This document is part of an archive of postings on Greenie Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written
This is a backup copy of the original blog
30 January, 2021
As Michigan governor, energy secretary nominee Jennifer Granholm divvied millions in taxpayer funds to alternative energy startups that went bankrupt
President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Department of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, divvied out millions in taxpayer funds during her two terms as Michigan governor to alternative energy companies that eventually went bankrupt.
In one instance, Granholm’s administration provided a $9.1 million refundable tax credit to a renewable energy company registered to the address of a single-wide trailer and run by a convicted embezzler named Richard Short. Short was found to be in violation of his parole and sent back to prison after appearing on stage with Granholm in 2010 to accept assistance from the Michigan Economic Growth Authority, according to Michigan Capitol Confidential.
Granholm also granted $10 million to an electric car battery manufacturer, A123 Systems, in 2009 and lauded the company in a press conference, saying it would help “make Michigan the alternative energy capital of North America and the advanced battery capital of the world.”
A123 Systems, which also received a $249.12 million federal grant by the Obama administration, filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The company is still in operation today as a subsidiary of a Chinese firm, Wanxiang America.
Another manufacturer of electric vehicle components that received Michigan taxpayer-funded assistance under Granholm’s watch, Azure Dynamics, filed for bankruptcy in 2012 and laid off 12o employees.
Granholm served as governor of Michigan from 2003 to 2011.
Only 2.3 percent of the 434 projects funded by the Michigan Economic Growth Authority under Granholm’s watch were successful in meeting their projected job creation goals, according to the American Energy Alliance.
Granholm would take a leading role in bringing Biden’s goal of building 550,000 electric vehicle charging stations and replacing the federal government’s fleet of vehicles with electric vehicles if she gets confirmed by the senate. The Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources is holding hearing on Granholm’s nomination Wednesday.
Granholm’s critics say her record as Michigan’s governor disqualifies her from heading the Department of Energy. “If her track record in Michigan was an audition for the Department of Energy she certainly failed,” American Energy Alliance President Thomas Pyle told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“She had a history of not doing due diligence, throwing money to try to force technological changes that weren’t ready for the marketplace,” Pyle said. “She basically saddled Michigan taxpayers with millions of dollars in a sort of transfer to startups and most of them were failures. Why would you put someone in charge of the pursestrings at the Department of Energy who has a track record like that?”
A former EPA transition team member for the Trump administration, Steve Milloy, said in a statement Wednesday that Granholm is “bound to be a disaster” as head of the Energy Department.
“Some of the battery companies she funded in 2010 were based on the faulty notion that, by 2020, electric cars would be popular with consumers. They’re not,” Milloy said. “Now Biden is entrusting Granholm to hand out tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to green tech companies. What we’re mostly likely to get are more green bankruptcies like Solyndra and Frisker Automotive.”
“Let’s not forget that one of DOE’s primary duty is management of the nuclear weapons laboratories, an area in which Granholm has no experience or expertise,” Milloy added.
https://dailycaller.com/2021/01/27/jennifer-granholm-michigan-energy-companies-bankrupt/
Unity: Republicans, Democrats and Industry Despise Biden's Latest Executive OrderDespite decrying the overuse of executive orders during the campaign as dictatorial, on Wednesday, Joe Biden let loose another blizzard of executive orders. Just half a week into his presidency, CNN counted up 30 such orders coming from Biden’s Oval Office on a wide array of subjects. Biden has imposed so many executive orders that the nation, including the media, has no time to analyze or react to most of them.
But Biden executive orders concerning domestic energy production are getting attention, scrutiny — and pushback. His climate-change order includes a directive to end so-called federal “subsidies” for fossil-fuel producers.
But here’s the thing. While so-called renewable energy sources are heavily subsidized at the federal and state levels, fossil-fuel producers are not. There is no “fossil-fuel subsidy.”
Jason Modglin, president of the Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, was succinct when I reached out to him.
“[T]he President promised to raise $40 billion in taxes on domestic producers today. There is no fossil-fuel subsidy in the Tax Code but there are standard business deductions including: the domestic manufacturing deduction, able to deduct costs, and account for asset depletion. These are similar to other deductions for domestic businesses.”
One source told me Biden’s action would “cripple” the industry. Fossil-fuel producers can presently write off the types of operational expenses any business may write off. For energy producers, this includes intangible drilling costs and depletion write-offs. If those write-offs go away, if Biden succeeds in singling out producers from being able to take the business write-offs other types of businesses can take, it would cripple their operations.
While Republicans can be expected to oppose Biden’s actions, and several including Reps. Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Yvette Harrell (R. N.M.) have, some Democrats have also stepped up demanding that Biden rescind the order imposing a moratorium on drilling and leasing activities on federal land.
Reps. Vicente Gonzalez (D-Texas), Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas), and Marc Veasey (D-Texas) sent a letter to the Biden administration opposing that EO. In the letter, they tell Biden that New Mexico, which voted for him by about 10 percentage points, would be devastated if the order stays in place.
New Mexico, a small, poor state that receives a huge portion of their revenue for things like funding Albuquerque schools, will find this rule devastating. Such a rule could also tighten supplies, send heating and cooling bills up, and cause a spike in fuel prices during a pandemic. Furthermore, this benefits Big Oil over small independents that did not have the resources to stockpile permits.
Energy producers in Texas, New Mexico, and other producing states are still reeling from the collapse in demand caused by the COVID pandemic. Layoffs have been massive. Biden’s orders would add to that misery.
The Democrats’ letter details further serious negative economic consequences that they say will result from Biden’s actions.
Near-term loss of potentially one million jobs;
A cumulative decrease in U.S. GDP by $700 billion;
Loss of one of the most significant sources of federal revenue;
Loss of a major source of revenue for programs like LWCF and individual states;
Net increase of crude imports by two million barrels per day from foreign countries, weakening U.S. energy and national security and increasing our dependence to others;
Reduction in critical energy supplies for Americans; and,
Legal implications from the Interior Department’s failure to meet statutory requirements to hold lease sales.
Biden’s orders, then, would have the collective effect of crushing the domestic energy industry, creating massive job losses, devastating state budgets, including states that voted for him, and shipping jobs overseas — mainly to China.
Biden Commerce Secretary: Sorry Folks, We're Raising Taxes to Pay for Climate Policies
During her confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill this week, Biden Commerce Secretary nominee Gina Raimondo admitted Democrats will have to raise taxes on all Americans, including the middle and lower class, in order to pay for President Biden's "climate" agenda.
"Let me say this, I as governor am deeply in touch with how much increasing bills affect the average American family. Having said that, we do need to meet the climate change challenge and we need funds for improved infrastructure," Raimondo said. "I would look to balance those interests."
Last week Transportation Secretary nominee Pete Buttigieg told Keystone XL Pipeline workers, who President Biden promptly sent to the unemployment line upon arriving in the Oval Office, to "find another job."
As Senator Ted Cruz noted, the Keystone XL pipeline is in fact an infrastructure project.
Climate Change Emergency?
Phelim McAleer
Ann and I got our start in American politics covering the FAKE climate emergency in the 2000s with the rise of political phonies Al Gore and John Kerry.
If you remember this time, it was full of hyperbolic dog whistles telling us that the world was going to end if we keep flying on planes. All while hypocrites like Al Gore jet-setted around the world without a worry!
These climate elites want access to luxuries while they ban you from them in the name of “saving the planet.” As you may know, these issues have resurfaced with the new Joe Biden administration. In the past few days, we’ve seen left-wing climate policies enacted through executive orders based on junk science.
That’s why Ann and I are releasing our documentary “Not Evil, Just Wrong” for FREE for you and your family to enjoy. These issues are going to be front and center again and it’s important for as many people to know the facts as possible.
You can watch the film for free below. It was made 10 years ago (keep that in mind) but the themes are even more relevant today!
Watch here: https://bit.ly/3pz8mzq
Watch for FREE!
We hope you enjoy the film and learn about how detrimental this will be for our country (and world) if politicians like Al Gore and John Kerry are successful. And if you’ve already seen “Not Evil, Just Wrong” -- please send it to your friends.
Via email: info@unreportedstorysociety.com
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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28 January, 2021
Living in an area with high levels of air pollution can increase your risk of developing macular degeneration and going BLIND, study warns
This is a typical rubbishy study of PM2.5 air pollution. It relies on the area a person lives in to describe anything about him/her. That quite different people might be living in the same area is not acounted for. We might, for instance, ask whrether or not it is mostly poor people who get AMD. No answer to that is available. All we are told is whether the sufferer lived in a poor area, which could mean many things. Their measure of pollution exposure was similarly inexact. They examined only whether a person lived in a polluted area. They had no estimate of how much pollution each person actually experienced.
There is however one thing unusual about this study. They found that many things -- such as living in a poor area -- DID affect the incidence of AMD but I can find no mention of the authors controlling for all such extraneous influences on the correlation between a polluted area and AMD incidence. We are thus left with the possible conclusion that it was other factors -- not pollution -- that increased levels of AMD. Poverty is one of the most common predictors of disease so we are quite at liberty to conclude from their report that it was poverty that caused poor eye function, not pollution. What a useless study!
Your risk of developing macular degeneration and going blind is increased by living in an area with a high level of air pollution, a study has warned.
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a progressive form of vision loss that is the leading cause of blindness among UK adults aged 50 and over.
Known risk factors for AMD — alongside increasing age — include certain genetic factors and being a smoker.
Researchers from the UK studied data on 15,954 people — each of whom was aged 40–69 at the start of the study and initially reported no vision issues.
They monitored them for the development of AMD — and compared outcomes with the average level of air pollution where they lived.
They found that greater concentrations of air pollution were associated with up to an 8 per cent increase in the likelihood of developing macular degeneration.
Data for the study was collected by the UK Biobank, a large-scale database containing detailed genetic and health information on half-a-million participants.
Of the participants, 52,602 had their eyes examined and assessed for the structural changes in the thickness and numbers of receptors in the retina which are indicative of age-related macular degeneration.
The study used estimates of the average annual levels of air pollution at each subject's home address, considering pollutants such as fine particles (or PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxides which mainly come from vehicle exhausts.
The researchers found that just over 1 per cent of the study cohort — 1,286 people — ended up being diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration.
Once factors such as lifestyle and underlying health conditions were taken into account, the team found that participants exposed to higher concentrations of PM2.5 were 8 per cent more likely to develop AMD.
Exposure to PM2.5 and other pollutants was also found to be associated with changes in the structure of the subjects' retinas.
However, the team noted, the study was an observational one which did not intervene with people's lives and could not prove that pollution caused sight loss.
But it echoes previous findings, they said, which have suggested that higher exposure to air pollution may make retinal cells more vulnerable and thereby increase one's risk of AMD.
'Overall, our findings suggest that ambient air pollution, especially fine (particulate matter) or those of combustion-related particles, may affect AMD risk,' the researchers said.
'Our findings add to the growing evidence of the damaging effects of ambient air pollution, even in the setting of relative low exposure.'
Molecular ophthalmologist Chris Inglehearn of the University of Leeds, who was not involved in the present study, said that the paper — and another from Taiwan — have both shown a link between air pollution and age-related macular degeneration.
While the studies have not proven that pollution is causing AMD, he said, 'the fact that these two independent studies reach similar conclusions gives greater confidence that the link they make is real.'
'These studies provide further evidence that links air pollution with detrimental impacts on human health,' he concluded.
'Age-related macular degeneration is the most common cause of sight loss in the developed world and so this finding is significant,' added Robert MacLaren, an ophthalmology expert from the University of Oxford.
'Participants in the study had an average age of around 60 and this small increase risk of 8 per cent is likely to be compounded further over ensuing decades.'
The full findings of the study were published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
The journal Abstract:
Association of ambient air pollution with age-related macular degeneration and retinal thickness in UK Biobank
By Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all
Abstract
Aim: To examine the associations of air pollution with both self-reported age-related macular degeneration (AMD), and in vivo measures of retinal sublayer thicknesses.
Methods: We included 115 954 UK Biobank participants aged 40–69 years old in this cross-sectional study. Ambient air pollution measures included particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx). Participants with self-reported ocular conditions, high refractive error (< ?6 or > +6 diopters) and poor spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) image were excluded. Self-reported AMD was used to identify overt disease. SD-OCT imaging derived photoreceptor sublayer thickness and retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) layer thickness were used as structural biomarkers of AMD for 52 602 participants. We examined the associations of ambient air pollution with self-reported AMD and both photoreceptor sublayers and RPE layer thicknesses.
Results: After adjusting for covariates, people who were exposed to higher fine ambient particulate matter with an aerodynamic diameter <2.5 µm (PM2.5, per IQR increase) had higher odds of self-reported AMD (OR=1.08, p=0.036), thinner photoreceptor synaptic region (?=?0.16 µm, p=2.0 × 10?5), thicker photoreceptor inner segment layer (?=0.04 µm, p=0.001) and thinner RPE (?=?0.13 µm, p=0.002). Higher levels of PM2.5 absorbance and NO2 were associated with thicker photoreceptor inner and outer segment layers, and a thinner RPE layer. Higher levels of PM10 (PM with an aerodynamic diameter <10 µm) was associated with thicker photoreceptor outer segment and thinner RPE, while higher exposure to NOx was associated with thinner photoreceptor synaptic region.
Conclusion: Greater exposure to PM2.5 was associated with self-reported AMD, while PM2.5, PM2.5 absorbance, PM10, NO2 and NOx were all associated with differences in retinal layer thickness.
https://bjo.bmj.com/content/early/2021/01/11/bjophthalmol-2020-316218
President Biden commits to converting government fleet to electric vehiclesUS President Joe Biden has signalled he’s serious about climate change by vowing to replace petrol vehicles with electric ones across the US government’s roughly 650,000-strong fleet, according to reports.
No timeline was given on when the swap would be completed, but the President said all the vehicles must be American made.
The project could cost about $US20b according to Reuters, but it would be a huge boost for the country’s struggling auto industry as currently only a handful of companies make electric cars in America including Tesla, Nissan and GM.
Biden vowed to create 1 million new jobs in the auto industry — including parts, supplies, electric vehicle charging and infrastructure.
The government’s vehicle fleet includes civilian, military and post office vehicles according to US publication, The Verge.
The move would have a massive impact on the emissions. In 2019 the US government used more than 1.4 billion litres of fuel as its fleet drove more than 7.2 billion km, according to the US General Service Administration.
Biden has vowed to build 550,000 electric vehicle charging stations to support the move to electric vehicles, according to Reuters.
The move by the US government to move its fleet to electric vehicles could have a world wide impact as it helps drive the production and take up of electric vehicles globally.
One of the biggest issues facing electric cars is the price, but production on such a large scale would help reduce the costs, making it easier for the average motorist to afford one.
Currently in Australia the cheapest electric car is the Chinese built MG ZS EV, which is priced at $43,990 drive-away and is at least $8000 cheaper than any EV on the market.
President Biden’s decision to move electric is coming at a critical time for the industry as many makers bring their first EVs to market.
Ford could be a big winner with electric versions of its Transit van and F-Series truck due in the coming years.
Japanese giant Toyota — which has a big manufacturing presence in the US — is also gearing up to release its first electric vehicle this year.
Hyundai Motor Group, which also includes Kia and luxury brand Genesis, is committing about $30b over the next decade to making electric cars in all shapes and sizes.
European manufacturers such as VW and Mercedes-Benz already have several vehicles in production thanks to Europe’s ever tightening emissions regulations.
There is also the US electric car start-up Rivian, which is expected to launch a zero-emission ute later this year. One of Rivian’s biggest investors is Amazon, which has a standing order for 100,000 electric delivery vans due to start production this year.
Oil Industry Reels as Biden Targets Fossil Fuels in First Days
Hours after taking office, President Joe Biden made good on a campaign promise to cancel the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Later that day his Interior Department mandated that only top agency leaders could approve new drilling permits over the next two months.
Next week, according to people familiar with the plans, Biden will go even further: suspending the sale of oil and gas leases on federal land, where the U.S. gets 10% of its supplies.
The actions sent oil producers’ stocks tumbling and raised blood pressure across the industry.
“In the first couple of days of the new administration, they are taking actions that will harm the economy and cost Americans their jobs,” said Frank Macchiarola, a senior vice president of policy for the American Petroleum Institute. “We’re concerned, and everyone in the country should be concerned.”
The Interior Department’s order, signed late Wednesday, changes procedures for 60 days while the agency’s new leadership gets into place. It requires top brass to sign off on oil leases and permits as well as decisions about hiring, mining operations and environmental reviews.
The industry took it as a bad omen. Officials are worried that technical permitting decisions are being placed in the hands of political appointees, rather than expert regulators in the field. And they’re concerned permits -- or simply changes to them -- will be delayed for existing drilling operations.
Moreover, many interpreted it as a prelude to broader actions, including the administration’s plan to next week impose a moratorium on all oil, gas and coal leasing across some 700 million acres (2.8 million hectares) of federal land.
This “announcement is intended as a temporary ban on leasing and permitting but is also a precursor to a longer-term ban,” said Kathleen Sgamma, head of the Western Energy Alliance, which has threatened to go to court to battle any such blockade.
While Biden’s campaign promises - and his initial moves to fulfill them - are a threat to some U.S. oil producers, the actions could be a boon for crude prices by restraining supply.
The administration’s early moves mark a dramatic shift from the course under former President Donald Trump, who sought to accelerate drilling permits and open up more places to oil exploration.
And the change in direction is already apparent in early staffing decisions. Under Trump, the top offshore drilling regulator at Interior was Scott Angelle, a longtime oil industry ally and former Louisiana official who pushed for rapid permitting of Gulf of Mexico oil projects after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.
By contrast, one of Biden’s first hires at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that oversees offshore oil leasing and wind farms is Marissa Knodel, a former activist with Friends of the Earth. Knodel was one of about 150 people whose rowdy protest of a bureau auction of oil drilling rights in March 2016 prompted the agency to shift subsequent oil and gas lease sales online.
On the campaign trail, Biden called for phasing out fossil fuels and promised to halt new oil and gas permitting on federal land. Worried oil producers stockpiled leases and drilling permits last year in anticipation of more restrictions under Biden.
But the suddenness of this week’s moves still took many in the industry by surprise, prompting frantic phone calls as lobbyists and lawyers sought to plan their next moves. They are strategizing their options, including litigation, and looking at any political levers they can pull to forestall a broader leasing ban.
Senator Dan Sullivan, a Republican from Alaska, said permitting changes threaten operations in his state during the current winter season, when companies such as ConocoPhillips rely on ice roads and ice pads to support drilling and other activity in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
“If you put a 60-day moratorium on drilling in the NPR-A, guess what? You lose the whole season,” Sullivan said Friday on the Senate floor.
Environmentalists are delighted. They say throttling fossil fuel development on federal land is necessary to pare the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change. The oil, gas and coal extracted from federal lands and waters is responsible for about 24% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, according to a U.S. Geological Survey report.
“Pausing new fossil fuel decisions brings us closer to healthier communities, a healthier climate and healthier wild places,” said Dan Ritzman, director of Sierra Club’s Lands, Waters and Wildlife campaign. “Public lands can and must be part of the climate solution.”
https://au.yahoo.com/finance/news/oil-industry-reels-biden-targets-113000874.html
Very Leftist State gets its just dessertsOne of Joe Biden's first acts as president was to sign a 60-day moratorium on new oil and natural gas leases and drilling permits. It's one way the administration plans to tackle the "climate change crisis." But Americans are already feeling the negative effects of the decision.
New Mexico, one of the most productive oil and gas areas in the country, is worried about the moratorium. The natural energy industry's success impacts everything, down to education and government-funded programs.
Industry insiders have said this regulation means the entire regulatory process shuts down, including normal day-to-day activities "routine requests that arise during the normal course of business to requests for rights of way for new pipelines designed to gather more natural gas as part of efforts to reduce venting and flaring," the Associated Press reported.
The majority of New Mexico's production takes place on federal lands. Oil and gas companies pay hundreds of millions in royalties each year to frack. The concern with the new order, however, is that energy companies could move to Texas where there is no reliance on federal lands to obtain energy.
“I think we’re going to see companies choosing not to invest in New Mexico and take their jobs and drilling to Texas just 3 miles away,” New Mexico Republican Party Chairman Steve Pearce said. “They can just scoot across the border where they don’t have federal lands.”
Royalties collected from fracking in the state had a price tag of $2.3 million in 2020, up 48 percent over 2019. The natural energy industry is responsible for 100,000 direct and related jobs in New Mexico.
A study conducted by the University of Wyoming found that New Mexico would lose $207.7 billion in GDP over the next 20 years if the Biden administration's rule remains in effect. That would result in a loss of "36,217 jobs, $22.1 billion in GDP, $9.8 billion in wages and $6.3 billion in tax revenue" over the course of four years under Biden, the Fairfield Sun Times reported.
Interestingly enough, Biden carried the state by 10 percentage points. The state remains heavily Democratic despite the Democrats' repeated calls to end fracking, the state's biggest industry.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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24 January, 2021
Toxic secrets behind your mobile phone: Electric cars, wind turbines and solar panels... how our so-called green world depends on the mining of rare metals which is a filthy, amoral industry totally dominated by China
Past the suburbs of the Chinese city of Baotou, below a quadruple carriageway, a lonely path led me to an embankment bristling with pylons, each with a security camera watching for intruders.
This is how I reached the Weikuang Dam – an artificial lake into which metallic intestines regurgitate torrents of black water from the nearby refineries. I was looking at ten square kilometres of toxic effluent. After observing this immense, disintegrating landscape, my guide and I decided to move before the security cameras alerted the police to our presence.
A few minutes later, we arrived in a village called Dalahai on another side of the artificial lake. Here, the thousands of inhabitants breathe in the toxic discharge of the reservoir as well as eating produce, such as corn and buckwheat, grown in it.
Cancer affects the local population and many villagers have died. The hair of young men barely aged 30 has suddenly turned white. Children grow up without developing any teeth.
One villager, a 54-year-old called Li Xinxia, confided in me despite knowing it’s a dangerous subject. He said: ‘There are a lot of sick people here. Cancer, strokes, high blood pressure… almost all of us are affected. We are in a grave situation. They did some tests and our village was nicknamed “the cancer village”. We know the air we breathe is toxic and that we don’t have that much longer to live.’
The provincial authorities offered villagers compensation to relocate but these farming folk were reluctant to move to high-rise flats in a neighbouring town.
In short, it is a disaster area. And the reason? Our insatiable demand for rare metals.
For centuries, mankind mined just seven primary metals – iron, gold, silver, copper, lead, aluminium and mercury. But from the 1970s, attention turned to lesser-known rare metals found in terrestrial rocks in infinitesimal amounts which have superb magnetic, catalytic and optical properties.
Now, we are totally reliant on them for the manufacture of devices such as mobile phones, not to mention electric and/or hybrid cars which require twice as many rare metals as a traditional internal-combustion engine vehicle.
They are also a key component in wind turbines and solar panels. Some of these substances have exotic names: vanadium, germanium, platinoids, tungsten, antimony, beryllium, fluorine, rhenium, tantalum, niobium, to name but a few.
For eight years, I have researched these rare metals that are upending our world. Across four continents, men and women involved in the opaque and underground industry told me a dark tale.
By their account, the development of these substances has not done us, or the planet, any of the favours we would have expected from a supposedly greener and friendlier world – far from it.
Above all, our dependence on rare metals brings two very big problems. The first is that mining, refining and recycling them is immensely polluting, thereby giving the lie to the idea that our increasingly digital and electricity-powered life is greener than one reliant on fossil fuels.
The 40 different rare metals in your phone
Screen: The glass is an aluminosilicate which is strengthened with potassium ions. The touch screen has indium tin oxide in the transparent film to help conduct electricity. Rare earth element compounds are needed for the colours in the screen. Others reduce ultra-violet light penetration into the phone.
Electronics: Copper is used for wiring. Gold and silver form the micro-electrical parts. Tantalum is the major component of micro-capacitors, which stabilise the power supply and generally total more than 700. Nickel is used in the microphone. Alloys including the elements praseodymium, gadolinium and neodymium are in magnets used in the speaker and microphone. The vibration unit contains neodymium, terbium and dysprosium. Pure silicon goes into the chip. Tin and lead are employed to solder the electronics.
Battery: Most mobiles have lithium-ion batteries, made of lithium cobalt oxide for the positive electrode and graphite (carbon) for the negative. Some batteries have manganese. Casings are made from aluminium. Some cases are constructed with magnesium compounds. Or with plastics, some of which contain flame retardant compounds such as bromine.
Second, one country – China – has a near stranglehold on the production and supply of rare metals. The Beijing government is not just seeking to control the metals found in its lands but also to control the production of rare metals wherever they are found on the globe. It has used barely credible chicanery to position itself as the sole supplier. It’s as if Saudi Arabia, which holds the world’s largest oil reserves, took it upon itself to control the reserves of the 13 other main petroleum-exporting countries.
BEFORE looking at these problems, we need to understand what makes rare metals so special.
While mineralogists have known of their existence since the 18th Century, they attracted little interest while their industrial applications remained undiscovered. But from the 1970s, their exceptional properties to make super-magnets began to be exploited.
Once processed, a minute amount of these metals emits a magnetic field that makes it possible to generate more energy than from the same quantity of coal or oil.
Magnets are now – to a vast majority of electric engines – what pistons have been to steam and internal-combustion engines. They have made it possible to manuacture billions of engines, be it for a motorbike, powering a train, making an electric toothbrush or mobile phone vibrate, operating an electric window, or sending a lift to the top of a skyscraper.
Without most of us realising it, our societies have become completely magnetised. Most crucially, rare metals allow us to generate clean energy as they cause the rotors of wind turbines to turn and in solar panels help convert the sun’s rays into electricity.
As a result, it is now possible to envisage a world without nuclear, oil-fired or coal-fired power plants. But that is merely the start.
Rare metals have a wealth of other properties that make them indispensable to myriad green technologies. They allow us to trap car-exhaust fumes in catalytic converters, ignite energy-efficient light bulbs, and design new, lighter and hardier industrial equipment, improving the energy efficiency of cars and planes.
Most surprising is how these metals have become indispensable to new information and communication technologies for their semi-conducting properties that regulate the flow of electricity in digital devices. Just look, for example, at all the rare metals in a smartphone and you can see how omnipresent they are. The fact is that we now use at least two billion tons of rare metals every year – the equivalent of more than 500 Eiffel Towers a day.
BUT while rare metals can produce green technologies, the savage irony is that mining and refining them are among the most polluting and wasteful processes on earth.
The 10,000 or so mines across China have played a big role in destroying that country’s environment. Pollution damage by the coal-mining industry is well documented. But barely reported is the fact that mining rare metals also produces pollution.
In 2006, about 60 Chinese companies producing indium – a rare metal used in the manufacture of some solar-panel technologies – released tons of chemicals into the Xiang River in Hunan, jeopardising the province’s drinking water and local people’s health.
Working conditions in the mines are appalling. But it is the refining process that causes the most pollution and harm to workers and nearby inhabitants.
In truth, there is nothing refined about it at all. It involves crushing rock and then using a concoction of chemical reagents such as sulphuric and nitric acid. ‘It’s a long and repetitive process,’ says a specialist. ‘It takes loads of different procedures to obtain a rare-earth concentrate close to 100 per cent purity.’
That’s not all: purifying a single ton of rare earths requires using at least 200 cubic metres of water, which then becomes saturated with acids and heavy metals. Very rarely will this water be treated at the plant before it is released into rivers, soils and ground water.
The Chinese could have opted for clean mining but didn’t. From one end of the rare-metals production line to the other, little in China is done according to the most basic ecological and health standards. So, as rare metals have become ubiquitous in green and digital technologies, the toxic sludge they produce has been contaminating water, soil, the atmosphere and the flames of blast furnaces – representing the four elements essential to life. The result is that producing rare metals has become one of the most polluting and secretive industries in China.
The pollution caused by rare metals is not limited to China. It concerns all producing countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, which supplies more than half the planet’s cobalt. This element, indispensable to the lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles, is mined under conditions out of the Middle Ages.
One hundred thousand miners equipped with spades and picks dig into the earth. Given the African country’s inability to regulate its mining activities, the pollution of surrounding rivers and turmoil in the ecosystems are legion.
Research by Congolese doctors has found that the cobalt concentration in the urine of the local communities living near mines in Katanga province is up to 43 times higher than a control sample.
We see the same in Kazakhstan, a central Asian country producing 14 per cent of the world’s chrome – prized by the aerospace industry for the superalloys that improve the energy performance of aircraft. In 2015, researchers from South Kazakhstan State University discovered that chrome-mining was responsible for colossal pollution of the Syr Darya, the longest river in Central Asia. Its water had become unfit for consumption by the hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, who are now even advised against using it for their crops.
Extracting minerals from the ground is an inherently dirty operation. But the way it’s been carried out so irresponsibly and unethically in the most productive mining countries casts doubt on the virtuous vision of those behind the energy and digital revolution.
A recent report by the Blacksmith Institute, a US environmental group, identifies the mining industry as the world’s second-most-polluting industry, behind lead-battery recycling.
Major users of rare metals rarely acknowledge their dependence on them. In Apple’s 2018 annual report, despite being a major consumer of rare metals, the words ‘rare earths’, ‘minerals’ or ‘metals’ did not appear. And Tesla, the biggest name in electric vehicle manufacturing, was discreet in its environmental report last year. Cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo were mentioned but nothing said of their environmental impact.
What the West has done, by moving the sourcing of its rare metals to China, is to relocate its pollution. We have knowingly and patiently created a system that allows us to move our ‘filth’ as far away as possible, and the Chinese have welcomed the initiative.
As a Canadian rare-metals industrialist said with great irony: ‘We can thank them for the environmental damage they have endured to produce these metals in our place.’
Beijing is well-versed in the power of such mineral sovereignty. When a student in France, Deng Xiaoping (China’s leader in the 1980s) worked in a foundry of the iron cookware firm Le Creuset. All but one of the past six presidents and prime ministers were trained in engineering – electrical, hydroelectrical, geology – and in process chemistry.
Consequently, and with the support of a stable authoritarian political system that values patient and consistent decision-making, they have laid the foundations of an ambitious policy to secure the nation’s supplies.
To put this stranglehold into perspective, look at OPEC, the oil producers cartel. For decades, its 14 members have been able to significantly influence oil prices, yet they represent ‘only’ 41 per cent of global production.
China has staked its claim on 95 per cent of global production of the coveted class of certain rare-earth metals. In the words of one expert: ‘It’s OPEC on steroids.’
So what does a nation do when it is so powerful?
Naturally, Beijing’s intentions become far more aggressive – reducing supply of rare metals in order to ramp up the price.
Experts noticed that China’s export quotas, set at 65,000 tons in 2005, began to drop a year later to under 62,000 tons. By 2009, Beijing had reduced this to 50,000 tons and official figures for 2010 put exports at only 30,000 tons.
The same trend was observed for all the rare metals disproportionally produced by China.
The World Trade Organisation’s analysis of the complaints against the Chinese was unequivocal: over the previous two decades, China had engineered a policy of systematic restrictions on rare mineral exports.
Notoriously, China is also expanding its rare-metals operations around the globe. It is a new world that China wants to fashion to its liking and has therefore begun its own hunt abroad for rare metals, starting in Canada, Australia, Kyrgyzstan, Peru and Vietnam.
The most prized location is Africa, and in particular South Africa, Burundi, Madagascar and Angola. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, China has built a railway line to open access to the cobalt-rich southern region of Katanga.
SO what is the solution? I support bringing back mining in the West. Not so much for the value, the additional tax revenues and the thousands of jobs it would create; nor for the strategic security of having our own supply chain.
Rather, my argument is on behalf of the environment. Reopening mines in the West would be the best possible decision we could make for protecting our planet.
Relocating our dirty industries to China and Africa has helped keep Western consumers in the dark about the true environmental cost of our lifestyles.
The effects of returning mining operations to the West would be positive. We would instantly realise – to our horror – the true cost of our supposedly green world. We can well imagine how having quarries ‘in our backyard’ would end our indifference and denial and drive our efforts to contain the resulting pollution.
Rare earths first? Or last?
Biden’s Green New Deal won’t work without mining, especially for rare earth elements
Duggan Flanakin
As Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take the reins of government and launch their program to “transition” America away from fossil fuels, they need to consider some hard realities. Chief among them is that no Green New Deal can succeed without major increases in US mining and processing – unless they want to make America even more dependent on China and Russia.
Rare-earth metals are essential to 21st Century technologies, including smartphones, lasers, night vision systems, weapons guidance systems – and GND technologies like wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. As British hedge fund veteran James Horrocks noted in a recent article, “It is easy to see why rare earths have become a pawn in the US-China trade war.”
China, Horrocks noted, has only a third of global reserves of rare earths, but in 2017 produced over 80% of the global supply of rare-earth metals and compounds, and its exports that year to the US accounted for 78% of the 17,000 tons of US rare-earth imports. Even rare-earth metals mined in the USA are processed in the People’s Republic – because China now owns the US deposit and we’d prefer to pay the cheaper prices associated with processing under China’s abominable pollution, wage and workplace safety rules.
Christopher Barnard, national policy director at the American Conservation Coalition, is but one of many who agree that a reliable, affordable domestic supply of rare-earth metals is critical to building a “green” economy. Last month Barnard warned that “the geopolitical, economic and environmental risks” inherent in near-total reliance on a potentially hostile power “can no longer be ignored.”
The Chinese near-monopoly (it was worse before Japan built a new supply chain after China blocked all rare-earth exports in 2010) is largely a creation of activist-driven US anti-mining policy. There are plenty of rare-earth deposits in the USA, but extracting them is not photogenic. Barnard laments the “regulatory minefield of labyrinthine local, state and federal rules” that has turned permitting into a two- to three-decades adventure in frustration.
Over the past decades, lawmakers have all but banned mineral exploration and development on minerals-rich federal lands. The few once-active rare earth mines are now long shuttered, largely due to high compliance costs. Mountain Pass, the sole US operating rare-earth mine, lost two years of production due to a 2016 bankruptcy and still sends its mined ore to China for processing.
To counter US dependence on Chinese imports, in September 2020, President Trump signed Executive Order (EO) 13953 declaring a national emergency in the mining industry. The order charged the Interior Department with increasing domestic production of rare-earth materials, to reduce America’s dependence on China for these building blocks for 21st Century technologies. EO 13953 built on his December 2017 EO 13817 that required the Interior Secretary to identify critical materials and reduce “the Nation’s vulnerability to disruptions in the supply of critical minerals,” especially those from China and Russia.
Many of the recommendations in EO 13953 were incorporated into the Energy Act of 2021, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act that also funded pandemic relief. The new law requires the Energy Department to conduct a research and development program for advanced separation technologies for extraction and recovery of rare-earth elements and other critical materials from coal and coal byproducts. A coequal goal is to ensure mitigation of any potential environmental and public health impacts from these activities – which is always required for US operations, though not for those in or by China.
The new law further requires triennially updated lists of critical minerals, plus new curricula for colleges and universities to build a strong critical minerals workforce; domestic, publicly available resource assessments of critical minerals; analytical and forecasting tools to evaluate critical minerals markets; new alternatives to, recycling of, and efficient production and use of critical materials; and more. Finally, the law requires that the Director of National Intelligence submit to Congress a regular report of Chinese investments in minerals.
In addition, during Trump’s final days, the Bureau of Land Management (the other BLM) announced new decisions that took effect January 15 expanding potential mining operations on federal lands, adding mining to the list of industries that can receive fast-tracked permitting (critical to getting any new rare-earth mines operational), approving a new mine in Nevada for lithium (a critical element in electric vehicle batteries), and approving a land swap to ease final approval of an Arizona copper mine.
With these final acts, the Trump Administration will have laid the groundwork to let the “clean-energy-focused” new government have a shot at meeting the raw materials needs for the 21st Century technologies that President Biden has promised will drive tomorrow’s US economy. Of course, China may use its leverage to try to undercut any US producers, especially if President Biden lifts (or fails to impose) tariffs aimed at offsetting China’s unfair advantages from its unethical and dirty mining and forced labor practices.
Will Biden and Congress undermine all this? Anti-mining Democrats were quick to object to the last-minute BLM actions. Rep. Paul Grijalva (D, AZ), whose own approach to U.S. mining has been called “good for China, bad for America,” has said President Obama’s 2015 FAST-41 law, which greased permitting for utility projects, was “never intended … to cover the mining sector.”
But Rich Nolan, president of the National Mining Association, lauded the BLM move, stating that, “American mining is key to successfully repairing our nation’s infrastructure.” Previously, Nolan had reiterated his organization’s stance that “the very technologies essential to our recovering economy will be built on a foundation provided by mining. It’s now absolutely essential that smart policy recognizes this need and opportunity.”
The Biden campaign privately told US miners it would support boosting domestic production of metals required to make electric vehicles, solar panels and other products critical to his climate plans. But this would represent a shift from Obama policies that included “rigorous environmental regulations that slowed US mining sector growth.” It’s also total anathema to environmental pressure groups that support and advise Biden.
Green groups in Minnesota, Nevada and Arizona – along with some Native American tribes – have begun pounding the drums of dissent. For example, Save the Boundary Waters opposes a Twin Metals copper mine in Minnesota; the project already has federal permits but is facing court challenges. Spokesperson Jeremy Drucker complained, “Mining companies have been using EVs and climate change as a cover to push their own agenda: profit.”
Then there is Biden’s nomination of New Mexico Native American Deb Haaland to head up his Interior Department. Native American groups have opposed the fast tracking of approval of the Resolution Copper Mine, which could supply up to a quarter of growing US copper demand for 40 years. Native Americans say the mine would desecrate sacred lands. How will Haaland, and her boss, handle this touchy issue, given her ties to tribes opposing the mine and the vital role of copper to the GND?
One wonders how much influence VP Harris will have on Biden Administration planning and policy, since she is on record as opposing almost any new domestic mining operations. Put another way, who will really be in charge of our energy and economy?
The ultimate question is, Should America be dependent on China (and Russia) to supply the tools for the new economy? Or will the Biden-Harris Administration follow up on the Trump approach to rebuilding the US rare-earths mining and processing industry, to avoid near-total dependence on major human rights violators? In other words, will Biden-Harris put America’s clean energy future in Chinese hands?
Via email
Paris Agreement: a commitment to terminal decline
Within hours of his inauguration, Joe Biden announced that the USA was ‘back in the Paris Climate Agreement’. Donald Trump had pledged, in June 2017, that the USA would withdraw from the agreement – a slow process, which took the remainder of his term to complete. Climate activists worldwide are now celebrating, of course.
The past five years have seen many comparisons drawn between Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Though they were dismissed as ‘populism’ rather than the (attempted) reassertion of popular democracy, both ballot-box revolts shocked political establishments that had by 2016 grown overconfident and entitled. ‘Globalism’, as it is sometimes clumsily referred to by its detractors, had been given a bloody nose. But not a coup de grâce. The epitome of this contempt for democracy comes in the form of climate environmentalism, which not only survived, but has also expanded since 2016.
The withdrawal from the Paris Agreement had nearly no effect on the ambitious architects of global ecological utopia. Climate advocates never learn anything from their setbacks since all dissent from their designs is rejected as ‘denial’. Accordingly, John Kerry, failed presidential candidate and now special presidential envoy for climate, tweeted that Biden’s announcement ‘restor[ed] America’s credibility and commitment – setting a floor, not a ceiling, for our climate leadership’. ‘Working together, the world must and will raise ambition’, he said.
The Paris Agreement requires member countries to propose their own levels of emissions reduction – or Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). America’s INDC pledge, made by the Obama administration, is to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2025. Trump argued that this was a bad deal for Americans, and that it would lead to job losses, rising prices, loss of industry and the surrender of democracy to a global agreement. All of that is true, but it has been hidden from public debate by a mixture of green utopianism and the complexities involved in turning abstract emissions-reduction targets into tangible policies.
Greens of all kinds talk a very good game about ‘creating jobs’ and ‘climate justice’. But these claims remain unsubstantiated. In 2010, for instance, Gordon Brown’s government claimed that its offshore-wind energy plans would create 70,000 jobs in the sector. But despite the agenda facing almost zero political opposition, by 2020, there were just 11,000 jobs according to the industry’s own (favourable) analysis, as reported by the FT. The sector still enjoys absurd levels of public subsidy (many tens of thousands of pounds per job ‘created’), despite claims that wind power is now ‘cheaper’ than coal or gas generation. Promises of green jobs and less expensive energy never materialise, but this is never questioned.
Put simply, there is no translation from emissions-reduction targets to reality which is not going to hit Americans hard, especially those who live either in cities designed around the motor car,or in deep rural country. Americans pay on average less than half what Britons pay for petrol. But for how much longer?
Similarly, America’s industrial economy is in large part built on industry powered by cheap energy. Carbon-reduction targets, which will cause energy prices to multiply, were dreamt up long before anyone had any serious ideas as to how to realise them, and without consideration for ordinary people’s lives. The existing Paris commitments are bad enough, but these will be succeeded by new levels of ambition set at this year’s climate conference in Glasgow.
No doubt Biden takes his pledges seriously. But his election victory may not have provided enough political capital required to make these ambitions real. That victory was secured on a margin of some seven million votes, in a country of 328million people. A convincing win for a presidential candidate, yes, but not for the radical reorganisation of 328million people’s lives that his climate imperatives demand. No matter how much smoke a sycophantic, fawning media try to blow up Biden’s rear, the American public are going to notice the dire consequences of these policies eventually.
‘This is the most important transition from one president to another of my lifetime’, tweeted a dizzy Robert Peston. There’s a great deal of journalistic buzz about Joe Biden ‘healing’ the country from its trauma. Commentators are making facile historical comparisons with Abraham Lincoln – the president that steered a divided country through its civil war. But Lincoln rebuilt an independent USA, he did not cede its sovereignty to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In order to sustain the historical allusion, Trump stands accused of ‘racism’, ‘fascism’ and ‘white supremacy’. But while such unevidenced and hyperventilating claims may denigrate the former president, they do little to elevate Biden, and do significantly less to win over Americans to the climate cause. The drama is confected, and the promise of a green utopia is hollow.
It is the bottom line that counts. As Roger Pielke Jr has pointed out, the scale of America’s ‘transition’ to Net Zero is a task far greater than any of its historical political, industrial or military projects. It ‘would require the deployment of approximately 1,500 wind turbines, over approximately 300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050’. Even if such an ambitious project were ever realised, Biden’s climate agenda would yield no net benefit to ordinary Americans, except – perhaps, maybe, but probably not – slightly fewer wildfires, slightly fewer hurricanes, and slightly less sea-level rise, and only then if viewed from the perspective of climate statistics at century timescales. Yet it would saddle the public with tens or even hundreds of trillions in debt, skyrocketing costs of living, immobility and terminal industrial decline. The conditions for civil war, in other words. Maintaining the Paris Agreement and reaching Net Zero are tasks far beyond President Biden’s means.
Environmentalism is, as Tim Black points out on spiked, the mainstay of technocratic rule. With the election of Joe Biden, it may have won a major battle. But the climate wars have reached a new phase. Much of what has gone before has been mere fluff: abstract virtue signalling about targets, that most voters have yet to connect with their day-to-day experiences. As those targets are made real in the years to come, the consequences will be profound. If these global agreements and Net Zero ambitions are not watered down, the climate technocrats will make themselves a lot of enemies.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/22/paris-agreement-a-commitment-to-terminal-decline/
How The Free Market Can Protect And Preserve The EnvironmentIn the ongoing debate over what to do about the environment, there seem to be two prominent views. One, that the government should intervene and steer the country toward a green future. The other, to do nothing.
Both are wrong, however, as both deny that the free market is capable of tackling climate change or other environmental concerns. Without a doubt, however, the free market can solve this crucial problem much more efficiently than the government can. Liberating the market from unfair subsidies, reforming tort laws, and allowing property rights to save our species and our lands are just some of the several ways this can happen.
Opponents of our current economic system claim it is a free market. There’s nothing free, however, about the chains of burdensome regulations and subsidies. Much of the environmental degradation we witness can be traced back to the billions of dollars of government kickbacks given to both the fossil fuel industry and farmers, a state of play that also prevents the proliferation of clean energy firms.
The Failings of Subsidies
This year, for instance, farmers were paid almost $50 billion in subsidies, an amount that accounted for a third of their income. These subsidies contribute to the overuse of farmland while hurting our wetlands and forests by increasing the use of pesticides and fertilizers. Furthermore, these subsidies increase prices on food and result in a reduced incentive to innovate.
But will eliminating farm subsidies hurt small farmers? Consider this: 70 percent of subsidies go to farmers of wheat, corn, and soybeans on typically big farms that don’t even need it. Once you include peanuts, cotton, and rice, the percentage of subsidies heading to Big Farming is 94 percent.
The vast majority of small farmers receive very little subsidies and vegetable, meat, and fruit farmers are almost entirely left out. In 2017, there were more than two million farms, of which 90 percent were small farms making less than $350,000 in annual gross cash farm income. To view this another way, 1.85 million farms receive almost nothing.
The fossil fuel industry receives far more in subsidies and the effects are similar. We give oil and gas companies almost $650 billion a year, which is enough for every adult to receive a stimulus of $2,600 a year. These subsidies encourage waste and distort the economy. Clean energy companies can’t be expected to compete when, at $200 billion, their industry is three times smaller than just the subsidies paid out to these corporations.
Where competition is nearly impossible due to government interference, is incredibly hard to have a free market where enterprising businesses can develop and eventually thrive.
Tort Law Reform Is Part of the Solution
Tort law reform would allow those who are hurt by environmental damage to receive compensation. This can be best exhibited in an example used by the economist Murray Rothbard: Suppose an airport is established and is quite noisy. The sound waves travel over the empty, unowned land. A housing development is built nearby and, later, the homeowners sue for noise pollution.
The airport can only pollute the land it owns, and any pollution it creates must be contained within its borders. Polluting land outside its borders is aggression and an assault committed on the homeowners. Therefore, with tort law, they’d receive monetary compensation and the airport would be forced with the choice to either innovate and reduce its noise output or continue paying those fines.
Under current tort law, however, small parties that pollute more are spared as the Environmental Protection Agency goes after bigger targets, resulting in high costs and legal delays. If we moved toward proportional liability where those more responsible pay more, increasing costs would push polluters towards reform.
Property Rights Are Key to Helping the Environment
The last element of using the free market to solve our current environmental dilemmas is to expand property rights. For this, the nation of Namibia serves as a shining example of how property rights can save species. When poaching was shrinking Namibia’s small number of black rhinos, the tiny African country allowed private landowners to breed their own black rhinos and protect them from poachers. In return, the landowners are paid for tourism and trophy hunting. Since 2013, the black rhino population has increased from 60 to 200.
South Africa has a similar problem with its white rhino population, so it too has encouraged the private ownership of wild rhinos. In 1982, a live rhino was worth 1,000 South African rand (about $1,000 at the then exchange rate of $1 equal to 1 rand) but a trophy was 6,000 rand (about $6,000), meaning there was little reason to keep them alive. In 1990, a live rhino was 49,000 rand (about $16,000 at the then exchange rate of $1 equal to 3 rand) while a trophy was 80,000 ($26,600).
Then, in 1991, a law was passed that allowed the private ownership of tagged animals. As it then made sense to keep and breed them, the white rhino population tripled by 2007. It makes sense. Why sell a trophy for 80,000 rand when a family of four rhinos is worth almost 200,000 rand and they can continue to produce more rhinos? To move away from rhinos to something more accessible, why cut down an apple tree for timber when the sale of its apples can make you far more in the long run or help feed your family?
If America implemented the system in South Africa and Namibia, it’d go a long way to saving our own endangered species. We did it with the nearly extinct North American bison and we can do it again. Our threatened species can be privately owned while our least-concern species can be wild and free.
Now, it is worth noting that, while some species would benefit from a South African/Namibian-style system like the polar bear or the red wolf, there are other species that people wouldn’t want to hunt or eat. So, what about creatures like the golden-cheeked warbler or the Chiricahua leopard frog?
Well, there are many reasons these species are endangered. The golden-cheeked warbler’s habitat is over-browsed by goats and white-tailed deer. One possibility — again lying in the realm of tort law — would see the owners of a specific population of warblers suing the owners of the deer and the goats that eat too much of their habitat and have them removed from that specific area. That allows the warbler to enjoy all the excesses of its ecosystem without the worry of competition from much larger creatures.
The Chiricahua leopard frog faces a different situation. One of the things that threaten it (besides climate change) is the chytrid fungus. If we allowed owning these frogs, the owner could move them to a safe marsh or wetland where no fungus could infect them. Private investment in efforts to develop a cure could fast track it just like what is happening with the coronavirus now.
The Freedom to Preserve
Ultimately, another beneficial move would be to extend property rights to the environment and not just the species that inhabit it. Yet, currently, it is illegal for someone to buy land sold for energy, grazing, or timber needs and not harvest, extract, or develop those resources. Energy leasing regulations force individuals to extract the oil or lose the lease, thus preventing anyone from buying land and protecting it.
The environmental activist Terry Tempest Williams and her husband, Brooke, tried to buy land they had no intention of developing, forming an energy company after purchasing 1,120 acres in Utah. Their lease was canceled by the Bureau of Land Management, however, for violating the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920.
Regulations like this and others prevent good Samaritans from keeping land from the fossil fuel industry. Like in Africa, if we allowed people to buy or lease this land and do whatever they wanted with it, our natural resources would be far better protected than they are today.
The solution to environmental problems doesn’t lie in the hands of the state, nor will things resolve themselves by doing nothing. To harness the undeniable power and benefits of the free market system, we must eliminate all unfair farm subsidies, ending the farming sprawl created by corporate farms that invade our forests and wetlands.
We must eliminate the subsidies that benefit the fossil fuel industry to the detriment of clean energy, putting them on equal ground.
We must reform tort law so that those responsible for damaging our environment pay for those damages. Finally, we must extend property rights so that our endangered species can survive and thrive and for our green good Samaritans to be able to buy or lease land to protect it from fossil fuel extraction. All of these measures would significantly reduce our carbon footprint while creating a powerful, modern economy where everyone prospers — a bright, green future for us, our children, and humanity.
https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/06/how-the-free-market-can-protect-and-preserve-the-environment/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*****************************************
23 January, 2021
'Carbon-neutrality is a fairy tale': how the race for renewables is burning Europe's forests
Kalev Järvik stands on a bald patch of land in the heart of Estonia’s Haanja nature reserve and remembers when he could walk straight from one side of the reserve to the other under a canopy of trees.
Järvik has lived in the Haanja uplands in the southern county of Võru for more than 10 years. His closeness to the forest has shaped his life as a carpenter and the fortunes of the surrounding villages, with their handicraft traditions – a substitute for farming on the poor arable land. Upcountry, travel literature promotes the region to city dwellers, promising its ancient woodlands as a place to rest and reinvigorate the mind.
But in 2015, the Estonian government allowed what is known as clear-cutting in some parts of the Haanja nature reserve. The practice involves stripping entire areas of mature forest and removing whole tree trunks.
This relaxation of the logging rules came as international demand for Estonian wood soared – not just for furniture or construction, but because of an unlikely culprit: Europe’s renewable energy policies.
“Sometimes I can’t bear to go outside,” Järvik says, standing by the stumps left on land stripped by the logging company Valga Puu. The firm is a subsidiary of Graanul Invest Group, Europe’s biggest producer of the wood pellets which are burned on an industrial scale as biomass for heat and light in many of Europe’s former coal-fired power stations.
The days Järvik is spared the sound of harvesters have become rare. “You don’t want to leave home, because the landscape has become so impassable, it leaves you feeling anguished. But still the noise comes.”
Forests cover 2m hectares or more than half of Estonia. Around 380,000 hectares (939,000 acres) of that, including the Haanja nature reserve, fall under the EU’s Natura 2000 network, which is designed to protect Europe’s forests and offer a haven to rare and threatened species. Haanja is home to 29 protected species, including the black stork, the lesser-spotted eagle and the corncrake.
Natura-protected zones are managed under the legally binding provisions of the 1979 EU birds directive and the 1992 habitats directive. But logging is governed by domestic laws, and Estonia permits it as long as it does not damage bogs and other special habitats, or fall within bird mating seasons.
Campaigners say that by allowing intensive clear-cutting in Natura 2000 sites, Estonia is in breach of the habitats directive and undermining the EU’s climate goals.
Siim Kuresoo of the non-profit Estonian Fund for Nature (ELF) doesn’t just blame the Estonian government. He says there is a direct connection between the subsidised growth in the biomass industry encouraged by EU renewable energy policies and the acceleration of unsustainable Baltic tree-felling.
“There is clear evidence that the intensification of logging is at least partly driven by higher demand for biomass for heat and power,” says a report co-authored by Kuresoo for the ELF and the Latvian Ornithological Society. “Given that over half of Estonia’s and Latvia’s wood pellet exports in 2019 went to Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK, ‘green energy’ use in those three countries contributes directly to increased logging in the two Baltic states.”
The Council of Estonian Environmental NGOs (EKO), of which the ELF is a member, has made a complaint to the European commission alleging “systematic” breaches by Estonia of its forest conservation obligations.
Across Estonia, between 2001 and 2019, Natura 2000 areas lost more than 15,000 hectares (37,000 acres) of forest cover, an area more than twice the size of Manhattan. The last five years account for 80% of that loss. Further alterations to rules in other Estonian national parks are planned.
This acceleration appears to be taking a toll on bird species like the black grouse, woodlark and others. Woodland birds are declining at a rate of 50,000 breeding pairs a year, according to national records.
The clearances are also damaging the ability of Baltic forests to store carbon, and could be undermining climate goals by reducing the chance for Estonia and Latvia to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.
In a country where the overwhelming majority of people say they regard nature as sacred, logging has led to protests or what the Estonian media calls the “forest war”. Residents of Saku, a small town 16 miles south of Tallinn, successfully fought to save an area of forest that was scheduled to be cut down this year by RMK, the state forest management company, which manages around half of Estonian forests.
“We convert our trees into pellets and sell them to energy plants in your countries,” says Ivar Raig, one of the Saku campaigners. “This is considered to be sustainable, but we suffer.”
Sustainability goes to the heart of the European renewable energy debate. The drive to replace coal, one of the world’s biggest sources of carbon emissions, with cleaner sources of power, is a top priority in the fight against climate change globally.
A switch to burning wood in the form of pellets appears to offer a simple and in theory carbon-neutral alternative to coal-fired power stations because trees take up carbon dioxide from the air as they grow. As long as the burned trees are replaced with new plantings, there is no net addition to the stock of carbon in the atmosphere.
However, that process of carbon take-up can take many decades. And in the furnace, burning wood releases more carbon dioxide per unit of energy than burning gas, oil, or even coal. By accelerating carbon dioxide emissions in the short term, burning wood for electricity could be fatal for states’ ability to meet the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global heating to well below 2C by 2050.
Demand for woody biomass or energy from wood as an alternative to coal in power stations took off from 2009, when the first EU renewable energy directive obliged member states to source 20% of energy from renewable sources by 2020 and classified biomass energy as carbon-neutral.
A flaw in the legislation meant that woody biomass was fully categorised as renewable, even if it came not just from wood residues or waste, but from whole trees. This meant that companies could directly harvest forests for pellets – rather than making pellets from the by-products of timber cut for other uses – in the name of sustainable forest management.
As the EU moved in 2018 to double the use of renewable energy by 2030, scientists warned the European Parliament that this loophole in the sustainability criteria of the revised EU legislation would accelerate the climate crisis and devastate mature forests. But against the competing interests of the multibillion euro biomass lobby, it went unamended.
Almost all European countries have recorded an increase in logging for energy. Nearly a quarter of the trees harvested in the EU in 2019 were for energy, up from 17% in 2000.
Biomass, of which wood from forests is the main source, now makes up almost 60% of the EU’s renewable energy supply, more than solar and wind combined, and a vast cross-border industry has emerged to meet this demand.
Taxpayer subsidies are driving much of the growth in this trade. Between 2008 and 2018, subsidies for biomass, of which wood is the main source, among 27 European nations increased by 143%. In the UK, government support for biomass projects is expected to total more than £13bn by 2027 – the date at which current subsidy agreements expire, according to the climate thinktank Ember.
Every month tens of thousands of tonnes of wood pellets leave the port of Riga to cross the North Sea on Graanul Invest’s vessel, the MV Imavere. Much of this cargo is bound for the port of Immingham, where it is transported to UK power stations including Drax, which has converted four of its six units from coal to biomass since 2013 and is now the world’s largest biomass burning plant. The UK accounts for more than a third of Graanul’s annual revenue. Denmark, the Netherlands and Italy are also target markets.
But electricity production from wood pellets would not be financially sustainable without public subsidies: the British government paid Drax the equivalent of €2.4m (£2.1m) a day in 2019. Drax will have received more than €11.2bn (£10bn) from the UK government since its conversion to biomass in 2012 until subsidies run out in 2027, researchers from the Ember have calculated.
The UK is now the biggest subsidiser of bioenergy in Europe, spending more than £1.9bn in 2019 primarily to pay for burning imported wood at Drax, according to new research by the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) and Cut Carbon Not Forests. Britain is no longer bound by EU renewable energy targets post-Brexit but has set a new target of cutting emissions by 68% by 2030 and is committed to the EU goal of net-zero carbon by 2050.
Other European governments are following suit. In the Netherlands, the government has promised energy companies RWE, Uniper and Onyx (formerly Engie) more than €3.5bn in subsidies to use biomass, making the country one of the biggest importers of wood pellets in Europe. Campaigners are anxiously watching Germany, where Onyx Power, a subsidiary of the US hedge fund Riverstone, is examining the possibility of converting coal plants to biomass.
“Biomass only exists at the scale that it does because of subsidies,” says Duncan Brack, associate fellow at the London-based thinktank Chatham House. “We’re effectively paying to increase carbon emissions in the atmosphere, which is an absurd use of public money.
China's 2020 coal output rises to highest since 2015, undermining climate pledges
China's coal output rose last year to its highest since 2015, despite Beijing's climate change pledge to reduce consumption of the dirty fossil fuel and months of disruption at major coal mining hubs.
The world's biggest coal miner and consumer produced 3.84 billion tonnes of coal in 2020, data from the National Bureau of Statistics showed on Monday.
China's coal output dropped after reaching a peak of 3.97 billion tonnes in 2013, as Beijing axed excessive mining capacity and promoted clean energy consumption. But production is rising amid surging industrial demand and an unofficial restriction on coal imports aimed at shoring up the domestic mining industry.
For December alone, coal output was 351.89 million tonnes, up 3.2% from the same month last year, and up from 347.27 million tonnes in November.
China's coal mining sector was one of the first industries to resume operations when COVID travel restrictions were gradually relaxed, as Beijing wanted to ensure adequate fuel supplies once the country emerged from the lockdown enforced to control the spread of the novel coronavirus.
However, production was partially disrupted in Inner Mongolia, China's top coal mining region by output, as the region in March launched an anti-corruption campaign to probe malpractice related to coal resource development over the past 20 years.
Output finally rebounded from multi-month lows in September, as coal import restrictions and surging electricity demand intensified a supply crunch at the onset of the winter heating season.
To stabilise the sky-rocketing coal prices, which hit their highest level since late 2011, Beijing urged miners last month to boost output.
Earlier this month, China's energy administration approved six coal mining projects, with projected combined annual production of 15.3 million tonnes, in the northwestern region of Xinjiang.
Climate challenge needs a very different approach
BJORN LOMBORG
Let’s get real. Climate is a man-made problem. But Biden’s climate alarmism is almost entirely wrong. Asking people to spend $1500 every year is unsustainable when surveys show that a majority are unwilling to spend even $24 a year on climate. And policies like Paris will fix little at a high cost.
Biden is right to highlight the problem, but he needs a smarter way forward.
The climate alarm is poorly founded. Take hurricanes. Last year, you undoubtedly heard that global warming made hurricanes “record-setting”. Actually, 2020 was above-average in the North Atlantic because of the natural La Nina phenomenon, and only record-setting in that satellites could spot more storms. When measured by total hurricane damage potential, the 2020 North Atlantic was not even in the top 10. And almost everywhere else on the planet, hurricanes were far below average, including the Pacific, southern and northern hemispheres. Globally, 2020 ranked as one of the weakest hurricane years in the 40-year satellite record.
We think 2020 was big on hurricanes because we read carefully curated stories of where and when they hit, but we didn’t see stories about the many more places and times they did not. This dynamic is why widespread climate alarm diverges from the decades of climate-economic research that shows the total impact of climate change is negative but manageable.
The UN Climate Panel, the gold standard of climate science, tells us the total impact of climate change in the 2070s is equivalent to an average income reduction of 0.2 to 2 per cent. Since the UN also expects everyone to be 3.63 times richer, global warming means we will only be 3.56 times as rich. That is a problem, but not Biden’s existential threat.
Yet, rejoining the Paris agreement will solve very little at a high cost. By the UN’s estimates, if all nations live up to all their promises (including Barack Obama’s promises for the US), it will cut so little, it will reduce global temperature by less than 0.05C by 2100.
And Paris is costly, because it forces economies to use less or more expensive energy. Across many studies, the drag to the economies is $US1-2 trillion in lost GDP every year after 2030. While achieving some good, each dollar of cost will only deliver about 11 cents of long-run climate benefits.
While politicians also talk about job benefits, economic research shows that green spending will predictably increase green jobs. But because subsidies will be paid by higher taxes on the rest of the economy, an equal number of jobs will disappear elsewhere.
In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson excitedly talks about five million new green jobs, while his advisers now warn him that 10 million other jobs could be at risk.
Many rich countries are now promising to make their economies carbon-neutral by 2050. There is only one nation that has done an independent cost estimate of net-zero — New Zealand. It found that the average best-case cost is 16 per cent of GDP. This translates to more than $US5 trillion per year by mid-century for the US, and similarly exorbitant costs for other nations. Such costs make these policies unsustainable in the long run.
Moreover, rich countries can achieve very little by themselves. Imagine if the entire rich world stopped all its CO2 emissions today and never bounced back. This would be utterly devastating — COVID-19 lockdowns only reduced emissions by less than 10 per cent. Yet, this would reduce global warming by the end of the century by 0.4C. This is because three-quarters of the 21st century emissions will come from the rest of the world — especially China, India, Africa and Latin America. They are unlikely to accept slower economic growth to address a 2 per cent problem 50 years from now.
Fortunately, there is a much smarter way forward: investing a lot more in green energy research and development. As Bill Gates says, “We’re short about two dozen great innovations” to fix climate. If we could innovate the price of green energy below fossil fuels, it wouldn’t just be rich, well-meaning first-worlders cutting a bit of emissions. Everyone would switch, eventually fixing climate change.
The cost would be much lower, the policies much more likely to be implemented — and, fortunately, it is one of the promises Biden has made.
Indeed, at the sidelines of the Paris summit, more than 20 countries, including Australia, committed to double their clean energy R&D investment until 2020. Most countries have not delivered, but doing so for both the US and Australia would be a much more effective, cheaper and more sustainable strategy.
Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus and Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book is False Alarm.
What is green hydrogen, how is it made and will it be the fuel of the future?
Abundant, cheap and clean-burning, hydrogen has long been described as the fuel of the future.
That future has never quite materialised, however, due to hydrogen's disadvantages. It's difficult to transport, it can make metal brittle and it's 20 times more explosive than petrol.
But in recent years, "green hydrogen" — hydrogen made without fossil fuels — has been identified as the clean energy source that could help bring the world to net-zero emissions.
Billions of dollars of investment capital and taxpayer support has flowed into the industry, and company share prices have soared.
This has accelerated in recent months, driven by the rising adoption of zero-emission vehicles, a deadline set by many countries to go carbon-free by 2050 and US President Joe Biden's support for clean energy.
The European Union plans to scale up renewable hydrogen projects and invest a cumulative amount of 470 billion euros ($740 billion) by 2050.
In November, Western Australian mining magnate Andrew Forrest announced plans to invest billions of dollars in green hydrogen to grow his new energy business.
In the first of the ABC Boyer lectures on Friday, he focused on the potential for Australia to produce "green steel", which uses green hydrogen in place of fossil fuels to power the iron ore blast furnaces.
"The immediate and multiplier impact on the Australian economy, if we get this right, could be nothing short of nation-building," he said in the lecture.
So what is green hydrogen? How can it be used? And is the hype a lot of hot air?
Hydrogen is the universe's most abundant element, but here on Earth it doesn't appear pure in nature, and requires energy to separate.
The most common technique is to extract hydrogen from water, which is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen (hence H2O).
Doing this is fairly simple. You can use heat and chemical reactions to release hydrogen from organic materials such as fossil fuels.
But this is enormously polluting. Worldwide hydrogen production is responsible for CO2 emissions equivalent to that of the United Kingdom and Indonesia combined. (The hydrogen is mostly used in the oil refining industry and to produce ammonia fertilisers.)
There is a cleaner way of getting hydrogen: a strong electrical current passed through a tank of water splits the molecule into its two constituent elements. This is called electrolysis.
Hydrogen atoms form hydrogen molecules (H2) and oxygen molecules pair up too. Each can then be bottled up (more on that later).
If the electricity is generated from renewable sources such as solar or wind, production of hydrogen in this way emits no greenhouse gasses.
This is how we come to all the different shades of hydrogen:
brown hydrogen is produced using coal where the emissions are released to the air
grey hydrogen is produced from natural gas where the associated emissions are released to the air
blue hydrogen is produced from natural gas, where the emissions are captured using carbon capture and storage
green hydrogen is produced from electrolysis powered by renewable electricity.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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22 January, 2021
Making America Energy Dependent Again
Joe Biden's plan is to reverse all the economic and energy gains made in the last four years.
During his presidency, one of the best things Donald Trump did was make America energy independent. Joe Biden plans to undue that agenda, ASAP. Among the 17 executive orders or actions the newly inaugurated president signed Wednesday afternoon was one revoking the permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline.
We knew it was coming. The phrase “Rescind Keystone XL pipeline permit” was part of the list of executive actions contained in a briefing note circulated by Biden’s transition team last weekend, after first being shared with U.S. stakeholders. The cancellation of the permit would undo one of Trump’s first executive actions and return America to the Obama administration’s stance against a pipeline that would transport oil from the Canadian province of Alberta into Nebraska.
Barack Obama had rejected the permit in 2015 saying it would conflict with his administration’s global warming agenda. When Trump issued an executive order in 2017 allowing it to proceed, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Morris, an Obama appointee, rejected it by claiming that the State Department’s environmental analysis of the pipeline “fell short of a hard look” at the cumulative effects of greenhouse gases and the impact of pipeline construction on Native American land resources. Morris agreed with environmental groups who asserted that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers permit would allow companies to skirt responsibility for damage done to rivers and streams.
Morris made his ruling in November of 2018. In July of 2020, it was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
On Sunday, TC Energy, the Canadian company working on the project, released a statement addressing climate concerns. Richard Prior, president of Keystone XL, insisted the pipeline is “not only the safest and most reliable method to transport oil to markets, but the initiatives announced today also ensures it will have the lowest environmental impact of an oil pipeline in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.” He added, “Canada and the United States are among the most environmentally responsible countries in the world with some of the strictest standards for fossil fuel production.”
The people who believe the transition from fossil fuels to a Green New Deal can simply be mandated, irrespective of technological and scientific realities, couldn’t care less.
The move apparently doesn’t sit well with Canada’s equally progressive leader, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In what seemingly amounts to progressive environmental heresy, Trudeau has long supported the $9 billion project because he thinks that creating jobs and reducing reliance on foreign energy sources is a commendable ambition.
How inane is it to cancel the deal? “Construction is well under way, with the cross-border portion of the line already completed,” explains columnist John Ibbitson. “Cancelling the project will cost thousands of jobs in both countries. TC Energy is committed to reducing carbon emissions, while the oil that replaces what Keystone would provide American refineries comes from countries with little or no commitment to fighting global warming.”
American labor unions are also less than enthused. Last August, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, the International Union of Operating Engineers, the Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA), and the United Association of Union Plumbers and Pipefitters reached a deal with TC Energy. Yet an oil and gas lobbyist who requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press spelled out reality in no uncertain terms. “The only question has always been whether labor can stave off the death sentence,” the lobbyist stated. “And they never had a chance.”
Alberta Premier Jason Kenney is also distressed. He notes that canceling the pipeline deal “will kill jobs on both sides of the border, weaken the critically important Canada-U.S. relationship, and undermine U.S. national security by making the United States more dependent on OPEC oil imports in the future.”
For the environmental religionists, killing jobs and a return to relying on foreign energy providers who hate us is a small price to pay for “saving the planet.”
And for eliminating racism to boot. Two incoming White House environmental aides — Maggie Thomas, who will be chief of staff for the Office of Domestic Climate Policy, and climate advocate Cecilia Martinez, billed as “senior director for environmental justice” — insist climate change is driven by systemic racism. In 2019, Martinez asserted that the nation’s only path forward “is to design national climate policies that are centered on justice.” Thomas’s scheme demands “trillions” in public investment, aimed at a “crack down” on oil production and a shift away from the nation’s “fossil fuel economy” — as well as funding for welfare programs, including rent and utility relief.
In other words, the Biden administration will precipitate skyrocketing energy prices, and then print trillions of additional dollars to subsidize the millions of Americans who can’t afford them. Anyone who disagrees with this double dose of ideologically driven stupidity?
Shut up — racist.
Keystone is just the beginning, and Americans will soon discover all of the other equally pernicious agendas an unchecked Democrat Party will inflict upon them. As columnist Steve Milloy warned last October, fracking, one of America’s most successful job-producing industries, can’t be killed by an executive order. Instead, it will be killed by thousands of regulations aimed at producing the same outcome.
“[Biden] has also committed to reversing President Trump’s deregulatory efforts,” Milloy wrote, “including the rollback of an Obama administration Environmental Protection Agency rule requiring the oil-and-gas industry to pay to limit methane leaks from fracking wells.”
Why? “Big oil companies support the Obama rule because it puts the squeeze on smaller players,” he continues. “If the rule is reinstated, struggling independent frackers will either close up shop or sell themselves to larger companies, whose profits have been harmed by a production glut. With the ability to control and limit overall production, those larger frackers could reduce the glut and increase their profits. There would be less fracking — and higher energy prices for consumers.”
In other words, in tandem with the economic destruction wrought by coronavirus lockdowns, more small businesses will be regulated into elimination, in service to a corporate oligarchy intent on eliminating any and all challenges to its hegemony.
In the next two years (at least), Americans are going to learn a very sobering lesson about the difference between a Trump administration’s aspiration to create economic abundance and a Biden administration’s socialist/Marxist effort to manage decline — the very same decline promoted as the “New Normal” during the Obama administration.
“This is just the beginning of an energy agenda that will cripple us on so many levels: jobs, cost of living, and opportunity,” warns columnist Daniel Turner. “It will hurt our critical allies in Canada and Europe. It will benefit our enemies Russia and China. And it will do absolutely nothing for the environment.”
No one should be surprised. It’s what happens when the electorate puts people who hate this nation in charge of it.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/77162-making-america-energy-dependent-again-2021-01-21
Get Ready for More Obama-Era Green Energy ScamsWith Democrats about to control all the levers of power in Washington, the biggest winners might be the wind and solar companies. These firms' stocks continue to surge mostly because President-elect Joe Biden has pledged to invest several hundred billion dollars in green energy through a pipeline of taxpayer-funded grants, loans, tax credits and loan guarantees.
This game plan looks suspiciously like a replay of the litany of green "stimulus" fiascoes that Biden piloted as vice president back in 2009 with the $800 billion Obama stimulus plan. The experiment in the government as an investment banker belly-flopped with embarrassing failures from Solyndra, Fisker Automotive and Abound Solar. Taxpayers lost billions of dollars on these lemons.
One of these disasters, the Crescent Dunes thermal solar power plant, located in the Nevada desert, is still embroiled in court battles to sort out who pays for all the losses. The Obama administration first started showering this project with money beginning in 2011, with a $700 million federal loan. The Department of Energy boasted that the facility was supposed to provide half a million megawatt-hours of electric power every year. Not quite. Thanks to construction design flaws, faulty equipment and hapless management, Crescent Dunes has never come close to its production target. Then, in 2017, Crescent Dunes came knocking on Treasury's door again, this time receiving $275 million in cash grants instead of tax credits on top of $250 million in private capital. Even with this second round of life support, the plant had to shut down. Last month, the bankruptcy court approved the entire operation's Chapter 11 reorganization plan.
But the story doesn't end there. Under the settlement terms, taxpayers will only see $200 million recouped of the remaining $425 million still unpaid from the Department of Energy's loan. The rest will be forgiven. Some of the loan losses could be recouped if the plant hits profitability. Expert testimony in the court proceedings concluded this outcome is unlikely given its track record so far. The bottom line: Expect taxpayers to swallow hundreds of millions of dollars of losses here.
What is especially galling about this whole misadventure is the Spanish firm Grupo Cobra, which botched the construction, received full payment to build the facility. The Department of Energy has reached a deal with Grupo Cobra that forgives the $225 million of outstanding loans and allows Grupo Cobra to become sole owners of the project. The total public and private investor losses could approach half a billion dollars when all is said and done. Meanwhile, a foreign company is going to walk away with sole ownership of a U.S. solar plant. Grupo Cobra is getting rewarded for its incompetence.
Will the Biden administration learn from bankruptcies such as Crescent Dunes? Don't bet on it. It wouldn't be surprising if Biden's "green energy" crusaders, flush with taxpayer money, toss millions of more dollars into Crescent Dunes.
Renewable energy scams such as Crescent Dunes remind us that these "public-private" projects rarely produce much electric power, and they don't save the planet from climate change. But they do make millionaires out of lobbyists and fraudsters. My friends at the Heritage Foundation have counted 25 separate green energy projects, each with multimillion-dollar taxpayer losses like those from the Obama era. My advice to the Biden team is the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Celebrity Climate Change Activists Flew Private Jets to Biden's Inauguration
Several celebrities attended and performed at Joe Biden's inauguration on Wednesday, and many of those celebrities took their own private jets to get there. They didn't even carpool.
A celebrity couple who attended Biden's inauguration reportedly took a private jet to D.C. despite the couple's hardline stance on the issue of climate change.
Celebrities Chrissy Teigen and her husband, singer John Legend, were spotted boarding a private jet in Los Angeles, California, the Daily Mail reported.
Actress and singer Jennifer Lopez also took her own private jet to D.C. where the 51-year-old performed before the small crowd.
Teigen and Legend have been caught a few times before flying in private jets, including a Valentine's Day flight to Yountville, California, where the couple had dinner. The restaurant of their choice? The infamous French Laundry, a favorite place for other Democrat hypocrites like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed who flouted their own coronavirus guidelines to eat at the restaurant.
Fishermen reject Greenie claims Australians are 'eating endangered sharks' under the guise of flake
Queensland shark fishers have rejected an Australian Marine Conservation Society (AMCS) campaign encouraging Australians to stop eating flake.
The Give Flake a Break campaign urges people to choose sustainable seafood alternatives, as there is no legal obligation to disclose what species of shark is being sold, or where it has come from.
Margaret Stevenson, who owns a fishing business with her husband Graham at Burnett Heads in Queensland, says there should not be any concern as fishers are already heavily regulated.
"We've got a total allowable catch that restricts how much we can catch," she said. "We have to call in and give out how many sharks we've caught, even if it's only one, and that's every trip. "We can't leave the boat ramp for an hour after we've called in so boating and fisheries patrol can inspect our catch.
"We have to identify each species of shark that we catch in our logbooks and report on it and we have to do that on the phone as well — we have to give them the numbers before we get in."
Senior sharks campaigner for the Australian Marine Conservation Society Leo Guida argued the seafood labelling system was "broken".
"Fishers do record what species they catch, and there are fishers out there who do a fantastic job and provide us with sustainable alternatives," he said.
"But by the time it gets to the plate, somewhere along the way, the information as to what species — particularly with sharks — that people are eating gets lost or is very difficult to find.
"We know this because there are quirks in our national environment laws that allow the harvest and sale of endangered fish. "These include the endangered school shark and the critically endangered scalloped hammerhead."
Mrs Stevenson said what AMCS was implying was simply wrong. "It just can't happen with these claims that we're selling product that we shouldn't be — that it's threatening an endangered species," she said.
"If they [boating and fisheries patrol] come and inspect our catch and we have something that we shouldn't have or there's an error in what we've told them over the phone — we're liable to get fined. "Our whole livelihood, our whole business then is on the line."
A handful of species are listed as threatened under Australia's Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, including the grey nurse shark and the speartooth shark, which banned them from being fished in Australian waters.
But while the scalloped hammerhead shark is classed as globally critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, it is legally allowed to be caught in limited numbers in Australia under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
In Queensland, recreational fishers are prohibited from catching scalloped, smooth and great hammerhead sharks, but commercial fishers are not.
Graham Stevenson explained that they were not catching endangered species of shark. "The species of sharks that we catch here primarily are spinner sharks, which are a school type shark — they're in the thousands out here," he said.
"We get black-tipped sharks and weasel sharks — weasel sharks only ever eat octopus, they're very similar to the southern gummy. "At different times of year we do get a lot of hammerhead sharks — they're very prolific in this area."
Mrs Stevenson said she was frustrated that there did not seem to be anything they could do about it. "We're guilty until we're proven innocent and we've got no mechanism available to us prove our innocence as an industry," she said.
"The only thing I can say to consumers is to put the onus back onto these greenie organisations and demand the evidence, demand the proof of what these claims are.
"A few years ago, we had a really good market for shark and they [AMCS] came out and did a big campaign and because of it that whole business that used to buy our shark went bust."
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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21 January, 2021
Electric car battery that can recharge in 10 minutes and last for 250 miles
Back to the steam car! You've got to wait for it to heat up before you can drive off
US experts have developed a new electric car battery that charges in just 10 minutes and lasts for 250 miles on a single charge.
The EV batteries are made from lithium iron phosphate, which is known for its 'unsurpassed safety', and can quickly heat up and cool down – key to rapid charging and a long life.
They quickly heat up to 140°F for charge and discharge and then cool down when the battery is not being used.
The system could tackle 'range anxiety' – drivers' fears that they don't have sufficient charge on their electric vehicle (EV) to get them to their destination.
Researchers say their battery should last more that 2 million miles in a lifetime and would be 'a well-rounded powertrain for mass-market EVs' if commercialised.
'There is no more range anxiety and this battery is affordable,' said Chao-Yang Wang at Penn State University in the US.
'The very fast charge allows us to downsize the battery without incurring range anxiety.'
According to Wang, these batteries can produce a large amount of power upon heating – 40 kilowatt hours and 300 kilowatts of power.
An EV with this battery could go from zero to 60 miles per hour in three seconds and would drive like a Porsche, he said.
'We developed a pretty clever battery for mass-market electric vehicles with cost parity with combustion engine vehicles,' said Wang.
'This is how we are going to change the environment and not contribute to just the luxury cars. Let everyone afford electric vehicles.'
Batteries have three main components – the anode, cathode and electrolyte.
The electrolyte is typically a chemical that separates the anode and cathode and moves the flow of electrical charge between the two.
Because lithium is a highly-reactive element it stores a large amount of energy.
Lithium-ion batteries use a liquid electrolyte – a flammable, carbon-based liquid. But this liquid electrolyte is often flammable and has been blamed for lithium ion batteries bursting into flames when overheated, for example.
Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries, a type of lithium ion battery, are an alternative. They use lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) as the cathode material, are already used in EVs and are renowned for safety.
This new battery is also lithium iron phosphate but is described as a 'thermally modulated LFP'. It uses a self-heating approach previously developed in Wang's lab, the Electrochemical Engine Center at Penn State.
The self-heating battery uses a thin nickel foil with one end attached to the negative terminal and the other extending outside the cell to create a third terminal.
Once electrons flow it rapidly heats up the nickel foil through resistance heating and warm the inside of the battery.
Once the battery's internal temperature is 140°F, the switch opens and the battery is ready for rapid charge or discharge.
Wang's team have also used low-cost materials for the battery's cathode and anode and a safe, low-voltage electrolyte.
The cathode is thermally stable lithium iron phosphate, which does not contain any of the expensive and critical materials like cobalt.
While the anode is made of very large particle graphite, a safe, light and inexpensive material.
Because of the self-heating, the researchers said they do not have to worry about uneven deposition of lithium on the anode, which can cause lithium spikes that are dangerous.
'This battery has reduced weight, volume and cost,' said Wang, who authored a paper on the findings that's been published in Nature Energy.
'I am very happy that we finally found a battery that will benefit the mainstream consumer mass market.'
Biden Cannot Legally Get Us Back Into the Paris Climate Accords; Here's Why
Joe Biden has made no secret of his intention to get us back into the Paris climate accords. It’s high up there on his laundry list of things to do upon taking office—even though the United States leads the world in reducing carbon emissions, despite not being a part of it anymore.
But the truth is, the United States was never actually legally a part of the Paris climate accords. The United Nations describes it as “a legally binding international treaty on climate change,” and it also meets the definition of a treaty under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which states that a treaty is “an international agreement concluded between [two or more] States in written form and governed by international law.”
And what does the United States Constitution say about treaties?
It says that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur.” It’s right there in Article II, Section 2, Clause 2.
Yes, Obama unilaterally signed the United States into the treaty in the final months of his presidency, which was a very telling move. Nearly 200 countries signed the treaty on December 12, 2015, but Obama didn’t sign it until nearly a year later, during the final stretch of the 2016 presidential election. Obama, who fancied himself a constitutional scholar, never even attempted to go to the Senate for ratification. Instead, he avoided referring to the agreement as a treaty publicly, in order to argue that Senate ratification wasn’t constitutionally mandated.
Obama’s move was clearly designed to benefit him politically while also punting the legal ramifications of the unratified treaty to another president. As such, less than six months into his presidency, Trump announced, to much fury from the left, that the United States would no longer be a part of the Paris climate accords—negating the need for a potential dispute over the legality of the treaty.
Just as easily as Barack Obama got us into the treaty, President Trump was able to get us out. This back-and-forth will continue ad infinitum each time the presidency changes parties. This is why the Founders established a system where neither the top executive nor the Senate can enter into a treaty without the consent of the other.
“The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist #75. “To have intrusted the power of making treaties to the Senate alone, would have been to relinquish the benefits of the constitutional agency of the President in the conduct of foreign negotiations.”
Whereas the election of Donald Trump, whose opposition to the Paris climate treaty was well-established, precluded the need for any legal battles over the legitimacy of the United States’ entry into the treaty, Biden’s promise to get us back into it unilaterally will bring this issue back to the forefront, and I suspect confrontation is inevitable. Senator Ted Cruz, for example, previously called on Trump to send the Paris climate treaty to the Senate for a vote—knowing full well it would not be ratified.
With any luck, the moment Biden illegally gets us back into the Paris climate treaty, Republicans will mount a legal challenge to it, and the Supreme Court will rightfully strike it down.
Biden Administration: Yes, We Are Following Through With a Fracking Ban
Speaking at the White House Tuesday night, Press Secretary Jen Psaki confirmed President Biden will follow through with campaign promises to ban new fracking on federal land.
"President Biden promised to end all new oil and gas leasing on federal lands when was a candidate," a reporter asked. "Does the administration still have that commitment today? To end that lease?"
"We do and the leases will be reviewed by our team we just have only been in office for less than a day now," Psaki said.
Earlier Tuesday, Biden signed an executive order placing the United States back into the Paris Climate Agreements, despite the country reducing emissions without being in the global agreement. He also revoked permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, eliminating 11,000 jobs and destroying $2 billion in wages.
From Fox Business:
The move could happen on President-elect Joe Biden's first day in office, after the Trump administration spent four years trying to further construction of the $9 billion, 1,200-mile pipeline that would transport up to 830,000 barrels of crude oil daily from Alberta, Canada, to Nebraska.
An existing Keystone pipeline currently transports oil from Alberta to Illinois and Texas.
According to the Keystone XL website, the project, initially proposed more than a decade ago, would sustain about 11,000 U.S. jobs in 2021 – including 8,000 union jobs – and generate $1.6 billion in gross wages.
It is unclear how the Biden administration plans to address the job losses, but his $2 trillion clean energy infrastructure plan, with its goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 at the latest, aims to "create millions of good-paying jobs that provide workers with the choice to join a union and bargain collectively with their employers," according to his website.
Biden Reportedly Putting Keystone Pipeline on the Chopping Block on Day One
Joe Biden is reportedly planning to rescind the Keystone XL pipeline permit during his first day in office. The move marks the fulfillment of a campaign promise Biden made in May of last year.
According to CBC News, sources say the incoming president plans to rescind the Keystone XL pipeline permit through executive action on his very first day in office. The rescinding of the permit, allowing the pipeline to cross the Canadian border into the United States, will effectively kill the pipeline as well as all the jobs and economic activity associated with the project.
In a memo circulated among incoming-senior Biden staffers, the words "Rescind Keystone XL pipeline permit" are reportedly among the list of executive actions the new administration is planning for Day 1. A lengthier version of the memo was shown to stakeholders, but a smaller version of the memo was released to the public earlier this weekend.
Biden has also said that he plans to transition America out of the oil industry. During his second and final presidential debate against President Trump, Biden said he plans to transition America out of the oil industry.
"Would you close down the oil industry?" President Trump, not the moderator, asked Biden the important question.
"I would transition from the oil industry, yes," Biden answered.
When asked why Biden was planning to eliminate the oil industry, Biden replied, "Because the oil industry pollutes significantly." Biden later clarified that he would not ban the oil industry outright, but reiterated the "need" to transition away from oil.
The Keystone XL pipeline was rejected by the Obama administration in 2015, when Biden was vice president, but subsequently approved two years later by President Trump.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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18 January, 2021
California secretly struggles with renewables
By David Wojick |January 16th, 2021|Economy|17 Comments
California has hooked up a grid battery system that is almost ten times bigger than the previous world record holder, but when it comes to making renewables reliable it is so small it might as well not exist.
The new battery array is rated at a storage capacity of 1,200 megawatt hours (MWh); easily eclipsing the record holding 129 MWh Australian system built by Tesla a few years ago. However, California peaks at a whopping 42,000 MW. If that happened on a hot, low wind night this supposedly big battery would keep the lights on for just 1.7 minutes (that’s 103 seconds). This is truly a trivial amount of storage.
Mind you this system is being built to serve just Pacific Gas & Electric. But they by coincidence peak at about half of California, or 21,000 MWh, so they get a magnificent 206 seconds of peak juice. Barely time to find the flashlight, right?
There is no word on what this trivial giant cost, since PG&E does not own it. That honor goes to an outfit called Vistra that does a lot of different things with electricity and gas. But these complex battery systems are not cheap.
This one reportedly utilizes more than 4,500 stacked battery racks, each of which contains 22 individual battery modules. That is 99,000 separate modules that have to be made to work well together. Imagine hooking up 99,000 electric cars and you begin to get the picture.
The US Energy Information Administration reports that grid scale battery systems have averaged around $1.5 million a MWh over100% renewable deception the last few years. At that price this trivial piece of storage cost just under TWO BILLION DOLLARS. At 103 seconds of peak storage that is about $18,000,000 a second. Money for nothing.
Mind you the PG&E engineers are not that stupid. They know perfectly well that this billion dollar battery is not there to provide backup power when wind and solar do not produce. In fact the truth is just the opposite. The battery’s job is to prevent wind and solar power from crashing the grid when they do produce.
It is called grid stabilization. Wind and solar are so erratic that it is very hard to maintain the constant 60 cycle AC frequency that all our wonderful electronic devices require. If the frequency gets more than just a tiny bit off the grid blacks out. Preventing these crashes requires active stabilization.
Grid instability due to erratic wind and solar used to not be a problem, because the huge spinning metal rotors in the coal, gas and nuclear power plant generators simply absorbed the fluctuations. But most of those plants have been shut down, so we need billion dollar batteries to do what those plants did for free. Nor is this monster battery the only one being built in California to try to make wind and solar power work. Many more are in the pipeline and not just in California. Many states are struggling with instability as baseline generators are switched off.
There is even an insane irony here, one that is perfect for Crazy California. This billion dollar battery occupies the old generator room of a shut down gas fired power plant. Those generators used to make the grid stable. Now we are struggling to do it.
Of course no one at PG&E or Vistra says publicly that this monster battery is there to keep renewables from trashing the grid, not to back them up. One wonders if the California Public Utilities Commission knows this? The big question is why is the rate paying public not told? Or the press? There is really a very expensive hoax here.
While on this topic, let’s ask what it would actually cost to back up wind and solar with batteries. This depends a lot on local climate. How often the wind does not blow hard for example. Wind generators need about 10 mph just to start and more like a sustained 30 mph for full power.
Multi-day heat waves are often periods of very low wind, combined with a maximum need for power. A nasty combination. So my rough rule of thumb is that you need storage of 7 days times peak need.
California peaks at 42,000 MWh and 7 days is 168 hours so using this rough rule we would need about 7 million MWh of batteries. This makes 1200 MWh truly trivial. Then at $1.5 million a MWh we get an astounding 10.5 TRILLION DOLLARS, just for the batteries to make renewables reliable.
The scam is breathtaking, and not just in California. Nationwide we are spending untold billions of dollars trying to keep the erratic nature of renewables from crashing the electric power system. But these efforts are routinely portrayed as storage for when renewables do not run. Stabilization is the opposite of storage. We are being lied to about renewables.
https://www.cfact.org/2021/01/16/california-secretly-struggles-with-renewables/
Nio, the ‘Chinese Tesla’ that has electrified investors worldwideWhen William Li, the founder and chief executive of Nio, decided that the electric car company’s mission statement should be “To shape a joyful lifestyle”, he probably wasn’t thinking about Britain’s twentysomethings happily punting on its share price to stave off boredom in lockdown.
Nio, based in Shanghai and a relatively small company by revenues, making about 200 cars a day, has lofty goals, not least helping to tackle climate change by shifting the world away from internal-combustion engines.
However, it has emerged, with a New York listing, as one of the most popularly traded stocks in Britain, boosted by the commonly expressed prediction that the company is going to be “the next Tesla”.
According to Susannah Streeter, senior investment analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, Britain’s biggest stocks platform: “Nio is the second-most popular overseas investment on the HL platform and since the start of the year has been in the top ten overall.”
AJ Bell, another large investment platform, said that it had handled more trades in Nio in the first week in January than in all of December. Markets.com has reported “very high interest” among its clients.
The stock also seems to be one of those prospective world-beaters that catch the imagination of younger, novice investors: those who have never experienced a full-scale bear market.
IG, the spread-betting group, said that Nio was its second most popular stock globally behind Tesla, especially with younger investors: “We’ve seen a huge amount of interest in it and other electric vehicle stocks over the past 12 months, particularly among the new, younger cohort of clients.”
Etoro, a fast-growing investment-cum-social media platform popular with young people that claims to have about 1.7 million registered users in Britain, said that Nio was its most frequently traded stock in December.
Some investors know very little about the company, let alone take a considered view about its prospects. One 26-year-old quantity surveyor, who asked not to be named, told The Times: “My mate told me to invest in it. He’s bang on it. I’d actually never heard of it before. It’s the Chinese Tesla.
“It’s tipped to nearly double by the end of the year. I’m just waiting for it to make me a millionaire.” This was said tongue-in-cheek, but there is no denying that investors hope to make a profit.
Social media sites are full of chat between millennials relating their investment experiences. One said that after making profits from bitcoin, he was shifting into Nio having taken advice from a 19-year-old friend on Tiktok: “He really knows his shit.”
This kind of talk is grist to the bears and sceptics who mutter about elevator boys in 1929 Manhattan offering share tips just before the Wall Street crash. Nio’s popularity, they argue, is a classic example of a frothy market, with some stocks in bubble territory.
Yet to portray Nio as a stock purely puffed up by naive novices would be wrong. The company has fans among some of the most admired and successful technology investors in the world.
James Anderson, manager of Scottish Mortgage, the FTSE 100 investment trust, sang its praises in a webcast with his investors last week, arguing that it had emerged over the past year from being merely one of perhaps a hundred electric car businesses in China to being “probably the clear leader”.
Nio shares reflect that progress, rising 28-fold from a low of $US2.11 in March to more than $US60 today, valuing Nio at $US96 billion ($125bn) – more than General Motors at $US74bn, or Ford at $US40bn. According to Scottish Mortgage’s most recent filings, its stake in Nio was worth £857 million ($1.5bn) on November 30.
If it holds the same number of shares, that will be more than £1bn today. That is starting to look meaty even against Tesla, which went up by a mere 1000 per cent in the same period since March. The Scottish Mortgage stake in Tesla was worth more than £2bn that last time that it reported.
“Tesla way underperformed Nio last year, so perhaps we should ask Mr Musk [Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and now the world’s second richest man] why he’s doing so badly,” Mr Anderson said.
Underpinning the confidence of investors is some eye-catching engineering. The latest Nio models seem not only to be ahead of the offerings from traditional car companies but also ahead of Tesla itself.
Nio’s 70 kilowatt-hour battery and 100kwh battery packs make its cars capable of travelling up to 450 miles (724km) on a single charge, soothing “range anxiety”. The company claims to be close to producing packs of denser, solid-state batteries to replace the ubiquitous lithium-ion batteries and push ranges to more than 960km.
Then there is its innovative approach to recharging. It has rejected the hugely expensive motorway service station superfast chargers being put in by Tesla, which still take 20 minutes to re-fire its cars, and has opted instead for battery-swapping stations, which reduce the stop time to only five minutes.
Nio also is turning out cars with “Level 2” autonomous capability as standard, a level of driver assistance – automatic braking, acceleration, lane guidance – only a step before the machine takes over at the steering wheel.
In a recent report into the electric vehicle market, Jefferies, the stockbroker, cited range, connectivity, autonomous driving and charging solution as the unique selling propositions of Nio in an industry divided between legacy companies and the wannabes.
“Wannabes’ success may hinge on legacies’ inability to respond,” it concluded. That included the way to market. The legacy companies rely on outmoded dealership showroom networks. Nio is selling on the internet and is marketing through pop-up shopping centre “Nio spaces”.
The excitement around Nio is that it is coming soon to try to crack the European market, where electric adoption is accelerating. Tesla is proving that the new wave can succeed, delivering the best electric car sales in Britain, ahead of BMW, Nissan and Renault.
So the company’s prospects are immeasurably sunnier than they were last March, when, as Mr Anderson concedes, the company was in “severe danger”. A $1 billion rescue by the provincial Chinese government of Anhui, where the vehicles are manufactured, helped to put the company on a more solid footing. Even so, the valuation remains stratospheric by conventional measures.
Nio is lossmaking, recently reporting a $US154m net loss for the quarter to September, although this was down by 59 per cent from a year earlier and down by 11 per cent on the previous quarter.
Annualising that quarter’s sales puts Nio on a multiple of 36 times annual revenues. To put it more starkly, the company is valued at $US2.19m for each car it has produced in the past year.
The “buy” case is that the lesson of digitised, globalised, brand-driven capitalism is that a very small number of winners – Apple, Google and Netflix – grab all the cake. In carmaking, Nio, founded in 2014, might just be that winner in ten or twenty years’ time.
Nio, which buffs up its brand via its Formula E motor racing team, as well as clothing merchandise, brought out its latest model this week. The ET7 is a £60,000 car that goes from nought to 62mph (99.8km/h) in 3.9 seconds and has a claimed range of 435 miles (700km).
That puts it head-to-head with Tesla’s forthcoming Model S Plaid, as well as traditional marques, such as the BMW 7 Series and Mercedes-Benz S-Class. Nio, for now, is roaring ahead, whether or not investors look under the bonnet.
At the White House, the purge of skeptics has started with David Legates
President Donald Trump has been sympathetic with the climate skeptics’ position, which is that there is no climate crisis, and that all currently proposed solutions to the “crisis” are economically harmful to the U.S. specifically, and to humanity in general.
Today I have learned that Dr. David Legates, who had been brought to the Office of Science and Technology Policy to represent the skeptical position in the Trump Administration, has been fired by OSTP Director and Trump Science Advisor, Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier.
The event that likely precipitated this is the invitation by Dr. Legates for about a dozen of us to write brochures that we all had hoped would become part of the official records of the Trump White House. We produced those brochures (no funding was involved), and they were formatted and published by OSTP, but not placed on the WH website. My understanding is that David Legates followed protocols during this process.
So What Happened?
What follows is my opinion. I believe that Droegemeier (like many in the administration with hopes of maintaining a bureaucratic career in the new Biden Administration) has turned against the President for political purposes and professional gain. If Kelvin Droegemeier wishes to dispute this, let him… and let’s see who the new Science Advisor/OSTP Director is in the new (Biden) Administration.
I would also like to know if President Trump approved of his decision to fire Legates.
In the meantime, we have been told to remove links to the brochures, which is the prerogative of the OSTP Director since they have the White House seal on them.
But their content will live on elsewhere, as will Dr. Droegemeier’s decision.
Trump’s past Actions Should Slow Biden’s Radical Climate Agenda
Incoming President Joe Biden has promised to implement the most radical energy and climate agenda Americans have ever seen.
With the Democratic party having become an almost wholly owned subsidiary of the radical progressive environmental left while controlling both houses of Congress for at least the next two years and the White House for the next four years, Biden and his climate alarmist ilk have their best opportunity ever to impose the biggest government takeover of the economy since the Great Depression.
Fortunately, in the waning days of President Donald Trump’s term, his administration took a series of actions that will act as shock absorbers for the economic havoc Biden’s climate policies would wreak, complicating Biden’s attempt to impose a “Great Reset” to fight supposed climate change.
The Trump administration auctioned off oil and gas leases on public lands in Alaska (January) and California (December). These sales will complicate Biden’s ability to keep his promise of ending new oil and gas leases on federal land.
Although, to the federal government’s fiscal detriment, a Biden administration can refuse to offer more leases, it will be hard to prevent future production from leases the Trump administration recently approved, unless it can come up with the money to buy the leaseholders out of the leases. Federal regulatory agencies under Biden’s control can drag out the environmental review and permitting process, but as long as the companies comply with the relevant laws and guidelines, they should eventually be able to develop these lands.
Biden has vowed to take us back into the Paris climate agreement, from which Trump withdrew the United States, and he can do so. Yet, actions the Trump administration has adopted will make it harder to implement Paris-compliant regulations solely through executive action.
In December, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) determined current National Ambient Air Quality Standards for Ozone and Particulate Matter (PM) were protective of public health. EPA also finalized a rule requiring comprehensive benefit-cost analyses (BCA) be carried out for all future rules implemented under the 1970 Clean Air Act (CAA).
The Obama administration justified most of its climate policies based on claims they would save thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Almost all the supposed benefits of the regulations, however, resulted from counting benefits of restrictions on pollutants such as PM and ozone as if they were new benefits from limiting nontoxic carbon dioxide emissions.
Other purported benefits of carbon-dioxide restrictions flowed from including benefits to people in foreign countries while limiting the cost calculations to those accruing within the borders of the United States.
Under the EPA’s recently finalized BCA rule, all new CAA rules must be accompanied by a BCA that must include a statement discussing any industry, group, or geographic region that will be disproportionately negatively impacted by the rule.
Each new CAA-related regulation must contain a plain-language explanation of what welfare and public health benefits EPA believes the rule will deliver and what costs it will impose. BCAs, under the new procedures, will distinguish between benefits flowing directly from the rule and “co-benefits” resulting from other CAA requirements, and they will separate domestic benefits from any benefits the rule produces for people in other countries, reporting both.
Because Trump’s EPA affirmed and locked in the current ozone and PM standards for the next five years, the Biden administration should find it exceedingly difficult to claim “new” co-benefits from tighter restrictions on these two pollutants from any proposed carbon-dioxide restrictions.
In addition, in early January, Trump’s EPA finalized a rule to improve the transparency and public scrutiny of the science used to justify regulations.
Under the final transparency regulation, the Biden administration will be required to be more transparent than any administration in history concerning the science used to justify new climate regulations. The rule establishes requirements for the independent peer review of pivotal science. In addition, when proposing a significant regulatory action, the agency now must clearly identify the research used to inform the rule, specifying which studies it relied upon for rule-making.
The rule also requires EPA to consider studies for which the underlying dose-response data are available for independent validation and public examination.
Each of the policies described here was in the works long before any votes were cast in the 2020 presidential election. As such, the rules were intended to further Trump’s efforts to promote American greatness and energy independence, not to thwart Joe Biden from implementing his climate agenda.
In fact, these rules by themselves cannot stop Biden from attempting to impose whatever climate policies he thinks he can get away with. What these policies do, however, is make Biden’s efforts more transparent. Maximum transparency and thorough publicly justified analyses are good policies to follow in a democratic republic, regardless of the president or the party in power.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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17 January, 2021
Statistical politics: Prof. Mike Hulme on ‘politically charged’ climate baseline changes from 1961-1990 to 1991-2020
I had to laugh as soon as I read this. It changes nothing of course but it is going to look like it does. And Greenies will certainly pretend it does. It is just a statistical trick. Comments from distinguished meteorologists that appeared in my email summarize the matter well:
"The only temperature plot that isn't a slave to baseline choices is absolute temperature. Anomaly based temperature is a statistical construct relying on the assumptions and choices of the statistician."
"Trends in fact don't change with changes in baseline, but any time there is a step up, it will be used for political and propaganda purposes without ever acknowledging that it is a statistical up-tick, and not real."
"It doesn't change temperature trends over ANY time period. What it will do is make temperature anomalies cooler, since the new 30 year baseline is warmer than the old."
Hulme: "January 1, 2021, a new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) climatological standard normal came into effect. The ‘present-day’ climate will now formally be
represented by the meteorological statistics of the period 1991-2020, replacing those from 1961-1990.
National Meteorological Agencies in member states are instructed to issue new standard normals for observing stations and for associated climatological products. Climate will ‘change’, one might say, in an instant; today, the world’s climate has ‘suddenly’ become nearly 0.5°C warmer. It is somewhat equivalent to re-setting Universal Time or adjusting the exact definition of a metre." ...
"So, what is the significance of the move to a new 1991-2020 WMO normal in January 2021? On the one hand, it is a pragmatic move to redefine ‘present-day’ climate for operational applications to that of the most recent 30-year period. On the other hand, it puts into play a third climatic baseline. Already existing is the ‘pre-industrial’ climate of the late nineteenth century and the ‘historic’ climate’ of 1961-1990, the latter about 0.3°C warmer than the former. And now there is the new ‘present-day’ climate of 1991-2020, in turn about 0.5°C warmer than the ‘historic climate’ of 1961-1990." ...
"Combining a climatic tolerance of 2°C—or indeed 1.5°C—with a pre-industrial baseline yields a very different climate target than, say, using a 1986-2005 baseline, the period widely adopted by IPCC AR5 Working Group I as their analytical baseline. The choices of both baseline and tolerance are politically charged. They carry significant implications for historic liability for emissions (La Rovere et al., 2002), for policy design (Millar et al., 2017) and for possible reparations (Roberts & Huq, 2015)."
Environmental Extremism Is Creeping Into Every Domain of Public Policy
Many on the left continue to place their ideology of environmental extremism above all other considerations, including economic growth, individual freedom, and the welfare of low-income Americans.
This worldview ignores critical trade-offs and places environmental interests above even basic principles that have long served as a foundation of this nation. Further, this extreme environmental movement has crept into almost every issue area imaginable.
There are certainly environmental issues that need attention, but sensible environmental policy doesn’t address those issues in a vacuum without regard for other important concerns. Yet, this extreme movement acts in such a manner.
The following examples highlight how environmental extremism is skewing public policy:
Energy
To environmental extremists, it’s more important for the government to force radical changes to how we generate electricity and fuel our vehicles than it is to have reliable and affordable energy or to remove barriers to innovation.
It doesn’t matter how unrealistic their objectives are, or the fact that their climate change efforts would have no meaningful effect on global temperatures.
This virtue-signaling may make the extremists feel better about themselves, but it certainly won’t make low-income households feel better when they are disproportionately impacted by higher energy prices. Nor will it make Americans feel better to pay more of their hard-earned money for less reliable energy.
Food and Agriculture
Some extremists would prioritize their environmental agenda over efficiently producing safe and affordable food for Americans.
Instead of simply addressing specific environmental issues, some want to develop a national food policy, which is just another way of saying a federally centralized approach to dictate food and agricultural production, distribution, and consumption.
One of the primary goals of this envisioned national food and agricultural policy would be advancing environmental objectives. What is ignored in this movement is affordable food and consumer choice.
To see how such a philosophy would be applied in practice, the 2015 Dietary Guidelines process is instructive.
In developing its recommendations for the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services, the influential Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee decided it would take into account non-dietary issues, such as climate change and sustainability, and not focus solely on the nutritional health of Americans—which is the purpose of the guidelines. Fortunately, the agencies rejected this extremism.
Housing, Land Use, and Transportation
The extreme environmental agenda has long been entrenched in urban policy, primarily through “smart growth,” which is a pleasant name given to an unpleasant centralized planning philosophy.
Some of the key components of this philosophy are restricting development through land use regulations, which drives up housing prices, and limiting the use of cars by promoting higher density development and transit. The ability of Americans to afford their own homes and live where they would like is ignored.
Financial Regulation
Environmental extremists are currently pushing for Janet Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s nominee for treasury secretary, to take drastic action to address climate change, such as by forcing oil and gas companies to sell off fossil fuel assets.
This is yet another effort to create a government mandate for environmental, social, and governance risks to play a primary role in banking and investing.
These efforts are a backdoor way to try and accomplish environmental objectives and simultaneously to try and radically change the very purpose of American businesses, and as a result, the entire economy.
The Left Does Not Have a Monopoly on Environmentalism
Environmental policy should be debated in an open and transparent fashion. Using every issue imaginable as a pretext to push an environmental agenda is both not transparent and minimizes other critical concerns, from higher prices of basic needs to ensuring a stable food supply.
There should be a proactive environmental policy agenda that doesn’t ignore the costs and trade-offs of seeking to achieve positive environmental outcomes.
The left likes to claim a monopoly about caring for the environment. But nobody, either on the left or right, has such a monopoly.
Placing the environment over individual rights and freedom, and even humanity itself, as some extremists do, may make some feel better about their commitment to the environment, but they do so at the expense of the well-being of the American people.
Global cooling?
Europe was in the grip of snow chaos today as power went out in Sweden and Finland, footage emerged of looters ransacking a food truck in Spain and one person died as cars swerved off ice-covered roads in Germany.
In Madrid, footage showed dozens of looters emptying a lorry full of vegetables, yoghurts and milkshakes after it was stranded in the heavy snow in the Spanish capital, with detectives today trying to identify the culprits.
Parts of Sweden were buried under 24 inches of snow while 3,000 homes were without power in the country as well as 4,000 households in Finland, with temperatures set to drop as low as -40C in Arctic regions.
As snow and ice descended across the continent, Swiss traffic police reported 50 road accidents in the space of six hours in Bern while an 18-year-old motorist died after swerving off a road and hitting a tree in Germany.
The extreme cold is expected to get even worse in the coming days, as Switzerland warns of avalanches and Poland faces -20C (-4F) temperatures with Friday likely to be the worst of the cold snap - and Spain set to impose emergency measures after Storm Filomena swept through the country.
Forecasters in Britain have raised fears of a second 'Beast from the East' to match the dramatic weather in February 2018 when a 'sudden stratospheric warming' brought freezing winds from Siberia.
The bad weather arrived in Spain at the end of last week and has since spread across Europe, with temperatures expected to drop further before this weekend.
In Madrid, the lorry thieves made their move after the driver was forced to abandon his vehicle near a supermarket which he was unable to reach because of blizzards.
While the driver was offered a room for the night at a Good Samaritan's nearby home, he later returned to his lorry to find locals ransacking the trailer - stealing an estimated 20,000kg of vegetables, yoghurt and drinks.
Footage of the extraordinary scene showed one man running through the snow with his arms laden with stolen goods as half a dozen women nearby walked away carrying heavy boxes.
At the end of last week Madrid suffered its heaviest snowfall since 1971 and sub-freezing temperatures from Sunday onwards have continued to cause chaos. The temperature at Madrid's Barajas Airport dropped to -13C (8F) in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the lowest for 75 years.
Some drivers were trapped in their vehicles for more than 24 hours before they were rescued by an army unit called in to deal with the fallout from the extreme weather.
It came after at least three people died when Storm Filomena swept through the country at the weekend, and on Tuesday Barcelona officials confirmed another two people, both homeless, had been found dead, with signs suggesting they died of hypothermia.
Madrid politicians have called on Spanish government to declare the nation's capital a disaster zone, which Spanish media says is likely to happen.
In Sweden, the snow was still piling up today after 24 hours of snowfall in the north of the country - although forecasters said it was finally slowing down.
Electricity provider Eon said around 3,000 homes were without power, adding that the blackouts may go on longer than usual because it is too risky to send out maintenance workers.
The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute reported snow accumulation of up to 24 inches in the north of the country.
In neighbouring Finland, snow blanketed the south and warnings of poor road conditions have been issued across large swathes of the country.
About 4,000 people lost power in Finland, according to broadcaster YLE, which said temperatures would drop as low as -25C (-13F) in the south and -40C (-40F) in the Arctic.
In Germany, an 18-year-old man died at the roadside near the town of Süderholz last night after his vehicle swerved on the icy road, crashed into guardrails and finally into a tree.
Another passenger was badly injured in the crash - while several others were hurt in separate accidents around Germany, according to local media.
Americans Supposedly Just Voted For Only Electric Vehicles
The election of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and their ultra-progressive cabinet will hasten the death of the internal combustion engine in the United States, despite the nearly even party split in the House and Senate. They will just take their narrow victory as a license to implement all manner of decisions in the name of saving the planet. Or so we’re told. And maybe they’re right.
President-elect Biden has promised his $2-trillion “climate change” plan will include “rigorous new fuel economy standards aimed at ensuring that 100% of new sales for light- and medium-duty vehicles will be zero emission vehicles (ZEVs).” VP-elect Harris has called for beginning this ban by 2035, perhaps even sooner, if they can maintain their momentum for fundamentally transforming America.
Once the sale of new gasoline engine vehicles is banned, the only question remaining is, How long before driving such vehicles is also outlawed? Harris has promised that, under “my plan, by 2045 we will have basically zero emission vehicles only. 100% by 2045.”
Of course, that means zero emissions in the USA, assuming all electricity generation is also zero-emission for charging batteries – despite enormous emission increases in places where battery minerals are mined and processed, and batteries are manufactured (which likely won’t be in America).
To jumpstart the government-mandated transformation of the 99.5% of US vehicles that are not yet ZEVs, Biden ally Sen. Chuck Schumer plans to introduce legislation authorizing $454 billion “cash for clunkers” incentives or rebates, to help people replace gasoline-powered vehicles with super-expensive all-electric vehicles (EVs). Schumer’s plan also includes building a half million new EV battery charging stations, and replacing the entire US government vehicle fleet with EVs.
That’s almost one-quarter of Biden’s $2-trillion climate plan right there. The rest of the massive Green New Deal (GND) will likely cost at least Bernie Sanders’ $16-trillion scheme, if not far more.
Not since Henry Ford introduced the assembly line for his Model T in 1913 has America faced such a transportation transformation. The Big Switch to an all-EV fleet will bring equally massive changes to American society, create new winners and new losers, make owning any vehicle a near impossibility for poor and even middle class families, and shift the balance of world power away from countries that ensure “the free flow of oil at market prices” to those that mine GND minerals (mostly China and Russia).
The Big Switch has been in the works for years. As early as 2017, many countries had already announced dates for banning internal combustion engines (ICEs). Norway said its 2025 date was just a “suggestion,” but Germany, France and the United Kingdom set “firm” dates of 2040, while the Netherlands pushed the funeral to 2030. Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Portugal, South Korea and Spain also set dates, as did India – and several American states, such as (naturally) California.
Major automakers also pledged to end ICE vehicle production soon, even though 2017 polls show that only 30% of millennials (and much lower percentages of older drivers) were willing to “invest” in an electric vehicle. That’s even before considering studies by economist Tilak Doshi and others that even after 50,000 miles on the road, the typical EV has effectively emitted some 76% as much carbon dioxide as a gasoline-powered vehicle.
That’s because, as economist Bjorn Lomborg explained, EV batteries are the product of emission-intensive mining, mineral processing and manufacturing operations, and because the electricity for recharging the batteries often involves additional CO2 emissions.
The term “zero emission vehicles” is obviously a deliberate misnomer, since emissions are just transferred from wealthy Western countries to other nations, where they go steadily upward.
The Big Switch will create jobs in some sectors. But it will also cause major declines in jobs in the oil and gas industry, declining revenues for convenience stores that profit from gasoline sales, and significant manufacturing cost increases for petrochemicals, automobile and truck tires, roof shingles, plastics, pharmaceuticals and a host of other consumer products that rely on oil and gas for raw materials.
All that also means huge decreases in lease bonus, rent, royalty and tax revenues for fossil fuel states.
Electric vehicle mandates will also harm auto repair and insurance industries. An EV drivetrain has around 20 moving parts, compared with up to 2,000 for ICE vehicles. However, these parts tend to be more expensive and (at least in the near term) less readily available. This means EVs needing repairs or new parts will sit longer in garages and repair shops, and delays in parts availability will increase the overall cost of EV maintenance and ownership. Will insurers cover these added costs?
The Big Switch will also mandate major shifts in tax policy for local and state governments and the federal government, all of which rely heavily on gasoline taxes to pay for highway maintenance and repair. The 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal excise tax goes to the Highway Trust Fund that pays for much of this (with a separate small tax covering remediation of leaking underground fuel storage tanks).
As gasoline sales continue to decline, will Washington find a way to replace this lost revenue?
(A related question: As we enter the era of driverless vehicles, how will computer-driven cars handle all the proliferating, expanding and deepening potholes?)
Highways maintained by state and local gasoline taxes are already threatened by declining revenues, thanks to EVs, hybrids and higher-mileage ICE vehicles – and to the 2020 pandemic, which cut highway driving by 64% in April 2020 and significantly ever since. Some states are adding or increasing electric vehicle registration fees: Alabama’s is now $200 for EVs and $100 for plug-in hybrids (a quarter of which will fund EV charging stations), while California began imposing a $100 annual EV fee last July.
That’s not all. People today can purchase an older gasoline-powered vehicle that will pass inspection for well under $2,000. Batteries for these vehicles cost under $200, and many really older vehicles can be repaired by amateur mechanics. By contrast, replacing an EV battery can cost up to $6,000, making even used electric vehicles unaffordable for tens of millions of Americans in a nation where half of all vehicles are over ten years old.
Meanwhile, China, India and dozens of other countries are building thousands of new coal and gas-fired electrical generating plants – and putting millions of new ICE vehicles on their roads. So there will be no reduction in global emissions, which means all this pain and disruption in the USA will bring absolutely no benefits, even if CO2 does drive climate change.
Moreover, as recently as 2017, industry experts said EVs will likely reach only 25% of all vehicles worldwide by 2050. People in other countries don’t want and cannot afford them, either.
Equally significant, the Biden-Harris plan also includes a total phaseout of fossil fuels for producing electricity – along with the major increase in electricity needed to keep EVs moving. Even if Biden, Harris, Democrats and Greens accept nuclear energy as a “renewable” (or at least zero-emission) fuel, building enough new nuclear power plants will take decades.
But then, when did Moscow or Beijing ever meet all, most or even some objectives of their Five-Year Plans? Does anyone really think centralized government planning will work better here? More critically:
Will We the People be able to raise and discuss these issues in public forums? Will Republican Members of Congress have any meaningful opportunities to do so during committee hearings or floor debates?
Or will we all just be canceled, censored, silenced and browbeaten into submission in the newly progressive, intolerant and Divided States of America, amid more phony calls for unity and comity?
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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13 January, 2021
Green New Deal ideologies, fantasies and realities
Your life, living standards, country and planet will take a big hit under the Green New Deal
Paul Driessen
Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, AOC, the Democrat Party and US environmentalists are committed to making climate change, the Green New Deal, and replacement of fossil fuels with wind, solar, battery and biofuel power the centerpiece of their foreign and domestic policies.
They claim the transition would be easy, affordable, ecological, sustainable and painless. That’s ideology and fantasy, not reality.
Wind and sunshine are certainly clean and renewable. Harnessing them to power America is not.
The GND would hit American families, jobs, living standards and environmental quality hard. Western states would feel the brunt, because their fossil fuel rents, royalties, jobs and tax receipts would disappear, as drilling, fracking and coal mining on federal lands are closed down. Their open spaces, scenic vistas, wildlife habitats and wildlife would be desecrated by wind turbines, solar panels and transmission lines to serve distant urban voting blocs that dictate energy and land use decisions far beyond city lines.
Coal, oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids still provide 80% of US energy. In 2018, they generated 2.7 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity – which would have to be replaced under an all-encompassing Green New Deal costing tens of trillions of dollars.
Another 2.7 billion MWh worth of natural gas powered factories, emergency power systems, and furnaces, ovens, stoves and hot water heaters in restaurants, homes and other buildings. Cars, trucks, buses, semi-trailers, tractors and other vehicles consumed the equivalent of yet another 2 billion MWh.
Altogether, that’s 7.4 billion megawatt-hours per year that the GND would have to replace! On top of that we’d need at least another 150 million MWh of wind and solar generating capacity to charge batteries over and over to maintain just one week of nationwide backup power, to avoid blackouts.
The more we try to do so, the more we’d have to put turbines and panels in low quality wind and solar sites, where they’d generate electricity only 15-20% of the year, 80-85% below “nameplate capacity.”
Of course, we could replace all this fossil fuel energy with nuclear power. But radical greens inside and outside the soon-to-be Biden Administration detest and oppose nuclear as much as they do fossil fuels.
That means this transformation to an all-electric nation would require millions of onshore wind turbines, thousands of offshore turbines, billions of solar panels, millions of vehicle battery modules, billions of backup energy storage battery modules, thousands of miles of new transmission lines, millions of charging stations, tens of billions of tons of concrete, steel, copper, plastic, cobalt, rare earth elements and countless other materials – and digging up hundreds of billions of tons of overburden and ores!
If the United States and world could summon the will to mine, process and smelt enough metals and minerals – and manufacture, transport and install all those turbines, panels, batteries and transmission lines – the GND would require the greatest expansion of mining and manufacturing in human history.
But radical greens inside and outside of the Biden Administration detest and oppose US mining and manufacturing almost as much as they despise fossil fuels. That means we would have to go overseas for these essential metals and minerals – primarily to China and Russia, which have them within their boundaries or under their control in various African, Asian and Latin American nations.
They also have no reservation or hesitation about digging them up and processing them – without regard for child, slave or forced labor, workplace safety, air and water pollution, mined land reclamation or any other standards that we insist on in America. And it’s highly unlikely that Team Biden would demand that those countries implement such standards – or that it would refuse to import the metals, minerals and finished “green” technologies unless China, Russia and their foreign subsidiaries abide by our rules and regulations. The entire GND (and much more) would collapse without those unethical raw materials.
Moreover, nearly all this mining, processing and manufacturing would require gasoline, diesel, natural gas and coal in those foreign countries, because those operations cannot be conducted with wind, solar and battery power. The fossil fuel use and emissions would take place outside the United States, but would not go away. Indeed they would likely double or triple. The carbon dioxide emissions would increase global atmospheric levels and, Team Biden insists, worsen climate chaos and extreme weather.
In fact, most wind, solar and battery mining, processing and manufacturing already take place overseas, under few or nonexistent workplace safety, fair wage, child labor and environmental laws. Some 40,000 Congolese children labor alongside their parents, for a couple dollars a day, while exposed constantly to toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air, to meet today’s cobalt needs. Imagine the GND toll.
Replacing oil and gas for petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals and plastics would require importing those feed stocks, as well – or planting millions of acres in canola, soybean and other biofuel crops. The water, fertilizer, pesticide, tractor, harvester, processing and transportation requirements would be astronomical.
All that work, and all those industrial facilities, would impact hundreds of millions of acres of scenic areas, food crop lands and wildlife habitats. Raptors, other birds, bats, and forest, grassland and desert dwellers would suffer substantial losses or be driven into extinction.
Most of those impacts would also occur in Midwestern and Western America, far from the voting centers and suspicious voting patterns that put Team Biden in office. But as they say, out of sight, out of mind – in someone else’s backyards.
The GND would also mean ripping out perfectly good natural gas appliances, replacing them with electric models, installing rapid charging systems for vehicles, and upgrading household, neighborhood and national electrical systems to handle the extra loads – costing more trillions of dollars.
Families, factories, hospitals, schools and businesses accustomed to paying 7-11¢ per kilowatt-hour for electricity would pay 14-22¢ per kWh, as they already do in “green” US states – or even the 35¢ that families now pay in Germany. Once they use more than some arbitrary “maximum baseline” amount of electricity per month, they will pay closer to 45¢ per kWh, as families already do in California.
How companies will survive, how many jobs will disappear, how many families will join the ranks of those who must choose between heating and eating – is anyone’s guess.
GND technologies are nearly 100% dependent on metals and minerals from China, Russia, Ukraine, and Chinese companies in Africa and Latin America. Emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop underscore concerns that America’s foreign, defense and domestic policies would be held hostage, while certain well-connected politicians, families and wind, solar, battery and biofuel companies get rich.
All these issues require open, robust debate – which too many schools and universities, news and social media outlets, corporate and political leaders, and Antifa thugs and arsonists continue to censor and cancel. That censorship and silencing must end before any votes or other actions are taken on any Green New Deal. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening.
Big Media and Big Tech are conspiring with Democrats, Greens and other authoritarian elements to shut down any and all discussion by anyone who does not support their agendas. Others are moving to persecute and prosecute President Trump and anyone associated with his administration and policies.
As anger and frustration build among the increasingly disenfranchised, America and the world could be heading into a frightening future indeed.
Via email
Biden’s Climate Appointments and the Potential Disruption to the Global Fossil Fuel Market
With President-elect Joe Biden about to assume office, he will soon roll out his “clean energy” plan, aimed at reducing America’s dependence on fossil fuels.
But such a move will cause ripples beyond America’s borders. It will likely impact key developing countries that have become increasingly reliant on fossil fuel imports from the booming U.S. oil and gas industry.
Biden’s Clean Energy Plan
In December 2020, Joe Biden appointed his climate team, which included a person who served under the Obama administration.
Among the list of climate nominees and appointees is Gina McCarthy, who spearheaded the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which mandated emission reduction in America’s power plants and set in motion the country’s alignment with the Paris Climate Agreement.
According to Biden’s official page, McCarthy will now serve as the first-ever National Climate Advisor at the newly envisioned White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy.
McCarthy currently serves as president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental lobbying group that is actively seeking to reduce methane emission from the oil and gas industry and limit the emission of carbon dioxide from power plants. Her appointment is a clear signal as to the direction the Biden administration is headed when it comes to the oil and gas sector.
Though Biden has not fully embraced the more radical calls for emission reductions—like the Green New Deal—his clean energy plan will still cause a disruption in the fossil fuel industry, including the booming natural gas industry.
Risking US Energy Security and Ripples Beyond Borders
The disruptions could threaten America’s energy independence. The country’s emergence as the undisputed energy powerhouse during the last decade can be credited solely to the booming oil and gas industry.
And it's not only other nations that will be affected. Importers of U.S. oil and gas also benefited from fossil-friendly policy.
To the extent that Biden’s anti-fossil fuel stance prevails in actual policy, it will diminish domestic production and so reduce or eliminate America’s energy surplus and energy independence.
Despite his anti-fossil stance, Barack Obama actually aided the development of the U.S. natural gas industry. The Trump administration furthered the policy. Since 2005, the U.S import of fossil fuels has fallen dramatically.
The U.S. is the world’s biggest producer of oil (19.47 million barrels per day in 2019, which accounted for nearly a fifth of the global production). It has held the top spot for the past six years. In 2019, after 70 years as a net importer, the U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum.
Developing countries like India, where the fossil fuel demand is extremely high and 80 percent of oil consumption is met through imports, saw a significant increase in import of natural gas and oil from the U.S. In fact, India began reducing its imports from its traditional trade partners like Iran and preferred imports from the U.S. Over in the Americas, Mexico, Canada, and Colombia rely heavily on U.S. oil supply.
But all these are likely to change if Biden implements his Clean Energy Plans. If oil and gas production are disrupted, the U.S. will cease to be a net exporter and will likely increase its oil imports from the Middle East, Canada, and Mexico. Countries like India will then have to increase their dependency on oil from volatile markets like Iran, threatening global security that U.S. oil and gas supremacy would otherwise have ensured.
If Biden walks the talk on his promise to reduce domestic fossil fuel production, the U.S. will lose its energy independence, and developing countries like India and Mexico will lose reliable oil and gas supply from a free market economy like the United States.
The Folly of Renewable Energy
The West needs to go nuclear
If you judge by the images used to illustrate reports about energy, the world now runs mainly on wind and solar power. It comes as a shock to look up the numbers. In 2019 wind and solar between them supplied just 1.5 percent of the world’s energy consumption. Hydro supplied 2.6 percent, nuclear 1.7 percent, and all the rest — 94 percent — came from burning things: coal, oil, gas, wood, and biofuels.
As Mark Twain might say, reports of an energy transition away from combustion as a source of energy are greatly exaggerated. True, carbon-dioxide emissions are rising more slowly than energy consumption, but that is mainly because gas is displacing coal. The rise of renewables has so far not even compensated for the recent decline of nuclear — a decline renewables have contributed to causing because intermittent renewable energy hits the profitability of nuclear power hardest. Nuclear cannot be easily switched on and off.
So the thermodynamic explanation of the world economy remains the same as it has since the industrial revolution liberated us from reliance mainly on the (renewable) muscles of people, horses, and oxen or the vagaries of (renewable) trade winds. We use the heat of flames to do useful things, such as move stuff around, light and heat our homes, manufacture goods, grow crops with tractors, power the Internet.
The main change in recent years has been that energy is increasingly centrally planned. Instead of a market deciding between fuels, the government picks favorites to subsidize, and then subsidizes the old ones, too, when it finds it has poisoned the market against them. Throughout the Western world energy markets are coerced. The development pipeline, corporate rhetoric, and fuel-market shares are all determined by policy.
This has some perverse consequences. Lobbied by firms such as General Electric, Sylvania, and Philips, governments all over the world forced consumers to give up incandescent light bulbs in favor of expensive compact fluorescent bulbs, ostensibly to save energy. All this achieved was a delay in the voluntary replacement of both by a much more efficient, safe, and reliable form of lighting: LEDs.
The world needs energy innovation if it is to reduce the use of fossil fuels, as almost every politician now demands. But things such as electric cars merely displace the flame from engine to power station. Whether that reduces emissions at all depends on how much of the electricity comes from coal, gas or other sources, on how much energy is used to make the battery, and how long the battery lasts. Under even the most optimistic assumptions, the emissions reductions are small. And although the efficiency of energy consumption is improving, it cannot solve the problem. First, many people in developing countries are still without electricity or transport fuel. Energy demand will increase as their incomes grow. Second, as the economist William Stanley Jevons pointed out in 1865, if you make coal (or light or flight) cheaper, people use more of it. Efficiency gains increase demand.
It is in the generation, not the consumption, of energy that innovation is needed. Here there is another obstacle. History shows that you cannot demand a particular innovation and expect it to turn up, however generous the incentives you offer. If you could, then the supersonic planes, routine space travel, and personal jetpacks we were promised in the 1950s would have long since arrived. Instead we have been using 747s for 50 years: We ran out of big innovations in transport.
For almost as long we have been asking inventors to find a way of generating cheap, reliable, and safe energy without producing carbon-dioxide. Frankly, it is now clear that renewables cannot do it. They tap low-density energy sources, so they need a lot of space. No amount of innovation will alter that constraint. There are not enough rivers to dam, tidal basins to barrage, or hills to festoon with wind turbines, at least not without destroying too much nature. It takes 150 tons of coal to make a wind turbine, and two tons of rare-earth metals. (Governments and market hucksters insist that wind energy is now cheap. Audited accounts of the firms that build wind farms reveal that this is untrue.)
There is enough desert space for the solar panels we would need — in the Sahara mainly — but the cost of getting it to where the energy is used, and storing it for use during the night or turning it into jet fuel, remains astronomical, however fast the cost of solar panels themselves falls. As for waves, or ground-source heat pumps, or geothermal energy, they remain niche opportunities with little prospect of denting demand for oil and gas.
Nuclear power could supply all our needs from a comparatively tiny footprint of land and steel, but we have made innovation in nuclear all but impossible by massively increasing the cost and time required to license a new design. So we stick with an old and inefficient design that uses water coolant and solid fuel, while distorted energy markets leave the nuclear industry begging for subsidies equivalent to those received by the renewables industry. Molten-salt reactors will one day be more efficient, safer, and cheaper, but only if there is a revolution in regulation as much as one in technology. Keep your eye on Canada, which is trying to achieve this.
Fusion energy is another innovation we promised but failed to deliver. In theory a small quantity of heavy water (containing deuterium) and lithium (to make tritium) could power a town, if the atoms could be induced to fuse. It works in H-bombs. But doing this in a controlled way has proved elusive for half a century. There is renewed hope, however, that low-temperature superconductors and “spherical tokamak” designs may yet crack the problem of controlled fusion and that by 2040 we will have abundant, cheap, reliable energy on tap.
If that were to happen, through molten-salt fission or through fusion, imagine what we could do. We could synthesize fuel for transport, dismantle wind turbines and oil pipelines, stop burning trees in power stations, desalinate enough water to supply the human race without touching wild rivers, and suck carbon-dioxide out of the air. Above all, we could raise the standard of living of the poorest on the planet. It is surely worth a try.
Meanwhile, here is a worrying trend. Energy consumption in the West is stalling and in some sectors, such as electricity, falling sharply. No one really believes that efficiency accounts for all of that. What is going on?
In effect, the West has outsourced its energy consumption to China. Xi Jinping’s announcement in September that China will be carbon-neutral by 2060 was merely a cheap headline-grabber. In the same speech he announced that China’s emissions will rise until 2030 and, implicitly, remain high for quite some time thereafter. It’s 30 years from 2030 to 2060. That was news.
China will hoover up and employ as much of the world’s fossil fuels as possible in the next few decades. Naïve divestment campaigns will simply play into Chinese hands. If Harvard sells its fossil investments, someone will buy them. Who?
With the wealth created from cheap coal, oil, and gas, China will then head for nuclear. Along with Russia, China has been involved in two-thirds of global nuclear development in the last 20 years. The future of energy thus depends on whether the West wakes up to the need to do the same or persists in its renewables folly until it is too late to change course.
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-folly-of-renewable-energy/
China loves coal far more than windWe have all heard about China building a lot of coal plants, but the central role coal plays in their booming economy is amazing. It is a big reason they are the world’s leading manufacturer. China generates almost twice as much electricity as the U.S. they generate more from cheap coal than we do from all sources. This makes them very competitive industrially.
China has some wind power but they are smart enough not to let it get in their way (unlike us). Renewables are driving our power costs through the roof, while China wisely wallows in cheap juice.
By way of scale, not too long ago the U.S. burned about a billion tons of coal a year to make electricity. We generated about 2,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) of electricity from coal, roughly half of our total 4,000 GWh. The foolish war on coal has reduced that to around 600 million tons, with further reductions scheduled.
By a strange coincidence, just the time when coal use switched from growing to shrinking, about 12 years ago, America’s use of electric power also stopped growing. It has remained at about 4,000 GWh ever since. Perhaps new energy intensive industrial developments were all switched from America to China in anticipation of the US juice price increases that followed.
China on the other hand now generates a whopping 7,500 GWh of electricity, or just under twice what America does. That’s right, they produce almost twice as much power as we do.
Even worse, less than 25% of our electricity goes for industrial uses, while a reported 70% of China’s juice use is industrial. That is roughly 1,000 GWh in America versus 5,000 in China, or five times as much industrial use of electricity. Small wonder that China makes most of the products we use (and pay them for).
Moreover, most of China’s vast power generation is from coal. Of their 7,500 GWh just about 5,000 GWh, or fully two thirds, is powered by cheap coal. By coincidence they equals their entire industrial use. Or maybe it is not a coincidence; it may be how they remain so competitive in the global economy.
In any case China is generating more electricity with coal than America is from all sources combined. That is a lot of coal juice. China’s booming economy basically runs on coal.
When it comes to wind power the story is very different. China does have some, in fact they produce about 400 GWH from wind, or around 5% of the total. This may be just a token amount, although it is growing, as are all forms of power generation.
What is most interesting is the reported “capacity factor” for wind power. The capacity factor (CF) is the ratio of how much power is produced in a year to how much could be produced if the generators ran full power all the time. The latter is called nameplate capacity, so CF equals power produced divided by nameplate, expressed as a percentage.
Because wind is intermittent its CF is pretty low, typically 30 to 35% in the U.S. But China reports a wind CF of less than 20%! The reason is an important part of China’s economic success. Unlike us, they wisely do not curtail coal fired power production just to make room for wind power, when the wind happens to be blowing.
So China uses the wind power if they need it, but not otherwise. We on the other hand actually throttle back our coal and gas fired power plants, when wind power is there, which is really stupid.
China is generating almost twice as much electricity as America and two thirds of that juice is coming from coal. Wind is a token generator at 5% and is not allowed to interfere with coal power. Anyone who thinks China is going to phase out coal for wind is simply green dreaming. Coal is central to China’s power.
https://www.cfact.org/2021/01/11/china-loves-coal-far-more-than-wind/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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11 January, 2021
Hundreds of Pacific Islands are getting bigger despite global warming
Global warming postponed. Greenies predicted the opposite of this
New research says hundreds of islands in the Pacific are growing in land size, even as climate change-related sea level rises threaten the region.
The scientists used satellite images of islands as well as on-the-ground analysis to track the changes.
Coastal geomorphologist Dr Paul Kench said coral reef sediment was responsible for building up the islands.
"All the islands that we're looking at, and the atoll systems, comprise predominantly of the broken up corals, shells and skeletons of organisms on the coral reef, which waves then sweep up and deposit on the island," he said.
Dr Kench said in areas where coral reefs were healthy, enough sediment was being produced to cause islands to grow. "The majority of islands in each of those nations has either got larger or stayed very similar in size," he said.
"So, you know, one of the remarkable takeaways of the work is that these islands are actually quite dynamic in a physical sense."
Healthy coral reefs key to growth
Coastal erosion from rising sea level is considered a major threat to many Pacific communities, with some already watching shorelines recede.
Dr Kench said about 10 per cent of islands captured in the study had gotten smaller in size.
He said a better understanding of which islands are growing and which are eroding could help Pacific nations adapt to climate change.
"That gives the island nations some power to think about adaptation strategies, about where do you focus further development, and you would perhaps choose those islands which we can demonstrate are actually growing in size," he said.
"So we think it's affording some different sort of strategies and opportunities for islands to think about as they're contemplating an uncertain future."
Dr Kench said there was more work to be done in understanding other factors influencing the growth or reduction of Pacific islands.
"While we can look at sites that are healthy, and the sediment production that's creating the islands is still taking place, there has to be some concerns at those locations where the reefs are in poor condition," he said.
"So we're not suggesting here by any stretch of the imagination that islands have nothing to worry about.
"I guess one of the messages from the work that we're doing is that the outcome and the prognosis for islands is going to vary quite markedly from one site to the other."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-08/why-are-hundreds-of-pacific-islands-getting-bigger/13038430
EPA’s Wheeler announces science transparency rule, slams reportersIn a live stream event hosted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler outlined a new science transparency rule being implemented at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Known officially as the not-so-brief “Strengthening Transparency in Pivotal Science Underlying Significant Regulatory Actions and Influential Scientific Information” rule, it requires researchers to divulge the processes and data by which they draw their conclusions and findings, according to The Washington Post.
“The American public deserves to know which studies we are using to craft our regulations, and which of those studies are key, or pivotal, to our decisions,” Wheeler said in his opening remarks. “And to the extent possible, that data should be available for the public to see.”
Not everyone is seeing it Wheeler’s way, however.
Left-leaning environmental groups claim the rule will make it harder for EPA to craft regulations and use studies, as many studies contain confidential or personal information that is prohibited from being disclosed.
Yet during the livestream, Wheeler brushed off those concerns, saying that is not an issue in this final rule.
“That data – those studies, can still be used. PPI (Protected Personal Information) data does not need to be disclosed,” Wheeler said in response to a question on that subject.
Throughout the livestream, Wheeler expressed frustration with incorrect information and reporting on the rule.
“But as far as trying to explain this to the public, it’s very difficult to break through at times, with the media, particularly when you have environmental activists masquerading as environmental reporters,” Wheeler said, adding their “agenda is not to present the truth, at times.”
Myron Ebell, Director of Energy and Environment at CEI, addressed the concerns of some conservative groups who felt the rule did not go far enough in limiting what has come to be known as “secret science” in environmental circles.
“For people who are looking for a magic bullet to solve the crisis of scientific integrity again, and…end the irreproducibility crisis, for those people, this rule may be a disappointment,” Ebell said. “But what I think what we need to understand is, it’s an incremental step forward…”
The rule is unlikely to be kept under the Biden administration. Being that the rule has been finalized, however, it may take some time for the incoming administration to go through the formal process needed to officially repeal the new rule.
https://www.cfact.org/2021/01/06/epas-wheeler-announces-science-transparency-rule-slams-reporters/
Missouri Conservation Department Moves to Open the State to Regulated Black Bear HuntingIn the waning days of 2020, the Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC), the agency established by law to conserve, control, manage, restore, and regulate of the fish, forest, and wildlife resources of the state, took the penultimate step toward approving limited black bear hunting in the state.
Based on population data which determined Missouri’s black bear population has been growing by 9 percent a year, leading to an increase in nuisance bear complaints, and additional data suggesting the state’s bear population is expected to double in less than 10 years, Missouri’s Conservation Commission approved MDC’s proposal to open portions of the state to limited black bear hunting in October 2021.
If the bear hunt does take place, it would be the first time black bears were hunted legally in the state in more than 90 years.
Hunting an ‘Essential Part of Population Management’
With Missouri’s growing bear population in an increasingly urbanized state, hunting is a critical tool to maintain bear and prey populations at sustainable levels while reducing the chance for bear/human conflicts, Laura Conlee, a furbearer biologist for MDC, told Fox News.
“A bear-hunting season in our state will provide opportunities for Missourians to participate in the sustainable harvest of this valuable wildlife species,” said Conlee. “As our black bear population continues to grow, a highly regulated hunting season will be an essential part of population management in the future.
The timing and length of the season, allowed hunting methods, and a limited permit allocation coupled with a limited harvest quota will ensure a sustainable harvest of our growing bear population,” Conlee said.
Under MDC’s proposal, the state’s bear hunt would begin on third Monday in October, ending after 10 days, or, for each of the state’s three bear management zone, until a specific quota is reached, whichever comes first. Hunter’s would be allowed to take bears using either firearms or bows. Hunting over bait or with dogs would be disallowed for the present time.
The final step before Missouri’s legal bear hunt can take place is for Conservation Commissioners to approve MDC’s suggested harvest quotas and permit limits, which the agency plans to submit to the commissioners in the spring.
Minneapolis Star Tribune Shamed on Yet Another Fake Coffee Climate Crisis
Just two days after Climate Realism debunked recently published false claims in the Minneapolis Star Tribune that climate change is “devastating” Central American coffee production, scientific evidence debunks another coffee crisis prediction the Star Tribune published in 2012.
In a 2012 article titled, “The last drop? Climate change threatens Arabica coffee crop,” the Star Tribune asserts, “Climate change could severely reduce the areas suitable for wild Arabica coffee before the end of the century.”
The article claims that Arabica is an especially important coffee bean because of its genetic diversity. According to the Star Tribune, Arabica beans also “lack the flexibility to cope with climate change.”
Eight years later, we can look at how these doomy claims are holding up. The answer is, Arabica beans are holding up just fine, while claims of doom and gloom are not holding up well at all.
The data website Statista reports that in every year since the Star Tribune’s 2012 prediction of declining Arabica production, production has instead exceeded the 2012 crop. This is quite amazing, considering that the 2012 crop was the third largest crop on record up to that time.
Arabica production is continuing a longstanding and rapidly upward trend. The 2020-2021 crop is forecast to be 20 percent higher than the 2012 crop. That is remarkable growth for less than a decade in time.
The Star Tribune made a second noteworthy prediction in the 2012 article that we can also review. The Star Tribune claimed climate change threatens all coffee varieties, in addition to Arabica. The Star Tribune asserted, “a changing climate could damage global production of coffee – the world’s second most traded commodity after oil.”
Statista documents even more impressive increases in total coffee bean production than has been the case regarding Arabica. The crop data show that total coffee production is setting new records virtually every year, with the 2020-2021 crop forecast to set yet another new record.
The reason the Minneapolis Star Tribune and other sock puppets of the climate industrial complex rarely publish actual data and instead couch their asserted crisis in subjective predictions rather than measurable real-world facts is that real-world facts and data consistently undermine the notion of an existing or imminent climate crisis. Coffee bean production, just like nearly every other measurable climate factor or impact, is enjoying beneficial improvement for the better as the Earth modestly warms.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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9 January, 2021
Temperature stasis: 2020 ties with 2016 as world's hottest year on record
But CO2 levels have been rising relentlessly. If global warming theory were right, 2020 should have been hotter
Last year tied with 2016 as the world's warmest on record, rounding off the hottest decade globally as the impacts of climate change intensified, the European Union's earth observation program says.
After an exceptionally warm autumn and winter in Europe, the continent experienced its hottest year on record in 2020, while the Arctic suffered extreme heat and atmospheric concentrations of planet-warming carbon dioxide continued to rise.
Scientists said the latest data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service underscored the need for countries and corporations to slash greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough to bring within reach the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to avoid catastrophic climate change.
"The extraordinary climate events of 2020 and the data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service show us that we have no time to lose," said Matthias Petschke, director for space in the European Commission, the EU's executive arm.
The bloc's space programs include the Copernicus earth observation satellites.
In 2020, temperatures globally were an average of 1.25 degrees Celsius higher than in pre-industrial times, Copernicus said.
Last year also saw the highest temperature ever reliably recorded, when in August a California heatwave pushed the temperature at Death Valley in the Mojave Desert up to 54.4C.
The Arctic and northern Siberia continued to warm more quickly than the planet as a whole in 2020, with temperatures in parts of these regions averaging more than 6C above a 30-year average used as a baseline, Copernicus said.
In 2021, let’s challenge green tyranny
Environmentalism has become a key weapon in the fight to restore technocratic rule.
At the start of the year, the world’s plutocrats gathered alongside their political allies in Davos for the World Economic Forum, and listened excitedly while special guest Greta Thunberg berated them for not going far enough in the fight to save the planet. It was a telling moment, capturing just how central environmentalism – especially today’s self-flagellating, end-of-days version – now is to the worldview of the West’s political, business and cultural elites.
It has been quite the rise. For much of environmentalism’s history, it was largely on the fringes of elite discourse, not at the centre. It was the counter-enlightenment preserve of landed aristocrats, disillusioned Tories (the origins of the Green Party), and the New Left. Not the mission statement of prime ministers, multinationals and the very institutions of globalist rule, from the EU to the UN.
But that is what it has become in recent decades: the hug-a-husky purpose of governments; the corporate social responsibility of international conglomerates; the cause to unite nations.
Two key factors account for its ascendency: the long-standing demoralisation of capitalism, and the emergence of essentially technocratic governments after the end of the Cold War. In the anti-modern narrative of environmentalism, these managerial elites found their raison d’etre: to manage the risks and the threats produced by industrial modernity. It even provided them with an ultimate aim: to manage us out of environmental disaster.
But environmentalism has always been more than just a story appended to ‘third way’ governing. It is itself essentially technocratic. It invests authority in ‘the science’ and the expert at the expense of the demos.
And it did so successfully until 2016. Until Brexit and Trump. Until, that is, so many across the West, disenfranchised for so long under this technocratic consensus, seized back some degree of control.
And this has had a tremendous effect on environmentalism. Ever since 2016, the tone has become shriller, the threat supposedly more urgent, the narrative more apocalyptic. Climate change is now a climate emergency. Al Gore’s merely inconvenient truth is now XR’s truth that must be told. And the future towards which we are forever tipping is catastrophic.
This is because environmentalism is no longer the handmaiden of technocratic rule; it is now a weapon in the fight to restore technocratic rule. Hence the presentation of climate change is now so aggressive, so hyperbolic, so threatening. Because it is being used to fight populism, frighten citizens back into obeisance and roll back the democratic gains of recent years. And that is what we have witnessed over the past 12 months, from the wilfully apocalyptic framing of Australia’s wildfires in Janaury through to the UN secretary general’s December demand that all nations declare a climate emergency: namely, the further elite turbocharging of environmentalism as a justification for the restoration of the pre-2016 consensus.
Admittedly, some environmentalists have been concerned that climate change would be pushed down the political agenda by Covid this year, just as it was after 2008 by the financial crisis. After all, some of XR’s planned stunts were shelved and the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) was postponed.
They needn’t have worried. The pandemic emergency has been treated as a climate emergency in miniature. A dress rehearsal, even. This is because it has largely been interpreted through the same risk-conscious prism as broader environmental problems have. Thus Covid has been conjured up as a by-product of baleful modernity, a symptom of our unsustainable lifestyles, a message from vengeful Gaia. As early as March, tireless green twerp George Monbiot was celebrating Covid as ‘nature’s wake-up call to complacent civilisation’. Prince Harry agreed, declaring ‘it’s almost as though Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms for bad behaviour, to really take a moment and think about what we’ve done’.
What’s more, Covid, like climate change in general, has also been relentlessly mobilised on behalf of the technocratic restoration against the populist revolt. Hence the death tolls in Britain and America have been deliberately attributed to their populist governments – proof, so the restorationist attack goes, that not listening to the experts, not heeding the warnings of science, is a fatal mistake. And vice versa. Listening to the science and locking down is proof of the merits of technocracy and the wisdom of its restoration. As Greta Thunberg put it, ‘It is possible to treat a crisis like a crisis, it is possible to put people’s health above economic interests, and it is possible to listen to the science’.
The implication of the pandemic is as clear to Thunberg as it is to the political, media and business elites who treat her as their outsourced conscience: climate alarmism builds on the pandemic, and further justifies the technocratic restoration. In other words, the short-term expert-led governance during the pandemic emergency now justifies the restoration of long-term expert-led governance during the climate emergency. And to hell with freedom, democracy and the rest of it.
A UN economist, Mariana Mazzucato, has even mooted the possibility of a ‘climate lockdown’, in which governments would limit car use, ban red-meat consumption, and shut down fossil-fuel companies.
While that green dream remains just that, we’re already seeing the fruits of this green restoration of the old technocratic order. Throughout the developed world, policies and long-term economic plans are now being drawn up according to the expert-defined imperatives of the climate emergency. A green future, it seems, is one colonised by today’s technocratic elites.
So US president-elect Joe Biden, who has spent the year wielding the ‘existential threat’ of climate change as a stick with which to beat Trump voters, has promised to sign the US back up to the Paris Climate Agreement and create carbon-free electricity by 2035. And Ursula von der Leyen, the unelected head of the European Commission, has, as part of her Green New Deal, pledged ‘to rebuild our economies differently and make them more resilient’. Even Boris Johnson, knocked off his populist course by the pandemic and never possessing the most adamantine of backbones, has announced a ‘green industrial revolution’.
Of course, there will be no democratic debate about the nature of all this green-washed, post-Covid rebuild. That is being decided elsewhere, by experts, in the name of sustainability. And that should worry us. At the end of this wretched year, the green restoration of the managerial order is in full swing. The political response should be the same in the coming months as it was four years ago: we need more democracy, not less.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/12/31/in-2021-lets-challenge-green-tyranny/
Here's Proof the Pentagon Must Get Out of the 'Climate Change' RacketFor many years now, the Pentagon has become infiltrated by liberals who want to turn the military into a division of the Environmental Protection Agency. In fact, the Defense Department inspector general’s annual report warns that “climate change” is a long-term threat to military installations and operations.
“Rising sea levels, extreme weather such as flooding, wildfires, or hurricanes, and a melting Arctic will require the DoD to consider the security, readiness, and financial implications of these non?traditional threats,” the report reads. Also, “droughts, water scarcity, and other natural resource limitations” brought on by climate change “offer opportunities for adversaries, competitors, and violent extremist organizations to exert their influence in pursuit of their goals.”
Apparently, climate change hurts us, but not our enemies?
In 2019, a Pentagon report claimed that climate change could cause our military to “collapse” in twenty years.
Oh, really?
I think it’s about time to get the Pentagon out of the business of radical environmentalism.
Why? Because the Pentagon is actually really bad at it. Really bad.
Back in 2004, a secret Pentagon report that was leaked to the media claimed that by 2020, major European cities would have succumbed to rising sea levels and Britain would be experiencing a “Siberian” climate. The report also predicted that nuclear conflict, widespread droughts, and famine would erupt worldwide. The report argued that climate change was a bigger threat than terrorism because climate change would bring the entire world to the edge of anarchy.
“Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,” the Pentagon report concluded. “Once again, warfare would define human life.”
None of it happened.
“The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists,” predicted The Guardian, “Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.”
Who’s humiliated now?
Despite the epic fail of the Pentagon to accurately predict the impact of climate change, years of fearmongering still have the Left believing that our military should be more focused on environmentalism than on defending the country from foreign adversaries. With Joe Biden expected to take office in a few weeks, the push to make the military a force against climate change will be stronger than ever. Ray Mabus, the former Secretary of the Navy under Barack Obama, recently wrote an editorial in TIME arguing that under Biden, the United States military must “lead the way” on climate change.
I want the military to focus on what it does best, not what the radical left wants it to do.
Politicians have turned a blind eye to the problems that "renewable" energy brings with it
Australia has "just months" to fix major problems with the electricity market, according to a blistering assessment of the state of the energy sector.
Chair of the Energy Security Board, Dr Kerry Schott, said "years of insufficient action" and "band-aid solutions" have characterised Australia's response to growth of renewable energy generation.
She warned the market needed a rapid redesign to ensure the lights stay on.
Her comments came as the Energy Security Board (ESB) released its latest Health of the National Electricity Market report.
The ESB was established by the energy arm of the Council of Australian Governments to "support the transition of Australian energy markets and advance the long-term interests of consumers".
It has oversight of energy reliability, security and affordability.
The report found that security of electricity supply "remains the most concerning issue" for the National Electricity Market (NEM), which includes all states and territories except Western Australia and the Northern Territory.
"Increasing penetration of variable renewable energy resources ... is making it more difficult to maintain security," the report said.
"To manage security issues, AEMO (Australian Energy Market Operator) has had to intervene in the market far more than in earlier years."
AEMO issued more than 250 directions in 2019-20, compared to 158 the previous year.
A direction is when some power generators are asked to increase or decrease their output to shore up electricity supply.
The report welcomed the growth of renewable energy, citing its success in "substantially" lowering emissions, with the electricity sector on track to cut emissions by more than 50 per cent by 2030 based on 2005 levels.
But in an accompanying statement, Dr Schott warned the failure of regulation to keep pace has become a critical issue.
"The technology and renewables-driven transformation of our energy market is no longer an if or when proposition. It is here and now," she said. "The pace of change is accelerating. Band-aid solutions are no longer viable.
"The current set of systems, tools, market arrangements and regulatory frameworks is no longer entirely fit for purpose.
"This pace of change means there are now just months to finalise the redesign of the electricity marketplace so consumers can reap the benefits of this change."
State governments have been implementing their own renewable energy policies, given the failure of successive energy and emissions reductions policies at the Commonwealth level.
Dr Schott said the states' actions are understandable given "years of insufficient action" across the sector, but warns the "diminishing patience of governments" could undermine the NEM.
She also noted the some players in the electricity sector were resistant to change.
The NEM and power generators are struggling to come up with a coherent plan "to keep the lights on" due to policy and pricing limitations, according to a major independent study.
"Some seem to be more interested in protecting the status quo or perhaps their own interests rather than addressing challenges in the long-term interests of the community," Dr Schott said.
Federal Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor agreed that taking action now was critical to minimise disruptions. "The NEM needs to adapt to address risks to reliability, security and affordability, particularly sudden, unexpected exits of thermal [coal] generators," he said.
"We need a coordinated approach to market design to keep the lights on and costs down."
The ESB is currently examining options to improve electricity supply security, including a nationally consistent approach for state and federal governments to underwrite development of "firming" technology, such as pumped hydro and gas plants.
Improving the Retailer Reliability Obligation, introduced by the Federal Government in 2019, is also on the cards, given it has been widely criticised in the sector as being cumbersome and ineffective.
But Mr Taylor pointed to financial support for specific projects as evidence of action to address the problems highlighted by the ESB.
"We've made many announcements and put in place a range of initiatives in the last two, three years that are addressing exactly this, whether it is underwriting new generation, Battery of the Nation [or] Snowy 2.0."
Professor Ken Baldwin from the ANU's Energy Change Institute told the ABC an integrated energy and emissions reduction policy is what is needed.
"If there was a consistent policy going forward which had targets milestoned at every decade for the amount of emissions reduction we need to achieve in the electricity sector, that would help," he said.
"The government has a role to play in central planning for transmission, but when it comes to the generation side of things, then leaving the market to respond to clear signals form government over time for our emissions reduction strategy is the most efficient way to proceed."
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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3 January, 2021
Major climate change measures included in Covid aid bill
The Covid-19 relief bill that President Donald Trump signed on Sunday includes legislation to fund investments in clean energy technologies and regulate climate-warming greenhouse gases — a step that offers some hope for the bigger climate ambitions of President-elect Joe Biden.
The legislation, as part of the Omnibus Appropriations Bill that was included within the Covid relief deal, authorizes $35 billion in spending over the next five years on solar, wind and other clean power sources. It also includes new regulations aimed at phasing out a planet-warming coolant called hydrofluorocarbon that is often used in refrigerators and air conditioners.
"This is the most significant piece of climate and energy legislation enacted by Congress in at least a decade," said Dan Lashof, director of the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based global research nonprofit.
The climate policy within the 5,593-page bill attracted support from prominent members of both parties in Congress.
"Republicans and Democrats are working together to protect the environment through innovation," Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, told The Associated Press.
"These measures will protect our air while keeping costs down for the American people,? he added.
The funding comes ahead of what is expected to be a significant climate push from Biden, who campaigned on a $2 trillion plan to modernize the U.S. energy system and achieve a 100 percent clean electricity standard by 2035. Biden has also said he plans to have the U.S. re-enter the Paris climate accord.
And while Biden does have some Republican allies in his fight against climate change, pushing through significant legislation is expected to be challenging. Gina McCarthy, the former Environmental Protection Agency chief who Biden has tapped to lead his climate efforts, said in an interview that Biden will have options as president if Congress resists his efforts.
"I know people are worried about what we can do legislatively, but there's so much that you can do with executive authority," McCarthy said. "It's the federal government that decides how it is going to advance the budget that is given by Congress."
"I think we can do a lot with executive orders," she said. "You can do a lot on the mitigation side to reduce greenhouse gases with work to begin immediately."
The legislation included in the Covid-19 relief bill gives those efforts a head start by targeting hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, which make up a small percentage of the greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere but are considered extremely dangerous because they have a thousand times the heat-trapping potency of carbon dioxide.
The law makes the U.S. consistent with the Kigali Agreement, an October 2016 deal reached by 197 nations to eliminate HFCs. During his presidency, Trump never ratified the agreement, which is seen by climate activists as a crucial part of the broader fight against global warming.
"All together the Kigali Amendment is projected to reduce global warming by 0.5 degrees Celsius, or almost 1 degree Fahrenheit," Lashof said.
McCarthy said these kinds of steps are key to reintroducing the U.S. as a global leader in the fight against climate change.
"I think we'll be welcomed with open arms," said McCarthy, who was also a negotiator on behalf of the U.S. for the Kigali Agreement, "I think people are waiting for the U.S. to rejoin and to again play a leadership role."
In addition to its HFC regulation, the legislation extends tax credits for solar and wind power companies, originally set to expire at the end of the year, by two years. It also puts money behind research into new "grid technology" to store energy and the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere produced by power and manufacturing plants.
Lashof called the bill a "very positive way to end a very difficult year."
Electric Vehicles and Their Drawbacks
Electric-powered cars are now the rage. Tesla’s market capitalization is seven times larger than that of General Motors and fourteen times larger than Ford’s, though it builds a fraction of the vehicles that those companies do. Many politicians are even considering banning gasoline-powered cars within a few years in favor of electric vehicles (EVs), all in the name of saving the planet.
This has significant meaning to me. As a third-generation automobile dealer, I need to get ahead of the curve and prepare for what is next. I want to sell what people want to buy. I have driven the Volkswagen Golf EV, the Honda Clarity plug-in (PEV), and now the Hyundai Kona EV. All have good road characteristics and operate similarly to gasoline-powered cars, with the exception of how they are powered. I installed a Level II charger at my home. The cost: about $850. I am fortunate that my fuse box is located in the garage, so I did not need much additional wiring. The garage is where I charge these EVs overnight.
Some say that a 250-mile range is a must for an EV, and I agree. Charging one with a normal 120-volt plug requires about 54 hours so a Level II, 240-watt charger is needed – the same voltage that a home drier uses. To fully charge the Kona with its 64 kW battery requires up to ten hours. Plug in when you come home, and it is ready by the time you leave for work in the morning. A 250-mile range gets me just about anywhere I want to go.
The question remains: What is it like to have to depend upon a public charging stations? Tesla has a robust, nationwide rapid-charging infrastructure, but Tesla uses a proprietary charging plug that does not work with other makes of vehicles. Volkswagen, as part of its diesel settlement, has constructed a large charging network under the name of Electrify America. Electrify America has the closest rapid chargers to both my home and my office.
Driving from my home and with about 25 miles of battery range (10% of capacity), I headed off to the Reston Virginia fast charger, located in an office park. It is a few miles farther than the local gasoline station that I normally use. It had three charging towers, each with two cords. One of the cords fits only the Nissan Leaf. There were four 350 kW chargers and one 50 kW charger to select from. I chose the 50 kW charger, plugged in the cord, inserted my credit card, and experienced my first public fast charge.
How long it takes a battery depends upon four things: the capacity of the charger, the capacity of the battery, the battery discharge condition, and the rate of charge that the battery will accept. The Kona will accept up to a 75 kW rate of charge.
Fast chargers will bring the battery only to an 80% total charge due to the limitations of lithium batteries. Charging above 80% will damage the battery. Since I arrived at the charging station with ten percent capacity remaining, I received an additional 70% charge, which gave me about 190 miles total range. It required one hour and ten minutes. The cost was $21.07, or 43 cents per kW. The cost would be about 34 cents per kW if I joined Electrify America for four dollars per month. Filling my gasoline vehicle for the same range would cost less – about $13. Charging an EV at a fast charger costs more per mile of range than filling up a gasoline-powered vehicle.
What struck me first was how this could possibly work for me if I had to rely entirely on fast chargers and instead of my home charger. I drive at least 80 miles each day, which means I would have to recharge my Kona every other day assuming that I did not do more driving than just between my home and the office. Since it required over one hour to charge the battery, I would have to spend over 200 hours annually charging my vehicle – the equivalent of 25 eight-hour working days. And this assumes that I never had to wait in line for another vehicle to finish charging and that the charging station was nearby when I needed one. If I lived in a town home, or an apartment, without access to a Level II home charger, I would have to rely entirely on the public fast-charging network. And instead of a 250-mile range, I would have only about a 190-mile range to work with.
I later charged with a 150 kW and 350 kW charger, but the time expended was no less. It was quite cold when I used the 350 kW charger. The charging time was actually about five minutes longer than when using the 50 kW charger. Perhaps the periodic cycling of my car’s heater was the reason. Using fast chargers can be quite boring, so make sure that you bring something to do.
Next, I used the nearest fast-charging station from my office. It is 12 miles distant, a 20-minute drive each way. If I had to rely entirely on this charger, it would require one hour and 40 minutes every other day, or 300 hours every year. This would be equal to 37 eight-hour work days annually.
I know that some EV drivers combine shopping and other activities while they charge their vehicles. This might work with the more common, publicly accessible, and slower Level II chargers, but probably not with the Electrify America charging network, since there is only a ten-minute grace once the 80 percent charge is achieved. Otherwise, 40 cents per minute is tacked on to the cost of charging.
Questions also arise about how many chargers would be needed to keep cars like mine on the road. One electrical cord could charge only about 20 cars each day (80 miles per day driving and 170 miles available driving range). Perhaps a more realistic capacity would be 12 cars a day, since it is doubtful many would be doing this in odd hours. Ten thousand cars like mine would require 416 charging cords (or 208 towers with two cords each). It would require only about 14 gasoline hoses (or seven towers) to fuel the same number of gasoline-powered vehicles at 50% capacity. One hundred thousand EVs would require over 4,000 available charging cords.
The other drawback to EVs is their higher cost. The MSRP of the 2021 Hyundai Kona Ultimate I have been charging is $46,985. The same model powered by gasoline has an MSRP of $31,370, or over $15,000 less. I have read that one reason for the price differential is that to manufacture a 1,000-pound battery requires the processing of 50,000 pounds of ore, and one must move 500,000 pounds of overburden to get the ore. The lithium, cobalt, copper, and rare-earth minerals required to manufacture the battery largely come from overseas. Eighty percent of battery manufacturing takes place in China, so this is likely to have an impact on our trade imbalance and energy independence.
EVs start their lives with a larger carbon footprint than gasoline vehicles. Another question is how these batteries will be charged, since electricity mostly comes from non-renewable energy sources such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy. Some speculate that EV costs will decline with mass production, and that battery-charging times will be reduced with newer technologies. If this does not occur, then affordability, lack of range, and charging times will be major handicaps.
Besides the extra cost to purchase an EV and the larger carbon footprint, the greatest drawback by far will be what to do with all those hours spent waiting while one’s car is charging.
https://tennesseestar.com/2021/01/02/analysis-electric-vehicles-and-their-drawbacks/
Don't Blame Climate Change for Massive WildfiresThe primary culprit is forestry mismanagement that panders to ecofascists.
According to Democrats and the mainstream media, the primary culprit for the massive wildfires consuming vast swaths of the Pacific Northwest is climate change. However, according to the scientific data accumulated over years of observation, the real reason has little to do with the changing climate and more to do with changes to forestry-management practices instigated by politicians unduly influenced by flawed environmentalist ideology.
Analysis of the historical records show that wildfires regularly burned millions of acres annually in the U.S. up until the late 1950s. Beginning in the 1930s, the U.S. Forest Service, along with state agencies, began efforts to better control and limit the amount of acreage burned annually. Ironically, these efforts to suppress and prevent fires has contributed to the massive fires America is seeing today. The reason is simple: By not being control burned, these forests have accumulated vast amounts of fuel (overgrowth) and have become literal tinderboxes primed for igniting, whether by lightning or, in many cases, arson.
A 2012 paper titled “Long-Term Perspectives on Wildfires in the Western USA” from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded, “There is now a ‘fire deficit’ in the western United States attributable to the combined effects of human activities, ecological [factors], and climate change. Large fires in the late 20th and 21st century fires have begun to address the fire deficit, but it is continuing to grow.”
A further indicator that climate change is not the cause of the Pacific Northwest’s massive wildfires is the fact that globally the number of wildfires has been steadily declining since 2003. Talk about an inconvenient truth refuting Joe Biden’s ridiculous and spurious labeling of President Donald Trump as a “climate arsonist.”
The solution to addressing California’s and other western states’ destructive and deadly wildfire problem is better forestry management. As Steven Hayward argues, “Forest management isn’t rocket science; native Americans actually practiced it. Active forest management is especially necessary if serious climate change is real, but instead of forest management, the climatistas think we can stop destructive forest fires by banning fracking and the internal combustion engine.”
https://patriotpost.us/articles/73519
Are cows the new coal? Chowing down on meat alternativesProbably just a temporary fad. Comment from Australia
Vegetarians and vegans aren't the only ones avoiding meat, according to Jack Cowin, a man who made his fortune selling burgers and who is now a firm believer in meat alternatives.
"The meat industry is a huge industry but plant-based is the future as far as new product development goes," Cowin, the owner of the Hungry Jack's burger chain, says.
The billionaire holds a 24 per cent stake in plant based meat alternative V2Foods, which is used in Hungry Jack's Rebel Whopper burgers and stocked across Australia in Woolworths and Coles supermarkets.
Cowin says he's happy with sales of plant-based burgers across Hungry Jack's stores and he believes they will continue to grow driven by customers who are not vegetarian nor vegan but want to reduce their meat consumption for environmental or health reasons.
"We sell a lot more animal-based meat than we do plant-based meat," he says. "But there's also a group of meat eating people that are interested in the health aspects and they're interested in the environmental aspects and the millennial side of the population as you know, anything that is kind of planet friendly they like."
"So there's a definite market there and we've been able to attract new business," he says.
Hungry Jack's isn't the only fast food company getting on board meat alternatives with McDonald's announcing it will introduce a line of plant-based meat alternatives called 'McPlant' in 2021 and local chains Hunky Dory, Pie Face, Mad Mex, Fergusson Plarre and 7-Eleven all stocking meat alternative products.
Globally plant-based meat is attracting significant investment and now boasts cashed-up players like the $US10 billion ($13 billion) listed plant-based meat company Beyond Meat.
Meanwhile, its keenest competitor Impossible Foods is also gearing up for an initial public offering in the new year to cash in on the trend. Established food giants like Nestle and Unilever are also keen to dive deeper into the sector and the COVID-19 pandemic has ended up adding more fuel to the fire.
With abattoirs and meatworks across the US closing down to contain the pandemic, the resultant meat shortage forced many consumers to switch their attention to plant-based meat.
The wider acceptance of the products looks set to accelerate investor activity in the local meat alternative market that a 2019 report from think tank Food Frontier and consultancy Deloitte says could generate up to $150 million in sales. The report adds that on a "moderate" growth trajectory it would be worth almost $3 billion by 2030.
Food Frontier says the sector has been "growing exponentially" since the report was published with 29 Australian companies producing meat alternative products and over 200 meat alternatives on the shelves across Australia.
One of these new entrants is Australian startup Fable Foods which launched its mushroom based meat alternative last year and is now stocked across 150 cafes and restaurants and 1,500 retail stores including Coles supermarkets.
Fable co-founder Michael Fox says there are "significant tail winds" boosting the prospects of the meat alternative sector.
"Talking to people in the food industry who have been in it for a long time, this is very much a once in a generation sort of opportunity ," he says. "It's exciting for the future of the planet and it's an exciting sector to be running a business."
Fox believes we are at the cusp of a dramatic shift in consumption from products derived by animals to plant-based meat, with the transition to fully take hold within the next couple of decades.
"For the most part people buy meat because they love the taste of it and it's reasonably priced," he says.
"So our goal at Fable and the goal of other meat alternative companies is to produce products that have a better taste and texture than meat and are cheaper than animal meat."
"And if we can do that, then there is really no reason for people to eat meat from animals anymore."
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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2 January, 2021
Cooling in 2020 Australia
CO2 levels have continued to rise so where is the global warming?
Below are the CO2 figures from Cape Grim in Tasmania. In the last 3 years, CO2 levels have risen from 403ppm to 410pm
2018 01 15 2018.0384 403.75 0.18 in situ
2018 02 15 2018.1233 403.81 0.15 in situ
2018 03 15 2018.2000 403.90 0.14 in situ
2018 04 15 2018.2849 404.16 0.17 in situ
2018 05 15 2018.3671 404.40 0.13 in situ
2018 06 15 2018.4521 404.67 0.16 in situ
2018 07 15 2018.5342 405.18 0.21 in situ
2018 08 15 2018.6192 405.65 0.13 in situ
2018 09 15 2018.7041 405.86 0.10 in situ
2018 10 15 2018.7863 405.91 0.16 in situ
2018 11 15 2018.8712 405.84 0.16 in situ
2018 12 15 2018.9534 405.75 0.13 in situ
2019 01 15 2019.0384 405.73 0.17 in situ
2019 02 15 2019.1233 405.66 0.14 in situ
2019 03 15 2019.2000 405.79 0.19 in situ
2019 04 15 2019.2849 406.20 0.17 in situ
2019 05 15 2019.3671 406.70 0.21 in situ
2019 06 15 2019.4521 407.23 0.21 in situ
2019 07 15 2019.5342 407.83 0.21 in situ
2019 08 15 2019.6192 408.33 0.16 in situ
2019 09 15 2019.7041 408.58 0.13 in situ
2019 10 15 2019.7863 408.73 0.11 in situ
2019 11 15 2019.8712 408.76 0.11 in situ
2019 12 15 2019.9534 408.52 0.17 in situ
2020 01 15 2020.0383 408.25 0.18 in situ
2020 02 15 2020.1229 408.32 0.16 in situ
2020 03 15 2020.2022 408.57 0.17 in situ
2020 04 15 2020.2869 408.80 0.13 in situ
2020 05 15 2020.3689 409.07 0.13 in situ
2020 06 15 2020.4536 409.49 0.18 in situ
2020 07 15 2020.5355 410.02 0.20 in situ
2020 08 15 2020.6202 410.47 0.16 in situ
2020 09 15 2020.7049 410.76 0.11 in situ
2020 10 15 2020.7869 410.85 0.13 in situ
2020 11 15 2020.8716 410.79 0.14 in situ
2020 saw a welcome shift to cooler and wetter conditions after the widespread drought of the past few years.
Last year's persistent drought-bringing climate, set up by a positive Indian Ocean Dipole, was replaced with neutral and eventually rain-encouraging La Niña conditions in September.
Despite a hiatus over spring, those conditions finally brought widespread rainfall to end 2020.
Many water stores have risen, but many have not filled to the extent we might have hoped for in a La Niña year … not yet.
There are still a few months of the summer wet season left.
Sydney's water stores are the big turnaround story of 2020. In January, the stores were at 44.9 per cent of capacity, their lowest point in the past five years.
Temperatures
Mean temperatures came in at 1.15 degree Celsius above the 1961-to-1990 average, well cooler than 2019, which was 1.52C above the average.
Overnight temperatures were also the fourth-highest on record using the Bureau of Meteorology's (BOM's) gridded dataset, which gives an average temperature for the country as a whole.
But maximum temperatures were less extreme than we have been accustomed to in recent years, coming in at the eighth-hottest on record, 1.24C above the 1961-to-1990 average.
1 January, 2021
Amazon rainforest will dry out and become arid, scrubby plain by 2064 due to climate change and deforestation, scientist predicts
Another stupid prohecy, like many other false prophecies before it. The tiny degree of global warming in the modern era won't change anything
But climate change in Amazonia can readily be traced to human activity there, deforestation etc
South America's Amazon rainforest will be wiped out by 2064 due to deforestation and prolonged droughts from climate change, a scientist predicts in a new paper.
At about 2.3 million square miles, the Amazon is the largest tropical forest on Earth.
As well as reducing air pollution and regulating the world's oxygen and carbon cycles, it creates its own precipitation to sustain local populations with freshwater.
But it stands on the verge of a 'tipping point' as a consequence of human-caused disturbances, 'for which we are all responsible', according to Robert Walker, a professor of geography at the University of Florida.
Professor Walker says the Amazon will transition over the next few decades from a dense, moisture-filled forest to an open savannah, dominated by flammable grasses and shrubs.
He added that the local people's dependency on the Amazon as a source of water means 'the magnitude of the catastrophe will be worse than heretofore imagined' in, at the very most, 44 years' time.
2064 marks the point at which 'a tipping point' is reached, where extreme droughts become too frequent for canopy to completely recover from them (something that currently takes about four years).
A 'collapse' of environmental governance in Brazil and other Amazonian nations has renewed public concerns about the fate of the forest, as highlighted by Professor Walker in his paper, published in the journal Environment.
'It is doubtful that the Amazonian forest will remain resilient to changes in the regional hydroclimate,' he writes.
'The biggest concern involves intensification of drought-based tree mortality stemming from the synergies of fire, deforestation, and logging.
'The development of Amazonia now lies on a collision course not only with the interests of conservation but also with the welfare of the very people it is meant to benefit.'
Deforestation – the permanent removal of trees – is a major environmental issue, causing destruction of forest habitat and the loss of biological diversity.
A big driver of deforestation is the deliberate ignition of the rainforest's canopy to clear space for agricultural crops.
Amazonian fires famously intensified last year – in August 2019, the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil reported more than 80,000 fires across all of the country, a 77 per cent year-on-year increase.
'A generalised collapse of environmental governance in Brazil and other Amazonian nations has renewed public concerns about the fate of the forest,' says Professor Walker.
'These concerns – recently intensified by Amazonian fires in the summer of 2019 –have put the focus on regional climate changes capable of inducing a "tipping point" beyond which the moist forest transitions to a tropical savanna.'
Shortly after the turn of the millennium, effective environmental policies in Brazil reduced deforestation rates in the Amazon Basin, which is home to the rainforest.
But these policies 'began to unravel at almost the same time they proved effective' and deforestation numbers started to climb after reaching a low point in 2012, Professor Walker says.
There is also mounting evidence that deforestation affects regional climate by reducing precipitation and by lengthening the dry season.
The researcher also points to 'waves of in-migrants' that initiated a process of agricultural development in the late 1970s, which has to date consumed about 20 per cent of the Brazilian portion of the original forest.
However, poverty and poor use of government resources ultimately drives much of the deforestation, Professor Walker suggests.
'The people there, they don't worry so much about biodiversity, the environment, when they have to worry about eating their next meal,' he told United Press International.
Meanwhile, more frequent spells of drought caused by global warming are killing off the most vulnerable tree species in the Amazon, arising from water and thermal stress.
What's more, drought severely comprises the ability of surviving trees to do their job as the lungs of the world.
The Amazon rainforest absorbs large amounts of carbon from carbon dioxide (CO2) – a major contributor to climate change.
Scientists estimate that the Amazon takes in as much as one-tenth of human fossil fuel emissions during photosynthesis.
But the rainforest experienced serious episodes of drought in 2005, 2010 and 2015, and studies show its trees absorb a tenth less CO2 from the atmosphere during droughts.
A single season of drought in the Amazon rainforest can reduce the forest's carbon dioxide absorption for years after the rains return.
Dr Adriane Muelbert, an expert from the University of Leeds who was not involved with Professor Walker's research, previously said the ecosystem's response is lagging behind the rate of climate change.
'Droughts that hit the Amazon basin in the last decades had serious consequences for the make-up of the forest, with higher mortality in tree species most vulnerable to droughts and not enough compensatory growth in species better equipped to survive drier conditions,' she said.
If dry seasons in the Amazon continue to lengthen as over the past few decades, the drought of 2005 will become the region's 'new normal' before the end of the century, Professor Walker believes.
The return period of serious drought once gave canopies sufficient time to recover from fire, but the lengthening dry season has 'begun to squeeze away this respite'.
'A forest cannot survive if its canopy needs more than four years to recover from a yearly event,' he says.
'In fact, southern Amazonia can expect to reach a tipping point sometime before 2064 at the current rate of dry-season lengthening.
'By then, the return cycle of severe drought will have dipped below the time needed for the canopy to recover, at which point the forested landscape, denuded by fire, will be permanently invaded by flammable grasses and shrubs.'
Elsewhere in the paper, Professor Walker refers to the Anthropocene era – a proposed geological epoch in which human permanently changed the planet.
'The Amazonian environment has proven resilient to long swings of climate change that can be tracked through the geologic record extending over millions of years.
'Even during periods much warmer than today, the forest held its ground, with some encroachment of tropical savanna along the Basin's rim to the south and east, now known as the arc of deforestation.'
'Will the Anthropocene act with greater force, triggering a tipping point transgression at basin scale?,' he asks.
'Whatever the answer, the evidence is indisputable that Amazonia’s climate is now changing.'
Organic meat is NO better for the environment than regular meat and produces the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions
Researchers from Germany calculate the emissions produced during the manufacture of regular and organic meat, as well as plant-based foodstuffs.
Organic and regular beef are just as environmentally damaging, they concluded — while organic chicken actually results in slightly more greenhouse emissions overall.
Based on their findings, the team propose that policy measures — 'meat taxes' — are needed to 'close the gap between current market prices and the true costs of food.'
Such taxation, the team said, would call for a 40 per cent increase in regular beef's cost, but only a 25 per cent rise for organic beef, which is already more expensive.
The same amount of greenhouse gas emissions result from the production of organic meat as regular meats, a study has concluded. Pictured, raw meat seen in a butcher's counter +2
The same amount of greenhouse gas emissions result from the production of organic meat as regular meats, a study has concluded. Pictured, raw meat seen in a butcher's counter
In their study, politics and technology researcher Maximilian Pieper of the Technical University of Munich and colleagues worked to calculate the external climate costs — specifically as regards greenhouse emissions — of various foodstuffs.
The team sorted the products that they analysed into one of three-categories. These included conventional meat production, organic meat production and plant-based food production.
They then took an account of the emissions produced during the stages of each production process — including those released during growing and the processing of feed and fertiliser, for example, and methane given off by animals and manure.
The team found that while organic meat saw emissions reductions in some areas — such as by not using fertiliser to grow the necessary animal feed — these savings were typically offset by increased methane emissions from the animals themselves.
This complication arose as a product of both the slower growth rates of the animals and the fact that they tend to produce less meat per individual — meaning that organic farms must raise more animals to meet the same level of demand.
The team found, specially, that organic and regular beef result in the same net level of emissions — while organically-grown chicken actually produces more emissions than when the meat is reared conventionally.
In contrast, however, organic pork was found to result in slightly less emissions than produced by the manufacture of regular pork.
'As the results show, the production of animal-based products — especially of meat — causes the highest emissions,' the researchers wrote in their paper, noting that the findings are consistent with the findings of various previous studies.
'Such high emissions stem from the resource intensive production of meat, because of an inefficient conversion of feed to animal-based products,' they added.
'Organic regulations prescrib[e] a certain amount of land per animal, which is higher compared to average conventional production, as well as a higher living age and lower productivity of organically produced feed and raised animals.'
This counterbalances or even reverses the described positive aspects of organic animal farming,' they concluded.
The full findings of the study were published in the journal Nature Communications.
Biden’s Climate Change Litmus Test
From the looks of former Vice President Joe Biden’s selections for Cabinet positions and other high offices, it seems belief in “climate change” has become a litmus test. Biden appears to have raised climate change to the level of a religious doctrine.
In naming John Kerry a climate “czar,” Rep. Deb Haaland, D-N.M., to head the Department of the Interior—if confirmed Haaland would become the first Native American Cabinet secretary in history, a diversity priority for Biden—and Michael Regan, head of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality, who would be the first black man to lead the Environmental Protection Agency (ditto on diversity), Biden has signaled he is all-in on using government to change the climate, which some believe is already improving because of technology and innovation in the private sector.
Here is a fundamental question: If Biden thinks government has the power to change the climate (it doesn’t), why hasn’t government been able to prevent hurricanes and other natural disasters?
COVID-19 is being used by politicians—nearly all of them Democrats—to erode our liberties. If given the power to dictate what we drive, the type of house we can live in, and other freedoms we have long taken for granted, government will not be able to resist adding even more demands in the name of saving the planet.
At the 2016 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, climate change disciples laid out their vision for America’s future. By 2030, some forecast:
– The U.S. will not be the world’s leading superpower.
– A billion people will be displaced by climate change.
– Polluters will have to pay to emit carbon dioxide.
– There will be a global price on carbon (and) this will help make fossil fuels history.
If these initiatives are enacted, it will turn the United States into something other than what we have enjoyed for two centuries. Some comments by the Davos attendees dismissed the notion that a majority of citizens should decide such crucial matters, leaving decisions instead to unaccountable elites.
This is the stuff of dictatorship, little different from what communist leaders have done in the past, and in the present in China.
Biden has called climate change a “crisis.” How many crises can we deal with at one time? I thought COVID-19 was a crisis. How about getting that under control before we start addressing climate, which is changing, but for the better in many places and provably in the U.S.
According to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organization “committed to shaping a secure and sustainable energy future for all,” “The United States saw the largest decline in energy-related CO2 emissions in 2019 on a country basis—a fall of 140 Mt, or 2.9%, to 4.8 Gt. U.S. emissions are now down almost 1 Gt from their peak in the year 2000, the largest absolute decline by any country over that period.”
Opinion polls have been all over the place on this issue. Prior to the election, an NPR/PBS News Hour Marist poll found climate change taking over the top spot of concerns for Democrats. The economy remained the No. 1 issue for Republicans with climate change not registering among those polled.
The media will join politicians and some “experts” to promote climate change during a Biden administration, including end-of-the-world scenarios with little or no scientific information that contradicts their line.
Two years ago, “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd announced he would not have any guests on who doubted climate change. This is censorship and the promotion of a single point of view constitutes indoctrination.
Implementing the Biden climate doctrine will cost a fortune and result in an outcome most Americans will not like.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/12/29/bidens-climate-change-litmus-test
Joe Biden’s Climate Czar Gina McCarthy Brings Controversy to the White HousePresident Elect Joe Biden has picked Gina McCarthy, head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under Barack Obama and president of the leftist environmental group National Resources Defense Council, to become his climate czar. The position does not require Senate confirmation, but would have significant impact across the federal government as McCarthy is expected to guide climate policy at Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and even Treasury.
The Natural Resources Defense Council has sued the Donald J. Trump administration more than 100 times for environmental policies including energy efficiency regulations and protections for threatened species.
But McCarthy does not come to the post without a resume that includes controversies.
Obama nominated McCarthy to head the EPA on March 4, 2013. She was confirmed after a record 136-day confirmation fight.
Toxic Mine Spill
McCarthy was tapped to pursue Obama’s agenda of climate change, global warming, and using regulation to save the environment. But in August of 2015 McCarthy was forced to apologize for an EPA mine cleanup that caused a toxic mix of lead and arsenic to spill from the Gold King Mine in southwestern Colorado, contaminating rivers in that state and waterways in New Mexico and Utah.
“McCarthy said she is ‘deeply sorry’ and it ‘pains me to no end’ to see the orange-colored toxic stream unleashed in the West,” NBC reported. “Calling the spill a ‘tragic and unfortunate accident,’ she took full responsibility for the waste oozing from an abandoned mine into the Animas River.”
“We are going to move as quickly as we can,” McCarthy said to reporters following a speech in Washington, DC, and said her agency was “working around the clock” to prevent the mine waste from moving further downstream.
“It does take time to review and analyze data,” McCarthy said. “As far as I know, we have been thankful that there is no reported cases of anyone’s health being compromised.”
Perjury Prompts Impeachment Probe
Controversy continued the next month when an impeachment effort against McCarthy took place, as USA Today reported in an article subtitled, “Is impeachment the only solution for lack of executive accountability?” According to the report:
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) has introduced a resolution of impeachment against her because he says she lied during testimony about the EPA’s new clean water rules. Says Gosar: “Perjury before Congress is perjury to the American people and an affront to the fundamental principles of our republic and the rule of law. Such behavior cannot be tolerated. My legislation will hold Administrator McCarthy accountable for her blatant deceptions and unlawful conduct.”
McCarthy is accused of perjuring herself three times, in discussing the scientific and engineering basis for those rules. So, you might wonder, why not just prosecute her for perjury?
The problem is that criminal prosecutions are brought by the executive branch, and there’s not much chance that Obama administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch will bring a perjury prosecution against a fellow member of the administration. And there’s nothing Congress can do to change that. Congress could choose to hold McCarthy in contempt of Congress — as it did, in fact, to Lynch’s predecessor, former attorney general Eric Holder — but contempt of Congress is enforced by the executive branch, too.
Social Media Propaganda Charge
McCarthy survived that effort, but was in the controversy spotlight again in February of 2016, according to a Morning Consult report that said she was trying to influence the outcome of the controversial Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule that included regulating water on private property:
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy says her agency did nothing wrong when it used social media to promote a major water rule during a public comment period. But on Thursday, she also said she would change the agency’s promotion policies after the Government Accountability Office said the EPA illegally engaged in “propaganda.”
“I think the word ‘propaganda’ is always construed as something horrible,” McCarthy testified at a House Agriculture Committee, adding that the EPA disagrees with GAO’s conclusion that the agency broke the law.
That prompted Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-Ohio) to respond, “You were lobbying the people who lobby us.” Republicans have said that in Iowa, the rule would give the EPA authority over about 97 percent of the state’s land. Opponents also say it could lead the EPA to regulate very small water supplies, including farmers’ ditches and man-made ponds. The rule includes exemptions for agriculture, but Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) said he isn’t convinced that a few carve-outs will undo the additional red tape the rule creates.
McCarthy would be the first climate adviser in the White House.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC) Saturdays only
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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For the notes appearing at the side of the original blog see HERE
Pictures put up on a blog sometimes do not last long. They stay up only as long as the original host keeps them up. Some newsapers keep their published pictures online for as little as a week. I therefore keep archives of all the pictures that I use. The recent archives are online and are in two parts:
Archive of side pictures here
Archive of this year's pictures in the body of the blog. Note that the filename of the picture is clickable and reflects the date on which the picture was posted. See here
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