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
29 February, 2024
Green Billionaires Press Hollywood to Promote Armageddon Climate Messages in Movies
Green billionaires are pouring money into discreet campaigns to persuade Hollywood writers to catastrophise the climate in future film and television scripts. One of their main vehicles is Good Energy, which tells writers that showing anger, depression, grief or other emotion in relation to the climate crisis, “can only make characters more relatable”. Los Angeles-based Good Energy is funded by numerous billionaire foundations including Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Sierra Club and the Climate Emergency Fund; the latter operation is part-funded by Aileen Getty and is one of the paymasters of the Just Stop Oil pests.
Good Energy aims to weave climate alarm into all types of film-making, “especially” if it is not about climate. With the support of Bloomberg, it recently published ‘Good Energy – A Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change’. It claims the Playbook is “now the industry’s go-to guide to incorporating climate into any storyline or genre”. As with almost all green campaigning groups, Good Energy would not exist without the support of billionaire funding. These operations seek a supra-national collectivist Net Zero solution to a claimed climate emergency. Good Energy acknowledges it would not exist without this funding, adding, “as collaborators and champions, each has provided a unique contribution for which we are endlessly grateful”.
Announcing the launch of the ‘Playbook’, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the tax-efficient ‘charity’ channel for distributing the wealth of former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, noted that “accurate and relatable storytelling about climate impacts and solutions can grow public support and motivate decision makers”. As regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will recall, billionaire foundations are grooming populations around the world by funding a variety of press, political and academic operations. Most significant non-profit bodies seeking to stop the use of hydrocarbons are funded from these sources. Few green campaigns arise from ‘grass roots’ these days. Put to the vote, for instance, the Green Party in the U.K. loses most of its election seat deposits.
Since this is La La Land, Good Energy has some relevant advice for writers to normalise climate friendly actions. “Let’s reimagine what it looks like for a character to eat a plant-rich diet (Michelin Green Star restaurant, yes!), attend a protest or upcycle vintage clothes. And if your story requires a yacht, why not make it solar powered.” That last idea might appeal to super-yacht lover Leonardo DiCaprio, but private planes, the preferred method of transportation for many high-end Hollywood stars, might be a problem. Hypocrisy a problem with all this? Not according to the Playbook, which quotes climate activist Bill McKibben that “hypocrisy is the price of admission in this battle”. For plebs, gammons, fly-overs and deplorables, this of course translates as “you do what you are told and radically change your lives – we don’t give a flying flamingo”.
Needles so say, a mere climate crisis is not enough for über-woke luvvies. It is not separate from other critical social issues like racism, sexism, economic injustice and war. The Playbook notes that “indigenous people are the first climate scientists, and indigenous people are leading us through this climate crisis”. Climate can be a “generative lens with which to view any subject or character”, the Playbook helpfully notes. For scripted entertainment, observes Good Energy, “the emotional truth is as important as the literal truth”.
Good Energy was started in 2019 and its influence and services seem to be growing within the U.S. west coast film industry. Rolling Stone recently profiled the operation in an article titled ‘How Hollywood is Crafting A New Climate Change Narrative’. One of Good Energy’s “standout” projects last year was a collaboration with Scott Z Burns on the series Extrapolations for Apple TV+. This was said to be the first mainstream show centred entirely around climate. It starred Meryl Streep in eight interconnected stories over 33 years and was said to explore how the planet’s changing climate will affect family, work, faith and survival. Rolling Stone reports that the operation is “dedicated” to ensuring that within three years, 50% of contemporary TV and film acknowledges climate change.
It is unsurprising that the power of film and TV to influence large audiences is being captured to promote a political message. During the 2021 COP 26 meeting in Glasgow, seven soap opera programmes in the U.K. including Coronation Street and Eastenders joined forces to highlight climate change. Most of the plot lines were clumsily inserted into existing storylines and in an era of declining audiences, the experiment does not appear to have been repeated.
Nevertheless, elite billionaires are pulling out all the stops to insert climate Armageddon messaging into all forms of media. As I write, the BBC climate disinformation reporter Marco Silva is possibly learning how to improvise on the theme of a mango during his six-month sabbatical at the Oxford Climate Journalism Network. Past funders of the course include the European Climate Fund, which is supported by Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn. Previous course attendees were told to pick a fruit such as a mango and discuss why it wasn’t as tasty as the year before due to the impact of climate change.
Truly, La La Land meeting the make-believe world of BBC Verify.
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Apple kills its electric car after 10 years development
Apple has canceled its plans to release an electric car with self-driving abilities, a secretive product that had been in the works for nearly a decade.
The company told employees in an internal meeting on Tuesday that it had scrapped the project and that members of the group would be shifted to different roles, including in Apple’s artificial intelligence division, according to a person briefed on the discussion, who requested anonymity because the announcement was not public.
As part of the restructuring, Kevin Lynch, an executive who had been involved in the car project, will report to John Giannandrea, the company’s head of artificial intelligence strategy, the person said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/technology/apple-ends-electric-car-plan.html
***************************************************Nearly half of young US voters won't pay more than $10 per month to fight climate change
Nearly half of all young voters are not willing to pay more than $10 a month to fight climate change, despite Joe Biden claiming it's an 'existential threat' and making it the center of his re-election campaign.
Less than half (45%) of the youngest crop of voters aged 18-34 would be willing to spend $10 or less per month to combat climate change, according to a recent survey by CRC Research for 85 Fund obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.
And one out of five (20%) in the same age bracket responded that they would not pay anything at all, according to the poll results.
The results were similar among voters aged 25-34, which may be a wake-up call for President Joe Biden who continues to call climate change the most pressing threat facing America today.
The findings are surprising considering younger voters site climate change as a top political issue and it is expected to be a key motivator heading into the 2024 elections.
President Biden is putting climate change at the center of his re-election campaign - calling it the 'last existential threat' to a small group of donors at a California fundraiser last week.
The Biden administration has worked to position itself as a champion of climate initiatives since day one - which generally appeals to younger voters.
But the CRC Research poll shows that although younger voters may be passionate about the topic, they don't want to spend their own money to fix it.
'Despite claims they are leading the charge on climate change, it turns out young people are actually just sheep in wolves clothing. They demand 'climate action', but demand someone else pay for it,' said Steve Milloy, a lawyer who briefly served at Donald Trump's Environmental Protection Agency.
'They disguise their rank hypocrisy by posturing as 'climate activists.' Their refusal to put their money where their mouths are just underscores how unserious they are as citizens and voters,' he told DailyMail.com
The CRC Research survey also found that 26 percent of 25 to 35 year old voters would not be willing to pay anything to combat climate change.
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Australia: Victorian blackout has lessons
When the lights went out last week for 500,000 Victorians, it wasn’t all bad. Most still had natural gas to turn to for cooking and some for hot water.
But gas connections to new homes are banned in Victoria from 2024. Clearly, the great fortune of being part of the Lucky Country, blessed with dual energy supplies, was too great a first-world burden for the socialist-left Allan state government to handle.
It means that for these new homes, the next time the lights go out, everything goes out.
However, Victoria’s diabolic blackout might be the best double-edged sword the state’s future could have ordered.
What happened last week may have been the first time many youngsters couldn’t charge their mobile phones, laptops, or other electronic gadgetry. Their lives and their lifelines also went flat.
Until then, they had been removed from reality. Until then, it was someone else’s problem…
Only now might they think about the importance of the essential service of electricity, and better still, the importance of cheap and reliable energy. One day they will have to pay the bills.
And so it is that there may be more power in a flat phone battery than we think.
Only now might the Net Zero zealots begin thinking about the real world, just as theirs shatters into texting and tweeting oblivion.
The blackouts, with the promise of more to come, might just be the real-life lesson in understanding the old saying that you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
Schooled in Net Zero nonsense, the younger generations and their educators have largely applauded the direction of phasing out coal and pursuing a renewables nirvana.
With eyes wide shut, they believe they are saving the world one poppycock plan at a time. They have skipped school and rallied for the cause. They have spent school hours making placards and writing letters to Ministers. Some have voted for the cause and more will follow.
Little might they think that their increasingly battery-led lifestyle, pumped up by power, is not the life that their childhood counterparts in the Congo are living.
Little might they think of the trees being pulled down in order to put up wind farms, or the interruption to whale migration at sea. Little might they think about what a romantic sunset could look like in years to come with industrial love on the horizon.
Little might they think of the increasing plethora of coal-driven power, mining, and industrial operations elsewhere in the world, while Australia’s decision-makers pull the plug on ours.
They are in the dark more than they might want to realise.
For first-time power blackout sufferers, it won’t be the temporary death of their fridge or freezer worrying them. These days, most order-in a solution to their food problems or go to a local supermarket – backed up by diesel generators – to get a tub of ice cream on demand.
No, it is only the absence of mobile phones, iPads, and the like that might make the younger generations understand what nobody else is telling them: reliable energy is really important.
When they can recharge their phones – and their lives – they should google the following: nuclear energy, reliable energy, low-cost energy, and underground powerlines.
Then they should google future job prospects in Australia.
But it’s a bit hard to find the buttons in the dark.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/switching-on-reality
***************************************28 February, 2024
Study: Air Pollution Increases Chances Of Breast Cancer By 45%, Prostate Cancer By Up To 28%
GIGO: Garbage in garbage out. This is just a meta analysis and the conclusions of such are only as good as the research reports surveyed. And air pollution studies are notorious for poor design leading to unsafe conclusions. I have critiqued many of them. The claims below can safely be regarded as not proven
Long-term exposure to air pollution significantly increases the chances of developing various forms of cancer, a study has claimed.
The findings of the study, which are yet to be published, have been accessed by the Daily Mail. It claims that air pollution can enhance the risk of getting breast cancer by 45 per cent and prostate cancer by between 20 and 28 per cent.
The experts reviewed as many as 27 studies for their analysis, and found that the risk of dying from breast cancer also increases by 80 per cent among people who are exposed to air pollution as opposed to those who are not.
The study said that long-term exposure to PM 2.5 can cause damage to the DNA, thereby, increasing the risk of getting cancer.
PM 2.5 are tiny particles in the air that can enter the lungs and bloodstream. The PM 2.5 limit set by the World Health Organization is 5 ?g/m3. However, most countries have failed to meet the WHO-prescribed limits.
"PM 2.5 also disrupts glands throughout the body that produce hormones. This is a particular concern for breast and prostate cancer which can be driven by hormones," per an excerpt from the study.
Air pollution was also found to be linked with a more aggressive disease and a poorer prognosis.
What do other studies claim?
The finding is mirrored by similar studies conducted over the years. A study published in the Lancet revealed that pollution caused approximately 9 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019. It included countries like China, the US, and many African and European countries.
While another study claimed that air pollution caused by fossil fuels is killing 5 million people every year across the world.
According to the World Health Organization, air pollution is responsible for about 7 million premature deaths every year. It adds that the disease burden due to air pollution is now estimated to be on par with other major global health risks.
In some cases, extremely tiny air pollution particles can even cross the blood-brain barrier and damage the neurons directly. However, Particulate Matter (PM) 2.5 has especially become a major cause of concern for authorities across the globe since it is so small that it can penetrate deep into the lungs.
Air pollution can even affect your sleep. In 2017, a study was conducted in the United States to assess if it is linked with bad sleep. It was measured at one year and five years into the study. The participants also wore a wrist monitor to measure their movements during sleep.
It looked at the effects of nitrogen dioxide and PM2.5 on sleep and found that people who were exposed to the most nitrogen dioxide in the past five years had a 60% increased risk of sleeping poorly. People exposed to the most PM 2.5 had an almost 50% increased risk of sleeping poorly.
Various forms of cancer continue to claim millions of lives globally every year. It is the second leading cause of death globally, accounting for an estimated 9.6 million deaths in 2018.
Between 2016 and 2018 in the UK, more than half of new cases of cancer were breast, prostate, lung or bowel cancer. Every two minutes someone in the UK is diagnosed with cancer, says the data provided by Cancer Research UK.
However, breast cancer is the most common form of cancer, with around 47,000 people being diagnosed with the disease each year in England alone. Every year, around 56,000 women are diagnosed with the disease in the UK—around 150 women a day. Some 400 men in the UK are also diagnosed with breast cancer each year.
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The Next Big Climate Scare: Counting Climate Change Deaths
The next big climate scare is on the way. Advocates of measures to control the climate now propose that we begin counting deaths from climate change. They appear to believe that if people see a daily announcement of climate deaths, they will be more inclined to accept climate change policies. But it’s not even clear that the current gentle rise in global temperatures is causing more people to die.
In December, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spoke at COP28, the 28th United Nations Climate Conference, and mentioned climate-related deaths.
“We are seeing and beginning to pay attention and to count and record the deaths that are related to climate,” she said. “And by far the biggest killer is extreme heat.”
According to Ms. Clinton, Europe recorded 61,000 deaths from extreme heat in 2023, and she estimated that about 500,000 people died from heat across the world last year.
Global temperatures have been gently rising for the last 300 years. Temperature metrics from NASA, NOAA, and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom estimate that Earth’s surface temperatures have risen a little more than one degree Celsius, or about two degrees Fahrenheit, over the last 140 years. But are these warmer temperatures harmful to people?
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most cases of influenza occur during December to March, the cold months in the United States. Influenza season in the southern hemisphere takes place during the cold months there, April through September. The peak months for COVID-19 infections tended to be the cold periods of the year. More people usually get sick during cold months than in warm months.
More people also die during winter months than summer months, according to many peer-reviewed studies. For example, Dr. Matthew Falagas of the Alfa Institute of Medical Sciences and five other researchers studied seasonal mortality in 11 nations. The research showed that the average number of deaths peaked in the coldest months of the year in all of them.
The late Dr. William Keating studied temperature-related deaths in six European countries for people aged 65 to 74. He concluded that deaths related to cold temperatures were nine times greater than those related to hot temperatures. Dr. Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, has pointed out that moderate global warming will likely reduce human mortality.
Yet, on January 30, Dr. Colin J. Carlson of Georgetown University published a paper in Nature Medicine titled, “After millions of preventable deaths, climate change must be treated like a health emergency.” Carlson claims that climate change has caused about 166,000 deaths per year since the year 2000, or almost four million cumulative deaths.
Carlson admits that most of these deaths have been due to malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, or malnutrition and diarrheal diseases in south Asia. But he goes on to claim that deaths due to natural disasters and even cardiovascular disease should also be attributed to climate change. If death from cardiovascular disease can be counted as a climate death, almost any death can be counted.
The evidence doesn’t support these climate death claims. Malarial disease has plagued humanity throughout history, even when temperatures were colder than today. Dr. Paul Reiter, medical entomologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, points out that malaria was endemic to England 400 years ago during the colder climate of the Little Ice Age. The Soviet Union experienced an estimated 13 million cases of malaria during the 1920s, with 30,000 cases occurring in Archangel, a city located close to the frozen Arctic Circle.
Malnutrition has been declining during the gentle warming of the last century. During the early 1900s, as many as 10 million people would die from famine each decade globally. Today, world famine deaths have been reduced to under 500,000 people per decade. About 10% of the world’s people are malnourished today, but this is down from about 25% in 1970.
The number of deaths from natural disasters has also been falling during the warming over the last century. According to EM-DAT, the International Disaster Database, the deaths from disasters, including storms, famines, earthquakes, droughts, and floods, are down more than 90 percent over the last 100 years.
With deaths from natural disasters and famine declining, and since fewer people die in warmer temperatures, the case for counting deaths from global warming is poor at best. But don’t underestimate the ability of climate alarmists to create fear by exaggerating the data.
https://heartland.org/opinion/the-next-big-climate-scare-counting-climate-change-deaths/
*******************************************************No, BNN, Climate Change Will Not Leave 200 Million Africans Hungry by 2050
An article published in BNN Breaking News by author Aqsa Younas Rana, titled “Climate Change to Plunge 200 Million Africans into Severe Hunger by 2050” asserts that climate change will result in widespread hunger, starvation, and agricultural revenue decline in Africa by 2050. The claims are unsubstantiated and contrary to real world data and trends on food production and revenue.
The article opens describing a dystopian future in Africa:
Imagine waking up one day to find that the very ground under your feet, once fertile and life-giving, has turned barren. The streams that meandered through your village, brimming with life, now barely whisper. The crops that danced in the wind, promising a bountiful harvest, stand withered. This isn’t a scene from a dystopian novel; it’s a looming reality for millions in Africa, as recent studies project a grim future where 200 million Africans could face severe hunger by 2050 due to the impacts of climate change.
The story doesn’t reference any data or a single study as basis for its prediction of the future, rather it issues a one sentence warning, “[a]ccording to recent findings, agricultural productivity is expected to plummet, with crop revenue forecasted to decrease by 30%.
There is no reference or citation given for the predicted 30 percent decline that Rana warns of, and the evidence that does exist actually indicates that during the recent modest warming, African crops and agricultural revenue have been regularly setting records.
Climate Realism has pointed out across multiple articles that crop production and yields have improved dramatically in most places in Africa during the recent period of modest warming. One recent article by Linnea Lueken, Wrong, Washington Post, Warming Hasn’t Harmed African Crop Production, shows the extent to which climate change has benefitted African farmers:
Data clearly show that the IMF’s claims about warming causing a decline in African crop production is patently and obviously false. Crop production in Africa in general, and Ethiopia in particular increased dramatically over recent decades, even as the planet has experienced a warming of more than 1?. To reiterate the point, as warming has occurred, crop production and yields have increased, not decreased. Also, real world data and peer reviewed agronomy research provides no reason for believing these trends will change in the future, absent political interference in to use of fossil fuels to plant, fertilize, harvest, and deliver crops.
This graph showing agricultural yields and production for primary cereal grains dramatically increased since 1990 at the same time that climate change was supposedly warming the continent of Africa:
Rana mentions Ethiopia, Kenya, and Malawi as specifically threatened by crop losses, yet since 1990 foundational cereal crops and roots and tubers have increased dramatically in each of those countries. Since 1990 (1993 Ethiopia), the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reports that:
In Ethiopia, despite civil strife, cereal crop production grew by approximately 496 percent, and root and tuber production increased by a little over 176 percent;
In Kenya, cereal crop production expanded by about 35 percent, and root and tuber production enlarged by almost 97 percent;
In Malawi, cereal crop production expanded by about nearly 185 percent, and root and tuber production grew by an astonishing 3,082 percent. (see the figure below)
Africa in general has seen dramatic increases in agriculture, as demonstrated in numerous other Climate Realism posts, like, here, here, here, and here. Clearly, climate change is not causing a decline in African crop production or harming African farmers.
Agriculture is the top source of income in most of the countries on the African continent with a few exceptions, and economic growth in Africa has been strong in recent decades. “Growth has been present throughout the continent, with over one-third of African countries posting 6% or higher growth rates, and another 40% growing between 4% and 6% per year, reports the World Bank.
With these facts in evidence, the obvious question is: where is the damage to agriculture from climate change claimed by BNN?
The BNN article misses the most obvious factor that has restrained crop production in recent years in some African countries, and caused dramatic fluctuations in others, namely political and civil unrest. According to the website African business, civil unrest is at a six-year high:
A surge in civil unrest in Africa, fueled by political tensions, food insecurity, and government inefficiencies threatens stability, disrupts businesses, and stirs up social and economic crises in the region, new report finds.
…
36 African countries experienced a surge in risk between 2022-Q2 and 2023-Q2, marking the continent’s largest annual increase since the dataset’s inception in 2017, Verisk Maplecroft’s Civil Unrest Index reveals.
The number of African countries now categorized as high or extreme risk for civil unrest has also risen to 37, a significant jump from 28 just six years ago.
Civil unrest threatens farmers’ livelihoods. Even when farms and farmers themselves aren’t in a war zone, such unrest and political fighting often limits farmers access fuel, fertilizer, seeds, and makes it hard, if not impossible, to transport their crops to market. War, rebellion, and civil unrest presents a far more immediate and disruptive danger to agricultural production in Africa, than the gradual warming of the climate over the past 100 years, or any potential warming one might realistically expect by 2050.
None of these facts stopped BNN from writing a poorly researched and unreferenced opinion piece claiming that climate change was the primary problem threatening agricultural production in Africa. Facts just get in the way when the media source wishes to push an alarming climate change narrative.
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Australian ex-PM eyes pumped hydro opportunity in the Upper Hunter
Pumped hydro requires TWO dams. What does Mal think the dam-hating Greens will say about that? He's dreaming
Acompany owned by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his wife Lucy has won a tender to develop plans for two pumped hydro projects in the Upper Hunter.
WaterNSW has awarded a development agreement to Upper Hunter Hydro (UHH) to explore the feasibility of the projects using WaterNSW land and reservoirs in the Hunter Valley.
The company was registered in early 2022 under the ownership of Wilcrow Pty Ltd - a Turnbull family entity that has traditionally held its pastoral properties in the Upper Hunter.
The pumped hydro projects, which would deliver long duration storage totalling more than 1.4 gigawatts for eight to 12 hours, could power a million homes.
Upper Hunter Hydro has been granted access to the Glenbawn Dam and Glennies Creek Dam as part of its investigation.
WaterNSW said the company would seek to secure all necessary approvals and consent for their projects.
Elsewhere in the region, AGL and Idemitsu are exploring the feasibility of establishing a $450 million pumped hydro project at the former Muswellbrook Coal site at Bells Mountain.
Mr Turnbull said pumped hydro projects would provide important support for industry and employment in the Hunter.
"Australia has abundant wind and solar generation, some of the best in the world. But the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow. Pumped hydro provides the long duration energy storage we need to make renewables available 24/7 and secure our clean energy future," he said.
"Renewables development is not for those wanting instant gratification .... but it is dawning on the market that we are going to need a lot more long duration storage than we thought."
Mr Turnbull said the Upper Hunter Pumped Hydro would proceed to a detailed design phase that incorporates "wide ranging community and stakeholder engagement" as well as "thorough environmental assessment," to secure planning approvals and backing from investors.
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27 February, 2024
Antarctica's sea ice drops to an 'alarming low' for the third year in a row, scientists warn
Here we go again: The ice loss is almost entirely in Western Antarctica, which is known for subsurface vulcanism. And volcanic eruptions are unpredictable, which is what they found. Nothing to do with global warming
Antarctica's sea ice has dropped to an 'alarming' low during the southern hemisphere's summer, scientists have revealed.
Ice surrounding Earth's southernmost continent now measures less than 772,200 square miles (2 million sq km), or about the size of Mexico.
Worryingly, this is the third year in the row that this figure has fallen below this threshold, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
Less sea ice can threaten habitats for penguins, seals and other Antarctic animal life, and also contributes to a rise in global sea levels.
Unfortunately, it follows a record-breaking low for Antarctica's sea ice during the winter as well.
What is sea ice?
Sea ice is simply frozen ocean water. It forms, grows, and melts in the ocean. It floats on the surface of the sea because it is less dense than liquid water. In contrast, icebergs, glaciers, ice sheets, and ice shelves all originate on land.
Sea ice is estimated to cover around 7 per cent of Earth's surface and about 12 per cent of the world's oceans.
The lion's share of sea ice is contained within the polar ice packs in the Arctic and Southern oceans.
These ice packs undergo season variations and are also affected locally on smaller time scales by wind, current and temperature fluctuations.
Walt Meier, a senior research scientist at NSIDC, said experts 'don’t yet know the full reason' why sea ice is now at a record low, although 'global warming certainly could be a factor'.
'It appears that warm ocean temperatures are important, but other factors may be in play, including wind patterns,' he told MailOnline. 'We have only 45 years of high quality data, which still may not capture all of the variability in the Antarctic sea ice.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13126187/Antarcticas-sea-ice-drops-alarming-low.html
******************************************************UK: Met Office concedes UK storms are not getting stronger ... but refuses to retract false climate claim
Press Release
London, 23 February - In response to a complaint by independent climate researcher Paul Homewood, the Met Office has acknowledged that “there is no evidence yet for an increase in wind gust strengths, although these are projected to increase with future climate change.”
Yet despite this confirmation, the Met Office still refuses to retract a false claim made by one of its senior meteorologists on BBC Radio 5 last month, that storms in the UK are getting "more intense" due to climate change.
The Met Office has already admitted, following an FOI request, that it has no evidence to support the claim. Indeed it provided its own recent reports which confirm no upward trend in wind speeds since 1969, and that several storms in the 1980s and 90s were very much more severe than anything seen since.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation is calling on the Met Office to stop prevaricating over evident misinformation by retracting the false claim and providing the public with the true facts.
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WHO Demands Global Meat Consumption Ban by 2025
Wacky!
The World Health Organization (WEF) has just upped the ante with its globalist “Net Zero” agenda by demanding that the general public must be banned from consuming meat and dairy products by 2025 globally.
The head of the United Nations “health” agency, Tedros Adhanom, declared in a statement that citizens around the world must begin the shift to plant and insect-based “foods” in order to “save the planet” from “global warming.”
“Our food systems are harming the health of our people and planet,” he said.
“Food systems contribute to over 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions and account for almost one-third of the global burden of disease.”
He estimates that eight million lives could be saved each year with this one change. Although shifting away from red meat has been recommended for many years for health reasons, his motivation here appears to be purely environmental, with a context note on a video of him declaring the war on meat noting that climate change “refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, mainly caused by human activities.”
https://evol.news/news/who-demands-global-meat-consumption-ban-by-2025/
**********************************************Spending Hundreds of Millions to Make a 0.1 Percent Difference to the Great Barrier Reef
By Peter Ridd
Hard-working Aussie fishermen, and all the people who depend on them, are about to suffer severe restrictions on their production. And all based on dubious science.
The barramundi fishery mostly operates in the creeks and rivers, or very close to shore. Our out-of-touch government ministers have never explained how catching a barra in a creek somehow damages the Reef, which is far from shore—mostly 40 to 100 kilometers (25 to 62 miles).
But worse is to come as governments cast their net further afield.
As part of the UNESCO demands, the federal government has announced that it is now restricting fishing in the southern Gulf of Carpentaria to “save the Reef.”
That area of the Gulf is 700 kilometres from the Reef and on the wrong side (to the west) of Cape York Peninsula. How can catching a barra near Mornington Island affect the Reef? Was this really demanded by UNESCO or is it being used as a convenient tool by our government to further enforce extreme green environmental policies?
If killing the barra fishery seems like a scientific folly, the recent letter from Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to UNESCO asking that the Reef not be listed as endangered contains an even bigger indication that the government, and the science institutions upon which they base their dubious decisions, have lost the plot.
Ms. Plibersek’s letter proudly states that government schemes costing hundreds of millions of dollars have stopped 140,000 metric tonnes of sediment reaching the Reef from farms and cattle stations in the last decade.
That 140,000 figure sounds like a lot of mud. But in a decade, the rivers in question carry roughly 1,000 times more sediment than that out into the ocean.
So, they reduced the sediment to the Reef by a meagre 0.1 percent—and they made it a big deal!
Before I was fired by James Cook University after calling for better quality assurance of Reef science, my group worked extensively on the impact of sediment.
We invented some of the instrumentation for doing this work. We took more measurements than all the other groups combined. We showed that mud almost never reaches the Great Barrier Reef, which is far offshore. And even when it does, it is in minuscule quantities for only short periods of time. Even the inshore reefs, such as around Magnetic Island near Townsville, are barely influenced by mud coming directly from the rivers fed by tropical monsoon rains.
Government-funded scientists and managers have thus spent hundreds of millions to make 0.1 percent difference to a non-problem.
We must hope that they do not try to scale-up their effort and completely solve a problem that does not exist. At this rate, it would cost roughly 10 percent of Australia’s yearly GDP just to manage this one environmental factor.
Strangely, Ms. Plibersek conveniently forgot to mention that data from the Australian Institute of Marine Science show that, since records began, the reef has never had more coral than in the last two years. People might think that Ms. Plibersek was on UNESCO’s side and doing their bidding.
The time has come for a forensic audit of the science that is being used to smash the livelihood of hardworking Aussie farmers and fishers. The government is in effect picking off industries one at a time in a classic “salami” tactic.
The Australian Environment Foundation is organising a coalition of affected small industries to fight back, and top of the list is to audit the science.
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26 February, 2024
Obama-Era Moratorium on Federal Coal Leasing Axed by Appeals Court
A federal appeals panel has thrown out a moratorium on new coal mine leases on public lands.
The Feb. 21 ruling by a three-judge panel from U.S. Court of Appeals 9th Circuit overturns an August 2022 decision from Judge Brian Morris of the U.S. District of Montana, which reinstated a 2016 Obama administration moratorium.
Initially, the Department of the Interior (DOI) issued a first-of-its-kind moratorium on all new coal leases on federal land in 2016 under Secretary Sally Jewell. A year later, Secretary Ryan Zinke, who succeeded Ms. Jewell, rescinded the moratorium.
Current DOI Secretary Deb Haaland then revoked Mr. Zinke’s order shortly after taking office in 2021. But according to the appeals court ruling, when Secretary Haaland rescinded Mr. Zinke’s order, it didn’t reinstate the original 2016 moratorium on coal leasing.
Environmental groups continued litigating Mr. Zinke’s order ending the moratorium, which led to the 2022 ruling. At the time, the DOI said it wanted to complete a thorough environmental analysis of the effects of burning coal from public lands before making a decision to formally reinstate the moratorium.
“The district court reasoned that the Haaland Order’s failure to reinstate the coal leasing moratorium from the Jewell Order meant that the Zinke Order still remains in partial effect. That is incorrect,” the appeals court ruling said (pdf).
While appellees may be dissatisfied with the government’s position that the Haaland Order did not revive the Jewell Order’s moratorium, this does not provide a basis for concluding that a challenge to the defunct Zinke Order is live.”
The National Mining Association (NMA), along with the States of Montana and Wyoming, led the successful appeal, and all applauded the judge’s decision. In a media statement, NMA President and CEO Rich Nolan said it was a victory for American energy because energy projects can now move forward.
“This is a victory for American-mined energy and we are pleased with the court’s recognition of the need to dismiss this irreparably flawed ruling,” he said.
Sen. Hawley Touts Ban on Imports of Critical Minerals Mined by Slave and Child Labor
“With this ruling, important projects can once again advance and support the production of affordable, reliable power to the grid, while creating jobs and economic development across the country,” Mr. Nolan added.
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Chicago’s Legal Battle Against Big Oil
The city of Chicago has filed a lawsuit against five major oil and gas companies, including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell, as well as the American Petroleum Institute, alleging that these companies have engaged in climate deception by misleading consumers about the dangers of climate change associated with their products. The lawsuit claims that these companies have known about the harmful effects of their products on the climate for decades and have actively concealed this information from the public.
“The climate change impacts that Chicago has faced and will continue to face — including more frequent and intense storms, flooding, droughts, extreme heat events and shoreline erosion — are felt throughout every part of the city and disproportionately in low-income communities,” the city said in its lawsuit.
Supporters of the lawsuit argue that the oil and gas industry has a moral and legal responsibility to address the harm caused by their products and that the lawsuit is an important step in holding these companies accountable for their actions. They link climate change to the burning of fossil fuels and argue that the industry has to inform consumers about the risks associated with their products.
Critics of the lawsuit argue that it is misguided and that the responsibility for addressing climate change should not be placed solely on the shoulders of the oil and gas industry. They point out that these companies have taken steps to reduce their emissions and invest in renewable energy, and that the lawsuit could have unintended consequences, such as increasing the cost of energy for consumers.
The lawsuit claims Chicago faces “more frequent and intense storms, flooding, droughts, extreme heat events and shoreline erosion” due to the actions of these companies. However, available data contradicts this narrative. Weather records show no significant increase in extreme temperatures or precipitation, and flooding projections predict minimal impact for Chicago.
Let’s look at the facts. What does weather.gov say about Official Extreme Weather Records for Chicago, IL?
The highest temperature was in 1934, the warmest month was July 1955, the wettest year was 2008, and the greatest 24-hour precipitation was in 1987.
Surely, there have been more days above 95°F in Chicago, IL recently. Below is a figure from the Fifth National Climate Assessment that shows a decrease of nearly 6 days annually above 95°F in Chicago, IL today relative to 1901-1960.
This figure shows the observed change in the number of (a) hot days (days at or above 95°F) over the period 2002–2021 relative to 1901–1960. Figure credit: Project Drawdown, Washington State University Vancouver, NOAA NCEI, and CISESS NC.
What are the outlooks for Chicago, IL in terms of flooding risk? Below is a figure from Nature Climate Change that suggests an increase of about 0-5% in average annual loss related to flooding by 2050.
In fact, the Fifth National Climate Assessment has predicted a change of only 0-10% in total precipitation on heaviest 1% of days.
In terms of coastal erosion, there has been little change in the water level of Lake Michigan in response to increasing concentrations of atmospheric GHGs.
The observational data is clear, Chicago is not facing any threats from climate change. Not in extreme temps, flooding or coastal erosion. So then why the lawsuit?
This is a clear attempt to recoup money from failed climate-related policies that are costing taxpayers billions. For example, the city of Chicago said it’s spending $188 million on climate projects in low-income communities.
In this audacious quest for climate dollars, it appears that adherence to scientific evidence is an optional extra. The city’s actions raise the question: Is the battle against climate change being co-opted as a convenient facade for financial mismanagement?
Chicago’s lawsuit, rather than being a noble fight for environmental justice, seems more like a high-stakes gamble with taxpayer money, betting against the oil giants in hopes of a lucrative payout. In the end, it’s the citizens who are left asking whether their city’s leadership is fighting for the planet, or merely fighting to cover up its fiscal blunders.
https://principia-scientific.com/chicagos-legal-battle-against-big-oil/
***************************************************Saskatchewan Premier Says Dropping Carbon Tax on Home Heating Helped With Inflation
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe says dropping the carbon tax on home heating helped Saskatchewan have the third-lowest inflation rate in the country last month.
In January’s inflation numbers, released Feb. 20, Statistics Canada said the inflation rate for Saskatchewan was 1.9 percent, well below the national average of 2.9 percent.
“In Saskatchewan, the collection of the carbon levy ceased in January 2024, contributing to the province’s year-over-year price decline of natural gas (-26.6%),” StatCan said.
Mr. Moe was quick to point that out on X.
“The Trudeau carbon tax was over a quarter of the cost of natural gas in SK,” Mr. Moe wrote. “If the feds are actually serious about fighting inflation, they would scrap the carbon tax on everyone and everything.”
In a news release, Saskatchewan Crown Investments Minister Dustin Duncan added: “Imagine the significant impact it would have on gas prices, grocery prices and everything else we produce and transport in Canada if the federal government scrapped the carbon tax. Instead, they are fully committed to another carbon tax increase on April 1.”
Saskatchewan stopped collecting carbon tax on home heating after the federal government paused carbon taxes on home heating oil, which is primarily used in the Atlantic provinces, but refused to extend the carve-out to other types of heating fuels. The federal government says that Saskatchewan’s pause is against the law.
According to StatCan, a variety of factors played a role in January’s numbers.
The January Consumer Price Index report points out there was an overall drop in natural gas prices of 16.4 percent across the country, along with an overall drop in gasoline prices of 4 percent.
One prominent economist said while dropping the carbon tax on home heating in Saskatchewan likely had some effect, there are other items that played a bigger role in inflation.
“It’s true, but the impact probably will be relatively small because home heating is only just part of the carbon tax impact. It also affects transportation costs and a whole bunch of other things,” Dr. Jack Mintz told the Epoch Times. Mr. Mintz is President’s Fellow at the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, and a distinguished fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
“It'll have some impact on reducing the cost of energy, but it’s not going to be huge,” added Mr. Mintz. “Food prices and shelter costs, and transportation are the three biggest items” in inflation.
Still, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre pointed out that Saskatchewan and Manitoba had among the lowest inflation numbers in the country—partly as a result of reducing taxes on energy.
“Notice yesterday, the lowest inflation: Manitoba, Saskatchewan,” Mr. Poilievre told a news conference in Kingston on Feb. 21. “What did they do in Manitoba and Saskatchewan? Got rid of carbon taxes. They took the carbon tax off gas in Manitoba, they took it off heat in Saskatchewan,” he said.
Manitoba had an inflation rate in January of 0.8 percent, the lowest in the country.
The Manitoba government gave credit to the provincial gas tax holiday that started on Jan. 1.
“We took action right away to give people relief at the pump,” Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said in a Feb. 20 news release. “Now we see that relief helping to lower costs across the province.”
However, the news release said it was the provincial fuel tax, not the carbon tax, that was dropped.
“According to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) from Statistics Canada, the gas tax holiday, which began on Jan. 1 and removed the 14-cent provincial tax on the price of gasoline, ‘directly contributed to a 0.4 per cent decrease to inflation,’” said the release. “Statistics Canada also noted Manitoba’s gasoline prices fell 20.2 per cent in January 2024 compared to January 2023,” it added.
Still, Saskatchewan’s premier is not the only one saying the low inflation number for Saskatchewan may be significant.
On Feb. 20, Sylvain Charlebois with Dalhousie University posted on X that “Saskatchewan’s experiment with the carbon tax contradicts the @bankofcanada’s assessment.”
Mr. Charlebois, who is with the Agrifood Analytics Lab, added: “After the province eliminated the tax on only nat/gas, propane, and heating oil, its inflation rate fell by 0.8 percentage points in January. This is a larger decrease than the Bank’s prediction that the C-Tax would lead to a one-time drop of 0.6 percentage points in the inflation rate, over one year.”
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Australia: Nuclear, gas fuel consevatives' tilt at green madness
In 2004, Australian electricity bills were the fourth-lowest in the OECD. The wind and solar caper had barely begun, and coal and gas supplied 91 per cent of the National Electricity Market.
Today, after 20 years of subsidy chasing by the renewable energy industry, Australia has slipped to 10th place in the OECD rankings of end-user power prices.
Of the nine countries where electricity is cheaper, six have nuclear power stations. They are Finland, Mexico, Switzerland, South Korea, Canada and the US. Of the remaining three, the wet and hilly ones, Norway and Iceland run mostly on hydropower because that’s the way God made them. Israel, somewhat unfashionably, has stuck with coal and gas but has other things to worry about.
So much for Energy Minister Chris Bowen’s claim that the opposition is using nuclear power as a culture-war distraction. His argument collapses at the first brush with reality.
Nuclear is the only baseload alternative to fossil fuel for the inhabitants of a wide and flat brown land unless we care to drill down 40km through the Earth’s crust to tap geothermal energy, which even Bowen must concede is impractical. The minister’s forlorn grab for supporting evidence in his article in The Weekend Australian suggests he knows he is losing the argument.
Until recently, conventional wisdom held that a pro-nuclear policy would be the kiss of death for the Coalition. Yet Bowen would know how quickly public opinion is changing, even within the green movement. When voters are asked if they favour nuclear power, the numbers are usually tight.
When the pollster asks if they would consider nuclear power, however, a clear majority say yes. The readiness to consider nuclear grows when they are asked about small modular reactors, notably among younger voters.
Bowen’s foolhardy use of statistics is unnerving, given his power to call upon the resources of a sizeable government department to stop him from embarrassing himself. He writes that “by early 2025, renewable energy will surpass coal as the planet’s largest source of energy”. As the Energy Minister should know, energy differs from electricity, which accounts for just 20 per cent of global energy use, according to the International Energy Market’s latest data.
Wind and solar accounted for 2.2 per cent of the world’s energy mix in 2019 if we assume it is what the IEA means by “other”. If we include hydropower in the renewables basket, it rises to 4.8 per cent.
Oil accounts for 31 per cent, down from 44 per cent in 1971, but the gap has been filled by gas (up from 16 to 23 per cent) and nuclear (0.5 per cent to 5 per cent). Coal has remained steady at 26 per cent.
The data does not exactly leap to Bowen’s defence, even if we assume he has conflated energy with electricity. In 2019, wind, solar and biofuels generated 10.8 per cent of the world’s electricity, and hydro 15.7 per cent. Fossil thermal fuel was by far the biggest contributor at 63 per cent.
Admittedly, the IEA’s reporting is somewhat tardy, but it would take a hockey stick curve of Michael Mann-ic proportions for renewables to overtake coal by this time next year, even if it were feasible.
Bowen’s suggestion that nuclear projects fall like skittles is equally hard to substantiate. The World Nuclear Association lists 62 nuclear plants under construction in 17 countries. They include 26 in China. Some 440 more are listed as either planned or proposed, of which 196 are in China, 25 in Russia and five in Iran.
Yet Peter Dutton would be foolish to assume the argument is as good as won, or that a nuclear policy is a substitute for a convincing energy policy.
Even on the most optimistic timetable, nuclear will not be part of our energy mix before the mid-2030s and investment won’t flow without a thorough reform of the energy market.
The short answer to almost every question is gas. The Opposition Leader will have little trouble persuading his own party room, where past battles have instilled a degree of energy literacy. He should prepare for considerable opposition from his own party at the state level, however, where many Coalition MPs have formed a unity ticket with Labor and the Greens in opposition to the imagined climate emergency.
Dutton should not underestimate the quantity of the venom in the hornet’s nest he has disturbed by challenging the orthodoxy that prevails in the media, universities and government departments. As Tony Abbott discovered, these people are not prepared to surrender their dogma in this policy debate without a fight.
An even more formidable opponent will be the energy industry, where a powerful combination of virtue signalling and naked self-interest has set in.
The energy industry with few exceptions is not campaigning for fossil fuel, as renewable advocates often claim. It is busy chasing subsidies and playing with the market. It has worked out easier ways to make money than supplying customers with affordable and reliable electricity. Renewable Energy Certificates have proved be a more dependable source of revenue than the energy itself.
Labor’s planned Capacity Investment Scheme, which is supposed to underwrite 32GW of renewal energy investment, has the added appeal of letting them make money without actually turning the generation plants on. It provides an even stronger incentive to stop nuclear before it eats their lunch.
Over the past 10 years, the renewable energy industrial complex has grown in strength and sophistication. It channels tens of millions of dollars into grassroots campaigns in Australia, creating an almost bottomless war chest to fund lawfare and buy influence in politics. Renewable energy interests almost entirely underwrote the teal campaign in 2022. Dutton shouldn’t expect any of these so-called independents to back nuclear anytime soon, despite their claim to be the heroes putting integrity back into politics.
Big renewables will fight almost as hard against gas, even though quick-start-up turbines are the quickest and cheapest way to firm the supply of the intermittent energy they fitfully supply. Gas threatens their investment in batteries for the same reason nuclear threatens renewables.
The cause of common sense is not just lost. Dutton has defeated the woke Goliath once and could do so again. Corporate support for the voice, however, was mainly motivated by virtue signalling rather than crude financial self-interest.
To use the words that turned boxing announcer Michael Buffer into a household name, “get ready to rumble”.
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25 February, 2024
Mercedes-Benz to update combustion engine cars amid EV demand slowdown
STUTTGART (Reuters) - Mercedes-Benz on Thursday toned down expectations on EV demand and said it will update its combustion engine lineup well into next decade, becoming the latest carmaker to flag a slower than expected appetite for electric cars.
The company, which has been preparing for all-electric sales by 2030, said it now expects electrified sales - including hybrids - to account for up to 50% of the total by that date.
CEO Ola Kaellenius cautioned towards the end of last year that even Europe would likely not be ready by 2030 for an all-electric lineup, with multiple studies showing customers were holding back for a range of reasons including a lack of charging infrastructure and appealing electric models.
Kaellenius said Mercedes-Benz wanted customers and investors to know it was well-positioned to carry on producing combustion engine cars and was ready to update the technology well into next decade.
Its current plans for updates mean "it is almost like we will have a new lineup in 2027 that will take us well into the 2030s," Kaellenius said.
While automakers and suppliers are betting big on future demand for electric vehicles, investment in capacity and technology development has outrun actual EV demand, boosting pressure on companies to cut costs.
Mercedes-Benz is working through supply chain challenges, CEO says
Slower economic growth, supply chain bottlenecks, and trade tensions between China and both the U.S. and European Union also weighed on Mercedes-Benz's outlook for 2024, the carmaker said, forecasting lower returns on sales across its car and van division.
First-quarter sales are likely to be below the previous year's level, it said.
Electrified vehicle sales, including of hybrids, were expected to remain at approximately 19-21% of the total, Mercedes-Benz said, in line with reports across the industry of slower growth in EV demand.
The luxury car maker reported an adjusted return on sales in its car division of 12.6% for 2023, in line with its forecast, as inflation and supply chain-related costs as well as component shortages ate into its profits.
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Climate Change Isn’t Endangering Fish Stocks
The oceans are still very much a mystery to humankind, with a vast majority of it yet to be explored. Early in my career, I wanted to make an in-depth study of how climate affected marine life. After all, many media reports claimed that “oceans will become empty by 2048.”
So, as a graduate research assistant, I explored the adaptability of marine fish and invertebrates to fluctuations in ocean temperatures. I found that both are highly adaptable to changes in the water around them. That is the way they are made.
Now, evidence emerging from scientific studies shows that marine life may be benefiting from the relative warmth of modern temperatures.
Contrary to the hyperbole of climate reporters, there has been no alarming increase in global sea-surface temperatures. Even if temperatures increase substantially, fish are free to migrate to cooler waters and do, as documented by scientific studies.
Fish also have natural adaptive mechanisms. Since their initial emergence in Earth’s waters, fish have developed genetically in ways that allow them not only to survive but to thrive in a variety of environments. In addition to the generational genetic adaptability, fish also display short-term phenotypic plasticity which allows them to adapt to temperatures and other physical factors. When combined, these mechanisms act as significant protection against the ill-effects of the physical environment.
Despite this, it is not uncommon to see news of fisheries crashing under the weight of a climate crisis. However, real-world data contradict such negative reports, indicating instead that global fish catches will improve in the coming decades.
A 2016 scientific study “assembled the largest-of-its-kind database and coupled it to state-of-the-art bioeconomic models for more than 4,500 fisheries around the world.” The study found that global fisheries will profit from an increase in marine species. The degree of this commercial success will depend on a range of policy measures, including ones that enable increased catches for individuals and communities.
In 2020, there was a record 214 million tonnes of production from both wild catches and aquaculture. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture 2022 report says that this production is expected to grow 14 percent by 2030. Fish are expected to become more affordable and accessible, with prices decreasing between 2024-2029, according to two international bodies: the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) that published the data in Agricultural Outlook.
As of 2017, around 65% of fish stocks were biologically sustainable. An index of population health is maximum sustainable yield (MSY), which is the point at which the stock can sustain itself without limits on fishing. The MSY calculation involves collaborative information gathering by marine biologists and fishers.
The 2022 report states that the number of catches from biologically sustainable stocks has been on the rise! This signals that catches can be increased without depleting the stock to levels that neither the species nor continued fishing is at risk. While some concerns remain for a few species, studies show that in regions where we have high-quality population data, the majority of fish stocks are either stable or improving.
In short, any threat to future catches is not “empty” seas but rather the effect of activities such as illegal fishing and overfishing. Fish as an important protein source is likely to remain available in large quantities. Reality contradicts the fallacious climate crisis that dominates popular media and politics.
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A professor of renewable energy at work
Gordon Wilkie, 61, of New Waterford, Nova Scotia, was granted bail of $30,000 this week after being charged with rape in the January 28 attack at the Warwick Hotel Paradise Island Bahamas.
'This is devastating,' the victim's son David Ahrens told DailyMail.com, saying the family received 'no notice or details' about a bail hearing before the ruling.
Wilkie, a community college professor of renewable energy, is accused of separating the vulnerable victim from her daughter in an elevator and raping her in his hotel room.
Prosecutors had opposed bail for Wilkie, but Justice Franklyn Williams granted it on Monday after the suspect's attorney raised health concerns, saying his blood pressure was not being properly treated in jail.
Wilkie was eligible for release as early as Thursday, but as of Friday afternoon it did not appear that he had posted bail.
His attorney, Ryszard Humes, declined to comment when reached by DailyMail.com.
Wilkie will be allowed to return to Canada while free on bail pending trial, a person close to the case told DailyMail.com.
However, he must return to the Bahamas to appear in court for the presentation of a voluntary bill of indictment on May 29, and subsequent arraignment before the Supreme Court, the person said.
A source close to prosecutors said they had a difficult time proving that Wilkie was a flight risk, and that he had no prior convictions in the Bahamas, which weakened their argument that he should be denied bail.
Last week, DailyMail.com was the first to report that Wilkie is a faculty member at Novia Scotia Community College, where he specializes in renewable energy and has been placed on leave following his arrest.
Wilkie runs a solar-power installation company and was an instructor in renewable energy at NSCC's Dartmouth campus, according to a 2021 CBC News interview.
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Australia: Inquiry Ponders How Government Can Legislate Against Climate Change Health Risks
The government is hearing testimony on whether to require lawmakers to consider the ‘health and wellbeing of children in Australia’ when approving mines.
Questions remain over how exactly the federal Australian government can define, and legislate, a climate change risk to the “health and wellbeing” of children.
A Senate Committee is examining an amendment to the Albanese government’s Climate Change Act 2022 to require legislators to consider the health of children when making significant decisions.
The Climate Change Amendment (Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity) Bill 2023 would also restrict approvals for mining activities related to coal, oil, and natural resources if they pose a “material risk of harm” to children.
While medical bodies like the Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP), as well as several climate change activist groups, shared their views on the health risks caused by climate change, the issue of how exactly the government would legislate against this, was largely left unanswered.
“How would you expect decision-makers to correctly identify a project-specific impact on health, in a context where the cumulative impact of emissions over many years is causing climate change? How would you see that point of identification?” said Labor Senator Karen Grogan on the morning of Feb. 22.
In response, Dr. Catherine Pendrey, chair of the Climate and Environmental Medicine Specific Interest Group at RACGP, said her organisation would not “specifically comment on the functions of the court.”
“I believe it’s the young people in Australia that have been taking these issues to court, rather than members of the medical profession,” she told the Senate Environment, Communications Legislation Committee.
Senator Grogan said that she had no argument with climate change science, but was concerned about the impact of how the law would operate on the ground.
“Will it have the intended impact? Or will it ... have unintended consequences, and limit the ability of the structures—that the Labor government’s put in place over the last 18 months—to try and ramp up action on climate change?”
She further added, “I’m asking how you would believe an administrative decision maker would make that assessment [on the health impact of climate change?]”
Dr. Michael Bonning, chair of the Public Health Committee at the Australian Medical Association, said there was evidence of legislators coming to conclusions based on available evidence and “utilising that going forward.”
“As for internal administrative procedures, we obviously aren’t able to comment on that.”
When asked the same question, Anjali Sharma, a young climate change activist, conceded it was difficult to quantify the impact of a fossil fuel project, but added that the “cumulative impact of all these decisions is what we young people will face down the road.”
“I know that 50 years down the road—in a world that potentially has seen warming past 1.5 degrees Celsius—we will not be able to look back and point to that one specific decision that was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said.
‘Health Impact Assessments’ Mentioned
Dr. Kate Wylie, from Doctors for the Environment Australia, provided, what she termed “the beginning of an answer” to the senator’s question.
“We have Health Impact Assessments for various projects ... and they do not consider climate change impacts. We could broaden the scope of the Health Impact Assessments to include climate change, and how that impacts on children’s health.”
Heath Darrant, national coordinator of the Australian Medical Students’ Association, concurred, saying Australia could adopt the United Nation’s Child Rights Impact Assessment Model.
“And I know Wales used that in their [Wellbeing of Future Generation Act] that they implemented, which is a similar bill that’s being discussed here today. And New Zealand also uses the same model to come up with criteria on what constitutes an impact on health.”
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22 February, 2024
Industrial Wind Turbines demonstrate their Unreliable and Intermittent Nature Generating 1.8% of their Capacity than jumping to 80.4% only a few days later
Yesterday, February 9th, 2024, those IWT spread throughout Ontario were impressive generating 94,605 MWh or about what 3.1 million average households would consume in a day suggesting they are the panacea to stop climate change! Mere days before on February 3rd and the first seven hours on February 4th they generated only 2,673 MWh which was 1.8% of their capacity in those 31 hours.
As the expression goes; they continually demonstrate their “traditional yo yo” tendencies as the following screenshot from IESO February 5th to the 10th demonstrates. They are the “green” in the chart which basically shows their intermittent and unreliable nature whereas the dark blue is natural gas which has the ability to ramp up and down as demand changes and to keep our grid from failing and causing blackouts.
So, the question one should ask, was the power delivered by those IWT on the 9th of February needed here in the province?
As it turns out 65.8% of the IWT generation or 62,259 MW were not really needed as IESO’s intertie data (net-exports) shows it went to our neighbours in Quebec, New York and Michigan and the average sale price over the 24 hours was $19.42/MWh and well below what we Ontario ratepayers/taxpayers paid for it. If we assume it was all surplus IWT generation those net-exports, we paid those contracted parties $135/MWh for; suggests the total cost of what was sold to our neighbours came to $8,404,965 but the price we were paid by our neighbours was an average of only that $19.42/MWh. Using the latter average price received over the 24 hours means we earned only $1,227,774!
The net result is we Ontario ratepayers/taxpayers have to eat the loss of $7,177,218 for just that one day’s IWT generation. The foregoing is not the exception particularly when Ontario’s peak demand is relatively low as it was yesterday reaching only 17,057 MW at hour 19.
For the foregoing reasons, we should wonder why the Ontario Minister of Energy is instructing IESO to extend the IWT contracts when their 20-year terms are up as they do nothing but increase our electricity costs. Those costs will be exacerbated by the addition of BESS (battery energy storage systems) as the latter will simply add another costly layer in an attempt to keep our grid reliable!
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Supreme Court will hear challenge to EPA's 'good neighbor' rule that limits pollution
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday in an important environmental case that centers on the obligation to be a "good neighbor."
Lawyers representing three states, companies and industry groups will ask the justices to block a federal rule that's intended to limit ozone air pollution. Experts said it's only the third time in more than 50 years that the court has scheduled arguments on an emergency application like this one.
At the heart of the dispute is the part of the Clean Air Act known as the "good neighbor" provision. It's designed to help protect people from severe health problems they face because of pollution that floats downwind from neighboring states.
"Air pollution doesn't respect state borders," said Harvard Law School professor Richard Lazarus.
The facts of the case
States like Wisconsin, New York and Connecticut can struggle to meet federal standards and reduce harmful levels of ozone because of emissions from coal plant smokestacks, cement kilns and natural gas pipelines that drift across their borders.
"One of the primary reasons that Congress passed this law in 1970 was the one place you could not trust the states to do it on their own was when there was interstate air pollution," Lazarus said.
Vickie Patton, general counsel at the Environmental Defense Fund, said these bedrock protections can save lives.
"There are children, there are older adults, people who work outside in the summer and people who are afflicted by asthma who are at very, very serious risk, and this case is just about asking those upwind polluters to do their fair share," Patton said.
Three of those upwind states — Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia — alongside companies including Kinder Morgan Inc. and U.S. Steel Corp. want the Supreme Court to freeze the good neighbor rule while they pursue an appeal with a lower court in the D.C. Circuit.
The Supreme Court steps in early
Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas and author of a book putting these kinds of emergency actions by the Supreme Court into context, said the other two cases where the justices entertained arguments at this stage involved vaccine mandates during the coronavirus pandemic.
The good neighbor case, on the other hand, doesn't present those same kinds of issues, he said.
"If this is an emergency, what isn't?" Vladeck asked. "There are lots of federal polices that are going to have massive stakes and they're going to have massive stakeholders on both sides. It's not at all obvious why this case merits this kind of special treatment."
Traditionally, the Supreme Court goes last — after a case has made its way through the lower courts and a variety of facts and arguments have been aired.
"This case hasn't really gone very far at all," Vladeck said. "I mean, the only thing that's happened in the entire litigation to date is that the D.C. Circuit, the federal appeals court, refused to give the same thing that they're now asking the Supreme Court for, refused to basically pause the rule at the beginning of the litigation."
The rule in question
Lawyers for the states and companies challenging the good neighbor rule declined to talk before the arguments. In court papers, they call the EPA rule a "disaster" and "a shell of itself."
That's because the plan originally applied to 23 states. But lower courts have hit pause in about half of them for a bunch of different reasons, in separate litigation.
These lawyers said states shouldn't have to shoulder the costs for what they say is an unlawful federal mandate, criticizing the EPA for taking a "top-down" approach to the rule.
But environmental advocates say many of the obligations in the new rule won't kick in until 2026, giving big polluters a couple of years to prepare. The rule is already in force and protecting people in a number of states, they add.
Lazarus, at Harvard Law School, said to win a pause at the Supreme Court, the states challenging the rule will have to meet what's typically a high bar by showing they're likely to win on the merits and they're suffering irreparable harm.
A skeptical Supreme Court
Even so, Lazarus said, regulators and environmental advocacy groups have had a hard time at the Supreme Court over the past few years. First, the justices struck down the Clean Power Plan. Then, they slashed the EPA's jurisdiction over the Clean Water Act. And just last month, they seemed skeptical about another case involving regulations for the fishing industry.
"It certainly seems like a court is sort of on a juggernaut to cut back in an aggressive way on sort of federal environmental law," he added.
Patton, whose environmental group submitted a friend of the court brief in the case, said she'll be watching closely.
"Industry has a responsibility to be a good neighbor under our nation's clean air laws, and I hope the Supreme Court does not upend those protections," Patton said.
There's no clear timetable for a decision from the justices
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/21/1232513666/supreme-court-epa-good-neighbor-rule
**************************************'Sue and Settle' Looks to Some Like Crony Democracy. And Under Biden's Lawfaring Eco-Politics, It's Back
When the Biden administration announced in 2022 that it would remove some 4 million acres of federal land in Western states from oil and gas exploration, environmental groups hailed the decision as a milestone in their fight against global warming.
“With the oil and gas industry bent on despoiling American’s public lands and fueling the climate crisis, this is a critical opportunity for the Biden administration to chart a new path toward clean energy and independence from fossil fuels,” said Jeremy Nichols, a director with WildEarth Guardians.
But Nichols could just as easily have slapped himself on the back: The administration’s move was part of a private settlement of a lawsuit filed by WildEarth and others over the objections of energy consortiums, whose efforts to intervene in the matter were dismissed.
A similar thing happened last August, when the Biden administration announced it had agreed to exclude 6 million acres of the energy-rich Gulf of Mexico seabed from exploration to settle a lawsuit brought by environmental groups, including the Sierra Club - an announcement that triggered operational delays for the industry and expensive litigation to overturn.
Administration critics say these moves reflect the resurgence of a practice embraced by the Obama administration and rejected during Donald Trump’s presidency: “sue and settle.” The tactic is simple: An advocacy group sues a federal agency for failing to enforce laws or regulations. Agency officials and the plaintiffs then come to a private agreement and that deal is ratified by the courts via a binding consent decree.
The practice is common at every level of government. New York City, for example, is obligated to house and feed tens of thousands of migrants because of a consent decree it entered into to settle a 1979 lawsuit brought by advocates for the homeless. But it is most prevalent in the environmental field, where well-funded groups commonly sue the Environmental Protection Agency or the Bureau of Land Management within the Department of the Interior alleging failure to enforce provisions of the Clean Air Act or regulations regarding federal leases for energy production.
Although such consent decrees do not have the force of laws passed by Congress or regulations issued by the government that have gone through formal review and allow for public comment, they set the rules of the road. Critics say it has allowed government to advance policy goals that cannot be achieved through normal democratic channels.
American Energy Alliance
Thomas Pyle: "It’s a nefarious practice in which the agency and the environmental groups get what they want.”
American Energy Alliance
“It’s not really an adversarial lawsuit, and with a settlement agreement and consent decree the case is never really over,” said Dave Tryon, director of litigation at the free-market Buckeye Institute. “The EPA is anxious to increase its power and control; it’s always happy to expand that.”
The legal maneuver represents, according to this view, a return to the proverbial smoked-filled backrooms of politics. Huddled privately, without input from citizens or businesses that may be adversely affected by the decisions – let alone the public at large – lawsuits that often involve parties more simpatico than adversarial are settled. The plaintiffs and defendants are familiar to one another from years in the environmental lobbying and litigation world – and because of the “revolving door” between environmental groups and Democratic administrations. These like-minded players approach the issue seeking similar goals, a process that has only intensified with the Biden administration and leftist environmental groups sharing the belief that global warming is an existential threat.
“Overall, it’s harkening back to the bad old days – they do this in order to avoid scrutiny and bypass the regulatory process,” said Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, an advocacy arm of the Institute for Energy Research. “It’s a way to advance an agenda that may be rejected by voters. It’s a nefarious practice in which the agency and the environmental groups get what they want.”
Sue-and-settle is part of an even broader effort known as “lawfare,” in which political parties and advocacy groups seek to achieve their goals not through elections or legislation but in the courts. This encompasses everything from President Trump’s “stop the steal” efforts to overturn the 2020 election through the courts to myriad efforts by Democrats, whose lawfare campaigns have ranged from getting courts to confiscate Trump’s businesses and charge him criminally to removing him from the 2024 ballot.
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Australia to pay coal generators nearly $1bn
Crazy. They take with one hand and give with the other. Greenies will be livid
Anthony Albanese will pay coal generators nearly $1bn in rebates under his market intervention which capped the price of coal used for electricity at $125 a tonne, according to the latest estimates from the Department of Climate Change and Energy.
Labor’s energy market intervention was triggered in December 2022 by the need to shield Australians from rising electricity prices, which were forecast in the October budget that year to increase by about 20 per cent over 2022-23 followed by a further 36 per cent rise in 2023-24.
Retail gas prices were also forecast to increase by up to 20 per cent in both 2022-23 and 2023-24. The government responded by working with NSW and Queensland to set a price cap on coal used for electricity generation at $125 a tonne, while imposing a price ceiling on new domestic wholesale gas contracts for east coast producers at $12 per gigajoule.
Under the intervention, additional financial support is supplied in cases where the costs of production exceed the cost of supply under the cap. Mr Albanese initially dismissed suggestions that compensation for generators under the arrangements could rise into the hundreds of millions.
But initial estimates provided to parliament’s cost of living committee in early 2023 by the Department of Climate Change and Energy suggested that the combined fiscal cost of the coal generator rebates to the Commonwealth, NSW and Queensland governments would be in the order of $1.5bn to $2bn, with the Commonwealth paying a 50 per cent share.
In a letter sent on Tuesday, Department Secretary David Fredericks provided an updated estimate based on the decline in the market price of thermal coal over the past year. The new estimate was in line with the department’s initial analysis, but slightly lower than the upper figure of $2bn.
“DCCEEW’s revised estimate of the maximum total fiscal cost of the rebates associated with the coal price caps is $1.85bn, with the Commonwealth government committed to paying half under the arrangement reached with the New South Wales and Queensland governments,” he said.
Responding to a request for the updated figure from Nationals Senator Matt Canavan, Mr Fredericks said the new estimate was “less than the previous estimate provided to the Senate Cost of Living Inquiry in February 2023.”
The update from Mr Fredericks suggests the Commonwealth will still need to fork out $925m for coal generators – half the estimated $1.85bn total fiscal cost of the rebates under the price cap.
The latest update from the Australian Energy Regulator revealed the cost of producing electricity in 2023 had fallen by as much as 64 per cent in a year and that wholesale electricity prices were running closer to longer-term averages.
The AER said milder weather, fewer coal supply issues and an increase in cheap wind and solar energy had helped drive the reduction. But it also noted another factor – lower fuel costs partly driven by the government’s intervention.
However, Senator Canavan argued that “massive government subsidies don’t lower electricity prices to our economy. Subsidies just transfer the cost of our inept energy policies from consumers to taxpayers.”
“To lift real wages we have to focus on lowering the costs of production. The government’s clumsy interventions have clearly chilled investment in new energy supplies in Australia. The US is doubling its LNG capacity while we remain at a standstill,” he said. “Our lack of investment in reliable energy supplies will continue to increase electricity prices for all over time.”
Leading energy economists have recently suggested there is no longer a strong rationale to extend Labor’s coal price cap beyond the middle of 2024, given the moderation in short-term coal prices.
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21 February, 2024
Biden’s Green Energy Plans Would Require Covering The American West In Solar Panels
Environmentalists say they want to preserve the natural world in its original, pristine state.
Yet the climate change activists among them would instead cast a solar panel shroud of human fabrication over parts of the great American West.
President Biden has given them the green light
The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management last month updated its Western Solar Plan, detailing options to open public land for large solar projects.
The bureau’s earlier blueprint allowed 16 million acres of public land to be used for solar development, which has now been enlarged to 22 million acres across 11 Western states. That’s more than 34,000 square miles — about the size of Maine.
Only portions of this land would be used. There are exclusions for steeply sloped terrain, tracts containing sensitive environmental and cultural resources, and land beyond a 10-mile distance from current or planned transmission lines.
Altogether, about 700,000 acres would be used to support the administration’s plan to convert the entire electric grid to intermittent sources such as solar and wind by 2035.
The scheme would add to the more than 11,000 megawatts of solar, wind, and geothermal energy the administration boasts it has already approved, which will provide electricity for more than 3.5 million homes — unless it’s a cloudy or windless day.
The Interior Department’s period for public comment on the revised plan ends April 18.
In addition to the massive human footprint blighting the natural environment, solar energy development has other downsides.
Most obvious is that even in the sun-drenched West, the sun doesn’t shine at night, which means backup power must always remain on standby.
And while solar panel manufacturing has exploded to meet growing world demand, it is not the United States that stands to benefit from Mr. Biden’s green energy policies.
In the past decade, China has grabbed a more than 80% market share of panel manufacturing, according to the International Energy Agency.
Increasing U.S. supply chain dependence and China’s export profits is hardly what the president has in mind with his “build back better” agenda.
Also, solar panels lose their capacity to transform sunlight into electrons in the course of an estimated 30 years of use. What to do with the expired sheets of glass and metal that no longer generate power?
According to the Department of Energy, the cost of recycling runs up to $45 per panel, which is far more than the $5 cost of disposal. That means most are destined for a landfill.
The consequence is a heap of trash that the International Renewable Energy Agency estimates could weigh in at 77 million tons by 2050 — yet another environmental blight.
With next-generation panels providing greater efficiency at lower cost, the option of replacing aging panels with new ones could result in 50 times as much waste, according to a 2021 Harvard Business Review study. Oops.
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Foundations Who Channel Public Funds Into ‘Renewable’ Energy
Of all rackets, the so-called ‘renewable energy’ racket may be the most fraudulent and nonsensical.
What geologists call the Last Glacial Period occurred between c. 115,000 – c. 11,700 years ago.
Pretty much ALL human development has occurred since the glaciers retreated.
During the last Ice Age, glaciers advanced as far south as what is now the state of Missouri.
They retreated at a time when human population is estimated to have numbered around 4 million.
The so-called ‘greenhouse gases’—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and ozone—comprise less than one percent of the earth’s atmosphere.
Even scientists who pay lip service to the human induced global warming theory acknowledge that for most of the last 300 million years, CO2 levels in the earth’s atmosphere were much higher than they are today.
In the 1970s, climatologists were concerned that modern man would soon experience another cooling trend, resulting in yet another glacial advance that would bulldoze the cities of Canada and much of the United States.
In the eighties, the theory of global warming—induced by human ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions—became fashionable.
What really ignited this intellectual, social, and political trend was the discovery that billions of public funds could be funneled into ‘renewable energy’ industries through the mechanism of subsidies and tax credits.
This morning I stumbled across a notable investigative report titled Secret Partnership Fueling Climate Hawk Journalism.
Note that many of the foundations that are key players in Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex are also key players in the Climate-Industrial Complex.
https://principia-scientific.com/foundations-who-channel-public-funds-into-renewable-energy/
**************************************************Proposed Climate Reporting Rule Is Foolish and Outside of SEC’s Mission, Study Shows
A new study by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) finds the climate disclosure rule being finalized by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) “exceeds the commission’s statutory authority, undermines its existing disclosure-based framework, and greatly increases costs and work-hour burdens for companies subject to the mandate.”
When the SEC first broached the possibility of such a rule in 2022, I offered an official comment. I wrote, in part,
The SEC’s proposed climate accounting and disclosure rules fall well outside its legal mission to protect investors from fraud and the markets from insider trading and manipulation.
The factors likely to materially affect the success or failure of publicly traded companies are best known to the officers and managers of the firms and funds themselves, not the SEC, other regulatory agencies, politicians, or self-appointed stakeholders, including climate activists, not actively involved in the relevant business.
The effects of climate change 20, 30, 50, or 100 years from now are unknown and unknowable. …
The SECs proposed rules would require publicly traded companies to track and report on the greenhouse gas emissions resulting from their own operations and those of companies in their supply chain and the electric utilities that supply them power. In addition, companies would have to determine and report on how climate change is affecting their businesses now, how it is likely to affect them in the future, and what they are doing in response, including steps they are taking to reduce non-toxic greenhouse gas emissions.
These rules would take hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of dollars away from businesses core operations, to carry out the SECs mandate to predict future climate to account for its fiscal effect on business operations, and act as their brothers’ keepers by tracking their power companies and suppliers’ emissions as well as their own.
The SEC does not possess the statutory power to deputize or empower officers of publicly traded corporations to act as agents of the state to seek information from other companies under its regulatory control, much less from individuals or companies not under its regulatory purview.
CEI Research Fellow Stone Washington’s analysis confirms my own and goes beyond it to detail the myriad failings of the rule. Taken together, these flaws undermine any legitimate case the SEC might assert for its climate disclosure rule. CEI’s press release about the study states,
Under the SEC’s proposed rule, companies must report how climate change risk factors influence their financial decisions, business, models, locations, and projects. Regulated companies will be required to capture and report data on their direct, indirect, and value-chain produced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
By capturing data from regulated companies’ value-chain—known in the rule as Scope 3 emissions (Scope 1 are direct emissions, Scope 2 are indirect emissions)—the rule would greatly expand the SEC’s regulatory reach, allowing it to demand information from a host of private entities that are not usually the target of the commission’s regulatory powers. The rule’s requirements would harm many non-regulated suppliers, including farmers, ranchers, and facility owners, simply because they do business with a registered company.
[T]he climate disclosure rule’s Scope 3 mandate will compel unregulated private companies to turn over sensitive GHG emissions data to registered firm partners. This backdoor regulation will likely be deemed by a reviewing court to compel information that is financially immaterial.
In his study, Washington says the proposed rule has all sorts of legal problems:
The SEC’s current climate rule now seeks to radically redefine established standards of materiality. This defies the Supreme Court’s Northway decision, previous agency precedent, and the agency’s statutory authorization … [and] violates the nondelegation doctrine, specifically the “major questions doctrine.”
In addition to the lack of appropriateness and legality of the rule, it is impractical. Washington estimates the rule will impose an additional $864,000 or more of annual disclosure costs for the average firm, with firms being forced “to hire lawyers, accountants, and ESG experts to contend with the rule’s estimated 39 million additional hours of paperwork.”
Large companies can absorb such costs, but smaller ones will struggle. The rule will force them to increase their prices or divert scarce resources from their core operations. Either way, their operations will be made less competitive with those of larger firms. On top of all that, the SEC has requested an additional $101 million in funding from Congress to hire new ESG-focused staff—more deficit spending for President Biden’s all-of-government approach to fighting climate change.
In a recent article on the SEC’s rule, I noted an additional problem:
If a company reported in its public documents and to the SEC that it did not expect climate change to materially affect its operations, whether because its board did not consider climate change a serious threat based on real-world data, or because it had no way of anticipating the types of weather events that might occur in the future, where, or when, it would be honest. However, it is doubtful that such honesty of a conclusion on the part of a company would satisfy the SEC’s climate mandarins.
Indeed, although the rule would do nothing to prevent climate change, because no single company or industry substantially impacts global warming, it would open regulated companies up to potential enforcement actions from the SEC and lawsuits from activists for “improper filing,” if the SEC isn’t satisfied with the filing or the anticipated impacts do not occur but other unforeseen impacts do occur that do materially affect the company’s profitability.
What should we conclude about the SEC’s rule? Washington has an answer:
In its current form, the SEC’s proposed climate disclosure rule will lead to expanded red tape, huge compliance costs, lawsuits, and little meaningful disclosure. Thus, the SEC should reconsider implementing the rule … and focus on its statutory mission of collecting disclosures of financially relevant information.
I wholeheartedly concur.
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Australia is way off track on drive for new fuel standards
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is not someone who allows the grass to grow under his feet, or under the industrial-sized solar panels he is so keen to promote, for that matter.
Early this month, he announced the government’s intention to introduce a New Vehicle Efficiency Standard for Australia. At the time, he told us Australia and Russia are the only advanced economies in the world not to have such a policy.
After the standard is implemented here, Russia will be on its own – something that’s not likely to worry the Russian government unduly. Bowen is targeting a start date of next year.
As is the case with many policy settings, the devil is always in the detail. It’s not just about having or not having an efficiency standard; it’s also about the parameters of the policy, other related measures and timing. Bowen plans to accelerate the implementation of the standard here by insisting we catch up to the US by 2028. This is the first problem with Bowen’s announcement.
How these schemes work is that an overall efficiency standard (typically set in terms of CO2 grams per kilometre) applies across a manufacturer’s entire fleet for sale. On average, the standard must be met, with some vehicles above the standard and others below. Credits are generated if the standard is more than met and these are tradable. For those who cannot meet the standard, these credits can be bought.
The expectation is that manufactures will seek to impose higher prices on vehicles that are above the standard and lower prices for those below it.
In other words, the standard induces price cross-subsidisation so the overall standard can be met and penalties won’t be payable. Electric vehicles are highly prized in this setting. But for those models of cars with above-standard efficiency, prices will inevitably rise.
Now if you think this is suppressing consumer sovereignty, you wouldn’t be wrong. Instead of allowing car buyers to take into account fuel efficiency as well as other characteristics, this policy deliberately restricts consumer choice to meet the government’s target. Bear in mind here that the most popular vehicles in Australia – the Ford Ranger ute and the Toyota HiLux – will massively exceed the new standard. There is speculation of price increases of between $10,000 and $25,000 for some models.
Bowen claims everyone will still be able to buy their preferred car; indeed he expects the choice of vehicles to expand even though Australia is known to be one of the best catered-for markets for right-hand-drive cars in the world.
The fact that there is little demand for some very small, fuel-efficient vehicles – those that are common in Europe and the UK – is mainly due to their unsuitability for families as well as being underpowered for Australian conditions. Bear in mind here that in Europe and the UK, petrol/diesel is highly taxed. The high price of petrol/diesel has been a driving force for many years determining the kinds of cars these citizens purchase. And, of course, many of these countries are the size of a handkerchief compared with Australia.
Using his department’s assumption-driven modelling, Bowen is predicting Australians stand to save about $1000 per vehicle per year by 2028. If that sounds unconvincing, it’s because it is. For starters, most people only buy new cars occasionally.
There are also some large leaps of faith about the take-up of electric vehicles – the real heart of this new policy – and the fact that it should be cheaper to charge a vehicle at home and drive a certain distance compared with filling up an internal combustion engine vehicle. Recent data point to it now being more expensive to use paid-for fast chargers between Melbourne and Sydney than driving a petrol-fuelled car.
(A complication that Bowen chooses to ignore about this policy is the fact that EVs use electricity generated still mainly from coal. The modelling doesn’t take into account this second-round effect.)
Had his department been closely watching overseas developments, he would also have been aware of significant problems emerging in a number of countries in relation to vehicle emissions standards, particularly the US.
Notwithstanding the extremely generous subsidies available to EV purchasers and the fact that a number of the car manufacturers have aggressively switched to EVs – think here Ford, General Motors and Volkswagen – EV sales have stalled. There are said to be row upon row of unsold EVs in dealers’ premises in the US and the dealers are now loudly complaining. The Biden administration is now considering watering down its emissions standards.
It turns out early adopters were keen to buy EVs – many had another vehicle in their garage – but demand has since slowed. The combination of high purchase prices, costly insurance and poor resale values, as well as ongoing issues with charging, has contributed to this outcome. (In the UK, this trend is, unbelievably, being blamed on an article written by Rowan Atkinson.)
Some of the car companies are now scrambling to change direction, with GM reintroducing a plug-in hybrid model to kickstart sales as well as deal with the efficiency standard. Toyota has emerged a winner in this race, with its chief always sceptical about rapid consumer acceptance of EVs. Toyota has been a substantial investor in hybrid technology and its hybrid vehicles have emerged as commercial winners in a number of countries.
Another clear trend in the motoring world is the increasing dominance of Chinese car manufacturers, particularly in the EV space. Their factories are churning out reasonable quality cars at much lower prices than the car companies that have dominated world sales for decades. Volkswagen, in particular, is under pressure as its strategic tilt to EV production fails to meet commercial expectations. (The fact that Chinese vehicles are constructed using cheap coal-fired electricity is again something that policymakers such as Bowen chose to ignore.)
So what is really driving Bowen’s decision to run with this new vehicle efficiency standard with its accelerated timetable? There are number of factors at work. The first is that some of the car companies and activists have been strongly pushing this standard. Volkswagen, which was caught up in a significant emissions misreporting incident, is very keen to see the new standard implemented.
Secondly, Bowen now realises the government’s stated emissions reduction target of a 43 per cent cut by 2030 won’t be met with current policy settings and the delayed rollout of renewable energy and new transmission lines. He is seeking some quick abatement from road transport to get closer to the target.
As for the conclusion that the policy will return $3 for every $1 spent, pull the other one. I can come up with an equally plausible set of assumptions that leads to a negative net return. When the government report makes the fatuous claim that “the projected impact of (car) emissions on Australian’s climate outlook cannot be ignored”, you know the bureaucrats are talking through their hat. (Hint: it’s about global emissions.)
Bowen might also be well-advised to admit that Australians love their cars.
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20 February, 2024
Eiffel power – France’s nuclear charge
As a consistent supporter of nuclear energy, it is encouraging to see a new French energy bill reaffirming the country’s commitment to nuclear power as ‘energy sovereignty’.
The draft bill omits setting targets for solar power, wind power, and other renewables, in favour of expanding ‘the sustainable choice of using nuclear energy as a competitive and carbon-free’ source of electricity.
This development follows a new wave of support for nuclear energy at the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai last year. France’s President Emmanuel Macron led the pledge which signed up 21 world leaders to ‘triple nuclear energy capacity from 2020 by 2050’. After signing he cheered: ‘Nuclear energy is back!’
Across the world, many countries are turning to atomic energy and rethinking their renewables targets.
In July 2023, the Swedish Parliament dumped its 100 per cent renewable target in order to build new nuclear plants claiming it needs a stable and reliable energy source.
South Africa, battling crippling energy blackouts, announced plans to add 2,500 megawatts of new nuclear generation within the next decade to resolve power shortages and secure long-term energy supply.
South Korea have reversed their phase-out of nuclear power acknowledging its efficiency in a time of rapid electrification of industry and everyday life.
Even after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, by 2015 the Japanese government had re-started the nuclear power industry with a target of reaching 20 per cent of the national electricity supply by 2030. Last year, Japan’s Cabinet approved the construction of new power plants and extended the lifespans of its existing reactors to 60 years.
While some nations are phasing out nuclear in favour of renewables, their dependency on importing electricity is growing. After Germany shut down the country’s last three nuclear power plants in April 2023, they have found themselves relying on imports from both France and Belgium’s nuclear-integrated power grids.
Nuclear energy remains a reliable, stable, and carbon-free energy source around the world, and Australia, as a world supplier of uranium, should embrace its energy opportunities too.
There are 60 nuclear power reactors currently under construction around the world and a further 110 are planned. There are 440 operating in 33 countries and an additional 30 countries considering, planning, and commencing nuclear power programs.
By contrast, Australia continues its Cold War reactionary approach, with outdated legislation blocking any true assessment of this alternative, internationally proven, carbon-free energy source.
In November 2023, the Victorian Labor government and Labor-allied crossbenchers voted down a private member’s bill seeking to repeal the state’s 1983 prohibition on nuclear energy-related activity. During debate, Labor dismissed the ‘fantasy being peddled now by the nuclear industry that somehow we have got new technology’ and described those favouring nuclear as the solution to our energy transition as ‘charlatans’.
If Labor can only resort to 40-year-old arguments and name-calling, they are clearly finding it difficult to come up with substantive reasons for their opposition.
In 2020, the Legislative Council’s Environment and Planning Committee inquiry into nuclear prohibition found that no detailed business case could be made without the moratorium being lifted.
The report found that ‘a number of submitters and witnesses have made the point that the necessary business case or firm proposals will not be attempted while a prohibition remains in place’. It concluded that ‘current estimates of the cost of nuclear energy in Australia are unreliable and accurately costing the full cost is not possible without a detailed business case being undertaken’.
Despite the evidence that banning the debate on nuclear energy stops assessment of its cost and efficacy, Labor continues to bury their heads in the sand.
We cannot forget Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, who put on a nationally embarrassing display at COP28 in Dubai.
While he attracted widespread derision for his extended Acknowledgement of Country, which now encompasses all the indigenous peoples of the world, it is perhaps fortunate less attention was paid to the detail of what he said.
Bowen claimed Australia was ‘within striking distance’ of the Albanese government’s target of a 43 per cent cut in emissions by 2030 while simultaneously tabling an ‘Annual Climate Change Statement’ in Parliament which showed Australian carbon emissions rose by 3.6 million tonnes the first six months of 2023.
Bowen’s virtue signalling knows no bounds as he jetted in on a fossil-fuelled plane to the UAE, the world’s eighth largest fossil fuel exporter, where the COP28 unanimously agreed to ‘transition away from fossil fuels’.
While leading nations provide a compelling and trailblazing example of how nuclear energy can provide safe, cheap, and carbon-free electricity, Labor’s ill-conceived excuses and dogmatic arguments now look embarrassingly outdated and parochial. The advent of Australian nuclear submarines should finally shatter them.
A non-nuclear Net Zero is fantasy, and for the good of Australia, it’s high time the state and federal Labor parties recognised that fact.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/eiffel-power-frances-nuclear-charge/
***************************************************UK: Decarbonisation is Labour’s next green policy disaster
Keir Starmer isn’t even in Downing Street yet already his government-in-waiting is in danger of being defined by its £28 billion green spending pledge, just as Tony Blair’s administration was defined by ‘45 minutes’ – the claimed deployment time of Saddam Hussein’s fabled weapons of mass destruction.
First, Starmer promised to spend that sum on green initiatives in every year of the next parliament. Then it was revised down to spending £28 billion in the last year of the next parliament. Last week he dropped the pledge and said instead that £4.7 billion a year would be spent on green investment.
But in the melee a more rash policy has been overlooked: Labour’s pledge to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030 – which brings the present government’s target forward by five years. This is one of the five great ‘missions’ laid out in the party’s pre-manifesto pitch, along with the creation of a state-owned company, Great British Energy, to achieve it. Not only will it save carbon emissions, Labour claims (without any evidence or published workings) but it will also save us an enormous amount of money, taking ‘up to £1,400 off the annual household bill and £53 billion off energy bills for businesses’ within six years. This is quite a boast, considering the average household pays £1,928 a year in energy bills.
A large part of Labour’s decarbonisation plans are laid out in a document called ‘Make Britain a Clean Energy Superpower’. Labour says it wants to quadruple offshore wind and double onshore wind by 2030, as well as to triple solar capacity. But this is likely to be impossible, not least because the National Grid won’t be able to get hold of enough subsea cables to plug in the required number of extra offshore wind turbines. There are four suppliers of such cables in the world – all of them have full order books until 2030.
Would Labour’s plan be doable even if it could get the required kit – and would it really save households money? Labour’s case is based on the idea that wind and solar energy are the cheapest forms of energy around. It repeats an often-quoted conceit that, at one point in 2022, ‘renewable energy was nine times cheaper than gas’ and asserts that it remains much cheaper.
But the ‘nine times’ claim was never true. It was made by CarbonBrief, a green energy advocacy website. They arrived at the figure by taking the prices paid for gas power at the very peak of the market in the summer of 2022 – £446 per megawatt-hour – as European countries rushed to fill their gas storage facilities ready for winter, following the loss of Russian gas after the invasion of Ukraine. It then compared them with the long-term, guaranteed ‘strike prices’ offered to operators of wind and solar farms over a 15-year period. In an auction in 2022, wind and solar farms agreed to a strike price of £48 per megawatt–hour.
It was like comparing the cost of a bus journey using a season ticket to that of hailing an Uber in rush hour. If you take the average price of gas power over the past 15 years, it is considerably less than wind or solar power.
Since 2022, the economics have changed sharply again: the price of gas has come down, but the price of renewable energy has jumped. Last July, the Swedish energy company Vattenfall pulled out of a North Sea wind farm project, complaining that the strike price it had agreed to the previous year was no longer enough. When the government held another auction for wind and solar power two months later, setting a maximum strike price of £44 per megawatt-hour for offshore wind, it didn’t receive a single bid.
The price of wind energy was on a downward trend while commodity prices were falling and interest rates were near zero (most of the costs come upfront, so these projects are especially reliant on cheap credit). That trend has now been firmly reversed. No one knows what wind will cost in 2030. It’s impossible to predict if commodity prices or interest rates will return to levels that make it the cheapest form of energy. Any claim to save consumers money is therefore spurious.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/decarbonisation-is-labours-next-green-policy-disaster/
*************************************************The renewables bubble has burst
It wasn’t so long ago that Orsted was being held up as an example of how oil and gas companies should handle the transition to clean energy. In 2009 the then-DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas) announced that it was going to turn around it business so that instead of earning 85 per cent of its money from oil and gas it was going to earn 85 per cent of it from renewables. It was an early mover in offshore wind – and, at least for some years, shareholders were richly rewarded. The share price marched upwards from around £19 in 2014 to a peak at £100 in early 2021. Increasing your money fivefold and saving the planet at the same time – you can hardly argue with that.
The economics of building wind farms has changed
Except that the bubble in renewables didn’t last. Fast forward three years and Orsted has wiped out almost all its share price gains of the past decade. In the third quarter of 2023 it managed to lose £2.5 billion as its revenues halved on the same period in 2022. This week it suspended its dividend and announced the loss of 800 jobs. It also lowered its target for renewable-generating capacity by 2030 from 50 gigawatts to 35-38 gigawatts. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies which were being battered by low wholesale prices up until 2021 have had a great couple of years. Suddenly, the divestment campaign which told us to bail out of soon-to-be ‘stranded assets’ and pile into wind and solar because they are the future looks a little poorly thought-out.
It is fair to say that not every renewable energy company has done as badly as Orsted, which has run into particular problems in a now-cancelled project to build two wind farms off the coast of New Jersey. Depending on what contracts they have, existing wind and solar farms have either benefitted from high electricity prices in Europe or they have continued to make plodding but reliable index-linked earnings thanks to guaranteed ‘strike’ prices. But Orsted’s misfortunes do rather expose the claims – still being made by Labour and others – that wind and solar energy is incredibly cheap as well as clean. The biggest problem for wind and solar is that most of their lifetime costs come upfront, in the construction phase. That is an issue when the cost of steel and other raw materials are going up – and even more so when the near-zero interest rates on which the finances of these projects were based are no longer there.
That the economics of building wind farms had changed was clear last July when Swedish firm Vattenfall withdrew from a North Sea project which it had won the right to build in a UK government auction just a year earlier. Next time the government held an auction, in September, there was not a single bid. In response, the government has since increased the maximum strike price on offer from £44 to £73 per MWh. That is still a little lower than the average wholesale price of electricity over the past year but 50 per cent above the average wholesale price in the decade up to 2020. Wind and solar energy can no longer claim to be cheap – and, barring a highly-unlikely return to near zero interest rates, making an Orsted-style switch to renewables is certainly not looking like a way for oil and gas giants to boost investment returns.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-renewables-bubble-has-burst/ ?
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Eating green ideology: official Australian diet advice to warn of climate impact
The federal government’s official advice on diets will now incorporate the impact of certain foods on climate change, sparking outrage from farmers who fear it is driven by an “ideological agenda” against red meat.
It could lead to consumers being told to reduce steak and lamb chop intakes in favour of alternatives like chicken, which some scientists say has a lower carbon footprint.
Red meat producers are concerned that the move by the National Health and Medical Research Council to incorporate environmental sustainability into Australian Dietary Guidelines will be based on “misinformation” and present an incomplete picture about the industry’s effect on the environment. They have called for it to be scrapped.
The statutory authority’s dietary guidelines expert committee says the change is based on “stakeholder feedback” and has already started setting up a sustainability working group to help its review of the 2013 guidelines, due by the end of 2026.
Red Meat Advisory Council chair John McKillop accused the NHMRC, which is responsible for funding medical research and providing health and nutrition recommendations to the government, of straying beyond its remit. “These developments are an overreach by the dietary guidelines expert committee that go well beyond the policy intent of the Australian Dietary Guidelines to provide recommendations on healthy foods and dietary patterns,” he said.
“The red meat industry has a strong story about sustainability, so our concerns are not because we believe it’s a weakness but because it’s not the role of the dietary guidelines nor is it the expertise of the dietary guidelines expert committee. The nation’s dietary guidelines should be focused on promoting public health, preventing chronic diseases and ensuring that all Australian have access to accurate and reliable information about their basic nutritional requirements.”
Sustainability was included in an appendix of the previous guidelines, but the expert committee says “sustainability messaging should be incorporated within the revised dietary guidelines, and not included as a separate section within the appendices”.
Mr McKillop said expanding the scope of the dietary guidelines into other non-nutritional topics would undermine their purpose and the public’s confidence in them. “This is going to make clear and simple nutritional messaging even more difficult,” he said.
RMAC will ask the NHMRC committee to reconsider the change to the guidelines. “If they refuse, we’ll be asking the federal government to intervene as it’s starting to look like the process is running off the rails,” he said.
“The dietary guidelines review process must not be allowed to be used as a vehicle to drive ideological agendas at the expense of the latest nutritional science.”
The dietary guidelines expert committee has defined sustainable diets as being “accessible, affordable and equitable diets with low environmental impacts”.
In a statement, the NHMRC said including sustainability followed a “stakeholder survey” in which one in three people surveyed listed it as a priority.
“While the 2013 guidelines included messages about the environmental impact of food choices, the placement of the messages in an appendix has made them easy to overlook,” a spokesman said.
“Stakeholder feedback suggests there is low awareness of their existence. The revision of the guidelines provides an opportunity to improve integration of messages about food sustainability into the guidelines.”
The organisation rejected the suggestion that incorporating sustainability messaging would undermine public confidence.
“Developing or updating NHMRC guidelines involves a thorough review of the evidence, methodological advice on the quality of these reviews, drafting of the guidelines, public consultation and independent expert review of the final guidelines,” the spokesman said.
“The dietary guidelines expert committee advised that recommendations for dietary patterns and food groups should firstly consider health impacts in the Australian context, followed by consideration of sustainability and other contextual factors,” the spokesman said. “This is consistent with how sustainability has been incorporated into dietary guidelines in other countries.”
Central Queensland cattle farmer Mark Davie said industry concerns were heightened by perceived misinformation about the health impacts and sustainability of red meat production permeating media, public policy and nutritional advice.
Mr Davie, who chairs the Australian Beef Sustainability Framework, questioned how the NHMRC could measure one food source against another while still accounting for benefits to things like soil or biodiversity.
Meat producers are concerned that an updated version could follow rhetoric from organisations like the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, which advocates for reduced livestock grazing.
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19 February, 2024
Biden Administration May Relax EPA Rules Driving Electric Vehicles: Report
In recent years, the American car market has been pushed toward becoming a significantly more electric one by the Biden Administration's strict Environmental Protection Agency rules. Those car tailpipe emission rules are so strict that they could result in two-thirds of all new cars having emissions at all by 2032. But now, after months of pressure from automakers, dealers, labor unions and the other side of the political aisle, the White House may ease up on that plan—a move that will sure to draw the ire of EV proponents and anyone sounding the alarm over global warming.
This report comes from the New York Times, citing three unnamed officials said to be familiar with the plan. The exact details of this plan are not known, except that a "sharp increase" in EV sales would not be required "until after 2030."
The new EPA rules are expected to be finalized this spring, the Times reports.
If so, the move could have profound effects on the future of the EV industry, America's ability to compete against a rising electric China, and a signature Biden policy achievement as he faces a tough reelection battle.
From the Times:
The E.P.A. designed the proposed regulations so that 67 percent of sales of new cars and light-duty trucks would be all-electric by 2032, up from 7.6 percent in 2023, a radical remaking of the American automobile market.
That remains the goal. But as they finalize the regulations, administration officials are tweaking the plan to slow the pace at which auto manufacturers would need to comply, so that electric vehicle sales would increase more gradually through 2030 but then would have to sharply rise.
The change in pacing is in response to automakers who say that more time is needed to build a national network of charging stations and to bring down the cost of electric vehicles, and to labor unions that want more time to try to unionize new electric car plants that are opening around the country, particularly in the South.
Last year was a landmark one for EV sales, with all-electric cars making up 7.6% of the market and record sales from every brand. But the rate of EV adoption slowed down toward the end of the year, moving less quickly than the industry anticipated. The so-called "EV slowdown" is often overblown, but the transition has been hampered by combatant car dealers, a largely inadequate public charging network, intense political opposition and concerns about how the cars operate differently than gas-powered ones.
https://insideevs.com/news/709077/biden-epa-rollback-nyt/
*****************************************Labor union urges Scottish Labour Party to oppose heat pumps and pursue hydrogen
Labour delegates attending its [Scottish] party conference this week will be urged to support the Scottish Government turning its back on Patrick Harvie’s heat pumps strategy and instead press ahead with using hydrogen to heat homes.
Bosses at the GMB union, who have been publicly hostile to the Scottish Government’s strategy to clean up how buildings are heated, are calling on Scottish Labour to oppose heat pumps and other renewable heating systems being pursued by [Scottish minister] Mr Harvie, and instead turn attention to hydrogen – believing it will help safeguard jobs.
But Mr Harvie has told The Herald that hydrogen “is not expected to play a central role in heating buildings”.
An independent study commissioned and published by WWF Scotland last year concluded that using hydrogen for heating was a “distraction” and called for the focus to be put on other methods, primarily heat pumps. […]
Bosses from the GMB union, which represents energy workers in Scotland, will table a motion at Scottish Labour conference on Friday, calling for more focus to be put on hydrogen for heating.
The motion to be tabled at Scottish Labour’s conference in Glasgow this weekend, seen by The Herald, will back “deep concern” over the Scottish Government’s heat in buildings plans, claiming the strategy “proposes banning gas boilers and forcing onto households untested systems such as heat pumps which come with higher installation and running costs”.
It adds that “the existing, vast and skilled gas workforce and 280,000km gas network” could be “be reskilled and repurposed to provide low and no-carbon hydrogen to homes”.
Mr Harvie, the Scottish Government’s Zero Carbon Buildings Minister, has launched a consultation that will phase out fossil fuel gas boilers by 2045, when Scotland has pledged to become net zero.
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Two windfarms share £80 million just to switch off
The cost to consumers of so-called windfarm constraint payments is rising quickly.
Regular readers will know that I have long been concerned over the extraordinary level of payments to windfarms to switch off. These so-called ‘constraint payments’ are deemed necessary when the wires in the transmission grid have inadequate capacity to get a generator’s power to market. When that happens, the windfarm (and it is always a windfarm) is paid to switch off, and a gas-fired power station is paid to switch on so that the end user of the electricity is not left short.
This is particularly a problem for windfarms in Scottish waters, because there is relatively little transmission capacity running across the border to England, where most of the power users are found. In 2022, I noted that the offshore windfarm called Moray East had spent 25% of the previous year switched off. The suspicion is that there may be perverse incentives for developers to build windfarms in Scotland precisely so they receive constraint payments.
With a large new offshore windfarm called Seagreen coming on stream in 2023, I was interested to see how things had developed. The data, taken from the Renewable Energy Foundation, is revealing.
Figure 1 shows that the total payments to windfarms has risen to £303 million, off a constrained volume of 4.3 terawatt hours. That’s roughly four days’ electricity demand thrown away entirely.
And if we break down the 2023 bill, we can see that once again it is the canny Scots who are the big beneficiaries (Figure 2), with Moray East getting an extraordinary £43 million, and Seagreen (as expected) not far behind at £39 million.
Moray East’s constrained volume is 590 GWh, which will represent something like 20% of its output. Seagreen’s is 759 GWh, which will be somewhat higher.
Interestingly, payments to Moray East’s neighbour, Beatrice, have fallen away sharply, from £33 million in 2022 to just £9 million in 2023. I don’t know why this is.
In summary then, the rip-off continues, and indeed is getting worse.
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An ESG Asset Manager Exodus
Has the tide turned on environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing? It appears so. JPMorgan Asset Management, BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors on Thursday retreated from the Climate Action 100+ investor compact because they don’t want the political and legal liability.
Climate Action 100+ describes itself as the “largest ever global investor engagement initiative on climate change.” Its 700 or so institutional investor members manage more than $68 trillion in assets (before Thursday’s exits). Their goal is to force companies to zero out CO2 emissions by 2050.
Members are supposed to “engage” 170 “focus companies” such as Boing, Home Depot and American Airlines—that is, threaten to vote against non-compliant corporate directors and back shareholder resolutions that pressure management. Their campaign has had great success with 75% of targeted companies committing to “net zero.”
But the climate left is never content. Last June the alliance impelled its members to publish information on their “engagements” and to explain how and why they voted on shareholder resolutions flagged by the outfit. The point was to embarrass asset managers that climate scolds accuse of being insufficiently committed to the cause.
Asset managers have been walking a fine legal line. GOP Attorneys General in 2022 warned that they might be violating their fiduciary obligations and antitrust laws. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan in December subpoenaed BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors for documents and communications related to their involvement in “collusive” agreements.
The climate alliance’s new rules would compound the legal and political jeopardy. In its withdrawal announcement, State Street said its rules “are not consistent with our independent approach to proxy voting and portfolio company engagement.” BlackRock said the rules “would raise legal considerations.”
All true. But perhaps their customers have also begun to realize that ESG and net-zero mandates are political crusades that accomplish little except politicizing investment. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink noted correctly last year that ESG has been “entirely weaponised.” But asset managers should have known that bowing to the left would invite pushback from the right.
New York City Comptroller Brad Lander lambasted the trio on Thursday for “caving to climate deniers.” “We are in the process of reviewing how well our managers are aligned in that approach and will consider our options for the management of our public market investments,” he warned.
What does it say when the climate left believes it can achieve its goals only by intimidation and coercion?
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18 February, 2024
Conceptual error in climate change analysis
It is often said that the ‘science is in on climate change’. Is it? We should always adhere to the principle of the ‘working hypothesis’ and have an open mind on scientific questions no matter how well-recognised the researchers are. In the study of science, there is always the chance new information can come along to cause a rethink.
A common error in problem-solving and policy development is to confuse a technical strategy for a desired client outcome. Our Climate Change Minister could be accused of this. Reducing emissions is a ‘strategy’, not the fundamental desired client outcome. With the mission ‘to reduce carbon emissions’ by increasing renewable energy, the way to assess performance is to concentrate on measuring emission reduction, and then to follow this up with how quickly the renewables are built and their cost (wind farms, solar panels, transmission lines).
Instead of the current strategy-driven mission, a fundamental client outcome statement would be: ‘To protect against, and where possible, prevent damage from extreme off-trend fluctuations in climate.’ How would you go about managing your program using this mission statement?
First, you gather accurate temperature, rainfall, and weather measurements. They are the valid and fundamental ‘outcome’ measures – not data on CO2 emissions. If there is an undeniable and dangerous increase in temperature and rainfall, more cyclones, and a clear and unabated rise in sea level, then the possible cause must be thoroughly identified. Depending on the answer, you would adopt appropriate mitigation strategies, or strategies that adapt to weather patterns and temperature levels.
Another principle of problem-solving is to map out the total picture and not be driven by ideology. The Climate Change Minister should consider possible causes other than human-induced emissions. It was announced in April 2023 that coronal cones 20 times larger than Earth have been discovered and may cause a massive outburst of energy from the sun. What could be the implications for our planet? Ask solar physicists.
Chief scientist in applied helio-physics at John Hopkins, Ian Cohen, has suggested that solar storms could take out satellites, cut power and shut down the internet. In 1972 a solar storm caused 4,000 magnetically sensitive mines in water off Vietnam to detonate. Earth is said to be entering a period of peak activity as part of an eleven-year cycle. It is suggested this potentially could be more violent than the solar cycles of the past three decades. Now that would be something for climate scientists to really worry about…
With respect to the world’s temperature, there are several sources that claim to present the precise figure. One says the 2023 average global temperature was 1.45c above the 1950-90 average. Another says since 1880, Earth’s temperature has increased by 0.08c. Another says during the last 50 years the increase is 0.13c. To the unscientific mind, these temperatures do not appear to be verging on catastrophic boiling us all to death. As of 2024, data on natural changes in temperature, rainfall, and sea level do not show any statistically significant difference to historical records.
There are respected scientists who question the current climate orthodoxy. Physicist Prof. William Happer of Princeton University and Prof. Richard Lindzen, Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT have argued science demonstrates there is no climate-related risk caused by fossil fuels and CO2, and that 600 million years of CO2 and temperature data contradicts the theory that high levels of CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming. They state reliable scientific theories come from validating theoretical predictions with observations, not consensus, peer review, government opinion, or manipulated data.
In July 2023, the International Monetary Fund cancelled a planned talk on climate change by 2022 Nobel physicist John Clauser when they learned he had stated publicly:
‘I can confidently say there is no real climate crisis, and that climate change does not cause extreme weather events. The OPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous disinformation.’
Clauser pointed out that the US Environmental Protection Authority has charts that show a heatwave Index going back to 1895, showing heatwaves were more common before the 1960s and especially in the 1930s.
In addition to these physicists, there are eminent Australian geologists who challenge the CO2 cause theory. Emeritus Prof. Ian Pilmer of the University of Melbourne, and Prof. Michael Asten of Monash University, have argued that throughout the history of the planet, there have been long periods of major change in climate due to natural forces. This would indicate recent human-based emissions may not be the important factor that we have been led to believe.
With respect to measuring emissions (nitrous oxide and methane), there is an expectation that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would have collected accurate data. Then one reads an independent 2023 report of these greenhouse gas emissions from farm dams in Australia’s irrigation regions, that the measurements had been massively over-estimated by the IPCC by 4 to 5 per cent.
To add further confusion to the issue, a 2023 research paper submitted to the European Physical Journal Plus claimed climate science has become ‘highly politicised’. Italian scientists analysed long-term data on heat, droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and ecosystem productivity, and found no clear trend of extreme events. The statements by these scientists would appear worthy of examination. Unfortunately, comments to the publisher by other climate scientists caused the withdrawal of the article.
If activists are correct, and if temperatures and rainfall start to show a significant increase without any influence from natural factors such as the sun or outer atmospheric disturbances, the second ‘outcome’ mission opens your mind to several strategies that could be compared against each other on cost and effectiveness – renewables, outer space satellites capturing solar energy and transmitting to Earth, small nuclear, carbon capture, examine possibility of amalgamating carbon and turning it into a useful product, lower emission coal-fired power stations, hydro, hydrogen fuel cells, a scientific search for a predator for carbon other than trees (or the planting of more trees), and so on.
A valid client ‘outcome’ statement encourages you not to jump to a conclusion in the initial stages of critical thinking about the cause of any global warming. If you make a mistake at that point, there are significant productivity implications. Governments could waste a significant amount of money (a catastrophic amount) on a less than optimum strategy. Rather than relying almost entirely on climate scientists who concentrate on carbon emissions, a politician with a mind focused on validity could bring together an inter-disciplinary team – climate scientists, nuclear physicists, solar physicists, atmospheric physicists, examine the moon’s behaviour, plant technologists, oceanographers, geologists, volcanologists, botanists, bushfire specialists and so on. Has any national government followed this approach? Has any Minister for Energy, in any country, expanded their vision beyond their own narrow ideology is a potential danger to their country…?
There are very obvious reasons why some politicians and many rich investors in renewable energy would oppose a serious questioning of the renewable strategy and switching to nuclear instead. If small nuclear was introduced – as is being done in many countries – it would make current renewable energy strategies redundant. That would mean all the billions of dollars spent on wind and solar would have been a waste of money. We wouldn’t need them. Admitting that would be far too embarrassing for any ideological politician and far too financially damaging to any rich wind farm investor obtaining government grants.
If the Sun is found to be the fundamental cause of the problem (variations in energy output, massive infrequent solar flares, and/or variations in distance between Earth and Sun), or if there is a slight tilting of the Earth on its axis, or the Moon changes position, or even disturbance further out in our solar system, you would evaluate adaptation strategies.
It seemed reasonable for some people to assume the vast flooding in 2022 could be attributed to human-induced climate change. There is however, a different possibility … nature. Environment analyst Graham Lloyd explained.
‘The meteorological processes at play are well understood. Three consecutive La Nina weather patterns have left the eastern seaboard soaked and prone to flooding. Triple La Ninas have happened four times in the Bureau of Meteorology’s 120-year record … The Southern Annular Mode is a climate driver that can influence rainfall and temperature. Although wet, the latest BoM figures show that 2022 was the ninth wettest year on record (not the wettest).’
When the above material, stressing the need to examine the total picture in any critical thinking, was shown to a high school Principal, to a high school science teacher and to an environmental engineer, they were all surprised and quite critical that one would want to show this to students. Annoyed actually. One was emphatic…
‘Why waste the students’ time having them look at irrelevant issues? We KNOW what the problem is. It is CO2 emissions. And we KNOW what the solution is. It is 100 per cent renewables.’
My answer to them was:
‘The difference between you and me, is that you want to tell the students WHAT to think. I want to teach them HOW to think. I want them to understand insightful thinking. Not to be indoctrinated’.
You can be the judge as to who is on the right track.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/conceptual-error-in-climate-change-analysis/
*******************************************JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock drop out of massive UN climate alliance in stunning move
JPMorgan Chase and institutional investors BlackRock and State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) on Thursday announced that they are quitting or, in the case of BlackRock, substantially scaling back involvement in a massive United Nations climate alliance formed to combat global warming through corporate sustainability agreements.
In a statement, the New York-based JPMorgan Chase explained that it would exit the so-called Climate Action 100+ investor group because of the expansion of its in-house sustainability team and the establishment of its climate risk framework in recent years. BlackRock and State Street, which both manage trillions of dollars in assets, said the alliance's climate initiatives had gone too far, expressing concern about potential legal issues as well.
The stunning announcements come as the largest financial institutions in the U.S. and worldwide face an onslaught of pressure from consumer advocates and Republican states over their environmental, social and governance (ESG) priorities.
"The firm has built a team of 40 dedicated sustainable investing professionals, including investment stewardship specialists who also leverage one of the largest buy side research teams in the industry," the bank said in a statement shared with FOX Business. "Given these strengths and the evolution of its own stewardship capabilities, JPMAM (JP Morgan Asset Management) has determined that it will no longer participate in Climate Action 100+ engagements."
BlackRock, meanwhile, withdrew its U.S. business from Climate Action 100+, shifting involvement in the alliance to BlackRock's smaller international entity where a majority of clients are pursuing decarbonization goals, the Financial Times first reported Thursday. A spokesperson for BlackRock confirmed to FOX Business that the move had been made in recent weeks.
And State Street said its exit from the alliance was made because Climate Action 100+'s "phase 2" commitments conflicted with the firm's internal investing policies.
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Meta, Amazon and Google shed 3,000 do-goody ESG staff as backlash over 'woke capitalism' intensifies
Meta, Amazon, Google, and other US firms are shedding staff with environmental, social and governance roles (ESG), research shows, in the latest sign of the backlash against what critics deride as 'woke capitalism.'
More people left ESG jobs than started them for much of 2023, marking the reversal of a once-mushrooming sector, according to Live Data Technologies, which tracks the employment market.
US firms saw 3,071 ESG departures in December 2023, compared with 2,897 arrivals — a net loss of 174 roles, says the review of more than 360,000 US-based ESG professionals that was published in The Wall Street Journal.
Meta Platforms, Amazon, and Google had the largest ESG job outflows among US firms last year, the data show. The pattern was visible across other technology, financial-services and consulting firms.
Those firms have not commented on the exodus.
'2023 saw a real cooling in chatter around ESG and in some quarters, quite a pronounced attack on what ESG was about,' Joe Dubbin, managing director at Cripps Leadership Advisors, a recruitment firm, told the Journal.
'It has certainly filtered through into the hiring requirements that we've been tasked to go do.'
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European Central Bank tells staff: If you’re not green, you’re not wanted
A top European Central Bank official stunned employees by saying people who don’t buy into the institution’s green objectives aren’t welcome to work there.
Frank Elderson, one of six members of the ECB’s executive board, told an internal meeting: “I don’t want these people anymore.”
His comments, verified by POLITICO, have sparked outrage among ECB staff, who described them as “authoritarian” and said they showed a free and open discussion about climate change ? and the role the bank should play in tackling it ? was no longer possible at the Frankfurt-based organization.
At the meeting earlier this month, Elderson asked employees ? some in person, some online ? “Why would we want to hire people who we have to reprogram? Because they came from the best universities, but they still don’t know how to spell the word ‘climate.’
Anyone already working at the ECB should be retrained, Elderson added. He insisted he was "not threatening anyone," and did not expand on what he meant by being able to "spell" climate.
The Dutchman’s remarks have broader significance because the ECB is embroiled in a debate ? internally and among Europe’s politicians ? over how much its policies should steer toward making the economy "greener," or whether it should just stick to its main goal of keeping eurozone prices stable.
Diversity and inclusion
The comments drew an angry reaction from employees who took to a private chatroom for bank staff. Their responses were also seen by POLITICO.
Elderson, who is the bank’s climate czar and vice-chair of its supervisory arm, “killed the ideal of diversity and inclusion in one sentence,” said one member of staff. “I thought these underpinned the culture of this institution.” They described the Dutchman’s comments as “authoritarian.”
Others warned his comments risked fostering “groupthink,” which would impair the ECB’s decision-making.
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15 February, 2024
What Should We Think Of Michael Mann’s Defamation Trial ‘Win’?
Written by Roger Pielke Jr.
I was a witness in the case and testified on Tuesday.2 Here, I’ll offer my thoughts on the case and some personal reflections on my experience
Mann’s case alleged that he was defamed by statements made by the bloggers more than a decade ago, which harmed his reputation and career (I won’t rehash the details here, but you can get a full accounting of the trial at this comprehensive podcast).3
The defense built their case around making three points to the jury.
One was to bring in experts to testify that Mann’s methods in producing the so-called “Hockey Stick” graph were manipulative, and thus critics of the Hockey Stick were factually correct in saying so.
The second point was to demonstrate that the debate over climate at the time the blog posts were written was intense and vitriolic, with Mann saying things about others that were worse than what the defendants said about him.4
Finally, the defense argued that Mann hardly put on a case — he provided no evidence or witnesses supporting his claims of damage to his reputation or career.
In contrast, the prosecution was — in the words of the court, “disjointed” — and was reprimanded on multiple occasions by the judge, most notably for knowingly providing false information to the jury on alleged damages suffered by Mann.5
When I was cross-examined, Mann’s lawyer had considerable trouble getting basic facts right like timelines and who said what.6
Even so, in a trial that most neutral observers would surely see as favoring the arguments of the defense, Mann walked away with a resounding, comprehensive victory.7 How did that happen?
In my view, there were two absolutely pivotal moments in the trial.
One occurred when Mann was testifying and he explained that he felt that the bloggers were not just criticizing him, but they were attacking all of climate science, and he could not let that stand.
As the world’s most accomplished and famous climate scientist, Mann intimated that he was simply the embodiment of all of climate science.
For the jury, this set up the notion that this trial was not really about Mann, but about attacks on all of climate science from ‘climate deniers’.
The second pivotal moment occurred when in closing arguments Mann’s lawyer asked the jury to send a message to ‘right-wing science deniers’ and Trump supporters with a large punitive damage award.
Here is how an advocacy group called “DeSmog” accurately reported these dynamics:
Mann sued Simberg and Steyn for defamation, but the trial proved to be about much more than statements that harmed the scientist’s reputation — the entire field and validity of climate science was under scrutiny.
In closing arguments, Mann’s lawyer John Williams compared the climate deniers in this case to election deniers overall. “Why do Trumpers continue to deny that he won the election?” he asked the jury. “Because they truly believe what they say or because they want to further their agenda?”
He asked the jury to consider the same question about Steyn and Simberg: Did they believe what they wrote was the truth, or did they just want to push their agenda? …
“Michael Mann is tired of being attacked,” Williams told the jury. “You have the opportunity to serve as an example to prevent others from acting in a similar way” to Simberg and Steyn.
An underlying current throughout this trial has been that ‘climate denialism’, like what the two defendants practice, isn’t really about the science. It’s more about politics and policy that drives organizations and individuals to “attack the science and confuse the public . . .
This framing — ‘climate deniers’ versus climate science — has also characterized mainstream media coverage.
For instance, The Washington Post announced, on the day the case went to the jury, that this case was part of a “mounting campaign” against “right-wing trolls” (below).
Prominent climate scientist or right-wing trolls? Which side are you on?
The case was formally about defamation, but in reality, it was not at all about defamation.
As Michael Mann stated after the verdict, the case was really about politics and ideology:
https://principia-scientific.com/what-should-we-think-of-michael-manns-defamation-trial-win/
*********************************************Boiling Point Reached On Green Policies
Something rather amazing is happening across Western Europe, although American media outlets would like to pretend that nothing is happening.
The sea change is that ordinary people are pushing back against green policies that will destroy farming (and also destroy the food supply) and against the endless immigration that’s intended to wipe out Europe’s ancient populations in favor of entirely new populations from the Muslim world and Africa (both Muslim and non-Muslim regions).
The farmer protests began last year in the Netherlands when the government announced that it intended to cut livestock farming by 30 percent to prevent ‘greenhouse gases’.
It was a pure “you vill eat ze bugs” moment, and the farmers protested vehemently.
Indeed, they protested uber-conservative Geert Wilders right into a parliamentary majority, although the wacky parliamentary system means he hasn’t been able to form a coalition to lead the government.
Because those policies are not limited to the Netherlands but have spread across Europe (where post-WWII socialism provided a ready landing pad for environmental madness), the same farmer protests are now in other European nations.
Again, no farmers means no food, except for the delightful Stone Age diet of bugs, scavenged fruits and vegetables, and gleaned grains.
Our famine-free era will be just a short interlude in the long history of human starvation.
As a reminder, when Stalin deliberately forced a famine on the Ukrainian people during the 1930s, the saying was that an orphan was a child whose parents died before they could eat him.
That’s the world leftists are pushing.
https://principia-scientific.com/boiling-point-reached-on-green-policies/
************************************************Biden’s Latest Climate Regs Hammer Manufacturing
The Biden administration finalized regulations severely tightening restrictions on fine particulate matter that the manufacturing and energy sectors are legally allowed to emit, an action that industry said would have devastating economic consequences.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled the regulations Wednesday morning in a joint announcement with environmental activists, saying limiting particulate matter known as PM2.5 or soot would have health benefits for Americans nationwide.
The rulemaking lowers the annual PM2.5 standard from a level of 12 micrograms per cubic meter to a level of nine micrograms per cubic meter.
“Today’s action is a critical step forward that will better protect workers, families, and communities from the dangerous and costly impacts of fine particle pollution,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan told reporters in a call. “The science is clear. Soot pollution is one of the most dangerous forms of air pollution and is linked to a range of serious and potentially deadly illnesses, including asthma and heart attacks.”
“The stronger standard is designed to ensure clear, routine pathways for industry to continue to upgrade and build while maintaining cleaner, healthier air,” Regan continued. “We know that cleaner air and a strong and bustling economy go hand in hand.”
According to the EPA, the regulations will prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays while yielding up to $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032. …snip…
However, industry associations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), and the American Petroleum Institute (API) have warned of the potentially wide-ranging impacts of more restrictive particulate matter restrictions.
In a September letter to Regan, those groups and 30 other industry associations said the regulations could lead to onerous permitting requirements that would “freeze manufacturing and supply chain investments.”
They also pointed to a May 2023 study conducted by Oxford Economics and commissioned by NAM that concluded more restrictive PM2.5 regulations would threaten between $162.4 and $197.4 billion of economic activity while putting 852,100 to 973,900 current jobs at risk.
“Tightening the NAAQS PM2.5 standard will grind permits to a halt for a large portion of our country,” Marty Durbin, the senior vice president for policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said Wednesday. “EPA’s new rule is expected to put 569 counties out of compliance and push many others close to the limit, which threatens economic growth.”
“Compliance with the new standard will be very difficult because 84 percent of emissions now come from non-industrial sources like wildfires and road dust that are costly and hard to control,” he continued. “While EPA states there are exemptions for wildfires, 70 percent of those requests haven’t been granted in the past, and the process for seeking one is time-consuming and difficult for states to manage.”
Durbin added that the EPA should have maintained the previous standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter and focused its attention instead on reducing non-industrial emissions. The regulations, he said, punish counties and the private sector “for situations largely out of their control.”
The regulations, meanwhile, will make the U.S. PM2.5 standards among the world’s most burdensome.
While Australia and Canada have annual standards lower than nine micrograms per cubic meter, Japan has a standard of 15 micrograms per cubic meter, and the U.K. and European Union both have a standard of 20 micrograms per cubic meter.
China and India have annual standards of 35 micrograms per cubic meter or greater.
“Protecting public health and the environment is a top priority for our industry, and America has seen significant air quality improvements and reduced emissions over the past decades under the existing EPA standards,” said API Vice President of Downstream Policy Will Hupman.
“Yet, today’s announcement is the latest in a growing list of short-sighted policy actions that have no scientific basis and prioritize foreign energy and manufacturing from unstable regions of the world over American jobs, manufacturing, and national security,” Hupman continued. “As we review the final standard, we will consider all our options.”
https://principia-scientific.com/bidens-latest-climate-regs-hammer-manufacturing/
*******************************************Absurd: New Zealand courts can now decide on climate change
The World Justice Project ranks New Zealand 7th out of 142 countries on its ‘Rule of Law Index’, narrowly ahead of Australia’s 13th place. However, Australia still has hope – if only because of a recent decision by the Supreme Court of New Zealand.
The case is easily told. In 2019 Mike Smith, an indigenous activist fighting climate change, filed a lawsuit against seven large New Zealand companies – including Fonterra and Z Energy – for their carbon emissions. Smith claims that they are causing him harm.
The case falls under what lawyers call ‘tort law’. It is an ancient branch of the common law dealing with making good damage unlawfully caused to one person by another.
In his case, Smith argued that the seven companies were responsible for the torts of ‘public nuisance’, ‘negligence’ and a hitherto unknown tort of ‘damage to the climate system’.
Armed with these claims, and supported by pressure group Lawyers for Climate Action, Smith went to court. The defendants promptly applied to strike his claims out. In legal parlance, such a ‘strike out’ means that the court considers a claim too frivolous to be taken seriously.
In the first instance, the High Court struck out Smith’s public nuisance and negligence claims. However, the High Court allowed Smith to take his damage to the climate system forward, not least to see whether that fabled new tort really exists.
The Court of Appeal did not think so. It threw out Smith’s whole case.
This is where Smith’s case would have ended, had it not been for the New Zealand Supreme Court, the highest court in the land. A couple of years ago, it permitted Smith to argue his case.
Last week, we finally learned the verdict. The Supreme Court not only allowed Smith to have his claim of damage to the climate system heard in the lower court. It did so on all three alleged torts.
You do not have to be a lawyer to understand the problems with New Zealand’s top judges’ decision last week. But perhaps one must be a lawyer to come up with it.
To be clear, the Supreme Court did not decide that Smith will eventually win his case. But it does mean that the court believes that he might.
Still, is this a logical analysis of Smith’s claims?
To answer this, we need to consider a little background on climate change and New Zealand’s policy for dealing with it.
In the grand scheme of planetary emissions, New Zealand is a rounding error. Of every tonne of global carbon emissions, New Zealand is responsible for 1.7 kilograms. Since Smith sued only seven New Zealand companies, his case is effectively a few grams out of each global tonne of carbon emissions.
Now, in tort law, the general rule is that there must be a close link between a defendant’s actions and the plaintiff’s alleged damage. The legal standard is that it cannot be “too remote”, i.e. the specific action must be causally connected with the harm.
Could any reasonable person think there is such a close link? Would anyone seriously believe that a (globally speaking) tiny amount of carbon dioxide from a specific emitter would cause specific harm in Mr Smith’s life? Had the Supreme Court followed the Court of Appeal’s lead, the case would have been closed.
If the link between action and damage is too loose, then anything goes. According to chaos theory, the flap of a butterfly’s wing can cause a hurricane. By Smith’s logic, if the butterfly had an owner, that owner should pay for the rebuild after the storm.
If this is already problematic, it gets worse. New Zealand has a legislative framework for dealing with carbon emissions: the Emissions Trading Scheme, or “ETS.” All non-agricultural emitters of climate gases in New Zealand must buy carbon units. These units permit them to emit these gases.
The seven companies Smith sued had such certificates for their emissions. So, they were complying with the rules and regulations put in place by parliament and administered by government.
A key part of the rule of law is predictability. If you play by the rules and obey the law, you should not have anything to fear. So how could the companies find themselves sued when they are complying with environmental law?
But wait, not even that is the end of this absurd story. That is because of the way the ETS works.
Under New Zealand’s ETS, the government auctions and allocates a fixed number of emission credits each year. Trading in ETS units only determines who emits how much of that total amount.
If Smith is ultimately successful in his claim, the seven companies will emit less in future. However, under the logic of the ETS, others will emit more. New Zealand’s total emissions will not change by a single gram.
Suing the government for not running a tighter cap would have had some coherence. Suing individual participants in the market does not. Again, one would have expected the Supreme Court to take this into account. Obviously, it did not.
Absurdities abound in this case. Law students learn that without a reasonably close connection between action and damage, there can be no tort. Not so, apparently, in this case.
Law students also learn that statute is the dominant source of law. Of course, this does not prevent common law from being applied and developed. But in this case, the Supreme Court has opened the door for climate change to be brought into common law when a sophisticated statutory regime is already in place.
Moreover, trying to deal with climate change through the common law is doomed to fail under the ETS. In effect, the existence of the ETS makes any common law tort toothless and superfluous.
All of this is, frankly, concerning. The most troubling thing about the Supreme Court’s decision is the signal it sends: Matters of policy and politics (such as climate change) can be decided by the courts.
In a democracy, however, voters elect parliaments to deal with the problems facing society. How democratic would it be for the courts to usurp such matters from elected lawmakers?
New Zealand is lucky to be one of the world’s highest ranked countries for the rule of law. But with decisions like the one just delivered by the Supreme Court, one may wonder for how much longer.
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14 February, 2024
Climate change row as British scientists claim ‘Day After Tomorrow’ modelling is wrong
A climate model predicting a devastating ‘Day After Tomorrow’ collapse of ocean systems has been criticised for relying on ‘entirely unrealistic’ scenarios.
A Dutch team from Utrecht University published work in the journal of Science Advances this week suggesting that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could reach a tipping point, triggering a new ice age.
The AMOC transports heat and salt throughout the world’s oceans and helps regulate the global climate, driving the Gulf Stream that keeps Britain warmer than it should be for its northerly latitude.
In the apocalyptic science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow, the ocean system is disrupted by climate change, plunging the northern hemisphere into a permanent winter.
Although ice-core data suggests the AMOC can switch off, recent sophisticated modelling has not been able to reproduce the effect, leading many scientists to think a collapse is unlikely to happen.
The new study claims to have shown that AMOC is “on route to tipping”, a prospect that the authors say is “bad news for the climate system and humanity”.
However British scientists warned that the outcome had been “forced” by using unlikely variables, such as assuming large influxes of freshwater into the Atlantic.
Prof Jonathan Bamber, director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre at Bristol University, said: “They did this by imposing a huge freshwater forcing to the North Atlantic that is entirely unrealistic for even the most extreme warming scenario over the next century.
“Their freshwater forcing applied to the North Atlantic is equivalent to six cm/year of sea level rise by the end of the experiment, which is more than seen during the collapse of the ice sheet that covered North America during the last glaciation.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that the AMOC is unlikely to collapse this century, and many scientists do not believe it will fail even if the climate continues to warm.
Observational data for the ocean system only goes back to 2004, making it difficult to predict, and because it spans the globe, most models cannot account for all the nuances and influences.
Commenting on the new research, Prof Andrew Watson, of Exeter University, said “They say it suggests that ‘the present day AMOC is on route to tipping’.
‘Push it quite hard’
“This sounds alarming, but it’s important to note that this is not the same as saying collapse is going to happen imminently. They have to run their model for a long time (1,700 years) and push it quite hard to make the collapse happen.
“Models are not reality. The real system may be more, or less, prone to collapse than this model suggests.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/09/climate-change-modelling-wrong-claim-uk-scientists/
****************************************************Britain’s Disastrous Path to Net Zero Is a Warning to the U.S.
At last year’s U.N. climate conference in Dubai, the Biden administration agreed to triple the world’s renewable-energy capacity by 2030.
In Britain, the impact of cap-and-trade on the cost of fuel to generate electricity is massive.
Britain was conned into net zero by deceptive and illusory promises of cheap renewable power. The results have been an economic disaster.
At last year’s U.N. climate conference in Dubai, the Biden administration agreed to triple the world’s renewable-energy capacity by 2030. It also joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance, pledging to eliminate coal-powered generation. This is all part of President Biden’s goal to completely decarbonize the U.S. electrical grid by 2035 and achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.
Britain has been going down this path since 2008, when Parliament wrote an 80 percent decarbonization target into law, which it raised to 100 percent, or net zero, in 2019. This luxury net-zero policy, which only the rich can afford, has been devastating for both businesses and ordinary Britons just trying to heat their homes and get to work.
A new report for the RealClear Foundation by Rupert Darwall is a timely and much-needed warning to America. It shows what would happen if Democrats and progressives get their way and inflict net-zero climate policies on the country.
British politicians boast of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions faster than any other major economy but ignore the unfortunate fact that Britain’s economy has been performing poorly since 2008.
In 2020, even before the recent surge in energy costs, everyday Britons were paying about 75 percent more for electricity than Americans, the result of a double whammy—cap-and-trade policies on the one hand and renewable subsidies on the other. And then came the Ukraine shock. During the 2022 energy crisis, electricity rates for British businesses were more than double the average paid by U.S. businesses.
In Britain, the impact of cap-and-trade on the cost of fuel to generate electricity is massive. In 2022, government-imposed carbon costs averaged $128 per megawatt hour (MWh) for coal-generated electricity and $51 per MWh for natural gas. Those costs are on top of actual fuel costs, which averaged $150 per MWh for electricity generated from coal and $160 per MWh for natural gas. These mean that it cost $278 to generate 1 MWh of electricity from coal and $211 from natural gas.
In the United States, electricity prices were significantly lower for two reasons. First, no cap-and-trade policies. Second, for coal, British power stations were old and operated at much lower thermal efficiencies than in the U.S. (the U.K. has nearly phased out all coal-powered stations—although some had to be brought back during a 2023 cold snap); and, for natural gas, it is much cheaper piped (as it is in the U.S.) than liquified and shipped (as it is in Europe).
So in the U.S., the fuel cost per MWh of electricity generated from coal was $27 per MWh (versus $278 in Britain) and $61 per MWh for natural gas (versus $211 in Britain).
Britons also have to pay the cost of subsidizing politically favored wind and solar. Analysis of the renewable portfolios of Britain’s Big Six energy companies shows that the average price for wind- and solar-generated electricity between 2009 and 2020 was well over £100 per MWh, whereas the price for reliable electricity from gas- and coal-fired power stations fell from £60 per MWh in 2013 to less than £50 per MWh in 2020.
That same year, consumer subsidies of renewables helped the Big Six to earn a profit of £61 per MWh of electricity on average for the higher-cost, intermittent, demand-unresponsive and therefore less valuable renewable outputs. On the other hand, government-imposed costs forced the Big Six to take massive write-downs on their gas-fired power stations, collectively recording a staggering £1.6 billion loss in 2014 for providing the lower-cost, reliable generating capacity on which Britain’s households and businesses depend.
Unsurprisingly, these policies have led to overinvestment in renewables and underinvestment in the reliable generating capacity needed to keep the lights on—and the costs down. Britain’s unintermittent, reliable coal- and gas-generating capacity peaked in 2010, at 88.0 gigawatts (GW). It then fell by 25.1 GW over the next decade, mainly as coal-fired plants were shuttered. Over the same period, wind and solar capacity rose by 33.5 GW.
Britain has managed to keep its lights on because higher electricity prices have driven demand down. Between 2010 and 2019, economy-wide electricity consumption fell by 10.8 percent. Even so, the gap between consumption and domestic generation has been widening, causing a surge in imported electricity from its European neighbors. That’s not an option for the U.S. We cannot import the equivalent of two-fifths of Canada’s electricity output.
Energy prices comparable to those in Britain—and across much of Europe—would tear the heart out of the American economy, which relies on cheap, abundant energy. The impact on working- and middle-class Americans would be intolerable.
While it is unlikely that Congress would pass legislation like Britain’s Climate Change Act, which made net zero the law of the land after an 88-minute debate in the House of Commons, the threat of net zero is nonetheless as real as it is dangerous.
In May 2021, the White House issued an executive order on the adoption of a whole-of-government approach to climate financial-risk disclosure, demonstrating how an alliance between the administrative state and woke ESG investors on Wall Street would bring about net zero.
In August 2022, Congress passed the energy bill misnamed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides for budget-busting, fiscally irresponsible uncapped subsidies of wind and solar, which will wreak havoc on the economics of reliable generating capacity, just as they have in Britain.
In 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a proposed regulation on greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel-power generators that, if implemented, would go a long way toward achieving the administration’s economically devastating goal of entirely decarbonizing electricity generation by 2035.
Renewable energy is not a low-cost substitute for fossil fuels. Renewables are not cheap, nor can they provide the reliability that modern societies expect and on which they depend. Darwall’s report convincingly demonstrates how Britain was conned into net zero by deceptive and illusory promises of cheap renewable power. The results have been an economic disaster.
There is still time to heed Britain’s warning and instead choose the path of energy abundance and economic prosperity by developing America’s unsurpassed reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas.
https://www.heritage.org/energy/commentary/britains-disastrous-path-net-zero-warning-the-us
******************************************************The political class is only just realising that voters prefer prosperity over climate jingoism
If you want to see how the politics of climate change are shifting, compare today with late 2009. In both cases, a general election was approaching.
In October 2009, with the Copenhagen climate summit imminent, the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced that we had only “50 days to save the planet”. The summit failed to agree any substantive action to reduce carbon emissions. The planet survived. But let that pass: the important point for Mr Brown was political. He wanted to make his party look as green as possible for the election, countering the Conservative opposition’s offer, under David Cameron, of “Vote blue, go green”.
It is 15 years on, and we shall have an election fairly soon. Sir Keir Starmer now, like Mr Brown then, is thinking mainly about the ballot box.
After a tussle with their consciences, Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves, who, in 2021, declared at the party conference that she would be Britain’s “first green chancellor”, announced on Thursday that her exciting green investment plan, unveiled in that same speech, will, sort of, not happen. Under that plan, a Labour government would have spent an extra £28 billion every year until 2030, including “borrowing to invest”.
As late as Tuesday, Sir Keir was still clinging publicly to the £28 billion figure. He said he was “unwavering”. But on Thursday he waveringly tried to defuse his own tax bombshell. He had decided, though of course he did not put it like this, that voters care more that Labour should be safe with the economy than it should save the planet.
Since July last year, when Labour failed to grab Boris Johnson’s old Uxbridge seat at a by-election, its leadership has finally noticed that the link in the public mind between the words “green” and “prosperity” has become tenuous. In that by-election, Sadiq Khan’s Ulez is thought to have worked its negative magic. Voters felt the pain of green policies, not the gain.
It follows that looking green is no longer a clear electoral plus. The Tories saw this slightly earlier than Labour last year. They stole a march by lessening the net-zero torture, extending the lives of the internal combustion engine and gas boilers. Probably Rishi Sunak intended no revolution of policy, only its softening, but the effect is marked. Once people realise you can have prosperity or an energy system dominated by renewables, but not both, they will choose prosperity. That realisation has big political consequences. I believe it makes net zero by 2050 unachievable.
A comparable cost-related disenchantment is visible in business. Last September, no bid was received for the government auction of offshore wind acreage. The subsidy was not big enough to make it worth bidders’ while. Before Christmas, Siemens Energy, one of the world’s biggest wind turbine companies, faced a collapse in its share price. Its chairman warned in January that the green transition must be paid for by higher energy bills: anything else was net zero “fairy-tale” thinking, he said.
Business wants green energy only if it is “de-risked” – in other words, if it is subsidised for the life of the asset. It is supposed to be “sustainable”, yet often only taxpayers’ money can sustain it. In short, it is unprofitable. And now, thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (a title as good as The Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984), businesses will try to extort higher subsidy here and buzz off to America if they cannot get it.
Thursday’s press reported that Ørsted, the gigantic Danish developer of offshore wind in Britain (and elsewhere), is sacking hundreds of workers and abandoning markets after losses of £2.2 billion in 2023. The day before, the new boss of BP, Murray Auchincloss, predicted resurgent demand for fossil fuels, especially gas, and is leading the company in that direction.
This is the same Mr Auchincloss who, under his now disgraced predecessor, Bernard Looney, had been a leader in the company’s plan to move away from fossil fuels in favour of renewables, which he described as the new “upstream oil and gas”. BP lost competitive edge against its rivals. We don’t hear about that plan any longer.
Part of the Looney case was that the switch to renewables was “grounded in economic reality”. We have now been with green energy and government attacks on fossil fuels long enough for people to wonder if that is true.
As is well set out in Rupert Darwall’s new short book, The Folly of Climate Leadership (RealClear Foundation), the increasing costs have been relentless. They are particularly high here because of what Darwall calls Britain’s “climate jingoism” – our vainglorious desire to get ahead in what successive governments have decided is a race to net zero.
Our Climate Change Act of 2008 mandated an overall cut in greenhouse gases of 80 per cent of the 1990 baseline by 2050. That was under Labour, led by Mr Brown. In 2019, that percentage was upped to 100 per cent (“net zero”) and became law after only 88 minutes’ debate in the Commons. That was under the Conservatives, led by Theresa May. In 2020, we were told that Britain would become “the Saudi Arabia of wind power”. That, of course, was under the Conservatives, led by Boris Johnson.
Our heroic example did not inspire others. Between 2008 and 2019, our CO2 fossil-fuel emissions fell by 33 per cent, but those from the rest of the world rose by 16 per cent, wiping out in 140 days, Darwall calculates, the reductions we achieved over 11 years.
There is a high price for setting this pace: by 2020, our citizens were paying about 75 per cent more for their electricity than were Americans. Darwall points out that, from 2008-22, Britain has experienced its lowest underlying growth rate since the 18th century.
The two phenomena are related. Competitively priced energy is essential for robust economic growth. By the 1990s, with Arthur Scargill well beaten and privatisations accomplished in the previous decade, Britain had achieved a good and secure energy mix on the “gas to nuclear” track, rendered more efficient by letting price signals drive changes. Natural gas is a fossil fuel, but a relatively clean one. Today our energy system is expensive, creaky, insecure, teetering on the edge of serious power cuts and, since the invasion of Ukraine, vulnerable to the malevolence of Vladimir Putin.
If you survey this history, two thoughts arise. One is the uniformity of error across the political spectrum. How was it that most people in all main parties thought they had to think the same things about the complicated and uncertain subject of climate change? Why did they unquestioningly accept ideas like the uniformity of “the science”, the concept of “emergency” in relation to policy, or the ability of governments, rather than businesses and consumers, to make the most efficient choices?
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Net Zero becomes all dissonance and no cognition
Politicians have trapped themselves into waging a crusade voters say they want but won’t pay for.
The fault, dear Olaf, lies not in ourselves but in our voters.
That, with apologies to Shakespeare, is starting to look like an explanation for the net-zero agonies now engulfing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and many other Western politicians. It’s both fun and accurate to lambaste our political class for its many climate hypocrisies and idiocies. But as climate policy becomes more expensive and less coherent by the week, voters deserve more and more of the blame.
A clue lies in a report released this week by the Ifo Institute, a think tank in Germany. Some 55% of respondents said they believe their country should play a leading role in the global effort to combat climate change, in a poll of Germans conducted last September. Considerably fewer were willing to pay anything for it. Asked their preferred measures for achieving net zero, only 16% supported mandates such as a ban on natural-gas-fired home heating that would impose direct costs on households. Eight percent supported an explicit carbon tax, the most economically efficient way to reduce emissions.
The punch line is that Germans’ most popular option for addressing climate change was “targeted subsidies for climate-friendly measures,” which 28% of respondents supported. Note the timing. This poll was conducted before a constitutional court ruling in November disallowed Berlin’s preferred method for using off-balance-sheet government borrowing to fund climate-related subsidies. Germans supported climate subsidies when it looked like free money.
Not anymore. The admission that subsidies must be funded by tax increases or offsetting spending cuts has cast Mr. Scholz’s administration into a crisis from which it might not recover. Case in point: A mass protest—by farmers, as it happens—erupted when Berlin tried to inch toward a policy vaguely resembling a carbon tax. The administration had to backtrack. Whatever else voters say they want on climate, people really, really don’t want to redistribute the costs of mitigation toward those who emit more carbon—at least not if Johann Q. Publik thinks he might be the emitter in question.
I don’t mean to pick on the Germans, as rich a vein as that is. Everyone else is confused, too. A December poll in Britain found that 85% of respondents described climate change as “an important problem” facing the U.K. (with 46% of respondents describing it as the most important or one of the most important problems). Forty-one percent said they’d be more likely to vote for a party that promised strong action on climate change vs. 33% who said they’d be more likely to vote for a party promising to slow down on climate policy.
Do they mean it? Of course not. The same poll found less than a quarter of respondents saying climate-change or net-zero policies would be “very important” in determining their votes in the election due this year. In a question for which respondents could choose more than one answer, 57% said they would vote based on policy promises concerning the National Health Service and healthcare, and 55% said they’d focus on the parties’ approaches to inflation.
Surveys in several large European economies in August found at least two-thirds of respondents in each country were worried about climate change—and totally unwilling to pay any personal costs to mitigate it. In: planting trees, subsidizing home insulation, taxing heavily emitting companies. Out: banning internal-combustion cars, limiting meat and dairy consumption, increasing fuel taxes. Hilarious: Voters support a frequent-flyer tax as long as they don’t think they’ll have to pay it themselves, since taxing all flights remains deeply unpopular.
Squaring the circles of our many and varied cognitive dissonances is what we as voters pay our politicians to do. The problem is that for years politicians have been leaning into the dissonance rather than the cognition.
By promulgating apocalyptic rhetoric about climate change, the climate-industrial complex in politics, academia, green tech and the media has persuaded voters that climate change is an existential danger. This is why 77% of Britons can tell a pollster that climate change is “a serious global threat” and Germans can come to view their global leadership on this issue in quasimoral terms. We don’t even talk about our beloved entitlements this way, let alone any other policy with the possible exception of immigration.
What a crash, then, as voters start noticing what net zero might cost them personally. Knowing that they can’t or won’t bear the costs themselves but also unable or unwilling to drop the moral crusade, voters instead demand ever more creative expenditures of someone else’s money to achieve climate goals.
This explains the reluctance of even moderately sensible politicians to admit what they’re so obviously doing: abandoning the climate project. Rollbacks of the most expensive, least popular climate measures, such as electric-vehicle mandates or agricultural-vehicle taxes, invariably are accompanied by pledges to keep doing something else for the climate at someone else’s expense.
It’s a note of caution for those of us breathing a sigh of relief at recent net-zero reversals. Voters are growing clearer-headed about what they aren’t prepared to pay to avert climate change. Yet true sanity won’t arrive until they’ve decided they also don’t care.
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13 February, 2024
Climate Change Is Not Behind Lake Mead’s Decline, Overuse and Poor Management Are
With an atmospheric river dumping trillions of gallons precipitation on California and other western states, some news outlets have asked how the precipitation might affect Lake Mead, suggesting that the rainfall will do little for the lake or the Colorado River basin which feeds it because it’s drying out due to climate change. Although it is true that the current storm will likely do little to reverse Lake Mead’s decline in the long-term, the reason for its decline is not climate change, but instead, overuse and poor management of the reservoir.
A number of mainstream media outlets ran stories in recent days remarking on the fact that the recent atmospheric river event is dumping more water in a few days than Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir by volume, can hold at full capacity. On February 7, for example, Newsweek, ran two stories on the heavy rains, “Bomb Cyclone To Dump More Water Than in Lake Mead on California,” and “Atmospheric Rivers Won’t Refill Lakes Mead and Powell, says expert.”
These two stories were largely straight forward reporting, the kind of honest journalism Americans used to expect from the media outlets. Newsweek did not attribute the present atmospheric river or Lake’s Mead or Powell present water levels to climate change.
Also, Lake Mead’s water levels are dominated, not by a single rainfall event, affecting areas primarily downstream of the reservoir, but by seasonal snowpack across the course of the winter which, when it melts over time, flows into the lake, its feeder streams, and Lake Powell above it, which is the primary source of stream flow feeding Lake Mead. Last season’s record snowfall on mountains of the Colorado River Basin boosted lake levels.
Courthouse News and the Missoula Current each ran stories covering a trial in which climate activists are suing U.S. Department of the Interior for setting a management plan that fails to account for the impacts of climate change, which they claim is causing lake and river levels to fall.
As detailed at Climate Realism, here, here, here, and here, for example, this is not the first time climate activists, often with the support of the mainstream media, have falsely claimed climate change has caused a precipitation decline in the Western United States, which they blame for recent declines in Lake Mead, the Great Salt Lake, and Lake Tahoe. Mismanagement is part of the story of the decline in some Western rivers, reservoirs, and lakes, but there is no evidence long-term climate change is contributing to the decline. Myriad other factors are, though.
As Newsweek reports, Lake Mead did reach its lowest measured water levels since filling in history in 2022, but it had similar low-level seasons in from 1955-1957 and again in 1964 and 1965, nearly 70 and 60 years of global warming ago, respectively, when temperatures were cooler.
The U.S. Drought Monitor reports that under 35 percent of the Colorado river basin, touching on seven states and parts of northern Mexico, is currently suffering any drought, and only approximately 3 percent of the area is suffering extreme or exceptional drought. A review of the history shows that record lake levels were recorded between 1965 and 1983, with Lake Mead remaining consistently above average through 2002, a representing a 37-year period of sustained above average water levels, even as temperatures were rising. As is noted in Climate at a Glance: Water Levels – Lake Mead, after 37 years of abundance, some decline was bound to eventually occur.
Since then, the Colorado River Basin has on average experienced below average precipitation, but it is in the arid West so that is to be expected. The U.S. drought monitor shows some years with severe, widespread drought for extended periods of time, and some years in which less than 10 percent of the basin was experiencing any drought at all. Regardless there is no clear trend of droughts of increasing intensity that would suggest climate change was causing a sustained decline in precipitation across the basin.
Since climate change can’t be shown to be contributing to Lake Mead’s decline, we must examine other factors which might, and there are many. The National Park Service (NPS) discusses two factors contributing to Lake Mead’s decline that are entirely ignored by climate alarmists: sedimentation and evaporation. Concerning evaporation, the NPS writes, “[e]vaporation in the area is extremely high and represents a significant water loss [equaling] … almost 10% of the average annual inflow.”
In addition, the NPS cites research which suggests that by 1970 the build up of sediment behind the Hoover Dam had already robbed Lake Mead of approximately 12 percent of its volume. Some of that sediment has likely compacted since then, but over the 54 years since that study study was done sediment has continued to flow into Lake Mead and accumulated, so its volume had undoubtedly shrunk even more. Sustained dredging operations would both increase Lake Mead’s volume and provide valuable, fertile soil for those who might want it.
The most important single factor in Lake Mead’s decline, however, is the tremendous growth in population for the region. Arizona and Nevada are two of the fastest growing states in the United States. The number of agricultural, urban, and industrial users of water from Lake Mead and its feeder rivers has grown tremendously in the past 30 years. More people farming in, living in and building homes, golf courses, businesses, in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Mexico, means more demand for water from Lake Mead, whether or not precipitation in the basin has declined. Since 1993:
Ever more people drawing water from the limited and variable resource that is Lake Mead, would naturally result in declining lake levels, unless the stream flow into it were dramatically increased. The latter is precluded by the fact that other states that draw water from the Colorado River, and other tributary rivers in the Colorado River Basin, have also experienced dramatic population growth, meaning there is less water flowing into Lake Mead simply because more people are taking more water out of its tributaries for more uses upstream. The largest source of water for Lake Mead is outflow from Lake Powell, yet Lake Powell is also oversubscribed and has the same problems with sedimentation and evaporation that Lake Mead does, limiting the water sent downstream to Lake Mead. Less flow in, more water withdrawn is a recipe for declining water levels.
And that’s not even counting the increase in water demand from Mexico.
Both California and the Federal government basically acknowledged in December 2023 that over withdrawal is the prime cause of Lake Mead’s declining fortunes. As reported by Fox News, “water districts representing California farmers and other major water users in the state agreed to significant cuts in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government.” The government estimates that this agreement by itself will result in Lake Mead rising at least 10 feet. Similar agreements with Arizona, Nevada, and Mexico would be expected to increase Lake Mead’s volume even more.
In short, myriad factors have resulted in Lake Mead’s substantial water loss. Climate Change is not among them.
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EU Parliament groups clash on 2040 climate goal, in post-election preview
Political groups in the European Parliament have offered radically opposing views on the EU’s recommended climate objective for 2040 this week, in a foretaste of debates to come after the June EU election.
For several months, opinion polls have all pointed in the same direction: The European Parliament is set to make a sharp turn to the right after the 2024 elections, with far-right and nationalist parties expected to make big gains at the expense of the Greens, leftists, and liberals.
In other words, the “Green wave” that swept through Parliament after the last EU election, paving the way for the European Green Deal in 2019, is set to come crashing down and recede five years later.
What could this mean for the EU’s climate policies?
The EU got a foretaste earlier this week when MEPs debated the European Commission’s recommended climate target for 2040 – a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 levels.
Here’s a round-up of what they said.
Nationalists and far-right
Taking the floor at the Parliament’s plenary session in Strasbourg, hardline conservative and far-right groups warned about the social consequences and risk of de-industrialisation associated with higher EU climate goals.
Speaking on behalf of the nationalist ECR group, Czech MEP Alexandr Vondra called out the EU’s “unrealistic ambition” to cut emissions by 90%.
“But the main issue in the climate plan for 2040 lies elsewhere,” he said. “It’s the effort to force people to have a different lifestyle, to restrict their freedom of choice.”
The Parliament debate took place amid protests from farmers who stood outside the building in Strasbourg while MEPs watched EU Climate Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra present his recommended climate target for 2040.
“Have you informed your electorate about this? Have you been open about your plans, of what their lives would look like if you really do this? Have you told farmers and the people that energy, transport, housing, meat and other basic foodstuffs will be more expensive?” the Czech MEP said.
“How far do you want to go, and how far do you want to try their patience?” Vondra asked Hoekstra, who sat in the first rank of the hemicycle after his presentation to listen to successive speeches from MEPs.
“I think it’s a serious risk to make such a proposal before the elections, without knowing the real socio and economic impact,” Vondra warned.
Vondra’s warning is not to be taken lightly. His political group, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR), is expected to grow its number of seats to 80 after the June election, up from 62 seats in the current Parliament, according to the latest projections in mid-January.
The far-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group, for its part, is expected to grow from 73 seats in the current Parliament to 93 seats after the EU elections.
They were represented in Strasbourg by Sylvia Limmer, a lawmaker from Germany’s AfD party, who warned against the economic consequences of setting ever-higher emissions reduction targets at EU level.
“Look at my own country, the ‘green champion’ Germany. De-industrialisation is progressing happily because companies can’t afford the highest electricity prices around the world,” she exclaimed.
And even though Germany’s share of renewables is nominally at 36.8% on paper, “on many days more than 90% of electricity is generated by coal, oil, and gas” because there is no wind or sun, she snarked.
Meanwhile, the EU’s wealth has decreased to reach 14.3% of global GDP, while emerging economies from the BRIC countries “enjoy rising CO2 levels and rising a rising share of global GDP at 32%,” Limmer pointed out.
“The green red policies are just pretty much the worst economic meltdown that we’ve seen in the history of the EU,” she concluded.
Full story:
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Germany’s ESG swindle: 36% of ESG funds invest in coal, 55% in oil and gas
Hundreds of ESG funds approved in Germany present a green image. And at the same time invest in the expansion of coal, oil and gas. How can that be?
A name is a promise. And sometimes this promise sounds so good that you don't even take a closer look. For example, if you invest in a fund called “Allianz Stiftungsfonds Sustainability”. 130 million euros in fund assets, low risk of loss. No tobacco production, no sales of controversial weapons. Sounds good at first. But the last half-yearly report reveals: The fund, which promotes sustainability in its name, also invests in BP, Shell, TotalEnergies, Eni and Equinor. Corporations that produce oil and gas worldwide.
Sustainability is a best seller. From 2020 to 2021, the total amount of sustainable investments in Germany increased by 65 percent, shows the market report from the FNG trade association. From 2021 to 2022 by a further 15 percent. Sustainability sells. But what's behind it? Anyone who wants to invest their money in the financial market today will quickly end up with the abbreviation ESG. It stands for the English terms Environment, Social and Governance. This refers to the criteria of environmental, social and good corporate governance. Anyone who takes them into account when selecting stocks and bonds can speak of a sustainable investment. But securities often don't keep what their label promises.
New data shows: The Allianz Sustainability Foundation Fund is not an isolated case. The Urgewald organization has evaluated 2,168 investment funds approved in Germany that are described as sustainable. Including all of the four largest main providers DWS, Union Investment, Allianz and Deka. The results are available exclusively to ZEIT. 36 percent of all ESG funds examined invest in at least one coal company, 55 percent in at least one oil and gas company. These include many funds that have phrases such as “Clean Energy”, “Carbon Transition”, “Low Carbon”, “Sustainability” or even “Climate” in their names.
https://www.zeit.de/2024/07/nachhaltige-fonds-erdoel-erdgas-klimaschutz-aktien
***********************************************Germany likely to kill EU Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Law
Since 2022, the European Union has been developing new regulations relating to the responsibilities of corporations for environmental and human rights concerns. The Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive expands businesses’ liability, not only in their internal operations, but also in their subsidiaries and value chain. The final draft of the CS3D was released on January 20, but requires final approval by the European Parliament, European Commission, and the European Council. However, the approval appears to be meeting strong resistance from Germany, who have indicated they will abstain from CS3D, most likely killing the proposal in the Council vote on February 9.
The CS3D is part of a series of regulatory actions taken by the EU to address climate change and broader environmental, social, and governance issues. The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive created ESG reporting obligations for both publicly traded and privately held businesses in the EU. The directive called for the creation of European Sustainability Reporting Standards, the detailed processes used by businesses to report under the CSRD. The drafting of the ESRS was delegated to the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group. The first round of ESRS standards were adopted in July 2023, but the adoption of additional standards soon met delays as opposition to the reporting burden on small and medium sized enterprises grew. […]
The delay could be more than a temporary setback for the CS3D. The 2024 European Parliament election is scheduled for the beginning of June. Sustainability advocates are concerned that the composure of the body may change on this issue, removing majority support for both the CS3D and the CSRD.
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12 February, 2024
Britain’s Labour Party Moves Right on Climate
Politicians these days are tripping over themselves to abandon net-zero climate policies, and the latest is Britain’s prospective next Prime Minister, Keir Starmer
Sir Keir ditched a promise to spend £28 billion ($35.3 billion) a year on climate measures if Labour takes power. Labour leaders scaled back the promise last year when they said they’d ramp up to that level of spending gradually rather than opening the money faucet immediately. Now they say they won’t spend it at all.
Some party leaders have believed that promising an aggressive transition to net-zero carbon emissions is part of Labour’s path to victory. This might be true in some urban precincts and among the culturally left-leaning and younger cohorts in the Labour base.
But Mr. Starmer and cooler heads in the party realized many more swing voters would be turned off by a spending pledge in support of policies that threaten jobs in manufacturing and the North Sea oil patch. They also seem to suspect that British taxpayers, already paying a postwar high of 36% of GDP in taxes, wouldn’t tolerate higher levies for climate action.
Abandoning net zero isn’t easy for Mr. Starmer, since the media and political class have spent years promoting climate change as a crisis. He faces pressure to devise some alternative climate plan. If that relies on expensive mandates for households or businesses, the costs to the British economy could be larger than the £28 billion in direct taxpayer cash he has now abandoned.
A similar dilemma afflicts the ruling Conservative Party. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak scaled back an electric-vehicle mandate and abandoned an effective tax on natural-gas boilers used by homes for central heating and hot water. Yet political pressure, including from green Tories, has prevented Mr. Sunak from admitting openly that net-zero is a foolish goal for an industrial economy. So a bevy of other distorting subsidies and regulations remain.
Still, politicians have to start somewhere. Credit Mr. Starmer for staring down the green faction in his party and focusing instead on making his party a plausible alternative to the Tories, which voters seem to want.
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Congress and Courts Enable Energy and Climate Fantasy and Tyranny
The left end of the political spectrum is relentlessly pursuing the transformation of America’s society, history, economy, speech, borders, governing systems, healthcare, energy and living standards. What it cannot secure via the ballot box and alliances with the legacy media and academic institutions, it works to impose through rule by unelected, unaccountable Executive Branch bureaucrats, collusive sue-and-settle legal actions, and court decisions that too often rubberstamp agency rules.
Instead of three co-equal divisions of government, the powers and functions of America’s Legislative and Judicial Branches have steadily been subsumed into an ever expanding, progressive and aggressive Executive Branch. Legislators and judges have acquiesced or actively participated.
The federal workforce has swollen to two million non-military employees, who “liberally” interpret, apply and enforce laws and policies. The Federal Register of regulations, explanations and justifications has ballooned from 50,998 pages in 1984, to a Jabba-the-Hutt 90,402 pages in 2023. Few can read, much less comprehend and comply with the intricate edicts.
Members of Congress want to be seen “doing something” to address perceived societal and environmental problems, often by holding hearings, enacting laws and spending money. However, instead of actually tackling difficult, controversial issues, they frequently make policy declarations, enact deliberately ambiguous statutory provisions, and rely on Executive Branch cohorts to interpret, stretch or even rewrite the vague language, thereby advancing agency powers and agendas.
Expanding this centralization of power even more significantly, the US Supreme Court rendered its landmark 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.
The “Chevron deference doctrine” holds that – when confronted with regulations that are based on ambiguous, or nonexistent, statutory text – lower courts should always defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation of the text, as long as the interpretation is “reasonable.”
Chevron deference has let federal agencies expand their domain and control in hundreds of instances, step by step, inch by inch. Affected citizens often have little or no recourse, as long as the impact of an individual rule can be viewed as small and the agency interpretation as not patently unreasonable.
In those situations, the 2022 Supreme Court decision in West Virginia v. EPA is of little help, because it only addresses “major questions,” agency decisions that have “major” economic or political significance.
However, the Court recently heard oral arguments on two cases that give it an opportunity to end this wholesale deference to federal agencies. Both cases ask whether small fishing boats can be required to pay $700 per day to take federal agents along with them, to ensure the boats are following fisheries rules. Relevant law allows the government to require fishing boats to carry observers – but does not say the boats must pay for them, and Congress never appropriated any funds to cover observers.
So, on its own, the National Marine Fisheries Service decided it had the authority to compel boats to shoulder the cost. The case could have enormous implications for the perpetually expanding Deep State.
The Justices could rule in favor of NMFS, even though monetary impacts that are small by federal governing and budgetary standards are major, even potentially ruinous for fishing boats.
They could hold that the agency interpretation in this single instance was “unreasonable” – and overturn this single rulemaking out of thousands issued since 1984, while leaving the Chevron doctrine intact and available for future abuse.
Or they could overturn Chevron. Doing so would end the appalling deference to powerful government agencies; reduce the growing imbalance between the Executive and Legislative Branches; and make it harder for circuit and appellate courts to support activist regulators.
A reversal might even prod Congress to enact laws that tackle hard questions, use precise language, and tighten the reins on unelected regulators, especially when they serve presidents who want to “fundamentally transform” our energy use, immigration system, economy and military.
The third option would also help America curb climate and energy fantasy and tyranny.
It’s certainly true that most federal actions taken to “save our planet from the existential threat of manmade climate change” are “major” or “significant” in their societal, economic, ecological and national security impacts – and thus subject to the Supreme Court’s “major questions doctrine.”
However, that Court has not defined “major.” Moreover, even actions that most Americans would call “major” can end up being upheld, and agencies can claim significant actions are “minor” or simply ignore court decisions that don’t apply explicitly to the agency or action in question.
Even in the climate and energy arena alone, hundreds of “minor” decisions can coalesce into massive disruptions and costs. Questions of Chevron deference should examine the totality of impacts – and whether a decision can actually pass a rational, evidence-based “reasonableness” test. To cite just a few examples, is it reasonable to defer to federal agencies that:
Impose government-wide mandates to terminate America’s coal, oil and natural gas extraction and use, based on computer models whose scary forecasts: (a) are built on the assumption that climate change and weather events are driven by fossil-fuel-related carbon dioxide and methane, which together represent barely 0.042% of Earth’s atmosphere; and (b) are not supported by actual, real-world data on temperatures, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, droughts and sea levels?
Keep oil and gas locked in the ground before they have any workable plan for replacing feed stocks for plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers and thousands of other vital products?
Compel families and businesses to replace gasoline vehicles and gas ovens, stoves, furnaces and water heaters with electric models – while regulators replace reliable, affordable fossil fuel power with intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar power?
Close down coal and gas-fired generators before sufficient, reliable, affordable replacement electricity is available – and before a single project anywhere in the world has demonstrated that wind, solar and battery electricity alone can power even a small village?
Demand that families purchase supposedly energy- or water-efficient washing machines and dishwashers, even though the new machines must run longer or even twice to get clothes or dishes clean – thereby requiring more electricity and water?
Mandate electric vehicles before there are sufficient charging stations, electricity for those stations, or even metals and minerals to manufacture all the EVs, charging stations, wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines?
Assert that wind, solar and battery power are clean, green, renewable and sustainable, while ignoring the monumental amounts of mining and processing – and attendant habitat and wildlife destruction, toxic air and water pollution, and child labor – involved in obtaining the metals and minerals for those technologies?
Insist that the United States slash or eliminate its fossil fuel use, while China, India and 100 other countries (including Germany) are extracting and burning more oil, gas and coal every year?
Courts must no longer view government actions in a vacuum. They are reasonable only in an alternative universe where individual and cumulative economic, ecological and social realities play no role. The era of Chevron deference to this federal agency climate and energy fantasy and tyranny must be ended.
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UN Says Melting Arctic Ice Is Key Indicator of Climate Change—But It’s Not Melting
It’s bad news for polar bears, according to the most recent assessment report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Because of increasing carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions, modeling and simulations predict the Arctic will be without ice during the month of September by 2050.
“We project an ice-free Arctic in September under all scenarios considered,” a scientific report highlighting IPCC’s findings states. “These results emphasize the profound impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the Arctic.”
A similar prediction was made in 2013, but at that time, the prediction was for no ice by about 2033.
“All climate models are projecting an ice-free summer within the next 20 years or so,” Ron Kwok, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in July 2013. “It’s not very far away.”
However, a new report by Allan Astrup Jensen, research director and CEO at the Nordic Institute of Product Sustainability and Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology in Denmark, shows that from September 2007 through September 2023, Arctic sea ice declines were near zero.
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“The facts are that the Arctic Sea ice extent measured by satellites since 1978 expresses annual variations, and it has declined considerably from 1997 to 2007. However, before that time period, from 1978 to 1996, the downward trend was minimal, and in the last 17 years, from 2007 to 2023, the downward trend has also been about zero,” the report states.
“Therefore, there is no indication that we should expect the Arctic Sea summer ice to disappear completely, as predicted, in one or two decades.”
Mr. Jensen told The Epoch Times that the IPCC and other organizations “exclude the possibility that the sea ice extent may expand in the future and even reach levels from before 1996.”
“That is because they believe that the driver of the sea ice extent is the predicted warming by rising CO2 levels in the troposphere,” he said.
Frank Geisel is an ocean engineer and naval architect who examined ice thickness in the Arctic and Antarctic with the Coast Guard over several expeditions in the 1980s.
He said it’s problematic to measure sea ice extent and ice thickness and then conclude that CO2 is driving a decline and should then be mitigated.
“We can’t just issue a command and say, ‘If we do this, then this will happen,’” Mr. Geisel told The Epoch Times. “Well, maybe. But maybe not.”
CO2 and Sea Ice
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) uses data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) to record Arctic sea ice yearly minimums in September, at the end of the summer melt season. The measurement is based on sea ice extent, which is the square mileage of ice covering the Arctic Ocean during a specified time.
In September 1979, the NOAA reported that the Arctic sea ice yearly minimum was 2.72 million square miles. At that same time, CO2 concentrations were 337.1 parts per million (ppm), according to The Nature Conservancy.
Nearly 20 years later, in 1996, CO2 concentrations had risen to 362.58 ppm, and the September Arctic sea ice yearly minimum had increased to 2.93 million square miles.
After 1996, the sea ice extent declined until 2007, with the most significant drop occurring between 2006 and 2007—from 2.26 million square miles in 2006 to 1.65 million square miles by 2007. CO2 concentrations were 383.37 ppm.
After the 2007 results were released, the American Geophysical Union issued a report warning that the Arctic may be “on the verge” of a fundamental change, and images of starving polar bears stranded on floating ice slabs became commonplace.
Due in part to their declining habitat, on May 15, 2008, polar bears were listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act.
But the sea ice extent recordings in the Septembers of 2008 and 2009 increased, and despite hitting a record low in 2012, from 2007 to 2023, sea ice declines have been close to zero.
In September 2023—during what NOAA’s Ms. Kapnick called “by far” the warmest year in NOAA’s 174-year climate record—the Arctic sea ice yearly minimum was 1.69 million square miles, an increase of about 40,000 square miles from 2007. CO2 was 421.55 ppm in 2023.
Mr. Jensen said that a couple of years ago, he started to make and post charts and diagrams with the NSIDC’s data to provide people with simple visual representations.
“My first diagram I did send to NSIDC but I got no reaction from that organization. It surprised me. It has also surprised me that many people, including scientists and even friends, are difficult to convince that the sea ice has been unchanged since 2007, although I use the same official data also used by the IPCC,” Mr. Jensen said.
“They are brainwashed by the many alarmist news articles telling about a decrease in the Arctic sea ice, and [by] their great respect for the U.N. organization IPCC.”
Mr. Geisel said he’s concerned some scientists and policymakers are using “a very precise, almost microanalysis on a very, very macro situation.”
“We’re looking at processes that change over decades, and we’re trying to understand how we’re going to respond this year,” Mr. Geisel said.
“If you study the weather systems in the high Arctic, there’s a tremendous high-pressure system that’s well known by weather geeks that sits on the top of the Pole. ... And it shifts, and it’s well known that it shifts positions and thus changes the weather patterns on a decadal frequency—we’re talking 10, 12 years.
“Those are really massive, longer-term processes that all of our technology can’t fully understand.”
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In Central Asia’s Brutal Winter, Fossil Fuels Trump Climate Politics
Globally, winter cold kills more people than summer heat, and winter in Central Asia is no gentle visitor. Temperatures can plummet to minus 40 degrees C (minus 40 degrees F), transforming bustling cities into frozen landscapes and testing the limits of human endurance.
The winter struggle is especially intense in rural areas, where shelter and other infrastructure are often rudimentary. Wood and coal have long been used for heat.
For example, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan—three Central Asian countries seldom mentioned in the media—rely heavily on abundant coal reserves for heat and energy.
However, this economical energy source, along with natural gas and oil, has come under attack by international political institutions, such as the European Union and United Nations, and leftist politicians and funding entities. Armed with the pseudoscience of climate change, fearmongering opportunists are seeking to ban the fuels that are a lifeline for the people of Central Asia.
Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan generate more than 95 percent of their electricity from gas, oil, and coal. Both countries are pragmatic about future energy needs, having decided to choose energy security over climate virtue signaling.
Uzbekistan is set to increase coal production by 22 percent and is conducting geological exploration across 31,000 square kilometers of new sites. Meanwhile, Kazakhstan is increasing oil production and plans to increase exports to Eastern Europe.
Kyrgyzstan has more than 33 percent of its population living in poverty, making it significantly poorer than Uzbekistan (17 percent in poverty) to the west and Kazakhstan (5 percent) to the north. Half of Kyrgyzstan depends on traditional coal-fired stoves for cooking, and nearly all citizens depend on solid fuels such as wood, coal, and rubber for winter heating.
Raw coal prices have risen so sharply that nonprofits are now giving out free coal for families in Kyrgyzstan to stay warm. In 2021, people queued for hours in freezing weather to receive coal handouts from the government.
“In a cold winter, we burn about 5-6 [metric] tonnes,” a Kyrgyz housewife told Reuters at the time. “It is expensive for us to buy coal at 5,500 soms [$62 a tonne]. Therefore, I stand in line for three-four hours. And what are we supposed to do, freeze?”
More than 90 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s electricity comes from hydroelectric plants. Though hydropower is a valuable resource, such high dependency on it increases the risk of power shortages in winter, which is one of the drier seasons in this relatively arid country. Kyrgyzstan supplements winter energy supplies with imported electricity from Tajikistan and Kazakhstan.
The most obvious solution to filling its energy needs is Kyrgyzstan’s coal reserves. Undeterred by the political noise of climate change, Kyrgyzstan is embarking on an ambitious program to increase coal production with advanced technology and by privatizing mines.
Mining has increased by around 30 percent during the past 15 years. Most of the mined coal is brown coal, or lignite, an inferior fuel that’s mostly exported. The demand for higher-quality coal is met predominantly by imports.
To bolster the movement of electricity imports and exports, the country is investing in the 500?kilovolt Datka-Khodjent-Sangtuda power transmission line connecting Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. There’s also a long-term partnership with Gazprom to improve gas supply in the country.
In addition to withstanding the annual assault of winter, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan all have interests in overall security and economic development that make the exploitation of natural resources such as fossil fuels all the more important. Climate politics has no place in the frigid expanses of Central Asia
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11 February, 2024
Why Climate Activists’ Push for Renewable Energy May Backfire
Renewables such as wind and solar are intermittent and largely unpredictable energy sources, with rapid swings in output from one minute to the next. This creates major challenges for operators of the nation’s electricity grid, because supply must equal demand, and the supply “curve” in a given area never tracks the output from intermittent renewable sources.
As a result, the more that intermittent solar and wind capacity is deployed to an electricity grid, the more of what’s called “dispatchable” capacity needs to be deployed to stabilize the grid to meet demand.
What this means, ironically, is that the rush to deploy solar and wind is locking us out of the one energy source that could actually achieve a zero-emissions grid, namely nuclear, and locking us into fossil fuel sources of electricity generation such as natural gas.
“Dispatchable” capacity refers to power plants that can quickly ramp up and ramp down as needed. This means simple-cycle combustion-turbine power plants such as “intermediate” and “peaker” natural gas-powered generators, and (in the developing world) power plants fired by heavy fuel oil.
“Dispatchable” power does not include power from steam electrical generators, because the boilers used to make the steam that propels their turbines take too long to heat up and cool down. Steam electrical generators, such as large low-carbon combined-cycle natural gas plants and zero-carbon nuclear plants, are instead used as “baseload” generators; “baseload” refers to that portion of demand that always needs to be satisfied around the clock.
At a joint hearing of federal regulators recently, Matt Lauby, the chief engineer of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (a not-for-profit regulatory authority that oversees power generation and distribution in the U.S. and Canada), argued that nuclear energy can help stabilize the electricity grid as increasing wind and solar capacity is deployed. But this is highly misleading. Some of the most advanced nuclear reactors include new electricity storage technologies that could in theory help them be more responsive to variable demand, but as a general rule, nuclear cannot be counted upon as dispatchable power.
Hence, the inordinate reliance on solar and wind is arguably moving us away from a zero-emissions grid. As the developed world proceeds in its increasingly heedless transition to clean energy, so much intermittent solar and wind capacity is being deployed to the grid in places like California that it is displacing reliable baseload generation.
People are only just waking up to the deep irony. Displacing baseload generation with intermittent solar and wind requires grid operators to replace baseload generation with dispatchable sources of power to stabilize the grid. In practice, this means replacing low-carbon combined-cycle natural gas plants and zero-carbon nuclear plants with more pollution-intensive, carbon-intensive and inefficient intermediate and “peaker” natural gas plants.
Utility-scale batteries are advancing in storage capacity and efficiency, potentially mitigating the intermittency of renewables and reducing the reliance on natural gas for peaking power. But these can only marginally flatten the supply curve, and only for a few hours. They can’t store solar and wind energy from Monday so that you can use it on Wednesday.
“Storage right now is about four hours per lithium battery,” said Lauby. “But I’m not worried about 24 hours. I’m worried about five days of extreme weather.”
Environmentalists are often their own worst enemies. They insist that clean energy is necessary to save the planet but are responsible for virtually all of the major obstacles to a clean energy transition. They welcome the Biden Environmental Protection Agency’s mandates on electric vehicles and power plants, though those rules will punish the most efficient power plants and cause utilities to switch to less-efficient and more carbon-intensive sources of electricity generation. They celebrate the Biden’s administration’s decision to stop granting new liquefied natural gas export licenses, though this will make developing countries poorer and more reliant on coal and will turn Europeans increasingly against the very idea of a clean energy transition.
If environmentalists were serious about eliminating carbon emissions from the electricity grid, they would be pushing for a massive expansion in nuclear power, so that demand is satisfied as much as possible from nuclear baseload generation. Instead, in their rush to deploy solar and wind, they are diminishing the rationale for baseload generation, thereby making grid management all about stabilizing the intermittency of solar and wind, rather than assuring reliance on the most dependable, efficient, and least carbon-intensive sources.
Renewable and conventional energy production in Germany over two weeks in 2022. In hours with low wind and photovoltaics (solar sources) production, hard coal and gas fill the gap. Nuclear and biomass show almost no flexibility. This graph shows how intermittent solar and wind energy displace baseload generation and force the electric grid to deploy more inefficient dispatchable power sources.
Writing in Energy Central in 2013, research scientist Schalk Cloete noted the catastrophic impact that Germany’s renewables-heavy Energiewende (“energy transition”) would have on utilities:
This incompatibility between baseload capacity such as nuclear and intermittent renewables such as wind and solar is part of the reason why Germany is retiring her nuclear fleet and building more flexible coal plants. Naturally, this is a tremendously expensive endeavour, and struggling German utility companies are now claiming €15 billion [$16.2 billion U.S.] in damages. Without this compensation, German utilities will not be able to meet the great challenges posed by rapidly fluctuating loads such as the example shown above and the Energiewende will fail.
Simply put, climate activists aren’t just putting all their eggs in one basket. It’s the wrong basket, even for the goal of net-zero carbon emissions electricity. They will be dismayed at how much fossil fuel power they find stuck inside of it.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/02/02/is-renewable-energy-actually-making-us-rely-more-fossil-fuels
*********************************************In praise of carbon dioxide
Humans don’t create carbon dioxide; they simply recycle some of it.
Once that is understood, the role of carbon dioxide in regard to climate change can be put into perspective. Since the formation of the Earth, many carbon compounds, from the pure form, diamonds, to the trace atmospheric gas that is essential to all life, have been expelled from the interior of planet Earth to the surface. Scientific literature is replete with graphs depicting the progressive depletion of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over hundreds of millions of years. Much of this has been captured in readily available and abundant fossil fuels.
All life is dependent on carbon dioxide, an invisible, odourless, non-polluting, heavier-than-air plant-nutrient. The CO2 Coalition, established in 2015 as a non-partisan education foundation to educate thought leaders, policymakers, and the public, reports that:
‘Contrary to the oft-repeated mantra that today’s CO2 concentration is unprecedentedly high, our current levels of carbon dioxide are at near-historic lows. The average CO2 concentration in the preceding 600 million years was more than 2,600 ppm, nearly seven times our current amount and 2.5 times the worst case predicted by the IPCC for 2100.’
We are thus experiencing a CO2 drought, more pervasive and threatening to life on Earth than water droughts. Water droughts occur in short-term cycles as in the Biblical seven years of feast and seven years of famine (a cycle that the use of hydrocarbon fuels has overcome), but a carbon dioxide drought is a long-term looming issue (that can also be met with the wise use of the vast depositories of coal, oil and gas that should be utilised, not locked away under superstitious, unscientific rules and regulations).
The quantities of fossil-fuel energy-banks (coal seams of solidified sunlight) are breathtakingly vast. For example, the big coal mines in the Bowen Basin are of Permian age, which goes back 240 to 290 million years (my), but the Walloon coal deposit seams in the Surat Basin in eastern Australia are over 12 metres thick and are of Jurassic age (135–200 my ago). Coals of this age exist also in other parts of Queensland and are common worldwide. We also have Cretaceous coals in Queensland and elsewhere (65-135 my ago) – still within the dinosaur period. Massive amounts of ‘brown coals’ (lignite) exist in Victoria (Yallourn and Loy Yang power stations), and in South Australia, and in other parts of Australia, deposited about 10-65 my ago. In Australia, we have an abundance of coal – thousands of years of supply at our present mining rate.
Australian drillers have recently discovered two 90-metre-thick coal seams in Mongolia. It takes approximately 10 metres of foliage to make a metre of peat, and 10 metres of peat to make a metre of coal. It is difficult to comprehend the eons of solar power collected through the miracle of plant photosynthesis that lie beneath the surface, but which are being locked away through political chicanery. Before humans use a fraction of these resources, newer and cleaner forms of energy based on the power of the atom will surely have been developed, but such advances will not come by candlelight.
Coal is the primary heavy-duty electrical energy source that propelled mankind from subsistence living and still underpins the world economy today. Its efficiency, though, is being undermined by regulatory imposition of the duplicitously named ‘renewables’ in pursuit of impossible Net Zero targets, but coal remains the fuel of today, and is the fuel that will allow a smooth transition to the fuel of the future, safely harnessed power of the atom. Hopefully, it might also generate wealth and release energy to facilitate the disposal of dead wind turbines and solar panels, the detritus of a temporary mass delusion that weak, intermittent wind and solar energy can be efficiently harvested in amounts sufficient to reliably replace the energy-on-demand that feeds every light switch and power point.
By extracting some CO2 from fossilised remains of past atmospheric CO2 and recycling it into the atmosphere from whence it came, mankind benefits from the energy released, and replenishes vitality in the air to help re-green the planet. Despite the demonstrable role played by carbon dioxide in greening and sustaining plant life, there are controversies and debates about how much CO2 in the atmosphere is anthropogenic and how much is naturally occurring. For example, Terry Gerlach confidently states that, ‘Research findings indicate unequivocally that the answer to this frequently asked question is human activities.’ In a paper, entitled Volcanic Versus Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide, he argues, ‘Anthropogenic CO2 emissions … clearly dwarf all estimates of the annual present-day global volcanic CO2 emission rate.’ But if CO2 levels have been much higher in the past without causing the planet to overheat, this is surely prima facie evidence that the source of the carbon dioxide is of academic interest only… The more we can return to the atmosphere, the healthier, the greener, the planet.
The entire UN/IPCC campaign against carbon dioxide is built on demonstratively faulty computer modelling and committee decisions driven by self-interest of largely scientifically illiterate delegates at annual Conferences of Parties. But a massive volcanic eruption in Tonga two years ago has turned climate prediction models on their collective ears. In the largest such event since the 1883 Krakatoa eruption, the effects of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption in January 2022 are still being felt in weather patterns across the world, and the disconnect between carbon dioxide levels, whether from natural causes or human recycling, and surface temperatures, unequivocally proves that atmospheric carbon dioxide is not the cause of climate change, but a residual of millennia of volcanic emissions.
The El Niño effects have been observed for centuries, as explained by National Geographic:
El Niño was recognised by fishers off the coast of Peru as the appearance of unusually warm water. We have no real record of what indigenous Peruvians called the phenomenon, but Spanish immigrants called it El Niño, meaning ‘the little boy’ in Spanish. When capitalised, El Niño means the Christ Child, and was used because the phenomenon often arrived around Christmas. El Niño soon came to describe irregular and intense climate changes rather than just the warming of coastal surface waters.
La Niña is described by the Australian Government Bureau of Meteorology:
La Niña occurs when equatorial trade winds become stronger, changing ocean surface currents and drawing cooler deep water up from below. This results in a cooling of the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The enhanced trade winds also help to pile up warm surface waters in the western Pacific and to the north of Australia.
However, ocean surface currents, piling up warm surface waters, and ‘upwelling’ of cooler deep water were unsatisfactory explanations for the functioning mechanism of these phenomena and could not explain the heat blobs that caused mass deaths of marine life. This can only be explained by sub-sea volcanic releases of heat and matter from the hot mantle.
Over 20 years ago, a Queensland mining engineer, Robert Arthur Beatty, correlated increased seismic activity in South America with increased rainfall on the East Coast of Australia, with a time lag. This was described in his seminal booklet Planets, Satellites and Landforms. The Humboldt Current – also known as the Peru Current – sweeps up the coast of Chile, then hangs a left below the Equator and sweeps across a highly volcanically active submarine trench past the Galapagos Islands to reach the east coast of Australia a year or two later – no mere coincidence that there is resultant increased rainfall and cyclonic events. When there is more sub-sea volcanic activity, the ocean will experience more heat. In turn, more heat triggers more heat dissipation via cyclones and rain depressions. Oceanic heat blobs do not come from a trace gas in the atmosphere or intermittent sunshine warming a few centimetres of the surface of the waters as the Earth rotates – cloud cover permitting.
Painstaking, pioneering work by Professor Wyss Yim of the University of Hong Kong in collecting and correlating volcanic activity, particularly the more numerous but lesser-known and little-understood sub-sea events, provides the essential link with volcanic eruptions that are affected by cyclical gravitational and electro-magnetic stresses on the surface crust, the solidified skin that envelopes the molten mantle. As the giant gyroscope of planet Earth spins around the Sun, precessional forces compete as the core beats to a different drum and the magnetic poles migrate around the inertial true North and South Poles. The Earth’s crust is thinner beneath the oceans and there are hundreds of thousands of sub-sea vents that allow hot magma to influence the ocean currents that drive surface weather and rainfall patterns. Healthy scientific debate is ongoing regarding the influence of volcanic activity versus solar influences on the climate, but this paper is focussed on the fact that a trace gas in the atmosphere controls neither, and that it may be recycled with great benefit to life on Earth, without causing the much feared and over-hyped ‘global warming’.
There are indeed many fissures in the sea. Blaming carbon dioxide and attempting to regulate this harmless gas and predicting surface temperatures using computer models based on pretentious carbon dioxide emissions targets is the ultimate scientific charade. Excellent research work has also been done on the benign and beneficial effects of atmospheric CO2 by eminent scientists, Emeritus Professor William Happer of Princeton University and Dr Patrick Moore, Past President of Greenpeace Canada, who bring a clear spotlight on the futility of attempting to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.
Hence, the answer to the question, whether volcanic activity or anthropogenic carbon dioxide is more responsible for an increase in temperatures on Earth is that it simply does not matter. The ideological one-sided pursuit of blaming an essential gas is destroying and trashing the principal source of the hydrocarbon energy on which the survival of mankind depends. Net Zero is a time bomb that must be defused before the blind pursuit of this impossible dream causes more economic devastation.
In an attempt to better understand the formation of the Earth, China has commenced a deep borehole drilling program. Had we spent the funding wasted in the mass-hysteria-led ‘renewables’ programs on hardening our defences against natural catastrophe and better researching the anatomy of our home in the wilderness of space, we would not today be facing the shut-down of industry in Western nations and skyrocketing costs-of-living crises.
Once the role of carbon dioxide in regard to climate change is put into perspective, and this gas given a fair trial, it will be found innocent of all charges of ‘pollution’ and driving ‘global warming’ and we can take a deep breath that we have escaped yet another bout of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/in-praise-of-carbon-dioxide/
*********************************************EU Farmers Protest Green Policies’ Threat to Greenest Lands
Europe’s picturesque landscapes, adorned with sprawling croplands and pastures, have long been part of the continent's agrarian identity. However, a wave of farmer protests has intruded on this peaceful scene and extended into cities.
From the rolling hills of France to the windswept plains of Poland, farmers have driven their tractors onto the streets, united in a fight against a threat to their livelihoods. Last week, thousands of French farmers blocked roads in the outskirts of Paris, in an act that has been dubbed the “siege of Paris.” The city of Toulouse, home to 800,000 people, was cut off from the rest of France due to protests.
Likewise, in cities across Belgium, Ireland, Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and Germany, farmers have blocked roads and conducted targeted protests at public buildings. Tractor convoys, road blockades, and impassioned speeches reflect the agricultural community’s deep frustration with attempts to reduce farmlands and ban fertilizer use.
This week, the protest spread to Spain and Greece. Spanish farmers blocked freeways and access to ports. Greek farmers dumped apples and chestnuts in the city of Thessaloniki as a sign of protest. Farmers in the majority of EU states have now joined the protest.
The primary policy target of farmers is a so-called Farm to Fork program that seeks to halve pesticide use, reduce fertilizer use, cut by at least 10% agricultural areas and mandate a conversion of 25% of the European Union’s agricultural land to “organic-only” farming. The initiative also includes the removal of subsidies for agricultural diesel used in tractors and machinery.
Farmers argue that all these policies jeopardize their livelihood, make the EU agricultural sector less competitive to non-EU markets, and undermine the rich agricultural heritage that has defined European societies for centuries.
Behind all this is the EU’s climate change agenda’s obsession with reducing harmless industrial and agricultural emissions of greenhouse gases, which include carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane. Farm to Fork is a subset of the bigger European Green Deal and Net Zero programs.
France’s largest farm union, FNSEA, says it wants a change in the “very philosophy of the Green Deal, which assumes degrowth.” “French farmers are united in their opposition to absurd, extreme and unworkable environmental policies,” said the president of Coordination Rurale, a French farming group. “Those in power do not spare a thought for the impact of these policies on the livelihoods of farmers, the food security of the nation and the cost-of-living crisis facing ordinary people.”
The farmer unions have a point and a serious one. Reducing the use of fertilizers would require employing more land for agriculture, but the EU’s green policies intend to decrease the amount of farmland. This amounts to forced agricultural suicide, which poses a threat to hunger, death, and societal collapse.
Shaken by these protests and to appease the farmers, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced minor concessions to their Farm to Fork program earlier this week. Though media outlets celebrated it as a success for the farmers, the concessions are too insignificant and are temporary measures to end the continent-wide protests.
In her speech on Tuesday, the EU president von der Leyen shockingly blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin and Climate Change for the farmers' protests, when the primary reason for the farmer protests was the EU Commission’s policies, under her very oversight. It is important to remember that the EU president is not directly elected by the people of the EU, yet has been bestowed with authority to impose life-crippling and farm-destroying policies on millions of Europeans.
Thomas O'Reilly of the Brussels-based The European Conservative, says, “No matter the rhetoric coming from the Commission (EU), the Green Deal is at the heart of EU climate policies, and nothing they will let go of without a fight. Neither, it seems, will Europe’s farmers, who are fighting for their lives.”
In other words, the fight goes beyond the immediate use of land and fertilizers and to the well-being of generations to come. Farm to Fork won’t be resolved until there is an end to the Green Deal and Net Zero programs.
The European agricultural crisis is a warning to citizens of other governments planning to adopt similar policies for agricultural production to avert a non-existent climate crisis. So-called green policies would kill the greenest parts of our world as they destroy ordinary people’s dream of a decent life with access to basic necessities for living.
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Australia: NSW to Introduce Legislation to Ban OFFSHORE Oil and Gas Exploration
One wonders why offshore drilling is singled out and why both parties support that. I guess the oceans have an image as pristine. They are more accurately seen as a biological soup. They teem with both life and pollution
On Feb. 6, the state Labor government announced that it would introduce a new piece of legislation to amend the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979.
Under the changes, all sea bed petroleum and mineral exploration and recovery activities in the state’s coastal waters will be banned.
In addition, the bill will make it impossible for energy companies to carry out other developments related to offshore oil and gas exploration (such as pipelines) within the state.
The NSW government cited the risks of “major environmental disasters” such as oil spills, as well as greenhouse gas emissions associated with petroleum extraction as the main reasons for introducing the legislation.
“The NSW government’s bill is designed to prevent the severe environmental impacts that can result from offshore exploration and recovery of petroleum and minerals,” it said.
Nevertheless, the exploration ban will not apply to activities that the state government deems beneficial to the environment, including the recovery of sand for beach nourishment or beach scraping to help protect against erosion.
Similarly, dredging activities for purposes such as removing sediments or pollutants, and laying pipelines or submarine cables will also not be subject to the ban.
NSW Climate Change and Environment Minister Penny Sharpe believed the new legislation was the right move by the government.
“We know an overwhelming majority of people in NSW do not support offshore mining. The passage of this bill will give certainty that our government is prioritising environmental protection and our own local interests,” she said.
“This bill is a sensible amendment to our legislation to protect NSW against the risks of offshore mining.”
Echoing the sentiment, NSW Central Coast Minister David Harris said local communities would be better off under the new bill.
“This is about providing communities with certainty that is in the best interest of NSW as well as protecting the NSW coastal waters and marine environments,” he said.
State Opposition to Support the Bill
It is expected that the bill will receive support from the state opposition, which introduced a similar bill in June 2023.
While Shadow Environment Minister Kellie Sloane welcomed the announcement, she questioned why the state Labor government did not take action earlier.
“Pleased to see that Labor has finally seen the light when it comes to protecting NSW coastal waters—and has agreed to legislate Liberals and Nationals policy to stop offshore drilling of oil and gas,” she said on social media.
“I’m not sure why they didn’t just do this 7 months ago when the Coalition introduced.”
Despite the looming prospect of a total ban, some energy producers have expressed the intention to continue their exploration activities.
On Feb. 6, Advent Energy Executive Director David Breeze stated that his company would maintain its commitment to exploring and securing gas resources in the Commonwealth waters under the Petroleum Exploration Permit 11 (PEP-11).
“Numerous reports show that NSW faces a gas supply shortfall within the next four years,” he said, as reported by ABC News.
“PEP-11 has the possibility of supplying NSW with the bulk of its gas needs for 20 years.”
Meanwhile, Samantha McCulloch, the CEO of the Australian Energy Producers, a peak industry body, criticised the new legislation, saying it ignored the critical role of gas under the net zero transition and the importance of new gas supply in ensuring energy security and reducing pressures on prices.
“Report after report from independent agencies such as the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Energy Market Operator have warned of approaching supply shortfalls and identified the need for new east coast gas supply–especially in NSW and Victoria,” she told The Epoch Times.
“Blanket bans unnecessarily limit sources of gas when existing regulations provide an appropriate framework to determine conditions for exploration and development.”
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8 February, 2024
Holly Valance takes a swipe at 'lefties' and climate alarmists in rare TV interview
Ex-Neighbours star Holly Valance has taken a swipe at 'crap lefties' and climate alarmists in shock appearance at a conservative event.
Valance attended the launch of the 'Popular Conservatism' group in London together with her property tycoon husband Nick Candy.
The group aims to reform Britain to 'allow conservative values to flourish'.
Speaking after the event, Valance revealed how she was attracted to the right after shunning 'crap ideas' from 'lefties' earlier in her life.
The mother-of-two took a swipe at climate alarmists and revealed her concern about 'the way things are going in the country'.
In an interview with GB News, Valance described how she was motivated to attend this morning's launch event in order to 'listen to good ideas'.
'I'm a citizen like everyone else here who's concerned about the way things are going in the country,' the former actress said.
'Many things worry and bother me with two little children to bring up - what they might inherit. So I want to come and listen to ideas, good ideas.'
She added: 'Everyone starts off as a leftie and then wakes up at some point after you start either making money, working, trying to run a business, trying to buy a home, and then realise what crap ideas they all are - and then you go to the right.
She told the TV news channel: 'I just think the climate crisis - or lack of - is not a crisis.
'The air is better than when I was growing up. It used to stink walking down the street when I was growing up.
'Cleaner, cheaper energy is what we need - we're perfectly able to get it and have it.
'But we're just putting all these restrictions on normal people who are just trying to go about their business and get to work, pick up their children from school, go to the supermarket.
'It's just insanity, it's like smashing your head up against a wall every day.'
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'Woke capitalism' funds COLLAPSED by $13B last year - investors fled trendy 'ESG' investments
US sustainability funds — which conservatives have derided as 'woke capitalism' — saw their worst year on record in 2023, with investors pulling $13 billion from US funds, a Morningstar report says.
That multi-billion dollar exodus in the US more than offset the inward flows seen in Europe, dragging down the market globally.
In the fourth quarter alone, investors withdrew $5 billion from funds that promote environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts, making the fifth straight quarter of net outflows, the report says.
According to Morningstar, a financial services firm, investors exited ESG amid fears of poor returns, a hidden leftist agenda, and 'greenwashing,' or making a firm appear more environmentally friendly than it really is.
ESG refer to standards to guide investment toward socially-conscious firms — for example, by funding wind farms to combat climate change, while pulling out of harmful oil and tobacco giants.
The strategy gets more controversial when it guides funding to firms promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) schemes, which irk conservatives, who say they help women and minorities by sidelining white men.
This has spawned a fractious debate about whether efforts to make society fairer and cut carbon emissions are in the strategic interest for investors, by mitigating the risks of climate chaos and social disorder.
Alyssa Stankiewicz, a sustainability researcher at Morningstar, said ESG investments faced strong macroeconomic headwinds last year.
Global supply constraints, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and high interest rates left renewable energy firms less profitable.
Investors walked away from ESG funds chiefly over lackluster returns. Their performance improved from 2022's lows, but they still lagged behind their traditional peers.
The median sustainable large-blend equity fund gained 20.8 percent in 2023. That's lower than the 23.9 percent gains made by all types of funds overall.
A lack of clear cross-border regulation over 'greenwashing,' when companies make false claims about their environmental standards, hurt demand, said Stankiewicz.
Questions about the future of sustainable finance persist in the US as lawmakers from more than a dozen states, from Florida to Utah, try to fight the incorporation of ESG principles into business and investing.
'Especially within the US, continued political scrutiny of sustainable and ESG strategies contributed to a chilling effect on demand for these funds,' she wrote in her report.
The weak period for ESG funds has been notable given the massive growth they've posted in recent years.
ESG investing boomed in the pandemic, when lockdowns caused energy prices to fall and buoyed portfolios that shunned fossil fuels.
Those same strategies have floundered as lockdowns ended and economic activity resumed.
The amount invested in US sustainable funds totaled $323 billion by the end of 2023, 12 percent lower than the record-setting amount invested in 2021.
'We saw such strong inflows between 2019 and 2021,' Stankiewicz told Yahoo Finance.
'It's not as though all of those investors that started allocating to sustainable funds are all of a sudden running for the exits.'
The underperformance of ESG-focused funds strikes at the heart of a core argument of ESG: that investors are rewarded by investing in do-good companies.
Advocates of ESG say it's a smarter way to invest, because it factors in longer-term concerns, such as the economic chaos from climate change and ever-more freak weather events.
While many nations are ramping up renewables and scrapping carbon-belching power stations, the transition is not smooth and near-term shocks hinder progress, the report says.
Millennials and Gen Zers are turning their backs on ESG funds faster than others, new research shows.
A survey of some 1,000 investors found that millennial and Gen Z respondents had started to allocate their money more like baby boomers, who are keener on turning a profit than lofty sustainability principles.
Prof David Larcker, of Stanford Graduate School of Business, who led the research, said support for ESG values among younger investors fell by 'double-digit percentages' between 2022 and 2023.
Previously, young investors said they were 'very concerned about environmental and social issues' and wanted their fund managers to push 'for change, even if it meant a loss of personal wealth,' said Larcker.
That 'sentiment has changed dramatically,' he added.
In the survey, preference for ESG investing among millennials and Gen Zers, who are aged between 18 and 41, fell sharply.
The share of those who said they were 'very concerned about environmental issues' dropped from 70 percent in 2022 to 49 percent last year.
The share of those who were worried about social issues fell from 65 percent to 53 percent.
Meanwhile, those concerned about social issues dropped from 64 percent to 47 percent, according to the study from Stanford University, the Hoover Institution, and the Rock Center for Corporate Governance.
The share of millennial and Gen Z investors who said they wanted their fund managers to promote ESG values also tanked — from nearly half of them in 2022 to about a quarter last year.
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Biden Strengthens US Soot Regulations, Angering Industry
President Joe Biden's administration on Wednesday announced tough new air quality standards it said were sorely needed to protect the health of vulnerable communities, though industry groups have said the move would devastate domestic manufacturing.
It comes as the Democratic incumbent faces a tough election rematch against the likely Republican candidate Donald Trump, who rolled back dozens of air pollution regulations when he was in office.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s new rule concerns fine particulate matter, commonly known as soot, a widespread, deadly pollutant linked to asthma and heart disease, and more.
Under the new standard, levels of PM2.5 (particles that are 2.5 micrometers in diameter and smaller) would not be permitted to exceed an average annual level of 9 micrograms per cubic meter, down from the current 12 micrograms per cubic meter and more stringent than current as well as proposed European Union regulations.
"Today's action is a critical step forward to better protect workers, families and communities from the dangerous and costly impacts of fine particle pollution," EPA chief Michael Regan told reporters on a press call.
Vehicles, smokestacks and fires are common sources of fine particles, which also form when gases emitted by car engines, power plants and industrial processes react in the atmosphere.
The agency estimated the action would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays, and generate up to $46 billion in net health benefits in 2032, the first year that states would be required to meet the new standard.
Wednesday's announcement was hailed by environmental and health groups.
"The body of science around this pollution is so robust -- we know it takes people before their time, premature deaths from heart attacks, we know that it gives children and adults asthma and many other sicknesses," said Abbie Dillen, president of the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice.
"We could not be more grateful on behalf of all of the clients that we've represented over the years," she added.
Industry groups have said the rule would threaten US manufacturing operations, and the issue threatens to become yet another battleground in key swing states in the 2024 presidential election.
"The standards will hinder onshoring, resulting in continued manufacturing abroad -- which is less clean than manufacturing in the US," the National Association of Manufacturers said in a statement when the rule was first mooted a year ago.
The move has also been opposed by the American Forest & Paper Association, with the pulp and paper mills large emitters of air pollution.
But the EPA has disputed the characterizations, calculating that 99 percent of the country's more than 3,100 counties will be in compliance by 2032 because of an overall downward trend in air pollution from other initiatives.
It added states could exclude exceptional circumstances arising from wildfires from the particulate matter they report -- a factor that could be important as climate change makes smoke exposure from forest blazes more common.
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Category 6 Climate Alarmism
Few people deny that the climate is and has been changing. Yet the exact reason, cause, and degree to which mankind may be affecting this change are very much up for debate. However, for the climate cultists, there is only one acceptable answer to the question of what is causing climate change. And that answer is human activity linked directly to the use of fossil fuels. Indeed, a failure to fully embrace this unassailable climate dogma will get one labeled a “climate denier.”
However, the trouble with any cult is that when its prophecies fail to materialize, its adherents begin to lose faith, and skeptics eagerly step forward to expose the failures and errors in those dogmatically held beliefs.
This is much of the reason why the Leftmedia, which has long held that anthropogenic climate change is “settled science,” must continuously prop up the climate narrative, or else people might not believe it and in turn might fail to vote for the media’s preferred leftist political party.
Therefore, the solution to this conundrum of keeping the faith despite repeated instances of climate alarmists’ dire warnings failing to materialize is to spin normal climatic weather events as abnormal and getting worse.
Are storms really getting worse? It has been a repeated refrain almost every time a significant weather event affects the U.S., be it hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, heat waves, or snow storms. The reporting on these seasonal and common weather events increasingly frames them as “more severe,” “more extreme,” “more costly,” “more frequent,” or “more deadly” than ever before.
The trouble is the historical scientific record fails to uphold that alarmist narrative.
The alarmists’ solution, then, is to continue to assert that climate change is making common weather events like hurricanes worse and then drive home the issue by making proposals like adding a “Category 6” to the hurricane power scale.
That’s right. An example of this not-so-subtle attempt at climate spin comes courtesy of two scientists, Michael Wehner and James Kossin. The two are promoting the idea, which is not necessarily a new idea, that a Category 6 designation should be added to the five-step Saffir-Simpson measurement scale of a hurricane’s intensity. The reason? Well, climate change, of course.
As Wehner asserts, “Climate change has demonstrably made the strongest storms stronger.” This is how it works: Simply declare it as an undeniable reality and then move on to a proposed policy solution. Wehner then argues, “Introduction of this hypothetical Category 6 would raise awareness of that.”
And there it is. Not enough people have bought into climate alarmism, so by adding a new “extreme” “Category 6” to the hurricane scale, the alarmist narrative can be further pressed home.
The trouble is that from a practical standpoint, adding a sixth level to the well-understood hurricane scale would likely add confusion or even blunt the public’s perception of the danger associated with lower-category storms. Furthermore, while the hurricane categories measure a storm’s maximum sustained wind speed, they don’t account for the other often more damaging aspects of a hurricane, like water or storm surge.
Everyone who lives in a hurricane-affected area already knows that a Category 5 storm is a monster to be avoided at all costs. Who needs to turn the volume up to 11?
https://patriotpost.us/articles/104204-category-6-climate-alarmism-2024-02-07
***************************************7 February, 2024
Green Crime: An Electric Car, Wind and Solar Crime Wave
Green energy feeds a cycle of copper theft and environmentalist crime
Biden’s Inflation Increase Act intends to spend $7.5 billion taxpayer money to build charging stations for electric car owners. Two years later, no EV chargers were built. And that’s good.
The modern sheen of the electric car is running into the medieval state of American cities.
Seattle began installing dozens of EV chargers only for thieves to show up and raid at least eight of the charging cables for copper requiring thousands of dollars worth of repairs.
In response, the city is planning to put the chargers high up on poles that can only be lowered by an app. This will cost even more money and in an environment in which brazen copper thieves toppled an FM radio tower in Oklahoma, isn’t likely to deter the criminals.
EV owners who suffered from copper theft while leaving their cars to be charged in public places were told by the Seattle Police Department to “stay with the vehicle if you can while it’s being charged,” Considering that it can take an electric car hours to charge, that’s gonna be a wait.
In Oakhurst, CA , every cable was cut on a Tesla ‘supercharger’ station almost as soon as it had been set up. At a nonprofit in Van Nuys, 38 cables were stolen. Since the thieves rarely see any real punishment in cities where property crime has effectively been legalized, it’s getting worse.
The problem has become commonplace enough that Biden’s Department of Energy rolled out a special guide to stopping charging cable theft by warning that “the theft of EV charging cables can lead to a decrease in the use of EVs, which can have a negative impact on the environment.” Proposals from the DOE include charging your electric car at home.
Not that only charging electric cars at home is enough because thieves have taken to going after charging cables right in driveways as the EVs are being charged overnight.
Charging cables for the already overpriced electric cars can cost over $1,000.
Thieves on bicycles ride from suburban house to house, seizing cables and riding away with them. It’s estimated that an experienced crook can make off with one cable in 13 seconds.
And so electric car owners are warned to make sure that they lock their car in the garage. Then they’re told to lock their cables with padlocks and make sure their insurance covers their cables.
The incredible convenience of electric cars is now such that owners can only charge them while locked in their garages, with a padlock on the cable and the cable under the car’s wheel.
But it’s not just Teslas. Copper thieves are coming for every piece of ‘green’ infrastructure.
In Fresno, CA, $100,000 in copper wire was stolen from a solar farm, but wind farms, because they’re often far away from people, are an even more attractive target for copper thieves. And wind turbines have massive amounts of copper in them, making them even more desirable.
Copper thieves cut into a turbine, haul out cables and then drive away causing as much as millions of dollars in damage. Such thefts have been reported from Arizona to Minnesota to Iowa to Massachusetts, Internationally in the UK, there was a 48% increase in solar and cable ‘green’ copper theft, and 5,000 major solar thefts across Europe.
But where is all that copper going? The answer is appropriately green. It’s being recycled.
After the copper is stolen, it’s taken to recycling centers, many of which boast of their “sustainability” and contributions to the planet. There the copper is resold, often to China, which spurred the original copper boom, and transformed into more green energy equipment that the copper thieves will steal and then recycle to continue the cycle of environmental crime.
Green energy gear, from EV charging cables to solar panels and wind turbines, require a lot of copper. This demand for copper raises the price of copper and drives copper thefts.
Recycling soda and beer cans depended on homeless people digging through the trash and hauling giant garbage bags full of cans to be exchanged for 5 cents each. Copper theft is a more advanced version of the same game. The perpetrators are often addicts stealing copper and turning it over to organized criminals or selling it to recyclers and buying fentanyl.
Videos have documented trucks picking up ‘harvested’ copper and providing fentanyl.
That’s the kind of dysfunctional misery that the green revolution rests on and always has. The recycling junkie thieves aren’t just looking through the trash for Coke cans, they’re tearing up copper wire, but that’s a difference in scale, not in substance. Recycling was always theft.
Biden’s Department of Energy claims that looting electric cars is a threat to the planet. “EVs are an essential part of the transition to a more sustainable future, and any obstacles to their adoption must be addressed,” it warns. But it doesn’t call for cracking down on crime.
And it’s the electric cars and other green tech that’s driving the copper theft wave.
Electric cars use four times as much copper as real cars. One Tesla needs a mile of copper just to hook up the battery packs. Solar panels need 5.5 tons of copper for each megawatt. A wind farm can use as much as 7,000 tons of copper. There’s nothing ‘green’ about any of this.
Green energy demands a lot of mining and then outsources that to Communist China. And China helps the cartels manufacture fentanyl which they trade to junkies for copper.
From the Chinese Communist perspective, it’s a beautiful virtuous cycle.
The zombies they create steal our copper, send it to them and they resell it to us. The more we go ‘green’, the more copper we need, and the more China makes money by selling us ‘green’. And the more Americans it can turn into fentanyl zombies to steal it back to China.
Green crime does pay: at least for thieves, Communists and environmentalists.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/green-crime-an-electric-car-wind-and-solar-crime-wave/
**************************************************Electric Vehicles Have A Weight Problem
A crash test study conducted by researchers at The University of Nebraska holds troubling news for the electric vehicle industry and policymakers focused on forcing the cars on consumers. The Canadian Press reports that the study has found what anyone able to reason critically has known for years, which is that US highway guardrails are not strong enough to withstand the force of EVs that weigh 1,000 – 4,000 lbs. more than their gas-powered counterparts.
Oh. That’s a problem, isn’t it?
Yes, it is, and it’s a problem this is going to cost US taxpayers billions reinforce or rebuild the country’s millions of highway guardrails in the coming years if the Biden plan to mandate a full conversion to EVs eventually succeeds. We will either build new rails capable of saving lives of passengers in these heavy EVs or we will keep the existing guardrails just for show to make us feel better – like we do with airport security now.
Now, think of this: What’s going to happen when road designers finally start to really press the policymakers about the fact that the roads themselves are not designed to withstand the pressure of these much heavier EVs, and are being torn up and left in need of repair or complete re-paving years sooner than had been anticipated?
Some honest researchers have been raising this issue in recent years but have gained little traction with politicians at all levels of government. After all, dealing with this very real issue would interfere with their virtue signaling opportunities that are so helpful in re-election campaigns.
Think of how many trillions of dollars that absolute reality is going to cost our society in the decades to come. But we’re not supposed to talk about it right now because the politicians find it all too inconvenient.
But wait, it gets worse.
You know all those multi-level parking garages that have been built across our society in recent decades? There are hundreds of thousands of them in the US alone. How many of those multi-level concrete parking facilities do you suppose were built with 6,000 lb. EVs in mind, rather than 3,000 lb. gas cars? Don’t you imagine the number would approach zero?
Now, think how many trillions of dollars reinforcing and replacing all those substandard parking garages is going to cost our society, all in the name of “doing something” about the climate boogeyman.
And I haven’t even talked about all those hundreds of thousands of bridges all over the country. They will all have to be reinforced or rebuilt entirely, too.
Oh.
Now, add all this to the trillions of dollars it is going to cost us to double or triple generation capacity on power grids just to accommodate the added load of charging those millions of EVs that have been mandated by Biden, Justin Trudeau, the EU and other globalist elites over the past 5 years.
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Winning! EU drops Net Zero demands after farmers’ protest
Brussels removes order to reduce emissions linked to agriculture after mounting anger across Europe
The European Union has caved in to angry protests from farmers and cut a target to slash agricultural emissions as part of the bloc’s net zero drive.
A demand to reduce nitrogen, methane and other emissions linked to farming by almost a third has been removed from a wider Brussels plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent by 2040.
On Tuesday, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, also proposed withdrawing the EU’s plan to halve the use of pesticides, calling it a “symbol of polarisation”.
“Our farmers deserve to be listened to,” she told the European Parliament.
“I know that they are worried about the future of agriculture and their future as farmers. But they also know that agriculture needs to move to a more sustainable model of production so that their farms remain profitable in the years to come.”
A recommendation urging EU citizens to eat less meat was also removed from the plan.
The concessions came amid mounting demonstrations by farmers in Belgium, France, Germany and Italy ahead of this year’s EU elections.
Blockades on supermarket distribution centres have left shelves empty in Brussels, while several people have been injured in traffic accidents caused by farmers’ protests in the Netherlands, as they dumped rubbish and set fires on highways.
Organisers have threatened to continue disruption in the lead-up to the elections for the European Parliament in June.
Resistance growing
The ballot is seen as increasingly problematic for Mrs von der Leyen, and other mainstream politicians seeking re-election on a green agenda.
Resistance to the environmental overhaul has been steadily growing, including from the European People’s Party, the centre-Right political group to which commission president belongs.
The move to offer concessions to the farmers would be seen as a major step away from the bloc’s original green plans.
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Green backlash looms over EU elections
What a difference five years make. During the last European Union elections in 2019, hundreds of thousands across the 27-nation bloc staged protests to fight climate change. Ahead of this year's EU vote, farmers are in the streets demanding fewer green rules, and politicians cannot afford to ignore them.
A shift in political tone around how to protect the planet is looming over EU Parliament elections in June, even as climate change unleashes more severe and costly extreme weather.
"There is a clear backlash on the agriculture part of the Green Deal," said French EU lawmaker Pascal Canfin.
"But there is no backlash for the rest," he said.
To appease farmers protesting against low food prices and high EU environmental standards, the EU last week loosened environmental regulations on fallow land while France paused a national pesticide reduction policy.
But the overall EU 'Green Deal' vision for tackling climate change remains intact, supported by more than two dozen laws passed over the last five years to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.
The policies already in place are unlikely to be withdrawn. But the EU's recent attempts to fold broader environmental policies into this package have faltered. In the last few months, EU countries and lawmakers have shot down or weakened new laws on industrial pollution, cutting pesticide use and restoring damaged nature.
"We shouldn't mix environment and climate", said Peter Liese, an EU lawmaker from the centre-right European People's Party, the biggest political family in the EU parliament.
"If we want to be carbon neutral and still want to be industrialised... we cannot do everything at the same time," he said……
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6 February, 2024
More than 150 Republicans take aim at Biden's moratorium on natural gas exports
More than 150 House Republicans are calling for President Biden to reverse his moratorium on liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects, an action they argued negatively impacts the energy security of the U.S. and its allies.
The Republican lawmakers — led by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., and joined by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., and Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y. — penned a letter to Biden on Sunday evening, demanding his administration "expeditiously approve all pending applications to increase the global supply of natural gas."
"This is economically and strategically dangerous and unnecessary," they wrote in the letter to Biden. "Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, DOE has consistently found that U.S. LNG exports serve the ‘public interest’ because they contribute positive economic benefits and strengthen energy security for the American people, and also have the potential to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions."
"Your administration should do everything it can to encourage greater production of clean-burning and reliable natural gas, and to grant the export permits that allow access to global markets," the letter added.
Late last month, Biden ordered the Department of Energy (DOE) to pause pending permits for LNG export facilities while federal officials conduct a rigorous environmental review assessing the projects' carbon emissions, which could take more than a year to complete. The action represents a major victory for activists who have loudly called for such a move, even threatening to hold large protests over the issue.
The president said the pause on LNG permitting was a part of his sweeping climate agenda, adding the action "sees the climate crisis for what it is: the existential threat of our time." He also took aim at "MAGA Republicans" for willfully denying the "urgency of the climate crisis."
But, in their letter Sunday, McMorris Rodgers, Johnson, Scalise, Stefanik and the other Republicans said pausing additional LNG export capacity could ultimately bolster Russia, noting that, in December 2023, more than 87% of U.S. LNG exports went to Europe, U.K., or Asian markets. In the aftermath of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, energy experts argued LNG exports would be critical for helping American allies to wean off Russian gas.
"Actions that slow or halt the ability to export U.S. LNG would weaken global energy security and put these strategic markets at risk," the lawmakers wrote. "Such actions would undercut efforts we have made to help Europe reduce its reliance on Russian energy."
And they further argued that pausing LNG export growth threatens to cause increased U.S. energy prices, lead to higher global greenhouse gas emissions and harm the U.S. economy. The letter pointed to research indicating that LNG exports could add as much as $73 billion to the U.S. economy by 2040, create upwards of 453,000 American jobs and increase U.S. purchasing power by $30 billion.
The letter, meanwhile, comes days before Energy and Commerce Committee Republicans are planning to hold a hearing to examine the potential ramifications of the LNG export pause.
In addition, Senate Banking Committee Ranking Member Tim Scott, R-S.C., led a group of 16 senators last week in introducing the Unlocking Domestic LNG Potential Act which would strip DOE of its authority having final say on LNG export projects, instead leaving approval decisions with the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
Companion legislation was introduced by Rep. August Pfluger, R-Texas, one day later and is expected to receive a floor vote this month.
While it is unclear which proposed projects the action will affect, a senior administration official said at least two have a larger capacity and two have a smaller capacity. Another official added that the pause implemented Friday will only impact projects that have gone through FERC's lengthy approval process and are ripe for DOE approval.
According to federal data updated last week, there are 11 projects that have been green-lit by FERC but are not yet under construction. An additional four projects are pending before FERC and two are in the pre-filing stage. Those six projects wouldn't be impacted by the pause since they are not before the DOE yet, but would be impacted if approved by FERC.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/more-150-republicans-take-aim-bidens-moratorium-natural-gas-exports
************************************************Germany’s budget chaos leaves green-energy projects in limbo
Germany’s climate and transformation fund faces a shortfall of as much as €10 billion ($10.8 billion) next year, according to people familiar with the matter, casting doubt on the nation’s goal for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.
The gap in the off-budget fund threatens key solar and hydrogen projects, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information is private.
“It is currently not possible to provide conclusive information on this, as it depends on various parameters and estimates that need to be updated,” according to Germany’s finance ministry, commenting on the size of the funding gap.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition was forced to overhaul its finances after a top court last year ruled that it was unconstitutional to transfer more than €60 billion earmarked to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic into the climate fund. While the 2024 budget has finally passed, that only came after the government readopted a debt brake, raising concerns about the funding available to achieve Germany’s target of slashing carbon emissions by 65% by 2030.
“The core problem remains that Germany should actually be investing massively this decade to accelerate the climate transformation, secure cheaper energy and transform our industry from a world based on cheap Russian gas,” said Jens Burchardt, a Berlin-based partner with Boston Consulting Group and the founder of the firm’s Center for Climate and Sustainability. “However, there currently seems to be a lack of political consensus in favor of this.”
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In the Land of Net Zero, The Man in the Diesel Tank is King
Gwythian Prins is quite right to express his concerns about the impact of Net Zero on the U.K.’s national security in a piece published the other day on this site, ‘Net Zero Threatens National Security‘.
I’ve been racking my brains to think of a time in human history when a kingdom or state consciously chose to retro-equip its army with inferior technology or compromise its capability by seeking to introduce unreliable equipment. And I can’t think of one – what can I think of is all those who lost because they didn’t keep up.
Back in the middle of the 16th century BC, northern ancient Egypt was controlled by a group called the ‘shepherd kings’ or Hyksos. They’d invaded from what is now Syria and pushed back native rulers, establishing their own regime. They’d achieved this with one very simple tactic: they had chariots.
Now, the Hyksos chariots were a bit cumbersome and seem to have had four warriors in them. But when the Egyptians didn’t have chariots, the Hyksos behemoths were cutting edge.
When an Egyptian leader called Ahmose materialised on a cometh-the-moment, cometh-the-man basis, he didn’t try to push the Hyksos out with slower and more cumbersome chariots. Indeed, the Egyptians didn’t have any chariots.
So they started making chariots. And what’s more, they made their chariots smaller, lighter and faster so that they could fight a Bronze Age Blitzkrieg war. Ahmose led these vehicles into battle and, just like Heinz Guderian’s Blitzkrieg war of 1940, he pulverised the Hyksos whose chariots had become obsolete in an instant.
The blistering Ahmose established the 18th Dynasty, reunified Egypt and ushered in its greatest line of kings who presided over an unprecedented era of wealth, power, and – most important of all – national security.
One of the last of the kings of that dynasty was Tutankhamun in the late 14th century BC, whose tomb was famously found almost intact in 1922. On his body was an iron dagger, made of iron from a meteorite. At this time this spectacularly hard metal, which cut through bronze like a wire through cheese, was beyond the wit of man to smelt. Only a king could own one.
Within a few centuries the secret of the high temperatures needed had been discovered and humanity, for good or ill, entered the Iron Age. No-one went to war with a Bronze Age sword after that unless he wanted to lose or be conquered. The Roman Empire was an Iron Age state.
When the Romans went to war against the Carthaginians in the First Punic War (264-241 BC) they were not a naval power, even though the Carthaginians were. The Romans used a wrecked Carthaginian ship as a template and built their own, adding improvements in the form of the corvus boarding ramp. Yes, it was trial and error, but they won their first engagement with the Carthaginians in the Battle of Mylae in 260 BC because their ships were better.
It was a long and hard struggle with catastrophes along the way, but Rome won that war, and the next two wars against Carthage and ended up as the most powerful naval force in the Mediterranean.
There are so many other stories like this that I could go on for hours. The principle is always the same and the dynamic is the process of technological development, which at its fastest is and always has been driven by warfare. The unavoidable fact that it is impossible to stand still or diminish the effectiveness of a nation’s armed forces without making that nation a sitting duck for a more ambitious nation’s greed.
Yes, of course arms reduction treaties can and do exist, and they’ve been a mechanism for trying to inhibit the recklessness of unrestrained militarisation by encouraging mutual compliance in stepping back. They can and do work – up to a point. But there has never been a situation where everyone is prepared to play ball at the same time.
In the world of realpolitik there is simply no conceivable possibility of any serious nation unilaterally trying to cripple its capacity either to manufacture the raw materials or the hardware with which to defend itself, and expecting to survive. Extraordinarily though, that is quite literally what seems to be happening in Britain today.
There is no future for Net Zero in warfare, the armed forces or manufacturing. We cannot defend ourselves with electric tanks made of papier-maché steel, to use them as a metaphor for any other aspect of military technology.
We can’t have a situation in which during a war our factories are at the mercy of windpower generated by turbines in the middle of a sea beyond us to defend in a meaningful way or can’t function at full bore simply because it’s a cloudy day. Nor can we depend on an energy source that isn’t up to the job, however much of it we have, just as in the same way the Bronze Age fizzled out in the face of iron.
It might be better for all of us if we were all susceptible to such limiting factors, but the world doesn’t work like that. The ‘enemy’, whomever that turns out to be and whenever that is, will kit itself out with whatever will make it most likely that it wins and seizes what it wants, whether that is territory or resources or just power. And if that means the enemy goes to war with faster, more reliable and more powerful equipment then that’s exactly what its troops will have to hand.
Look at how the Germans spent years preparing themselves for 1939. That they ended up losing isn’t the point. In 1939-40 they were streets ahead of other European countries, which is why their advance was terrifyingly fast. They lost in 1945 because by then the Allies (which means the U.S.) had poured unlimited resources into record-breaking technological development and manufacturing capability on an unprecedented scale. The Germans probably had some of the best equipment, but they couldn’t produce it in sufficient quantities, despite resorting to synthetic oil. And that’s just as important as the equipment itself. The Tiger tank might have been as good as ten Shermans, but the Allies had eleven Shermans.
It may be an unpalatable aspect of human society, but if there’s anything that history tells you, it is what people are like. And in a world of nation states, you must be in a position to defend yourself. I hope beyond anything else there isn’t going to be a war, but one of the best ways of making sure there is one is to make yourself look like a pushover.
Cyber assaults are all too likely in the future. That’s a whole other story too, but it won’t change the fact that if we ever need to pull ourselves together and fight back then we’ll have to kiss Net Zero goodbye on the spot. The only question now is whether it’s already too late.
Here’s hoping we don’t have to find out the hard way.
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Why some Australians still need convincing the future lies in renewable energy
Last year, the Energy Minister asked the Energy Infrastructure Commissioner to investigate regional pockets of stubborn resistance and recommend ways of getting the doubters onside.
Andrew Dyer’s Community Engagement Review Report makes the bold assumption that Chris Bowen’s renewable energy plan can be put back on track, that his target of installing a 7MW wind turbine every 18 hours and 22,000 solar panels a day until 2030 is not as fanciful as it sounds. Opposition in the regions can be overcome by “ongoing excellence in community engagement and, more broadly, excellence in the execution of the energy transition”.
Engagement is a weasel word much loved by technocrats. It implies a two-way conversation, an exercise in exchanging information on the assumption that those in charge don’t possess the perfect knowledge needed to make perfect decisions.
In the minds of those who write these kinds of reports, however, engagement means no such thing. Engagement is the dissemination of a top-down plan, designed by people in the know.
Dyer says the government should develop a narrative “articulating why there is an urgent need for new renewable energy and transmission infrastructure”. He says opposition is often driven by “misinformation” and recommends the government establish one-stop information shops to help opponents get their facts straight.
He cites previous campaigns for efficient water use, cancer awareness and drink-driving as models of what could be achieved by appointing “an eminent, respected and independent spokesperson to engage the nation and be the ongoing champion of the energy transition”. Wisely, he steers clear of putting names to his proposal. The authority of most of those once considered national living treasures has been eroded by their endorsement of the voice referendum.
Dyer reflects on the role played by Sir John Monash in championing Victoria’s energy transition in the 1920s. This begs the question: Would Monash, the engineer who developed Victoria’s brown coal as a source of cheap and abundant energy, be prepared to champion wind and solar power today? Will wind and solar be powering the nation in a century’s time, the lifespan Monash anticipated for lignite?
The transition to renewable energy will reverse the progress made by Australia between the wars. Cheap energy attracted productive capital from Britain and the US. The increase in domestic manufacturing was driven by the perceived need for power and industrial self-sufficiency after the experience of WWI. Expensive and unreliable energy is driving companies offshore. It is barely 10 months since the Albanese government announced a $15bn scheme to attract manufacturing jobs and avoid a repeat of the shortages of essential goods experienced during the Covid-19 panic. The fund has yet to accept a single application, and Australia has fallen to 93rd in the Harvard Growth Lab’s rankings for economic complexity, sandwiched between Uganda and Pakistan.
Nowhere is the cost of the renewable energy transition more keenly felt than in the regions. They know first-hand the pressures on small and medium businesses from rising energy prices. They have discovered the dirty secrets the inner city prefers to ignore. They have experienced the rapacious demand for land required to generate a moderately respectable amount of power from wind and solar. They have seen and heard the scale of the civil engineering works required to build endless access roads and level platforms for turbines and cranes, often in remote and rugged terrain. They have been disturbed by the aviation warning lights on top of the turbines that compete with the natural beauty of a night sky away from the city lights.
Their roads have been churned by hundreds of truck movements transporting blades, steel and concrete. They know what it is like to be patronised by know-nothing community relations agents with newly minted degrees in strategic communication from UTS.
A community survey conducted for the commissioner’s review shows the extent of their unease. Nine out of 10 (92 per cent) were dissatisfied with the standard of community engagement by developers. Explanations in response to questions were considered unsatisfactory by 85 per cent. Only 11 per cent considered explanations relevant to their questions, and 85 per cent thought their explanations were not addressed promptly.
The conclusion the commissioner painfully avoids presenting to the Energy Minister is that any chance of gaining the social licence he desires has long since been lost. The haughtiness, equivocation and condescension of some developers have trashed the industry’s reputation. Governments that are supposed to control the excesses of the free market have instead acted as their facilitators. MPs, supposed to stand up for their constituents, have been nervous about taking up their concerns, fearing being labelled as climate deniers.
The idea an official information campaign will put these people straight is fanciful. The arrival of broadband means rural Australians have abundant information about the limits of renewable energy. They can follow the news from the US and Europe, where appetite and investment for wind and solar are diminishing and governments are reaching for other ways to reduce emissions, such as nuclear.
The internet has brought together communities blighted by renewable development from Tasmania to the edge of Cape York. In the past year, individuals overwhelmed by fighting their own lonely battle against cashed-up corporations have coalesced into a fledging national movement, Reckless Renewables; remarkably, without professional support or funding.
On Tuesday, the protest goes to Canberra with a rally at Parliament House. The renewable energy lobby has already fired warning shots. GetUp, which received $80,000 in donations last year from Mike Cannon-Brookes, is promising to pepper Canberra with posters. Renew Economy, the renewable sector’s version of Pravda, has tried to belittle the participants, mocking the support they have received from MPs Barnaby Joyce and Pauline Hanson.
Bowen is unlikely to break his habit of entering parliament through the basement ministerial carpark and instead turn up at the front door. Put that down as a lost opportunity. His reception would have told him more about the country’s mood than any number of engagement reviews.
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5 February, 2024
Biden EPA Has Acted Like ‘Gestapo,’ Mistreated Ohio Residents in East Palestine Cleanup, House Candidate Says
A Republican candidate for the House of Representatives ripped the Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday, saying it was “mistreating residents” of East Palestine, Ohio.
President Joe Biden announced Wednesday he would visit the city where the Feb. 3, 2023, train derailment occurred, fulfilling a promise to visit East Palestine made in March 2023. The derailment caused people to evacuate after chemicals were spilled.
Dr. Rick Tsai, who is running for the House seat vacated when Rep. Bill Johnson, R-Ohio, resigned last month to become president of Youngstown State University, blasted the EPA and federal government during an appearance on WMAL-FM radio’s “The Vince Coglianese Show” in Washington.
“I don’t think the world knows the whole truth about what happened here and is still going on in East Palestine,” Tsai told Coglianese, who is also the Daily Caller’s editorial director.
Officials warned of a possible “catastrophic blast” at the derailment site Feb. 6, 2023, and carried out a controlled burn of chemicals, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
“The government put the entity that caused this catastrophe in control of the cleanup, and they’ve almost been like the Gestapo here, mistreating residents,” Tsai added.
Tsai has done his own testing of local creeks, saying he has found elevated levels of benzene, according to Cleveland’s WKYC-TV
“As of yesterday or the day before, Ann Vogel of the Ohio EPA was saying they have no evidence of chemicals in our land or a creek,” Tsai told Coglianese. “I can give a 7-year-old a stick and teach him how to find these chemicals. I don’t know how the EPA doesn’t do it with their millions of dollars at, you know, their beck and call.”
Former President Donald Trump visited East Palestine in February 2023, donating bottled water and pallets of supplies to assist residents in the town
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The SEC Oversteps its Powers on Climate Change
Nearly two years ago, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a rule that would force publicly traded companies to take climate change seriously by reporting on how climate change might materially affect their operations. The mandatory reports were to include, among other things, what actions they are taking to fight climate change, to anticipate and mitigate its potential impacts, to report on their emissions, and the emissions created throughout their supply chain, and any efforts they were taking to reduce emissions. This was a purely political action pushed by the commission’s three Democrat appointees.
Facing fierce backlash from investors, the public, and Congress, the SEC has delayed, for the moment, formally imposing the rule.
During the SEC’s delay, California, ever the leader in inane, job-destroying, consumer-costing policies, stepped in and passed its own similar law. As will be the case should the SEC finalize its rule, business and farm groups sued to block the law, in part, because it usurps the federal government’s constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce by applying to companies headquartered outside the state, if they do business in California. The lawsuit also argues the law violates their constitutional right to free speech by compelling to them to take a position on the much-debated topic of climate change -- the state’s position, in fact.
Back to the SEC. Created in the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash in order to protect investors from fraud and market manipulation, to maintain a fair and orderly market, and to facilitate capital formation, the SEC’s climate rule falls well outside its statutory authority. The SEC assumes that climate change does or will soon materially affect the operations of most, if not all, the publicly traded companies over which it has oversight. However, evidence for this is lacking.
As detailed at Climate Realism, Climate at a Glance, and Climate Change Weekly, there is no evidence that extreme weather events are becoming more frequent or severe; not hurricanes, floods, droughts, nor wildfires. Seas are rising, but no faster than their historic norm since the end of the last ice age. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that it can’t detect, with high confidence, trends in extreme weather resulting from ongoing climate change, nor can it attribute any such events or trends to human actions, with high confidence.
If data doesn’t show climate change is making weather worse, and the IPCC can’t find such a signal, how can any individual company be expected to determine that at some point in the future “climate change” will “materially affect” its operations.
Companies located in areas that are historically prone to wildfires or hurricanes might be expected to take actions to reduce the likelihood that their operations will be impacted or compromised by such events, but this would be true regardless of climate change, and such actions would have to be weighed against the cost that such action would have on long-term profitability.
Such actions might include hardening infrastructure, improving supply chains, or even moving their operations to states or areas in states less prone to the types of natural disasters that might reasonably be anticipated to materially affect the company’s operations. Of course, the high costs of prior climate regulations are already driving companies to flee California, a trend its new reporting law will likely exacerbate.
And there’s the rub, “reasonably” be anticipated. No one, no company, no country can know what will happen 30, 50, or 100 years from now. Simply put, if a company reported in its public documents and to the SEC that it did not expect climate change to materially affect its operations, whether because its board did not consider climate change a serious threat based on real-world data, or because it had no way of anticipating the types of weather events that might occur in the future, where, or when, it would be honest. However, it is doubtful that such honesty of a conclusion on the part of a company would satisfy the SEC’s climate mandarins.
Indeed, although the rule would do nothing to prevent climate change, because no single company or industry substantially impacts global warming, it would open regulated companies up to potential enforcement actions from the SEC and lawsuits from activists for “improper filing,” if the SEC isn’t satisfied with the filing or the anticipated impacts do not occur but other unforeseen impacts do occur that do materially affect the company’s profitability.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/the_sec_oversteps_its_powers_on_climate_change.html
***********************************************UK: Another Net Zero retreat? Tories ditch ‘boiler tax’
The energy secretary is planning to scrap the so-called boiler tax in a move that will be welcomed by homeowners facing the prospect of having to spend money to replace an old appliance.
Under the government’s “clean heat” strategy, targets had been drawn up to help phase out gas boilers and deliver 600,000 eco-friendly heat pump installations a year by 2028.
The target was due to come into effect in April, when boiler manufacturers would be required to match, or substitute, 4 per cent of their boiler sales with heat pumps or face a fine of £3,000 for every installation they fell short by.
Even though the target had not come into force, manufacturers were already increasing prices on their gas boilers to counter the impact of the fines, with prices set to increase by up to £120 this year.
Claire Coutinho, the energy secretary, accused manufacturers of price gouging, which is when businesses heavily inflate the price of products that are in high demand.
She is preparing to scrap the 4 per cent target and fines after concluding that any government intervention was unlikely to prevent consumers from being hit with additional costs.
A government source said: “Boiler manufacturers have saddled families with indefensible price hikes — this is not right. We’re looking again at the policy, and expect manufacturers to do the right thing and remove their price hikes immediately.”
A formal decision has not been announced, Coutinho has held discussions with officials over several weeks on scrapping the “boiler tax”.
Coutinho has instructed officials in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to speak to the Competition and Markets Authority about launching an investigation into the home heating market to ensure that competition is not limited and consumers are getting a fair price.
The move is likely to infuriate environmentalists, coming only months after Rishi Sunak announced a climb down on the government’s net-zero strategy by pushing back the deadline for banning new petrol and diesel cars.
However, Coutinho believes it may be the only way to get manufacturers to drop their prices again, and that consumers should be prioritised over environmental targets. Some 23 million households were still using a gas boiler last year.
Sunak’s decision to slow down the green transition has won applause from right-wing Tories but sparked criticism from moderates, including the former minister Chris Skidmore, who quit as an MP last month.
A source pointed out that in a recent letter, the Energy and Utilities Alliance (EUA), an industry association representing boiler manufacturers and other gas appliance companies, had confirmed that the companies were prepared to back down if the target were dropped.
The energy secretary is also increasingly concerned that opposition to the boiler tax could undermine confidence in heat pump technology and lead to fewer consumers buying them.
Claire Coutinho has accused manufacturers of unreasonable price rises and is said to believe that consumers should be prioritised over environmental targets
Green policies have also plagued Germany’s government. Olaf Scholz’s coalition government tried to in effect ban all new gas and oil boiler installations as part of its drive to reach carbon neutrality by 2045, but the political and public opposition resulted in the plans being dramatically altered.
The UK government has been chastened by Germany’s experience, with sources revealing that Sunak had already contemplated scrapping the boiler tax back in September, when he announced his big climbdown on net zero.
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Europe’s Greens are on the ropes
The parties that roared to their best-ever results in 2019’s EU election on the back of mass climate protests led by Greta Thunberg are now facing a farmer-fueled backlash that is endangering their prized Green Deal.
Europe is rocking with farmers demanding exemptions from environmental rules. Nationalist parties are fanning the flames. And far-right parties in places like Germany and France are surging.
The Greens now face a stark choice as they strategize for their next big electoral test in the June EU election: compromise to save the best of the Green Deal or stick to their ideals and risk their calls for a greener agenda being sidelined.
"I'm ready to compromise — but then knowing that you need to compromise to get something," said Bas Eickhout, a Dutch European Parliament member expected to be chosen as a co-leader of the Greens’ EU election campaign during a party congress in Lyon this weekend.
The prospects of pulling off another green wave look slim, if not impossible.
In the upcoming EU election, the Greens — who vaulted to become the Parliament’s fourth-largest group in the 2019 election — are poised to lose about a third of their 72 seats, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls. Some of their most experienced legislators who shaped the faction’s European policies in recent years are also departing.
It gets worse.
EU environment chief Virginijus Sinkevi?ius — the only commissioner nominated by a green party — will not have a second stint in the role. Meanwhile, his erstwhile boss — and long-term EU climate czar — Frans Timmermans has long since returned to Dutch politics. Talks to coax Italy’s 5Star Movement to join — which could add to the Greens’ numerical strength in the next Parliament — have also hit a dead end.
The ramifications are potentially damning: The Greens could be pushed to the sidelines of climate policy decision-making in the next Parliament, have little sway over Europe’s legislative agenda in the next European Commission and be forced to watch as a more right-leaning EU assembly slows down or even repeals large parts of the Green Deal.
"The risk is real," said `Belgian MEP Philippe Lamberts, who is a co-leader of the Greens’ faction in the Parliament.
“Everyone is green as long as it’s free of charge. Once it starts costing someone a penny then they all scatter,” he lamented.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-greens-are-on-the-ropes-eu-elections/
***************************************4 February, 2024
Climate change in the dock
No single artefact did more to launch the climate change scare than Professor Michael E Mann’s famous – or should that be infamous? – 1998 hockey stick graph, showing an unprecedented and sudden rise in global warming. Widely criticised on many scientific counts it is again under fire, in a Washington courtroom drama significant for both free speech and climate science.
A 12-year defamation battle between Mann and the witty and acute conservative Canadian pundit Mark Steyn is culminating in Room 518 in D.C.’s Superior Court, after Steyn wrote a piece in National Review in 2012 referring to Mann as ‘the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus’. Scientist blogger Rand Simberg, quoted in Steyn’s piece, is also being sued.
For those who have followed the climate-change gravy train for decades, as I have, this will be a walk down memory lane. All the old stagers are there, either listed as witnesses or mentioned in despatches – Steve McIntyre (‘human filth’, according to Mann), Roger Pielke Jnr, Ross McKittrick, ‘Mike’s Nature trick’, Climategate emails, tree rings and bristlecone pines. Even the catchy harmonies of ‘Hide the Decline’, the cult hit song by Minnesotans for Global Warming, have rung through the court.
The trial is pertinent because climate scientists have long avoided debating the science, saying it’s ‘settled’ and they don’t want to give ‘deniers’ a stage, although sceptics say that’s because the ‘settled science’ itself is so full of holes.
The evidence thus far includes jaw-dropping moments, such as when Mann declared that he had not, to his knowledge, paid one penny for his litigation involving three law firms and multiple lawyers over a dozen years. No such luck for Steyn, and Mann’s dark money donors remain unknown. The graph was first published in Nature magazine in 1998, starred in the 2001 IPCC report and became the poster child for global warming alarmism; it’s foundational to the IPCC’s climate-change case, so there are plenty of deep-pocketed left-leaning vested interests at stake.
The trial is occasionally rollicking and hilarious, given Steyn’s theatricality and turn of phrase, but also ugly. The court has heard of Mann’s abuse against ‘deniers’ (his preferred term) as evidenced in emails and Twitter posts – no playing the ball for Mann. In one email to a Wikipedia editor, with Nasa scientist Gavin Schmidt copied in, Mann accused climate scientist Judith Curry of engaging in an affair with a married academic while a student. ‘Sleeping her way to the top’, as the defence lawyer characterised it. In fact, she was on university staff and the colleague had separated from his wife; Mann had to admit that his gossip was false. He was only human, he said. Those who cherish science as a noble endeavour need to remember that those who practise it are ordinary humans, and sometimes very ordinary. But don’t take it from me – check out Mann’s long history of belittling Twitter posts for yourself.
One is tempted to see Mann’s abuse as par for the behavioural course from a scientist who frequently and falsely claimed to have won a Nobel prize, even after the Nobel committee said he had not. The court heard Mann was the only person the Nobel committee had ever asked to stop claiming to be a Nobel winner.
As the litigant, Mann must prove he suffered damages. No witnesses so far have been led to testify to his career suffering. His salary has risen, he has jet-setted to many international climate events, published a number of books and rubbed shoulders with the Clintons and Leonardo DiCaprio, as is typical of the climate glitterati. Much time was spent on his suffering ‘a mean look’ in his local supermarket from a stranger, and he claims his grant applications failed precipitously after the alleged defamation. However, Penn State had been hit by a child rape scandal around the same time, involving high-profile football coach Jerry Sandusky, who was ultimately jailed, and even the university’s president was charged, convicted and jailed, having tried to hush the crimes; that may have dried up the money flow. The two cases are connected by Steyn and Simberg’s claim that a corrupt Penn State tried to sweep both issues under the carpet, to protect their stars, and brand.
Further emails read to the court have hinted at Mann’s motivation; he hoped to ruin both National Review and Steyn himself, ‘this odious excuse for a human being’.
The case necessarily touches on climate science. I was curious to hear how Mann explained the use of two different temperature sets to create the hockey stick, the first one from tree-ring proxies dating back to the 1100’s, showing flat temperatures and switching to the second record, using modern thermometers, in the 20th century to get the final uplift of the hockey stick ‘blade’. Seemingly the proxies had become unreliable in the 20th century around the point when they contradicted the thermometer record. This at the time reportedly prompted even Phil Jones of the East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit to complain that Mann was comparing apples and oranges. Well, yes. In court, Mann had no explanation for why the tree-ring data became unreliable in the 20th century, it just had, he averred. It didn’t seem to occur to him that perhaps it was always unreliable, given that the graph had also erased the well-attested medieval Warm Period.
It has also emerged that Mann’s Ph.D expertise is in geology, not in statistics. Nor did he consult a statistician over the creation of the hockey stick graph, which Mann compiled from tree-ring data gathered by two climatologists; in court he admitted his original calculations were ‘pretty crude’.
(A note: I am taking much of my information from the podcast Climate Change on Trial, a daily enactment and account by awarded journalists Ann McElhinny and Phelim McAleer. There is little mainstream reporting; if the podcasters err, so will I.)
Given the vindictive USD$83 million damages found against Trump in his case against serial rape accuser E. Jean Carroll, one cannot be optimistic about any jury trial in deep blue Washington DC. But Steyn is going down fighting, and one cannot but admire his guts and brio, even if his bank balance has been cleaned out. Sadly Steyn, representing himself, is now in a wheelchair, having recently suffered three heart attacks. If ever there were a case deserving funding, it is his. The trial continues.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/climate-change-in-the-dock/ ?
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Carbon ‘facts’ according to Green Dream Believers
I’ve seen the light – the truth about ‘carbon pollution’ in simple terms as explained by some Green Dream Believers and disciples of the new Climate Change religion.
So why am I still in the dark? I’ve always wondered how Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, Greens leader Adam Bandt, the nowhere-near-independent Teals, and a host of other climate change advocates keep banging on about ‘carbon pollution’ and how we must eliminate it to save the planet while creating thousands of new Green Renewables jobs.
I thought they were talking about carbon dioxide or CO2, an essential trace gas that now measures slightly over 400 parts per million or a minuscule 0.04 per cent of the atmosphere. Science confirms it has been present at much higher levels due to natural influences in the past when trees thrived and coral reefs proliferated.
From Wikipedia:
Concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere were as high as 4,000 ppm during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago, and as low as 180 ppm during the Quaternary glaciation of the last two million years. [4]Reconstructed temperature records for the last 420 million years indicate that atmospheric CO2 concentrations peaked at approximately 2,000 ppm during the Devonian (400 Ma) period, and again in the Triassic (220–200 Ma) period and was four times current levels during the Jurassic period (201–145 Ma). [16][17])
How can they call it ‘carbon pollution’ when we know it is essential to all life on Earth?
How can they call it ‘carbon pollution’ when all living organisms breathe it out as part of the respiration process and then plants absorb it and return oxygen to the atmosphere as part of nature’s perfect master plan?
Well, just as decades ago in TV ads we were told ‘oils ain’t necessarily oils’, carbon pollution ain’t necessarily carbon pollution.
My re-education on how all this is really supposed to work began years ago, courtesy of a newspaper column I wrote where I suggested people who lie awake at night worrying about breathing and adding to the ‘carbon pollution’ need worry no more as there were a couple of ingenious devices developed which could sequester their own personal greenhouse contributions (at least from their lungs).
With a global population now approaching 8 billion and each human exhaling an average of about 1kg of CO2 daily, that’s nothing to sneeze at. In fact it inspired the developers of the amazing ‘Living Green Screen Mask’ hailed as a living, carbon-capturing face mask which also filters bacteria and the Binchotan (Japanese for ‘White Coal’) bracelet.
If you combined these colourful accessories back then, you would not only be noticed in a crowd (any crowd), but more importantly you would capture and store CO2, filter out microbes, generate feel-good negative ions, and ward off electromagnetic waves from the cellphone powered by the electricity you have just generated with your bracelet, all at the same time you are helping to save the planet. Or so I thought, when I passed the information on to readers with just a hint of sarcasm.
According to the angry nest of Green hornets and climate worriers I stirred with my helpful information, the CO2 that humans breathe out is not pollution. Some also said the CO2 spewed out by volcanoes was not pollution since it was natural and possibly responsible for higher CO2 levels in the past which was all good because humans weren’t responsible.
They were adamant that we were not contributing to ‘carbon pollution’ through breathing. Some mistakenly thought the carbon dioxide we breathed out was the same volume we breathed in, when in reality, through respiration we breathe out about four times as much.
Others said the CO2 we breathe out today is the carbon we ate yesterday and this was ‘good carbon’ seeing it was perfectly in balance with nature. Apparently it does not matter whether you are a vegetarian or a meat eater, the principle remains the same. Garbage in, garbage out, I guess (just like today’s climate computer models which churn out the desired predictions).
Now to their explanation of why we really need a carbon tax in the form of carbon offsets or whatever other form our leaders dictate. The same CO2 suddenly becomes ‘carbon pollution’ when it is produced by power stations, cars, trains, planes, or anything else burning fossil fuels and releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere. Here it upsets the balance of nature and drives ‘climate change’ – even though it’s only about 3 per cent of total CO2 emissions.
Water vapour is acknowledged by NASA as a much more efficient greenhouse gas and on average makes up about 10 times as much of the atmosphere, but there is no need to tax that because it wouldn’t be possible and also because it eventually condenses into rain which helps cool things down until the CO2 warms them up again. More water evaporates in a type of atmospheric global warming perpetual motion machine. (Or maybe it’s not really warming, some say it’s just cooling more slowly than it should.)
Trees are good as they help to restore the balance except when they were part of former climate-sceptic Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s direct action plan which apparently could not work as well as a carbon tax or a ‘carbon price’.
Simple really… We have been told for many years there is a scientific consensus that anthropogenic CO2 we emit is responsible for ‘climate change’ and this is accepted by ‘every reputable climate scientist in the world’. Julia Gillard said all that before she ended her stint as Prime Minister by pledging, ‘There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead…’ Before quickly changing her mind. Oops…
Albanese and his side-kick Bowen still sing from the same old climate change song sheet and are determined to speed Australia down a destructive road to ‘Net Zero’ emissions regardless of the cost to the economy and the cheap, reliable source of energy we once enjoyed. And don’t mention the naughty ‘N’ word which still remains on the banned list here. Meanwhile, other nations are increasingly turning to modern nuclear reactors as a better alternative that won’t have to be scrapped and added to landfill within a couple of decades.
There never was any climate consensus, with many eminent international scientists such as Richard Lindzen, Henrik Svensmark, John Christy, Judith Curry, Ferenc Miskolczi, Miklos Zagoni, our own Ian Plimer, David Evans, and the late Pro Bob Carter at odds with the unproven CO2 hypothesis. More than 1,800 scientists, academics and professionals have also recently signed a petition refuting man-made global warming and stating: ‘There is no climate emergency.’
It highlights the fact we really do need a proper scientific debate to sort out the claims made by the Green Dream Believers.
Oh and in case you’re wondering, the Green Screen Mask and the White Coal bracelet never set the world on fire, in fact, they quietly disappeared without a trace and failed to re-appear even during the height of the Covid Pandemic … funny that!
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/carbon-facts-according-to-green-dream-believers
****************************************************The Unfair Demonization of Plastic Bags
Sometime in the last ten years, the crunchy left decided that average people were far too happy and satisfied leaving the grocery store with 50 pounds of groceries piled in plastic bags. They decided that such joy is surely bad for the environment. So they decided to ban them.
I’m not sure that it was any more complicated than that. It’s been this way for a while, reminding us of H.L. Mencken’s definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” Mother nature surely doesn’t like that so let’s just make it stop. We need more misery around here!
So some years ago, states started to ban them. We all had to revert to brown paper bags which tear and are awkward to carry. Clearly an inferior product. Another solution was to bring your own bag, which is invariably made of, you guessed it, plastic. So that was replacing one kind of plastic with another.
If you live in a blue state, you know about this very well. You have to keep all sorts of bags in your closet or car and remember to haul them into the grocery store. But then you forget and you have to buy more. Now you have two extra bags, and this is to add to your growing collection at home.
It’s all a bit of a peasant way to shop and that’s the whole point, to make you feel poor and grubby, which, for some reason I cannot understand, is very fashionable among left-wing, academic-influenced communities. They are saving the planet, don’t you know, and probably curbing carbon emissions to forestall the existential threat of... climate change!
Except that there is one problem. Freedonia Market Research—at the behest of the disposable plastic bag industry, of course—has taken a close look at New Jersey’s program and concluded that the new plastic bags you slog around require much more plastic than the old thin and brilliant bags we used at the store in the old days. They discovered that the new bags are used only two or three times by 90 percent of people, so of course they have to keep buying more and more.
So get this. These new non-woven polypropylene bags have increased greenhouse gas emissions by 500 percent. Whoops!
Probably none of this surprises you now that you read it. After all, the bulk of actual plastic related to the grocery comes from the products themselves. Think of it. Every bit of meat, everything made of bread, every box has a plastic inside for freshness, and even your vegetables are put in bags to get them to the counter. The whole place is a plastic mecca. How much difference would the carry-out bags really make?
The point, as it turns out, has nothing to do with actually reducing plastic consumption but rather imposing coercive behaviors that take away conveniences and replacing them with a virtuous signal that everyone can understand. They do this to us even when it makes no sense at all.
We should anticipate this effect by now. Name any policy you can think of that is designed to somehow “save” resources—wind turbines, electric cars, solar panels—and you can pretty much guarantee that deploying them will be less efficient overall than the process which it replaces. It just keeps happening.
The plastic bag frenzy of the last ten years has some odd twists and turns. Remember when the world was freaking out about COVID germs? In my community, plastic bags had already been banned but now the germophobic pearl-clutchers grew concerned that the polyester bags people were slogging into the store carried bad germs on them. Once that word got out, the city council instantly abolished the very thing they had spent years encouraging.
Suddenly the whole community was back to using disposable plastic bags at checkout, because they were deemed to be more sanitary than the stuff people were bringing in from outside. None of it makes sense but there it is.
So there were a few merciful months when we could bag our groceries the way we used to, slipping them in bag after bag and hurling them around our arms to the point that on two arms we could conceivably lug 100 pounds of groceries in without tears and struggles and fruits rolling all over the floor. Those were the good old days.
But once the COVID hysteria died down, and especially once the idea that the bug could live on surfaces was thoroughly debunked, guess what happened? The all-knowing city council issued a new edict that once again banished plastic at the checkout counter and poked people to dig up their old polyester bags again and bring them to the store.
In other words, they bounced from one bogus belief to another bogus belief and then back again, all in the name of signaling virtuous actions to save the planet and the human race from extinction. So far as I know, no one thought to do anything about the tons of plastic used to wrap food in the store. That is what it is.
The people who do this stuff are quite fascinating creatures. Let’s say they were in a Brazilian village and shopping for meat and stumbled upon a farmers market with open cuts around which flies were flying. They would be grossed out and not eat a bite. And yet here we have exactly what they are going for: no plastic, no energy use, no artificial anything. Still, they won’t touch it.
What classifies as clean and worthy to this crowd is malleable and largely socially determined, having nothing to do with science or even reality.
So will this new study make any difference in the New Jersey law? Absolutely not. The state government will go on its blind path toward stupidity without a thought. It’s how they do it, because pretending to care about big issues like climate change is far more important than doing anything actually to fix the supposed problem.
The plastic bag at checkout was and is a marvelous innovation: clean, convenient, and surprisingly recyclable as trash bags in the average American home. We should bring them all back and stop this ridiculous charade of bringing one’s own bags everywhere. It’s degrading and pointless—not that this ever stops the new breed of woke puritans who have seized control of our lives and standard of living.
Let’s conclude with a slightly amusing blast from the past. Remember when plastic straws were considered terrible and we should all carry metal straws? That was before COVID. Then a woman in England died after falling and impaling herself, which went through her eye and into her brain. Then a young boy who suffered a life-threatening injury when a metal straw plunged into his throat and artery.
And so now we use wet and soggy paper straws which aren’t really straws at all. Blech. What can we say but “man’s inhumanity to man”? At least the sea turtles are safe.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/the-unfair-demonization-of-plastic-bags-5576644
********************************************************Stop wasting water
Almost every river in Eastern Australia is pouring surplus water into the sea.
Despite this, only two dams have been built in Queensland in the last 20 years – the Wyaralong Dam (built 13 years ago), and Paradise Dam (built 19 years ago).
Droughts will come again and we will wish for another dam builder like Joh Bjelke-Petersen, whose government built at least eight dams in Queensland – the Burdekin, Wivenhoe, Hinze, Beardmore, Haig, Fairbairn, Bjelke-Petersen, and Eungella dams.
All that dam-building came to a halt in 1988 when the plans to build the Wolffdene Dam were scuttled by the usual suspects.
Taxpayers also spent some $460 million on preliminaries for the Traverston Dam, but then cancelled it when the infamous Peter Garrett rejected the project. And recently it was revealed that the Paradise Dam in the Bundaberg Region had faults in the wall and a new wall would have to be built.
So, while our water storages are stagnant or declining, our politicians support dangerously high levels of immigration as well as promoting tourism, games, and circuses, all of which add to the demand for water. The population clock managed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us that Australia’s population increases by one person every 50 seconds. They all need water.
And some fools want to use more of our precious stored fresh water to produce hydrogen fuels (every tonne of hydrogen produced by electrolysis consumes at least nine tonnes of fresh water). The ‘green hydrogen’ cycle needs lots of water and will always be a net consumer of electricity.
Climate alarmism of the it’ll never rain again variety resulted in the rash approval and construction of artificial desalination plants in Australia about 15 years ago. Recently, Hunter Water announced that it was going to spend $500 million on a desalination plant south of Newcastle. All desalination plants are costly to build and operate, and many stand idle most of the time. And of course, green politicians want the power to be supplied from wind-solar adding greatly to the costs and environmental destruction.
To let surplus fresh water escape to the oceans and then try to recover it using artificial desalination plants is the ultimate water stupidity.
Right now, Cyclone Kirrily is demonstrating nature’s power of desalination – sucking moisture from the Pacific Ocean and dumping it on land. This is free fresh water with no costs to taxpayers.
Sensible people have their water storage facilities ready – new dams and weirs built, silt cleaned out, dam walls and overflows checked, and no leaves clogging the tank strainers etc.
Australia must build more dams for flood mitigation, urban water supply, and irrigation. Most East Coast Rivers have surplus water that races to the sea during floods. It could be conserved.
And it is time to apply our engineering skills to building the Bradfield water scheme – it will certainly provide better returns to Australians than green energy dreams like Snowy 2 or powerlines from the Northern Territory to Singapore.
A sensible society would identify the best dam sites and have a long-term plan for acquiring and preserving the land rights needed for them. We do the reverse. Decisions are postponed until the need is critical. Then landowners with vested interests, green busybodies, and media stirrers manage to scare the politicians, and the water conservation proposal is killed.
Then the ‘No Dams Ever’ Mafia takes over, trying to sterilise the site for all future dams by quietly changing land-use or vegetation classifications. They search for (or manufacture) evidence of native title or endangered species, and declare national parks over critical areas.
Green destroyers have also grossly mismanaged stored water by insisting on excessive and ill-timed ‘environmental’ flows. This is a scheme where you build a dam to catch water and then try to manage the water as if the dam did not exist. It is very slow and expensive to get this lost water back from the sea using desalination plants.
Existing dams have two great enemies – silting which gradually steals their water capacity, and evaporation which continually steals the water itself. Our engineers can manage ‘desilting’ and the CSIRO could divert some resources from climate alarmism to reducing evaporation from water supply dams.
But most of all we need more stored water. The wet La Niña will inevitably be followed by a droughty El Niño.
Let’s find a new Joh who will build more dams.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/stop-wasting-water/ ?
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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