. Clouds both trap heat and reflect incoming solar energy. And scientists still cannot separate human from natural factors in all this.

But Virginia Democrats insist there is a climate crisis, and are determined to ban fossil fuels to end it.

Virginia’s “carbon-free” bills would shut down some 6,200 megawatts of coal-based electricity and ban construction of new gas-fired units. Meanwhile, China already has 900,000 MW of coal-fired power plants, has another 200,000 MW under construction, is planning an additional 150,000 MW (all in China), Greenpeace reports, and is building or financing numerous coal and gas power plants in Africa and Asia. India already has hundreds of coal-fired units and is planning nearly 400 more. China and India are building or planning to build hundreds of new airports, and to put millions more cars on their roads.

So even if CO2 does play more than a trivial role in climate change, Virginia’s actions might reduce future warming by an undetectable 0.001 to 0.01 degree. The bill’s details are revealing, and troubling.

The nearly enacted law would close America’s newest and cleanest coal-fired power plant, unless it can slash CO2 emissions 83% by 2030, using still unproven “carbon capture and storage” technology. But even if it worked, that technology would cost millions per year to operate – and require a third of the power plant’s electricity output to operate. Talk about not being free, especially for local residents.

To replace the eradicated electricity, Virginia energy companies would install 5,200 MW of offshore wind turbines – apparently GE 12 MW Haliade-X turbines manufactured in a new factory in Guangdong Province, due south of Wuhan. That would require 433 of these behemoths, each one rising 850 feet above the waves some 27 miles off the Norfolk-Virginia Beach coastline, in 50-70 feet of water. (For comparison, the Washington Monument is “only” 555 feet tall.)

Constant saltwater and frequent storms will corrode the turbines, causing them to perform worse every year. Actually getting 5,200 MW of electricity would require that the 433 turbines operate at 100% of rated capacity 24/7/365. If they work only half the time, Virginia would need 866 monster turbines.

Climate activists and Big Wind developers expect up to 30,000 MW of offshore wind along the East Coast by 2030. At 100% capacity, that’s 2,500 gargantuan Heliade-X turbines! The impacts on radar, aviation, submarines, surface ships and fishing would be enormous. Turbine blades would kill countless birds. Vibration and infrasound noise would impair whale and dolphin sonar navigation systems for miles.

Since these turbines would be in federal waters, the Interior Department, National Marine Fisheries Service and other federal agencies must fully and carefully evaluate their cumulative impacts on all these human activities and environmental values. They must also address the cumulative impacts of all the global mining, processing, manufacturing and other operations required to build and install the turbines.

These monster windmills will require millions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, rare earth elements, carbon-fiberglass composites and other raw materials. Obtaining them will require removing billions of tons of ore and associated rock, in new or expanded mines all around the world, but probably not in the United States. Wind (and solar) energy would be almost totally dependent on foreign materials, components and finished products – mostly Chinese or Chinese owned. Pollution, workplace conditions, land and habitat destruction, child labor and human rights violations, cancers and other terminal diseases among workers and local communities, would be rampant, and abhorrent to most Americans.

Right now, there are few or no derrick barges capable of installing 12-MW turbines. Imagine how long it will take to install 400 to 2,500 of them along the East Coast – and repair or replace them as they age, or after a huge storm like the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 wipes out offshore electricity generation.

The Clean Economy Act states that another16,100 MW of fossil fuel replacement power would come from photovoltaic solar panels. Based on data for a 400 MW Spotsylvania County, Virginia solar operation, those panels would completely blanket a land area up to 3.5 times larger than Washington, DC.

Arizona conditions don’t exist in Virginia. Clouds, nighttime, and sub-optimal sunshine during much of the day and year make it likely that these millions of panels will actually generate little more than 3,200 megawatts – unpredictably and unreliably. To get the full, legislated 16,100 MW of electricity, Virginia would have to cover up to 18 times the land area of Washington, DC with panels. That’s 700,000 acres.

The Virginia legislation (HB1526 has passed both chambers) also requires that utility companies “construct or acquire 3,100 megawatts of energy storage capacity,” presumably batteries. This is confusing, since batteries don’t generate electricity (megawatts); they simply store power generated by coal, gas, nuclear, wind or solar sources (megawatt-hours, MWh). If the legislators mean 3,100 MWh, Virginia would need 36,500 half-ton Tesla 85-kilowatt-hour battery packs, requiring still more lithium and cobalt sourced from places with terrible environmental and human rights records.

Will Virginia require that its wind, solar and battery materials and components be responsibly sourced? Will it require independently verified certifications that none of them involve child labor, and all are produced in compliance with US and Virginia laws, regulations and ethical codes for workplace safety, fair wages, air and water pollution, wildlife preservation and mined lands reclamation? Will it require that any supposed social costs of carbon recognize the social benefits of carbon-based fuels and carbon dioxide?

Getting power from offshore wind and eastern region solar facilities to communities on the western side of the 2,200-mile-long Appalachian Trail will require many new transmission lines across the trail. Environmentalists adamantly oppose gas pipelines that would pass 700 feet beneath the trail. How will they respond to multiple transmission lines and towers crossing the trail and impairing scenic views?

Wind, solar, battery and biofuel alternatives are simply not clean, green, renewable or sustainable. The Clean Economy Act represents greenwashing, virtue-signaling and government control at their worst. It replaces reliable, affordable electricity with expensive, unreliable power. Simply declaring, as this Virginia legislation repeatedly does, that all these actions are “in the public interest” does not make it so.

Eliminating fossil fuel electricity means lighting, heating, air conditioning, refrigeration, computing and other costs will soar – for families, hospitals, schools, churches, businesses, factories and government agencies. Local, state, US and global environmental impacts will skyrocket, with no climate benefits.

In Virginia and across America, liberal cities and counties have given “sanctuary” to illegal immigrants, including repeat criminals. Numerous conservative Virginia communities have declared themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries. Perhaps it is time for them to resist the onslaught of climate alarmism and pseudo-renewable energy fantasies – by declaring themselves fossil fuel sanctuaries, as well.

Via email

Greta Thunberg embarrasses EU by savaging bloc's new climate law

Greta Thunberg attacked the EU's new law to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050 as a "surrender" on Wednesday, humiliating the European Commission on the day the flagship legislation was launched.

The 17-year-old activist was invited to Brussels as the commission put forward a bill to make the target legally binding on its member states. The climate law is central to the European Green Deal, which includes a €100 billion package to help fossil fuel-dependent regions move to cleaner technologies.

Ms Thunberg savaged the law as unenforceable and unambitious, and accused the EU – which styles itself as global frontrunner on climate action – of a lack of leadership.

She said it had a less than 50 per cent chance of limiting the global average temperature rise to below 1.5 degrees celsius, a goal of the Paris accord

SOURCE

Study shows climate change link to devastating 2019/20 Australian bushfire season

There is no way these attribution studies can prove anything. To make judgments of cause and effect you need the same events to be repeated several times but this never happen with climate. It is always changing

One comment below is admirably frank: "We found that climate models struggle to reproduce these extreme events and their trends realistically"

Need I say more?

This bushfire season has been the worst on record, but what elements of it are fact and what has been distorted by myth.
Climate change did play a part in Australia’s devastating 2019 bushfire season as it has increased the chances of extreme temperatures by at least 30 per cent, a new study shows.

The eight-week study from World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international collaboration that analyses the effect of climate change on extreme weather events, found a strong link between climate change and hotter-than-normal conditions in Australia during the time of the 2019/20 fires.

Last year was the warmest and driest year in Australia since temperature and rainfall records began in 1910 and 1900, and it follows two other dry years in large parts of the country.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology’s Annual Climate Statement 2019, these conditions contributed to a more widespread and intense fire season that started earlier in the season than usual. Other factors included a strong Indian Ocean Dipole and the Southern Annual Mode.

The WWA study looked at what caused the high temperatures and prolonged dry conditions between September to February, to see if they could be linked to climate change.

While they couldn’t link climate change to the drought, it did find a 30 per cent increase in the likelihood of high temperatures.

As climate-heating emissions continue to increase, “We will be facing these extreme conditions more often than in the past,” said Maarten van Aalst, a climate scientist and director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. “Should we be worried about this? Yes, very,” he told journalists.

The study also suggested that scientific models may be vastly underestimating the impacts of rising temperatures.

“We found that climate models struggle to reproduce these extreme events and their trends realistically,” Professor Geert Jan van Oldenborgh of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute said.

“However, they always underestimate the increase in chances for extreme fire risks such as Australia saw in the last few months.

“This means we know the effect is likely larger than 30 per cent increase lower bound, which is already a significant influence of global warming.”

The high temperatures and prolonged dry conditions resulted in unprecedented bushfire activity across the states of New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia and in the Australian Capital Territory.

The 2019/20 bushfires burned more than 11 million hectares – an area larger than Ireland or South Korea – destroyed nearly 6000 buildings and killed at least 34 people and an estimated 1.5 billion animals.

The economic costs of the fires could reach $100 billion, according to separate analyses.

“Climate change is now part of Australia’s landscape,” Dr Sophie Lewis of the University of New South Wales said.

“Extreme heat is clearly influenced by human-caused climate change, which can influence fire conditions. There is evidence that Australian fire seasons have lengthened and become more intense, and extreme temperatures have played a role in this.

“Climate change contributed to the fires and extreme heat we lived through in southeastern Australia.”

A week of hot temperatures, like that experienced in southeast Australia in December 2019, was 10 times less likely in 1900 than it is now, while heatwaves like the one in Australia in 2019/20 are already hotter by 1-2°C than they were around 1900.

Dr Friederike Otto of Oxford University said the study was not an ultimate answer to the question of how climate change was impacting things like fire but did confirm it was an important driver locally.

“We need to continue to test our models in the real world to improve them so we can provide higher confidence risk information at the scales where people live and make decisions.”

Researchers from Australia, Europe and the United States carried out the analysis under the World Weather Attribution project, which provides rapid scientific evidence on how much climate change is fuelling extreme weather events.

The group has so far conducted more than 230 such studies, linking last year’s record-breaking heatwave in France and extreme rainfall during Tropical Storm Imelda in Texas, for instance, to climate change.

Not all the events analysed show a connection to global warming.

But the researchers said devastating fire seasons will be at least four times more common in Australia than they were in 1900 if global average temperatures rise 2C above pre-industrial times.

Temperatures have already heated up by a little over 1C, and the world is on track for at least 3C of warming even if all countries meet their commitments to cut emissions under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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2 March, 2020

Temperature drivers

Some notes from a reader

A few day ago I watched a documentary by a person in the paleontology field......don't recall the name so that shows how much of an impression he was. I have the recording so I will look him up again(Kirk Johnson). The documentary titled "Polar Extremes" was very interesting and very compelling. It was presented as a geological history of the range of earth climate with focus on the expansion and contraction of the polar ice caps. Data and graphs were supported with geological evidence in the way of actual site visits, excavations, fossil evidence, etc. which was his collection over the past 40 years that he had observed or participated in personally. The sites were from all over the world so they did represent a reasonable earth wide sample. The content was extremely well done with excellent photos, videos, samples, professional commentary from experienced scientist. Kirk even included information or references to other planets. Bottom line this was a NOVA documentary, done very well and very compelling to any layman interested in history of the climate.

But now the underlying thrust. Everything was carefully choreographed to have the audience conclude that climate change is real and caused by humans. Kirk used the planet Venus as an example of run away warming, pointing out that the atmosphere is 95%+ CO2. He brushed over this rather quickly but with a clue to what he was saying. Venus is closer to the sun but he makes comments that it was not enough difference to account for the temperatures in the atmosphere of Venus. I will comment on this later.

His graphical presentations were of major revelation. He did present what is believed to be atmospheric conditions over the past several million years overlay with the estimated CO2 levels. These were presented as a graph of warm periods and cold periods and not actual temperatures. C02 levels ranged from a low of 180 ppm to 300 ppm verses the current spike to 415 ppm. You would soon conclude that it is only a matter of time until we are in for a huge warm spell, melting polar ice, sea level rise, break up of major glaciers, new weather phenomenon, famine, plague, etc.One could argue with the conclusions but not with the presentation.

As for Venus..........he is wrong. The solar energy load on Venus is about 2.3 times the energy load on Earth. If Earth had that same load the ground level temperatures would rise to over 250 deg F in typical locations and perhaps to over 300 deg F in desert areas. Ground level pressure is about 1300 psia. The density of the Venus atmosphere at ground level is about 5 lbs per cu ft.......it would be like a thin liquid that you could hardly walk through. In addition C02 at the pressures and temperatures there would act like a very good solvent. You would literally dissolve as your body melted down. You would not burn up as there is no oxygen but you would turn into a charcoal brick.

Venus rotates very slowly, has no tilt on its axis.These features would increase the greenhouse effect A constant solar load on a steady location would drive the temperatures to extremes. The Venus day is 243 earth days and the year is 224 earth days. In other words the planet barely rotates. Earth temperatures would do the same if it were not rotating on a 24 hour frequency. Earth temperatures would climb to over 300 deg F, lakes and oceans would evaporate thus further enhancing the water vapor greenhouse effect. As an example....one winter day my neighbor's door in Buffalo, New York melted all of the plastic moldings when he installed a glass storm door over the main front door. The temperatures had to have reached about
400 deg F.

All very interesting but not so true of a conclusion that 415 ppm of CO2 is going to drive up atmospheric temperatures.

Senate’s ‘Energy Innovation’ Bill Wasteful, Redundant

When you think of the word “innovation,” what comes to mind?

Maybe it’s something new and inventive—or something cutting edge, original, and creative.

Or, if you’re in Washington, “innovation” is trotting out the same, stale approaches to policy that have done less to empower innovators and families and more to empower special interests.

The latest case in point is a 555-page energy bill introduced in the Senate. The majority of provisions in the so-called American Energy Innovation Act are not something that would spur American energy innovation, nor is it innovative thinking when it comes to promoting sound public policy.

In fact, large chunks of the bill are amending or expanding existing programs.

In many ways, the legislation regurgitates the Energy Policy Act of 2005. It includes regulatory energy-efficiency mandates, subsidies for specific energy technologies (fossil, renewable, and nuclear), increased government intervention in energy markets masked as federal research and development, expanded loan guarantees, public-private partnerships where taxpayer resources don’t belong, and taxpayer-funded job-training programs.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended economic privilege to favored energy technologies, erected barriers to entry for those that didn’t receive them, and wasted taxpayer resources in the process.

These interventionist policies put Congress and Department of Energy bureaucrats—rather than investors and customers—in the position of narrowing the field of competition between the many energy technologies being perfected in the U.S. right now to win customers. That cannot help but narrow the scope of innovation.

Some of the more egregious provisions in the American Energy Innovation Act include:

—Preferential treatment for various energy sources. In one form or another, the bill provides programs to boost wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, carbon capture, nuclear, and energy-storage technologies. Carve-outs might buy support from specific industries, but they don’t benefit energy consumers or taxpayers. While subsidies might spur some amount of commercial activity, it’s limited only to what is subsidized.

The market for energy, whether it’s to light and heat our homes or to get to work every day, is a massive one. In the U.S. alone, consumers spent over $1 trillion on energy, and global investment reached $1.8 trillion.

Any of these technologies that can capture a sliver of that market won’t need the taxpayers’ help. Rather than propping up a few projects, if Congress wants American energy companies to innovate more, it should break down government-imposed barriers that prevent them from doing so.

—Subsidized and mandated energy efficiency. The bill includes a number of provisions to expand the government’s role in promoting energy efficiency, such as expanding eligibility for existing programs, adding new programs, and increasing government spending through grants and rebate programs.

Energy-efficiency spending programs and related legislation have enjoyed bipartisan support because politicians view such spending as a “win-win” proposition that will save consumers money and reduce emissions.

But families and businesses don’t need government mandates, rebate programs, or spending initiatives to be more efficient. They have that choice and can make those investments on their own.

When they don’t, it’s not because they’re acting irrationally, but because they have other preferences or budget constraints to consider. The market and price signals sort those preferences out. Government meddling merely distorts these decisions.

—Government involvement in activities best left for the private sector. Beyond the subsidies for specific energy technologies, the legislation would further embed industry with government through workforce-training programs and public-private partnerships. For instance, the bill would support jobs training, scholarships, and apprenticeship programs for nuclear power, renewable energy, energy efficiency, and grid modernization.

Additionally, government programs aim to improve the efficiency and sustainability of industrial and manufacturing processes and other processes that “can increase the efficiency of, and reduce petroleum use in, passenger and commercial vehicles.”

At face value, these initiatives may sound benign, but why do we need to spend taxpayer resources on them?

Automakers, for instance, understand that consumers value fuel efficiency and find ways to reduce petroleum use in vehicles without any mandate or government program in place.

Moreover, as industries expand, those companies find ways to train workers appropriately to meet demand. Conversely, government-led workforce-training programs have a miserable track record.

For example, with the workforce training programs in the 2009 American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (the Obama administration’s nearly $1 trillion “economic stimulus” bill), job placement was sparse, and much of the training was delivered to already employed workers who did not need the training to perform their jobs, according to a Department of Energy auditing report.

Congress needs to put forth an energy bill, but one that does exactly the opposite of the American Energy Innovation Act.

Congress should undo the policies that have entangled the federal government in the business of energy and the decisions of families to make choices for themselves about what services and technologies best meet their needs.

SOURCE

UK: The Heathrow decision is an assault on democracy

MPs and the public want a third runway and yet judges have struck it down. This is a disgrace.

Yesterday’s ruling in the Court of Appeal has seemingly resolved the decades-long wrangling over the future of Heathrow’s third runway. The court decided that the government had failed to take into consideration its own commitments to the 2015 Paris Agreement, and that therefore its Heathrow plans are ‘unlawful’. Transport minister Grant Shapps plunged the runway into more doom, by announcing on Twitter that the government will not appeal the decision. Heathrow’s operator, however, has said it will appeal.

But the realisation that has brought many down to Earth with a bump is that courts now seem to be making decisions that had hitherto been made by government. Yesterday’s events are very significant in terms of what they tell us about the threat posed by environmentalism to democracy and progress.

That a court has made a decision that overrides the wishes of elected politicians is not at all a trivial point. This isn’t just about the need to expand airport capacity – the court’s decision also puts a question mark over every future infrastructure project. As the BBC’s green correspondent reported shortly after the decision: ‘New roads face Heathrow-style court action threat.’

In short, well-funded campaigning organisations can use the nebulous Paris Agreement on climate change to close down anything they don’t like. With climate change being a theory of everything, everything from the planning of the economy to the planning of roads seems to fall under the remit of the Paris Agreement. And yet, while the Paris Agreement is a seemingly ‘global’ agreement that compels UK courts to obstruct the UK government’s strategic decisions, it places no such obligation on other signatories, many of which are expanding airport capacity. Why? Because it calls on governments to determine their own contributions to emissions reduction. So for governments, like ours, that have ‘ambitious’ climate-change policies, the agreement is an economic suicide pact.

Capturing the broader concern with what happened yesterday, former Conservative-turned-UKIP MP Douglas Carswell asked: ‘How did we end up in a situation where unelected judges decide airport policy?’ The answer to this question requires a long memory.

The first aggressive emissions-reduction targets were set by the 2008 Climate Change Act. The Climate Change Bill had originally been drafted in 2005 by Friends of the Earth. It received broad, cross-party support, but it was interrupted by that year’s General Election. The bill was then reintroduced in the next parliamentary session, amid what can only be described as a climate-change arms race: the main parties were all competing with each other to appear as the most committed warriors against climate change.

‘This bill’, said the then Labour government’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, ‘will constrain every future UK government to ensure its carbon emissions do not exceed the level of budgets that are agreed by a carbon committee made up of independent people and government itself’. He continued: ‘We need the choices that individuals make about electricity, about heat and about transport also to respect environmental limits and to ensure that we live within our means environmentally.’

It should have struck anyone listening to government ministers at that time – or, indeed, to their opposite numbers in parliament – that what was being proposed was a clean break from democratic politics; a departure from the UK constitution itself. And yet less than one per cent of MPs objected to the bill at any stage of its progress through the House of Commons.

One of the few who did object was the then Conservative MP, Peter Lilley. He observed that, ‘The sole effect of enshrining the targets in statute will be that the government’s policies will be open to judicial review. Judges will be asked to assess whether measures introduced will be likely to be effective in ensuring that targets are met. I do not have a great deal of faith in the ability of ministers of this government, or perhaps any government, to meet the targets, but the idea that judges should decide on policies costing billions of pounds, without being accountable to the electorate for the billions that they might decide need to be incurred, fills me with foreboding.’

Lilley reiterated this point in debates inside and outside of parliament. All these years later, his foresight has been proved entirely correct: courtesy of climate-change acts and agreements, the government has lost control of its core function – strategic planning. And it has ceded control of it to an activist judiciary and a degenerate network of unaccountable NGOs, backed by shadowy billionaires.

A key problem is the inexplicable desire of UK politicians to ‘lead’ the world in draconian climate policy. Back in 2008, the Climate Change Act was rushed through parliament partly in order to equip the government with what its ministers believed would be an impressive bargaining position at that year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference. Then, as now, politicians believed that their legislative acts of self-sacrifice somehow elevated the UK on the global stage, boosting our moral standing in the ‘international community’.

The Court of Appeal’s decision came on the day that the government launched its finance strategy for this year’s UN climate-change summit, which will be held in Scotland. It was launched at an event in London featuring an all-star line-up: voice-over artist David Attenborough; loathed technocrat, Bank of England governor and this year’s summit president, Mark Carney; and convicted criminal and president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde.

In a video address to the public, Carney said: ‘You demanded action, and now it’s time for the financial sector to deliver… We have an enormous opportunity to bring climate change into the heart of every financial decision and our plan will manage the risk for climate change while helping to seize the opportunities from a newer, greener economy.’

But ‘we’ did not demand such action. We the public have never been asked for our views on these fundamental issues. As I have argued on spiked before, the climate agenda has never been tested democratically. And yet it has far-reaching consequences.

The climate-change agenda, authored by idiots, has now been seized by something far more sinister. It was under the Labour government that the Bank of England was given ‘independence’. And it was under the same administration that parliament established, via the Climate Change Act, the ‘independent’ Committee on Climate Change to set the UK’s ‘carbon budgets’ right up to 2050. And it was the same administration which created an activist judiciary and civil service in its attempts to bind future governments to its agenda. All those chickens are now coming home to roost.

One does not need to agree with Lilley’s politics to see what drove his concerns about democracy. We are now witnessing the dissolving of democracy he predicted; the deciding of key political, strategic questions by activist judges and green campaigners. For asking questions about costly, undemocratic climate policies, Lilley was called a ‘climate-change denier’. spiked, too, and those, like me, who write about green politics for spiked, are accused of ‘denying’ the science on climate change. But any honest review of what Lilley or spiked has said will yield no evidence of science being denied. Our argument is that issues that impact on the infrastructure and future of society should be discussed and tested democratically, not pushed through under the guise of science.

The mess that we now see is not accidental. It is design. The design was obvious in Friends of the Earth’s original authorship of the Climate Change Act. It was explicit in David Miliband’s and other ministers’ statements on climate-change policy. It was transparent in the formulation of the cross-party consensus on climate change. And it was clear in the framing of any criticism of these policies as ‘denialism’. The design has been to bring about a transformation of the relationship between individuals and the state; to take power away from democratic political institutions.

The lawfare that now blights the government’s plans to expand Heathrow, boost the economy, and pursue large-scale projects in general, was knowingly, purposefully and recklessly engineered by politicians themselves. It was their choice to eschew debate, and not to bother seeking the public’s approval of their green agenda. No past or sitting MP can claim not to have understood the consequences of their wilful disregard for democracy. The Court of Appeal’s decision is of much greater significance than an extra runway at Heathrow: it calls into question democracy itself.

SOURCE

Bernie’s green policies are an assault on the working class

His proposed bans on fossil fuels and fracking will cost millions of jobs and send energy prices soaring.

Fans of Bernie Sanders like to say he is a left populist, a politician who defends ‘the interests of working people’. That is a myth.

Sanders’ political agenda squarely reflects the outlook of a particular section of society: the ‘progressive’ wing of America’s upper-middle class, which forms his base of support. A look at his programme shows that Sanders is more aligned with the perspective of the faculty lounge than the shop floor. He is quite willing to override the views and interests of the working class – and even destroy their jobs – to pursue his brand of ‘socialism’.

Perhaps no issue demonstrates this reality better than Sanders’ environmental politics, which includes a ban on fracking and the introduction of a so-called Green New Deal. If enacted, his backward-looking green policies would be a disaster for workers. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s imposition of green taxes and austerity was a key spark to the gilet jaunes protests. A similar reaction among workers in the US could happen if Sanders got his way.

For many Democrats, climate change has become a matter of religious belief, not science or economics. Bernie has become their leading evangelist. To Sanders, the climate represents an ‘existential threat’ to humanity, a ‘global emergency’ and the country’s ‘single greatest challenge’. His rhetoric on climate change is as alarmist as that espoused by Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion. A generation of school indoctrination has encouraged young people to believe that climate change will bring about the collapse of civilisation. For too many, this outlook has unfortunately become a defining part of their identity. The more scared and anxious youth are especially drawn to Sanders.

Rising temperatures and other effects from a changing climate are a serious problem, but exaggerated doom-mongering does not help. As the environmental author Bjorn Lomborg has noted: ‘The vision of climate change as the end of the world is unsupported. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that by the 2070s, the total effects of climate change, including on ecosystems, will be equivalent to a reduction in average income of 0.2 to 2 per cent. By then, each person on the planet will be 300 to 500 per cent richer.’ In other words, climate change is a manageable problem we can deal with over time, especially if we invest our increasing resources and wealth in new technologies.

For all of Sanders’ alarmism over how the climate is an ‘emergency’ that needs to be addressed immediately, he rejects the energy sources that are here right now, such as natural gas and nuclear power, which have already done far more to reduce carbon emissions than renewables like wind and solar. Admitting that natural gas and nuclear can play a role in transitioning to cleaner energy, however, would take away the looming threat of apocalypse, which would render Sanders’ radical green proposals less necessary.

In recent decades, the US has reduced emissions by more than any other country in the world. The largest contributor to this has been the widespread adoption of hydraulic fracturing – aka fracking. US power plants have shifted from using coal – a carbon-intensive energy source – to natural gas, which is much cleaner.

Yet Sanders wants to ban fracking and shut down all gas plants. According to his recently introduced Senate bill, drafted with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders would immediately prevent federal permits for expanded and new fracking, and make fracking entirely illegal by 2025. To justify his ban, Sanders said fracking is a danger to the water supply, creates earthquakes, and adds to climate change.

These are tired arguments that have been disproved. Techniques used by the regulated fracking industry have also become safer over time. In reality, water-contamination incidents are few, seismic activity is insignificant and has more to do with wastewater disposal methods than fracking per se, and relatively minor methane emissions from fracking do not outweigh the net benefits for the climate that the technique brings. There are more than 250,000 fracking wells operating in the US – if there were serious problems, we would hear about them more often.

Fracking has been a huge economic boon for the US. The Brookings Institution, a liberal think-tank, found in 2015 that the benefits from fracking shale gas contributed to a net economic benefit of $48 billion per year, mainly due to lower energy prices, which benefit both industry and consumers. Fracking has also boosted state tax coffers, enabling more spending on social welfare, among other things.

Most worrying of all, Sanders’ proposed ban on fracking would be a job-killer. One study, conducted by PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), estimates that fracking directly supports 2.8million jobs in the US. Indirectly, over 10million jobs depend on fracking. Another study, from the US Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute, found that a ban on fracking would cost four million jobs in its first year alone.

During last week’s Democratic debate, Sanders was asked what he would say to the workers who would lose their jobs thanks to his ban. He didn’t back down: ‘The scientists are telling us that if we don’t act incredibly boldly within the next six, seven years, there will be irreparable damage done not just in Nevada, not just to Vermont or Massachusetts, but to the entire world.’ The immediate impact on workers’ livelihoods must be sacrificed to his green ambitions. ‘This is a moral issue, my friends’, he said. But apparently destroying jobs and livelihoods doesn’t factor into Sanders’ moral considerations.

Imagine what this sounds like to the ears of working people in a rust-belt state like Pennsylvania or Ohio, who desperately need the jobs and state revenues that fracking brings. As Donald Trump’s election showed, many workers in the middle of the country feel they are disregarded. And yet Sanders has joined the chorus of the coastal elites. These people enjoy the benefits of cheap and abundant energy, but look down on the icky process of extraction, and don’t think twice about eliminating the jobs of the people who do it. If Sanders does manage to win the Democratic nomination, his fracking policy would be likely to cost him votes in the general election in these areas. As a union official in Pennsylvania told the New York Times, ‘If we end up with a Democratic candidate that supports a fracking ban, I’m going to tell my members that either you don’t vote or you vote for the other guy’.

Sanders says workers in the fracking-related industries shouldn’t fear his axe, because his Green New Deal (also co-written with AOC) will – somehow – create 20million new jobs in the future. But for a plan that demands $16 trillion in new spending, the Green New Deal is remarkably short on details and long on magical promises. In addition to shutting down the low-emission sources of energy (natural gas and nuclear) that currently provide around 55 percent of the country’s electricity, the Green New Deal promises to eliminate all fossil fuels in just 10 years from now. It will make electricity ‘virtually free’ after 2035, and will ‘pay for itself over 15 years’.

Sanders’ plan has similarities with the approach Germany has adopted – the so-called Energiewende – which has hugely backfired. Germany has phased out nuclear power and has spent $580 billion on renewables, only to see electricity prices jacked up to among the highest in Europe. On top of that, the Germans have discovered how unreliable solar and wind are, forcing them to increase their use of coal as a back-up source. As a result, emissions have remained stubbornly high.

As energy writer Michael Shellenberger has pointed out, to see why the Green New Deal won’t work, you only have to look at Sanders’ home state of Vermont: ‘In 2005, Vermont legislators promised to reduce emissions 25 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, and 50 per cent below 1990 levels by 2028, through the use of renewables and energy efficiency only. What’s happened since? Vermont’s emissions rose 16.3 per cent. That’s more than twice as much as national emissions rose during the same period.’

Shellenberger rightly concludes that Sanders’ plan is regressive, not progressive: ‘It would disproportionately hurt the poor by making them pay more for basic goods like food and energy. And it would slow economic growth by reducing labour-productivity.’ But what about all those jobs Sanders would create? They are low-skill and inevitably would be low-paid. ‘In boasting that [his plan] will create 20million more jobs’, Shelllenberger writes, Sanders ‘is pointing to the reason why energy prices would rise. Making anything more labour-intensive makes it more expensive.’

Sanders’ green politics are not a minor side issue in his campaign – the Green New Deal is one of his most high-profile policies. It shows that his vision of the future is limited: it is not about growing and transforming the economy, investing in new technology, and giving workers more control over their lives. A campaign that is promising to throw hundreds of thousands out of work is not about to give workers more agency. In an era in which more people have voiced demands for more say and more control over their lives, Sanders proposes a top-down approach that centralises more power in the state, prioritising abstract global concerns over real lives in local areas.

Bernie says there is a moral imperative to support his green politics. Those are his morals, not ours.

SOURCE

Our leaders open to ridicule in setting silly climate targets

Comment from Australia

We might like talking about political promises but let’s be frank: they have the half-life of a prawn salad. Our politicians have broken so many pledges they’ve made cynicism more contagious than the coronavirus.

Ruling out new taxes, heralding surpluses and guaranteeing stability — breaking these undertakings is the only thing that has united our major parties over the past decade. Crossing voters is an across-the-aisle conviction.

When core promises can last less than a year, try to imagine the voter buy-in for a pledge spanning 30 budgets and at least 10 elections. Anthony Albanese says Labor will deliver a zero net carbon dioxide emissions target by 2050, without saying how it will be done or what it will cost.

If it happens, it will be achieved by a prime minister who is most likely not yet in the parliament and some of the people who will get to pass judgment on the outcome at the ballot box won’t be born for more than a decade. When we evaluate our 2050 performance, Albanese will be 86, Greta Thunberg will be 47 and Keith Richards will most likely still be confounding medics and turning 106.

If we cast our minds back an equivalent period, it was the delivery date for an infamous promise from former prime minister Bob Hawke. “By 1990, no child will be living in poverty,” he said in 1987. Despite manifestly failing on this, Hawke was re-elected for a fourth term in March 1990. Although the Silver Bodgie is no longer with us, children living in poverty are — as we were reminded this week with references to the Newstart Allowance and poverty on the NSW central coast.

If you can’t remember 1990, let me remind you: it was the year that Germany officially reunited, a year after the Berlin Wall came down, and Poland became the first Eastern bloc nation to begin to embrace capitalism; Tim Berners-Lee began work on creating the world wide web; the first digital camera was sold; and mobile phones were chunky things in fancy cars. Iraq invaded Kuwait and troops, including Australian sailors, blockaded Iraq in the lead-up to the first Gulf War; while the Rio Earth summit, which first drew global attention to global warming, was still two years away.

Supporters of zero net by 2050 argue that it is pointless discussing the cost because we have no idea about technological, industrial and economic settings that far in the future. Which is exactly the point: why promote the target when there is no way of knowing where we will be placed on climate knowledge, technological advances, emissions reduction and economic settings even two years from now?

This target is virtue-signalling, pure and simple, which is why state governments and large corporates sign up; they are eager to access subsidies and projects but are not responsible for delivering. In federal politics, where the rubber will hit the road, any party adopting the target surely is obliged to provide plans and costings for achieving it.

Labor wipes its hands but a study by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research costed scenarios and found zero net would cut GDP growth by 0.2 per cent. It said the higher the target, the higher the cost to households. Former resources minister Matt Canavan wrote in The Australian this week that the same formula would mean annual economic costs of $200bn to $400bn in Australia, with between 200,000 and 400,000 fewer jobs.

That estimates the pain, yet until we know what the rest of the world does, we cannot guess at any gain. If global emissions continue to rise — as they are forecast to do for at least a decade — all our costs will be for no discernible benefit. None of our politicians want to talk about cost/benefit analysis on climate action.

The evangelical enthusiasm for this target from green/left politicians, activists and journalists is irrational, more emotion and gesture than reason and fact.

They boast of 80 nations already signed up to zero net but they seldom list those countries. Here are a few: Antigua and Barbuda, Burkina Faso, Botswana, Cape Verde, Chad, Colombia, Cook Islands, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guyana, Lebanon, Mali, Nauru, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Rwanda, Samoa, Suriname, Uganda and Zambia.

One of the few signatories with a prospective economy is Norway, but it gets almost all of its electricity from abundant hydro-electricity while exporting lucrative gas and oil. It has its cake and exports at the same time.

To be fair, proponents point to Britain but while it has dramatically reduced emissions, it has fallen short of some targets, has already switched from coal to gas for cost reasons rather than climate, and it gets about 20 per cent of its electricity from nuclear.

In Australia, added emissions reduction will be costly and difficult. Already our shift to about 23 per cent renewable power has helped double electricity costs and threaten energy security.

For just over a fortnight this month, South Australia faced an accidental experiment. Cut off from the Victorian interconnector because of storm damage, it was left as an island, reliant on its own generation, four years and $500m of government investment after its statewide blackout in 2016.

Saved by cool weather, the state just managed to scrape through, but only by relying on gas for 70 per cent of its electricity generation. The state’s much-vaunted 50 per cent renewable energy achievements fell by the wayside — the zeitgeist wasn’t blowing when required — and without coal-fired power from across the state border, it only got through by firing up every bit of gas it could.

If targets and subsidies force out more coal and gas power in Victoria and NSW, all this will get much worse. Battery storage is too expensive and too short-lived to play much of a role.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal in August, Mark P. Mills detailed the resources needed for expansion of wind farms and battery storage.

“Building one wind turbine requires 900 tons of steel, 2500 tons of concrete and 45 tons of plastic,” he outlined.

“The International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that solar goals for 2050 consistent with the Paris Accords will result in old-panel disposal constituting more than double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste.”

He points out that the manufacture of a single electric car battery demands the digging up and processing of 230,000kg of raw materials. For each car.

The mining growth required, especially for rare earths, would be extraordinary, expensive and energy intensive.

“Building enough wind turbines to supply half the world’s electricity would require nearly two billion tons of coal to produce concrete and steel, along with two billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades,” wrote Mills, confronting the reality of clean, green industries.

Our debate is dominated by unrealistic posturing rather than cold hard facts. Scott Morrison ought to stick to practical policies and dismiss the climate poseurs in his own ranks and in the state Liberal governments. Australia ought to either focus primarily on affordable and reliable power or, if we are serious about emissions reduction, consider solving our energy security, climate policy and submarine technology dilemmas through a pivot to nuclear technology.

Politicians must resist believing their own publicity. One of the greatest risks for the Coalition after winning last year’s election was believing that the result was all about its brilliance rather than being largely a consequence of Labor’s determination to make themselves unelectable.

With a thin reform agenda, fragile economy and underlying divisions in its ranks, it is vital that the Coalition governs competently and embarks on a more ambitious program. It has been tardy on this front but, again, has been gifted a re-election strategy by a Labor Party addicted to radical, non-nuclear climate action as the learned helplessness of its electoral failure.

Morrison must oppose climate self-harm and fight for reliable, affordable electricity — coal-fired, gas-fired or nuclear. This contest will shape our economic future and crystallise his government’s reason for being.

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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1 March, 2020

Two newly published articles on the astronomical origin of the solar and climate oscillations

I'd like to share two newly published articles that I think are important for understanding solar and climate oscillations. The first one is the most important and perhaps simplest to understand, the other is more technical.

1)
Scafetta, N. : Solar Oscillations and the Orbital Invariant Inequalities of the Solar System. Solar Physics, 295, 33 (2020)

shared free copy: https://rdcu.be/b2ep0

I think this article just published on Solar Physics may be of great interest. Herein, all main oscillations found both in solar and climatic data found and discussed in the litterature for more than 50 years are theoretically identified. I remind that these are known as the cycles of Bray–Hallstatt (2100–2500 yr), Eddy (800–1200 yr), Suess–de Vries (200–250 yr), Jose (155–185 yr), Gleissberg (80–100 year ), the cycles of 55–65 yr and others. The same oscillations are found in the climatic series. The article highlights in an "elegant" way that these oscillations are in fact a particular subset of orbital oscillations which have been herein labeled as the "Orbital Invariant Inequalities" of the solar system due to the jovian planets. These orbital oscillations are important because they enjoy particular physical properties which make them theoretically able to induce remote synchronization processes on rotating systems such as the sun and the heliosphere and, therefore, can induce the observed solar oscillations. One of the proposed hypothesis is that there may be a "lensing" effect of the planets in concentrating or in any case modulating the flow of particles towards the sun which could interfere with the solar dynamo process inducing a modulation. Evidence about solar-flare effects are also discussed using the litterature. The paper strongly supports the hypotheis that solar and climate oscillations have an astronomical origin which cannot be anymore ignored since alternative theories explaining these oscillations do not exist.

2)
Scafetta, N., Milani, F. & Bianchini, A. : Multiscale Analysis of the Instantaneous Eccentricity Oscillations of the Planets of the Solar System from 13 000 BC to 17 000 AD. Astronomy Letters 45, 778–790 (2019).

shared free copy: https://rdcu.be/b2enx

This second article proposes an analysis of the variations of the eccentricity of the planets of the solar system on the small scales, that is, up to the multi-millennial ones. The research, which is an extension of Milanchovich's studies to all planets and for the short time scales, is aimed at finding where the most significant oscillations that are observed both in the sun and in the climate are best seen in the solar system. Among all the cycles, those of 60 and about 900-1000 years observed in the orbital variation of Jupiter are impressive and they are very beautifully correlated with the similar cycles of the Earth's climate. Again, a planetary modulation of the streams of particles moving in space is suggested as the "secret" mechanism that explains solar and climate variations.

Via email from N.Scafetta

How Much Will the Green New Deal Cost Your Family?

The Green New Deal, a proposal to overhaul the entire economy in the name of fighting climate disaster, has driven the policy agenda for 2020 Democrats and the Democratic Party in general. These Democrats do not tell Americans exactly how much the hair-brained green scheme will cost the average American family, however. A new study from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and Power the Future (PTF) estimated exactly how much this proposal will cost the average American family in terms of energy in eleven key battleground states.

"At a minimum, the Green New Deal would impose large and recurring costs on American households. We conclude that among the 11 states analyzed, the GND would cost a typical household a minimum of $74,287 in the first year of implementation. Among 10 of the states, excluding Alaska at $84,584, the average household burden of the GND in its first year is $75,168. For the subsequent four years, the average annual costs per household for 10 of the 11 states is $47,755, decreasing to $40,706 for ever after. The expenses in Alaska are more than $10,000 more per year per household," Kent Lassman and Daniel Turner reported.

The study focused on eleven states, most of which are considered pivotal "swing states" in the 2020 election: Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

These numbers only represent the increased energy costs each household would likely face in these states — they do not capture the immense burdens of the other massive changes the Green New Deal aims to implement.

Lassman and Turner focused on the GND's "imposition of a significant set of constraints on energy generation." The Green New Deal would shift energy consumption from various sources to the electric grid. "In 2019 Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute analyzed the cost of electricity under the GND. His study looks at current electricity generation and estimates what it would cost to replace all non-GND compliant electricity generation—such as coal, natural gas, petroleum, and nuclear—with wind and solar power. Zycher also looks at the cost of emissions, transmission, backup power, and land for replacement capacity," the authors explained. Zycher's analysis was understated but useful for determining increased energy costs.

"Energy research firm Wood Mackenzie estimates that the greening of the U.S. power sector would cost approximately $35,000 per household and take 20 years. Wood Mackenzie estimate[s] a total price tag of some $4.7 trillion, including around $1.5 trillion to add 1,600 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity and $2.5 trillion of investments in 900 gigawatts of storage. Another $700 billion is estimated for new high transmission power lines to move that electricity from sun-drenched deserts and windswept plains to the urban areas where it would be used," they explained.

In a chilling paragraph, the CEI/PTF study noted that "[m]ost provisions of the GND are so broad and open-ended that the list of potential programs necessary to implement the program is only limited by the capacity of legislators to imagine new government programs. Therefore, it is impossible to calculate the maximum cost of the GND. However, other parts of the GND are more precise, sufficiently so that an approximate minimum cost estimate is attainable."

The study focused on additional electricity demand, costs associated with shipping and the logistics industry, new vehicles, and building retrofits. These costs represent low-end estimates for the Green New Deal's electricity costs.

CEI and PTF chose these eleven states because they have "diverse climates, geography, economies, and populations." Alaska, for example, is remote, sparsely populated, and cold. Iowa and Wisconsin share some characteristics with Alaska but have stronger diversity of power generation. Florida and North Carolina are economic powerhouses in a temperate-to-warm climate. New Hampshire is a small state well connected with larger economies in a cold climate. New Mexico has a small population but a large area and is situated between large states. Colorado, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are large in terms of geography, economy, and population in a mild-to-colder climate.

This study built on a previous study finding that the Green New Deal would cost the average American family at least a quarter of a million dollars in the first five years. That study examined Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania. This new study added more swing states, such as Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

If you do not live in any of those states, you can estimate the rough cost of the Green New Deal for your household by comparing your state with the regional characteristics of each state. If you live in California, for example, your household costs would be similar to those of Florida and Colorado in key respects. If you live in Maine, your household costs would likely be similar to those of New Hampshire.

These astronomical costs are a low-end estimate for the Green New Deal, and they illustrate the wide-ranging radical nature of the Green New Deal. A Heritage Foundation study found that taxing the rich at 100 percent would still fall trillions short of the costs for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All.

Democrats need to face tough scrutiny over this radical legislation.

SOURCE

Dems Want to Drill the Economy With Fracking Ban

Many Democrats want to ban hydraulic fracturing — a.k.a. fracking — for oil and natural gas. Their ostensible goal is saving the planet, but their ban would fail to reduce emissions while triggering a recession. Sounds like a typical Democrat “deal.”

The American Petroleum Institute (API) released a study on the consequences of the Democrats’ desired policy. The API summarizes that a fracking ban “would cost up to 7.5 million American jobs in 2022 alone, lead to a cumulative GDP loss of $7.1 trillion by 2030, slash household incomes by $5,400 annually, increase household energy costs by more than $600 per year and reduce farm incomes by 43 percent due to higher energy costs.”

Why the stunning impact? API notes, “More than 95% of U.S. natural gas and oil wells today are developed using hydraulic fracturing. Technologically, fracking is the chief reason the U.S. is the world’s leading natural gas and oil producer.” Cut off the tap, and everyone suffers.

And yet we have Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sponsoring the Fracking Ban Act. “Fracking is a danger to our water supply. It’s a danger to the air we breathe, it has resulted in more earthquakes, and it’s highly explosive. To top it all off, it’s contributing to climate change,” Sanders insists. “If we are serious about clean air and drinking water, if we are serious about combating climate change, the only safe and sane way to move forward is to ban fracking nationwide.”

Elizabeth Warren wouldn’t bother with legislation, declaring she would “ban fracking everywhere” on Day One in the White House.

But their claims are false. The U.S. leads the world in decreasing emissions precisely because of fracking. And there is plenty of evidence that fracking does not cause the harm Sanders and his cadre of ecofascists claim.

By the way, we rebuked Barack Obama last week for falsely claiming credit for economic growth. What did cause that growth? Energy production through fracking.

Democrats are desperate for recession, however, so their efforts to stoke one through impeachment, coronavirus panic, and various taxes and regulations are not surprising.

SOURCE

Greta Thunberg addresses school strikes in Bristol

Thousands of children closed down Bristol city centre on Friday as they joined Greta Thunberg on a mass school strike over climate change.

Protesters as young as six were undeterred by heavy rain and gathered on College Green where they waited to be addressed by the 17-year-old Swedish activist, before beginning a march around the city.

Avon and Somerset Police are warning parents that the event, organised by Bristol Youth Strike 4 Climate, has “grown so large” that it could be unsafe for their children.

Specially arranged coaches arrived from all parts of the country bringing schoolchildren, some accompanied by their parents. Bristol Strike 4 Climate, the organisers, estimated that about 30,000 people attended.

SOURCE

When a poet is a better prophet than the prophets

It would be difficult to be a worse prophet than the Greenies. Starting from Paul Ehrlich, they repeatedly make these confident prophecies that in some number of years disasters will befall us unless we do something that they want. But it just doesn't happen. When the prophesied year rolls around, life just goes on as usual.

During Australia's recent summer bushfire season, all sorts of Greenie-influenced people screeched that the fires were the result of global warming and unless we shut down our our entire electricity generation industry the fires would get worse. They were so shrill about their claims that PM Morrison came under great pressure to "do more" about global warming.

And then came something that no Greenie had prophesied -- showing how little they understood of the events concerned. It rained. And DID it rain! Concerns about fire were rapidly replaced with concerns about flooding. The Greenie prophecies that the fires would go on until we did something about global warming were thoroughly falsified. The Greenies basically did not know anything about how Australia's climate worked.

But a poet did. In 1908 Dorothea MacKellar described Australia's climate with limpid simplicity, as being "Droughts and flooding rains". She knew how Australia's climate went even if the Greenies did not. It happened this year exactly how she said it always does: Drought followed by flood. She was a good observer.

The Greenies were no observers at all. We were constantly regaled with assurances that the recent fires were the worst ever when in fact the 1974/75 fires consumed a much bigger area. Lies on top of ideology were all the Greenies had to offer.

And there is no doubt that the drought contributed to the buildup of fuel in the forests and made the fires worse. Dry vegetation burns well. But what was the cause of the drought? Was it simply a recurrent feature of the Australian climate? No way! said the Greenies. It was caused by global warming.

For instance we have the opening sentence from a recent rather emptyheaded article in a prestigious medical journal (JAMA) which says: "There is increasing scientific consensus that climate change is the underlying cause of the prolonged dry and hot conditions that have increased the risk of extreme fire weather in Australia".

But that is magical thinking. Global warming would cause MORE rain, not less. Warmer oceans would evaporate off more water vapour which would come down as more rain. The temperature that causes drought is cooling, not warming. So again the global warming faith flies in the face of the facts

Most global warming activism is purely political with agitators such Thunberg and Occasio-Cortez knowing nothing of the detailed climate statistics. And it is mostly from them that the wild predictions come. Scientists -- such as Ezekiel -- who do know the facts are much more cautious in their predictions.

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For more postings from me, see DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here. Email me (John Ray) here.

Preserving the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

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IN BRIEF

Home (Index page)

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here. It shows that we actually live in an era of remarkable temperature stability.

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about 100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not because of the facts

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If sugar is bad we are all dead

And when it comes to "climate change", I know where the skeletons are buried

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be challenged, no sacred truths.

"Thinking" molecules?? Terrestrial temperatures have gone up by less than one degree over the last 150 years and CO2 has gone up long term too. But that proves nothing. It is not a proven causal relationship. One of the first things you learn in statistics is that correlation is not causation. And there is none of the smooth relationship that you would expect of a causal relationship. Both temperatures and CO2 went up in fits and starts but they were not the same fits and starts. The precise effects on temperature that CO2 levels are supposed to produce were not produced. CO2 molecules don't have a little brain in them that says "I will stop reflecting heat down for a few years and then start up again". Their action (if any) is entirely passive. Theoretically, the effect of added CO2 in the atmosphere should be instant. It allegedly works by bouncing electromagnetic radiation around and electromagnetic radiation moves at the speed of light. But there has been no instant effect. Temperature can stay plateaued for many years (e.g. 1945 to 1975) while CO2 levels climb. So there is clearly no causal link between the two. One could argue that there are one or two things -- mainly volcanoes and the Ninos -- that upset the relationship but there are not exceptions ALL the time. Most of the time a precise 1 to 1 connection should be visible. It isn't, far from it. You should be able to read one from the other. You can't.

Antarctica is GAINING mass

Warmists depend heavily on ice cores for their figures about the atmosphere of the past. But measuring the deep past through ice cores is a very shaky enterprise, which almost certainly takes insufficient account of compression effects. The apparently stable CO2 level of 280ppm during the Holocene could in fact be entirely an artifact of compression at the deeper levels of the ice cores. . Perhaps the gas content of an ice layer approaches a low asymptote under pressure. Dr Zbigniew Jaworowski's criticisms of the assumed reliability of ice core measurements are of course well known. And he studied them for over 30 years.

The world's first "Green" party was the Nazi party -- and Greenies are just as Fascist today in their endeavours to dictate to us all and in their attempts to suppress dissent from their claims.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Believing in global warming has become a sign of virtue. Strange in a skeptical era. There is clearly a need for faith

Climate change is the religion of people who think they're too smart for religion

Some advice from the Buddha that the Green/Left would do well to think about: "Three things cannot be long hidden: The Sun, The Moon and The Truth"

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century. Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses, believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

Global warming is the predominant Leftist lie of the 21st century. No other lie is so influential. The runner up lie is: "Islam is a religion of peace". Both are rankly absurd.

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those days

The plight of the bumblebee -- an egregious example of crooked "science"

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile, mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel" produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil), which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far) precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all, in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all other living things."

Fossil fuels are 100% organic, are made with solar energy, and when burned produce mostly CO2 and H2O, the 2 most important foods for life.

Warmists claim that the "hiatus" in global warming that began around 1998 was caused by the oceans suddenly gobbling up all the heat coming from above. Changes in the heat content of the oceans are barely measurable but the ARGO bathythermographs seem to show the oceans warming not from above but from below

WISDOM:

“I would rather have questions that can’t be answered, than answers that can’t be questioned.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman, Physicist

“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” — Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

UNRELIABLE SCIENCE:

(1). “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness… “The apparent endemicity of bad research behaviour is alarming. In their quest for telling a compelling story, scientists too often sculpt data to fit their preferred theory of the world. Or they retrofit hypotheses to fit their data. Journal editors deserve their fair share of criticism too. We aid and abet the worst behaviours. Our acquiescence to the impact factor fuels an unhealthy competition to win a place in a select few journals. Our love of ‘significance’ pollutes the literature with many a statistical fairy-tale…Journals are not the only miscreants. Universities are in a perpetual struggle for money and talent…” (Dr. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief, The Lancet, in The Lancet, 11 April, 2015, Vol 385, “Offline: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?”)

(2). “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

Consensus: As Ralph Waldo Emerson said: 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.'

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

"The growth of knowledge depends entirely on disagreement" -- Karl Popper

"I always think it's a sign of victory when they move on to the ad hominem -- Christopher Hitchens

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers". It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an" could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays", "might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global cooling

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest" which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself." He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective. They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.“ – Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation

“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” – Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)

Leftists generally and Warmists in particular very commonly ascribe disagreement with their ideas to their opponent being "in the pay" of someone else, usually "Big Oil", without troubling themselves to provide any proof of that assertion. They are so certain that they are right that that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for opposition to them. They thus reveal themselves as the ultimate bigots -- people with fixed and rigid ideas.

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I have shifted my attention to health related science and climate related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic. Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter. Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future. Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world. Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions. Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were. But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count (we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

A Warmist backs down: "No one knows exactly how far rising carbon concentrations affect temperatures" -- Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate 50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

The frequency of hurricanes has markedly DECLINED in recent years

Here's how that "97% consensus" figure was arrived at

97% of scientists want to get another research grant

Another 97%: Following the death of an older brother in a car crash in 1994, Bashar Al Assad became heir apparent; and after his father died in June 2000, he took office as President of Syria with a startling 97 per cent of the vote.

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here) that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they agree with

David Brower, founder Sierra Club: “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license"

To Greenies, Genghis Khan was a good guy, believe it or not. They love that he killed so many people.

Greenie antisemitism

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2 and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2 will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees. So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen: "We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones' Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

Comparing climate alarmist Hansen to Cassandra is WRONG. Cassandra's (Greek mythology) dire prophecies were never believed but were always right. Hansen's dire prophecies are usually believed but are always wrong (Prof. Laurence Gould, U of Hartford, CT)

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in 1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out. Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it. That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed -- and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy. Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

UPDATE to the above: It seems that I am a true prophet

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of "The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil fuel theory

Help keep the planet Green! Maximize your CO2 and CH4 output!

Global Warming=More Life; Global Cooling=More Death.

The inconvenient truth about biological effects of "Ocean Acidification"

Medieval Warm Period: Recent climatological data assembled from around the world using different proxies attest to the presence of both the MWP and the LIA in the following locations: the Sargasso Sea, West Africa, Kenya, Peru, Japan, Tasmania, South Africa, Idaho, Argentina, and California. These events were clearly world-wide and in most locations the peak temperatures during the MWP were higher than current temperatures.

Both radioactive and stable carbon isotopes show that the real atmospheric CO2 residence time (lifetime) is only about 5 years, and that the amount of fossil-fuel CO2 in the atmosphere is maximum 4%.

Cook the crook who cooks the books

The great and fraudulent scare about lead

How 'GREEN' is the FOOTPRINT of a WIND TURBINE? 45 tons of rebar and 630 cubic yards of concrete

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this, that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light; preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely. But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility. Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years hence. Give us all a break!

If you doubt the arrogance [of the global warming crowd, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over. Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The "precautionary principle" is a favourite Greenie idea -- but isn't that what George Bush was doing when he invaded Iraq? Wasn't that a precaution against Saddam getting or having any WMDs? So Greenies all agree with the Iraq intervention? If not, why not?

A classic example of how the sensationalist media distort science to create climate panic is here.

There is a very readable summary of the "Hockey Stick" fraud here

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: "The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added." So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been considered.

Relying on the popular wisdom can even hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

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