This document is part of an archive of postings on Greenie Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written
This is a backup copy of the original blog
28 February, 2022
Fracking was ended on a ‘false pretext’ and should be resumed with ‘vigour’, MPs say
Fracking was ended in Britain on a "false pretext" and should be resumed with "the vigour of a national war effort", Conservative MPs said last night, as an official report cast doubt on evidence cited by ministers to justify the ban.
Days after Boris Johnson warned that Europe was "addicted" to Russian oil and gas, it has emerged that a report commissioned by a UK regulator described some of the tremors used to justify the moratorium on shale gas exploration in Britain as "almost imperceptible".
The larger tremors cited by ministers when they announced the ban in 2019 affected just tens of buildings with, at the most, "slight non-structural damage", according to a report commissioned by the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA) and finalised after the moratorium was put in place.
The disclosure comes after the Prime Minister acknowledged that there was "merit" in the idea of the temporary "use of hydrocarbons in this country" after MPs pressed him to "look again at fracking". Sources insisted that he had not changed his mind on the issue, having pushed back against a suggestion by Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Brexit opportunities minister, that the ban should be reversed.
The 2019 moratorium was announced by Andrea Leadsom, then business secretary, in November of that year "on the basis of the disturbance caused to residents living near Cuadrilla’s Preston New Road site in Lancashire" and the "latest scientific analysis" for the OGA.
But several other reports, published months later without fanfare on the OGA's website, prompted calls last night for the decision to be reversed.
'Hang their heads in shame'
On Saturday night, Steve Baker, the former Brexit minister, said: "There's a war on which appears to be possible only because Europe is, as the PM said, addicted to Russian gas. While Putin bears responsibility for the ultimate war crime of initiating a war of aggression, everyone who allowed our shale gas to remain in the ground on a false pretence should hang their heads in shame as the Ukrainian people fight and die for their country.
"Boris should immediately stop the concreting in of current shale wells and go for gas with all the vigour of a national war effort, which this very nearly is.
"Our civilisation may depend upon it."
The "disturbance" cited by ministers in Nov 2019 appeared to refer to a magnitude 2.9 tremor which led to the suspension of operations at the Preston New Road site in Aug 2019.
But one of the reports published by the OGA states that the effect equated to some 50 buildings experiencing "damage state one" (DS1) , the lowest of five damage states, which involves either "no structural damage" or "slight non-structural damage which is manifested through hairline cracks in walls and damage to plaster".
The report, a final version of which was submitted to the OGA in July 2020, adds that the British Geological Survey "assigned the event as intensity VI ["slightly damaging"] due, in part at least, to some reports of minor cosmetic damage (DS1)".
It adds: "This intensity is unusual for an event of this magnitude." An average "of 52 buildings at DS1 was calculated. This is consistent with reports made to the BGS.
"It is noted, however, that these 'did-you-feel-it?' reports are self-submitted online and therefore unverified."
The report also addresses earlier magnitude 1.1 and 1.5 tremors at the Preston New Road site, stating: "Generally, the motions can be considered as almost imperceptible and well below the level of vibration that people experience going about everyday activities."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/02/26/fracking-ended-false-pretext-should-resumed-vigour-mps-say/
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Italy may reopen coal plants amid concerns about energy supply, PM says
After Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine on Thursday, the EU announced an initial raft of sanctions against Russia with more expected to follow.
The instability and sanctions are expected to have a wide-ranging impact on gas supplies and prices in Europe, particularly in Germany and Italy, the two European countries most reliant on gas exports from Russia.
Addressing Italy’s parliament on Friday, Draghi laid out plans to offset price increases and turn to alternative sources of energy.
“The sanctions require us to carefully consider the impact on our economy,” he said. “The biggest concern is in the energy sector, which has already been hit by price rises in recent months: around 45 percent of the gas we import comes from Russia, up from 27 percent ten years ago.”
Draghi suggested Italy needs to increase its domestic production of gas, which has fallen in recent years, and source more power from existing coal plants.
“The reopening of coal-fired power stations could be used to make up any shortfall in the immediate future,” he said, adding that “the government is ready to intervene to further lower the price of energy, should this be necessary. It is necessary.”
Italy is already in the middle of an energy price crisis, with the authorities last week announcing another €6 billion in aid to offset price hikes following record bill rises last month.
These funds are on top of some €10 billion already budgeted since last summer to help customers and businesses.
https://www.thelocal.it/20220225/italy-may-reopen-coal-plants-amid-concerns-about-energy-supply-pm-says/?mc_cid=35cf33ed9f&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Graveyard of the green giants: It's the hidden cost of our dash for windpower - thousands of decommissioned blades that are so difficult to recycle, they are just dumped as landfill
Right across the road from the town cemetery in Sweetwater, Texas, sits another graveyard where the dead are never buried. Some 4,000 worn-out giant wind turbine blades are piled as far as the eye can see, taking up most of a 25-acre field.
Windmill blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing — more than 300ft — and weigh up to eight tons, so these have been sawn into three pieces with a diamond-encrusted industrial saw. They’re still imposingly big, although now increasingly covered in weeds.
They’ve been here for five years and, given a recycling company’s failure so far to deal with them, are almost certain to remain for many more — an unsightly monument to ‘clean’ energy’s dirty little secret.
Hailed by the green lobby as one of the most under-used renewable energy sources, carbon-free wind power is on the rise.
The enormous white windmills are sprouting on land and off coastlines in ever-greater numbers, including in Britain, which is building the world’s biggest offshore wind farm in the North Sea.
But they come with a hidden environmental cost that is rarely mentioned: they don’t last for ever: only 20 to 25 years, in fact. And the blades, built from a ‘composite’ of fibreglass and resin that can withstand hurricane-force winds but be light enough to turn, cannot easily be crushed, let alone recycled.
Scientists are looking for ways to separate the resins from the fibres or grind chunks of blade into small pellets that can be used in other products, but they’re struggling to find any process that works on a large scale.
Amid the zeal to recycle, there’s no small irony in the fact the main sources of renewable energy cannot themselves be renewed when they reach the end of their life.
By 2050, it’s predicted that the world will need to dispose of two million tons of wind turbine blade waste every year. In the UK, the volume already exceeds 100,000 tons per year.
Currently, the world’s decommissioned blades are mostly buried in landfill sites, where they will take centuries to degrade.
While there’s growing pressure for this practice to end, in the absence of an effective way of recycling them, the alternative could be something like the hideous sight at Sweetwater.
‘It’s amazing what we waste,’ sighs Christina Speck, a local teacher and mother, as she drives past the blade dump, one of two on the outskirts of Sweetwater.
She mentions that the town’s main social event is coming up, an annual ‘rattlesnake round-up’ billed as the largest rattlesnake cull in the world. And she adds proudly that, unlike wind turbines, everything in the thousands of snakes that will be killed — from the meat to the venom to the skin — is recycled.
Of course, green energy exponents will point to the carbon savings turbines make in their 20 to 25-year lifetime by making electricity from wind rather than oil or coal. They also note that the steel towers which support the blades, as well as smaller parts such as wiring, can be recycled.
However, the problem of what to do with used turbine blades will only get more pressing. The number of those reaching the end of their life is set to rocket as those built in the wind energy boom of the 1990s and 2000s wear out. Meanwhile, the blades are getting ever longer to improve efficiency so there’s more and more waste.
Scientists at America’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory have warned that in the next few decades, the world faces a ‘tidal wave’ of redundant blades that will number ‘hundreds of thousands, if not more’.
Used wind turbine blades don’t leech toxins into the soil, as some have alleged, but they do take up vast areas of already overloaded landfill sites.
The U.S. government’s Environmental Protection Agency has described the sheer size of the windmills, along with the difficulty of disposing of them, as a ‘towering promise of future wreckage’.
And there is no sign of the problem coming to an end, as more and bigger turbines are erected across the globe.
The International Energy Agency has predicted that if we built offshore wind farms on every feasible site around the world, they could generate more electricity on their own than the world needs.
The huge Dogger Bank wind farm under construction in the North Sea will be the largest offshore farm on the planet, capable — says its developer — of powering six million UK homes.
Nolan County, of which Sweetwater is the capital, is home to the biggest concentration of wind turbines in the U.S., which, in turn, is the world’s second biggest wind energy generator after China. Of the 180,000 wind turbines churning away in the U.S., a quarter are in Texas, where the west of the state is generally flat and windy: perfect for windmills.
In the days of 1980s TV series Dallas, the booming oil industry in Texas was something to boast about, but global warming ended that. The remote town of Sweet-water, with its 9,500-strong population 220 miles west of Dallas, has hitched its cart to wind power, proclaiming itself the ‘wind capital of the U.S.’ and using a turbine blade as a welcome sign on the main road.
But now, its love affair with wind energy appears to have cooled, thanks to the ugly turbine graveyards. They are owned by Global Fibreglass Solutions, a U.S. recycling company that arrived here back in 2017. It bought an old aluminium plant to recycle the turbine blades and turn them into products ranging from wall panels and railway sleepers to concrete almost as strong as steel.
The company subsequently announced it had become the first in the world to develop a method of breaking down the blades and turning them into pellets and fibreboards. It established more offices, including one in the UK —in Corby, Northants.
But the work has yet even to start at the main plant in Sweetwater and the UK branch has closed. Locals suspect that GFS — which was paid by wind companies to take their used blades off their hands — has no intention of ever reprocessing them. It certainly wouldn’t be the first ‘green’ recycling company to fail to live up to its ambitious promises.
Don Lilly, GFS’s chief executive, told the Mail his firm has discovered a way of recycling the blades. The hold-up, he says, is largely due to the financial challenge of getting enough advance orders to pay for the equipment required for production.
However, he added, they have secured new investors and new funding, and ‘all will be apparent in the next 40 days’.
Officials in Sweetwater are not holding their breath. ‘It’s kind of fizzled out,’ says Karen Hunt, director of the local Chamber of Commerce, of the recycling project.
She sees little sign of that changing, adding mournfully of the blade dumps: ‘They’re part of our landscape. And not an attractive one.’
At least the residents of Sweet-water can console themselves that they accepted only a couple of years’ supply of decommissioned blades — although even that looks a huge amount. And, with endless acres of unused land around town and few people to complain about the eyesore, there are plenty of places to dump them.
In densely populated Britain, discarding thousands of old turbine blades so casually in plain sight would hardly be tolerated — the 100,000 tonnes of them each year are instead largely buried in landfill.
In the EU, which strictly limits what can be buried on such sites, some blades are burned in power plants or special ‘pyrolysis’ ovens to create products such as glue and paints. However, the process requires a lot of energy, and burning fibreglass emits pollutants — so it’s not exactly very ‘green’.
How long Britain and the rest of the world can keep burying turbine blades is open to question. Last month, a European Parliament report called for an EU-wide landfill ban on used turbine blades by 2025. Wind industry insiders expect the UK to follow suit.
In November, a £2 million Whitehall-funded, three-year project was announced to develop research by Strathclyde University into recycling wind turbine blades so that components can be used in the car and construction industries.
In Denmark and Ireland, blades have been turned into bridges and bicycle shelters; and in the Netherlands into children’s slides and ramps — but they’ll deal with only a small fraction of the decommissioned blades heading our way.
Solar panels — which contain photovoltaic cells to convert sunlight to electricity and typically boast a 25-year life span — are another green recycling nightmare waiting to happen.
The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that by 2050, up to 78 million tons of solar panels will have reached the end of their life and the world will create another six million tons of photovoltaic waste every year. Where to put all of that is potentially an even bigger headache than the turbine blades. It’s very complicated to recover the more valuable materials, such as silver and silicon, used in solar panels.
Research suggests the cost of recovering the materials outweighs the cost of extracting what can be reused by a ratio of ten to one. In other words, if the cost of recycling is $10 you get only $1 back.
And unlike wind turbine blades, solar panels contain toxic materials such as lead that can contaminate the ground as they break down, so dumping them in landfill sites poses serious issues.
And what about the lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars? Here, too, there’s a money issue. Japanese researchers say the value of the materials that can be recycled from them is about a third of the cost of the recycling operation, while it’s five times cheaper to mine new lithium than extract the old lithium from batteries.
Did you know that when you virtuously shelled out £45,000 on a Tesla Model 3?
Apostles of green energy undoubtedly glossed over all this — if indeed they even knew about it — when they first brandished wind and solar power as the perfect alternatives to help wean us off planet-killing oil, coal and gas.
It’s more realistic, say experts, to accept that we will never have a source of energy that is 100 per cent green.
That may be true — but it’s small consolation to the people of Sweetwater as their town is choked by the bones of dead wind turbines
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10558375/TOM-LEONARD-Graveyard-green-giants.html
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The state of the polar bear, 2021
Susan J. Crockford
Executive summary
* Recent survey results suggest the global polar bear population is at least 32,000, although the estimate has a wide range of potential error.
* Results from the 2017–2018 survey of the Davis Strait subpopulation indicated numbers stable at about 2,015 (range 1,603–2,588), but bears were fatter than in 2005–2007, with good cub survival.
* An aerial survey of the Chukchi Sea in 2016 generated a population estimate of 5,444 (range 3,636–8,152), about 2,500 greater than a previous survey, plausibly reflecting the excellent conditions for polar bears in this area.
* Reports that polar bears seem to be moving from Alaska to Russia in a ‘mass exodus’ may describe a real phenomenon that reflects the excellent feeding conditions for bears in the Chukchi Sea compared to Alaska, fueled by continued increases in primary productivity across the Arctic.
* Spring research in Svalbard, Norway in 2021 showed the body condition of male polar bears was stable, and that litter size of family groups was the same as it had been in 1994, but lower than 2019.
* A new paper reported that more polar bears in Svalbard seem to be killing and eating reindeer during the summer than they did during the 1970s, but the phenomenon was not exclusively tied to reduced sea ice.
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2022/02/StateofPolarBears-2021.pdf
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Sunday, February 27, 2022
2021: Warming as usual?
The global temperature has been plateaued since 2015. NOAA figures below:
2015,0.93
2016,0.99
2017,0.91
2018,0.82
2019,0.95
2020,0.98
No trend
It has been a long time since anyone was able to say that the past year was the warmest ever solely due to global warming.
Dr David Whitehouse, Science editor
Last week the UK Met Office released its measurement of the global temperature of 2021, a year described by the Guardian as one of climate crisis.
The continent of Africa had its warmest January on record. There was torrential rains in Malaysia and Turkey was in the tenth year of drought. In February vicious winter weather hit Texas resulting in ten million people being without power. In March Australia was hit by severe flooding forcing thousands to flee in New South Wales. Come April there were huge sandstorms in China and a hurricane brought record rainfall to some parts of Western Australia. In May the governor of California declared a drought.
June saw a remarkable heatwave in North America, Europe and Asia had their second warmest Junes on record. New Zealand temperatures broke records. The next month Death Valley in California recorded 54.4 C. Torrential rain in India killed over a hundred. In August wildfires broke out in the Mediterranean as well as swathes of Siberia. Floods hit Japan, Turkey and South America. In December floods hit Australia again. Kentucky experienced a devastating tornado.
Despite all this the data for 2021 showed it to be the seventh warmest year on record. Announcing the global temperature the Met Office emphasised that global temperatures were temporarily cooled by successive La Niña events at either end of the year.
There was a little reticence in proclaiming the news that 2021 was far from being a record breaking year. The explanation is that 2021 was very warm but it came after a few years whose temperatures were boosted by a super El Nino event. 2021, it is claimed, continues a long-term trend, super El Nino notwithstanding.
Dr Colin Morice, of the Met Office, said: “2021 is one of the warmest years on record, continuing a series of measurements of a world that is warming under the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. This extends a streak of notably warm years from 2015 to 2021 – the warmest seven years in over 170 years of measurements.”
Emphasising the long-term trend Prof Tim Osborn, of the University of East Anglia, added: “Each year tends to be a little below or a little above the underlying long-term global warming. Global temperature data analysed by the Met Office and UEA’s Climatic Research Unit show 2021 was a little below, while 2020 had been a little above, the underlying warming trend. All years, including 2021, are consistent with long-standing predictions of warming due to human activities.”
“WMO Secretary-General, Prof. Petteri Taalas commented, “Back-to-back La Niña events mean that 2021 warming was relatively less pronounced compared to recent years. Even so, it was still warmer than previous years influenced by La Niña. The overall long-term warming as a result of greenhouse gases is now far larger than the year-to-year variability caused by naturally occurring climate drivers.”
Consider though that in these climate conscious times it has been a long time since anyone was able to say that the past year was the warmest ever solely due to global warming. What’s more, new research by a group of Chinese scientists from the Ministry of Natural Resources to be published in the Journal of Climate suggest that the above or below the long-term trend line argument might be too simplistic.
By looking at all available global temperature datasets and a comprehensive span of durations and start and end times they find that the so-called global warming hiatus of the 2000s and beyond was real. Moreover, they find that the rapid warming of the late 1900s and the hiatus of the 2000s are statistically incompatible.
The ending of the hiatus is also interesting. It ended with a (record) El Nino since which global temperatures have not increased. Some see this as significant, others as we have seen there has been a resumption of the long-term linear increase despite, as the Chinese scientists point out there has been 30 years of non-linear increases in global temperature. Bear in mind that 30 years is frequently used as the definition of climate.
What I take from this is that sometimes it is very useful to draw a straight line through noisy data as it often shows the fundamental factors of a data set. Sometimes though it might not be what it seems.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/2021-warming-as-usual/
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How a court case over pollution could be used to unravel federal regulatory power
On Monday the US supreme court will hear arguments in a group of cases that could have an immediate impact on the American government’s ability to respond to the climate emergency.
The consequences could be even more substantial, however, reaching deep into the Biden administration’s authority to govern.
The court will be considering the 2015 Clean Power Plan, a signature Obama program requiring states to lower greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. It was touted as critical to the achievement of the landmark Paris climate agreement, but its existence was short-lived: a coalition of states and energy groups sued to stop it, the supreme court blocked it and Donald Trump, self-professed lover of coal, repealed it when he took office.
The Biden administration said it would not reinstate the Clean Power Plan, even after a federal court invalidated Trump’s repeal, because the goals of the plan had already been met through market forces, and because it was considering a new rule to replace it. So it came as a surprise when the supreme court announced it would review the lower court’s decision.
Why is the court hearing a challenge to a plan that has never really been in effect, and never will be?
Richard Lazarus, a professor of environmental law at Harvard University, thinks the court may be interested in a preemptive strike against ambitious environmental regulation. “This is a shot across the bow,” he says. “We’re going to tell you what you can’t do in case you’re even thinking about it.”
But some court observers believe the case, West Virginia v EPA, may be an opportunity for the court’s conservative supermajority to take an even bigger hammer to the government’s regulatory power, helping to see through a Trump administration objective: the “deconstruction of the administrative state”.
A muscular decision could help upend the power of the government to regulate a range of issues, from air quality to workplace protections to drug safety, and mean an effective supreme court veto over Joe Biden’s agenda.
There are a number of ways the justices could rule in the EPA case.
They could restrict the EPA’s powers under the Clean Air Act, the legal foundation for the Obama plan. They could more broadly target its power to address environmental concerns. They could also dismiss the case outright since the Clean Power Plan doesn’t actually exist.
Or they could rule in a manner with implications beyond the EPA, as a who’s who of rightwing groups, many linked by funding from billionaire Charles Koch, have urged them to do in briefs filed in the case.
By some counts, at least five justices have expressed interest in reviving a legal doctrine dormant since the 1930s, until recently considered fringe, which views much of the authority of the executive branch as illegitimate. Under an expansive version of that view, “most of government is unconstitutional”, Justice Elena Kagan has warned.
The case “could be extraordinarily important, it could be moderately important, or it could be a case the court just dismisses on a belated realization that there’s no live controversy at all,” says Kate Shaw, professor at the Cardozo School of Law and co-host of the Strict Scrutiny podcast, which covers the supreme court.
“The fact that the court took the case at all is concerning to me and suggests the court may want to use this case as a vehicle to really change the law,” she says.
Some believe the case could undo the US government as we know it.
In the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal created dozens of government programs and agencies to improve the US economy and create a social safety net. But the supreme court, in those years famously pro-business and prone to strike down social welfare legislation, thwarted him at every turn. In two decisions, it invoked a principle of “nondelegation” – a doctrine that says the constitution forbids Congress from transferring power to federal agencies to make rules.
In 1937, faced with FDR’s threats to expand the court in order to push his legislation through, the court did an about-face and began upholding New Deal laws. The nondelegation doctrine faded into obscurity and the administrative state flourished.
Ever since, the delegation of authority from Congress to agencies has been core to the functioning of government.
Congress passes broad legislation enshrining certain principles and instructs agencies to fill in and update the details. The Clean Air Act, for example, instructs the EPA to regulate harmful emissions, but leaves it up to the agency to determine how to do so. The Occupational Safety and Health Act gives the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) the authority – recently restricted by the court – to issue standards regulating workplace safety.
Particularly central in an age of congressional gridlock, this model of government allows experts in federal agencies to issue rules without Congress needing to regularly pass detailed laws.
“Whether we’re talking about energy regulation, environmental regulation, workplace health and safety regulation, labor regulation – in each of those areas, Congress has passed broad statutes and given agencies a lot of discretion to implement those statutory directives,” says Shaw. “Depending on what the court says if it does reach the merits in this case, that could throw into question the permissibility of all of those delegations, which are in many ways the foundation of modern governance.”
In the last two decades, and with particular fervor since the Obama presidency, the nondelegation doctrine has gained traction among originalists – jurists who claim to adhere to a meaning of the constitution fixed at the time of its drafting – who insist America’s founders were opposed to Congress delegating regulatory power to agencies. (Scholars respond that the doctrine has no basis in history or in the constitution).
“Congress cannot duck its responsibility for making hard choices requiring compromise … by passing the buck to unelected, politically unaccountable administrative agents. The Constitution flatly prohibits Congress from delegating any of its legislative power to other entities,” according to a brief filed by the Koch-backed political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity.
“As Justice Thomas has observed: ‘The end result may be trains that run on time (although I doubt it), but the cost is to our Constitution and the individual liberty it protects,’” the brief continues. Americans for Prosperity campaigned aggressively for the confirmation of Trump’s three supreme court nominees.
Conservatives on the supreme court have expressed varying degrees of sympathy for this view, most recently when they blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers.
In that case, three justices – Neil Gorsuch, Thomas and Samuel Alito – signed a concurring opinion, invoking both the nondelegation doctrine and the major questions doctrine, a related theory that says matters of major economic or political importance must be mandated by Congress. In a different case, Chief Justice John Roberts joined a dissent asserting the doctrine. Add to that signals from Brett Kavanaugh, and there are five justices who have voiced at least some support for using this arcane theory to undo the post-New Deal arrangement undergirding American government.
Lazarus, the environmental law professor, has some sympathy for a principled view that major agency action should have backing from Congress.
“The problem is, what do you do with that if you know Congress isn’t going to pass anything? We have a climate problem that if we don’t address [it] in the near term, it’s just an irreversible disaster at some point,” he says. “One is hard pressed to contend that the constitution requires such a catastrophic result.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/politics/how-a-court-case-over-pollution-could-be-used-to-unravel-federal-regulatory-power/ar-AAUi00L?ocid=winp1taskbar
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Why aren’t there more hurricanes?
Why haven’t hurricanes increased in frequency or intensity? We live in a warming world, so why haven’t they?
When it comes to hurricanes so many perform what I term the climate two-step. It’s a not an uncommon series of moves when it comes to the climate debate, but the particular dance over the increasing incidence of hurricanes due to global warming has become a rather farcical pirouette. Part of the problem is that many expect the incidence of hurricanes to have increased already and are clearly annoyed with the lack of cooperation they get from the available data.The confusion is between what has, or has not happened, and what is expected to happen. In the real world everyone knows they are not the same thing.
Last year in his book “Unsettled: What Climate Science tells us, what it doesn’t and why it matters,” and in his lecture to the GWPF, Steven Koonin said that hurricanes were not increasing in frequency. It was not a new statement. Ryan Maue has some very good data showing that over the past 40 years hurricanes have not increased in frequency or intensity. The argument looks good, so why the controversy?
The response to Koonin’s book was instructive. The counterarguments, stated forcefully, fall apart when looked at closely. Take Scientific American’s response to Koonin. They, and I mean 12 authors, pointed to this research, to knock down Koonin’s conclusion. But their research actually says; “Detection and attribution of past changes in tropical cyclone (TC) behavior remain a challenge due to the nature of the historical data, which are highly heterogeneous in both time and among the various regions that collect and analyze the data.While there are ongoing efforts to reanalyze and homogenize the data there is still low confidence that any reported long-term (multidecadal to centennial) increases in TC activity are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities [which is unchanged from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) assessment statement ].”
Game set and match then to Koonin and Maue one would have thought. But no, there is a two-step introduced into the logic, an injection of doublespeak into the reposte. It says, unscientifically, that just because we haven’t seen an increase in hurricane frequency doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened! It’s the two-step. It continues;
“This is not meant to imply that no such increases have occurred, but rather that the data are not of a high enough quality to determine this with much confidence. Furthermore, it has been argued that within the period of highest data quality (since around 1980), the globally observed changes in the environment would not necessarily support a detectable trend in tropical cyclone intensity. That is, the trend signal has not yet had time to rise above the background variability of natural processes.”
I repeat. Game set and match to Koonin and Maue.
So why haven’t hurricanes increased in frequency? Climate attribution studies have become more common in recent years consigning this or that extreme event into a statistical regime that could not exist on a world without climate change. Koonin has described such studies as being the scientific equivalent of being told you have won the lottery, after you have won the lottery!
But where are the attribution studies that explain why in a world that has warmed, warmth with so many predict will increase the incidence and severity of hurricanes in the future, there has been no increase in hurricanes? Surely this lack of an increase is an extreme event in itself? Why have hurricanes not increased as the global temperature has?
Let’s take another step in this climate dance.
Many people cite research that indicates that the incidence of hurricanes has in fact increased in line with global warming computer model predictions. The paper often referred to is by Kossin at al. which really is an exemplar when it comes to the study of the changing incidence of hurricanes. It starts off by saying that “theoretical understanding of the thermodynamic controls on tropical cyclone (TC) wind intensity, as well as numerical simulations, implies a positive trend in TC intensity in a warming world.” In other words, hurricanes should increase as the world warms.
So much for the theory but as is often the case in science the data is a little bit more messy, which the researchers admit is “generally unsuitable for global trend analysis.” One could say that they looked for a trend, but couldn’t find one.
To solve the problem Kossin et al reframe the data applying filters to it producing what they describe as a “homogenized data record based on satellite data” for the period 1982–2009. The analysis of those 28-years – the period of rapid increases in global temperature – “exhibited increasing global TC intensity trends.” Seems straightforward enough. Hurricanes have increased. One would have thought that it was a good result but it was actually scientific nonsense as they then say the trend was “not statistically significant at the 95% confidence level. In other words there never was a trend.
A logical next step would be to extend the data and see if it makes any difference, and they found an extra 8 years. It did! Well, barely, and of course it’s all “consistent with expectations based on theoretical understanding and trends identified in numerical simulations in warming scenarios.”
The paper didn’t find much of an increase in hurricane frequency, if any at all, and is clearly not robust. Look carefully at the bottom line of this paper and you will see that it finds increases in the incidence of hurricanes of between 2 to 15% per decade. This is a rather shaky conclusion. Yet this shaky conclusion has entered the debate as solid evidence. Look at how Carbon Brief reported it. Their headline was (parenthesis notwithstanding) that an increase in 15% had been found! It would not have been as good, or rather an acceptable story, if they had reported just a 2% increase with associated errors.?
The increase in hurricane frequency is now widely sloppily thrown in amongst other extreme events. In his book Hot Air(The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial) Peter Stott says that in 2013, “the increasing toll of death and destruction from heatwaves, floods, droughts and storms was progressing at a startling and terrifying scale.”
Hine’s Hole
Perhaps data obtained from a region called Hine’s Hole will give some pause for thought. It’s a blue hole on Cay Sal Bank – one of the largest submerged platforms in the Bahamas. Islands across the Bahamian Archipelago have been devastated by five major hurricanes from 2010 to 2020, including Category 5 Hurricane Dorian in 2019 that inundated parts of Abaco and Grand Bahama with up to 4 m of surge, killing 84 people and leaving more than 250 others missing.
Bahamian hurricane frequency is poorly understood. Writing in the journal Marine Geology Journal a team of researchers present a 530-year record of hurricane passage from Hine’s Blue Hole which it archives hurricanes in its disturbed sediments.
Hine’s Hole records 16 intense storms per century from 1850 to 2016, but there are three periods from 1505 to 1530, 1570 to 1620, and 1710 to 1875 with over twice as many intense storms per century.
These active periods are also found in other reconstructions from the Bahamian Archipelago and Florida Keys, where the effect seems more pronounced. Hine’s Hole provides data on weaker and more distal storms and provides unprecedented insight into changes in hurricane activity within the pre-industrial climate system. Its 170-year record shows many more hurricanes than seen in recent decades.
Hurricanes, like other extreme events, vary on timescales longer than the recent spell of global warming. While some contemplate the implications some are waiting for the increase in hurricane frequency. Others are sure it’s already happened. The debate can be described as unsettled.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/why-arent-there-more-hurricanes/
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The stampede of green lemmings
No country on Earth relies entirely on wind and solar energy, but Australian politicians aim to achieve this miracle.
They are leaders in the ‘Stampede of the Green Lemmings’.
Solar energy has a huge problem. Even on sunny days almost nothing is generated to meet the demand peaks around breakfast time and dinner time – the solar energy union only works a six-hour day, goes on strike with little warning, and takes quite a few sickies.
So, for at least 18 hours of every day, electricity must come from somewhere else. Then at around noon millions of solar panels pour out far more electricity than is needed, causing electrical and financial chaos in the electrical grid.
Naturally, our green ‘engineers’ see wind power as filling the solar energy gaps. But wind power has a union too and they take lots of sickies when there is no wind over large areas of the continent. And they down tools in storms, gales, or cyclones in case their whirling toys are damaged.
So the green planners claim that batteries can solve these intermittent problems of the green energy twins.
They will need to be humungous batteries.
Batteries are just a crutch for a crippled generation system. And with fierce lithium battery fires reported regularly, who wants a humungous fire-prone battery over the back fence or in the basement?
A battery is not a generator of electricity – every battery (including Snowy 2.0) is a net consumer of electricity. Batteries are very expensive, most lose capacity as they age, and every conversion between DC storage and AC transmission triggers energy losses. To collect, back up, and re-distribute green electricity will require a continent-spanning spider-web of transmission lines with all the costs and energy losses that network entails.
Still nights and calm cloudy days are what really expose the problems of wind-solar-plus-batteries.
Suppose electricity consumers require 100 units of electricity every day. A well-designed coal, nuclear, or gas power station can do that, 24/7, day after day, whatever the weather.
But to insure a wind or solar system against, say, 7 days of calm or cloudy weather would require a battery capable of storing 700 units of electricity. To re-charge this huge battery while still supplying consumers will require much larger wind or solar generating capacity. However, if several weeks of windy or sunny weather then occur, this big battery will sit idle, connected to a bloated expensive generation system that is capable of delivering far more power than is needed.
Sunny or windy weather brings a deluge of green energy, causing power prices to plunge at irregular intervals, and forcing reliable generators to stop producing and lose money. Eventually they will close. Once all coal-gas generators are all gone, every (inevitable) green energy drought will awaken the spectre of extensive blackouts.
On top of all these practical problems of green energy, we have the massive carbon credits scam, where speculators sell green fairy stories to greedy bankers, and real producers are forced to buy these fictitious ‘products’, passing the costs onto real industry and consumers.
Australia is following the green energy lemmings of Europe.
Germany once produced abundant reliable electricity from coal and nuclear power – the backbone for German industry. Then green ants started nibbling at this backbone, replacing it with wind-solar toys. Now, Germany has expensive electricity – a grid in danger of collapse and must rely on imported gas from Russia, nuclear power from France or hydro-power from Scandinavia.
UK is also following similar foolish energy policies, even banning exploration of their own oil and gas resources.
Australia is almost alone in the Southern oceans, with no near neighbours to buy, beg or borrow electricity from. We cannot afford to follow the green energy lemmings or their billionaire pied pipers.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/02/the-stampede-of-green-lemmings/
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Friday, February 25, 2022
Changes in Global Vegetation Distribution and Carbon Fluxes in Response to Global Warming
If CO2-induced warming ever happens, both the the increased CO2 supply and the raised temperatures will promote plant growth -- including food crops
Abstract
Terrestrial ecosystems are an important part of Earth systems, and they are undergoing remarkable changes in response to global warming. This study investigates the response of the terrestrial vegetation distribution and carbon fluxes to global warming by using the new dynamic global vegetation model in the second version of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) Earth System Model (CAS-ESM2). We conducted two sets of simulations, a present-day simulation and a future simulation, which were forced by the present-day climate during 1981–2000 and the future climate during 2081–2100, respectively, as derived from RCP8.5 outputs in CMIP5. CO2 concentration is kept constant in all simulations to isolate CO2-fertilization effects. The results show an overall increase in vegetation coverage in response to global warming, which is the net result of the greening in the mid-high latitudes and the browning in the tropics. The results also show an enhancement in carbon fluxes in response to global warming, including gross primary productivity, net primary productivity, and autotrophic respiration. We found that the changes in vegetation coverage were significantly correlated with changes in surface air temperature, reflecting the dominant role of temperature, while the changes in carbon fluxes were caused by the combined effects of leaf area index, temperature, and precipitation. This study applies the CAS-ESM2 to investigate the response of terrestrial ecosystems to climate warming. Even though the interpretation of the results is limited by isolating CO2-fertilization effects, this application is still beneficial for adding to our understanding of vegetation processes and to further improve upon model parameterizations.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00376-021-1138-3
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Tesla gets wrist slap from EPA for violating Clean Air Act
Tesla has agreed to pay a $275,000 fine in a settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for violating the federal Clean Air Act at its electric vehicle manufacturing plant in Fremont, California.
The penalty is next to nothing for a company that generated a net income of $2.32 billion in the fourth quarter of last year alone.
The EPA found Tesla to be in violation of specific regulations known as National Emissions Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants for Surface Coating of Automobiles and Light-Duty Trucks from October 2016 through September 2019, which could put people living in communities nearby at a health and environmental risk. Tesla’s facility applied coating materials containing such hazardous air pollutants as formaldehyde, ethylbenzene, naphthalene and xylene.
Based on several requests for information from Tesla, the EPA determined that Tesla either didn’t develop or implement a work practice plan to minimize hazardous air pollutant emissions from the storage and mixing of materials used to coat Tesla’s vehicles. The EPA also found that Tesla didn’t perform the required monthly emissions calculations to demonstrate compliance with federal standards, and it failed to collect and keep all required records associated with the calculation of pollutant emission rate for coating operations.
This isn’t the first time Tesla or its Fremont facility, also the site of alleged rampant sexual and racial discrimination, has been called out by the EPA. In 2019, Tesla agreed to pay a $31,000 penalty for failing to comply with air emissions standards for equipment leaks, failing to comply with management requirements for generators of hazardous wastes and failing to make an adequate hazardous waste determination for certain solid waste generated at the facility, according to the EPA. At the time, Tesla also had to purchase $55,000 in emergency response equipment for the City of Fremont Fire Department.
Tesla has had multiple fires in the paint shop of its Fremont factory, in large part because filters meant to clean and carry air into and out of the building were visibly coated in paint and clearcoat, Tesla employees told CNBC in 2018.
“Compliance monitoring is one of the key components EPA uses to ensure that the regulated community follows environmental laws and regulations,” wrote the EPA in a statement. “Today’s case is another example of the Agency’s years-long compliance oversight of this facility. Tesla has corrected the violations noted in both settlements and returned to compliance.”
https://webicnews.com/tesla-gets-wrist-slap-from-epa-for-violating-clean-air-act/
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UN-backed green investment fund on brink of failure months after UN summit launch
A UN-backed green investment fund is on the brink of failure three months after its launch during the Glasgow climate summit because institutions including big banks never delivered expected seed funding.
The MSCI Global Climate Select exchange traded fund was unveiled in early November. Trading under the ticker NTZO, it excludes fossil fuel companies and boosts holdings of companies with lower carbon emissions.
The fund has amassed less than $2mn and is likely to be wound down as soon as the end of March without further investment, said Ethan Powell, founder of Dallas-based Impact Shares, the fund manager. He said Impact Shares has been spending about $25,000 a month to manage the ETF.
The case illustrates how corporate organising to combat climate change can fall short when capital is needed. The ETF was created by Impact Shares and Global Investors for Sustainable Development (GISD), a group of 30 global companies that launched in October 2019 to help fund the UN’s sustainable development goals.
Bank of America, Citigroup and Santander, all GISD members, pledged to provide seed money to NTZO but have refused until other investors step up, said Jim Healy and Sudip Thakor, former Credit Suisse bankers who are involved with the fund.
“It is a classic case of everyone just going through the motions,” Thakor said. He said he invested $500,000 in the ETF, while Healy and his wife invested $1mn.
Bank of America and Citigroup pledged up to $50mn and $12.5mn for the ETF, respectively, but with the proviso that their investments could not account for more than 25 per cent of the fund, Healy and Thakor said. They said Santander, the Spanish bank, pledged $50mn but would not have more than 5 per cent.
Because of the ETF’s small size, the banks could not provide their maximum dollar commitments without exceeding the pledged percentages.
Bank of America said it “stood by ready to provide seed capital on the basis that the ETF would be able to gather sufficient volume from long-term institutional investors”.
Citigroup said it is willing “to provide seed capital for the NTZO ETF contingent on preset criteria and regulatory requirements”, adding that “any claim to the contrary is false”.
Santander said it “remains committed” to investing in the ETF “once the fund has been seeded and the information required to complete due diligence has been provided”.
The UN said it “continues to support innovative finance solutions” and will “support those efforts when called upon”. ....
https://www.ft.com/content/84196790-2030-44d7-988c-b6e3408f9b4b?mc_cid=e19cbb27e9&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Australia: BlueScope’s $1 billion blast furnace rebuild indicates ‘green steel’ isn’t coming anytime soon
BlueScope Steel (ASX:BSL), the steel business carved out of BHP (ASX:BHP) two decades ago will press ahead with a study on a $1 billion furnace reline at the Port Kembla steelworks.
It is a surefire indication those in the know do not view the transition to so-called ‘green steel’ as a near-term shift.
The reline of the mothballed number 6 blast furnace will have a 20 year life and cost up to $300 million more than BlueScope initially planned, setting the firm up to maintain its domestic supply of steel from 2026, helping BlueScope through the energy transition ahead of its 2050 net zero target.
BlueScope’s position is the furnace reline will provide a “challenging but credible timeline” for the development of low emissions steelmaking technologies.
“The reline does not lock BlueScope in to blast furnace steelmaking for the full 20 years if technology is ready earlier,” the company said.
“However, achieving this will be dependent on several enablers including access to low cost green hydrogen, firmed and affordable renewable energy, the development of suitable raw material supply chains and appropriate policy settings.”
It follows comments last week from South32 (ASX:S32) CEO Graham Kerr, a supplier of metallurgical coal to BlueScope, that coal would have a use in the steelmaking process for at least 20 years given the infancy of low emissions technologies like green hydrogen.
BlueScope is well stocked to deploy capital at the moment after reporting record first half underlying profit of $1.57 billion, up 373% on the same period in 2021.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/markets/monsters-of-rock-bluescope-s-1-billion-blast-furnace-rebuild-indicates-green-steel-isn-t-coming-anytime-soon/ar-AAU6T1h?ocid=winp1taskbar
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Thursday, February 24, 2022
Aluminium shortages to deter blanket sanctions on Rusal - analysts
Mainly because of its lightness, aluminium is a crucial metal in meeting Greenie objectives
LONDON (Reuters) - The United States and European Union countries are unlikely to impose blanket sanctions on Rusal if Russia invades Ukraine as that would exacerbate aluminium shortages, propel prices to new records and damage manufacturing, analysts say.
Russia has repeatedly denied it is preparing to invade Ukraine.
Rusal, which accounts for about 6% of global aluminium supplies estimated by analysts at around 70 million tonnes this year, is the world's largest producer outside China.
U.S. sanctions on Rusal imposed in April 2018 - and lifted in early 2019 - created major disruption for firms in the transport, construction and packaging industries. The resulting scramble for aluminium saw prices jump 30% in just a few days.
"It is important to note that lawmakers initially underestimated the impact of the Rusal sanctions," said CRU analyst Eoin Brophy. "Aluminium inventories are so low today that a replay of that error would be explosive for prices."
"To limit disruptions to manufacturing, it is highly likely that any existing contracts would sit outside of sanctions."
In response to requests for comment, EU spokesperson Peter Stano said it was premature to speculate about specific measures, since "no decisions have been made about any new sanctions against Russia".
Oil market could plunge into crisis as spare capacity remains tight and Russia-Ukraine tensions linger
"Our sanctions will be suggested, discussed and adopted only in reaction to further violation or aggression against Ukraine," he said.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/markets/aluminium-shortages-to-deter-blanket-sanctions-on-rusal-analysts/ar-AAU7yCl
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Greenland’s Melting Ice Is No Cause for Climate-Change Panic
One of the most sacred tenets of climate alarmism is that Greenland’s vast ice sheet is shrinking ever more rapidly because of human-induced climate change. The media and politicians warn constantly of rising sea levels that would swamp coastlines from Florida to Bangladesh. A typical headline: “Greenland ice sheet on course to lose ice at fastest rate in 12,000 years.”
With an area of 660,000 square miles and a thickness up to 1.9 miles, Greenland’s ice sheet certainly deserves attention. Its shrinking has been a major cause of recent sea-level rise, but as is often the case in climate science, the data tell quite a different story from the media coverage and the political laments.
The chart nearby paints a bigger picture that is well known to experts but largely absent from the media and even from the most recent United Nations climate report. It shows the amount of ice that Greenland has lost every year since 1900, averaged over 10-year intervals; the annual loss averages about 110 gigatons. (A gigaton is one billion metric tons, or slightly over 2.2 trillion pounds.) That is a lot, but that water has caused the planet’s oceans to rise each year by only 0.01 inch, about one-fifth the thickness of a dime.
In contrast, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that for the most likely course of greenhouse-gas emissions in the 21st century, the average annual ice loss would be somewhat larger than the peak values shown in the graph. That would cause sea level to rise by 3 inches by the end of this century, and if losses were to continue at that rate, it would take about 10,000 years for all the ice to disappear, causing sea level to rise more than 20 feet.
To assess the importance of human influences, we can look at how the rate of ice loss has changed over time.
In that regard, the graph belies the simplistic notion that humans are melting Greenland. Since human warming influences on the climate have grown steadily—they are now 10 times what they were in 1900— you might expect Greenland to lose more ice each year. Instead there are large swings in the annual ice loss and it is no larger today than it was in the 1930s, when human influences were much smaller. Moreover, the annual loss of ice has been decreasing in the past decade even as the globe continues to warm.
While a warming globe might eventually be the dominant cause of Greenland’s shrinking ice, natural cycles in temperatures and currents in the North Atlantic that extend for decades have been a much more important influence since 1900. Those cycles, together with the recent slowdown, make it plausible that the next few decades will see a further, perhaps dramatic slowing of ice loss. That would be inconsistent with the IPCC’s projection and wouldn’t at all support the media’s exaggerations.
Much climate reporting today highlights short-term changes when they fit the narrative of a broken climate but then ignores or plays down changes when they don’t, often dismissing them as “just weather.”
Climate unfolds over decades. Although short-term changes might be deemed news, they need to be considered in a many-decade context. Media coverage omitting that context misleadingly raises alarm. Greenland’s shrinking ice is a prime example of that practice.
If Greenland’s ice loss continues to slow, headline writers will have to find some other aspect of Greenland’s changes to grab our attention, and politicians will surely find some other reason to justify their favorite climate policies.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/greenland-melting-ice-panic-sheets-global-warming-variance-seal-level-rise-climate-change-carbon-fossil-fuel-11645131739
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A "preference cascade" for global warming
Writing in the Daily Telegraph James Morrow referred to something called a preference cascade which he said was a term used by political scientists.
This term (new to me) set my wordsmith’s whiskers tingling so I did a bit of digging. It appears that preference cascade was coined by Turkish economist Timur Kuran, It means that average people behave the way they think they ought to, even though that behaviour might not reflect their own personal feelings. Given a sufficient ‘A-ha!’ moment when they discover that their personal feelings are overshadowed by a large portion of the population their behaviour may change dramatically—as they feel compelled to fall in line with others.
I wonder if this is what has happened to the climate debate? From the 1980s (when climate hysteria began) most ordinary Australians applied their common sense to the issue. They thought that ‘global warming’ sounded a lot better than ‘global freezing’. On top of which, there’s no point is worrying about it because governments can’t control the climate any more than they can control next Wednesday’s weather.
But as the years have gone on, school children have been brainwashed, the hysteria has become more and more alarmist and I now wonder if many are not thinking, ‘Well, it makes no sense to me, but if that’s what most people think…’. At which point the dominoes start to tumble and a preference cascade happens? If that really is what has occurred, then the irresponsible, alarmist media has a lot to answer for.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/02/aussie-language-47
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Yamaha Gets Busy Crafting A 5-Liter V8 Hydrogen Engine For Toyota
Is internal combustion dead? Not if some companies have anything to say about it
In November, 2021, five major automotive and motorcycle companies announced their plans to collaborate on carbon neutrality. Kawasaki, Yamaha, Mazda, Subaru, and Toyota all pledged to work together on projects they didn’t spell out in detail just then. Their joint press release also voiced the eventual expectation that Honda and Suzuki would join at some yet-to-be-determined point in the future.
Now it’s February, 2022, and Yamaha and Toyota announced plans to jointly develop a 5.0-liter V8 engine powered entirely by hydrogen. The goal, the two companies say, is to not give up entirely on the internal combustion engine while still pursuing all the companies’ stated carbon neutrality goals. It’s the next phase in that previously-announced multi-company collaboration, and it certainly won’t be the last.
“We are working toward achieving carbon neutrality by 2050,” Yamaha Motor president Yoshihiro Hidaka said in a statement. “At the same time, ‘Motor’ is in our company name and we accordingly have a strong passion for and level of commitment to the internal combustion engine.”
Also Betting Big On Hydrogen:
Why France May Be Pushing Hard For Hydrogen-Powered Scooters
Segway Introduces Apex H2 Electric-Hydrogen Hybrid Prototype
“Hydrogen engines house the potential to be carbon-neutral while keeping our passion for the internal combustion engine alive at the same time. Teaming up with companies with different corporate cultures and areas of expertise as well as growing the number of partners we have is how we want to lead the way into the future,” Hidaka concluded.
The carbon neutrality of hydrogen as a fuel is a possibility—but as we’ve mentioned previously, a whole lot of things have to happen end-to-end for it to be more than a pipe dream. That’s the goal of so-called green hydrogen, but the complexity and expense are two reasons why so-called blue hydrogen is presently the more popular option. (Well, that and the fact that blue hydrogen production still utilizes natural gas, and gas companies don’t exactly want to get left out in the cold.)
Anyway, Yamaha's V8 hydrogen engine is intended for use in automobiles. It makes a claimed 450 horsepower at 6,800 rpm, as well as peak torque of 540 newton-meters (or 398 pound-feet) at 3,600 rpm. We’re all for combining performance, usability, fun, and environmental sustainability whenever possible—but can manufacturers really have it all? That remains to be seen.
https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/yamaha-gets-busy-crafting-a-5-liter-v8-hydrogen-engine-for-toyota/ar-AAU8tzD
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Wednesday, February 23, 2022
Greenland hokum
The finding that the Greenland ice sheet is melting from the bottom up is totally unsurprising given what we know about subsurface vulcanisn in Greenland Having a volcano underneath you can give you a pretty warm bottom. But it totally undermines the Warmist gospel that atmospheric warming is at work. Warmists frequently point to global warming as the cause of melting in the Arctic.
Widespread awareness of subsurface vulcanism would however take away from Warmists one of their favorite claims. It would confiscate one of their toys. So they had to come up with an explanstion for the anomalous warming that did not refer to vulcanism.
And what they have come up with is a lulu. They say that meltwater from the top of the glacier has trickled down through cracks in the glacier and delivered its higher temperature to the bottom of the glacier
But that is pretty mad. Surely water trickling down through cracks would rapidly refreeze long before it got to the botton of the glacier. Do they think that the meltwater wears little furry coats as it trickled down?
Greenland's Ice Sheet is melting from the bottom up and is now the largest single contributor to global sea level rise, a new study has warned.
Researchers have observed 'unprecedented' rates of melting at the bottom of the ice sheet, caused by huge quantities of meltwater falling from the surface to the base.
As the meltwater falls, energy is converted into heat in a similar way to how hydroelectric power is generated by large dams.
This effect is by far the largest heat source beneath the world's second-largest ice sheet, an international team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge found, leading to phenomenally high rates of melting at its base.
The lubricating effect of meltwater has a strong effect on the movement of glaciers and the quantity of ice discharged into the ocean, but directly measuring conditions beneath more than half a mile (1 km) of ice to the bottom is a challenge, especially in Greenland where glaciers are among the world's fastest moving.
Experts say this makes it difficult to understand the dynamic behaviour of the Greenland Ice Sheet and predict future changes
Each summer, thousands of meltwater lakes and streams form on the surface of the ice sheet as temperatures rise and daily sunlight increases.
But many of these lakes quickly drain to the bottom, falling through cracks and large fractures which form in the ice.
With a continued supply of water from streams and rivers, connections between surface and bed often remain open.
Professor Poul Christoffersen from Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute has been studying these meltwater lakes, how and why they drain so quickly, and the effect that they have on the overall behaviour of the ice sheet as global temperatures continue to rise.
The current work, which includes researchers from Aberystwyth University, is the culmination of a seven-year study focused on Store Glacier, one of the largest outlets from the Greenland Ice Sheet.
'When studying basal melting of ice sheets and glaciers, we look at sources of heat like friction, geothermal energy, latent heat released where water freezes and heat losses into the ice above,' said Christoffersen.
'But what we hadn't really looked at was the heat generated by the draining meltwater itself.
'There's a lot of gravitational energy stored in the water that forms on the surface and when it falls, the energy has to go somewhere.'
To measure melt rates at the base of the ice sheet, the researchers used radio-echo sounding, a technique developed at the British Antarctic Survey and used previously on floating ice sheets in Antarctica.
'We weren't sure that the technique would also work on a fast-flowing glacier in Greenland,' said fellow author Dr Tun Jan Young, who installed the radar system on Store Glacier as part of his PhD at Cambridge.
'Compared to Antarctica, the ice deforms really fast and there is a lot of meltwater in summer, which complicates the work.'
The melt rates at the base were found to be as high as those measured on the surface with a weather station.
This is despite the fact that the surface receives heat from the sun while the base does not.
To explain the results, the Cambridge researchers teamed up with scientists at the University of California Santa Cruz and the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.
The researchers calculated that as much as 82 million cubic metres of meltwater was transferred to the bed of Store Glacier every day during the summer of 2014.
They estimated that the power produced by the falling water during peak melt periods was comparable to the power produced by the Three Gorges Dam in China, the world's largest hydroelectric power station.
With a melt area that expands to nearly a million square kilometres at the height of summer, the Greenland Ice Sheet produces more hydropower than the world's ten largest hydroelectric power stations combined, the researchers found.
'Given what we are witnessing at the high latitudes in terms of climate change, this form of hydropower could easily double or triple, and we're still not even including these numbers when we estimate the ice sheet's contribution to sea level rise,' said Christoffersen.
The researchers compared temperature measurements from sensors installed in a nearby borehole to verify the melt rates recorded by the radar.
At the base, they found the temperature of water to be as high as 33°F (0.88°C), which is unexpectedly warm for an ice sheet base with a melting point of 31°F (-0.40°C).
'The borehole observations confirmed that the meltwater heats up when it hits the bed,' said Christoffersen.
'The reason is that the basal drainage system is a lot less efficient than the fractures and conduits that bring the water through the ice. The reduced drainage efficiency causes frictional heating within the water itself.
'When we took this heat source out of our calculations, the theoretical melt rate estimates were a full two orders of magnitude out.
'The heat generated by the falling water is melting the ice from the bottom up, and the melt rate we are reporting is completely unprecedented.'
Researchers said their study provides the first concrete evidence of an ice-sheet mass-loss mechanism, which is not yet included in projections of global sea level rise.
While the high melt rates are specific to heat produced in subglacial drainage paths carrying surface water, the volume of surface water produced in Greenland is huge and growing, and nearly all of it drains to the bed.
The study has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10535831/Greenlands-Ice-Sheet-melting-bottom-up.html
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Frackers push into once-dead shale patches as oil nears $US100 a barrel
Spurred by the highest oil prices in years, shale companies are moving drilling rigs back into oil fields that were all but abandoned a few years ago.
Private oil producers are leading an industry return to places like the Anadarko Basin of Oklahoma and the DJ Basin in Colorado, where drilling had almost completely stopped in mid-2020 when those areas became unprofitable because of lower oil prices.
Oil production in these marginal regions isn’t expected to move the needle in the global market, which is facing tight supplies, but it could help some oil producers who have lost money in past years. Output in the contiguous US by year-end is expected to increase almost solely from the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico, offset by declines elsewhere, according to energy consultant Wood Mackenzie.
Some of the largest shale companies told investors this past week they plan to remain disciplined on capital spending and limit production growth. But with oil climbing above $US90 a barrel, near the highest levels in more than seven years, some peripheral drilling, particularly by smaller companies, is now becoming more feasible even in places like Kansas and Utah, where wells produce far less oil than prolific fields in Texas and New Mexico. The regional revivals show the economic ripple effects when prices surge and mark a turnaround for companies hard-hit by the pandemic.
Brent, the global oil benchmark, rose to $US95.39 a barrel monday, up almost 2 per cent. Charter Oak Production is planning to bring one drilling rig back to the Anadarko Basin this month and contract a larger rig to work there until late 2022, in hopes of doubling or tripling its output from about 1,000 barrels a day. Though oil-field costs have climbed sharply amid new activity and inflation, Charter founder Joe Brevetti said the clock is ticking for his drilling plans because, at some point, high commodity prices will dent demand and lead to lower prices.
“We have a limited window of opportunity,” Mr Brevetti said. “Our costs are obviously up right now, but I’d rather have the higher costs and sell the product at $US90.” Mr Brevetti’s company waited out the oil-demand destruction wrought by the pandemic, slashing drilling activity and storing as many as 60,000 barrels of oil in empty tanks that typically hold other materials used in fracking, instead of selling the oil at low prices. Those moves were key to helping the company survive the downturn, he said.
Putting drilling rigs back to work in the Anadarko Basin wouldn’t have made sense when oil prices were around $US45 a barrel or lower in 2020, with some companies needing at least $US60-per-barrel oil, or even $US80 a barrel, to increase investments, executives said.
The average number of active drilling rigs in the Anadarko Basin has surged from the pandemic low of seven to 46, according to energy data analytics firm Enverus. The latest number is several more than the region had before oil prices collapsed because of economic shutdowns in the spring of 2020, and almost double the average of mid-2021.
In the DJ Basin in Colorado, the average number of active rigs has risen to 15, up from four in 2020, Enverus data show. In the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and the Uinta Basin in Utah, which both saw rigs fall to zero in mid-2020, the rig count has increased to almost a dozen. All three areas need higher oil prices to make wells profitable.
This past week, oil producer Crescent Energy said it would buy assets in the Uinta Basin for $US815m in cash and plans to operate two rigs there this year. Utah is pumping the most oil since late 2014, though it makes up less than 1 per cent of the nation’s output.
Companies have started pumping more oil from regions that yield tiny wells by industry standards. Private oil producer Palomino Petroleum is now running as many as six drilling rigs this year in western Kansas, the largest fleet it has had there in about seven years. The wells it drills there typically start producing about 50 to 100 barrels a day. That oil is moved by truck to a refinery in central Kansas.
Klee Watchous, Palomino’s president, said oil prices climbing back to $US90 a barrel has marked a sharp turnaround in the fortunes of both the company and the small towns near its operations. Mr Watchous said his company is also planning to drill wells in Illinois this year, a state where rigs have rarely ventured recently.
“After many years of fighting this low oil-price situation, it feels great,” Mr Watchous said. “The cycles of boom and bust have been part of the oil-and-gas industry for decades, and no one knows how long it will last.” Still, the renewed investment in many of the regions is nowhere near the levels they saw during shale’s peak years. Most of the largest, publicly traded companies are still focusing instead on top-tier fields like the Permian.
Activity in the Anadarko basin is well below its 2018 levels. Investor interest in the region faded around 2019 following disappointing oil-well performance. Oil companies and their service providers cut hundreds of jobs in the region as activity waned. Some industry observers are hopeful that the region could see the number of drilling rigs there climb above 100 again and bring back jobs, but said that would take years of high oil prices.
Even though the region is on the upswing, some larger private companies are taking a conservative approach. Citizen Energy, a private producer based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is reinvesting around 50 per cent of the money it generates from operations back into capital expenditures on developing its assets, said finance chief Tim Helms. In shale’s heyday, companies almost always spent more money on drilling and fracking than they made selling the oil and gas.
Mr Helms said Citizen is now running four rigs in the Anadarko Basin, up from two that targeted natural gas in 2020. While the company may consider adding rigs if prices stay high for a long time, it is still focused on generating cash flow while increasing output around 10 per cent this year, he said.
“The financial model would tell you to put eight rigs at work,” Mr. Helms said. “We, like the rest of the industry, have learned our lessons about growing at all costs.”
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/frackers-push-into-oncedead-shale-patches-as-oil-nears-100-a-barrel/news-story/16d6e1c2e3d5c4d0d79a4da5240da11d
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The group that brought down Keystone XL faces agonies of its own
The group that revived a slumbering environmental movement by focusing on big targets was flying high. It was no longer just a plucky collection of friends from a Vermont college and their luminary founder, Bill McKibben. It was a global force. The $800,000 retreat at a five-star luxury resort in Killarney, Ireland in March 2019 proved it.
The rise for 350.org had been meteoric. The crash would be, too.
In the early 2010s, 350.org was the environmental movement’s driving force. Led by McKibben, a famed environmentalist and best-selling author, its spectacle-worthy, guerrilla-style protests over causes, including blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, captured the public’s imagination. It brought younger, more diverse activists into the green tent. Starting out with eight founding members in 2008, it had grown to 165 full-time employees — not including its many contractors — when staff traveled to Ireland that March.
It was at the Killarney retreat that May Boeve, the executive director and one of 350.org’s founders, announced that she’d hiked the organization’s annual budget to $25 million. She told staff to dream big. She revealed plans for nearly 130 new hires to make a splash at global climate strikes that September — part of an envisioned revamp to improve the organization’s diversity and equity. Everyone there was elated.
But 350.org had never eclipsed $20 million in revenue in a single year. When it quickly became clear it wouldn’t that year, Boeve said she initially kept the information largely to herself, according to an October 2019 internal email to the staff.
“[W]e decided to go very big this year in anticipation that there would, in fact, be a movement surge. We were right about that. My big mistake was not giving us enough time to bring in the resources prior to expanding our spending,” Boeve wrote in the all-staff memo. “Money certainly has come in, but not at the scale we needed it to. … My other regret is not to have sounded the alarm sooner.”
The fallout would lead to mass layoffs, departures, exhaustion, distrust and a protracted labor battle that exists to this day, according to internal documents, third-party audits and communications obtained by POLITICO — which made an attempt to contact all parties referenced in this story — in addition to interviews with 18 current and former staff members, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak candidly. The organization saw its U.S. program office fall from nearly 50 people in 2019 to nine entering this year.
The hiring spree intended to make 350.org look more the part of the global organization it wanted to become by adding staff from more diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Its struggles mirror those of many leading environmental organizations, including the National Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, which are wrestling with internal dissension at a crucial juncture in the fight against climate change — problems shadowed by the movement’s historical lack of diversity and its urgent need to bring activists of different backgrounds into the fold.
“This exclusion has resulted in failed attempts to pass durable climate policy because policymakers have ignored the very people who have an organized community behind them,” Keya Chatterjee, executive director of the U.S. Climate Action Network, told the House Natural Resources Committee during a Feb. 8 hearing on movement diversity and justice. “My own experience working at a large, white-led NGO was that while there was a focus on diversity in the workforce, there was a lack of retention because of a lack of commitment to justice.”
In detailed responses to POLITICO, 350.org’s leaders acknowledged their financial missteps and said that, like many organizations, it must do more to create a more inclusive workplace. It described new financial processes and governance measures, efforts to eliminate pay disparities and initiatives to improve equity in hiring.
“Of course it’s impacted staff,” Boeve said in an interview, referring to the layoffs and financial crisis. “Change processes are very hard. The team leading our U.S. staff have really intentionally focused on rebuilding culture through a justice and equity lens. So that’s been a big focus.”
As a result of the restructuring, 350.org said, its finances have stabilized. Revenues for fiscal year 2020 hit $25 million against $19 million in expenses, while preliminary 2021 estimates show $23 million of revenue versus $20 million in expenses, according to 350.org. Across those fiscal years it received $2.6 million from the Paycheck Protection Program, part of the coronavirus economic relief package that then-President Donald Trump signed into law.
Meanwhile, she said, the group’s strategic focus has shifted from focusing on mass demonstrations to more targeted campaigns, such as getting the Federal Reserve to take climate risks more seriously or prodding China to stop financing overseas coal projects.
“350’s original purpose as an organization was very much about building this strong, people-powered movement to fight climate change,” Boeve said. “I feel like the ways we’ve transformed the organization has made it fundamentally different from where we started, but remaining really true to our core DNA — and in fact, in some ways, making us even better suited to fulfill that original purpose.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/20/350org-mckibben-boeve-keystone-00009866?utm_source=pocket_mylist
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Concrete: The big CO2 source Greenies have forgotten
In vowing not to close coal fired power stations until equivalent replacement generation is in place, the bidders for AGL – Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes and Brookfield’s Stewart Upson – have added realism to the “shut down coal frenzy” sweeping Australia.
For that, the nation can be grateful because, until now, the frenzy was not being moderated by that vital qualification. The frenzy has also obscured sources of carbon pollution which rival coal that few want to discuss, because they go to the heart of the current Australian and world economic stimulation. That is the use of concrete and steel in construction.
Twiggy Forrest’s Fortescue has highlighted the carbon content of steel production, but concrete is rarely talked about probably because, as a community, in most of our houses we are replacing stored carbon in the form of timber with concrete slabs and their associated carbon emissions.
If we are serious about carbon emissions, then we must not leave all the heavy lifting to coal – concrete must be part of the action. And just like coal, we can’t simply abandon concrete unless we develop techniques and materials to either replace it or make it differently. Late last week Frank Cerra, head of Perth based project engineers BG&E, sent me a note highlighting the size of carbon emissions from concrete.
– The global construction sector accounts for 25 per cent of the world’s emissions. And as the world increases its investment in infrastructure and new buildings, emissions are rising rapidly. It’s predicted the equivalent of one New York City will be built every month globally until 2060.
– The global cement industry produces 7 to 8 per cent of the world’s man-made carbon dioxide. Concrete is consumed at a rate of 33 billion tonnes per annum and is the most consumed material in the world after water.
– Currently, over 20 per cent of Australia’s GDP is attributed to infrastructure sectors, with 33 per cent of planned infrastructure project activity occurring in NSW and Victoria. Approximately 25 million cubic metres of concrete are used annually in construction.
Cerra says engineers understand the critical interdependence of structural efficiency and materials and are working with key players to reduce embodied carbon in their projects, but a lot more needs to be done.
Meanwhile NSW has launched a program to reduce carbon in infrastructure by developing “collaborative solutions which are practical yet ambitious while also ensuring our infrastructure is fit-for-purpose and built to last”.
Now to the “Bacchus Marsh” cement-making technology story. Soon after the turn of the century, scientist Mark Sceats concluded that for many furnace applications, including cement, it would be far better to use a cylinder heated to very high temperatures and to conduct the treatment process inside that cylinder. That method of operation would also allow electrification of the furnace.
Washington H. Soul Pattinson saw Sceats process as a potential way of making better bricks. A test plant was commissioned at Bacchus Marsh in Victoria, but Soul Pattinson pulled out with the plant not completed. The employees raised the money to complete the plant and managed to keep it operational. Sceats is now the chief scientist at Calix, the listed-Australian company that owns the technology.
Australian cement makers were not interested, but in Europe there was a crisis. Back in 2005, the enormous emissions from its cement makers were neutralised by huge carbon credit certificates which would have lasted many decades.
But the cement makers were greedy and didn’t take carbon seriously, so they sold their abundant carbon credits for a profit of some $8bn.
Now the European Union is being tougher on carbon but most of the credits have gone. So far the cement makers have not been able to find a satisfactory substitute for lime in cement so they are pursuing a strategy of developing technology to separate and collect the carbon emissions from the cement process. They will either use the separated carbon in industry or store it in old oil wells.
The Bacchus Marsh plant was able to separate carbon so the European cement makers trialled the Australian technology (officially called LEILAC-1) in a massive Belgium pilot plant. Other technologies were also tested before the Europeans declared last October that the Australian technology offers the cheapest way yet to decarbonise the cement industry.
Calix will receive royalties, but it is now pursuing non-cement uses for its technology.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/its-time-to-get-serious-about-cement-to-take-on-climate-change-robert-gottliebsen/news-story/080db34cc805c0e886b719cf87f9d380
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Tuesday, February 22, 2022
California’s green-energy subsidies spur a gold rush in cow manure
Another absurdity in pursuit of the zero carbon chimera
Clean Energy Fuels, a major distributor of natural gas made from waste, found a way to boost its earnings by millions of dollars, virtually overnight.
All it had to do was switch the main biofuel it supplies to power cars and trucks in California – currently a type of natural gas produced with methane emissions from garbage – to a chemically identical gas produced from the manure of cows.
California’s clean-fuels grading system gives cow-poop gas a much better score – and much higher subsidies – than landfill gas. So that simple substitution could net Clean Energy an additional $US70m in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation by 2026, the company estimates.
Together with European energy giants BP and TotalEnergies, Clean Energy is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into gas production on dairy farms to milk that advantage. A host of developers, financiers and carbon-conscious corporations, from Chevron to Amazon.com, are looking to buy or produce the fuel as well.
“It is like magic,” said Andrew Littlefair, Clean Energy’s president and chief executive, of the projected earnings boost.
The surging interest in dairy renewable natural gas, as it is called, shows how incentives can spur action to address the emissions linked to climate change – and sometimes unintended consequences as well. Until a few years ago, the gas, which is interchangeable with conventional natural gas and can replace dirtier fuels like diesel, was a niche product that was too expensive to make commercially.
Now, California’s generous subsidies have prompted what some observers are dubbing a manure gold rush. One developer said he showed up at a dairy only to discover that the farmer had gotten more than 10 pitches for business tie-ups already. Others said competition for business has gotten so heated that some developers are promising to pay farmers a fixed amount per cow – a risky setup if the price of the California credits plummets.
Driving the boom is California’s Low-Carbon Fuel Standard. The standard requires companies that sell transportation fuels in the state to lower their products’ carbon intensity – the carbon dioxide emitted during manufacture, distribution and consumption. Companies that exceed the carbon-intensity maximums have to buy offset credits, each of which represents a metric ton of emissions. Those with low-scoring fuels generate credits, whose price goes up and down depending on demand.
The lowest carbon-intensity scores go to fuels that keep warming gases out of the air – particularly methane, a greenhouse gas that can be 84 times more potent in trapping heat than carbon dioxide, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientific group that helps the United Nations evaluate the state of research on the issue.
Other waste sources such as landfills produce methane, too. But California already requires landfills to curb methane emissions while farms don’t have to, and thus they emit more. So capturing the methane from decomposing manure at dairies to make truck fuel cuts net emissions a lot, and reaps some of the best scores of all.
US regulators haven’t generally imposed controls on methane emissions from livestock, since they are tough to implement and politically sensitive.
California Bioenergy LLC, which develops projects to make energy out of manure, in 2016 received the first provisional carbon-intensity score – around negative 270 – for a dairy-gas facility. Diesel by comparison has an average carbon-intensity score of more than 100. CalBio, as it is known, now has 41 dairy-gas projects in operation and another 60-odd projects in development.
Its latest project to go online is the 1500-cow Rib-Arrow Dairy in central California, where manure is now flushed from the floor of the stalls into a covered lagoon, called a digester, so the methane can be collected for processing rather than released into the air. That raw biogas, which is around 60% methane and the remainder mostly carbon dioxide, is piped to a central facility that collects gas from a cluster of dairies in the area and purifies it for injection into the local utility’s pipeline.
David Ribeiro, a third-generation co-owner of Rib-Arrow, said he had been approached by digester salesmen before, but that adding the gas sales to the environmental benefits finally made everything economically feasible: “We’re like, ‘Wow, this makes sense.’” There are 116 such facilities currently operating in the US – more than half of which went online last year – and another 121 planned or in construction, according to the Coalition for Renewable Natural Gas, a non-profit that promotes gas made from waste. Analysts say thousands more dairies could support such plants, which can reduce foul odours in addition to capturing emissions.
The market is likely to remain small compared with the US’s overall appetite for natural gas in homes, businesses and transport. Even in an optimistic scenario, biogas from manure would supply only around 3% of today’s demand by 2040, according to a 2019 study commissioned by the American Gas Foundation.
Still, money is pouring in from big companies looking to lower their carbon footprints quickly – as well as entrepreneurs smelling a business opportunity. Clean Energy said it is working on more than a billion dollars worth of deals through its dairy-gas joint ventures with BP and Total, and that it hopes to channel more than $US2bn in investment by 2026.
California-based Chevron has committed around $US500m to develop renewable natural-gas supply, starting with dairies. A Chevron investor presentation in September showed plans for a national network of as many as “190,000 milking cow equivalents” and forecast double-digit returns. Amazon has inked a deal with Clean Energy to buy biogas for its massive trucking fleet; it declined to comment.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/the-wall-street-journal/californias-greenenergy-subsidies-spur-a-gold-rush-in-cow-manure/news-story/9047bbbc5c738659c184ae55d73febd4
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China Signals Coal Reliance to Continue With Three New Mines
China’s top planning agency approved three different billion-dollar coal mine projects on Monday as the country continues to support the fuel that much of the rest of the world is shunning.
The National Development and Reform Commission gave the go ahead to two mines in the northwestern province of Shaanxi and another in Inner Mongolia. The three projects will require a total investment of 24.1 billion yuan ($3.8 billion) and produce 19 million tons of coal a year.
The approvals follow a massive surge in mine activity late last year as China boosted production to record levels after fears of an energy shortage sent prices skyrocketing. Each of the projects plans to rely on bank financing for about 70% of the capital involved, a sharp difference from most of the rest of the world where lenders have promised to stop funding new coal mines.
China's coal output soared to record levels to stave off an energy shortage
China has ambitious long-term climate goals and world-leading renewable energy industries, but its leaders have placed top priority on energy security and have vowed to continue supporting coal, which still generates about 60% of the country’s electricity. While benchmark coal futures in the country have fallen by more than half from an all-time peak in October, they’re still 40% higher than they were a year ago.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-21/china-signals-coal-reliance-to-continue-with-three-new-mines
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Virginia and Climate Change – No visible effect
Maybe Virginia is not part of the globe
A team of experts assembled by the CO2 Coalition has completed a detailed examination of effects (or non-effects) of climate change in the Commonwealth of Virginia. View the entire document here (pdf) Virginia and Climate Change.
Conclusion
This detailed analysis of climate change and its alleged impact on Virginia finds the following to be true and supported by voluminous governmental and peer-reviewed studies concerning the Commonwealth:
There is no unusual or unprecedented warming
Heat waves have been declining
Severe weather is not increasing
Crop and forest growth are increasing
Droughts are in decline
There is no increase in hurricanes
Complete elimination of carbon dioxide emissions within Virginia will have an impact that is so close to zero that it is meaningless
In short, there is no climate crisis and any attempts to eliminate CO2 via regulation or taxation are simply “solutions in search of a problem.”
https://co2coalition.org/publications/virginia-and-climate-change-separating-fact-from-fiction/
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Apartment buildings face massive bill for electric vehicle charging stations
The costs and other obstacles are such that NO charging stations are likely to be provided in most existing apartment buildings. That might effectively prohibit electric car ownership for most apartment dwellers, a very large number
Building managers are facing costs in the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars to retrofit complexes to accommodate the power to supply electric vehicles, experts have warned.
There’s also likely to be confrontation between those who want to retrofit a complex and unit owners who do not drive nor live there and have no interest in the paying for an EV charging stations, says strata title specialist Chris Irons.
Unit owners may not even have the right to install an EV charger in their ‘exclusive’ car space even if they foot the bill, the former Queensland commissioner for Body Corporate and Community Management said.
“If you have exclusive use of a parking space, or even it is on the title, to install a charging station may require a motion at an AGM to be passed as technically the car park is common property,” Mr Irons said.
“Even if the building owners decide to install several charging stations as a convenience, but on common property, there may be owners who do not own electric vehicles and do not want money spent on them.
“You also have the issue of where they are going to be placed and how is the vehicle owner charged for the use of the power if it is a shared meter.”
Transformers for established complexes are highly unlikely to cope with the power demand to service dozens of EV charging stations, said Master Electricians Australia CEO Malcolm Richards.
Bodies corporate can expect to pay more than $100,000 alone just to upgrade a transformer, before pricing the cost of retrofitting the wiring for their complex and individual meters, he said.
“In terms of putting car charging stations in the basement of existing premises, you have got a significant headache for the body corporate to put infrastructure in place,” Mr Richards said.
“They have to determine what type of chargers are going to be installed, how much extra power they going to draw.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/property/developers-future-proof-complexes-for-electric-vehicle-charging-stations-but-existing-buildings-face-massive-bill/news-story/8a337351c487f7e9d0f83ba1d1166684
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Monday, February 21, 2022
UK: Seizing land to make way for solar farms could worsen ‘deep and troubling’ farming crisis
Campaigners have warned that Britain faces a worsening agricultural crisis if it presses ahead with turning thousands of acres of land into solar farms to meet net zero carbon targets.
An analysis of data from the solar farm industry has shown that developments currently in the planning or pre-planning stage would total 37 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity.
Critics said that if the proposals are given the go-ahead, it could take as much as 150,000 acres of agricultural land out of production at a time when Britain has less farmland in use than at any time since 1945.
The country is already losing 99,000 acres of rural land a year to industrial and other uses.
Net Zero Watch, which monitors the implications of what it fears are expensive and poorly considered climate change policies, said the change will increase Britain’s dependency on food imports.
'Protect the national interest'
Dr John Constable, Net Zero Watch’s director of energy, said: “Farmland is already a renewable energy producer, making food from sunlight. Sacrificing that national asset to produce low quality electrical energy from solar photovoltaic panels is foolish in itself and will have deep and troubling long-term implications for British food security.”
Net Zero Watch said planning guidance should be revised to “protect the national interest” by changing the existing presumption of favour of solar development to one against, forcing developers to prove the case for proposals on their own merits.
The warnings come amid a growing row over plans to build one of the country’s biggest solar farms on agricultural land across a swathe of Lincolnshire and Rutland.
Its backers say that, if approved, the 2,175 acre Mallard Pass solar farm would generate in the region of 350 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy, enough to power 92,000 homes.
But local opposition groups say it will dominate the landscape and cause damage to farming and the environment.
Alicia Kearns, the MP for Rutland and Melton, said: “The Mallard Pass solar plant proposal is utterly inappropriate. By building on quality agricultural land, we will destroy a natural resource in the heart of England’s green and pleasant land.”
Keith Busfield, of the Mallard Pass Action Group, said: “As a country we need to ensure our energy policy dovetails with the nation’s approach to food and agriculture, rather than undermine it.”
Mallard Pass is one of nearly a dozen large solar farms currently at the planning stage, including 2,400 acre Cottam Solar Project on the Nottinghamshire/Lincolnshire border, which would produce 600MW, and a 1,400 acre solar farm near Chelmsford, Essex, which would produce 350MW.
Another is the 2,792 acre Sunnica solar farm on the Suffolk and Cambridgeshire border, aimed at producing 500MW.
MPs and residents living in many of the small villages in the area have criticised proposals by Sunnica to use compulsory purchase orders for land it needs.
Mallard Pass Solar Farm’s developer Windel Energy and Canadian Solar said there was an "urgent need to decarbonise our electricity system” by generating “a significant amount of clean, renewable energy”.
The National Farmers’ Union said solar farms should only be built on lower quality agricultural land, avoiding the most productive and versatile soils.
Stuart Roberts, the NFU’s deputy president, said: “As with any land use projects, we need to strike a balance to ensure we can continue to produce quality, sustainable food for the nation while also delivering on our net zero ambition.”
A government spokesman said it did not recognise the figure of 150,000 acres, adding: “Of those solar projects in the planning pipeline, not all are likely to progress, and not all would be sited on greenfield land.
“Ultimately, the more clean, cheap power we generate at home - like solar - the less dependent Britain will be on expensive gas prices set by global markets.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/12/seizing-land-make-way-solar-farms-could-worsen-deep-troubling/
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Greenie obstruction of copper mining
By Robert Kunzig
The world needs copper. Humans were shaping it into spearpoints as long as 9,500 years ago. But demand really started soaring at the turn of the last century, after we discovered how well copper conducts electricity. Now we need it more than ever: It’s essential to transitioning off fossil fuels and toward renewable sources of electricity. “The shift to a clean energy system is set to drive a huge increase in the requirements” for copper, the International Energy Agency reported last year.
So where should we get the stuff?
Not from Bristol Bay, Alaska, where the long-delayed Pebble Mine is awaiting another decision this year from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The mine and the transportation corridor required to get its copper out to the world would threaten the rich salmon fishery in Bristol Bay and impinge on “one of the United States’ richest and most unique remaining stretches of wilderness,” my colleague Douglas Main wrote a couple of years ago.
Not from Oak Flat, Arizona, where, as Main wrote last year, plans to mine “one of the largest untapped reserves in North America” would create a massive crater on a site sacred to the Apache people.
And not from the proposed Nussir Mine on the northern coast of Norway, according to the environmentalists and Indigenous Sámi fishers and reindeer herders whom Brett Simpson and photographer Andrea Gjestvang met for this week’s story on the controversy. The mine would pump two million tons a year of tailings into the Repparfjord (pictured above). The company says it will use a chemical flocculant to bind the powdery tailings and confine them to a small area on the bottom of the fjord. Independent scientists are unconvinced, to say nothing of the activists (shown below at a protest camp), some of whom were chaining themselves to Nussir’s excavators last summer.
A few years ago, when I was reporting on the circular economy, I visited a plant in western Germany that belong to Aurubis, Europe’s leading copper smelter. That plant has been recycling copper since World War I, when copper was needed for artillery shells. It has gotten very good lately at extracting copper from such unlikely sources as municipal incinerator slag. Copper ends up there when people throw cell phones and other electronics into the trash.
Copper is valuable, and Aurubis is the world’s leading recycler. But two-thirds of its production still comes from mines, mostly in Chile and Peru. “Demand is growing,” deputy plant manager Detlev Laser told me. “You’ll never cover that with recycling.” Aurubis had signed a billion-dollar deal with Nussir to buy ore from the new mine—but after the protests last year the contract was canceled.
The IEA worries that underinvestment in mining—for copper but also for minerals such as lithium and cobalt that are needed to make batteries—could create bottlenecks that would slow the global energy transition. The average electric car requires 117 pounds of copper, it says, more than twice as much as a gasoline-burning one. A giant wind turbine may require more than 30 tons.
“This idea of leaving the metals in the ground doesn’t work,” Nussir CEO Øystein Rushfeldt told Simpson. “Then all of our hopes for handling the climate crisis are obviously lost and gone.”
There are a lot of ways to mine copper badly, in ways that environmentalists, scientists, or people living near the mine will take legitimate exception to (pictured above, Per Jonny Skum inspects an old mine in his district in Norway). What does mining copper well, or at least acceptably, look like? I should know the answer to that question, but I don’t. Maybe there’s a story in that.
nationalgeographic.com email
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UK: Green energy cannot save us
Cheaper energy benefits the economy at every level. But today’s Government seems unable to look beyond the green groupthink that pervades Whitehall.
Amid the furore surrounding “birthdaycakegate”, “cheeseandwinegate” and “proseccogate”, which could still derail the premiership of Boris Johnson, the risks in Ukraine are looming large and the certainty of a cost of living crisis lies dead ahead. The government must deal with it. To restore trust with the wider public and the new voters who, perhaps for the first time voted Conservative in 2019, Boris Johnson has to show that he is the one with the solutions to the problems Britain is facing.
While inflation is soaring across the board, rising fastest of all is the cost of energy. Energy is an area where the Government has intervened repeatedly to exacerbate this crisis. It would take extreme propaganda to blame free markets and low taxes when we have had extensive state planning, high taxes, subsidies and misleading claims about the costs of renewables. Only by solving the energy crisis can the government’s economic agenda be revived, not least given the state of out pandemic finances.
We have heard this crisis shows we need to move more quickly away from gas (though habitually from people who would have said this whatever else was happening in the world). That may be a solution for decades ahead once technology evolves, but the problem we have is now.
Natural gas is used by the overwhelming majority to heat their homes, and it is the dominant single power source providing electricity to the National Grid. By sharply reducing domestic production and storage way ahead of the marginal reduction in our gas use, we have simply paved the way to increased imports and inadvertently assisted in the financing of Putin’s war machine.
This attitude also displays a certain complacency. Are people facing eye-watering bill increases supposed to wait until we have an economy that isn’t overwhelmingly powered by fossil fuels?
Far from protecting us from price rises, the present obsession with renewables has made the current crisis much worse. If you look at when wind and natural gas are supplying power to the grid, you see that when wind conditions are poor, gas ramps up to make up the difference. This winter, the predictable coincidence of both poor wind conditions and high natural gas prices has caught us out time and again. Wind has offered next-to-no protection. It is neither kind nor responsible politics to leave the most vulnerable the least well-protected.
The determination to push through Net Zero policies without adequate consideration of their implications could do even more damage to the Government than Partygate. Thankfully, there are solutions to our energy woes staring us right in the face. And they’re real, unlike the hysterical conspiracy theories supporters of the government’s ruinously costly energy policies tend to spout.
Oxford energy professor Dieter Helm was commissioned by the Government to do a “Cost of Energy Review”, published in 2017. In it, he attacked successive governments for ignoring the problem of intermittency and creating a complex web of overlapping policy interventions that led to bloated costs. He offered solutions such as the creation of “Equivalent Firm Power” auctions, that would have given renewable generators a strong incentive to invest in back-up and storage.
Helm’s recommendations were shouted down by the industries that had most to lose from their implementation. The proposals would have brought an end to the high prices being charged for network services and forced renewable generators to manage the grid instability that they were responsible for. Regrettably, the Government were unable to recognise these vested interests for what they were, and ignored their own report.
As my colleagues and I made clear in our letter to The Sunday Telegraph, consumers will need urgent relief from spiralling prices. Relief from VAT and from the cost of environmental levies, which now make up close to 25 per cent of electricity bills, will cushion the blow, but we have to deal with the market fundamentals to get bills down for good else face impoverished families and the final closure of remaining high energy intensive industries as production, jobs and the positive tax-take simply relocates abroad.
We must be able to use our own natural gas supplies, which are right under our feet as well as out to sea. Using our own gas will bring investment, jobs, a good helping of taxes and reduce emissions compared to imported gas, which often comes with geopolitical strings attached. To say that we ought not to try because it might not make that much of a difference to prices is utterly defeatist, neglecting the experience of the USA. It’s for businesses to experiment in the marketplace and not for the government to arbitrarily cancel industries and manage prices based on a hunch that may prove to be wrong.
The electricity market must be reformed, unravelling the unnecessary complexity of many layers of intervention, and bringing market forces to bear on prices. It is only by properly incentivising the provision of reliable power that we can hope to meet the changing energy needs of the future at an affordable price while maintaining security of supply.
Historically Conservatives at heart understood these principles well — that cheaper energy benefits the economy at every level. Or we did. But today’s Government seems unable to look beyond the green groupthink that pervades Whitehall. Getting this government back on track is going to require reliable power: we’re a long way from that..
https://thecritic.co.uk/green-energy-cannot-save-us/?mc_cid=3f7c80f0e4&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies
BjornLomborg
Abstract
Climate change is real and its impacts are mostly negative, but common portrayals of devastation are unfounded. Scenarios set out under the UN Climate Panel (IPCC) show human welfare will likely increase to 450% of today's welfare over the 21st century. Climate damages will reduce this welfare increase to 434%.
Arguments for devastation typically claim that extreme weather (like droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes) is already worsening because of climate change. This is mostly misleading and inconsistent with the IPCC literature. For instance, the IPCC finds no trend for global hurricane frequency and has low confidence in attribution of changes to human activity, while the US has not seen an increase in landfalling hurricanes since 1900. Global death risk from extreme weather has declined 99% over 100 years and global costs have declined 26% over the last 28 years.
Arguments for devastation typically ignore adaptation, which will reduce vulnerability dramatically. While climate research suggests that fewer but stronger future hurricanes will increase damages, this effect will be countered by richer and more resilient societies. Global cost of hurricanes will likely decline from 0.04% of GDP today to 0.02% in 2100.
Climate-economic research shows that the total cost from untreated climate change is negative but moderate, likely equivalent to a 3.6% reduction in total GDP.
Climate policies also have costs that often vastly outweigh their climate benefits. The Paris Agreement, if fully implemented, will cost $819–$1,890 billion per year in 2030, yet will reduce emissions by just 1% of what is needed to limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C. Each dollar spent on Paris will likely produce climate benefits worth 11¢.
Long-term impacts of climate policy can cost even more. The IPCC's two best future scenarios are the “sustainable” SSP1 and the “fossil-fuel driven” SSP5. Current climate-focused attitudes suggest we aim for the “sustainable” world, but the higher economic growth in SSP5 actually leads to much greater welfare for humanity. After adjusting for climate damages, SSP5 will on average leave grandchildren of today's poor $48,000 better off every year. It will reduce poverty by 26 million each year until 2050, inequality will be lower, and more than 80 million premature deaths will be avoided.
Using carbon taxes, an optimal realistic climate policy can aggressively reduce emissions and reduce the global temperature increase from 4.1°C in 2100 to 3.75°C. This will cost $18 trillion, but deliver climate benefits worth twice that. The popular 2°C target, in contrast, is unrealistic and would leave the world more than $250 trillion worse off.
The most effective climate policy is increasing investment in green R&D to make future decarbonization much cheaper. This can deliver $11 of climate benefits for each dollar spent.
More effective climate policies can help the world do better. The current climate discourse leads to wasteful climate policies, diverting attention and funds from more effective ways to improve the world.
Previous article in issueNext article in issue
This article will outline how to establish a rational climate policy in the context of many other, competing global issues.
It takes its starting point from the standard climate models as described by the UN Climate Panel, the IPCC, in its latest, fifth assessment (IPCC 2013a) and impact models (IPCC 2014a) along with its special 1.5°C report (IPCC 2018), showing that climate change is real and man-made, and CO₂ and other greenhouse gasses lead to higher global temperatures, which on average cause a net detriment to humanity.
Global warming1 has become a top priority across the world with almost every nation committing to a target of limiting global temperature rise at or just above 1.5°C. This is partly because climate impacts have been presented repeatedly as catastrophic, leading many people to believe that unmitigated climate change is likely to lead to devastated lives, collapsing societies, and even human extinction.
These claims of devastation are almost entirely unwarranted and can lead to wasteful climate policies in which resources are allocated and decisions made driven by fear and panic. In order to identify rational climate policies, it is first necessary to address these misplaced concerns about devastating impacts from climate change.
I will do this with data from the most respected sources. Given the divisive nature of the climate debate, my first choice where available will be data from the UN Climate Panel, the IPCC, which is respected by all parties. I will use global data where available and I will mostly use US data when I refer to a specific country, partly because of the much greater availability of long-term data for the US, and partly because of its uniquely highlighted profile in the global climate conversation.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162520304157
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Sunday, February 20, 2022
Greenland’s Melting Ice Is No Cause for Climate-Change Panic
One of the most sacred tenets of climate alarmism is that Greenland’s vast ice sheet is shrinking ever more rapidly because of human-induced climate change. The media and politicians warn constantly of rising sea levels that would swamp coastlines from Florida to Bangladesh. A typical headline: “Greenland ice sheet on course to lose ice at fastest rate in 12,000 years.”
With an area of 660,000 square miles and a thickness up to 1.9 miles, Greenland’s ice sheet certainly deserves attention. Its shrinking has been a major cause of recent sea-level rise, but as is often the case in climate science, the data tell quite a different story from the media coverage and the political laments.
The chart nearby paints a bigger picture that is well known to experts but largely absent from the media and even from the most recent United Nations climate report. It shows the amount of ice that Greenland has lost every year since 1900, averaged over 10-year intervals; the annual loss averages about 110 gigatons. (A gigaton is one billion metric tons, or slightly over 2.2 trillion pounds.) That is a lot, but that water has caused the planet’s oceans to rise each year by only 0.01 inch, about one-fifth the thickness of a dime.
In contrast, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects that for the most likely course of greenhouse-gas emissions in the 21st century, the average annual ice loss would be somewhat larger than the peak values shown in the graph. That would cause sea level to rise by 3 inches by the end of this century, and if losses were to continue at that rate, it would take about 10,000 years for all the ice to disappear, causing sea level to rise more than 20 feet.
To assess the importance of human influences, we can look at how the rate of ice loss has changed over time.
In that regard, the graph belies the simplistic notion that humans are melting Greenland. Since human warming influences on the climate have grown steadily—they are now 10 times what they were in 1900— you might expect Greenland to lose more ice each year. Instead there are large swings in the annual ice loss and it is no larger today than it was in the 1930s, when human influences were much smaller. Moreover, the annual loss of ice has been decreasing in the past decade even as the globe continues to warm.
While a warming globe might eventually be the dominant cause of Greenland’s shrinking ice, natural cycles in temperatures and currents in the North Atlantic that extend for decades have been a much more important influence since 1900. Those cycles, together with the recent slowdown, make it plausible that the next few decades will see a further, perhaps dramatic slowing of ice loss. That would be inconsistent with the IPCC’s projection and wouldn’t at all support the media’s exaggerations.
Much climate reporting today highlights short-term changes when they fit the narrative of a broken climate but then ignores or plays down changes when they don’t, often dismissing them as “just weather.”
Climate unfolds over decades. Although short-term changes might be deemed news, they need to be considered in a many-decade context. Media coverage omitting that context misleadingly raises alarm. Greenland’s shrinking ice is a prime example of that practice.
If Greenland’s ice loss continues to slow, headline writers will have to find some other aspect of Greenland’s changes to grab our attention, and politicians will surely find some other reason to justify their favorite climate policies.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/greenland-melting-ice-panic-sheets-global-warming-variance-seal-level-rise-climate-change-carbon-fossil-fuel-11645131739?mod=opinion_major_pos5
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The ocean acidification effect was a false alarm
Meta-analysis reveals an extreme “decline effect” in the impacts of ocean acidification on fish behavior
Abstract
Ocean acidification—decreasing oceanic pH resulting from the uptake of excess atmospheric CO2—has the potential to affect marine life in the future. Among the possible consequences, a series of studies on coral reef fish suggested that the direct effects of acidification on fish behavior may be extreme and have broad ecological ramifications. Recent studies documenting a lack of effect of experimental ocean acidification on fish behavior, however, call this prediction into question. Indeed, the phenomenon of decreasing effect sizes over time is not uncommon and is typically referred to as the “decline effect.” Here, we explore the consistency and robustness of scientific evidence over the past decade regarding direct effects of ocean acidification on fish behavior. Using a systematic review and meta-analysis of 91 studies empirically testing effects of ocean acidification on fish behavior, we provide quantitative evidence that the research to date on this topic is characterized by a decline effect, where large effects in initial studies have all but disappeared in subsequent studies over a decade. The decline effect in this field cannot be explained by 3 likely biological explanations, including increasing proportions of studies examining (1) cold-water species; (2) nonolfactory-associated behaviors; and (3) nonlarval life stages. Furthermore, the vast majority of studies with large effect sizes in this field tend to be characterized by low sample sizes, yet are published in high-impact journals and have a disproportionate influence on the field in terms of citations. We contend that ocean acidification has a negligible direct impact on fish behavior, and we advocate for improved approaches to minimize the potential for a decline effect in future avenues of research.
https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3001511
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EVs are a plaything for the rich
It’s hard to get away from the propaganda ‘nudging’ us in that direction, whether from the car companies, activists in the media, or the political classes. If you have needed a new car in recent years, an EV will at least have crossed your mind.
It’s also fair to say that most of the people who have actually gone through with the deal are either environmental fanatics or people with money to burn. That’s because the cost of EVs remains much higher than their fossil-fuelled equivalents, and they are also more expensive to own and run.
That’s not my opinion, by the way. It’s revealed by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s rEV dataset, which was recently made public. While they don’t publicise these particular figures, it shows that in the UK, despite being subsidised, an EV costs 46% more than its fossil fuelled equivalent.
What is worse, once you have bought one, it costs 32% more to run each year. The research predates the recent energy price crisis, so they are currently an even worse buy than the figures suggest.
That being the case, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that EVs remain a plaything for the wealthy, and the fanatical few.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/a-plaything-for-the-rich/?mc_cid=3f7c80f0e4&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Koalas not endangered
Vic Jurskis
The Long March has reached its destination. Our world is governed by mass hysteria and Australia’s a world leader. There’s the Climate Crisis, the climate-driven Bushfire Crisis, the Reef Crisis and – it’s finally official – a Koala Crisis.
The Environment Minister has listed koalas with postcodes in the 2000s or 4000s as an endangered species. The same species with postcodes in the 3000s or 5000s are not officially endangered because everyone knows there’s plenty of them. Supposedly because they’re inbred, with limited genetic diversity.
Minister Ley has this on good authority – our Threatened Species Scientific Committee (TSSC). TSSC, in turn, were informed by our leading koala experts. These scientists are so confident in their abilities that they didn’t need any empirical data to make their assessment. In their own words: ‘A quantitative, scientific method for deriving estimates of koala populations and trends was possible, in the absence of empirical data on abundances.’
An ‘elicitation specialist’ helped the experts make up the numbers using ‘a modified version of the Delphi process’. I assume the process is named after the famous Oracle. These quotes aren’t from Monty Python, they’re from Diversity and Distributions – A Journal of Conservation Biogeography.
Their numbers are wrong. I pointed this out in Ecological history of the koala and implications for management, published in CSIRO’s Wildlife Research journal. It was available to TSSC, but peer-reviewed science is seemingly irrelevant unless it gives the Scientific Committee the answer it wants.
Koalas are in absolutely no danger of extinction. There are more koalas over a much wider area than there were when Europeans arrived in Australia. They are naturally rare because they eat soft young shoots which are scarce in healthy mature forests.
Koalas have big noses and strong limbs to aid their nightly quest for edible and nutritious browse in their large ~ 100 ha home ranges containing thousands of trees. Natural, stable populations have chlamydia but no disease and they are invisible. Koalas didn’t live in the open grassy woodlands sought by explorers and pastoralists.
Strzelecki was the only explorer to see koalas. There were plagues in the ranges that now bear his name. Struggling for 26 days through 50 miles of dense young forest, he ate koalas. There were no kangaroos, emus or small game to be had in the scrub. The Yowenjerre had been decimated by smallpox in 1789. Without the firestick, scrub climbed out of deep dark gullies and covered their land. It exploded from lightning in a hot, dry summer around 1820.
European occupation from the 1830s disrupted Aboriginal management across Victoria.
The 1851 Black Thursday holocaust burnt more than 12 million acres. The ranges were also incinerated by Red Tuesday 1898, Black Friday 1939, Black Saturday 2009 and many other un-named disasters. A total of 20 megafires raged in 200 years. The Strzelecki koalas, supposedly the last natural population in Victoria, are still in unnaturally high numbers.
The northern koalas were listed as vulnerable after the Senate Environment Committee accepted that there were 10 million koalas in 1788. The evidence was that millions were shot for fur after 1888. Truth is, koala plagues followed European occupation as dense young forests grew in the hills and mature trees declined in the valleys. Declining trees continuously re-sprouted soft young shoots. Koalas irrupted in the hills, invaded the valleys and outstripped their food.
People shot starving, diseased koalas and sold their fur. But the more adults they shot, the more young survived. When leaves frizzled and trees died in the Federation Drought, koalas crashed back to natural levels.
National Parks expanded and mild burning declined in the late 20th century. People planted eucalypts for timber or amenity. Koalas irrupted again.
The valleys are now occupied by suburbia. As koalas move in, they fall prey to dogs and motor vehicles. Wild dogs and carpet pythons bred up in response to irruptions on the Koala Coast. During the Millennium Drought, dense populations at Pilliga – Gunnedah – Liverpool Plains and on the Koala Coast crashed. Overcrowded koalas in VIC and SA were translocated to die out of sight. The weakest were euthanised.
Koalas are currently breeding like rabbits on all the soft young growth after Black Summer. I showed NSW Koala Inquiry a picture of a young koala in dense scrub south of Eden where they’re supposedly extinct. I explained that lack of mild burning, koala irruptions and megafires go together. I sent them a picture of the same spot after the holocaust. Green Chair Cate Faehrmann wasn’t interested. She likes crises, they’re good for business.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/02/the-koala-industry-has-won-but-not-the-koalas/
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Friday, February 18, 2022
West megadrought worsens to driest in at least 1,200 years
By SETH BORENSTEIN (again)
Perhaps he should have checked with NOAA first:
The American West’s megadrought deepened so much last year that it is now the driest in at least 1,200 years and is a worst-case climate change scenario playing out live, a new study finds.
A dramatic drying in 2021 — about as dry as 2002 and one of the driest years ever recorded for the region — pushed the 22-year drought past the previous record-holder for megadroughts in the late 1500s and shows no signs of easing in the near future, according to a study Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study calculated that 42% of this megadrought can be attributed to human-caused climate change.
“Climate change is changing the baseline conditions toward a drier, gradually drier state in the West and that means the worst-case scenario keeps getting worse,” said study lead author Park Williams, a climate hydrologist at UCLA. “This is right in line with what people were thinking of in the 1900s as a worst-case scenario. But today I think we need to be even preparing for conditions in the future that are far worse than this.”
Williams studied soil moisture levels in the West — a box that includes California, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, most of Oregon and Idaho, much of New Mexico, western Colorado, northern Mexico, and the southwest corners of Montana and Texas — using modern measurements and tree rings for estimates that go back to the year 800. That’s about as far back as estimates can reliably go with tree rings.
A few years ago, Williams studied the current drought and said it qualified as a lengthy and deep “megadrought” and that the only worse one was in the 1500s. He figured the current drought wouldn’t surpass that one because megadroughts tended to peter out after 20 years. And, he said, 2019 was a wet year so it looked like the western drought might be coming to an end.
But the region dried up in late 2020 and 2021.
All of California was considered in official drought from mid-May until the end of 2021, and at least three-quarters of the state was at the highest two drought levels from June through Christmas, according to the U.S. drought monitor.
“For this drought to have just cranked up back to maximum drought intensity in late 2020 through 2021 is a quite emphatic statement by this 2000s drought saying that we’re nowhere close to the end,” Williams said. This drought is now 5% drier than the old record from the 1500s, he said.
The drought monitor says 55% of the U.S. West is in drought with 13% experiencing the two highest drought levels.
This megadrought really kicked off in 2002 — one of the driest years ever, based on humidity and tree rings, Williams said.
“I was wondering if we’d ever see a year like 2002 again in my life and in fact, we saw it 20 years later, within the same drought,” Williams said. The drought levels in 2002 and 2021 were a statistical tie, though still behind 1580 for the worst single year.
Climate change from the burning of fossil fuels is bringing hotter temperatures and increasing evaporation in the air, scientists say.
Williams used 29 models to create a hypothetical world with no human-caused warming then compared it to what happened in real life — the scientifically accepted way to check if an extreme weather event is due to climate change. He found that 42% of the drought conditions are directly from human-caused warming. Without climate change, he said, the megadrought would have ended early on because 2005 and 2006 would have been wet enough to break it.
The study “is an important wake-up call,” said Jonathan Overpeck, dean of environment at the University of Michigan, who wasn’t part of the study. “Climate change is literally baking the water supply and forests of the Southwest, and it could get a whole lot worse if we don’t halt climate change soon.”
Williams said there is a direct link between drought and heat and the increased wildfires that have been devastating the West for years. Fires need dry fuel that drought and heat promote.
Eventually, this megadrought will end by sheer luck of a few good rainy years, Williams said. But then another one will start.
Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who wasn’t involved in the study, said climate change is likely to make megadrought “a permanent feature of the climate of the Colorado River watershed during the 21st century.”
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/02/15/uclas-hypothetical-droughts/
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British Government's Oil & Gas Authority orders abandonment of 37.6 trillion cubic meters of onshore gas
Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics is that “the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies”.
When it comes to the government’s Oil & Gas Authority quango the axiom’s truth is clear. The quango has ordered Cuadrilla to permanently seal the two shale gas wells drilled at the Lancashire shale exploration site, with the result that the 37.6 trillion cubic metres of gas located in the northern Bowland Shale gas formation will continue to sit unused – when just 10% of this volume could meet UK gas needs for 50 years. UK imports of Natural Gas are expected to skyrocket to over 80% by 2050.
According to Cuadrilla’s CEO, Francis Egan:
“Cuadrilla has spent hundreds of millions of pounds establishing the viability of the Bowland Shale as a high-quality gas deposit. Shale gas from the North of England has the potential to meet the UK’s energy needs for decades to come, yet ministers have chosen now, at the height of an energy crisis, to take us to this point.
Once these wells are filled with cement and abandoned it will be incredibly costly and difficult to rectify this mistake at the PNR site. Safe shale gas offers us a chance to combat the cost-of living crisis, create 75,000 jobs and deliver on the ‘levelling up agenda’ in Red Wall areas, in addition to reducing our reliance on imported gas so that Britain becomes more energy secure. What’s more ridiculous is that leaving our own shale gas in the ground will make reducing global emissions even harder. Emissions from importing gas are far higher than those from home-produced shale gas. I don’t think that this has been properly thought through.”
Craig Mackinlay, the MP who chairs the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, is livid:
“Following last week’s hike in gas prices, my constituents are concerned about one thing: the cost-of-living crisis. If this government really wants to deliver on the people’s priorities, help them through the crisis and level up it should not be depriving the country of access to cheap and reliable energy sources. Doing this at the height of an energy crisis is utter madness. What’s more, if the Government wants to achieve Net Zero by 2050, this move will make it impossible. It will force us to import more gas instead, when UKOOG and the Climate Change Committee have already told us that the carbon footprint of imported gas is so much higher than homegrown shale gas."
Steve Baker also tells Guido, “By abandoning our shale gas industry, we will inflict more costs on our constituents and make Net Zero even more difficult to deliver given that importing gas is more carbon intensive than producing it at home.” Also given the geo-political situation it is bad from an energy security point of view, see how Putin has Germany over a barrel…"
Andy Samuel will be stepping down as CEO of the Oil & Gas Authority in the summer. During his tenure the organisation has become more aligned with the fashionable Net Zero goals of Extinction Rebellion than the needs of Britain’s hard pressed energy consumers facing ever-rising energy bills.
Boris and Kwasi need to ensure that the new leadership of this quango is focused on securing cheap energy resources, onshore and offshore, including abundant cheap shale, rather than closing down energy sources.
https://order-order.com/2022/02/10/governments-oil-gas-authority-orders-abandonment-of-37-6-trillion-cubic-metres-of-onshore-gas/
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Now racism is the root cause of climate change!
Writer on environmental and social justice issues, Jeremy Williams, is just the latest polemicist to claim climate change and racism, ‘two of the biggest challenges of the 21st century’, are intertwined. In an article for the BBC, ‘Climate change divides along racial lines. Could tackling it help address longstanding injustices?’, he argues white supremacists are behind both. How generously ‘rich’ countries (primarily the Anglosphere) respond to demands from ‘vulnerable’ countries… will determine whether climate change becomes a problem that unites or divides humanity.
As evidence of climate injustice, Williams cites hurricanes Katrina and Harvey which disproportionately impacted already stretched black neighbourhoods in New Orleans and Houston.
While urban flooding affects a wide range of demographics, those who live in poorer, more densely populated neighbourhoods, where there is limited green space to absorb water, are most affected. These are predominantly black communities where ageing sewers, already near capacity, are easily overwhelmed by torrential rain. That much is true. But his proposition that the combination of climate change and racism is the reason people of colour were so affected, is not.
First, Williams assertions ignore the IPCC’s conclusion that, ‘There is low confidence in attribution of changes in tropical cyclone activity to human influence’. Current data sets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century, with 2021 being one of the quietest hurricane years in the satellite era.
Second, Williams ignores the reality that the authorities have used welfare to buy off poorer communities who, over time, have become trapped in perpetual incubators of poverty and violence. Children grow up with a sense of victimhood and learned helplessness. This restricts their social mobility and institutionalises inequality and misery. What Williams attributes to ‘racism’ is actually the cumulative failure of decades of ‘compassionate’ socialist experimentation and Tammany Hall politics.
Still, he remains secure in his ignorance. He acknowledges ‘that for some, it can be disconcerting to hear terms such as “racism” and “white supremacy” used in discussions about climate change. After all, most people believe climate change is an environmental issue’. But, for Williams, they are missing ‘institutional racism’. While there may be no one specific event or person identified, the problem lies in the way victims are treated. That he says is buried away in processes and systems – ‘racism without racists as it is sometimes described’.
For proof he instances Zambia. While Zambia’s CO2 footprint is low, innocent Zambians face environmental disaster from prolonged droughts. The resulting crop failures, livestock deaths and reduced GDP have left over one million victims in need of food assistance.
Of course, Mr Williams immediately sees institutional racism at work, conveniently ignoring that between 2001 and 2020, Zambia lost 1.87 million hectares of tree cover, equivalent to an overall decrease of 7.8 percent. Chinese loggers are particularly to blame. Compared to their foreign competitors, they have proven to be poor forest managers and engage in illegal timber trading.
As an environmental writer Williams should know that deforestation creates a negative climate feedback loop. As forests are cleared, the rain decreases at a faster rate, leading to longer droughts and higher temperatures. More prolonged droughts lead to longer and hotter fires, which clear more forest, thus speeding up the process.
Those living in rural areas, especially women, are hit hardest and make up the majority of those living in poverty. Traditionally, Zambian girls are taught to be obedient and subservient to men. Women account for 65 per cent of food production and processing, but remain dependent upon their husbands for access to land and financial resources. Gender-based violence is commonplace. The charity, Care International, reports that gender inequality is a major influence on food insecurity and poverty but there is little mood for change.
Yet Williams and his ilk insist Zambia is the victim of oppressive European (British) colonial powers. They have ‘colonised the atmospheric commons. They’ve enriched themselves as a result, but with devastating consequences for the rest of the world’. It’s they, not Zambian practices, which are primarily to blame.
Nowhere is China mentioned, even though its emissions are colonising ‘the atmospheric commons’. Indeed, China emits more greenhouse gases than the entire developed world combined. Its CO2 has trebled over the past 30 years. Undaunted, Beijing is building another 43 coal-fired power stations and 18 blast furnaces and, has directed coal production in Inner Mongolia to be increased by nearly 100 million tons annually. China has also agreed to stop funding fossil fuel projects in developing countries like Zambia, condemning them to more expensive energy and lessening the risk they will ultimately compete against Chinese manufacturers.
But the West’s oppressive colonial past is the focus. China’s use of eighteenth century mercantilist practices to colonise today’s developing nations is apparently of no consequence. Unless, like Sri Lankans, you are a victim of China’s debt trap diplomacy. Two-thirds of Colombo’s revenues now go in interest payments, leaving Sri Lanka struggling to pay for food.
Having watched this debt crisis evolve over 15 years, a distressed former Cabinet minister, Wijeyadasa Rajapaksheto, commented, ‘It is manifestly visible… you (Beijing) use our relations to achieve your ambition of becoming the world power at the stake of the lives of our innocent people’. He said he resigned from Cabinet because he ‘couldn’t stomach’ the level of Chinese corruption.
But who cares? The Chinese aren’t part of the Anglosphere and Mr Williams is so consumed with hate for it he is blind to everything else. Worse, the BBC like its counterparts in Australia and elsewhere, is eager to promote similar anti-white, climate change fantasies. They would rather contemporary Western values of reason, liberty and the devolution of authority, be sacrificed on the altar of revisionist history. Better it seems to return to a primitive world order based on self-delusion, superstition and coercion, where omnipotent non-white leaders will lead Zambians to the promised land. Try telling Sri Lankans that.
https://spectator.com.au/2019/08/climate-change-stripped-bare/
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Malign focus on the long term
I’m thinking of the situation described by the writer and philosopher Phil Torres in a recent essay. He argues compellingly that what’s become called long-termism is a “dangerous secular credo”.
What is this credo? It’s the notion that what really matters is humanity’s alleged very long-term potential. This future is allegedly post-human, or will involve colonising the solar system, the galaxy and the universe. Once one starts thinking this way, almost any sacrifice or indeed crime is justified, in order to keep our species alive. More precisely: to keep alive that part of our species which is betting everything upon big tech, space exploration, cryogenesis and more.
Torres’s essay exposes how justifiable concern with the existential risks – risks to our very existence – which, increasingly, humanity has come to hang over itself, is morphing into a way of perpetuating the very system that’s created those risks. A big-tech/industrial/academic complex has sprung into existence, which is sucking up money and attention that could be going into thinking about how we could become genuinely long-termist, and is instead focusing that well-paid attention on the idea that the way to prevent ourselves from destroying ourselves is to have much more tech, much more surveillance (supposedly, to guard against existential threats to humanity coming from non-state terrorists) and much more economic growth.
If you think that Torres and I are exaggerating, here is an example. Oxford academic and leading “long-termist” Nick Bostrom proposes that everyone should permanently wear an Orwellianly-named “freedom tag”: a device that would monitor everything that you do, 24/7 for the remainder of your life to guard against the minuscule possibility that you might be part of a plot to destroy humanity.
This might sound like satire. When I first read Bostrom’s piece, I assumed he was proposing the “freedom tag” idea for rhetorical effect only, or something like that. But no – he means it quite seriously.
And here’s the real trouble: these long-termists, in backing to the hilt the idea of a big-tech, industry-heavy future appear to be calling for much more of the very things that have brought us to this desperate ecological situation.
Not a fully existential threat?
Proponents of the technotopian conception of long-termism often, extraordinarily, see climate breakdown as only a fairly minor issue since they believe it is not a fully existential threat to our species. Allegedly, technological innovation sprung from within the rich world will eventually “solve” climate change. This is why long-termists such as billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel and Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn urge us to worry less than we do about the climate.
By contrast, I want to explicitly hold open the possibility that global eco-catastrophe really is a “white swan” existential threat (unlike black swan threats, which are unexpected, white swans are of course expected). If that is the case, then the wisest way to truly plan for the long term might even be a possibility virtually uncontemplated by long-termists: the deliberate reduction of our techno-power.
Ultimately, I believe we should work towards a relocalised future in which we have democratic control over what technologies get developed. Perhaps this is virtually never contemplated because long-termists are overwhelmingly technophiles from wealthy countries.
The point then is to differentiate between the valid concept of long-termism and the dubious conception of it that’s become almost hegemonic. We of course need to care more about what the world will be like in the future, after our individual lives are over. In that context, it’s dreadful news that “long-termist” has in effect been appropriated by one particular interpretation.
https://theconversation.com/climate-crisis-and-the-dangers-of-tech-obsessed-long-termism-176951
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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17 February 2022
US Army surrenders to wokery: New climate change plan will see electric fleet of non-combat vehicles by 2035 and 50% reduction in greenhouses gasses at bases
The Left will do anything they can to mess up the army. They know that two thirds of the army votes GOP
The U.S. Army has unveiled a new climate change plan that includes an electric fleet of non-combat vehicles and a desire to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at military bases.
The woke new plan was released amid rising tensions overseas, with President Joe Biden telling Americans to leave Ukraine immediately and warning them that they could not expect to be rescued by U.S. troops if Russia launches an invasion.
The Army's climate change strategy, published in a report Tuesday, aims to make its bases more self-efficient and to move to an electric fleet of non-combat vehicles by 2035.
The plan says the Army's 'immediate objectives' are to provide 100 percent carbon-pollution-free electricity for branch installations needs by 2030 and a 50 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions at all Army buildings by 2032.
'The time to address climate change is now. The effects of climate change have taken a toll on supply chains, damaged our infrastructure, and increased risks to Army Soldiers and families due to natural disasters and extreme weather,' Secretary of the Army Christine E. Wormuth penned in the report.
'The Army must adapt across our entire enterprise and purposefully pursue greenhouse gas mitigation strategies to reduce climate risks. If we do not take action now, across our installations, acquisition and logistics, and training, our options to mitigate these risks will become more constrained with each passing year.'
To some Americans, the report may appear ill-timed given the fact that Russia has amassed some 120,000 troops close to the Ukrainian border, triggering fears of an invasion.
'American citizens should leave now,' Biden said in a Thursday interview with NBC News. 'It's not like we're dealing with a terrorist organization. We're dealing with one of the largest armies in the world. It's a very different situation and things could go crazy quickly.'
The president added: 'That's a world war when Americans and Russia start shooting at one another. We're in a very different world than we've ever been.'
The Army's new plan seeks to deal with the effects of climate change that it claims 'endangers national and economic security' by making all military installations self-sufficient in terms of energy and water needs.
It also calls for a transformation to sources of clean energy, including development of electric combat vehicles by 2050. It also calls on bases to switch to an all-electric fleet of non-combat vehicles by 2035.
Wormuth said the Army is on-track to achieve its goals by the target dates.
'As the Army invests in modernization, readiness, and operations, we can create the land forces that our nation needs today while securing a sustainable, cleaner tomorrow,' she wrote in the report.
'As the Army optimizes the use of fuel, water, electricity, and other resources, we increase our resilience while saving taxpayer dollars and reducing our impact on the planet.'
'The Army will mitigate and adapt to climate change, and in doing so gain a strategic advantage, especially as we continue to outpace our near-peer competitors.'
The plan, released ahead of Biden's notice to withdraw from Russia, argues armed conflict will continue to grow globally as world temperatures continue to rise, increasing competition for resources.
It also calls for a transformation to sources of clean energy, including development of electric combat vehicles by 2050. It also calls on bases to switch to an all-electric fleet of non-combat vehicles by 2035
The report - citing Middle Eastern nations like Syria where drought has played a role in civil war - claims the impacts of climate change will 'compound social instability, reduce access to basic necessities, undermine fragile governments and economies, damage vital infrastructure and lower agricultural production'.
'Climate change poses unique challenges to the Army at all levels. Bold actions now will ensure the Army is ready to support our nation in competition, crisis, and conflict far into the future,' the report states.
'By implementing this strategy, the Army will be a resilient and sustainable land force able to operate in all domains with effective mitigation and adaptation measures against the key effects of climate change, consistent with Army modernization efforts.'
Experts allege the impacts of climate change will 'disrupt Army activities, displace individuals and communities, and increase the frequency of crisis deployments' for the 'foreseeable future'.
The military organization claims it must be prepared to energy and water scarcity, damage to installations and infrastructure, disruptions to supply chain operations and imperiled soldier healthy from exposure to airborne irritants like smoke and dust, disease vectors, and temperature extremes.
Experts also warn that the land on which the Army trains and operates may be altered, limited or constrained.
'The Army must act decisively and urgently to address the risks associated with all these effects,' the plan urges.
The climate change plan is just the latest of the U.S. military's push towards progressiveness.
Last week, the Army announced it will 'immediately begin separating soldiers from the service' who refuse to comply with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Those who refuse to be vaccinated or don't have an approved or pending request for exemption will be discharged.
'Army readiness depends on soldiers who are prepared to train, deploy, fight and win our nation's wars,' Wormuth told NPR. 'Unvaccinated soldiers present risk to the force and jeopardize readiness.'
Soldiers who are discharged over vaccination refusal 'will not be eligible for involuntary separation pay'. They may also have to return any unearned special or incentive pay.
The Army said in January that 96 percent. of active troops have been completely vaccinated. 3,350 soldiers had refused to get the vaccine and nearly 5,900 had received temporary exemptions.
In December, the Air Force announced it was authorizing the use of gender-neutral and gender-specific pronouns in email signature boxes.
The Air Force made it clear that allowing for emails to end with he/him, she/her and they/them would be allowed in a memo on December 9.
'This guidance provides approval for the use of pronouns in electronic signature blocks and expands on written communication by providing official templates posted on e-publishing website available for download,' the Air Force correspondence states.
'The use of pronouns (he/him, she/her, or they/them) in an email signature block is authorized but not required,' the memo added.
The Air Force memo came on the heels of the Army releasing a recruitment ad that features an animated lesbian wedding and an LGBTQ pride parade.
Released on May 4, the two-minute recruitment video, centers on Corporal Emma Malonelord and her upbringing as she is raised by two moms. Malonelord is an actual Army corporal; her story is illustrated in the cartoon.
The animated recruitment video chronicles Malonelord's life from her childhood up until she joins the Army as a Patriot Missile operator.
Her animated counterpart watches her two mothers get married after one recovers from a serious car accident that left her paralyzed
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10502971/Army-unveils-climate-change-plan-troops-receive-orders-leave-Ukraine-amid-tensions-Russia.html
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Trendy woodburning stoves do NOT pollute the atmosphere as much as they were previously feared to – but are still a growing problem for clear air
Woodburning stoves produce less emissions that previously thought but still contribute to particle pollution, revised government data has found.
New data from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has cut the estimated proportion of small particle pollution that comes from wood burners from 38 per cent to 17 per cent.
The revised data also shows that manufacturing and construction now represent the largest single contributor to tiny particle pollution, called PM2.5, The Telegraph reports.
However the new report, which comes after a survey of 50,000 homes provided updated information on the use of wood stoves, said the burners are still a growing problem for clear air.
Particulates are the group of pollutants that are so tiny they can 'enter the bloodstream, lodging in the heart, brain and other organs', and causing serious impacts to health, according to Defra.
The report also found that particulate air pollution had declined between 1970 and the late 2000s, largely due to Britain turning its back on burning coal as a source of power.
But since then, this has 'been partially offset by increases in emissions from residential burning' and 'the increasing popularity of solid fuel appliances in the home such as wood-burning stoves,' according to the report.
Previous data showed that last year domestic wood-burning alone was responsible for 38 per cent of all PM2.5 emissions.
However this has now been reduced to 17 per cent with figures suggesting households are now burning less wood that previously thought.
Simon Birkett, founder and director of the campaign group Clean Air, said the new figures were still an 'enormous percentage' and woodburning stoves were still a 'serious problem'.
He told The Telegraph: 'It is still an enormous percentage of the most powerful pollution. Whether it is 17 per cent or 38 per cent, it's still an extremely serious problem.
'In policy terms, the key thing is that the number has gone up 35 per cent in the past 10 years, and is still growing at 3 per cent a year, so wood-burning stoves are clearly a problem.'
Figures last year showed the most deadly form of air pollution rose by three per cent thanks to an increase in the use of trendy woodburning stoves.
'Emissions of particulate matter arising from the domestic combustion of wood as a fuel increased by 35 per cent between 2010 and 2020, and accounted for 17 per cent of primary emissions of PM2.5 and 10 per cent of PM10 in 2020,' the report said.
'There is an increasing trend in emissions from this source; annual emissions from domestic wood burning have increased by an average of 3 per cent each year since 2003.'
This makes wood burning a bigger contributor to particulate pollution than cars and lorries, which contributed 12 per cent of PM10 and 13 per cent of PM2.5 in 2020.
Wood burners are a danger to children and elderly people and should be sold with a health warning, a study finds.
Researchers from the University of Sheffield placed pollution detectors in 19 homes for a month and collected data every few minutes.
Wood burners were lit for four hours at a time and, while operating, the levels of harmful particles was three times greater than when they were unlit.
These particles have been linked to a number of health issues and can cause damage to the lungs - particularly in young and old people.
The burners were all 'smoke exempt', meaning they meet government standards due to be compulsory by 2022.
Scientists warned that the trend for burning wood at home was threatening to undo improvements in air quality.
Professor Alastair Lewis, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of York said: 'Burning wood for home heating, particularly in cities, undoes many of the recent improvements seen in PM2.5 - hard won gains that have been achieved from our collective investments in cleaner cars, buses and lorries.'
Professor William Collins, professor of climate processes, University of Reading, said the air pollution caused by burning wood meant it could not be classed as 'environmentally friendly'.
He said: 'Domestic wood burning is now the single largest contributor to fine particle pollution in the UK.
'These particles can increase the risk of cancer and heart disease.
'Strong pollution controls have been very successful in cleaning up particles from vehicle exhausts.
'Cutting down on pollution from wood burning would therefore make significant inroads into reducing the particles in the air we breathe.'
The report said that 2020 saw air pollution from NOX - oxides of nitrogen particularly nitrogen dioxide - fall sharply.
'A large reduction in road traffic activity in 2020 following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to a substantial reduction in average roadside NO2 concentrations in 2020 compared to previous years,' it added.
In May last year, new legislation came into force that restricted the sale of the most polluting fuels used in domestic burning.
Meanwhile, in January 2022, rules came into place that meant all new stoves placed on the market in the UK had to be Ecodesign compliant.
'Ecodesign stoves, compared to non-Ecodesign stoves, produce lower emissions and are more efficient,' a Defra spokesperson explained.
'We recognise that some households are reliant on solid fuels for heating, hot water and cooking.
'The measures we have introduced will protect health by phasing out the sale of the most polluting fuels and by encouraging a transition to less polluting fuels.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10515799/Trendy-woodburning-stoves-drive-levels-dangerous-air-pollutants-3-year-UK.html
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U.S. corn-based ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline, study finds
Corn-based ethanol, which for years has been mixed in huge quantities into gasoline sold at U.S. pumps, is likely a much bigger contributor to global warming than straight gasoline, according to a study published Monday.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, contradicts previous research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showing ethanol and other biofuels to be relatively green.
President Joe Biden's administration is reviewing policies on biofuels as part of a broader effort to decarbonize the U.S. economy by 2050 to fight climate change.
“Corn ethanol is not a climate-friendly fuel,” said Dr. Tyler Lark, assistant scientist at University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment and lead author of the study.
The research, which was funded in part by the National Wildlife Federation and U.S. Department of Energy, found that ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion.
Geoff Cooper, president and CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, the ethanol trade lobby, called the study "completely fictional and erroneous," arguing the authors used "worst-case assumptions [and] cherry-picked data."
Under the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), a law enacted in 2005, the nation's oil refiners are required to mix some 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol into the nation's gasoline annually. The policy was intended to reduce emissions, support farmers, and cut U.S. dependence on energy imports.
As a result of the mandate, corn cultivation grew 8.7% and expanded into 6.9 million additional acres of land between 2008 and 2016, the study found. That led to widespread changes in land use, including the tilling of cropland that would otherwise have been retired or enrolled in conservation programs and the planting of existing cropland with more corn, the study found.
Tilling fields releases carbon stored in soil, while other farming activities, like applying nitrogen fertilizers, also produce emissions.
A 2019 study from the USDA, which has been broadly cited by the biofuel industry, found that ethanol’s carbon intensity was 39% lower than gasoline, in part because of carbon sequestration associated with planting new cropland.
But that research underestimated the emissions impact of land conversion, Lark said.
USDA did not respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which administers the nation's biofuel policy, is considering changes to the program. Under the RFS, Congress set blending requirements through 2022, but not beyond, giving the EPA authority to impose reforms. EPA plans to propose 2023 requirements in May.
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/us-corn-based-ethanol-worse-climate-than-gasoline-study-finds-2022-02-14/
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Australia: Super battery to boost State supply once coal-fired power station closes
What rubbish! You just have to have an extended period of high demand and the battery will go flat. What do you do then?
NSW Treasurer and Energy Minister Matt Kean says NSW’s energy supply will be secured through a super battery to be installed by the private sector as Australia’s largest coal-burning power station prepares to close early.
Mr Kean made the announcement on the back of Origin Energy’s revealing that it intended to bring forward the closure of its Eraring power station in Lake Macquarie. Eraring supplies 20 per cent of the state’s energy.
The Treasurer said he was disappointed about Origin’s announcement but the government had been doing preparatory work after the company flagged several months ago its intentions to close the station.
Eraring was originally intended to close in 2032.
The 700 megawatt super battery will be operational by 2025 to release grid capacity to ensure Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong consumers can access more energy from existing electricity generation, Mr Kean said.
Mr Kean said the battery would be the “biggest in the southern hemisphere and would act as a shock absorber for incidents such as lightning strikes and bushfires.
“NSW has the strongest reliability standard in the country – the Energy Security Target – which aims to have sufficient firm capacity to keep the lights on even if the state’s two largest generating units are offline during a one-in-10 year peak demand event,” Mr Kean said.
The government will also accelerate its NSW electricity infrastructure road map to keep energy prices affordable.
“The best way to put downward pressure on electricity prices is to increase supply and the road map provides us the tools to do just that,” he said.
Under its road map, the NSW government will drive the transition to renewable energy by attracting $32 billion of private investment in infrastructure.
As part of that plan, the government will support the private sector to build critical energy infrastructure by 2030 as NSW faces the end of the coal-fired power generation.
Mr Kean said the government would release a significant support package on Friday for workers affected by the closure of Eraring.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/super-battery-to-boost-nsw-supply-once-coal-fired-power-station-closes-20220217-p59x9w.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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16 February, 2022
Climate grant illustrates growth in philanthropy-funded news
Morano comments: The media’s coverage of climate change has sunk to a new journalistic low. The Associated Press declared on February 15, 2022, that it is no longer “wary” of accepting millions of dollars in outside group money to expand the news company’s climate change coverage. The mainstream media, led by the Associated Press, is now publicly admitting they are just phoning in their coverage on ‘climate change.’ Led by the Rockefeller Foundation and others, the AP will be parroting what the ideological activist groups’ funding pays for, while actual news will be tossed aside.
The Associated Press said Tuesday that it is assigning more than two dozen journalists across the world to cover climate issues, in the news organization’s largest single expansion paid for through philanthropic grants.
The announcement illustrates how philanthropy has swiftly become an important new funding source for journalism — at the AP and elsewhere — at a time when the industry’s financial outlook has been otherwise bleak.
The AP’s new team, with journalists based in Africa, Brazil, India and the United States, will focus on climate change’s impact on agriculture, migration, urban planning, the economy, culture and other areas. Data, text and visual journalists are included, along with the capacity to collaborate with other newsrooms, said Julie Pace, senior vice president and executive editor.
“This far-reaching initiative will transform how we cover the climate story,” Pace said.
The grant is for more than $8 million over three years, and about 20 of the climate journalists will be new hires. The AP has appointed Peter Prengaman as its climate and environment news director to lead the team.
https://apnews.com/article/science-business-arts-and-entertainment-journalism-united-states-087d1d5dd7189c529fe5d7a21a1ffb5f
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US judge strikes down Biden climate damage cost estimate
Neither the WaPo nor NYTimes have reported yesterday's federal court decision dealing a major blow to the Biden climate agenda. "Social cost of carbon" shot down in flames
A federal judge on Friday blocked the Biden administration’s attempt to put greater emphasis on potential damage from greenhouse gas emissions when creating rules for polluting industries.
U.S. District Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana sided with Republican attorneys general from energy producing states who said the administration’s action to raise the cost estimate of carbon emissions threatened to drive up energy costs while decreasing state revenues from energy production.
The judge issued an injunction that bars the Biden administration from using the higher cost estimate, which puts a dollar value on damages caused by every additional ton of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere.
President Joe Biden on his first day in office restored the climate cost estimate to about $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions after the Trump administration had reduced the figure to about $7 or less per ton. Former President Donald Trump’s estimate included only damages felt in the U.S. versus the global damages captured in higher estimates that were previously used under the Obama administration.
The estimate would be used to shape future rules for oil and gas drilling, automobiles, and other industries. Using a higher cost estimate would help justify reductions in planet-warming emissions, by making the benefits more likely to outweigh the expenses of complying with new rules.
Known as the social cost of carbon, the damage figure uses economic models to capture impacts from rising sea levels, recurring droughts and other consequences of climate change. The $51 estimate was first established in 2016 and used to justify major rules such as the Clean Power Plan — former President Barack Obama’s signature effort to address climate change by tightening emissions standards from coal-fired power plants — and separate rules imposing tougher vehicle emission standards.
The Supreme Court blocked the Clean Power Plan before it ever took effect, and a more lenient rule imposed by the Trump administration was later thrown out by a federal appeals court.
The carbon cost estimate had not yet been used very much under Biden, but is being considered in a pending environmental review of oil and gas lease sales in western states.
In Friday’s ruling, Cain wrote that using the climate damage figure in oil and gas lease reviews would “artificially increase the cost estimates of lease sales” and cause direct harm to energy producing states.
Economist Michael Greenstone, who helped establish the social cost of carbon while working in the Obama administration, said if the ruling stands, it would signal the U.S. is again unwilling to confront climate change.
“The social cost of carbon guides the stringency of climate policy,” said the University of Chicago professor. “Setting it to near-zero Trump administration levels effectively removes all the teeth from climate regulations.”
Republican attorneys general led by Louisiana’s Jeff Landry said the Biden administration’s revival of the higher estimate was illegal and exceeded its authority by basing the figure on global considerations. The other states whose officials sued are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Landry’s office issued a statement calling Cain’s ruling “a major win for nearly every aspect of Louisiana’s economy and culture.”
“Biden’s executive order was an attempt by the government to take over and tax the people based on winners and losers chosen by the government,” the statement said.
The White House referred questions to the Justice Department, which declined to comment.
Federal officials began developing climate damage cost estimates more than a decade ago after environmentalists successfully sued the government for not taking greenhouse gas emissions into account when setting vehicle mileage standards, said Max Sarinsky, a professor at the New York University School of Law.
Not fully accounting for carbon damages would skew any cost-benefit analysis of a proposed rule in favor of industry, he said, adding that the social cost of carbon had been “instrumental” in allowing agencies to accurately judge how their rules affect the climate.
“Without a proper valuation of climate impact, it would complicate agencies’ good faith efforts to make reasoned conclusions,” Sarinsky said.
A federal judge in Missouri last year had sided with the administration in a similar challenge from another group of Republican states. In that case, the judge said the Republicans lacked standing to bring their lawsuit because they had yet to suffer any harm under Biden’s order.
Friday’s ruling by Cain, a Trump appointee, follows a ruling by another Louisiana judge last summer that struck down a separate Biden attempt to address greenhouse gas emissions by suspending new oil and gas leases on federal lands and water. The judge in that case, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, is also a Trump appointee.
In a sign of the shifting politics on the issue, a federal judge in Washington rejected a lease sale in the Gulf of Mexico conducted largely in response to Doughty’s ruling.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras, an Obama appointee, threw out the lease sale, saying the administration did not adequately take into account its effect on greenhouse gas emissions.
https://apnews.com/article/climate-joe-biden-business-trending-news-louisiana-8d06087eb01ebdcf8f60be06a99c05d0
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Climate Tyrants' New Tactics
Chief Justice John Marshall’s observation, “[t]hat the power to tax involves the power to destroy,” has become part of American political lore. Marshall understood that the state’s revenue-extracting power can be weaponized—even against those who have committed no crime. We are now seeing a corollary to that notion in finance, with fossil fuel companies as the target. It turns out the government may not need to tax your company into oblivion if it can isolate you from all sources of commercial financing.
It has become an article of faith among climate activists that it is not enough for ethical investors to voluntarily divest themselves from hydrocarbon holdings. Governments and central banks must intervene in capital markets to eventually drive such companies out of business. This strategy is not new—previous generations of activists sought to restrict capital to firms that produce military hardware, nuclear power, cigarettes, firearms, and other politically disfavored products. But never before has government policy so forcefully been part of the plan.
In that spirit, the Senate Banking Committee held a hearing last year, titled “Protecting the Financial System from Risks Associated with Climate Change,” where members of the committee and witnesses were asked what the Federal Reserve was doing to save our planet from hydrocarbon-fueled climate disaster. One witness invited by the committee’s minority, however, had a different view. Economist John Cochrane of the Hoover Institution pushed back on the hearing’s premise that the federal government needs to be “protecting the financial system” from climate risks, suggesting that what climate policy advocates actually had in mind was to “steer funds to fashionable but unprofitable investments and away from unfashionable ones” via “regulatory subterfuge rather than above-board legislation or transparent environmental agency rule-making.”
Many policies favored by climate activists are out of line with prudent policymaking. Worse, they may arrogate entirely new powers to the agencies involved. In his congressional testimony, Cochrane pointed out that the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System—which the Federal Reserve recently joined—has a stated goal to “mobilize mainstream finance to support the transition toward a sustainable economy.” But that is not how finance regulation works. Agencies like the Fed don’t get to pick the policy goals that their leadership happens to like, pressuring private parties to immanentize those outcomes. The Fed has a specific statutory mandate regarding unemployment and inflation—it does not have plenary authority over the entire U.S. economy.
Fortunately, more people are recognizing that the Fed is about to get dangerously out of its depth on climate policy. For instance, in November, Joshua Kleinfeld of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and Christina Parajon Skinner of Wharton wrote in National Review of the effort to transform the Federal Reserve into a climate regulator: “It is democratically illegitimate for the Fed to engage in freelance activism. The Fed has no legal right to do so.” In a 2021 Vanderbilt Law Review article, Skinner pointed out that the allegedly pressing nature of a societal problem doesn’t magically expand the legal powers of a given government entity. She explained, “despite the substantive importance of climate change, the U.S. Federal Reserve presently has relatively limited legal authority to address that problem head-on,” concluding that “many aspects of climate change sit outside the Fed’s legal remit today.”
It would be a mistake in any case for the Federal Reserve Act to bestow on the Fed the expansive powers some think it needs to address climate change. The American Enterprise Institute’s Ben Zycher has discussed this in detail, emphasizing that the expertise one would need to do this prudently is entirely lacking at the Federal Reserve—and other agencies. Moreover, this problem could not be solved by convening a conference of professionals with doctorates in atmospheric physics. The uncertainties inherent in multi-decade climatological forecasts are not amenable to the supposed financial risk mitigation strategies that proponents want the Fed to employ.
Policymakers would be called on to make assumptions, not just about greenhouse gas levels or changes in the global energy mix, but also about detailed—and contested—scientific issues like the dynamics of cloud formation and regional climate oscillations. How will a given content of aerosols in the upper atmosphere combine with a La Niña event 20 years from now, to influence the value of corporate bonds sold to finance energy infrastructure five years ago? Will warmer winters and melting permafrost in Siberia threaten Citibank’s balance sheet? Will the greening effect of more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere benefit developing nations by helping increase food production? No one knows for sure, but banks are already being pressured to cancel loans based on the assumptions of a handful of non-expert regulators.
Just because climate change is the hottest topic in progressive policy circles today doesn’t mean that other issues won’t command similar attention in the future, as anti-nuclear and anti-firearms campaigns have in the past.
Advocates of climate finance regulation might retort that they don’t need to be sure about things like the average air temperature on Earth in 2100. We already face more immediate risks that will affect the economy and banks’ solvency. Therefore, regulatory institutions like the Federal Reserve should attempt to steer capital flows away from carbon-intensive investments to deal with those immediate risks. That’s true—but only because climate activists themselves have intentionally created and amplified those risks.
When the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued its first guidance on how public companies should disclose potential climate-related risks in 2010, it identified four sets of circumstances under which firms might be expected to have a disclosure requirement. They were 1) the impact of legislation and regulation, 2) the impact of treaties, 3) the “indirect consequences of regulation or business trends,” and 4) the physical impacts of climate change. In other words, any actual changes to weather patterns, sea levels, or natural disasters were an afterthought to the real financial threat to shareholders: government policy aimed at intentionally sabotaging hydrocarbon energy investments.
Thus, climate activists have managed to work both ends of the field. They publicly attack companies for being involved with oil and gas production, lobby for punitive policies to disadvantage those companies, and then turn around and label those efforts as a “climate risk” that corporations must disclose—and be further targeted by government policy. None of this has anything to do with climate change itself. No stakeholders are being saved from hurricanes or floods by any of this activity. It is a purely political attack on a legal industry that produces the vast majority of the energy that powers the United States and the world. Yet the proponents of this strategy claim that they are “protecting shareholder value” and reducing financial risks to investors. As my Competitive Enterprise Institute colleague Marlo Lewis recently wrote, the real point of all of this is not to identify banks’ climate risks but to intensify fossil fuel companies’ legal and political risks. It’s a self-fulfilling shell game.
This all leads observers to wonder which other industries will see similar attacks in the future. Just because climate change is the hottest topic in progressive policy circles today doesn’t mean that other issues won’t command similar attention in the future, as anti-nuclear and anti-firearms campaigns have in the past.
Unfortunately, we need not even make the case for a slippery slope; federal officials have already done exactly the same thing to other industries. In the mid-2010s, the Obama administration undertook a coordinated enforcement effort called “Operation Choke Point” to delegitimize and de-bank legal businesses that the administration had deemed politically incorrect, choking off their access to capital and financial services. Under the guise of protecting banks from the reputational risk of being associated with unsavory clients, federal officials warned banks that they should reconsider doing business with companies that offered everything from dating services and collectible coins to firearms and payday loans. Not surprisingly, many firms in such a heavily regulated industry took the hint and dropped those suddenly-controversial clients.
When the details of Operation Choke Point became widely known, it met widespread public blowback and was eventually discontinued. But the fact that senior officials within the Department of Justice, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) all thought this was a reasonable approach to enforcement is alarming. It also raises the question: Why did they go about it in such a non-transparent way? If the businesses in question were so problematic, why not simply pass new laws that disciplined them for their alleged transgressions?
The answer, of course, is that any such public effort would have been unpopular and very unlikely to be approved by Congress. Most Americans don’t think that the small businesses targeted by Operation Choke Point should be exiled from polite society–but the progressive-left bureaucrats in the Obama administration did. Moreover, if Congress had decided to criminalize certain previously legal financial transactions, payday lenders and gun stores would have been entitled to due process in an Article III court. But that is not what the Choke Point architects wanted. They preferred a system of vague and unaccountable “regulatory dark matter,” whereby government lawyers threaten private parties with enforcement actions via guidance documents, letters, and blog posts. It is easier to pressure a regulated firm to cut off another business from services than it is to prove in a court of law that the business in question has actually done anything wrong. The effort to expel oil and gas producers from the financial system is following a similar playbook.
Finally, we must consider the long-term political impact of financial agencies like the Fed, SEC, FDIC, and OCC expanding their portfolios to include topics like climate change and risks like those targeted by Operation Choke Point. As University of Alabama law professor Julia Hill wrote in the Georgia Law Review in 2020, “because reputation risk is largely subjective, regulators can use it to further political agendas apart from bank safety and soundness.” That politicization, she goes on, “undermines faith in the regulatory system and correspondingly erodes trust in banks.” Brian Knight of the Mercatus Center has warned about turning financial agencies into “universal regulators,” noting that it is “dangerous for our system of government to have administrative agencies, rather than our elected representatives in Congress, setting policies to address important social problems.”
Leadership at these agencies can step back from the brink and confine their enforcement to the powers actually granted by Congress, but if they do not, a future Congress will need to nudge them back into their corners.
Furthermore, financial regulators’ freelance initiatives on social and environmental policy might not survive a federal court challenge. Consider a similar recent case of agency overreach. Last July, the Supreme Court struck down the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction moratorium, with the majority writing, “It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts,” and adding that, “If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must specifically authorize it.” Would-be climate finance czars might hear similar admonishments soon.
https://lawliberty.org/dethrone-the-climate-tyrants/
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Renewables revolution is revolting
For decades consumers have been promised renewable energy that will be greener, cheaper and more reliable than the power delivered by the derided fossil-fuel generators. Instead, after billions if not trillions of dollars investment in the likes of wind farms and solar panels, consumers worldwide find they must pay much higher energy bills in return for a service that is far less reliable – all for a reduction in emissions that can have no appreciable effect on climate.
A major case in point is the vast increase in the number of times the Australian National Energy Market Operator (AEMO) is being forced to intervene in generator operations, to ensure stability of the east coast grid. In a submission to the Australian Energy Regulator on a focus paper on Wholesale Market Performance Monitoring late last year, the Australian Energy Council (AEC) notes that before 2017 the AEMO rarely issued what are known as intervention orders.
The AEC, which represents the biggest operators in the energy market, says that now these orders are almost commonplace and have become seemingly the default way of managing the market. These orders may involve directing a gas generator to remain in the market, or a diesel generator to continue operating because the AEMO has realised that there is not enough reserve capacity. The safety net if something goes wrong has become too thin, and more firm generation has to be made available.
Although the AEC does not say so, the cause of this instability is the shift away from reliable coal-fired generations towards weather-dependent renewable energy, particularly in the wind farm capital state of South Australia which is the subject of many of the notices, not to mention a number of wholesale price spikes in excess of $5,000 a megawatt hour. Instead, understandably, the AEC’s focus is on the cost of all these interventions, and that no one seems to be ensuring that the underlying problem is fixed through commercial arrangements – that is by power providers being paid to make additional firm power generation available when required.
As matters stand, Australian consumers may be in a bad way when it comes to paying for energy, but at least their lot has improved in recent years. A graph in the annual retail markets report produced by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for 2020-21 shows that power prices spiked in 2018 at about 80 per cent plus above 2005 prices in real terms. At last count they were about 60 per cent or so above 2005 prices, which is better but still far above the 20 per cent increase in real incomes over the same period, with much of the recent reduction being due to a surge in investment in networks working its way through the system.
The increasing level of intermittent renewables on the system – an AEMO interactive site shows that about three per cent of power came from solar in the past 12 months and ten per cent from wind – has certainly not reduced consumer bills, despite the blather from activists. But they also have not added much to costs directly. The main effect of renewables in Australia has been to help drive the old, efficient, reliable brown coal plants out of business. The closure of so much reliable capacity has driven up wholesale power prices.
However, the Australian experience with power prices remains rosy compared with that of European consumers, particular when much colder winter temperatures mean that consumers have to pay higher energy bills or freeze in their own homes.
In the UK, a price cap on power bills has shielded consumers from the worst of a spike in wholesale prices, although that cap has been still set high enough for them to complain bitterly. Another major effect of the cap has been to push a lot of smaller power suppliers out of business, as they are unable to pass on price increases to consumers. The price cap is expected to be increased by perhaps 50 per cent in the northern spring.
This European-wide spike in wholesale electricity prices increasing consumer distress is, in turn, the result of Russia putting Europe low on the list of customers for its gas – and the gas that does make it through the connecting pipelines will vanish if Russia invades the Ukraine. However, European countries have also gone out of their way to block development of other sources of gas such as through fracking, and even to close still viable nuclear and coal power plants all due to often marginal if not imaginary green concerns.
The major LNG producers, Australia, Qatar and the US, are potential sources of gas, but LNG sold overseas in the fast-expanding market for the fuel are typically purchased under long-term supply arrangements. As prices have been high for many months LNG production trains are operating at full capacity, with all production sold forward. There is little to spare for European consumers.
One fact noticeably absent in all of this is the immense renewable energy assets which the UK and Germany in particular have built up over years of screaming by green activists that doom is just around the corner. This is in part because solar power does not count for much in the dead of winter in Europe and wind farms have been affected by a wind drought. UK academics have noted that 2021 was an unusually still one, with UK power company SSE reporting that its renewable assets produced 32 per cent less power than expected.
Although last year was unusual, calm periods, or wind droughts as they are now called, associated with high pressure systems are a feature of European weather – a feature that has not been a factor in economic life since the days of sailing ships.
With less wind than expected and gas at a premium, both Germany and Britain have restarted coal plants – although coal remains a small part of the UK’s generating capacity – and the roller coaster ride of coal prices continues with a major upswing in price.
An assessment of electricity prices for EU countries by the union’s statistical body Eurostat for the first half of last year found that green-mad Germany had the region’s highest electricity prices, followed by Denmark which has been boasting about its use of renewables. Renewables-mad Spain is in fifth place.
All of this is a world away from the airy confidence of activists that the adoption of renewable energy adds up to a new industrial revolution of clean, cheap energy while coal is consigned to the rubbish bind of history. Instead, renewables are increasingly likely to be seen as a footnote in coal’s grand march through history.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/02/renewables-revolution-is-revolting/
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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15 February, 2022
The Great Climate Backslide: How governments are backtracking worldwide
From the U.S. to China, in Europe, India and Japan, fossil fuels are staging a comeback, clean energy stocks are taking a hammering, and the prospects for speeding the transition to renewable sources of power are looking grim.
At the conclusion of COP26 in November, summit chairman Alok Sharma praised the “heroic efforts” by nations showing they can rise above their differences and unite to tackle climate change, an outcome he said “the world had come to doubt.”
Turns out the world was right to be skeptical.
Three months on, a toxic combination of political intransigence, an energy crisis and pandemic-driven economic realities has cast doubt on the progress made in Scotland. If 2021 was marked by optimism that the biggest polluters were finally willing to set ambitious net-zero targets, 2022 already threatens to be the year of global backsliding.
From the U.S. to China, in Europe, India and Japan, fossil fuels are staging a comeback, clean energy stocks are taking a hammering, and the prospects for speeding the transition to renewable sources of power are looking grim.
That’s even as renewable energy costs have fallen rapidly and investment in clean technologies is soaring, while voters across the world demand stronger action.
“We’re going to have a multi-year stress test of political will to impose costly transition policies,” said Bob McNally, president of Washington-based consultant Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House official.
He accused governments of showing “Potemkin support” for the necessary policy steps, a sham display of action that’s being exposed by the energy crisis.
Emissions rose last year, when they needed to decline if the world is to stay on track to hit climate goals. National interest was always going to run up against the kind of painful measures scientists agree are needed to meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius relative to pre-industrial levels. But even this early in the year, the headwinds to aggressive climate action are ferocious.
Oil is on a roll as the world economy picks up from its pandemic-induced swoon, nearing $100 a barrel just two years after the price collapsed. That’s swelling the coffers — and influence — of fossil fuel giants like Saudi Arabia and Russia, while reinvigorating an industry that had been shifting its focus to clean energies. Exxon Mobil Corp. has just given a vote of confidence in the U.S. shale industry with plans to boost output by 25% this year in the Permian Basin.
And with gas prices hitting records, utilities have been turning to coal instead, despite it producing about twice the carbon, according to Kit Konolige, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence.
Even the U.K. host of COP26 risks regressing, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the ropes and some members of his Conservative Party pushing back against his green agenda.
Little wonder that U.S. climate envoy John Kerry has seemed increasingly glum, repeatedly warning that the world is falling behind. “We’re in trouble,” Kerry said during a Chamber of Commerce event last month. “We’re not on a good track.”
For many, the highlight of COP26 was the surprise agreement by Kerry’s team and their Chinese counterparts to look beyond U.S.-China rivalry and jointly raise climate efforts this decade.
That deal still stands, but both nations have since backtracked in their respective actions.
The U.S. was the world’s top LNG exporter in January, taking the No. 1 spot from Qatar for a second month running. Coal consumption has surged, while production climbed 8% in 2021 after years of declines. It’s expected to inch upward through 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration.
In Washington, President Joe Biden is struggling to get his signature “Build Back Better” bill and its core climate measures through the Senate. An initial proposal, which would have devoted some $555 billion to climate and clean energy, has collapsed amid objections from all of the chamber’s Republicans and a key Democrat, Joe Manchin of coal- and gas-rich West Virginia.
Those climate provisions — including some $355 billion in multiyear tax credits for hydrogen, electric vehicles and renewables — are essential to fulfilling the U.S. Paris Agreement commitment to slash greenhouse gas emissions 50% to 52% by 2030. Without them, that pledge is in jeopardy, an analysis by the Rhodium Group found.
Rather than the leadership role that Biden has claimed, that makes the U.S. look like a climate straggler. Enacting the key provisions is needed “to empower us diplomatically,” Kerry acknowledged in a January interview. “Credibility will be in a hard place if we don’t.”
Democratic lawmakers are still hoping to revive the legislation, though there’s little time with November’s midterm elections looming large. And right now Biden is under pressure to confront rising inflation and especially gasoline prices that could weigh on his chances of retaining control of Congress. He’s responded by appealing to OPEC+ producers to boost output, asking domestic oil companies to drill more and rallying nations to join the U.S. in a coordinated release of emergency crude stockpiles.
Japan’s new prime minister, Fumio Kishida, is feeling similar pressure. Last month, in an effort to keep a lid on prices, his government announced subsidies for oil refiners worth some 3 U.S. cents per liter of gasoline produced. This week, it said it was considering going further to mitigate the impact of rising oil prices amid reports it may triple the subsidy rate.
All of which looks like a free pass to China, the world’s biggest emitter.
In several recent high-level meetings, top Chinese officials have stressed energy security alongside carbon reduction efforts. As the People’s Daily, a Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece, said in an recent commentary: “The rice bowl of energy must be held in one’s own hand.”
While top leaders have repeatedly stressed that its record-breaking build out of solar and wind power is part of the campaign to secure China’s energy future, the push has yet to tangibly shift the nation’s energy mix. China’s share of coal and gas in power generation was still as high as 71% in 2021, the same as 2020.
After an unprecedented power crunch that struck China in the second half of last year, Beijing was forced to raise both coal output and imports to record levels. At a group study session of the Politburo last month, President Xi Jinping said that supply chain security should be guaranteed while curbing emissions, and that coal supplies should be ensured while oil and gas output need to “grow steadily.”
“Cutting emissions is not aimed at curbing productivity or at no emissions at all,” Xi said, stressing that economic development and the green transition should be mutually reinforcing. To illustrate his point, this week China offered its vast steel industry an additional five years to rein in its carbon emissions.
It’s a sentiment shared elsewhere. South Africa’s Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe told the heads of mining companies on Feb. 1 that coal will still be used for decades and that rushing to end the country’s fossil fuel dependency “will cost us dearly.”
India’s biggest coal miner, state-owned Coal India Ltd., is ramping up production as the country reduces its dependence on imports. It’s exposing the carbon-dependent model of economic growth that the West used and which India is yet to walk away from, even after Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a net-zero target of 2070 in Glasgow.
India is the second-biggest coal user after China, and last year coal accounted for 74% of power generation, followed by renewables with a 20% share, according to the latest report by the International Energy Agency.
Yet that ratio is set to shift, with ambitious plans to build out renewable capacity. Billionaires Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani helped drive investment targeting alternative energy to a record $10 billion last year, but that’s dwarfed by Ambani’s new clean-energy plan worth a total $76 billion.
“The world is entering a new energy era which is going to be highly disruptive,” Ambani said last month as he unveiled his plans, which include making his Reliance Industries Ltd. — among the world’s biggest oil refiners and plastic producers — net-zero by 2035.
The energy crunch has without doubt cast a shadow on the European Union’s debate about how to implement its Green Deal, an unprecedented economic overhaul to reach climate neutrality by 2050. Many governments are concerned that the spike in prices may undermine public support for the reforms.
“The only lasting solution to our dependence on fossil fuels and hence volatile energy prices is to complete the green transition.”
The political atmosphere is not helped by the West’s standoff with Moscow over Ukraine, a situation that raises the threat of disruption to Russian gas supplies, stoking prices still further. For now, however, flows are intact, albeit more volatile than usual.
Higher fossil fuel and emissions prices may improve the relative economics of renewables. EU leaders have in any case already thrown their weight behind the Green Deal. And with polls consistently showing climate to be among the biggest concerns for the bloc’s voters, the European Commission, the EU’s executive, is doubling down.
Speaking to reporters on Jan. 22, EU Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson said that geopolitical tensions are compounding unusually high energy prices in the short term. “But we are also at a crucial point in our long-term effort to tackle the climate crisis and ensure a just clean energy transition,” she said. “The only lasting solution to our dependence on fossil fuels and hence volatile energy prices is to complete the green transition.”
China meanwhile added a record amount of solar power last year, and is likely to break that again in 2022, driven by a nationwide push for more rooftop installations and a mammoth build-out of renewables in the northern deserts.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-11/climate-action-suffers-from-china-to-u-s-as-politics-hits-energy-crisis
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Worst-Case Climate Change Scenarios are highly implausible, argues new study
Back in the bad old days of the 2010s, folks like David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (2019) warned, "The UN says we're on track to get to about 4 degrees or 4.3 degrees of warming by the end of the century if we continue as we are." Or you may remember author Gaia Vince asserting in 2019 in The Guardian that "experts agree that global heating of 4C by 2100 is a real possibility."
Before rushing to kit out your climate prepper bunker, you might want to take a look at the new study by University of Colorado climate change policy researcher Roger Pielke that confirms what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found in August 2021, namely that the worst-case climate scenario is increasingly unlikely, and that while our future will be warmer, it will not be catastrophically so.
These dire predictions were based on calculations derived from a scenario of the future in which fossil fuel and agricultural emissions over the course of this century would boost atmospheric carbon dioxide to nearly 1,400 parts per million (ppm) by 2100. The current level of atmospheric carbon dioxide is just under 420 ppm, and that is up from the pre-industrial level of about 280 ppm.
Largely as a result of this increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, global average temperature has risen to around 1.1°C above the pre-industrial level.
Climate researchers labeled this worst-case scenario "RCP8.5," and it has been somewhat updated in the new Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC AR6) on the physical science basis of climate change and given a new moniker of SSP5-8.5.
The IPCC's AR6 report, released in August 2021, now acknowledges that "the likelihood of high emission scenarios such as RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 is considered low in light of recent developments in the energy sector."
The recent developments in the energy sector to which the AR6 report refers are that fossil fuel usage is likely to be fairly flat for the next 50 years. One of the main ways that the RCP8.5 scenario goes off the rails of plausibility is that it projects a six-fold rise in global coal consumption per capita by 2100. Since future coal consumption is likely to remain flat or decline, that means that global carbon dioxide emissions will be "approximately in line with the medium RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and SSP2-4.5 scenarios."
For some years now, University of Colorado climate change policy researcher Roger Pielke, Jr., and his colleagues have been pointing out that the development of the global economy is highly unlikely to trace the high emissions pathways that led to the worst projected outcomes. Nevertheless, climate studies based on the RCP8.5 scenario are the ones being relied upon by people making their predictions of dire climate calamity by the end of this century.
Pielke and his colleagues have published a new study in the journal Environmental Research Letters that argues that these intermediate emissions scenarios are much more plausible than the high end scenarios that engendered fears of climate catastrophe.
"These scenarios project between 2 and 3 degrees C of warming by 2100, with a median of 2.2 degrees C," they conclude. They do, however, acknowledge that "these scenarios also indicate that the world is still off track from limiting 21st-century warming to 1.5 or below 2 degrees C."
These new calculations are based on the future energy use and energy policy projections found in the International Energy Agency's latest World Energy Outlook report. That report concludes that, instead of rising six-fold, global coal consumption will peak during this decade. On the other hand, the U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that world coal consumption will continue to rise slightly through 2050, but that's still far from the sixfold increase entailed in the RCP8.5 scenario.
To assess plausibility of most of the IPCC scenarios, Pielke and his colleagues ask which of the scenarios have projected carbon dioxide emissions growth errors and divergences of less than 0.1 or 0.3 percent per year over the observed growth rates between 2005 and 2020. That is, which scenarios tracked what actually happened with carbon dioxide emissions over the last fifteen years? Next they further parse how well the scenarios similarly track actual emissions beginning in 2005 through the IEA's projections of future emissions to 2050.
The chart above displays the plausibility of the various IPCC emissions scenarios by tracking how well they match likely cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide over the course of this century. The scenarios that closely track actual and projected IEA emissions are marked with blue dots (0.1 percent) and triangles (0.3 percent).
"All of the plausible scenarios," explains Pielke in his Substack newsletter The Honest Broker, "envision less than 3 degrees Celsius total warming by 2100. In fact, the median projection is for 2100 warming of 2.2 degrees Celsius." He adds that that "is within spitting distance of the Paris Agreement goal of holding temperatures to a warming of 2.0 degrees Celsius."
https://reason.com/2022/02/09/worst-case-climate-change-scenarios-are-highly-implausible-argues-new-study/?mc_cid=9a023167a7&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming
The evidence does not support those who claim we are already suffering greatly from changing climate
Abstract
This article reviews recent bibliography on time series of some extreme weather events and related response indicators in order to understand whether an increase in intensity and/or frequency is detectable. The most robust global changes in climate extremes are found in yearly values of heatwaves (number of days, maximum duration and cumulated heat), while global trends in heatwave intensity are not significant. Daily precipitation intensity and extreme precipitation frequency are stationary in the main part of the weather stations. Trend analysis of the time series of tropical cyclones show a substantial temporal invariance and the same is true for tornadoes in the USA. At the same time, the impact of warming on surface wind speed remains unclear. The analysis is then extended to some global response indicators of extreme meteorological events, namely natural disasters, floods, droughts, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat). None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events. In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet. It would be nevertheless extremely important to define mitigation and adaptation strategies that take into account current trends.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjp/s13360-021-02243-9
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UK set to ‘torpedo climate action’ by approving six new North Sea oil and gas fields
Environmental groups have accused the UK of “torpedoing climate action” and “disregarding science” amid reports six new oil and gas fields are to be approved in the North Sea this year.
Rishi Sunak - who said last week he wanted to encourage more investment in new fossil fuel drilling - is reported to have pressed the business secretary to fast-track applications.
A new oil and gas field in the North Sea has already been given the green light this year - just two months after the UK held the global climate Cop26 summit. Green groups fiercely criticised the move, accusing the government of hypocrisy and taking action that “only worsens the climate crisis.
It is set to be followed by half a dozen more approvals for fossil fuel drilling this year, according to The Telegraph. The sites have reportedly already been given a preliminary licence by ministers and are expected to be approved by the Oil and Gas Authority (OGA), the UK regulator.
The Telegraph reported there were fears in the Treasury over how the move to net-zero could impact the economy, while a Whitehall source told the newspaper the business secretary was “pushing for more investment in the North Sea” during the transition for “domestic energy security” as well.
Philip Evans, oil campaigner at Greenpeace UK said: “This would represent a stunning retreat from the pro-climate posturing we saw from the government at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/oil-gas-fields-net-zero-b2010060.html
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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14 February, 2022
Emerging evidence suggests COVID-19 was worsened by air pollution
Nothing like that "emerging evidence". But they don't actually quote any. The <a href="https://cedelft.eu/publications/air-pollution-and-covid-19/">Dutch study</a> was just modelling.
I have followed the literature on air pollution and health for many years and the effects reported are always negligible
As science reveals more and more links between air pollution and the effects of COVID-19, the pressure is mounting on the European Commission to set high ambitions in the upcoming revision of the EU’s Air Quality Directive.
It is no secret that air pollution is heavily associated with a wide range of diseases. And now scientists have started new research in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: the relation between infectious diseases, such as COVID-19, and air pollution.
At an event hosted by the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA) Thursday (February 10), two scientists made it clear that there is an increasing amount of evidence that the levels of air pollution could have worsened the spread and severity of COVID-19.
A study by the Dutch consultancy CE Delft investigating the situation in the Netherlands states that “if air pollution were lower, fewer COVID-19 control measures would have been necessary” and “had policy efforts to prevent air pollution been stronger, significant social costs could have been prevented.”
But despite these initial results, more research is needed in the field.
“The relationship between air pollution and virus transmissibility is still uncertain, so we need more research (…). Nevertheless, we can say that the relationship between air pollution and virus transmission forms an additional argument for ambitious air quality policy,” said Daan Juijn, co-author of the Dutch study ‘Air pollution and COVID-19’.
He was supported by Annette Peters, a researcher at Helmholtz Munich’s Institute of Epidemiology, who has also been looking into this issue:
“There is emerging evidence that air pollution is linked to infectious diseases, something we may have overlooked before. The pandemic situation is complex and studies are needed to understand the impacts fully, so it’s still early days. However, action to reduce air pollution is needed,” she said at the event.
The Dutch study focused on the COVID-19 situation and levels of air pollution in the Netherlands, concluding that their results indicate “the social costs [both economic and non-economic such as eg well-being] of the additional COVID-19 control measures that were required due to air pollution amount to around €11 billion. This equals around 1.5% of Dutch GDP.”
In that context, Juijn pointed out that these numbers could be higher in countries with higher levels of air pollution. Both he and Peters called for more research in the area.
Air pollution in Europe still killing 300,000 a year: EEA
Premature deaths caused by fine particle air pollution have fallen 10% annually across Europe, but the invisible killer still accounts for 307,000 premature deaths a year, the European Environment Agency said Monday (15 November).
If the latest air quality guidelines from …
Higher ambitions in the updated Air Quality Directive
Lockdowns enforced to contain the spread of COVID-19 led to a temporary increase in air quality. Despite this, the European Environment Agency (EEA) said in a report in November 2021 that air pollution still accounts for 307,000 premature deaths a year in Europe alone.
The EEA’s air quality viewer shows the levels of fine particulate matter measured in cities in Europe, which reveals that the largest proportion of the most polluted cities is in the eastern and southern parts of the continent.
Following the launch of the World Health Organisation’s new Global Air Quality Guidelines in September, the European Commission has begun to look into a revision of the EU’s Air Quality Directive, which dates back to 2008, and is set to present its proposal in the third quarter of this year.
It will take a lot of effort to reach the very ambitious goals set by the WHO, Vicente Franco, policy officer at the Commission’s DG Environment, said at the event.
“Everything is on the table,” he said, adding that along with reviewing the legislative framework, they are reviewing many elements such as sanctions, the use of air quality modelling, improvements on how monitoring is done, and how member states should prepare air quality plans.
“One of the elements of feedback that we got from stakeholders, including member states, is that perhaps these aspects of monitoring, modelling and air quality plans were under-specified in the directive, and they would welcome a higher level of harmonisation of specification of how things should be done,” Franco said.
Until then, said Ugo Taddei, director of nature and health at Client Earth NGO, “we need very strong policies to put us on the right track to tackle this human health crisis caused by air pollution because the figures are quite shocking”.
“This needs a very strong answer from policymakers and civil society.”
https://www.euractiv.com/section/health-consumers/news/emerging-evidence-suggests-covid-19-was-worsened-by-air-pollution/
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Russian gas crisis stokes Europe’s appetite for ... Russian coal
Russian coal merchants are proving to be the winners as European buyers, nervous a feared Russian invasion of Ukraine could lead to disrupted gas supplies, stock up on the dirtiest fossil fuel.
Despite Europe’s ambitions to reduce carbon emissions to net zero by the middle of the century, which means weaning itself off all fossil fuels, but especially coal, the continent has been switching to coal from gas since the middle of last year.
Even before the current risk invasion and possible Western sanctions on Russia could choke off gas from Europe’s biggest gas supplier, fuel buyers responded to record high gas prices.
The European Union’s coal imports rose by 55.8% in January versus a year ago, to 10.8 million tonnes – of which Russia supplied 43.2% – analysis from shipbroker Braemar ACM, based on ship tracking data, found.
Australia provided around 19.1%.
EU coal imports also rose in December 2021 by 35.1% year-on-year to 9.3 million tonnes.
For 2021 as a whole, imports of Russian thermal coal into Europe, of which the majority is shipped to Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, rose to 31.1 million tonnes, a year-on-year increase of 16.2%, Braemar analysis showed.
European politicians say Russia has helped to cause the record gas prices by witholding supplies, a charge Russia denies.
Russia has said it is meeting contractual agreements to European customers and that prices would fall if Germany gave approval to the Gazprom-backed Nord Stream 2 pipeline because that would increase shipments of Russian gas to Europe.
Meanwhile, the high gas prices are expected to continue to lead to high coal demand.
The International Energy Agency said this week that European gas demand is expected to decline by 4.5% this year as coal is cheaper for power generation
https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/russian-gas-crisis-stokes-europes-appetite-for-russian-coal/?mc_cid=f9e06c2aa6&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Europe’s Net-Zero Carbon crackup begins ahead of schedule
Joseph C. Sternberg
At the end of last year, I predicted that 2022 would be the year politicians stepped back from the climate-policy cliff. I allowed too much time. It happened in January.
Or rather, January was the month the political class decided they wanted to step away from the cliff. Now we wait to see if they can.
The European Commission, the bureaucratic wing of the European Union in Brussels, moved on New Year’s Eve to classify natural gas and nuclear as potential green energy sources in a “taxonomy” designed to steer government spending and private investment. It has stuck by that decision despite noisy protests from environmentalists. This is a recognition that foreclosing investment in proven, reliable technologies amid a once-in-a-generation energy price crisis is creating a political nightmare.
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s net-zero fixation has become the biggest threat to his political future, a far more serious danger than any lockdown-defying birthday party. British households last week discovered their home electricity and natural-gas bills could shoot up by 54% come April as a regulatory price cap adjusts to market realities. Energy costs for commercial premises are a separate crisis, as rapidly escalating electricity and natural-gas prices squeeze small businesses and large manufacturers alike.
Real politics finally is breaking out in response. A group of lawmakers from Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party have formed a caucus to vent their skepticism of Mr. Johnson’s net-zero ambitions, while Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak professes his enthusiasm for more North Sea drilling. The left-wing Guardian newspaper trotted out climate-change scaremonger Michael Mann to brand this effort a “culture war.” Which is how we now describe any effort to repoliticize questions of economic and social trade-offs that an axis of technocrats, activists and media had tried to assume unto itself.
The political world is awakening belatedly to an observation prominent French economist Jean Pisani-Ferry offered last year. To paraphrase: Because carbon-based energy is cheap and reliable and zero-carbon alternatives remain elusive, current consumption will have to be suppressed to finance aggressive investment in developing zero-carbon technology.
This is taking two forms today. Astronomical energy prices are the mechanism by which consumption based on carbon (whether of energy or of any product whose manufacture or distribution requires carbon—which is most products) can be suppressed while diverting resources to research and development in green technologies.
Second, someone must induce financial investment to shift to green purposes, even if investors otherwise would have concluded that strategy doesn’t maximize returns. Retirees or anyone else whose consumption is based on income from investment may have to receive less income and therefore consume less in order to subsidize capital allocation to green ends.
No wonder politicians are fleeing. Witness a kerfuffle, again in the U.K., over taxing the “windfall profits” of oil-and-gas majors such as BP and Shell, which recently announced bumper earnings. The companies are accused of gouging consumers, but the actual plan as announced to their shareholders is to plow carbon profits into an expanding portfolio of green projects.
This is possible only by shifting resources away from consumers via higher prices. Whoops. Any form of consumption tax, whether by levy or by price-raising regulation, is highly regressive. Calls by Britain’s Labour Party for a windfall-profits tax to redistribute those reinvestable profits back to consumers, in contravention of the whole point of net-zero policies, mark an admission that climate mitigation is an impending political train wreck. Maybe one day the left will understand what they themselves are saying here.
Can the train be stopped? Politicians will try, and are due to get a reminder about the importance of long-term thinking. Boosting energy supply depends on persuading investors that politicians support long-term investments. Net zero comes with a deadline of 2050, but that needs to be scrapped right now for investors to be willing to finance capital-intensive projects with long enough lives to be useful.
The danger is that investors won’t be willing to do that when politicians belatedly come begging. Recent years have seen a concerted effort by climate activists and various enthusiastic enablers in the financial world to co-opt private capital in pursuit of green aims. Hence the rise of so-called ESG investing—the E standing for “environmental.” Politicians in their more foolish moments have been happy to help, as with efforts to embed such principles in financial regulation.
The political class will be sorry as this shift makes it harder for politicians to assuage angry voters. The EU’s taxonomy is meant to subvert the ESG push by encouraging investors to treat natural gas and nuclear as green. Investors intoxicated by their own virtue signaling might not be encourageable. “Investors may now need to consider going further than the taxonomy requires in order to align with net zero,” Stephanie Pfeifer of the Institutional Investors Group for Climate Change, an umbrella group for pension funds and other asset managers, said recently.
The politicians’ challenge is to wrest well-functioning energy and financial markets back from a financial, activist and media class that seems unshaken by the anticonsumption, income-redistribution miseries their agenda is inflicting. Culture war, indeed.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-net-zero-crackup-climate-change-natural-gas-nuclear-prices-boris-johnson-esg-sunak-european-commission-green-energy-11644509997?mc_cid=9a023167a7&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Australia: The great hydrogen controversy
This week has seen an amusing to and fro of ads from the federal government about its commitment to “clean hydrogen” and counter ads from iron ore billionaire Andrew Forrest, who has become a “green hydrogen” evangelist.
The brightly coloured ads, with their cartoon pictures of a truck carrying “hydrogen” (in the case of the government ad), or “green hydrogen” (in the case of those by Forrest’s Fortescue Future Industries) have been a welcome addition to newspaper advertising revenue, which is (hopefully) set to benefit even more from the approaching federal election.
The government ad declares that “a clean hydrogen industry is part of our plan to reach net zero by 2050”. Scott Morrison sees “clean hydrogen” as being an essential part of the nation’s technology-led move to zero carbon by 2050.
But Forrest strongly rejects the idea that the Prime Minister’s version of “clean hydrogen” – which includes hydrogen made from fossil fuels – is clean.
FFI’s counter ad declares: “A green hydrogen industry is our plan to reach net zero by 2030.”
Forrest argues that only green hydrogen is clean hydrogen. All the other types, as he explains in the ad, are made from fossil fuel such as coal or gas and are not clean.
Forrest argues that the greenhouse gas footprint of what he calls “blue hydrogen” – hydrogen made from fossil fuels – can actually be as much as 20 per cent larger than burning natural gas or coal for heat.
The ads confirm two things – that the nuances of climate change and energy policy will be a major issue in the election campaign, and that business will be at the forefront of change.
It was only the last election that Morrison and his team led a scare campaign about Labor’s electric vehicles plans. Last year, he took a big step forward (for his party) by outlining his own policy to facilitate the use of electric cars.
Once seen primarily as being a threat to jobs in the coalmining industry, climate change and green business has become big business, with almost every company having a commitment to become more energy efficient, to shift their own company’s reliance on coal-fired energy to more renewable energy, and making some form of commitment to net zero carbon emissions.
A few years ago, the average Australian knew little about hydrogen energy. Now the debate is not whether hydrogen energy will be part of Australia’s clean energy future, but what sort of hydrogen it will be and how we will get there.
While each major company has been on its own journey through, Forrest has become a poster boy for the big shift.
Having made his billions from exporting iron ore to China, he is now recycling a large chunk into clean energy subsidiary FFI, which was set up in 2020.
Some of Forrest’s followers, and some of his more traditional shareholders, have questioned his motives in his big shift to renewable energy.
Forrest has committed to spending 10 per cent of Fortescue Metals’ profits on FFI projects.
He argues that any projects FFI commits to will be externally funded without having recourse to the Fortescue Metals balance sheet.
Forrest is approaching his new-found fervour for green hydrogen with evangelical zeal, having spent a lot of time in 2020 and 2021 signing up new hydrogen energy deals for FFI.
Not all Fortescue Metals investors like it. Many traditional mining investors don’t, as has been pointed out by articles in this newspaper.
But then again, there is a new range of climate-conscious institutional investors – including pension funds, super funds and other funds – pushing companies to become greener.
Los Angeles-based Capital Group last month announced that it had bought a 5 per cent stake in Fortescue, becoming its third-largest shareholder for a cost of about $3bn.
In comments made in December, Forrest said FFI now had the largest single portfolio of green hydrogen, green ammonia, green iron ore, green iron and other green product developments in the world. He said the number of shareholders in Fortescue Metals had “increased exponentially” since FFI was announced. The total number of shareholders has almost tripled over the past two years – from 60,000 to 170,000.
Fortescue Metals’ share price is affected by the price of iron ore, its biggest single commodity, making it hard to pull apart its ups and downs. Its shares rose from $10.12 in January 2020 to $24.76 in January last year on the back of soaring iron ore prices.
They slumped to just over $14 in October last year on the back of slowing prices and – some critics would argue – concern about how much money was going into the FFI expansion.
Since then, as more details of FFI emerge, its price has recovered to above $21.
Fortescue Metals will release its half-yearly results next Wednesday, and we can expect to hear more about the company’s plans for FFI.
FFI chief executive Julie Shuttleworth, who has gone on a wild global ride into green hydrogen with Forrest, must be considered a serious contender as a replacement for Elizabeth Gaines, who has announced her plans to step down from the role of Fortescue Metals chief executive.
In a report this week, analysts at Goldman Sachs said Australia had the potential to become the world’s biggest exporter of hydrogen, competing with the Middle East, Chile and North America for the title. Another major report released on Thursday by ANZ also talks about Australia’s potential as a global exporter of hydrogen.
The debate over the potential of hydrogen energy, including how clean it is, is only just beginning in Australia. Either way, the debate over the potential of Australia’s hydrogen energy potential is set to heat up, with major implications for corporate Australia and its investors.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/hydrogen-debate-heats-up-with-energy-policy-set-to-be-a-key-issue-in-federal-election/news-story/efd2b9234948b068b117799ccb7e0d1f
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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13 February, 2022
France defends its ‘big nuclear adventure,’
French pragmatism triumphs over the hysteria elsewhere
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told CNBC on Friday that the country’s decision to bet big on nuclear power was driven by geopolitical concerns and the desire to achieve “total energy independence.”
His comments come shortly after French President Emmanuel Macron pledged to build at least six new nuclear reactors in the decades to come, with the option for another eight. The move controversially places atomic power at the center of France’s bid to achieve carbon neutrality by the middle of the century.
Speaking to CNBC’s Charlotte Reed on Friday, Le Maire described the move as “the most ambitious plan for France over the last decades.”
He said scientific analysis seen by the government last year had shown it was necessary to build new nuclear plants and accelerate the deployment of renewable energies to reduce carbon emissions and achieve “total energy independence.”
Policy shift
The French government’s buildup of its atomic power program marks a stark policy shift from the start of Macron’s presidency when he committed to reducing the share of nuclear power in the country’s energy mix.
Asked whether geopolitical concerns had prompted this reversal, Le Maire told CNBC: “Of course, the changes in the geopolitical landscape [have] played a key role.”
Alongside soaring energy prices, escalating tensions between Russia, Ukraine and the West in recent months have heightened concern about the future of Russian gas flows to the European Union.
Lawmakers and energy providers have scrambled to prepare contingency plans in the event of a full supply disruption of Russian gas to the EU — which receives roughly 40% of its gas via Russian pipelines, several of which run through Ukraine.
Climate concerns
Speaking on Thursday with the presidential election just two months away, Macron said the new nuclear power plants would be built and developed by state-controlled energy giant EDF and tens of billions of euros in public financing would be channeled to support the projects.
“We need to pick up the mantle of France’s big nuclear adventure again,” Macron said.
Ahead of the announcement, the French government had lobbied to successfully get the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, to label nuclear power as “green.”
The EU’s decision to designate nuclear power as a climate-friendly power source has been sharply criticized by some member states, with environmental campaigners saying the move “makes a mockery” of the EU’s desire to position itself as a sustainable finance leader.
The Green presidential candidate, Yannick Jadot, said via Twitter on Thursday that Macron’s move would condemn France to “energy and industry obsolescence,” adding that it was “irresponsible” to push ahead with the plans “without any debate and for a cost equivalent to the budget of the public hospital.”
Asked whether it was pertinent for the French government to prioritize nuclear power, Le Maire emphasized that the strategy was based on a mix between renewable energies and nuclear plants.
He added: “We are explaining to the French people: This is our strategy. If you want to work in the nuclear plants, if you want to be an engineer … you could do it [and] you should do it because there is a future for the nuclear plants in France and also everywhere in the world.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/11/france-defends-nuclear-strategy-says-it-is-influenced-by-geopolitics.html
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After ousting its green leader, Canadian Conservative Party drops support for carbon tax
Canada's Conservative Party is ending its support for a federal carbon tax.
Interim Conservative leader Candice Bergen rises during question period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Feb. 10, 2022.
Interim leader Candice Bergen told her caucus about the change at a meeting on Feb. 9, saying that the carbon tax issue will be dealt with in the upcoming leadership race, according to a report in the Toronto Star.
Conservative MP John Williamson tweeted the Star article, headlined, “Conservatives drop support for carbon pricing, bring an O’Toole foe back from exile,” without disputing its reporting, except to say, “‘Tax’ spelled incorrectly by headline writer.” His comment is a reference to the Tories’ official position under Erin O’Toole’s leadership that their carbon levy isn’t a tax, but just a price on carbon generation.
The Conservatives’ decision comes a week after O’Toole was ousted by his caucus on Feb. 2.
O’Toole had announced his own version of a carbon tax during the 2021 federal election campaign, reversing a previous pledge to never introduce a national carbon tax scheme of any sort.
On Jan. 31, Conservative MP Bob Benzen issued a statement to caucus calling for a review of O’Toole’s leadership, citing his “adoption of a de-facto carbon tax policy in April 2021” as one of the reasons.
Bergen’s decision to drop the carbon tax was welcomed by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF), which issued a statement the same day saying that it was the right thing for the party to do.
“Carbon taxes cost Canadians a lot of money but aren’t working, and that’s exactly the kind of policy the Official Opposition should be opposing,” said CTF federal director Franco Terrazzano.
“Inflation is one of the key economic issues facing Canadian families and the carbon tax is making these tough times tougher by making it more expensive to drive to work and heat our homes.”
According to the Canada Revenue Agency, the federal carbon tax is scheduled to increase to 11 cents per litre of gasoline starting on April 1.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also announced in December 2020 that he would raise the carbon tax on fuels to $170 per tonne by 2030. The tax is currently priced at $50 a tonne but will increase by $15 a tonne yearly starting in 2023 until it hits $170 per tonne in 2030, as part of Liberals’ plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 to 40-45 percent lower than in 2005.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/tories-drop-support-for-federal-carbon-tax_4270300.html?mc_cid=9a023167a7&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Gasoline prices jump in Keystone Pipeline cancellation fallout
Oil demand is at record highs in the U.S., but domestic oil producers can't or won't catch up because they have been canceled by the Biden administration, which is feeling the sting of its own anti-energy policies.
Prices at the pump hit a seven-year high of $3.41 per gallon as oil topped the $92- per-barrel level.
President Biden, who canceled the Keystone Pipeline on his first day in the White House, continues to chip away at America's energy industry.
Drilling moratoriums, threats for fossil fuel investors and desperate appeals to OPEC for help have contributed to rising energy prices, a major component of the inflation spike.
The Biden administration has tried to backtrack on that and now is calling on the U.S. shale industry to drill the leases that they have and to add rigs, but even though the rig counts are going up, the production that's coming online is barely moving the needle.
The U.S. shale industry is in need of constant investment to keep oil production going up at the same time companies have to be more fiscally responsible than they were in the past because the Biden administration's clampdown is making it almost impossible to take economic risks.
Adding insult to injury, on Thursday lawmakers called on Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to limit natural gas exports.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/gas-prices-jump-in-keystone-pipeline-cancellation-fallout?mc_cid=f9e06c2aa6&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Desperation: Britain to drain electric car batteries at times of peak demand
Electric car owners will be called on to help Britain avoid an energy crunch as suppliers prepare tariffs allowing them to draw power from parked vehicles at times of low supply or high demand.
Cars which are charging on driveways are to be plugged into a system responsible for balancing the National Grid for the first time, in an experiment aimed at easing the burden on the country's creaking energy infrastructure.
It will lay the groundwork for a national rollout of the technology if successful, paving the way for millions of electric cars to act as a giant battery so that power supply is stable at times of low wind speeds after the transition to green energy.
In the trial, which will begin at some point from April to June, car owners will agree to allow the grid to draw power from their vehicles and release it as and when required. They will be paid for energy which the grid drains off.
The scheme is being run by the National Grid and domestic supplier Octopus Energy, which has recruited 135 households. [...]
As part of its work with Octopus, the National Grid ESO’s control room has been testing how to send and receive signals from cars that are part of the vehicle-to-grid trial.
Eventually it is hoped these cars could be called upon to release charge when extra supply is needed, or in turn create demand by drawing power.
Ms Miller said that a typical electric car had an output of about seven kilowatt hours.
At peak hours, or between 4pm and 7pm, a typical household would only use around three kilowatt hours of energy, leaving about four kilowatt hours of spare capacity.
That means one million electric cars could provide 4,000 megawatt hours to the grid at peak times – roughly the same as 5,000 onshore wind turbines, Ms Miller said.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/02/10/national-grid-drain-electric-car-batteries-times-peak-demand/?mc_cid=9a023167a7&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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11 February, 2022
It’s Not Just Climate: Are We Ignoring Other Causes of Disasters?
One balmy summer evening in mid-July last year, the tiny river Kyll flowing out of the Eifel Mountains in Germany turned from its normal placid flow into a raging torrent that engulfed several riverside towns in its path. By the morning, more than 220 people had died here and along several other German and Belgian mountain rivers. It was the worst flood disaster in Western Europe in several decades.
Politicians rushed to blame climate change for the intense rains that flooded the rivers that night. The world had to be “faster in the battle against climate change,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as she toured devastated communities. Climate scientists later concluded that a warmer atmosphere had made such downpours up to nine times more likely.
But there was another factor behind the floods that few politicians or media have mentioned, then or since. Hydrologists monitoring the river flows say that the spread of farms in the once-boggy hills where the rainfall was most intense had destroyed the sponge-like ability of the land to absorb heavy rains. Field drains, roadways, and the removal of natural vegetation channeled the water into the rivers within seconds, rather than days.
That suggested a way to prevent future floods here and elsewhere that would be much faster than fixing climate change. Unpublished analysis of the Kyll by Els Otterman and colleagues at Dutch consultantcy Stroming, reviewed by Yale Environment 360, had found that blocking drains and removing dykes to restore half of the former sponges could reduce peak river flows during floods by more than a third.
Focusing only on climate can end up absolving policymakers of their failures to climate-proof their citizens.
Of course both climate change and land drainage were important in causing the floods. But while one will take decades of international action to fix, the other could be healed locally.
This is not just about what happened in Germany. There is a growing debate among environmental scientists about whether it is counterproductive to always focus on climate change as a cause of such disasters. Some say it sidelines local ways of reducing vulnerability to extreme weather and that it can end up absolving policymakers of their own failures to climate-proof their citizens.
“Stop blaming the climate for disasters,” says Friederike Otto of Imperial College London, a climatologist who is co-founder of World Weather Attribution, an international collaboration of scientists dedicated to identifying the underlying causes of weather-related disasters.
She is determined to call out climate change where it contributes to disaster but cautions that “disasters occur when hazards [such as climate change] meet vulnerability.” And vulnerability has many causes, including bad water or forest management, unplanned urbanization, and social injustices that leave the poor and marginalized at risk.
The danger too, she concluded in a paper in January with Emmanuel Raju, a disaster researcher at the University of Copenhagen, and Emily Boyd of Lund University in Sweden, is that knee-jerk attribution of disasters to climate change creates “a politically convenient crisis narrative … [that] paves a subtle exit path for those responsible for creating vulnerability.”
Jesse Ribot, of American University, and Myanna Lahsen, of Linkoping University in Sweden, agree. “While politicians may want to blame crises on climate change, members of the public may prefer to hold government accountable for inadequate investments in flood or drought prevention and precarious living conditions,” they write in a paper published in December.
“A really striking example is the current food crisis in Madagascar, which has been blamed on climate change quite prominently,” Otto told e360. Last October, the UN’s World Food Programme said more than a million people in the south of the African country were starving after successive years of drought. Its warning that the disaster “could become the first famine caused by climate change” was widely reported. Madagascar’s President Andry Rajoelina said: “My countrymen are paying the price for a climate crisis that they did not create.”
But in December, Luke Harrington of the New Zealand Climate Research Institute concluded that climate change played at most a minor role in the drought, which was a reflection of past natural variability in rainfall, as evidenced by records dating back to the late 19th century. He instead pinned the blame for the crisis on poverty and poor infrastructure, such as inadequate water supplies to irrigate crops — issues that had gone unaddressed by Rajoelina’s government.
An even more glaring example may be how climate change is blamed for the continuing dry state of Lake Chad in West Africa and its huge security and humanitarian consequences.
Half a century ago, Lake Chad covered an area the size of Massachusetts. But during the final quarter of the 20th century, its surface shrank by 95 percent, and it remains today less than half the size of Rhode Island. Deprived of water, local fishers, farmers, and herders have lost their livelihoods. Deepening poverty has contributed to a collapse of law and order, growing jihadism, and an exodus of more than 2 million people, many heading for Europe.
Nigeria’s president Muhammadu Buhari says it is clear where the blame lies. “Climate change is largely responsible for the drying up of Lake Chad,” he told an investors summit last year. The African Development Bank has called the shriveled lake “a living example of the devastation climate change is wreaking on Africa”.
But there is another explanation. While the initial decline in the lake was clearly due to long droughts in the 1970s and 1980s, which some have linked to climate change, the lake has remained stubbornly empty over the past two decades, while rainfall has recovered. Why? Hydrologists say the answer is that rivers out of Cameroon, Chad, and Buhari’s Nigeria that once supplied most of its water are being diverted by government agencies to irrigate often extremely inefficient rice farms.
A 2019 analysis headed by Wenbin Zhu, a hydrologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that water diversions for irrigation explained 73 percent of the reduction in flow into Lake Chad from the largest river, the Chari, since the 1960s — a proportion that rose to 80 percent after 2000. Variability in rainfall explained just 20 percent.
Robert Oakes of the United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security in Bonn says that “the climate-change framing has prevented the identification and implementation of appropriate measures to address the challenges.” Those measures include restoring flow to the rivers that once fed the lake.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/its-not-just-climate-are-we-ignoring-other-causes-of-disasters
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Britain needs a new dash for gas to save it from the lunacy of net zero
For an industry facing an existential crisis in order to forestall global warming, oil and gas companies are performing remarkably well. BP announced profits of £9.5 billion shortly after Shell posted what it called “momentous” record annual takings. These huge sums are a function of the restart of the world economy after the pandemic shutdowns but are pretty mind-boggling none the less. For the green lobby they indicate that more needs to be done and faster to expedite the move to non-carbon fuel sources.
For the rest of us, however, they demonstrate that the UK’s rush to achieve net zero is not being followed by the rest of the world and cannot be sustained here without a massive public backlash. The baleful consequences of this policy are finally beginning to dawn on the Government.
As we reported yesterday, final approval is to be granted for six new North Sea oil and gas fields, the first sensible decision on meeting the country’s energy needs taken for at least three decades.
It also gives the lie to the claim that investment in new fields was halted for economic considerations when the principal objections were environmental. For the same reason, the Government should lift the ban on fracking.
The prospect of new licences in the North Sea marks a significant political push-back against net zero, with Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, and Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, seemingly determined to make the policy more rational and voter-friendly. Some of the more unrealistic targets for phasing out petrol cars or banning gas boilers need to be revisited as well.
In any case, the UK is able to claim a fall in CO2 emissions in part because it outsources them elsewhere. Refusing to exploit our own reserves of gas while importing it from countries that have no renewable energy to speak of is mendacious. Continuing to import goods from countries that still burn vast amounts of coal surely does not help the planet in any way.
In these circumstances, it is idiotic to withhold approval to exploit Britain’s own oil and gas supplies in the North Sea, even if it does turn out to be the last hurrah for what was once seen as the nation’s economic salvation.
History repeats itself. The arrival of natural gas in the 1960s required the conversion of around 14 million households previously reliant on so-called town gas produced by burning coal. The newcomer was cleaner, cheaper and less noxious. A similar upheaval is envisaged to remove gas boilers and install energy efficient heat pumps. Some 85 per cent of the UK’s 29 million homes are heated by gas-fired boilers and the Government wants about one million to be replaced every year by 2030 compared to just 60,000 last year.
How can this be brought about? The answer is that it can’t, not least because the engineers are not available and the costs to homeowners already hit by soaring energy bills are too high. It is estimated that 60,000 qualified plumbers will be needed to meet 2028 installation targets – yet just 1,800 have the correct training today. The new pumps will also be expensive, about £8,000-£10,000 for a typical three-bed home.
Even if costs are brought down, this is a sizeable outlay. In another market intervention, the Government is now offering incentives for people to switch and seeking to force boiler-makers to sell a certain proportion of heat pumps to “help create the conditions for rapid innovation”.
Amid all this lunacy comes evidence that the proposed move to greater electrification risks power cuts without significant changes in behaviour (leave aside what might happen if supplies are affected by a war in eastern Europe or the Gulf or both). From this week, households are to be paid to ration their power usage at peak times to relieve pressure on the National Grid as part of a trial to encourage people to charge cars and use appliances at different times during the day and night. That is why we were all being urged to switch to smart meters and move to special tariffs, though these have now been scuppered by the rise in prices.
All in all, our energy policy has been an unmitigated mess for decades, with incessant governmental interference in the market and a failure to invest in nuclear power and fracking leaving us dangerously exposed to price hikes and supply crunches. The driving force behind most of our problems is the 2050 net zero target now underpinned by statute law and international treaty commitments.
Every political party is signed up to this, as are most countries in the world, even though few expect it to happen. Here, the politics are potentially toxic as people see bills rise, costs increase, supplies diminish and sanctions applied while the biggest CO2 producers carry on burning oil and coal. Labour may be just as culpable for this but the governing party always gets the blame.
Since natural gas accounts for more than half our primary energy consumption – and yet we import more than half of what we require – reviving North Sea investment is a no-brainer. Even the EU now recognises gas as a sustainable energy source to be used in the transition to a low carbon future.
It will take time to get new rigs running, which is not going to help alleviate the Government’s immediate problems. But international instability shows that we need to secure our energy supplies in the long-term through exploiting (and storing) our own gas reserves, moving to hydrogen, investing in small nuclear reactors, expanding carbon capture and storage, and lifting the moratorium on fracking.
There are signs that, apart from shale, this prudent mix is beginning to come together but it will need the Government to stand up to the green lobby in a way that it has so far been unwilling to do. We can move to a lower carbon future, but to do so by impoverishing the country and risking its energy supplies is madness.
Moreover, it is feeding into the debate around Boris Johnson’s future. Many Tory MPs are less concerned about lockdown parties or injudicious remarks concerning Sir Keir Starmer’s prosecution record than the impact of high energy prices on the incomes of their constituents. The Prime Minister would be wise to back the Chancellor and the Business Secretary in a new dash for gas.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/08/britain-needs-new-dash-gas-save-us-lunacy-net-zero/
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"The Guardian" on conservative foes of Net Zero
A group of Conservative politicians and their allies are on the “frontline” of a new climate war and are attempting to derail the government’s green agenda, according to claims by leading climate scientists.
Tory MPs and peers in the Net Zero Scrutiny Group (NZSG) have gained widespread media coverage in the past month, attempting to link the government’s net zero agenda to the cost-of-living crisis and calling for cuts to green taxes and an increase of fossil fuel production.
Some members claim the government’s plans to reach net zero emissions by 2050 have been dreamed up by out-of-touch elites and would impoverish working people, “making them colder and poorer”. The 19 Conservatives confirmed to be in the group say they do not dispute climate science or the need to decarbonise.
Two leading members have links to an organisation, often described as “climate-sceptic”, that was founded by the long-term climate denier (sic) Nigel Lawson. The group’s chair, the MP Craig Mackinlay, has also been accused by a leading climate institute of using misleading and inaccurate information.
Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading authorities (sic) on the climate and author of The New Climate War, said the group appeared to be attempting to drag climate policies into a culture war, which he described as a “dangerous new tactic being used by those opposed to addressing the ecological emergency”.
“This is where the frontline of the battle is now, and yes, we do have to push back fiercely on this sort of pernicious disinformation,” he told the Guardian.
Tory MPs involved in the Net Zero Scrutiny Group include the Brexit campaigner Steve Baker; the former work and pensions secretary Esther McVey; Robert Halfon, a former schools minister; and Peter Lilley. There are also several “red wall” MPs elected in 2019.
Baker is a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), launched by Lord Lawson in 2009. The organisation – which recently rebranded its campaigning arm to Net Zero Watch – is characterised by its opponents as being one of Britain’s biggest sources of climate science denial, a claim it denies.
It and the NZSG of Conservative politicians have recently turned their attention to the costs of the government’s decarbonisation plans.
Lord Lilley and Baker were at the think tank’s annual lecture at the end of November last year where the main speaker, the US scientist Prof Steven Koonin, who admits the climate is changing and humans are responsible, questioned the scientific consensus around the climate crisis.
He told the audience: “The first thing we can do is get authoritative bodies – the royal societies, the US national academies – to stand up and say there is no climate crisis. This is an issue, we can deal with it in due course, but let’s all relax.”
Leading climate scientists, shown a video of the event by the Guardian, suggested it had “cherrypicked data” and “distorted” the facts of climate science. They also questioned whether members of the UK’s ruling party might be getting their evidence about the climate crisis from such events.
In response, Koonin expressed disappointment at the criticisms, adding: “Viewers of my talk will see that my points are specific, relevant, and well-supported by references to the literature and data.”
Analysis by the Guardian also found that more than half of the members of the NZSG were members of the European Research Group (ERG), which successfully pushed for the Brexit referendum inside the Tory party. This has led to fears they could push for a similar culture war over net zero – and even a referendum.
Nigel Farage, another veteran of the Brexit campaign, has said he is agitating for a referendum on net zero, and Baker says the anti-net-zero campaign will be bigger than Brexit.
A Tory MP told the Guardian he considered Baker to be “seeing this like Brexit: he sees net zero and the [global warming target of] 1.5C as an imposition from an unelected remote bureaucracy that must be defeated”.
Dr Benny Peiser, a longtime policy lead for GWPF and director of its net zero watch campaign, said it did not dispute the need to decarbonise, but he was pleased that Tory MPs were now willing to put their name to opposition to net zero.
He told the Guardian: “We are obviously delighted that MPs are beginning to recognise that there’s a problem. Now for the first time we have a proper debate about the pros and the cons of the different options.”
The GWPF did not respond to subsequent written questions from the Guardian.
A number of experts dismiss the NZSG’s claims around the cost of net zero, saying the costs are relatively small and diminishing, at less than 1% of GDP by 2050. They also point out the multiple benefits of moving rapidly away from fossil fuels, from cleaner air and water to well-paid green jobs and lower energy bills.
Mackinlay was accused of misinformation by the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics. It suggested he had relied on “inaccurate and misleading claims, particularly about the investments required to achieve the statutory target of net zero emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050, in order to promote [the NZSG] cause”.
Some members of the group appear to have mocked climate policies or questioned the need for rapid action on reducing emissions. Scott Benton, the MP for Blackpool South, tweeted in November: “It’s Gender Day at #cop26 today. Apparently women and girls are more susceptible to climate change than others so the government’s naturally making £165 million available to address this apparent disparity. You really couldn’t make it up.”
Mark Jenkinson, the MP for Workington, has lobbied for more coalmines to be opened, calling those who opposed the Cumbria coalmine “climate alarmists” and saying: “Apocalypticism risks becoming the new UK religion.”
Lilley had an initial conversation with the Guardian but he and Baker did not respond to subsequent written questions about the article. Mackinlay confirmed his role as chair but declined to say more.
Three members of the NZSG did respond, stating they did not dispute climate science or the need to decarbonise, although they did object to the government’s current net zero plans. Jenkinson said he was confident it was possible to reach net zero “without making my constituents poorer”.
“I’m delighted that we’re having the adult discussions that so many outside the Conservative party are afraid of having, around the ongoing need for UK oil and gas for transition to net zero by 2050 and beyond it,” he added.
Halfon said: “Millions are now being hit desperately hard by the cost-of-living crisis with heating and fuel bills soaring. We cannot sacrifice any further their ability to cope on the altar of climate change.”
There is opposition to the group within the Conservative party. The MP Chris Skidmore, a former energy minister, has set up a new “net zero support group”, and a current environment minister told the Guardian that the NZSG was of “no concern to the government” and was being widely ignored.
The former Tory environment secretary Theresa Villiers also urged her party not to slip into a “culture war” over the climate crisis: “It should be dealt with in the context of a normal political debate, I hope we don’t start to see a culture war in this area.”
But as Boris Johnson – seen as a Tory standard-bearer for net zero – fights for his political life, attacks on the policy are continuing. After last week’s energy price hike, “senior cabinet ministers” were quoted on the front page of the Daily Telegraph urging the government to “rethink its net zero plans”.
James Murray, the editor of the website BusinessGreen and a leading environmental commentator, said: “Those within government and beyond that accept the net zero transition is the defining economic project of the age would be wise not to underestimate the threat. Opposition to climate action may be on the periphery. But as the past few years have taught us, ideas that were on the periphery can become very influential, very quickly.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/08/tories-fighting-net-zero-plans-are-dragging-climate-into-new-culture-war-experts-say
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Australia: Getting new power sources to market needs more attention
Transmission links are expensive but indispensible if new power sources are going to be used
The federal government-owned Snowy Hydro has attacked a planned national energy blueprint, warning a failure to push ahead with crucial investment in new electricity transmission could trigger higher power prices, blackouts and dangerous system instability.
Snowy, currently building a giant expansion of its hydro scheme, has written to the Australian Energy Market Operator saying its 20-year plan for the national electricity market released in December has gone backwards in recognising the urgency of transmission reform, and contains false modelling assumptions.
The major energy player, which owns retail power companies Red Energy and Lumo, has also attacked assumptions AEMO makes in its integrated system plan about the value of Tasmania’s wind farms, and says global energy investors are worried their spending on generation and storage may be put at risk due to the glacial pace of progress pushing on with more than $10bn of urgent transmission links.
“Transmission augmentation which takes place later than required not only leads to higher prices and slower decarbonisation, but also blackouts and dangerous system instability,” Snowy chief executive Paul Broad said in the company’s submission to AEMO, obtained by The Australian.
The 2022 integrated system plan “seeks to delay transmission upgrades until the last moment while retaining the flexibility to bring forward or yet further delay projects as needed. That may appear to be sensible policy but it is unworkable in practice.
“It is impossible to reconcile AEMO’s forecasts of an increasingly rapid structural shift towards renewables with its recommendations to delay key transmission links.”
READ MORE:Coal snuffed out in power revolution|Snowy boost to ‘beat blackouts’|Snowy wants transmission fast-tracked|Energy players warn of ‘grid gap’
Snowy is worried whether there will be enough transmission in place to transport power from its Snowy 2.0 expansion to market once it is completed in 2026. That includes TransGrid’s proposed Hume Link to southern NSW and the southern transmission link to Melbourne called VNI West.
AEMO, which runs the national electricity network, has plotted a “step-change” scenario after consultation with industry to guide power grid investment over the next decades and ensure Australia hits goals to cut pollution.
Under the plan, coal is set to be extinguished from the electricity system up to a decade earlier than planned, exiting three times faster than expected, under a radical blueprint for the power grid that requires a nine-fold increase in wind and solar capacity by 2050 to meet the nation’s net zero emissions targets.
Snowy also hit out at what it regards as the prioritisation of the Marinus Link, a second power cable connecting Tasmania to Victoria, ahead of transmission needed in NSW and Victoria under the latest draft of the power market scheme.
The plan “prioritises Marinus Link over VNI West, seemingly valuing Tasmanian wind resources (which, in fact, offer little diversity value) over the larger renewables investment in Victoria and access to Snowy 2.0, the single best asset for shoring up system security in the national electricity market. This is dangerous for consumers and industry,’’ Snowy said.
Mr Broad casts doubt on plans for Tasmania’s Battery of the Nation and the Marinus Link ever being built.
“Given that Snowy 2.0 is under construction, what is the probability that Battery of the Nation and Marinus will even exist? Deferring VNI West for four years (compared to ISP2018 and ISP2020) in the hope that a marginally economic and geographically remote undersea cable and remote storage will save the day is playing Russian roulette with national electricity market reliability and efficiency,’’ he said.
Snowy has previously warned the lack of transmission could kill the transition to renewables – with a string of major players weighing into the debate – and singled out concerns over infrastructure as a major issue that needs to be confronted to ensure supplies can flow to users.
Renewable developers and network operators are worried a pipeline of power generation and clean energy supplies faces delays or gridlock unless major electricity transmission projects are delivered across the national power system.
It cautioned that major global energy investors could be put off by the uncertainty in the transmission sector, an assertion that may raise heckles from other big market players that have previously accused Snowy of distorting the market with its government ownership.
“It does not help Australia’s case that these participants (many of whom already deliver renewable energy to Snowy via long-term offtakes negotiated across 2019-21) look on in dismay at the fate of VNI West’s role in transmitting their energy to the load centres and to Snowy 2.0,’’ Snowy said in its submission. “These investors are … typically global energy investors who cross-invest in generation and storage, and therefore know that Snowy 2.0 is a key piece to ensuring generation backup and storage for Victoria. The treatment to which Snowy 2.0 has been subjected provides them no comfort that their own investments would be treated equitably or transparently.’’
AEMO has said transmission projects will add $29bn in value while allowing renewables to be spread across the grid, with the Victoria NSW Interconnector and HumeLink projects both seen as critical to guard consumers against the risk of faster-than-expected coal retirements.
Consultation on the draft 2022 plan will be open until Friday
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/snowy-hydro-warns-of-high-costs-and-potential-blackouts-if-aemos-energy-blueprint-proceeds/news-story/7001143dc33a35157c0b4d81c76e0415
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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10 February, 2022
Nimbyism: The Consequence of Environmental Regulations
Dense development is beneficial for the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency recognizes this, in theory, and developed guidelines for advancing “infill development.” Oftentimes, its own regulations get in the way by requiring strict mitigation and banning construction near bodies of water on somewhat dubious premises.
Other environmental agencies at the state and local levels also stop development, having been captured by Nimbys for whom “green” is a lifestyle brand, not a coherent ecological worldview.
For a lesson in EPA contradiction, take the 12,000-unit residential project that Cargill has wanted to build for years in Redwood City, a Silicon Valley suburb. Under the Obama administration, the agency determined that the development, which would go on industrial salt-making land, would negatively impact the San Francisco Bay, despite opposite findings from the Army Corps of Engineers. Much of the dispute stems from whether or not the site is on wetlands; the developer contended that it was not, while regulators argued that it was. In 2018, the Trump administration worked to reverse the EPA’s regulatory stance, but last year, with Democrats back in office, the project was shut down for good following a major court ruling. This means that after a decade of regulatory back-and-forth, the EPA, working with local environmentalists, helped squash badly-needed housing in an area with some of America’s most expensive median home prices.
Water-related pollution is strictly regulated by the agency. As the EPA explains: “Runoff can pick up and deposit harmful pollutants like trash, chemicals, and dirt/sediment into streams, lakes, and groundwater. Construction sites, lawns, improperly stored hazardous wastes, and illegal dumping are all potential sources of stormwater pollutants.” For this reason, the agency’s National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System policy requires any development that creates a point source to obtain a permit.
Local runoff regulations can be even more onerous. In 2004, a group of developers in Spokane County, WA, brought challenges to a runoff ordinance they claimed was overbearing, as it would require them to eliminate all runoff caused by new construction. A related regulation forced developers to construct retention ponds. One area developer called for a case-by-case approach to drainage issues in response, rather than sweeping regulations that would obstruct multiple types of development. And all 50 states have their own stormwater standards, which come with varying degrees of severity.
A As I covered for Catalyst in 2020, the “Friends of the L.A. River” organization blocked a mixed-use development that would have placed 420 housing units along the Los Angeles River, because the group wanted wetlands along the river instead. This means people who would have lived in the project will likely instead live in sprawling developments that add to impervious surfaces.
California’s Environmental Quality Act law (CEQA) is notorious for this counter-intuitive advocacy. The law “requires that state and local agencies disclose and evaluate the significant environmental impacts of proposed projects and adopt all feasible mitigation measures to reduce or eliminate those impacts.”
Yet a 2015 analysis by the law firm Holland & Knight found that urban “infill” projects—meaning those that don’t require new construction on greenfields—were the most commonly targeted for CEQA lawsuits (80% of cases). The law had been used against everything from state-funded amenities, to local transit projects and senior housing. As a summary finds, “renewable energy is the most frequently challenged type of industrial/utility project, and housing (especially higher density housing) is the most frequently challenged type of private-sector project.”
Of course, not all environmental laws are as counterproductive as CEQA; and I don’t pretend, as an ecology layman, to know how courts should have ruled in all the above-mentioned cases. But public officials who delve into these “environment vs. development” issues must understand the role that regulatory capture plays in hijacking the conversation. Whether it’s a local, state, or federal agency that is tasked with enforcement, there is often immense pressure on these agencies from local activists who act in bad faith. As the Holland & Knight paper reiterated, the majority of CEQA lawsuits, for example, came from “associations…which have no prior track record of environmental advocacy.” Rather, it seems the goal is to abuse well-meaning environmental laws for Nimby purposes.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2022/02/03/environmental-regulations/?omhide=true
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UK: Bring back fracking, says new Brexit minister
Jacob Rees-Mogg, who was yesterday appointed as the Brexit opportunities minister, suggested that there should be a return to fracking to increase Britain’s energy independence.
However, the suggestion was rejected by the prime minister.
Fracking, a controversial method of extracting shale gas, was banned in 2019 amid concerns that it was causing earthquakes. Environmental groups have claimed it is incompatible with the government’s net zero target.
Johnson told the cabinet yesterday that he wants to “go for nuclear” and make it an integral part of building a greener Britain.
Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, said that the government was looking at the “transition not extinction” of oil and gas.
The prime minister led a discussion of the UK energy security situation at the weekly meeting of the cabinet in Downing Street yesterday.
The meeting coincided with the oil giant BP announcing annual profits of £9.5 billion. However No 10 indicated that there was no planned shift in the government’s opposition to calls for a windfall tax on fossil fuel companies.
“There is obviously volatility in gas prices, you are seeing that reflected in profits,” the prime minister’s official spokesman said. “I am not going to comment on individual companies. Those that perform well pay more in taxes, including corporation tax.”
The spokesman added that the UK was investing in renewables to provide further security of supply, with important roles for nuclear and offshore wind, as the economy moved towards net zero.
“The oil and gas industry will continue to play a role as we make that transition. They are investing in clean technologies like carbon capture and hydrogen that we need to get to net zero,” he said. “We know that having an element of independence of oil and gas is important. Sourcing gas locally through the North Sea makes us less dependent on foreign imports.”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bring-back-fracking-jacob-rees-mogg-climate-change-foreign-imports-lgg9vw8ms?mc_cid=c08288b71e&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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UK: We applaud Government for approving new oil and gas fields amid soaring energy bills -- says popular newspaper
THREE cheers if reality is dawning and sanity prevailing over Net Zero in the Cabinet.
Soaring energy bills should shortly sober up any remaining holdouts still drunk on utopian promises from Cop26.
Our energy future is in disarray. We are horribly exposed to the cost and stability of imports. We cannot power ourselves solely on wind, solar and our dwindling, dilapidated nuclear plants.
And demands by Labour and eco zealots to go further, faster on Net Zero are deranged.
So we applaud the Government for going ahead with approving new North Sea oil and gas fields.
But we will need a lot more gas in the decades before we finally eliminate emissions. So why stop there? Fracking is still a vast, untapped opportunity.
The Government must face down the scaremongers and seize it.
VOTERS don’t much care who occupies which chair in Boris Johnson’s Government. They just want results.
For what it’s worth, though, yesterday’s changes look like improvements to us.
The cheerful new Chief Whip should help calm relations between No10 and fractious Tory backbenchers.
And Jacob Rees-Mogg, a true Brexiteer, should make a decent fist of maximising the many opportunities from leaving the EU which Covid delayed.
But the public isn’t obsessed by reshuffles. Nor, for that matter, by the choreographed efforts of Boris-hating MPs, Remainer bores and their media mates to blame the PM for random anti-vaxx yobs barracking Keir Starmer.
Voters want action on the cost of living — and the promises of Brexit fulfilled.
Get on with it, PM.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17590094/government-applauded-new-oil-gas-fields/
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Greenpeace boss Morgan to become Germany's new climate envoy
Jennifer Morgan, who heads the environmental group Greenpeace International, is to become Germany's new climate envoy, officials said Tuesday.
She will be taking on a key role in the new center-left government that has pledged to ramp up Germany's efforts to curb global warming, including through its presidency of the Group of Seven major economies.
Morgan is to be formally announced in the new role Wednesday by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a member of the environmentalist Green Party officials said. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because her appointment — first reported by German weekly Der Spiegel — still needs to be approved by the Cabinet.
The American-born campaigner, who has co-led Greenpeace since 2016, has been a prominent figure in international climate diplomacy for years.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/germany-berlin-greenpeace-green-party-glasgow-b2010368.html?mc_cid=c08288b71e&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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9 February, 2022
Jeopardy’s Great Barrier Reef Gaffe
On Jeopardy January 25, 2022, the final clue in the category of Sea Life was, “In 2018, National Geographic reported that half of this was dead, ‘akin to a forest after a devastating fire.’” All three contestants correctly answered the Great Barrier Reef.
This was day 40 of Amy Schneider’s dominant performance watched by almost ten million people.
The long-running syndicated show sat comfortably as the highest rated non-sports program across broadcast and cable television during her record-run.
So, almost ten million folks heard that the Great Barrier Reef was half dead in 2018.
Shame on Jeopardy researchers for not doing their homework! They totally did not get the facts correct
The best data on the Great Barrier Reef coral cover is provided by the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), who have been measuring over 100 reefs every year since 1986.
AIMS data show that coral cover fluctuates dramatically with time but at present the amount of coral on the reef is at record high levels.
This record high, despite all the doom stories by reef science and management institutions and Jeopardy spreading this falsehood to ten million people.
https://principia-scientific.com/jeopardys-great-barrier-reef-gaffe/
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Bloomberg OpEd: ‘Blot Out The Sun’ To Fight Global Warming
A Bloomberg Opinion editor actually suggested humanity just blot out the sun to fight global warming.
Bloomberg Opinion Editor Michael Newman wrote a senseless blog headlined, “What if We Blotted Out the Sun to Fight Global Warming?”
He probably subconsciously realized the suggestion was insane, as he hedged in his subheadline: “It’s risky, but then again the path we’re on now may be even riskier.”
Newman called “solar geoengineering” one of the “great hopes” to “stop or slow climate change.”
He explained the idea as “an attempt to figure out a way to cool the planet by deflecting some of the sun’s rays before they reach us humans.”
Newman based his argument on an equally absurd article by Bloomberg Opinion columnist Clara Ferreira Marques headlined: “Solar Geoengineering Research Is a Risk Worth Taking.”
As Newman summarized, “Clara argues it’s ‘terrifying and terrible in the way that chemotherapy is: We don’t want it, but can we deny ourselves the possibility?’”
But Newman undercut himself by admitting that “The science isn’t yet there,” and that “a group of scientists argue it should be banned now — and they are not wrong that it is a risky and last-resort proposition.”
Or, perhaps dimming the thing that makes life possible on Earth is just as crazy as it sounds, and Newman pushing it as a solution makes no sense at all.
Climate Depot founder Marc Morano slapped down Newman’s blot “out the sun” as a “last resort” argument in comments emailed to MRC Business.
Morano referenced his book Green Fraud (2021), which pointed to a Newsweek article from April 28, 1975, showing how climate change extremists advocated for “melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot” to stave off global cooling.
According to Morano, Newman’s argument is “a redo of the 1970s. Before fossil fuels caused global warming, fossil fuels caused global cooling and the ice age in the 1970s!”
Morano further analyzed the narrative shift:
They were worried that our fossil fuel pollution was blocking out the sun creating global dimming and the next ice age.
They were trying to geoengineer the climate back in the 1970s and here we have come full circle now trying to do it the other way by essentially cooling the planet instead of trying to warm it.
But as is the case with much of the eco-extremist fearmongering, outrageous proposals like blotting out the sun are just political gibberish to convince politicians to push more meaningless climate regulations.
“Climate activists are using the threat of ‘blotting out the sun’ as a form of lobbying for ‘climate action,’” Morano argued.
“They are saying, ‘We are being forced to do this risky radical experiment on our planet’ unless we reduce our emissions. It’s one level of futile to pass legislation to attempt to regulate the climate and a whole different level to monkey around with the physics and mechanics of the atmosphere.”
https://principia-scientific.com/bloomberg-oped-blot-out-the-sun-to-fight-global-warming/
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Rethink net zero plans, Cabinet urges, as Britain faces biggest cost-of-living crisis in a generation
Senior Cabinet ministers believe there should be a rethink of the Government's net zero plans as the country faces the biggest cost of living crisis in a generation, The Telegraph can disclose.
A number of ministers have expressed concern that the pace of the planned switch to renewable energy is too fast and is increasing costs for consumers. They believe Britain should use more of its own gas in the short-term.
On Thursday, it was announced that energy bills will rise by almost £700 from April – an increase of more than 50 per cent and the largest on record.
Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, announced a £9billion bailout, which will see rebates of £200 for all bills and a £150 council tax cut for those in less expensive homes, to help households cope with the unprecedented rise.
However, a controversial green energy levy, which will add £153 a year to the average bill from April, has been kept.
The Bank of England also raised interest rates to 0.5 per cent, warning that inflation would hit seven per cent by April amid growing fears over a cost of living crisis.
Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s Governor, said the country was facing the worst crunch to household incomes since its records began in 1990. However, he also urged workers not to ask for big pay rises or they would risk making inflation worse.
Wage growth slowed to just 4.2 per cent at the end of last year, meaning workers will require an 8.7 per cent pay rise for their salaries to keep pace with current levels of inflation.
Cabinet ministers are increasingly uneasy about Downing Street’s focus on its net zero target and have warned that the cost of living crisis should be given more priority in the coming years.
One said the UK “should not be running towards net zero so aggressively”, describing the 2050 pledge as one of the “most aggressive targets in the world”.
“We've stigmatised gas, and that’s wrong,” the minister said. “Gas has to be part of the answer.”
Another Cabinet minister told The Telegraph: “The priority should be the cost of living – 2050 is a long way away, and our own gas is a valuable transition fuel in the meantime.” That view is understood to be shared by at least another two Cabinet ministers.
Mr Sunak indicated that he may share these concerns, and highlighted that North Sea gas “plays an important part of our transition to net zero”.
He told a Downing Street press conference: “I want to make sure that people acknowledge that we should also exploit our domestic resources. We have resources in the North Sea, and we want to encourage investment in that because we're going to need natural gas as part of our transition to getting to net zero.
“And in the process of getting from here to there, if we can get investment in the North Sea that supports British jobs, that's a good thing. So that has to be part of the mix as well.”
The Telegraph can reveal that Mr Sunak has asked Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, to fast-track new licences for North Sea gas exploration.
A source close to Mr Kwarteng said he believed the North Sea oil and gas industry should be protected to prevent imported energy becoming a “geopolitical weapon” that can be used against Britain.
“You cannot turn the taps off overnight, because restricting North Sea production doesn’t restrict demand,” a government source added.
This week, the EU announced that it classed gas as a “bridge” to its own net zero target, along with nuclear power.
Mr Sunak said it was “not sustainable” to keep energy bills “artificially low” amid rising prices on global markets, fuelled by concern about Russian aggression on the Ukrainian border.
"Higher energy prices are something that we’re going to have to adjust to in common with other countries around the world and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise,” he said.
In a statement to MPs on the Government’s plans to ease the cost of living crisis, the Chancellor announced a £200 energy rebate in October that must be paid back in installments over the next five years.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/02/03/ministers-urge-boris-johnson-rethink-net-zero-plans-cost-living/?mc_cid=ad1b90475b&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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As British households worry about keeping warm, Americans remain happy
If Ofgem’s decision yesterday to hike domestic energy bills from April by almost £700 confirmed one thing for us, it should be that now, more than ever, we must rapidly work towards energy security.
Indeed, it doesn’t have to be this way. As British households worry how they are going to keep warm, Americans remain as happy as Larry.
In the US electricity prices currently average $0.15 (11.2p) per kWh (kilowatt-hour) – little more than half the average of $0.28 (20.6p) per kWh in Britain. And that is before you account for Ofgem’s price rise.
So why is it so expensive over here?
The answer is prices are kept affordable for Americans because of an energy policy which prioritises self-sufficiency.
By exploiting vast shale gas reserves, America escapes the whims of international markets. Europe and the UK, on the other hand, now find themselves trapped in a perilous price hike.
For a variety of reasons, international wholesale prices are soaring – not least because of artificially implemented pressure from President Vladimir Putin, who is said to be inflating the price of gas coming out of Russia.
And yet, this mess makes little sense when Britain is sitting on ample gas, oil and coal reserves.
Where did it all go wrong?
Britain’s energy problems can largely be traced back to then Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act of 2008, which legally committed Britain to cut carbon emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.
In 2019, then Prime Minister Theresa May upped that target to going net-zero (fully carbon-neutral) by 2050. Boris Johnson has maintained that goal.
Yet as we continue to close coal plants, switch to electric and ramp up inefficient renewables we place ourselves even more in the clutches of those we import from.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10474649/ROSS-CLARK-analyses-state-Britains-energy-reserves-face-soaring-bills.html?mc_cid=ad1b90475b&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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8 February, 2022
Report comes under fire for claims about negative outcome of nuclear exit
A report published on Thursday, which warned that the closure of all nuclear power plants in Belgium could result in energy prices rising and possible blackouts, has been criticised by energy experts.
Belgium reached an agreement on the country’s exit from nuclear energy in December last year and decided to close all nuclear power plants by 2025. In March, the Federal Government is expected to make its final decision on the matter.
Research published on Thursday reported the potential impacts of complete closure, warning that this could put energy supplies under pressure and further increase the price of electricity, according to a simulation carried out by three researchers associated with the University of Antwerp (UAntwerpen).
However, these claims have now been criticised by energy experts for being incomplete and not including sufficient data, while one UAntwerp professor pointed out that the authors did not consult with the engineering faculty for their research.
Elia, Belgium’s Electricity System Operator, said the study was very brief considering it reported a major impact on the outcome (blackouts). “This study only models Belgium while our country is part of a European integrated system,” the company wrote in a statement to The Brussels Times.
https://www.brusselstimes.com/204514/closing-nuclear-plants-could-lead-to-blackouts-price-hikes-and-more-co2-emissions
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How climate activists are taking over Dutch industry
A new initiative by environmental organization Friends of the Earth (“FoE,” called “Milieudefensie” in The Netherlands) threatens to plunge the Dutch economy into a green abyss. Last Thursday, FoE sent a letter to the 30 largest companies in the Netherlands demanding that those companies submit a “climate plan” by April 15. To support its demands, FoE relies on the verdict it won in a case against Shell, in which the District Court of The Hague ordered Shell to accelerate its emission reductions to solve the “climate crisis.”
With that verdict in hand, FoE is now trying to bring the entire Dutch business community to its knees. Thus, an activist private organization that represents only a minuscule part of the Dutch citizenry has been appointed legislature, executive, judge, and bailiff all in one.
“The climate case of the century”
The omens were not favorable for Shell. Urgenda, another Dutch NGO that promotes “sustainability” – in its case against the Dutch state – had succeeded in three instances in deceiving the judiciary, up to and including the Dutch Supreme Court, with extreme climate–alarmist scenarios disguised as “climate science.” With the help of these deceptions, Urgenda secured an order for emissions reduction against the state. Now that the judiciary had been willing to supersede the authority of the national legislature in the Urgenda case, it seemed like a small step to persuade a judge to supersede the authority of a private firm’s chief executive officer.
The District Court of The Hague did indeed set aside Shell’s leadership and set policy goals for the entire global group. Shell was ordered to adopt corporate policies to reduce the CO2 emissions from the group’s activities by net 45% by the end of 2030 compared to 2019. This reduction obligation relates to the Shell Group’s entire global energy portfolio. Shell must not only reduce its own emissions but also must ensure that the emissions of its suppliers and customers (Scope 3 emissions) fall drastically.
Reputational damage
Shell could hardly defend itself against the alarmist statements put forward by FoE because the company had previously made similar statements. Nowadays, a large, publicly traded company cannot publicly deny the “climate crisis.” If a company were to do so, it would have the media, activists, and a large number of politicians all condemning it. No public company can afford such reputational damage. Climate activists exploit the inability of corporations to defend themselves. When there is no microphone nearby, one can hear business leaders complain about these abuses, but they cannot do so in a court of law.
https://clintel.org/how-climate-activists-are-taking-over-dutch-industry/
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US flood risk is about to explode — but not for the reasons you think
Extreme flooding has struck almost every corner of the country over the past year, from rural areas in Tennessee and California to the Michigan suburbs and the streets of Brooklyn, New York. Floods have always been by far the most widespread and costliest weather disaster in the U.S., and they have only gotten worse as climate change has accelerated. Total damages from floods and hurricanes last year eclipsed $100 billion, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.
A new study published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change projects that the number of people in the U.S. who are exposed to flooding will almost double over the next 30 years — but not for the reasons you might think. Most new risk will come not from climate change but from population growth in areas that are already vulnerable to flooding. The findings underscore a hard truth with dire implications for climate adaptation policy: The lion’s share of U.S. flood risk does not stem from the changing nature of storms and seas, but instead from our decisions about where to build and where to live.
That’s not to say climate change isn’t playing a major role: The study’s authors found that climate change will render around 700,000 more people vulnerable to flooding by 2050, mostly as a result of rising sea levels and stronger hurricanes. The lion’s share of current flood risk is borne by low-income white communities in places like Appalachia, but the new climate-driven risk that will arrive by 2050 will fall hardest on Black communities. (People of color are more likely to live in flood zones overall.) Many of these are located in coastal cities or hurricane-vulnerable Southern states, which puts them right in the crosshairs of rising seas and whopper storms.
When the authors measured the role of future population growth on flood vulnerability, though, they found an even stronger effect. The report finds that population growth in flood-prone areas will put over 3 million more people at risk of flooding by 2050 — four times the increase that will result from climate change. Unlike the new risk that results from climate change, most of the new risk from population growth will come in places that don’t have very much exposure to flooding right now, from Arkansas to Kansas to Idaho. As cities and suburbs in these areas sprawl out onto untouched land, more people will put themselves in the water’s way.
To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How
“Yes, climate change will intensify floods on average across America,” said Oliver Wing, a researcher at the University of Bristol and the lead author on the study. “But the much more sensitive component is where people are going to be living. Because ultimately, a flood is only risky if there are people and property in the way of it.”
This study complements other recent research about the relationship between climate change and population dynamics, though it adds a concerning twist. A landmark study published last year in Nature found that more people are moving into flood-prone areas across the globe, ratcheting up risk levels worldwide; the study concluded that the world’s flood-prone population grew by as much as 25 percent between 2000 and 2015. Population data from the recent U.S. census shows that Americans are still rushing to vulnerable coastal cities like St. Petersburg and Fort Myers, Florida, and that more people than ever are living in the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico. The long-term demographic shift toward Sun Belt cities has yet to slow down.
According to a recent survey by the real estate company Redfin, almost half of Americans say climate change is a factor in their moving decisions, which suggests that people are growing more cautious about moving to places that have suffered the worst climate disasters. Even if Americans begin to move away from these places, though, they may only be laying the groundwork for future disasters.This danger is exacerbated by the fact that U.S. flood mapping is widely believed to underestimate risk: A 2020 New York Times analysis found twice as many flood-vulnerable properties nationwide as appeared on the official government flood maps issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.
The study points to a gaping hole in existing climate adaptation policy. In the past few decades, the federal government has pumped more and more money into adaptive measures such as home buyouts and living shorelines, which use natural materials to absorb flood impacts. The infrastructure bill signed into law by President Joe Biden last year contains billions of dollars more for such measures. If executed well, such projects could reduce risk in areas that are already vulnerable to flooding or stand to suffer from a changing climate. By erecting coastal storm surge barriers or buying out neighborhoods in the floodplain, the federal government can counteract some of the new climate-driven risk that Wing’s paper projects.
To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How
When it comes to forestalling future population growth, though, the policy solutions are much trickier. The federal government doesn’t have direct authority over local zoning codes, which means it’s up to local towns and cities to choose whether they permit development in flood-prone areas. From an economic perspective, most municipalities have strong incentives to allow this kind of development: More houses means more people, which means more jobs, which means more revenue from sales taxes and property taxes.
“There’s not really an established practice by which a town or village or city can say, ‘well, we’re going to lose population from a particular area based on this increasing hazard, so what does that look like?’” said Mathew Sanders, a manager of the Pew Charitable Trust’s Flood-Prepared Communities initiative. In other words, governments don’t have much practice moving beyond a narrowly-focused pro-growth mentality.
Still, added Sanders, more development doesn’t have to mean more flooding.
“It’s not a fait accompli,” he told Grist. “We have enough landmass to accommodate everyone, so it’s about strategic decision-making.”
Sanders pointed to measures like the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, an investment guideline just reinstated by the Biden administration that sets standards for what can be built in floodplains with federal money, as an example of how the government can channel resources toward safe development. He also said that new tools like the First Street Foundation’s Flood Factor mapping tool should help developers make decisions about flood risk without relying on outdated FEMA maps.
“The conclusion that the study draws — that is a possible outcome,” says Sanders. “I don’t think that has to be the ultimate outcome.”
But the risk posed by future growth means that climate adaptation is far more complicated than just moving to high ground. Reducing flood risk will require not only intensive federal investment but also a sea change in local policy. There are examples of such policies already, such as the resilience-based zoning code implemented in Norfolk, Virginia, but in most of the country it’s still business as usual. For as long as that’s the case, said Wing, the cost of flooding is going to keep going up.
“The majority of [flood] risk is historical risk — risk that has failed to be dealt with right across decades of policy failure,” he told Grist. “The compound risk [of climate change] is interesting, but the bigger problem is not adapting to the problem in front of us.”
https://grist.org/extreme-weather/flood-risk-growth-development/
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Green investing changes nothing
Green investing promises a financial route towards a cleaner planet, built around the idea that big, future-minded institutions like pension funds and insurers should exclude from their portfolios carbon-intensive assets like oil, gas and coalmining companies. That line of thinking has had enormous mileage in recent years, so much so that today the value of sustainable investments amounts to $35trn, or about a third of all managed assets. But recent numbers suggest there may be a flaw in the reasoning.
Take a look at the ballooning profits that Big Oil has been reporting, after a year of humbling losses. Soaring energy prices are one cause. But the trend also captures proceeds from divestments as listed energy firms rush to sell their most polluting assets, often as a result of pressure from activists, regulators and governments. The West’s six biggest majors have shed $44bn of mostly fossil-fuel assets since the start of 2018.
As we report this week, many of these “brown” assets end up in the hands of private-equity funds, which in the past two years alone have spent $60bn on oil, gas and coal assets—a third more than they have invested in renewables. That is not surprising: despite the stigma, high energy prices mean those assets are extremely profitable. But private investors argue that, because they typically have controlling stakes in those assets and are holding on to them for several years, they alone have the patience and focus to manage carbon footprints down.
Are they right? It is impossible to know. Private equity’s carbon reporting is patchy and inconsistent. And with a record $3.3trn of unspent private capital looking for investments, the onus for many asset managers is probably on doing deals fast rather than crafting carefully thought-through decarbonisation plans.
Part of what is going on is a raid by private-equity firms on “midstream” assets—oil pipelines, gas grids and fuel-storage tanks. Because their revenues are contracted and paid for by big clients—energy majors and utilities—they are deemed very safe. They are often sizeable pieces of infrastructure, so that private funds can deploy a lot of money in one go. In July Brookfield, an asset manager based in Canada, agreed to pay $6.8bn for the country’s fourth-largest pipeline company. And they can be lucrative. A banker I spoke to predicts the latest mega-deals will produce “extraordinarily high returns”.
All this sits uncomfortably with the credo of many institutional investors, 1,485 of which, representing $39trn-worth of assets, have pledged to get out of fossil fuels. Our research suggests that investors in eight private vehicles that closed fossil-fuel deals in the past two years include 53 pension funds, 23 universities and 32 foundations—and this only comprises those institutions that disclose such investments.
There is probably much more in the pipeline (so to speak): Wood Mackenzie, a consultancy, reckons the oil-and-gas industry is preparing to offload another $128bn in assets in the coming years. Eventually such institutions may come to realise or acknowledge the discrepancy and decide to opt out of private fossil-fuel investments, too. But other would-be buyers are standing in the wings: state-owned companies and sovereign funds from countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia that pay little heed to sustainable investment. Until carbon disclosures and taxes apply to the whole economy, the fossil-fuel hunt will carry on.
https://www.economist.com (via email)
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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7 February, 2022
The EU is sabotaging its economy in the name of unattainable climate targets
By Samuel Furfari, formerly a senior official at the Energy Directorate-General of the European Commission (1982-2018), Professor em. at Université libre de Bruxelles and President of the European Society for Engineers and Industrialists
As Europe is suffering an energy crisis, the European Union continues to boast about its energy strategy, the “European green deal”, which is supposed to point the way to the rest of the world. This is all happening under pressure from countless green NGOs, combined with a lack of critical reflection which is prevalent within EU institutions.
Faced with the COP26 fiasco, the EU failed to notice that the rest of the world is not following it. Now, it continues to stubbornly promote renawble energy even more, even though this EU policy is at the root of Europe’s energy crisis.
Natural gas prices on the spot market have risen fivefold in one year, due to a very strong economic recovery in China which caused an equally strong increase in its energy consumption. Thanks to an abundance of natural gas – the energy source of the future – a single, liquid market now exists between the EU and Asia, while the geographically isolated United States rejoices in the very low price of its shale gas.
https://t.co/p5RLPC5n25 @Isabel_Schnabel” / Twitter
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Greenflation: European Central Bank Official Admits the Obvious
China, which did not put all its eggs in one basket, is coping by importing more coal from Indonesia, by unloading Australian coal that had been blocked for a year in Chinese ports following the sanctions China had imposed on Australia, and by fully exploiting its small coal mines which it was busy closing due to lack of economic profitability.
China prepared for growing demand by constructing nuclear power stations – the electricity source of the future. In short, China is doing the opposite of the EU, because it knows that there can be no growth without abundant and cheap energy, as the founding fathers of the European Community declared in Messina on 2 June 1955.
In Brussels, everyone is silent
A few weeks ago, Christoph Leitl, the president of Eurochambres, the federation of EU chambers of commerce, declared on leaving office that the objectives of the EU’s “Green Deal” are unrealistic. One would wish he would also have had the courage to say this during the time when he was in office.
Because this is precisely the strength, and the weakness, of the European Commission. Everyone is silent, causing the Commission to believe that it is on the right track. That is a big problem, because the current situation is the consequence of EU energy policies that have been subjected to the dictates of climate policy. Just like the emperor who thinks he has new clothes in Andersen’s fable, the European Union is naked in the face of this crisis that it has helped to create.
Pieter Cleppe op Twitter: “Flemish Energy Minister @Zu_Demir: “Let’s not delude people: energy prices are as high because of a deliberate EU policy to drive up the price of CO2 and make our own supplies scarce. #Greenflation, green inflation is not made up. Need to act structurally” https://t.co/GO43hkiMW8? / Twitter
In order to deal with the most pressing problems, the European Commission has been quick to blame Russia, even though Gazprom respects the contracts signed in 2005 by Gaz de France, on request of the French President at the time, Jacques Chirac. As he didn’t want to damage good trade relations – the USSR had started selling gas in the 1970s – Russian President Putin pledged Russia would supply as much gas as possible. Vladimir Chizhov, Russia’s ambassador to the EU, then commented: “Change the adversary into a partner and things are more easily resolved.”
Indeed, President Obama bears his share of responsibility as well for dragging us into counterproductive sanctions in 2014. His country has all the gas it wants, while the EU needs to primarily rely on its Russian neighbour for its gas supply. As a result, Russia cannot be expected to dance while the European Parliament whistles.
https://clintel.org/the-eu-is-sabotaging-its-economy-in-the-name-of-unattainable-climate-targets/
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FALLEN ICON by Susan J. Crockford
Book Review by Kip Hansen
A fantastic read! Take a deep dive into the intrigue and devious deception perpetrated on the world by a detailed list of international operators at the point where international climate change politics, the entertainment industry and over-zealous and unscrupulous advocacy meet to generate money, transfer power and influence international politics.
This book is a forensic investigation into how one sad and tragic act of Nature was intentionally, and with great stealth, twisted into a false narrative to bolster the very questionable claims that there is a climate emergency and wielded in secret to influence the movers and shakers of international policy.
It is also the heart-breaking tale of how a great man, one who has educated and delighted audiences around the world with a long list of award-winning nature documentaries, fell prey to the temptings of a duplicitous money-hungry advocacy organization which drew him into a scheme to hide the truth in order to create a powerful lie. The scheme involved years of secretive planning and included requiring participants to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent the true story from emerging before the gut-punch video could have its intended shocking effect on the stage of world opinion.
That man was the highly respected Sir David Attenborough.
The story was “Walruses are jumping off cliffs to their deaths — yes, because of climate change”.
The major knowing and complicit malefactors in this deception: The BBC, Netflix, Silverback Films, and WWF.
FALLEN ICON is not a book for children, it is serious professional investigative journalism, and clearly laid out for readers in a step-by-step narrative. This is not just speculation but an extremely detailed account from start to finish. The book is 166 pages of eye-gripping reporting and includes, for those who wish to dig even deeper, 73 additional pages of references, appendices and citations.
Read it and rejoice in the victory of Truth over Falsehood – and weep for our Fallen Icon.
https://clintel.org/book-review-fallen-icon-by-susan-j-crockford/
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Climate change SAVED over half a million lives in England and Wales alone
If climate change has saved half a million lives in England and Wales alone in the last two decades, it can be deduced that it must be many millions in temperate countries.
British authorities estimate that over 550,000 fewer people have died than could be expected in the last 20 years due to higher temperatures – in England and Wales alone. Global warming is becoming a blessing in temperate zones.
Anyone who relies on media reports must come to the conclusion that countless people are dying because of climate change. "More and more heat deaths due to the climate crisis in Germany," headlined the "Spiegel." The magazine "Geo" wrote: Without rigid measures to protect the climate, "an additional 83 million people could die by the end of the century." A study involving the University of Bern also made headlines last year, according to which 37 percent of heat-related deaths can be attributed to man-made global warming.
Such reports often only focus on a small section of the effects of global warming. For example, people fail to appreciate that fewer cold-related deaths are to be expected as temperatures rise, or that people are generally very adept at adapting to changing climatic conditions.
The British Office for National Statistics (ONS) has now come to interesting results in a report that was published a few days ago. The ONS analysed how climate-related mortality developed in England and Wales between 2001 and 2020. It recorded all deaths whose cause showed a temperature dependency. In particular, these are respiratory diseases and infections, which become more important in the cold, as well as cardiovascular problems and heart attacks, which become more frequent in the heat (see here).
The ONS notes that the average temperatures during the period studied were higher than they used to be. From 1991 to 2020 it was 0.9 degrees warmer than from 1961 to 1990. From the prevailing temperatures, the office estimated how many deaths were recorded each year due to cold or heat.
Annually 27,755 fewer fatalities
The result: while in 2001 there were still 993 climate-related deaths per 100,000 inhabitants, in 2019 there were only 771. (In 2020 it was slightly more with 830 due to the pandemic). Overall, according to the ONS, 555,103 fewer people died in England and Wales from 2001 to 2020 due to cold or heat. That's an average of 27,755 per year.
The strong decrease in climate-related deaths is also due to better adaptation to temperature extremes and better health care.
What is remarkable is that the increase in warm days during the months of June to September led to a total of 1,643 additional heat-related deaths. However, this number lags behind the decrease in deaths due to fewer cold days by orders of magnitude. This finding also contradicts the assertion that has been made time and again that the number of heat deaths is increasing faster than the number of cold deaths is decreasing.
In short, global warming has saved well over half a million lives. However, the strong decrease in climate-related deaths is not only due to higher temperatures, but also, according to the ONS, to better adaptation to temperature extremes, better health care and "improvements in socio-economic circumstances".
People are getting better and better at protecting themselves
At the same time, the ONS warns that the trend towards fewer climate-related deaths could reverse in the coming decades if the UK is increasingly hit by extreme heat. However, there are several studies that show that even heat-related deaths have tended to decrease in recent years - despite rising temperatures. In concrete terms, people are becoming better and better at protecting themselves from heat waves, for example with insulating construction, planning more green spaces or using air conditioning more often.
If climate change has saved half a million lives in England and Wales alone in the last two decades, it can be deduced that it must be many millions in temperate countries. The effect that cold-related deaths are falling more than heat-related deaths is likely to also play a role in other European countries, in America and in large parts of Asia. Higher crop yields are also expected in these climate zones due to rising temperatures, so overall climate change should prove to be a boon.
https://www.nebelspalter.ch/der-klimawandel-rettete-ueber-eine-halbe-million-menschen?mc_cid=28ed616680&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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6 February, 2022
Another study of air pollution showing that it has negligible if any health effects
The authors have a different conclusion but that is what their data shows. These studies seem to come out about once a year. I have demolished many of them. So I am glad that Wm Briggs is doing the critique this time
I’m always on about Experts, which are credentialed trained individuals who support the regime, so I thought it well to show Experts in action. One way is through the use of the Epidemiologist Fallacy, which happens when a scientist says X causes Y, but where X is never measured, and the cause is confirmed by a wee p-value.
Now there is nothing more embarrassing in science than a researcher running around, simpering “Look at my wee p! Look at my wee p!” Yet it happens all the time. I won’t here prove that every use of a p-value contains a (separate) fallacy, but it is so. For proof go here.
You’d also think claims like “fracking natural gas kills people” would be based on measuring the cause, in this case measuring fracking natural gas exposure or, rather, intake. But you’d be wrong. Neither natural gas exposure or intake in the study I’m about to describe was measured. At all.
Yet the researchers still claimed that natural gas killed old people.
How do they get away with it? I’ll tell you. You won’t believe me, but I swear to you the reason I give is true. They get away with it because everybody else commits the Epidemiologist Fallacy, too. And misery loves company. Here are many examples.
Our example today is the peer-reviewed paper “Exposure to unconventional oil and gas development and all-cause mortality in Medicare beneficiaries” by Longxiang Li and a host of others in Nature Energy. Following a depressing trend, most of the paper is shunted to supplementary material. You cannot understand what is happening in papers anymore.
Here’s their main claim:
We found evidence of a statistically significant higher mortality risk associated with living in proximity to and downwind of unconventional oil and gas wells. Our results suggest that primary air pollutants sourced from unconventional oil and gas exploration can be a major exposure pathway with adverse health effects in the elderly.
The paper is constructed from the Epidemiologist Fallacy. They want to say X (natural gas) causes Y (death in the elderly) but they can’t measure actual exposure to natural gas or its effluvia.
So what do they do?
Like many before them, they use exposure to zip codes: “For each beneficiary’s ZIP code of residence and year in the cohort, we calculated a proximity-based and a downwind-based pollutant exposure.”
Zip codes are used to classify people who live within some distance to a natural gas source. Address is taken to be exposure/intake.
Were people at their zip codes the entire time? Did some have their windows open, some closed? Did some use air filters and others not? What about those who ate what the government recommended (not a wise idea) and those who didn’t? What about the actual level of exposure to natural gas and its combustion products?
Were the people who lived right next to gas wells or fires poorer than those living in more placid lands? And therefore, being poorer, suffer more for various other reasons besides gas?
We’ll never know.
Now it is not impossible that somebody sniffing natural gas fumes will live a shorter life next to somebody who breathes only pristine air. But there must be some great uncertainty in measuring the distance from a gas source and saying that distance is exposure or intake, even if intake does in fact lead to shorter lives.
I don’t know what this uncertainty is, but it cannot be small. But it exists and should be applied to any claims of cause. Here’s what I mean. If they say that there’s a certain percent chance you’ll die sniffing gas or its byproducts because of the gas, but don’t measure exposure but only distance, you must multiply that percent chance by the uncertainty in the proxy.
Suppose they say you have a 1% chance of dying from sniffing gas. But they don’t measure sniffing, but only distance. And the chance that distance truly represents sniffing is, say, also 1% (a plausible number).
That makes the real chance (based on this evidence) that gas kills you 1% x 1% = 0.01%.
The real result doesn’t sound as exciting, does it.
Our authors’ result, even before doing this necessary calculation, sounds even worse. I won’t explain the model, but it’s a regression stuffed aplenty with, well, stuff, one thing of which is distance/zip code.
Before that, here’s a table of their raw data, to show you the effect of modeling (and recalling all models only say what they are told to say).
The “PE” is “exposure”, i.e. zip code. And the “DE+/-” is wind direction “exposure” (read the paper). You can see the raw mortality rates. They barely differ across the levels of “exposure”. There certainly isn’t any strong signal that greater “exposure” leads to more death.
To get that, they had to use a model, the output of which was a “hazard ratio”, which is a multiplicative effect to the chance of dying right now, at this moment. The lowest “exposure” had a HR of about 1.01. The highest “exposure” had an HR of just over 1.02, which rose to almost 1.03 in the downwind category (see their Table 4; supplementary Table 2). But these differences, because of the massive size of the data, gave them wee p-values to wave around.
All this means the effect, even if genuine, is tiny. Before accounting for the uncertainty in the proxy as cause (and the over-certainty in this parametric and not predictive analysis). Once we do that, and recognize that in the raw data there was no signal at all, we must conclude that THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE HERE.
Back to Experts. The paper we now see says nothing. Yet the regime picked it up and touted it. Here’s a headline from Inside Climate News: “For the First Time, a Harvard Study Links Air Pollution From Fracking to Early Deaths Among Nearby Residents.” Science Daily: “Living near or downwind of unconventional oil and gas development linked with increased risk of early death”.
Linked is the supreme weasel word in Science. It’s like convicted in court on purely circumstantial evidence.
https://wmbriggs.com/post/38983/
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COVID Masks environmentally destructive
Liberals always claim to care a lot with the ocean and the surroundings but the truth is they are actually destroying it as we converse.
Hypocritical liberals killing marine life and polluting seashores with their beloved COVID masks.
According to the Specialists at OceansAsia said that greater than 1.56 billion face masks utilized in 2020 will find yourself within the ocean.
Additionally, they predict that face masks would add as much as round 4,860 to six,240 tons of additional plastic waste within the oceans.
And that analysis was accomplished earlier than Fauci and Biden and the remainder of the clown present advised everybody to put on TWO masks. So these numbers are even larger now.
But, we don’t even have any stable proof that masks are stopping the unfold of COVID.
The CDC and Fauci are all around the map in terms of masks. Put on none, put on one, put on two, possibly three. It’s baffling how anybody can take these so-called “consultants” severely.
We all know Rand Paul doesn’t take Fauci severely in any respect. As a matter of reality, he’s repeatedly referred to as him out for “masks theatrics.”
The piece goes on to say that masks by no means really break down – as a substitute, they break up into smaller items and exit indefinitely.
A current examine discovered that one masks can shed as much as 173,000 tiny plastic microfibers in simply sooner or later.
Specialists say which means the harm from masks is cumulative and is actually piling up within the ocean over time. The consultants go on to say that the state of affairs is critical, and our present waste programs should not geared up to deal with it.
Option to go Dems. You’re actually creating an enormous environmental disaster by pushing masks that don’t have any science even proving in the event that they work or not.
However Dems don’t care, do they? The dirtier the ocean, the more cash these environmental teams can rake in.
It’s all an enormous money-making scheme, and it has little or no to do with really caring in regards to the “surroundings.”
https://thepatriotnation.net/covid-masks-found-responsible-for-thousands-of-unexpected-deaths-3/
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Rethink net zero plans, British Cabinet urges, as country faces biggest cost-of-living crisis in a generation
Senior Cabinet ministers believe there should be a rethink of the Government's net zero plans as the country faces the biggest cost of living crisis in a generation, The Telegraph can disclose.
A number of ministers have expressed concern that the pace of the planned switch to renewable energy is too fast and is increasing costs for consumers. They believe Britain should use more of its own gas in the short-term.
On Thursday, it was announced that energy bills will rise by almost £700 from April – an increase of more than 50 per cent and the largest on record.
Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, announced a £9billion bailout, which will see rebates of £200 for all bills and a £150 council tax cut for those in less expensive homes, to help households cope with the unprecedented rise.
However, a controversial green energy levy, which will add £153 a year to the average bill from April, has been kept.
The Bank of England also raised interest rates to 0.5 per cent, warning that inflation would hit seven per cent by April amid growing fears over a cost of living crisis.
Andrew Bailey, the Bank’s Governor, said the country was facing the worst crunch to household incomes since its records began in 1990. However, he also urged workers not to ask for big pay rises or they would risk making inflation worse.
Wage growth slowed to just 4.2 per cent at the end of last year, meaning workers will require an 8.7 per cent pay rise for their salaries to keep pace with current levels of inflation.
Cabinet ministers are increasingly uneasy about Downing Street’s focus on its net zero target and have warned that the cost of living crisis should be given more priority in the coming years.
One said the UK “should not be running towards net zero so aggressively”, describing the 2050 pledge as one of the “most aggressive targets in the world”.
“We've stigmatised gas, and that’s wrong,” the minister said. “Gas has to be part of the answer.”
Another Cabinet minister told The Telegraph: “The priority should be the cost of living – 2050 is a long way away, and our own gas is a valuable transition fuel in the meantime.” That view is understood to be shared by at least another two Cabinet ministers.
Mr Sunak indicated that he may share these concerns, and highlighted that North Sea gas “plays an important part of our transition to net zero”.
He told a Downing Street press conference: “I want to make sure that people acknowledge that we should also exploit our domestic resources. We have resources in the North Sea, and we want to encourage investment in that because we're going to need natural gas as part of our transition to getting to net zero.
“And in the process of getting from here to there, if we can get investment in the North Sea that supports British jobs, that's a good thing. So that has to be part of the mix as well.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2022/02/03/ministers-urge-boris-johnson-rethink-net-zero-plans-cost-living/
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California urged to keep nuclear plant open to meet climate goals
Nearly 80 scientists and academics, including a former U.S. energy secretary, on Thursday urged Governor Gavin Newsom to delay closure of California's remaining nuclear plant to comply with state laws on fighting global warming.
"The threat of climate change is too real and too pressing to leap before we look," said a letter to Newsom from Steven Chu, a former U.S. energy secretary, and the others. "Considering our climate crisis, closing the plant is not only irresponsible, the consequences could be catastrophic."
The letter was organized by Isabelle Boemeke, a model and founder and executive director of Save Clean Energy, a nonprofit group that promotes the emissions benefits of nuclear power.
Faced with rising costs for operating the plant's two reactors, the utility PG&E (PCG.N) decided in 2016 to allow their licenses to expire in 2024 and 2025, which would close the last nuclear plant in the nation's most populous state.
Environmental groups concerned about earthquakes, nuclear waste, and use of seawater to cool reactors, had also pushed for the closure.
As concern about climate change has mounted, however, so has the call to keep open Diablo Canyon, which backers say is the state's top source of emissions free power.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a Reuters interview in November that she would be willing to talk with California officials about the possibility of keeping it open once the federal government makes progress on dealing with nuclear waste, an issue for which there is no permanent fix.
Granholm said then that there is a "change underfoot about the opinion people may have about nuclear." The Department of Energy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Erin Mellon, a spokesperson for Newsom, said retail energy providers are in the process of procuring projects to replace power generated by Diablo Canyon and that California has the technology and plans to meet its clean energy goals.
PG&E said its focus is on safely operating the plant until the end of its licenses.
Diablo Canyon can withstand earthquakes larger than nearby faults are capable of triggering, the letter said. It cited an assessment that PG&E sent in 2018 to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission finding no significant seismic or tsunami hazards to the plant.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group that has studied seismic risks to nuclear plants, says Diablo Canyon is one of the top 10 U.S. plants most vulnerable to earthquakes and was built to a more stringent, though insufficient, standard than reactors in the U.S. East.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-urged-keep-nuclear-plant-open-meet-climate-goals-2022-02-03/
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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4 February, 2022
Soylent Green: why hasn’t society collapsed yet?
Patrick Whittle, Spiked, 30 January 2022
The sci-fi classic was inspired by environmental predictions that have signally failed to materialise.
‘Soylent Green is people!’
That is the anguished final cry of police detective Frank Thorn in legendary ecological thriller Soylent Green. Set in a decaying future world, ravaged by pollution, global warming, resource depletion and overpopulation, the plot follows Thorn (played by Charlton Heston) as he makes a sickening discovery: that a new wonder food, the eponymous Soylent Green, is actually human flesh.
The film was made in the early 1970s, when the twin fears of rapidly rising populations and temperatures were first coming to the boil, and it was set far enough in the future for all manner of fanciful predictions to be made. So when exactly did the filmmakers imagine environmental collapse would reduce us all to this state of barbarism? According to the Hollywood blockbuster, starving humans would be resorting to cannibalism in the year… 2022. Yes, we’ve already arrived.
Of course, Soylent Green was sci-fi fantasy, not a scientific forecast of the future. Yet this isn’t how the progressive press has been commemorating the film this year. According to a recent Washington Post feature, ‘Soylent Green envisioned the world in 2022. It got a lot right.’ Apparently, the movie was most right about today’s ‘climate catastrophe’. Another review draws the same conclusion: ‘The most 2022-resonant notes in the film are connected to the way it shows a catastrophic collapse of a society that’s choked out nature… when the threats we currently face due to the climate crisis feel real within the confines of the movie.’
Really? What planet do these writers live on? Certainly, we have got a serious pandemic and political problems aplenty to contend with. But where on Earth is society collapsing due to catastrophic climate change?
‘Madagascar!’, environmentalist George Monbiot recently proclaimed in the Guardian. According to Monbiot, ‘The famine harrowing Madagascar at the moment is the first… likely to have been caused by the climate emergency. It will not be the last.’ Ironically, Monbiot’s confident claims came two weeks after the Guardian had itself reported that ‘Poverty, not climate breakdown, caused Madagascar’s food crisis’.
A great number of people seem convinced that in 2022, civilisation is coming apart at the seams thanks to climate change, despite having to look quite far afield to find much evidence of this. As awful as hurricanes, wildfires and famines in faraway places may be, they do not presage global societal collapse. Nevertheless, the dystopian nightmare of the kind portrayed in Soylent Green is talked of by environmentalists as a realistic consequence of climate change. We are, as one newspaper put it during the COP26 climate talks, ‘still on the road to hell’.
The origins of environmentalism’s dystopian mindset can be traced back to the doom-mongering about overpopulation of the 1960s, and in particular biologist Paul Ehrlich’s influential 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb. In this bible of over-the-top catastrophism, Ehrlich described the inevitable ‘mass starvation’ we faced on ‘a dying planet’ that Soylent Green so graphically passed on to a wider popular audience. Over five decades later, and the picture painted in Ehrlich’s miserabilist book still colours the thinking of the mainstream environmentalist movement, where it seems as if nothing positive is possible for the future, only hardship, suffering and death.
Yet although a lot has changed in the past 50 years, society hasn’t collapsed in the way that Ehrlich predicted (and as most environmental alarmists still predict it will). Instead, for most people in most places, things are now measurably better. From the massive plunges in child mortality and extreme poverty to the steep upswings in health, education and life expectancy, human flourishing has increased not diminished over the long decades since the Population Bomb first hit the shelves and Soylent Green first hit our screens. And as for fears that a growing population would struggle to cope with scarce resources, the world is actually hundreds of times more abundant today than it was in the 1970s. Even the alarmist BBC, when not issuing dire warnings that it’s ‘foetal-position time’, occasionally remembers to report the many reasons why the world is actually improving.
All of these gains are happening despite the human population doubling since the early 1970s, from under four billion people then to nearly eight billion now. Contrary to the grim vision of ever-increasing starvation and malnutrition set out in The Population Bomb and Soylent Green, it is obesity, diabetes and other ‘diseases of affluence’ that are spreading around the globe.
Of course, this doesn’t mean we now live in a panglossian ‘best of all possible worlds’. Food insecurity remains a very real threat for many millions of the world’s people. But as today’s famine hotspots in Yemen, Afghanistan, Ethiopia and indeed Madagascar clearly show, this is due to politics not environmental collapse.
None of this is to say that climate change is not a serious problem. But the environmental apocalypse has been predicted in the past and has clearly failed to materialise. It is also darkly ironic that those who bought into Soylent Green’s far-fetched tales of imminent ecological collapse half a century ago are now grandparents to teenagers similarly convinced the world will end within their lifetime. What’s less amusing, is that a debilitating ‘climate depression’ is spreading among the young (that is, among those not yet aware that, according to environmental campaigners, the end is always nigh, always has been and always will be).
The actual course of history, in contrast to the green doom-mongering, shows the power of human ingenuity and innovation. Instead of ‘hundreds of millions of people’ starving to death in the 1970s, as Ehrlich predicted, before ‘an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity’ by the 1980s, we got the technological marvel of the agricultural Green Revolution, which allowed us to feed the world’s expanding population. (Despite Ehlich’s predictions being spectacularly wrong, he still insists that the ‘collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades’.)
It’s worth noting how Ehrlich (and the makers of Soylent Green) assumed human beings would simply descend into barbarism and despair when faced with environmental challenges. Contrast this with the practical actions, from exactly the same era as the Population Bomb, of industrialist and movie mogul Arthur Rank. Rank, too, was concerned about overpopulation and starvation, but his solution wasn’t simply to wail and moan. Rather, he began to search for a new source of plentiful food. The result was Quorn, a mycoprotein made from fungus that has since become a favourite of vegetarians.
While fungal mycoprotein isn’t quite the saviour food that Rank hoped, there are plenty of other up-and-coming innovations that could be. Modern biotechnology especially has the potential to revolutionise food production once again, at the same time as reducing its environmental impact and carbon emissions. Yet who is most opposed to such Earth-saving technology? The very environmentalists who shout most loudly for immediate solutions to the ‘climate crisis’. You couldn’t make this up. Greens’ opposition to nuclear power, the most efficient carbon-neutral power source we currently have, is similarly counterproductive.
It goes without saying that a world without the threat of climate change and the environmental harms it threatens is one worth striving for. It’s also one that’s possible – just that it is more likely to come from innovation and ingenuity rather than from the activism of eco-alarmists.
Eco-catastrophism has led nowhere except to the impotent apathy of today’s climate-depressed children (and along the way to the hideous repression of China’s one-child policy and the mass coercive sterilisation of millions in India and elsewhere in Asia).
There are more positive paths to saving the planet. The polarised either/or of climate catastrophism vs climate-change denial are not the only options. From the skeptical environmentalism of economist Bjorn Lomborg and the rational optimism of science writer Matt Ridley to the eco-pragmatism of counterculture icon Stewart Brand, other more reasonable and realistic alternatives can readily be found.
In discussing the role of modern genetic biotech, for example, Brand enthuses about how the ‘conservation story could shift from negative to positive, from constant whining and guilt-tripping to high fives and new excitement’. (Paul Ehrlich, not surprisingly, is a biotech nay-sayer.)
Half a century of history has repeatedly shown the environmentalist movement’s worst predictions to be far off the mark. That doesn’t mean, of course, that things must inevitably continue to improve. As the shocking unexpectedness of Covid illustrates, the future is hard to predict. In another 50 years time, in 2072, the world might well be a whole lot worse. But here’s one thing you can bet your bottom dollar on – that eco-catastrophism won’t make it any better.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/30/soylent-green-why-hasnt-society-collapsed-yet/?mc_cid=28ed616680&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Tesla Owners Warn of Random, Uncontrolled Braking and Stops
With every forward lurch in modern technology, our civilization tends to open itself up to new sorts of trouble as well – particularly when it comes to this new digital dimension that we’re largely operating in.
By moving banking and other activities to the internet, we’ve allowed hackers and other identity thieves tricky new ways to pry into our daily lives. Furthermore, the advent of low-grade artificial intelligence has begun to take over for some of our otherwise mechanical technologies…and that’s not always a good thing.
Take, for instance, terrifying new reports about high-tech vehicles from Tesla randomly braking and stopping without the owners’ input.
Some Tesla drivers say they’re experiencing an increase in “phantom braking,” in which their cars make random, jolting stops because they misinterpret hazards like trash on the road, trucks in nearby lanes and oncoming traffic on two-lane roads. 107 Tesla drivers have filed complaints with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the past three months, according to federal data reviewed by The Washington Post. Only 34 complaints had been filed in the preceding 22 months.
“My wife has requested that I don’t use cruise control or autopilot while she’s in the car, as we experienced an unwarranted, aggressive automatic braking episode which caused great pressure against her pregnant belly on a previous road trip,” one driver said in their report.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving tech has continued to be controversial and occasionally problematic, even as Elon Musk has touted the tech’s features and potential. Tesla recalled one iteration of the software in October after a surge in this so-called “phantom braking.” According to the Post, complaints have stayed elevated since the recall.
And this isn’t Tesla’s only issue at the moment.
Tesla also recalled 54,000 vehicles this week because a more aggressive Full Self-Driving mode allowed vehicles to roll through stop signs. The feature also warned that the car might “perform more frequent lane changes [and] will not exit passing lanes.”
As far as finding a culprit for the issue, Tesla has recently moved away from a radar-operated self-driving system and into one that relies on “Tesla Vision”: A series of in-car cameras that create a composite reality in which the vehicle makes decisions. The accounts of spooked drivers appears to have coincided with this change.
https://flagandcross.com/scary-tesla-owners-warn-of-random-uncontrolled-braking-and-stops/
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The wonders of global warming
In what local media outlets are labeling a “once in a lifetime phenomenon”, sea ice, usually found in more northern and polar oceans, has formed off the coast of Greece as the country continues to be ravaged by record snow and sub-zero cold.
Arctic Sea Ice being on something of a tear this year –currently standing at an 15+ year high— is one thing, but the ocean freezing-up in Greece demands a whole new level of denial from AGW proponents.
Ice formed off the coastal village of Sagiada in Thesprotia, Epirus after temperatures nosedived to almost -20C (-4F).
Sagiada is the westernmost point of mainland Greece. The village is situated on the shores of the Ionian Sea–an elongated bay of the Mediterranean Sea.
According to a report by climatestotravel.com, this part of Greece has a Mediterranean climate, with mild, rainy winters and hot, sunny summers. At sea level, continues the report, it never snows nor freezes.
The sea ice formed with Greece still reeling from the heavy snowstorms that swept the country earlier this week.
Record snow was measured in Athens, with incredibly rare flurries hitting the nation’s islands:
On Wednesday, Meteo.gr reported that 288 of its meteorological stations in Greece had logged below-freezing temperatures, of which 44 had recorded readings below -10C (14F). The lowest value was the -18.1C (-0.6F) in Lefkochori, Fthiotida — a new record.
https://electroverse.net/sea-freezes-in-greece-arctic-blast-sends-u-s-nat-gas-futures-to-record-highs-covid-narrative-crumbling/
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Reef notes
Jennifer Marohasy
With the recent A$1billion announced to save the ‘dying’ Great Barrier Reef, I wonder how many realise there has been an increase in the amount of coral dug-up and sold overseas as part of the aquarium trade – the quota is now 200 tonnes each year. This is not a lot considering the size of the entire ecosystem that is visible from outer space, but it is probably more than is going to be replanted with the A$1 billion.
When the announcement of the new funding was made, there was commentary that this is about the upcoming federal election and keeping the Cairns-based seat of Leichhardt and, also, satisfying the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation monitors, who will soon be taking another look at Australia’s environmental policies. The focus has been on climate policies. There will be funding for replanting corals, ostensibly dead from bleaching – from global warming. No mention anywhere that each year more and more tonnes of coral, many of the species listed as endangered, are being excavated and exported. With the new funding for replanting, this could end up being one big hole-digging and filling in operation.
The UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee is considering a draft ruling declaring the Great Barrier Reef to be a World Heritage Site in danger. University Professor Terry Hughes, a well-known proponent of ‘The End is Nigh’, was on national radio saying that the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Area deserved to be downgraded by the United Nations because he didn’t like our climate change policies. It had nothing to do with the state of the coral reefs, not even those being sold overseas.
Journalist Fran Kelly made the very reasonable comment that a listing should have something to do with actual impacts.
‘…if we look at it more broadly though, Terry, I mean, if climate change impacts are used as a justification for an endangered listing, then every reef must be, therefore, listed in danger because climate change is a problem [all over the world]. Every World Heritage Site that is affected in any way by climate change, must be listed as endangered. Is that the logical extension of this?’
The University Professor gave a very political reply.
‘Not really. There are 29 World Heritage Sites that have coral reefs. Four of them are in Australia. But other countries that are responsible for those World Heritage properties have much better climate policies [not necessarily better reefs] than Australia does. Australia is still refusing to sign up to a net zero target by 2050, which makes it a complete outlier. And I think this draft decision from UNESCO is pointing the finger at Australia and saying, If you’re serious about saving the Great Barrier Reef, you need to do something about your climate policies.’
Australia is a rich country with a population concentrated in the south – a long way from the corals. Commercial fishing is heavily regulated. Tourism is heavily regulated. Every town has a sewage treatment plant. High-tech agriculture is the other side of heavily mangroved-river catchments. Temperatures are monitored at eighty sites within the Great Barrier Reef by the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences, and individual records do not show a long-term warming trend. There are no studies showing either a deterioration in coral cover or water quality.
Back in 1998, soon after the World Wildlife Fund Inc. launched its campaign focussed on the impacts of fishing and agriculture on the Great Barrier Reef, WWF revenue from the federal government increased seven-fold from less than $500,000 to more than $3.5 million in just four years.
In April 2018, then Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull approved a $443 million grant to the tiny Great Barrier Reef Foundation with $86 million for ‘administration’.
Those who believe in the competence of government and the integrity of science might assume that in the process of grant distribution, scientists identify and prioritise the big remaining research questions, through some process that included rigorous checks and some quality assurance. But we know from Peter Ridd’s book Reef Heresy: Science, Research and the Great Barrier Reef that there is none – no accountability, no quality assurance, no system for prioritising.
But not even $443 million seems like a great deal of money any more, not with the recently announced $1 billion.
With some of this new money going to go to the consortium that want to replant corals there will be jobs for scuba divers, and it will be filmed by underwater videographers, marine scientists will collect data around the program and boats will be chartered. There will be money for almost everyone who wants to participate – if they are vaccinated, believe in human-caused climate change and that the Great Barrier Reef is dying.
There may even be money for the ‘coral fishery’ people – that is the euphemism for the trade in rare and endangered corals. Never mind corals are not fish! An October 2021 assessment of the Queensland Coral Fishery by the federal Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment explains there is a quota of 200 tonne total allowable catch, split between ‘specialty coral’ (30 per cent) and ‘other coral’ (70 per cent).
Many of the corals are listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES). The assessment report does mention that there is some concern around the lack of harvest limits for CITES-listed coral species and the lack of adequate mechanisms to enforce harvest limits. It also explains that the take of corals has been increasing. But not a mention of this 200-tonne quota by Fran Kelly or Terry Hughes on Radio National. It was somewhat brazen of Professor Hughes to suggest that it is not the state of the corals but politics that should dictate how a coral reef is listed by the United Nations.
And I can’t image that his team at James Cook University will be measuring the area of coral replanted relative to the area dug up over the next few years.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/02/australian-notes-311
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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3 February, 2022
Europe’s gas demand declining, coal demand rising
Coal power is now a lot cheaper
Europe’s natural gas demand is set to decline this year as buyers begin to favor lower-priced coal, the International Energy Agency said in the latest edition of its quarterly gas market report.
According to the IEA, gas demand on the continent is seen declining by 4 percent this year, after rising by more than 5 percent last year. The decline will be partially driven by a reduction in gas burning in the power sector, the agency said, which is seen declining by 6 percent this year.
The decline will be partially compensated by renewables, according to the IEA, which should see a “strong expansion” this year, but also “high gas prices continue to weigh on its competitiveness vis-à-vis coal-fired generation.”
“Exceptionally high gas – and by extension electricity – prices have hurt consumers, utilities and wholesalers, and are likely to have a lasting negative impact beyond the current seasonal tension,” the agency warned, adding that the adverse effects of the gas shortage were not limited to Europe.
The report noted that developing markets were particularly vulnerable to energy supply shocks that they were already experiencing. On top of this, there was also concern for food supply due to tighter availability of gas-based fertilizers, the International Energy Agency also said.
Global gas supply is seen remaining tight, the IEA also said, citing production outages, project delays, and a slow pace of new investment decisions on new production capacity.
“In the absence of strong policies to curb demand growth to achieve net zero emission targets, gas supply adequacy could emerge as a concern for the medium term on a combination of recent LNG project delays, the relatively small number of new LNG final investment decisions (FIDs) in 2020-2021 and a structural decline in upstream spending since the early 2010s,” the IEA said in the report.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/IEA-Europes-Gas-Demand-Set-To-Decline-In-Favor-Of-Coal.html?mc_cid=90ada3c8ef&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Net Zero push could bankrupt Church of England, Archbishop Welby is warned
Worried clergy say new rules on boilers would hit rural churches hardest and could bankrupt struggling parishes
Justin Welby’s push for net zero could force churches to close and leave congregations shivering in the pews, clergy have warned.
The Church of England is proposing to cajole vicars into replacing traditional boilers with green alternatives, a move likely to pile excessive costs on parishes when some are already close to collapse.
Those that insist on a gas or oil replacement will be faced with a lengthy and bureaucratic process.
It means churches whose boilers break down and cannot afford a climate-friendly alternative could go for months without heat.
Bankrupt struggling parishes
Worried clergy have said that the rule, which will be presented at next month’s General Synod, would hit rural churches hardest and could bankrupt struggling parishes.
It echoes increasing concern across society about the costs to ordinary people of carbon-reduction targets.
The Church of England’s drive to reach net zero by 2030 is more aggressive than that of the Government, which has an overall target of 2050, with a pledge to ban gas boilers in new buildings from 2025 and to prevent them being sold at all from 2035.
In November Archbishop Welby likened climate change to the rise of Nazism, although he later apologised for the comparison.
The new proposal comes amid warnings about the future of the parish, fuelled by the pressures of the pandemic.
A leaked document last year suggested that the Church of England might need to do away with the current grassroots model to stay financially viable.
Church attendance outside London has declined 40 per cent over the past three decades, and countryside parishes are increasingly struggling to pay their priests.
Father Marcus Walker, rector at Great St Bartholomew’s in London and part of the Save The Parish campaign, said: "This is a policy designed by people who won’t actually have to implement it.
“It will increase the difficulties of those struggling to keep their parishes open and it will certainly tip some over the edge.”
The Church of England says that replacements for fossil fuel boilers should include heat pumps, biomass boilers, or an electric boiler run on renewable electricity.
Heat pumps are considerably more expensive to install, more expensive to run, and would be unsuitable to spacious, poorly insulated buildings such as churches, according to experts.
Mike Foster, CEO of the Energy and Utilities Alliance, applauded the church for trying to tackle climate change, but added: “It is potentially misguided advice at this stage, partly because swapping a traditional gas boiler for a heat pump is going to mean an upfront cost far in excess of what a replacement boiler would be.
“Parishes are not awash with cash, so how on earth can they afford to put in heat pumps?”
According to government figures, the average cost of replacing a fossil fuel burning boiler in a domestic home is roughly £2,500 compared with £10,000 for installing a heat pump, while the running costs for a heat pump are about £200 higher per year.
Biogas is not carbon neutral
Mr Foster said waiting for hydrogen to be blended into the gas network, expected to begin next year, would be the most viable option for reducing carbon as it would not necessitate equipment change.
Meanwhile biogas is not carbon neutral.
“My advice to any vicar is to replace what you’ve got with what you’ve got,” he said.
The Church of England allows vicars to apply to their archdeacon for permission for non-major changes to their church, including a like-for-like boiler replacement.
However, if the General Synod adopts the new proposal, named GS2245, to get permission for a replacement gas or oil boiler they will have to apply for a Faculty, a process which requires extensive documentary preparation and often legal and architectural advice, akin to making a planning application to a local council.
Decisions frequently take months to come back.
Father Walker said: “When a boiler goes down it will take forever to get a new one in.
“Will churches have to close over the whole winter or ask parishioners to worship in freezing conditions?”
“This is going to hit rural parishes the hardest - it’s going to make life really difficult.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/30/net-zero-push-could-force-churches-close-leave-parishioners/?mc_cid=85a4faa2e6&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Why is it that climate change on Earth is supposed to be due to recent human emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas of life?
Ian Plimer
There is a well-documented record of billions of years of climate change in our planet’s geological past well before humans existed. Why is this ignored by climate activists? There is validated evidence of climate change on planets and moons in our Solar System in places that humans have not visited. This is also ignored by climate activists.
We now have hints of climate change on distant exoplanets which will be validated with new space science. Whether we look into the past, the present or the future, there is climate change in our galaxy and it never has been shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming.
I follow the science about this planet and others. It is exciting, always changes and is certainly not settled. Never has been. Never will be.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/02/white-dwarfs/
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How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future
Book review by Prof Michael Kelly:
This is a hugely important and very timely book. At a time when thinkers in the developed world are split between environmental catastrophism and unbridled techno-optimism, here is a firmly grounded analysis of the present day, informed by the previous history that got us here, and the likely short-term future. This history includes many failed predictions of the future which are quickly forgotten, as exemplified by population explosion fears on the one hand and unlimited nuclear power on the other just 50 years ago.
Most of what we hear and read about today by way of prognostications and nostrums for the future will simply not come to pass. The complexity and inertia of the systems of the modern world – energy acquisition and use, food production, materials requirements for contemporary living – place strong constraints on the pace of change in any preferred direction. This is true even if all the world leaders should agree to move in any particular direction, say on a net-zero global economy by 2050, with a global command economy.
Vaclav Smil is an internationally acclaimed scholar, and has been working on energy, food and materials for decades: he has an encyclopaedic knowledge and penetrating insight. When one talks about decarbonisation, what to make of the following facts about everyday life? A medium sized (125gm) tomato put on an English table out of season has involved the consumption of 75mL of oil to get there, not much short of its own volume! The same ratio applies to a chicken (up to 1L of oil per kg of meat) and bread (0.6L of oil per kg of loaf). The four materials pillars of modern living are ammonia (half the world is fed on foods that have had the benefit of artificial fertiliser), plastics, steel and cement: the annual production of these are 150 million, 370 million, 1.8 billion and 4.5 billion tonnes respectively. Note that silicon comes a long way down at 10 thousand tonnes per year!
The key sentence from the introduction is:
The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast, but in a democratic society no contest of ideas or proposals can proceed in rational ways without all sides sharing at least a modicum of relevant information about the real world, rather than trotting out their biases and advancing claims disconnected from physical possibilities.”
The author is at pains to point out that he is not a pessimist or an optimist, he is a scientist: there is no agenda in understanding how the real-world works.
The seven chapters explain energy, food production, materials, globalization, risks, the environment and the future. Each and every chapter serves as a reality check on public discourse, and anyone armed with the contents of this book will be able to detect arrant nonsense dressed up as gospel by the ‘experts’.
Globalization is not inevitable, but has led to greater efficiencies, but also greater risks – 70% of rubber gloves in the world were made in one factory in China. COVID-19 will have long-term effects on humanity, not available to the futurists of the past, and onshoring jobs from offshore may proceed in the cause of greater resilience.
Our perception of risks had always been very irrational. We are many times more likely to die in a road accident or a fall at home than in a terrorist incident.
On matters of the environment, there is no free lunch in human living, but a reduction in the vast levels of food waste, and a more modest diet in the developed world for example could do more good than rapid decarbonization. Meanwhile the UN rightly prioritised the elimination of human poverty and hunger over environmental protection in their ordering of the sustainable development goals. In fact, it is wealthy countries who are repairing the environment.
The future will be neither a nirvana nor a hell on earth, but an evolution of the past, a combination of our best endeavours hindered by obstacles and aided by serendipity.
What is also of great concern is the extent to which knowledgeable people are meretricious (my word) in misleading the less knowledgeable. Why are the extreme scenarios (for good or evil) focussed on to the extent that they become taken up as the mostly likely future? This is particularly bad in the case of climate science studies and the way the results are portrayed in the media.
This book is a very strong antidote of realism against both the relentless pessimism and the blithe optimism of our day.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/how-the-world-really-works-a-scientists-guide-to-our-past-present-and-future/?mc_cid=90ada3c8ef&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Corporates face climate crackdown from big investors
Australia’s biggest polluters face a crackdown from a powerful group of climate investors who have vowed to push for new executive leaders if companies fail to move to net zero emissions or signal enough ambition on green transition plans.
Climate Action 100+, a global investor group which controls $65tn in assets, plans to boost its focus on how big business and emitters are responding to the threat of climate change amid concern a flurry of net zero announcements may not be followed through with significant action in the short and medium term.
Integrating climate risk into financial accounts will be among the focus areas in 2022 annual general meetings, according to Climate Action 100+ which includes Australia’s biggest superannuation funds including AusSuper, Cbus and UniSuper.
“In 2022, investor signatories expect more climate-focused shareholder resolutions and higher votes, including a laser focus on how company net zero goals are being met with short, medium and long-term emissions reduction targets aligned with the Paris Agreement,” the group said in its 2021 progress update.
“An increasingly critical and hot topic, they also anticipate more resolutions on integrating climate risk into financial accounts and oversight of such risks by audit committees and auditors.”
Australian corporates are increasingly under pressure on climate change as institutional investors such as Climate Action 100+, backed by domestic superannuation funds, use their power to hold companies to account.
Companies in the spotlight in Australia include AGL Energy, BHP, Rio Tinto and Origin Energy while globally 111 of the 165 focus companies have now set 2050 net zero targets.
The group last year started probing the credentials of non-executive directors serving on Australian energy companies, questioning whether stacking boards with oil and gas veterans was appropriate given escalating climate pressures. It’s indicated it will step up that focus into 2022.
Investors “have made it clear that if companies aren’t willing or able to respond to the challenge of moving towards a net zero transition, they will look for new leadership. Where signatories don’t see required progress from companies, the next step is to ask board directors to respond to these challenges and bring about required change.”
Some 70 new investors joined the Climate Action 100+ group in 2021, marking 170 per cent growth since 2017.
One of the world’s biggest money managers, State Street Global Advisers, put Australian companies on notice earlier in January that they need to come clean on how they intend to hit net zero targets, arguing that climate change represents a “systemic risk” that has the potential to destroy value.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/corporates-face-climate-crackdown-from-big-investors-climate-action-100/news-story/061ff430e613372b2342cb5e37f83d2e
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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2 February, 2022
Three out of five Britons would not vote for an MP who backs ban of new petrol and diesel cars
BORIS Johnson is facing a voter backlash over plans to ban new petrol and diesel cars sales in 2030. Three out of five would not vote for an MP who backs the idea, a survey reveals.
The growing anger is revealed in the study of 41,000 road users, including car, van and taxi drivers, truckers, bikers, cyclists and walkers
There is also overwhelming support for a referendum on the Government action to hit its net zero target for harmful emissions.
Most alarming for the PM is hardening opposition to curbs on motorists among voters in the former Red Wall seats.
Some 79 per cent of them say it is unlikely or impossible he will hit a 2050 net zero goal.
The growing anger is revealed in the study of 41,000 road users, including car, van and taxi drivers, truckers, bikers, cyclists and walkers.
Tory Craig Mackinlay, chairman of the Net Zero Scrutiny group of MPs, said: “A big backlash is brewing unless we see a change of direction soon.”
FairfuelUK founder Howard Cox, who organised the survey with the Alliance of British Drivers and the Motorcycle Action Group, accused ministers of “green fantasy edicts”.
He warned it could lead to a “massacre at the ballot box” for the Tories.
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/motors/8355455/prime-minister-lose-key-voters-banning-petrol-cars/
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UK Gas Production Could Plunge 75% By 2030
The UK could become much more vulnerable to price shocks and geopolitical events unless new offshore fields are approved and developed—and the UK’s gas production could plummet by 75 percent by 2030, the offshore energy industry body OGUK said on Thursday.
Without new investment in new gas fields in the North Sea, the UK will be left more vulnerable to crisis, such as the current one between Russia and Ukraine, the industry association noted.
Additional price shocks would add to the ongoing energy crisis in the UK where gas and power suppliers are going bust, while customers face a cost-of-living crisis when the energy market regulator Ofgem raises the price cap on energy bills as of April 1. The worst is yet to come for consumers in April, when millions of households would be thrown into energy poverty, with many people having to choose between eating and heating.
Domestic production currently meets 47 percent of the UK’s gas demand, 31 percent comes from pipeline imports from Europe, mostly from Norway, and 21 percent from LNG imports. In 2020, Russia supplied 3.4 percent of the UK’s gas, OGUK said.
According to the industry body, new fields are needed in the UK North Sea to stave off a predicted 75-percent plunge in domestic supplies if no new fields are approved. Many fields remain to be tapped, according to geological surveys. Such fields are estimated to contain oil and gas equivalent to 10-20 billion barrels of oil—enough to sustain production for 10-20 years, OGUK said.
“In the longer term, if UK gas production is allowed to fall as predicted, then our energy supplies will become ever more vulnerable to global events over which we have no control – as we now see happening with Russia’s threatened invasion of Ukraine,” OGUK Energy Policy Manager Will Webster said on Thursday.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/UK-Gas-Production-Could-Plunge-75-By-2030.html?mc_cid=85a4faa2e6&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Europe is closing down nuclear power just when it really needs energy
Countries are plunging deeper into an energy crisis, but some governments are still shutting down reactors.
As the Fukushima disaster unfolded in Japan in 2011, then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a dramatic decision that delighted her country’s anti-nuclear movement: all reactors would be ditched.
What couldn’t have been predicted was that Europe would find itself mired in one of the worst energy crises in its history. A decade later, the continent’s biggest economy has shut down almost all its capacity already. The rest will be switched off at the end of 2022 — at the worst possible time.
Wholesale power prices are more than four times what they were at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Governments are having to take emergency action to support domestic and industrial consumers faced with crippling bills, which could rise higher if the tension over Ukraine escalates. The crunch has not only exposed Europe’s supply vulnerabilities, but also the entrenched cultural and political divisions over the nuclear industry and a failure to forge a collective vision.
Other regions meanwhile are cracking on. China is moving fast on nuclear to try to clean up its air quality. Its suite of reactors is on track to surpass that of the U.S., the world’s largest, by as soon as the middle of this decade. Russia is moving forward with new stations at home and has more than 20 reactors confirmed or planned for export construction, according to the World Nuclear Association.
“I don’t think we’re ever going to see consensus across Europe with regards to the continued running of existing assets, let alone the construction of new ones,” said Peter Osbaldstone, research director for power and renewables at Wood Mackenzie Group Ltd. in the U.K. “It’s such a massive polarizer of opinions that national energy policy is required in strength over a sustained period to support new nuclear investment.”
France, Europe’s most prolific nuclear energy producer, is promising an atomic renaissance as its output becomes less reliable. Britain plans to replace aging plants in the quest for cleaner, more reliable energy sources. The Netherlands wants to add more capacity, Poland also is seeking to join the nuclear club, and Finland is starting to produce electricity later this month from its first new plant in four decades.
Belgium and Spain, meanwhile, are following Germany’s lead in abandoning nuclear, albeit on different timeframes. Austria rejected it in a referendum in 1978.
Nuclear power is seen by its proponents as vital to reaching net-zero targets. Once built, reactors supply low-carbon electricity all the time, unlike intermittent wind or solar.
Plants, though, take a decade or more to construct at best and the risk is high of running over time and over budget. Finland’s new Olkiluoto-3 unit is coming on line after a 12-year delay and billions of euros in financial overruns.
Then there’s the waste, which stays hazardous for 100,000 years. For those reasons European Union members are still quarreling over whether nuclear even counts as sustainable.
Electorates are also split. Polling by YouGov Plc published in December found that Danes, Germans and Italians were far more nuclear-skeptic than the French, British or Spanish.
“It comes down to politics,” said Vince Zabielski, partner at New York-based law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, who was a nuclear engineer for 15 years. “Everything political ebbs and flows, but when the lights start going off people have a completely different perspective.”
Indeed, there’s a risk of rolling blackouts this winter. Supply concerns plaguing Europe have sent gas and electricity prices to record levels and inflation has ballooned. There’s also mounting tension with Russia over a possible invasion of Ukraine, which could lead to disrupted supplies of gas. All this is strengthening the argument that Europe needs to reduce its dependence on international sources of gas.
Europe will need to invest 500 billion euros ($568 billion) in nuclear over the next 30 years to meet growing demand for electricity and achieve its carbon reduction targets, according to Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner. His comments come after the bloc unveiled plans last month to allow certain natural gas and nuclear energy projects to be classified as sustainable investments.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-01-31/europe-s-nuclear-power-plants-are-disappearing-just-as-energy-crisis-hits-hard
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Erratic output from renewables requires Australian government agency to spend a lot on bringing in other electricity supplies
Costs incurred by the body that keeps the lights on across Australia's major electricity systems are skyrocketing as surging levels of renewable energy increasingly challenge the security of the grid.
Following another year in which record amounts of renewable energy were added to the national electricity mix, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) is pushing for a big hike in funding to oversee one of its key jurisdictions.
The agency wants $156.2 million over three years to 2025 — a 66 per cent jump on the previous period – to operate the main electricity market in Western Australia.
In a submission to WA's economic watchdog, the AEMO said it needed the extra funds to help cope with the increasing complexity and volatility in the market as more and more renewable energy flooded onto the system.
"While the growing level of variable renewable generation is helping the [WA system] transition towards clean, low-cost generation, it can pose operational challenges," it said in its submission.
The proposal mirrors the AEMO's actions in Australia's biggest power system — the National Electricity Market (NEM) – where the organisation has faced steeply rising costs to stabilise a grid that services almost 10 million customers.
As part of its most recent snapshot of the market, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) noted the AEMO was spending tens of millions of dollars on contingency measures to ensure the NEM did not run short of power at vulnerable times.
Much of the outlay was on back-up capacity — provided either by power plants that could generate electricity or major users who could scale back consumption when needed — for times when the grid was "under stress".
The AER noted that the so-called reliability and emergency reserve trader scheme had been in place for a number of years but had rarely been used until recently.
It said the scheme had now been invoked in all the biggest states, including South Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, while its total cost between 2017 and 2020 had reached $110m.
On top of this, the regulator said the AEMO was having to intervene in the normal functioning of the market by calling on more expensive power plants that could help with the stability of the grid.
The regulator noted these interventions had "risen sharply in recent years" as the AEMO ordered some generators, such as gas-fired power plants, to stay on while telling others, including wind and solar farms, to back off at certain times.
These interventions had come "at significant cost to consumers", the AER said, with the AEMO shelling out $50m in 2018 and 2019 to compensate affected generators.
Despite efforts to control these costs, the AER noted they were higher still in 2020 at $66m.
"Aside from formal compensation, the use of constraints or directions penalises consumers by driving up wholesale electricity prices," the AER said in its report.
"For example, by restricting wind or solar output that might have zero marginal costs, AEMO directions may lead to dispatch from synchronous (coal- or gas-fired) generators with higher costs."
The AEMO said the growing challenges of keeping the lights on were highlighted in its latest snapshot of the market, which showed record volatility in the three months to December 31.
Minimum demand for electricity from the grid fell to new lows in SA, NSW and Victoria as cooler weather subdued demand and growing amounts of rooftop solar pushed out fossil fuel-fired generators.
Across the NEM, the average output of renewable energy also increased from 31.6 per cent to 34.9 per cent, with maximum output reaching as high as 61.8 per cent for a short time on November 15.
The AEMO said the combination of factors helped to push wholesale power prices into negative territory, where generators have to pay someone to take their electricity, a record number of times.
At the same time, the market body noted its own costs "remained elevated" for the quarter as it scrambled to ensure there was enough back-up to meet demand when renewable generation fell away or when there were other shocks to the system.
Synergy, the WA state-owned power provider that would be up for the biggest share of the AEMO's cost increase in the west, declined to comment.
The Australian Energy Council, which represents big electricity providers, said the AEMO's spending plan reflected the "dramatic shift in the energy mix and significant government reforms".
But the council also said it was critical to ensure the AEMO's spending was transparent to ensure it was kept to a minimum.
"WA's Economic Regulation Authority … plays an important oversight role [in the WA market] and we expect to make a detailed submission once the ERA has released its draft determination," a spokesman said
https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2022-02-01/renewable-energy-levels-send-grid-management-costs-soaring/100792576
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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1 February, 2022
Putin’s Green Fifth Column
German environmentalists have made the country dependent on Russian energy, a weakness with geopolitical implications we are seeing now.
It is now apparent that unless further actions are taken to deter him, Vladimir Putin intends to proceed with his plan to mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Yet any effective military or economic deterrent is being undermined by Germany, which has refused to agree to any meaningful threat of sanctions. Indeed, Germany has gone so far as to attempt to block other NATO nations from sending Ukraine any arms to defend itself. According to the Germans, Putin needs to be free to slaughter and subjugate Ukrainians, because otherwise he might cut off Germany’s natural-gas supplies.
In fact, Germany’s dependence on Russia for its natural gas is an entirely self-inflicted weakness.
Let’s compare the sources of German and French electricity.
A number of important points stand out from this data. In the first place, note that the Germans get far more energy from coal than from natural gas Note also that while Germany now only gets 4 GW of power from nuclear energy it previously obtained 22 GW of nuclear power, nearly twice the total amount it gets from all gas, not just the 40 percent that comes from Russia. Finally note that Germany’s “green” power has resulted in 541 gms of CO2 emission per kWh. This is six times the 95 gm/kWh of nuclear-powered France.
In short, Germany’s dependence on Russian gas is entirely an artifact of Germany’s decision to shut down its nuclear-power plants. This dependence is not only driving Germany to sabotage any effort to deter Russian military expansionism, it is also funding the Russian war effort itself.
Russia’s foreign gas sales totaled $54 billion last year, while its defense budget was $62 billion. Through their gas purchases, the Germans are literally financing Russia’s war on Ukraine.
There is no limiting principle to this dependency. While Ukraine is not a member of NATO, the German argument for passivity in the face of Russian aggression would hold if Russia attacked the Baltic states or Poland as well. Sorry we can’t help you, dear Poles. Germany needs Russian gas.
Not only that, but like a drug addict seeking to induce his friends to join him in enslavement to his pusher, they are trying to increase Russian leverage over all of Europe by pushing the EU to replace nuclear power with natural gas on a continent-wide basis. Thus, in the EU’s deliberations over its energy “taxonomy” they are arguing that natural gas should be considered carbon-free, but that nuclear power should not.
In making this case, the Germans are maintaining a position that is precisely the opposite of what all know to be physical reality. Not only that, but the Green movement, which effectively dominates Germany’s political ideas, has had a continent-wide campaign — with vocal Russian backing — to prevent Europe from becoming independent in natural gas by fracking its abundant shale resources
The Greens have also acted to block the establishment of liquid natural gas (LNG) terminals that would allow the importation of LNG from the Unites States or the Mideast. So the Germans and their Green international allies are not really in favor of natural gas. They are just in favor of Russian natural gas.
In the United States the Green movement operates primarily through the Democratic Party. While they do not completely control the Biden administration, they have a strong voice in it. Accordingly, to appease his Green supporters, President Biden has acted to sabotage American oil and gas production while calling on OPEC nations to increase their output, lest prices rise too high.
These actions do not align with the claim of the Green movement that it is simply trying to protect the global environment. Oil and gas produced in Russia and OPEC nations do not merely create the same amount of pollution as the oil and gas produced in the West, they create considerably more. This is because Russia and OPEC countries have much weaker environmental enforcement than Western countries. Furthermore, many of them flare enormous amounts of natural gas associated with oil production.
In contrast, because the United States has a well-developed pipeline system that can bring associated gas to market, only a small fraction of our gas is flared. Furthermore, the claim of Green advocates in Germany that they must close their nuclear-power plants because of fears that they might experience a domestic Fukushima is simply absurd. Germany has never, and can never, be swept by tsunamis. As for other kinds of accidents, the record is clear. Close to a thousand pressurized water reactors have been operating worldwide on land and sea since 1954, and not one of them has ever harmed a single member of the public. No other energy source has a safety record remotely as good.
The positions of the Green movement make no sense whatsoever from the point of view of their alleged goals of reducing pollution, carbon emissions, and risks to public health. They make perfect sense, however, if viewed as a central effort in support of Putin’s war on the West.
Nuclear power and fracking are essential to the defense of the West. In fighting to shut them down, the Greens are serving as Putin’s fifth column
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/putins-green-fifth-column/
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As Biden doubles down on his War on Energy, prices keep shooting up
Think energy costs are high now? Just wait: President Joe Biden is doubling down on his War on Energy, and that’s sure to keep prices zooming up, up and . . . up.
Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency is writing new rules that will raise costs for fossil-fuel-based power plants. And, as Kenneth R. Timmerman noted in The Post last week, Team Biden has also moved to kill the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Pipeline, which would’ve brought Israeli and Cypriot natural gas to gas-starved Europe, helping ease shortages there.
The prez is also reviving Obama-era loan guarantees for “clean energy” producers, starting with $1 billion in backing for a Nebraska company that will make “clean” hydrogen.
That guarantee could cost taxpayers; think Solyndra, the solar-panel company Team Obama aided to the tune of $500 million before it went belly-up — only with the stakes now twice as high. Favoring such companies also puts traditional energy producers at a competitive disadvantage.
Meanwhile, a Russian invasion of Ukraine would worsen European energy shortages; Russia provides 30% to 40% of Europe’s oil, gas and coal. Team Biden is working on a plan to get global producers to increase output and divert gas shipments just in case, but many are already near maximum. Brace for worldwide prices to skyrocket even more.
Americans are already paying about $3.33 a gallon for gas at the pump, nearly 40% percent more than a year ago. US benchmark crude oil just hit a seven-year high, $87 a barrel. Home heating fuel costs are up more than 40%.
High gas-pump prices are particularly painful for lower-income workers who can’t work from home and must commute. But rising energy costs also fuel higher price tags for other goods and services — food, clothing, other manufactured products, transportation. Last month’s Consumer Price Index pegged overall inflation at 7%, the highest in 40 years. That, too, hits the poor hardest.
Biden’s green agenda clearly deserves blame for pushing up energy prices: He killed the Keystone XL pipeline, threatened to shutter another critical conduit between Canada and Michigan, halted oil and gas leases on federal lands and is discouraging production and investment by vowing an ever-greater crackdown on fossil fuels.
Think about it: Though oil prices were much higher in 2021 than in 2018, US shale producers’ capital investments were down by about a third last year; production fell from 2020, which was already down from 2019. And fewer supplies mean, yep . . . higher prices.
Indeed, the extremists driving Biden policy want higher energy prices — to make renewables seem more competitive.
The green agenda is all about pain and sacrifice in the name of fighting climate change. Yet with countries like China and India pumping out massive and growing amounts of CO2 each year, Biden’s measures can barely dent the rise in global emissions — but they’re doing a great job of inflicting pain.
https://nypost.com/2022/01/29/as-biden-doubles-down-on-his-war-on-energy-prices-keep-shooting-up/?mc_cid=85a4faa2e6&mc_eid=cc88839e92
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Larry Fink of BlackRock and His Global Crusade to Advance Green agenda
Larry Fink has emerged as the point man for environmental, social, and corporate governance capitalism, broadly known as ESG. As chief executive officer of BlackRock, which holds a $10 trillion global portfolio, Fink leverages this immense power to compel companies that BlackRock invests in to comply with an aggressive climate change and diversity agenda in their operations.
Fink’s BlackRock is committed to a net-zero carbon strategy, and seeks global conformity across its clients on sustainability reporting measures, i.e., they must prove that their companies are seeking this goal.
His annual letter to CEOs is closely read, and, it would seem, followed. In 2020, he stated that BlackRock “will be increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the business practices and plans underlying them.”
His 2021 letter noted the valiant protests for racial justice in 2020. And it concluded that companies must meet the demands of protesters: “We ask that your disclosures on talent strategy fully reflect your long-term plans to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion, as appropriate by region.”
All of this, we are told, leads to more profitable companies. For those corporate doubting Thomases, they too must learn to become profitable by following a detailed ESG disclosure regimen. But something does not quite sum here.
Last year, BlackRock sided with “Engine No. 1,” an activist investment fund that replaced directors on ExxonMobil with three of its selections because of a belief that the corporation was not seriously confronting the challenges of climate change in its business strategy. The new directors then attempted to compel the company to divest oil and gas fields in Mozambique and Vietnam. The gaping need is to look for more environmentally sustainable investments in green energy, they argued.
As a slow-rolling energy crisis and its increase in demand for conventional energy emerged in 2021 and 2022, that view is a bit precious.
From where does Fink’s breathless enthusiasm come? And why does it find such a receptive, pliable audience? To take climate change, most of America’s, and presumably the world’s, progress in decreasing its carbon footprint will come through technological growth and the impacts this growth will have on numerous industries. Companies will find themselves more productive while using less energy.
Coerced investments in sustainable energy technologies, whose markets are heavily created by state intervention, will likely prove negligible in lowering carbon emissions by comparison.
To gain understanding of Fink’s actions, we need to go deeper into the spiritual awakening in identity politics that could reshape virtually every institution in America and the West. In “American Awakening,” Joshua Mitchell argues that identity politics is a religious revival seeking salvation by replacing the substance of justice with the supplement of mercy.
Justice is the arduous task of giving to each person what is due to them. Our voluntary institutions in work, politics, and civic associations are predicated on us attempting and generally getting this virtue right. Mercy, Mitchell observes, is the supplement when we don’t. We ask and hope to be granted forgiveness when we fail our neighbor.
Mitchell further observes that we live in two worlds, two economies, the visible and invisible. Both are necessary to the human person.
The visible, tangible economy concerns profit and loss, debt and credit. These accounts must be measured and settled if the work of a modern economy is to go forward. The invisible economy is also part of our existence. Here, we deal with perennial notions of sin, guilt, forgiveness, and mercy.
Accounts in the invisible economy frequently can’t settle. Sins are too great; forgiveness is not sought; and the guilty go unpunished. Biblical religion has provided us the means to understand the enormity of these unmet accounts, and to help us live under their weight. But they remain different worlds, separate economies that we live in.
Identity politics seeks nothing less than to input the invisible economy’s ledger of sin and guilt into the visible economy of profit and loss, debt and credit. But it redesigns the invisible economy by its conception of sin and guilt. There is no original sin, only an original sinner, the heterosexual white male. And there are victims, holy innocents.
The heterosexual white male’s guilt cannot be atoned, he must endlessly bleed and attempt to show his innocence. Mitchell notes this is the most he can do. On him hangs the sins of colonialism, slavery, racism, sexism, bigotry against sexual minorities, and the rank injustice of the capitalist economy.
These sins committed by the transgressor against the innocent are unforgiveable. And this also means that our inheritance, defined and made by the white heterosexual male, is poison and must be replaced. There are only two terms: sinner and innocent.
Thus, identity politics replaces the liberal politics of deliberation, compromise, and building institutions with others and proclaims an illiberal politics that supplants our irredeemable inheritance.
And identity politics must be illiberal politics because it seeks the mercy of the invisible economy in the visible economy, and that latter economy cannot pay what is without cost. As Mitchell observes, if you eliminate the visible economy, you also eliminate justice.
But mercy needs justice. Mercy without justice becomes tyranny. Does Mitchell not give us the needed leverage to understand not only what amounts to the corporatist hijinks of Fink, but the unpayable debts sought by today’s Democratic Party, whose motivations and thought increasingly reflect the mindset of identity politics?
If the visible economy of the capitalist world is bound up with patriarchal white male sin and must be replaced with the mercy of the invisible economy as understood by identitarians, then, Mitchell notes, we can understand “the impossibly expensive Green New Deal and the demand that there be free health insurance, or free college tuition, or socialism—which for the upcoming generation is a proxy, really, for the negation of the ‘capitalist’ world of payment.” And this “produces a citizen who demands everything and thinks he deserves everything.”
Might we also understand Fink’s incessant push to remake global capitalism into a crusade for environmental atonement and diversity and racial equity?
When identity politics approaches the environment, Mitchell reasons, it finds nature poisoned, another holy innocent besmirched by the white man’s economy. Accordingly, “the stain of ‘anthropogenic climate change’ must be wiped away, either by dismantling the world white, heterosexual men have built with ‘unclean’ energy or by sustaining that world only with ‘clean,’ green energy.”
Fink’s charge to the “international community” of transnational institutions, corporations, and governments to plan comprehensively for a capitalist net-zero carbon economy by 2050 becomes similarly rational once we grasp the identity politics component that drives it.
Fink proclaims not his virtue; he proclaims his innocence. As a white male capitalist, he is inherently tied to the “unclean” substance—carbon dioxide—and the sins it commits on holy nature. Can it be redeemed under a new order dictated by the invisible economy of identity politics?
Fink’s calling is to make it so. So limitless are the debts of this economy that even BlackRock must acknowledge the inability of the visible economy to settle the account. BlackRock remains invested in unclean companies. And the protesters in front of BlackRock’s offices accusing them of hypocrisy and backsliding remind them of it. In the old religion, the path to hell was easy, the road to heaven was hard. Something of that remains.
ESG requirements on publicly traded companies are expensive and can lead to competitive disadvantages. Many companies will refuse them or accept them and then shirk. To deal with these sinners will require government orders, and the Securities and Exchange Commission now attempts to fill the void with proposed rules to mandate disclosure about sustainable business models and diversity metrics on their boards and employees.
Even here, BlackRock and others implore the SEC to go beyond its public company statutory mandate by similarly mandating private companies to comply with ESG disclosure requirements.
As reported in The Wall Street Journal, BlackRock’s public comment to the proposed SEC rule stated, “We encourage the SEC to explore its existing regulatory authority to mandate climate-related disclosures with respect to large private market issuers” in order “to avoid regulatory arbitrage.” No stone will be left unturned.
What to make, then, of BlackRock’s extensive operations in China, including being invited by the Chinese Communist Party to be the first foreign company to sell mutual fund investments to Chinese investors? BlackRock has poured its clients’ money into Chinese investments.
Of course, BlackRock also has ownership stakes in Chinese companies iFlytek and Hikvision, the former develops AI and voice recognition software while Hikvision manufactures surveillance equipment. Both companies were blacklisted by the United States government for participating in human rights abuses against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. BlackRock is invested in both and increased its holdings in Hikvision after the blacklisting.
Certainly, being a favored company like BlackRock in China’s strong-man economy guarantees a favorable return on investment. But BlackRock still must account for its actions in China under the standards of identity politics. The classic refrain of needing to be inside the system to change it surely will be voiced. But, ultimately, within the communion of holy innocents, American capitalism, led by the innocence-seeking hands of Fink, must become China’s carbon offset.
The invisible economy is a vengeful paymaster.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/01/28/larry-fink-esg-capitalism
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Green-tinged West shoots itself in the foot on energy
The absurdity of the West’s position in its confrontation with Russia over Moscow’s aggression towards Ukraine lies in this wretched equation.
If Russia invades Ukraine the only response threatened by the West – led by US President Joe Biden – is crippling sanctions. Chief among those sanctions must be stopping Russia earning the money to fund its army through its energy exports. Yet Russia provides a third of Europe’s gas, and half of Germany’s gas imports.
But Germany, in thrall to the excesses of Green enthusiasm, is abolishing not only its coal-fired energy but also its nuclear energy as well, making it hugely dependent on gas. Fracking is effectively banned in Britain, which is also moving to a ban on other gas exploration. Ditto other west European nations.
The greening democratic West is crippling its own energy production while in reality still relying overwhelmingly on fossil fuels. This has left much energy production, and therefore huge strategic leverage, to dictatorships which couldn’t care less about green issues, namely Russia, China and the regressive regimes of the Middle East.
The US-led Western alliance must deal with Russia AND China simultaneously, which is what the forthcoming Quad nations (US, Australia, India, Japan) foreign ministers meeting in Melbourne is really all about.
The Biden administration is rightly signalling, through the Melbourne Quad meeting, that while it is dealing with Russian aggression against Ukraine, it is not taking its eye off China.
This is a big assignment and the US needs all the help its allies can provide. US allies ought to be vastly more capable militarily, and they ought to be producing much more energy.
Russia is the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas and one of the biggest exporters of oil. Any conflict involving Russia will send commodity prices soaring.
Those European greens who think Australia’s climate policies are too permissive – especially, say, our natural gas production – may soon find their national governments paying to import Australian gas to keep European lights on.
They should be very glad there are still some Western-aligned, democratic, fossil fuel energy producers – especially Australia, Canada, the US and India.
The Biden administration itself is working through the agonising paradox of trying to restrict fossil fuel production domestically, while still relying on it fundamentally, and finding all its allies, including the progressive green Europeans, also rely on it.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/greentinged-west-shoots-itself-in-thefoot-on-energy/news-story/c48acfe1bfc417c50a22e3c71542f4f8
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