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
January 31, 2022
Wall Street’s green push exposes new conflicts of interest
The booming business of green finance is being led by an unlikely group of companies that sits at the heart of the financial system.
The giant firms that audit the books, rate the bonds, advise on proxy voting and categorise the world’s companies are spending billions to boost their climate-related operations. That could accelerate the shift away from fossil fuels but could also create a new set of conflicts of interest for industries that struggled to manage them in the past.
In the past two years, US firms in the financial-services sector have spent more than $US3.5bn buying green-ratings companies and data providers, a review by The Wall Street Journal found. The big four audit firms are also moving into the environmental, social and governance, or ESG, arena. PricewaterhouseCoopers last year said ESG was a focus of its $US12bn investment plan.
When the United Nations last year asked the finance industry to back its plans to cut carbon emissions, many banks had to be cajoled into signing up. Financial-services firms eagerly jumped in, according to people involved in the effort.
These firms are betting on big profits as companies, responding to demands by regulators and investors, seek to reduce their carbon emissions and better disclose their ESG practices. The firms have bought up smaller companies to bolster their offerings.
The market for helping companies with corporate ESG reporting alone is worth an estimated $US1.6bn globally, and forecast to increase by 21% a year over the next six years, according to UK-based research firm Verdantix. “The growth rate across several areas of ESG professional services is very strong,” said Kim Knickle, a research director at Verdantix.
In many cases, firms that rate or evaluate companies on things like climate risk also sell services to help companies address these issues. Many of the firms providing these ratings, such as credit raters and auditors, are already managing deep conflicts of interest because they are paid by the companies they judge. Conflicts of interest in the credit-ratings industry were one cause of the financial crisis, according to politicians.
One new set of potential conflicts springs from the widespread practice of selling ESG ratings alongside consulting and other services.
Institutional Shareholder Services, the nation’s biggest shareholder advisory firm, sells to investors its climate-risk ratings for thousands of companies. It also sells to those companies advice on how to increase those scores.
“Improve ESG Ratings,” the Rockville-based firm says in its pitch to the roughly 5,000 businesses it covers. “Stand out among companies that you compete with for capital.”
The financial-services firms’ multiple ESG services create clear potential conflicts of interest, according to Anant Sundaram, a finance professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. “They earn cash flows by selling their services … to the very firms they’re supposed to be unbiasedly scoring and ranking,” he said.
ISS’s general counsel, Steven Friedman, said the firm, owned by German stock exchange operator Deutsche Börse, has taken steps to address potential conflicts of interest in its ESG work, including a firewall separating its ratings and corporate-advisory units. “ISS does not and will not give preferential treatment to any corporate issuer,” Mr. Friedman added.
ESG raters typically get most of their income from investment firms, which package together topscoring companies to create green-branded products that are sold to investors. That creates an incentive to hand out high ESG scores, said Hans Taparia, a business professor at New York University.
“If the raters were to be tough on companies, there wouldn’t be any products to create for investors,” Mr. Taparia said.
Fund-ratings firm Morningstar gives out performance awards that are available only to companies that pay it for an ESG assessment.
Morningstar’s Sustainalytics unit sells companies an “ESG Risk Rating License” for an undisclosed amount. “Showcase that you are rated by a world’s leading ESG Rating agency,” its website states. Only companies that buy the license are eligible to potentially get a “Top-Rated ESG Badge.”
Badge winners include Freehold Royalties, a Canadian firm with a portfolio of oil-and-gas properties. The company isn’t top rated by everyone. It is classified as a “poor” ESG performer, with a score of 23 out of 100, by ratings-firm Refinitiv, owned by London Stock Exchange Group. A Freehold Royalties spokesman declined to comment.
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Hedge fund short sellers take aim at green energy stocks
The Greenie dreams are dying
Hedge funds have been cranking up their bets against sustainable energy stocks, wagering that as interest rates rise, investors will be less forgiving of companies with strong environmental credentials but weak earnings.
Shares in sustainable stocks have drawn in billions of dollars of inflows from ethically minded investors in recent years, lifting the valuations of some stocks to eye-watering levels.
Already, some of those stocks have begun to fall back as the Federal Reserve prepares to start withdrawing its pandemic-era support — a process that is pulling down many high-growth assets, especially in the tech sector. But doubters say green stocks have much further to fall.
“In a bear market, a company doesn’t trade at 60 times earnings just because it does something morally good,” said Barry Norris, chief investment officer at Argonaut Capital. “People will be a bit more hard-nosed about it.”
Norris is shorting a number of wind power stocks and has recently increased his bet against Danish wind turbine maker Vestas Wind Systems.
On Wednesday, the company reported a lower-than-forecast profit margin and said supply chain issues would continue for the rest of the year, having warned in November of an “increasingly challenging global business environment for renewables”.
The shares soared from DKr130 at the start of 2020 to peak briefly above DKr300 a year ago. They have since fallen back, although on Wednesday they were 5 per cent higher at about DKr175. Norris believes Vestas, with contracting margins, is now “the most expensive it has ever been”.
Shares in green companies are not the only ones trading with elevated valuations. Tesla, the electric carmaker, is priced at a forward price to earnings rate of 92 times, while Nvidia, another popular stock in recent years, is priced at 43 times.
Germany’s Nordex has also been targeted by short sellers, with bets against the wind turbine manufacturer soaring from 0.79 per cent of the company’s shares a year ago to more than 7 per cent, according to data group Breakout Point. That makes it one of Europe’s most shorted stocks based on disclosed short positions.
Among hedge funds betting against it are $52bn-in-assets Millennium Management, AKO Capital and Gladstone Capital Management.
It is a risky strategy. Government-supported efforts to shift the global energy reliance away from fossil fuels point to heavy demand for companies in the sector. One executive told the Financial Times their fund “won’t touch” bets against such stocks because of the increasingly favourable regulations and weight of money pouring into the sector.
But hedge funds in the US and UK have been buying the lowly valued shares of oil and gas companies discarded by investors focused on environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors.
Betting against companies whose stories of helping the environment are stronger than their earnings, or against those that have exaggerated their ethical credentials, has also become increasingly attractive.
The prospect of four rises in US interest rates this year is also now providing a challenge for lossmaking green stocks. Higher interest rates mean higher borrowing costs for companies and a lower value ascribed to future cash flows.
Funds have targeted hydrogen stocks, with disclosed bets against Norwegian hydrogen technology group Nel, which reported a loss of NKr1.4bn ($156m) in the first nine months of last year, jumping from 1.8 per cent a year ago to 7.8 per cent, according to Breakout Point. Helikon Investments, Crispin Odey’s Odey Asset Management and WorldQuant have short positions against Nel, whose shares have risen from NKr5 three years ago to more than NKr35 a year ago but have since dropped to about NKr11.
“There is no obvious valuation support with Nel,” said James Hanbury, a partner who manages about $1.3bn in assets at Odey, in a note to investors seen by the FT.
The company is “lossmaking, cash consumptive, they continue to fail to win material contracts or partnerships, their medium-term capex needs are not fully funded and, on top of this, the [Odey] team perceive the business to be a commoditised technology offering”, he said.
He added that while hydrogen would play “a big role” in the transition to cleaner energy, there will “inevitably be many companies in the space that will not succeed economically”. Odey declined to comment.
A spokesman for Nel said the company is “the technology and market share leader in an industry that is at the beginning of significant growth and industrialisation”, adding that its investment was “backed by a robust financial position”.
https://www.ft.com/content/05d218ea-982b-4e95-add1-26550316b2f0
***********************************************How About A Pilot Project To Demonstrate The Feasibility Of Fully Wind/Solar/Battery Electricity Generation?
At this current crazy moment, most of the “Western” world (Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia) is hell bent on achieving a “net zero” energy system. As I understand this concept, it means that, within two or three decades, all electricity production will be converted from the current mostly-fossil-fuel generation mix to almost entirely wind, solar and storage.
On top of that, all or nearly all energy consumption that is not currently electricity (e.g., transportation, industry, heat, agriculture) must be converted to electricity, so that the energy for these things can also be supplied solely by the wind, sun, and batteries. Since electricity is currently only about a quarter of final energy consumption, that means that we are soon to have an all-electric energy generation and consumption system producing around four times the output of our current electricity system, all from wind and solar, backed up as necessary only by batteries or other storage.
A reasonable question is, has anybody thought to construct a small-to-moderate scale pilot project to demonstrate that this is feasible? Before embarking on “net zero” for a billion people, how about trying it out in a place with, say, 10,000, or 50,000, or 100,000 people. See if it can actually work, and how much it will cost. Then, if it works at reasonable cost, start expanding it.
As far as I can determine, that has never been done anywhere. However, there is something somewhat close. An island called El Hierro, which is one of the Canary Islands and is part of Spain, embarked more than a decade ago on constructing an electricity system consisting only of wind turbines and a pumped-storage water reservoir. El Hierro has a population of about 11,000. It is a very mountainous volcanic island, so it provided a fortuitous location for construction of a large pumped-storage hydro project, with an upper reservoir in an old volcanic crater right up a near-cliff from a lower reservoir just above sea level. The difference in elevation of the two reservoirs is about 660 meters, or more than 2000 feet. Here is a picture of the upper reservoir, looking down to the ocean, to give you an idea of just how favorable a location for pumped-storage hydro this is:
The El Hierro wind/storage system began operations in 2015. How has it done? I would say that it is at best a huge disappointment, really bordering on disaster. It has never come close to realizing the dream of 100% wind/storage electricity for El Hierro, instead averaging 50% or less when averaged over a full year (although it has had some substantial periods over 50%). Moreover, since only about one-quarter of El HIerro’s final energy consumption is electricity, the project has replaced barely 10% of El Hierro’s fossil fuel consumption.
Here is the website of the company that runs the wind/hydro system, Gorona del Viento. Get ready for some excited happy talk:
A wind farm produces energy which is directed into the Island’s electricity grid to satisfy the population’s demand for electricity. The surplus energy that is not consumed directly by the Island’s inhabitants is used to pump water between two reservoirs set at different altitudes. During times of wind shortage, the water stored in the Upper Reservoir is discharged into the Lower Reservoir, where the Wind-Pumped Hydro Power Station is, to generate electricity from its turbines. . . . The diesel-engine-powered Power Station only comes into operation in exceptional circumstances when there is neither sufficient wind or water to produce the energy to meet demand.
Over at the page for production statistics, it’s still more excitement about tons of carbon emissions avoided (15,484 in 2020!) and hours of 100% renewable generation (1293 in 2020!). I think that they’re hoping you don’t know that there are 8784 hours in a 366 day year like 2020.
But how about some real information on how much of the island’s electricity, and of its final energy consumption, this system is able to generate? Follow links on that page for production statistics, and you will find that the system produced some 56% of the electricity for El Hierro in 2018, 54% in 2019, and 42% for 2020. No figures are yet provided for 2021. At least for the last three years of reported data, things seem to be going quite rapidly in the wrong direction. I suspect that that’s not what you had in mind when you read that the diesel generators only come into operation in “exceptional circumstances” when wind generation is low. And with electricity constituting only about 25% of El Hierro’s final energy consumption, the reported generation statistics would mean that the percent of final energy consumption from the wind/storage facility ran about 14% in 2018, 13.5% in 2019, and barely 10% in 2020.
So why don’t they just build the system a little bigger? After all, if this system can provide around 50% +/- of El Hierro’s electricity, can’t you just double it in size to get to 100%? The answer is, absolutely not. The 50% can be achieved only with those diesel generators always present to provide full backup when needed. Without that, you need massively more storage to get you through what could be weeks of wind drought, let alone through wind seasonality that means that you likely need 30 days’ or more full storage. Get out your spreadsheet to figure out how much.
Roger Andrews did the calculation for El Hierro in a January 2018 post on the Energy Matters website. His conclusion: El Hierro would need a pumped-storage reservoir some 40 times the size of the one it had built in order to get rid of the diesel backup. Andrews provides plenty of information as to the basis of his calculations and his assumptions, so feel free to take another crack at his calculations with better assumptions. But unfortunately, his main assumption is that the pattern of wind intermittency for any given year will be just as sporadic as it was for 2017.
Then take a look at the picture and see if you can figure out where or how El Hierro is going to build that 40 times bigger reservoir. Time to look into a few billions of dollars worth of lithium ion batteries — for 11,000 people.
And of course, for those of us here in the rest of the world, we don’t have massive volcanic craters sitting 2000 feet right up a cliff from the sea. For us, it’s batteries or nothing. Or maybe just stick with the fossil fuels for now.
So the closest thing we have to a “demonstration project” of the fully wind/storage electricity has come up woefully short, and really has only proved that the whole concept will necessarily fail on the necessity of far more storage than is remotely practical or affordable. The idea that our political betters plow forward toward “net zero” without any demonstration of feasibility I find completely incomprehensible.
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'A spectacular failure of climate leadership': Climate activists hit out at the Biden administration
Biden issued 3,557 permits for oil and gas drilling in his first year in office, 900 more than Trump in his first year
Biden's runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership,' said the Center for Biological Diversity's Taylor McKinnon
Legal challenges have 'made it impossible for us to stop many of these leases,' White House press secretary Jen Psaki claimed Thursday
Despite lofty promises on environmental goals, President Biden has outpaced even President Trump in issuing new drilling permits on public land.
Biden in his first week in office had issued an executive order halting new leases for oil and gas drilling. But that order was struck down by U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty in Louisiana, and the administration has said its hands were tied and it had to continue issuing the leases.
Biden issued 3,557 permits for oil and gas drilling in his first year in office, 900 more than Trump in his first year, according to federal data compiled by the Center for Biological Diversity.
'Biden's runaway drilling approvals are a spectacular failure of climate leadership,' said the Center for Biological Diversity's Taylor McKinnon in a statement. 'Avoiding catastrophic climate change requires ending new fossil fuel extraction, but Biden is racing in the opposite direction.'
Legal challenges have 'made it impossible for us to stop many of these leases,' White House press secretary Jen Psaki said during a daily briefing on Thursday.
Permits are typically issued for leases that have already been sold, mostly under previous administrations.
'We have an entirely different policy from the Trump administration on addressing ... the climate crisis,' Psaki added.
But climate activists have said that the Biden administration could have found a way to slow drilling, either through litigation or through reopening the environmental review that normally takes place during the leasing process.
'Their hands are not tied,' McKinnon told DailyMail.com in response to Psaki's remarks.
'We've gone to great lengths to research how the government can do this under existing laws without Congress. It's disappointing to hear an administration that purports to be leading on climate dismiss that possibility rather than researching how they can do it.'
Nearly 2,000 of the permits were administered by New Mexico's Bureau of Land Management Office. Meanwhile 843 were given to Wyoming, 285 to Montana and 171 to Utah. The Biden administration approved 187 permits for California, more than double the 71 Trump approved in the state in his first year.
Asked about the permits, Department of Interior spokesperson Tyler Cherry told DailyMail.com: 'Permit reviews are required by law.'
'Interior is conducting a more comprehensive analysis of greenhouse gas impacts from potential oil and gas lease sales than ever before,' he said. Cherry added that the department is working on a number of reforms in fossil fuel leasing, including eliminating the preferential financial treatment given to fossil fuel companies by the Trump administration and tightening oil and gas safety standards.
Rising gas prices, inflation and tensions with Russia, meanwhile, clash with Biden's rhetoric on climate change. In November at the COP26 Summit, Biden called climate change an 'existential threat to human existence.'
He has often used climate change to push for his Build Back Better plan, which passed the House and stalled in the Senate, and contains $550 billion for clean energy and climate initiatives. The bill included $320 billion in tax incentives for producers and purchasers of wind, solar and nuclear power, intended to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels.
Since 2018, the U.S. has been the top crude oil producer in the world. But with prices rising at the pump, Biden has not only increased production at home but called on OPEC+ nations to produce more fuel. And as Russia threatens to invade Ukraine and cuts back on its gas exports to Europe, the U.S. has become the number one exporter of natural gas in the world.
The Center for Biological Diversity, together with climate, indigenous and community groups wrote a petition to the Biden administration last week urging them to use executive authority to delay these permits.
Their petition cited a number of different laws that could be used to assert Biden's authority to reassess the permits. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act requires the Department of Interior to 'take[] into account the long-term needs of future generations' in drilling permits.
They also cite the Mineral Leasing Act (MLA) and the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (OCSLA) specify that the president and secretary of Interior must take into account public good in issuing permits.
The MLA stipulates that leases must contain provisions 'for the protection of the interests of the United States . . . and for the safeguarding of the public welfare.'
The OCSLA charges the president with overseeing 'expeditious and orderly development [of offshore oil and gas resources], subject to environmental safeguards, in a manner which is consistent with the maintenance of competition and other national needs.'
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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January 30, 2022
The article below from 2004 is of obvious interest: A typical Greenie false prophecy. They dream of Armageddon to destroy the society they hate
Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters..
A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.
The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2004/feb/22/usnews.theobserver
*********************************************Saving money on energy bills more important to Britons than saving the planet
More than a third of households care more about cutting their bills than using environmentally friendly alternatives, according to a new poll.
A survey of the British public found that they are expecting a range of household costs to rise this year, including food, motoring and socialising as the country deals with a cost-of-living crisis.
In particular, 75 per cent of respondents are expecting their utility bills to rise over the next few months, with 49 per cent expecting them to rise a lot.
Energy bills are expected to increase about 50 per cent in April, when the price cap is likely to be raised from £1,277 to £1,925, and could rise again in October to £2,400, according to energy analysts.
More than a third of respondents, 38 per cent, said it was more important for them to tackle their household costs than to make choices that were environmentally friendly, according to the poll.
Balancing costs and environmental concerns was of equal importance to 43 per cent of respondents, the survey found.
Only 13 per cent of respondents suggested that it was more important to make environmentally friendly choices, even if it costs more money, with young people and high earners more likely to agree with this.
Among those earning more than £55,000 each year say, 16 per cent said there should be a greater focus on green choices, compared to nine per cent of those earning up to £19,000.
The Government has faced calls to cut green levies from energy bills, with the Conservative Environment Network, a group of 116 MPs, arguing they should be temporarily moved to general taxation.
However, removing the levies will not be enough to offset the significant rise in bills, linked to a global gas crunch.
The Prime Minister has also been urged to help people invest in energy efficiency measures, such as insulation, to help them save on bills as well as reduce their emissions.
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Net Zero could wipe out 14,800 Northern Irish beef and sheep farms, MPs warned
Northern Ireland’s plans to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2045 could wipe out 14,800 beef and sheep farms, the Ulster Farmers Union (UFU) has told MPs.
UFU president Victor Chestnutt told the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee that farmers agreed that climate change legislation was necessary to tackle emissions, but added that a fair transition must be ensured.
“Beef and sheep farms operating in less productive land could see a decrease in farm numbers of 98%, that’s 14,800 farms ceasing to operate. Beef and sheep farms operating in the Lowlands could face a fall in numbers of 79%, with 4,100 farms ceasing to operate. The dairy sector could see a decrease of 86%, with 2,250 less farms,” Chestnutt said.
The figures stem from a KPMG report commissioned by stakeholders in the agri-food industry.
“Given a context of 24,000 farms in Northern Ireland, taking over 19,000 out of production? That is why we are so concerned,” he added.
Officials at the devolved Stormont institutions say that the climate strategy for Northern Ireland lags behind the commitments made by Great Britain and Ireland. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK and Ireland without a climate change act.
Two separate climate bills are currently proceeding through legislative stages in the Assembly — a private member’s bill from Green party NI leader Clare Bailey and one tabled by agriculture and environment minister Edwin Poots.
Bailey’s bill, which is supported by a majority of other Stormont parties, sets a 2045 target for reaching net-zero carbon emissions. Poots’ bill wants to cut emissions by 82% by 2050.
The report added that 13,000 farming jobs in Northern Ireland were at risk under the bill.
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Rising energy prices likely to slow demand for electric cars in Britain
Expected removal of Energy Price Cap in April could cause higher electricity bills, making electric cars less attractive
The cost of charging electric cars could rise significantly as a result of moves by regulator OFGEM to raise the Energy Price Cap in April, potentially threatening the rate of EV adoption as consumers weigh up the benefits of switching from petrol or diesel cars.
The cost of electricity is driven mostly by the wholesale price of gas, which UK power stations use to generate between a third and half of the UK’s power. The figure rises when wind farms aren’t generating in calm weather.
Wholesale electricity costs are 300 per cent higher than a year ago and home bills could rise by as much as 50 per cent from April if OFGEM raises the cap as expected.
While many EV owners with smart home chargers benefit from low fixed-rate EV tariffs that offer cut-price off-peak electricity for charging, the Money Saving Expert website reports that most energy providers have pulled their EV tariffs.
EDF and Octopus Energy currently offer the lowest off-peak rates on their EV tariffs of just 4.5p and 7.5p per kWh respectively. EDF says its GoElectric tariff is still open to existing and new customers, and it intends to maintain the rate of 4.5p per kwh off-peak. Octopus raised its rate from 5p late last year, but says it’s committed to low EV tariffs as a ‘loss leader’ to encourage adoption.
Even so, new EV drivers can’t sign up online, and Octopus requires customers to talk to its sales consultants on the phone because some may be better off sticking with their current domestic supplier. That ties in with general consumer advice that EV owners looking for the best deal need to carefully work out the overall cost to change.
Energy UK, the trade body representing providers, said that if problems in the retail market remain and energy prices increase more generally, appetite for off-peak tariffs may decrease, making retailer investment in such models less likely and ultimately hindering longer-term EV uptake.
https://www.autoexpress.co.uk/news/357189/demand-electric-cars-could-slow-due-rising-energy-prices
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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January 28, 2022
Mercedes owner 'horrified' to discover new electric battery will cost more than car is worth
Battery costs are a big issue with EVs
A DRIVER was stunned to discover the cost to replace his Mercedes Benz's battery is £15,000 - more than the value of the vehicle itself.
Ranjit Singh, 63, bought the second-hand Mercedes Benz hybrid car four years ago, believing its lower CO2 emissions meant it was greener than the alternatives. The motorist, from Knighton, Leicester, bought it for £27,000 at a Mercedes Benz dealership.
But Ranjit learnt this week the battery had come to the end of its life after just eight years of motoring.
He claims he was quoted £15,000 for a battery replacement - excluding labour costs which he was quoted would be roughly around £200 an hour.
Speaking to Leicestershire Live, the dad said: "I have always been a Mercedes customer and loved the cars they produce and we bought the car for its reliability.
"I'm horrified by what has happened. I feel I now have just two options - scrap the eight-year-old car or spend more than it is worth.
"We checked on Auto Trader and it says the car value now stands at just £12,850."
Mr Singh claims the battery died after just eight years.
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Climate activists try to smear & censor Jordan Peterson for climate model claims – But Peterson made accurate scientific claims
Jordan Peterson appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and made scientific valid claims about climate change. The climate activists and their media supporters tried everything to discredit Peterson’s claims. See UK Guardian: ‘Word salad of nonsense’: scientists denounce Jordan Peterson’s comments on climate models – By Graham Readfearn
Peterson told Rogan that because the climate was so complex, it couldn’t be accurately modeled. He said: “Another problem that bedevils climate modeling, too, which is that as you stretch out the models across time, the errors increase radically. And so maybe you can predict out a week or three weeks or a month or a year, but the farther out you predict, the more your model is in error.
“And that’s a huge problem when you’re trying to model over 100 years because the errors compound just like interest.” Peterson said that if the climate was “about everything” then “your models aren’t right” because they couldn’t include everything.
Climate Depot’s comment: “Jordan Peterson gave a fantastic scientific analysis of climate models that even the United Nations IPCC, UN scientists and many top scientists agree with. The UK Guardian smear piece on Jordan claimed “He has no frickin’ idea” about the climate or climate models. The exact opposite is true and verifiable.”
UN IPCC’s Third Assessment Report admitted: “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future exact climate states is not possible.”
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Israel as a water powerhouse
Not bad for a basically arid country
Jordan is pushing ahead with plans to import urgently-needed water from Israel and hopes to complete a feasibility study for a pipeline by September.
Water resources in the country are being stretched because of climate change and a rapidly growing population, according to Water and Irrigation Minister Mohammed Al Najjar.
The study by companies from the United Arab Emirates “will determine the route of pipeline but our preference is to get the water in the northern part of Jordan,” where the capital Amman is located, he said in an interview.
Water Woes
Jordan looks to desalination and imports as its aquifers deplete
Jordan’s struggled to cope with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees from war-torn Syria in recent years.
Climate change has also hit Jordan’s water supplies, said Najjar. Its aquifers are rapidly depleting and it’s getting 20% less rainfall than it did 50 years ago, causing more land to turn into desert, he said. The government expects unmet demand for water to surge from around 50 million cubic meters in 2021 to 70 million this year.
Water-Solar Swap
In an agreement involving the U.S. and the UAE, Jordan is meant to receive 200 million cubic meters a year of desalinated water from Israel. That’s roughly 20% of what the Jordanian government supplies its citizens and residents with today. Jordan will, in return, allow UAE companies to build 600 megawatts of solar power that will be solely for export to Israel.
The swap deal will partly make up for a shelved multi-billion dollar project to pump water from the Red Sea to the inland Dead Sea on the border of Jordan and Israel.
Jordan also wants to desalinate water itself by 2027, said Najjar. The government has invited five consortiums to bid to build a plant at Aqaba capable of handling 300 million cubic meters a year. The winner will construct a pipeline linking the plant to Amman and other areas.
Without both projects, Najjar said, unmet water demand will rise to 300 million cubic meters annually by 2040.
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$1bn from Australian government to keep the Great Barrier Reef off UN’s danger list
This is a complete waste of money. The reef is in no danger. Only Greenie scaremongering says it is. And the reef is at its most diverse in WARM climates (e.g. the Torres Strait) so global warming would help, not hinder it. Guess why the reef lies almost entirely in the (warm) tropics? Greenies rely on people not knowing even the basics and nobody dares to contradict them. Peter Ridd did and he got the sack
Scott Morrison will inject an additional $1bn into protecting the Great Barrier Reef – the largest single investment in the marine park – to avoid the national treasure being listed as an endangered world heritage site.
Three weeks after Anthony Albanese announced Labor would spend an extra $163m over four years to extend the Reef 2050 program, the Prime Minister will unveil the Coalition’s election pledge in Cairns to increase funding for the reef to $3bn.
Mr Morrison’s funding boost for the Great Barrier Reef – a key economic driver in the government-held electorates of Leichhardt, Herbert, Capricornia and Flynn – comes as Labor attempts to wrestle back the central and north Queensland seats.
The reef package is also expected to bolster the government’s environmental credentials across inner-city electorates in Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney where Liberal MPs are facing challenges from cashed-up pro-climate change independents at the election due by May.
The major pre-election spending follows a global push and recommendation from UNESCO last year for the 21-country World Heritage Committee to list the Great Barrier Reef as being “in danger”. While the government successfully lobbied against the push, the Morrison government must report to UNESCO by next month about how it is strengthening its Reef 2050 plan.
More than half of the extra $1bn in reef funding, to be spent over nine years, will go towards improving water quality and working with land managers to remediate erosion, improve land condition and reduce nutrient and pesticide run-off.
Efforts to combat threats from the crown of thorns starfish, which has severely damaged large swathes of the reef, will be bolstered by $253m.
The crown of thorns starfish control program, which has already culled more than 275,000 of the marine invertebrates since 2014, will be extended from 253 to 500 reefs.
Mr Morrison said protecting more than 13,000 hectares of coral reef captured under the crown of thorns starfish program required “state of the art on-water management practices”.
“We are backing the health of the reef and the economic future of tourism operators, hospitality providers and Queensland communities that are at the heart of the reef economy,” the Prime Minister said.
“This is already the best-managed reef in the world and today we take our commitment to a new level. Funding will support scientists, farmers and traditional owners, backing in very latest marine science while building resilience and reducing threats from pollution in our oceans and predators such as the crown of thorns starfish.”
The Australian understands the Great Barrier Reef Foundation – controversially awarded a $443m grant by Mr Morrison’s predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, in 2018 – will likely work with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and other government agencies but not play any role in the allocation of funds.
With the Great Barrier Reef supporting 64,000 jobs and generating $6.4bn in annual tourism revenue, veteran Liberal MP Warren Entsch said “the people in Cairns and far north Queensland care about the reef more than anyone”.
“Our tourism operators, local communities and traditional owners are invested in the health of the reef and this funding supports their commitment and the future of the world’s greatest natural wonder.”
The Leichhardt MP holds his Cairns-based seat on a margin of 4.2 per cent.
“The reef is an amazing place for people to visit and, particularly as local businesses start to recover, I encourage people to come up and see that for themselves,” Mr Entsch said. “This funding will help us keep it that way and ensure that we remain the best reef managers in the world.”
The government’s existing $2bn 2050 plan has supported management agencies including GBRMPA and the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences maintain the health of the reef.
In addition to water quality and reef management, $92.7m is being funnelled into research and deployment of world-leading reef resilience science and adaptation strategies. A further $74.4m is going towards indigenous and community-led projections including “species protection, habitat restoration, citizen science programs and marine debris”.
Central to the Coalition’s reef management plan is improving the quality of water flowing to the reef, which involves land-management transformation across a catchment area of about 424,000sq km. About 80 per cent of the catchment area is under agricultural production.
Environment Minister Sussan Ley said the best science and engagement with communities, industries and indigenous groups would drive record investment.
“From breakthrough science in coral seeding and restoration, to improved water quality, the latest on water management and compliance systems, as well as the protection of native species, we are working across every aspect of the reef,” Ms Ley said. “Our farmers, tourism operators, and fishers are our reef champions and we are supporting them through practical water and land based strategies that will contribute significantly to the health of the reef.”
The Opposition Leader this month launched his Queensland election campaign blitz in the state’s north and promised a Labor government would ensure the key tourist attraction was never classified by the UN as “in danger”.
“That’s what we’re determined to do: make sure that it’s never ever put on that list,” Mr Albanese said. “The way to do that is take the big action that we will take by joining the world in climate policy, once again, not being a pariah sitting in the naughty corner with Saudi Arabia and Brazil and a couple of other countries.”
Mr Albanese also pledged to tear up Mr Turnbull’s Great Barrier Reef Foundation funding arrangement.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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January 27, 2022
Britain's rejection of domestic gas exploration is 'irresponsible'
The rejection of new gas exploration in the UK by COP26 President Alok Shama has been branded irresponsible and against the interests of the British people by campaign group Net Zero Watch.
In an interview with Sky News, the COP 26 President, Mr Alok Sharma, appointed by Boris Johnson, has refused to support domestic production of natural gas in the North Sea.
This is in spite of the fact that Britain faces a deepening energy crisis, Russian gas-blackmail and the indispensable need for natural gas to support the UK electricity grid, where it guarantees security of supply on dark, cold low wind days, like yesterday (24 January), when wind power falls to extremely low levels across the whole of the UK and much of Europe as well.
Without domestic natural gas the UK will become increasingly exposed to the regional European gas markets and to the political manoeuvring of the Russian state.
Mr Sharma has helpfully laid out the options before the Prime Minister.
One the one hand dogmatic Net Zero zealotry that cannot accept the realities of the UK's policy-driven energy crisis, and on the other the clear, pressing economic and security interests of the British people that require us to expand domestic production of natural gas in the North Sea.
Dr John Constable, Director of Energy for Net Zero Watch, said:
“There is a huge gulf opening up between naïve, jet-setting green dreamers, such as Mr Sharma, and the increasingly hard-pressed British people. The government has to choose a side, and on that choice hangs its future reputation and survival.”
Contact Dr John Constable: e: john.constable@netzerowatch.com
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It has been a long time since anyone was able to say that the past year was the warmest ever solely due to global warming
Last week the UK Met Office released its measurement of the global temperature of 2021, a year described by the Guardian as one of climate crisis.
The continent of Africa had its warmest January on record. There was torrential rains in Malaysia and Turkey was in the tenth year of drought. In February vicious winter weather hit Texas resulting in ten million people being without power. In March Australia was hit by severe flooding forcing thousands to flee in New South Wales. Come April there were huge sandstorms in China and a hurricane brought record rainfall to some parts of Western Australia. In May the governor of California declared a drought.
June saw a remarkable heatwave in North America, Europe and Asia had their second warmest Junes on record. New Zealand temperatures broke records. The next month Death Valley in California recorded 54.4 C. Torrential rain in India killed over a hundred. In August wildfires broke out in the Mediterranean as well as swathes of Siberia. Floods hit Japan, Turkey and South America. In December floods hit Australia again. Kentucky experienced a devastating tornado.
Despite all this the data for 2021 showed it to be the seventh warmest year on record. Announcing the global temperature the Met Office emphasised that global temperatures were temporarily cooled by successive La Niña events at either end of the year.
There was a little reticence in proclaiming the news that 2021 was far from being a record breaking year. The explanation is that 2021 was very warm but it came after a few years whose temperatures were boosted by a super El Nino event. 2021, it is claimed, continues a long-term trend, super El Nino notwithstanding.
Dr Colin Morice, of the Met Office, said: “2021 is one of the warmest years on record, continuing a series of measurements of a world that is warming under the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. This extends a streak of notably warm years from 2015 to 2021 – the warmest seven years in over 170 years of measurements.”
Emphasising the long-term trend Prof Tim Osborn, of the University of East Anglia, added: “Each year tends to be a little below or a little above the underlying long-term global warming. Global temperature data analysed by the Met Office and UEA’s Climatic Research Unit show 2021 was a little below, while 2020 had been a little above, the underlying warming trend. All years, including 2021, are consistent with long-standing predictions of warming due to human activities.”
“WMO Secretary-General, Prof. Petteri Taalas commented, “Back-to-back La Niña events mean that 2021 warming was relatively less pronounced compared to recent years. Even so, it was still warmer than previous years influenced by La Niña. The overall long-term warming as a result of greenhouse gases is now far larger than the year-to-year variability caused by naturally occurring climate drivers.”
Consider though that in these climate conscious times it has been a long time since anyone was able to say that the past year was the warmest ever solely due to global warming. What’s more, new research by a group of Chinese scientists from the Ministry of Natural Resources to be published in the Journal of Climate suggest that the above or below the long-term trend line argument might be too simplistic.
By looking at all available global temperature datasets and a comprehensive span of durations and start and end times they find that the so-called global warming hiatus of the 2000s and beyond was real. Moreover, they find that the rapid warming of the late 1900s and the hiatus of the 2000s are statistically incompatible.
The ending of the hiatus is also interesting. It ended with a (record) El Nino since which global temperatures have not increased.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/2021-warming-as-usual/
****************************************Greenies worldwide furious at Joe Manchin
Within the brutal machinations of US politics, Joe Manchin has been elevated to a status of supreme decision-maker, the man who could make or break Joe Biden’s presidency.
Internationally, however, the Democratic senator’s new fame has been received with puzzlement and growing bitterness, as countries already ravaged by the climate crisis brace themselves for the US – history’s largest ever emitter of planet-heating gases – again failing to pass major climate legislation.
For six months, Manchin has refused to support a sweeping bill to lower emissions, stymieing its progress in an evenly split US Senate where Republicans uniformly oppose climate action. Failure to pass the Build Back Better Act risks wounding Biden politically but the ramifications reverberate far beyond Washington, particularly in developing countries increasingly at the mercy of disastrous climate change.
“He’s a villain, he’s a threat to the globe,” said Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, based in Bangladesh. “If you talk to the average citizen in Dhaka, they will know who Joe Manchin is. The level of knowledge of American politics here is absolutely amazing, we know about the filibuster and the Senate and so on.
“What the Americans do or don’t do on climate will impact the world and it’s incredible that this one coal lobbyist is holding things up. It will cause very bad consequences for us in Bangladesh, unfortunately.”
The often tortuous negotiations between Manchin, the White House and Democratic leaders appeared doomed on 19 December when the West Virginia senator said he could not support the $1.75tn bill, citing concerns over inflation and the national debt. The latest twist caused anguish to those who see their futures being decided by a previously obscure politician located thousands of miles away.
“I’ve been following the situation closely,” said Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, a low-lying Pacific nation that risks being wiped out by rising sea levels. “We have to halve emissions in this decade and can’t do it without strong, immediate action by the US.”
Stege said the Marshall Islands was already suffering the impacts of the climate crisis and if the US doesn’t slash its emissions “the outcomes for countries like mine are unthinkable.”
Even America’s closest allies have looked on in dismay as a single lawmaker from Biden’s own party has stalled what would be the biggest – and arguably first – piece of climate legislation in the US’s plodding, and often rancorous, history of dealing with escalating global heating.
“Biden has done a fair bit in very challenging circumstances [but] in Canada we look on with bewilderment because it’s such a different political context. It’s very bizarre,” said Catherine McKenna, who was environment minister in Justin Trudeau’s government that introduced carbon pricing in 2019. “Politics is hard but I don’t think anyone has given up. We just really hope they are able to get a deal.”
McKenna said she was vilified by some Canadian provincial premiers who “fought to the death” against carbon pricing but that there was now broader support for climate action across the country, including within industry, than in the US. “It’s unfortunate that it’s just one person that is holding up something that’s so critically important,” she said of Manchin.
“Joe Manchin is a problem, and I think he needs to be called out,” said Ed Davey, a British MP who was previously the UK’s secretary of state for energy and climate change. “It’s in the US interest, in the interest of West Virginia and elsewhere, to take advantage of green zero-carbon technology, which is the future.”
Davey, who is now leader of the Liberal Democrats, warned that the US risks ceding leadership in clean energy to China if it doesn’t act. “People will end up paying higher prices, jobs will go and not be created, the security of America will be reduced, Beijing will be laughing,” he said, adding that Manchin was in effect “working on behalf of the Chinese government” by not supporting the transition away from fossil fuels.
China used last year’s Cop26 climate talks in Scotland to “insidiously point out to every country that US just can’t implement”, said Rachel Kyte, an expert in international affairs at Tufts University and a climate adviser to the UN secretary general. Kyte said many governments believe Biden is well-meaning but cannot follow through on his commitments, a frustration compounded by a lack of American action on related areas, such as climate finance for poorer countries.
“There’s almost a resentment that the US just can’t deliver,” she added. “There’s this sinking feeling about the politics of America. You can’t turn your back on the US because it’s still the biggest economy, but what are countries supposed to do?”
Much of this angst is now being channeled towards Manchin.
After more than a decade in national politics, the 74-year-old senator has suddenly garnered a level of infamy far beyond his fiefdom of West Virginia, where the centrist Democrat has served as governor and senator while reaping millions of dollars through his personal investments and campaign contributions from a coal industry that continues to loom large in his state. It’s a situation that has caused bafflement overseas.
“Who is Manchin, the Dem senator from West Virginia who betrayed Biden?” La Repubblica in Italy has demanded.
Clarín, a newspaper in Argentina, has called Manchin a “rebelde” and a “tycoon with ties to the mining structure of West Virginia, the other Virginia of the USA”. Helsingin Sanomat, a Danish newspaper, also noted Manchin’s links to the fossil fuel industry and lamented that he has “disagreed with the most ambitious climate action” put forward by the US.
The negotiations with Manchin involve stakes far greater than any normal political maneuvering in Washington. The world is already being strafed by wildfires, heatwaves, floods and societal instability wrought by the climate crisis and rising temperatures are on track to breach limits set by governments in the Paris climate accords, a situation that would push some parts of the world beyond human livability.
Salvaging this situation will be virtually impossible without swift action by the US, the world’s second largest carbon polluter and a major oil and gas exporter. Analysts say the half a trillion dollars of support for renewable energy and electric cars in the Build Back Better bill would give the US a decent chance of cutting its emissions in half this decade, which Biden and scientists say is imperative to avoid climate breakdown.
But Manchin’s opposition has already ensured the removal of a key element of the bill, a plan to force utilities to phase in clean energy over time, and the prospect of him joining Republicans to block the overall package has seen him come under intense criticism within the US.
Climate activists have confronted Manchin in Washington and kayaked to his yacht to remonstrate with him. Some fellow Democrats say he has “failed the American people”. Even the Sunday Gazette, the local paper of Charleston, West Virginia, has run a headline of ‘We need this so bad’, in reference to the bill.
All this has been to little effect, although Manchin did say earlier this month there could still be agreement on “the climate thing”, offering some vague hope to activists while not quite quelling their anger. “Senator Manchin is a fossil-fueled sociopath on a Maserati joyride while he lets the world burn,” said Janet Redman, climate campaign director at Greenpeace USA. “At the end of the day, Manchin cares less about his constituents than he does about the fossil fuel industry.”
The current, floundering attempt to pass climate legislation is a grimly familiar episode in a lengthy record of American inadequacy. Donald Trump donned a coal miner’s helmet on the campaign trail and removed the US from the Paris climate deal. Barack Obama failed to get cap-and-trade legislation past a recalcitrant Congress. George W Bush rejected the Kyoto climate accords. In 1993, a previous Democratic senator from West Virginia, Robert Byrd, blocked a Bill Clinton plan to tax carbon emissions.
Manchin is, in some respects, a “fall guy” for a deeper American political dysfunction over the climate crisis, Kyte said. “If Republicans weren’t in the lock-grip of certain vested interests, if they had a policy on climate adaptation or green jobs for the future, Joe Manchin wouldn’t have the influence he has,” she said.
“Joe Manchin has become the personification of a problem and removing him doesn’t solve it,” Kyte added. “It doesn’t give us a bipartisan agreement of the danger we are in. A political culture that allows you to enrich yourself and your family from industries you regulate and not declare a conflict of interest lies beyond Joe Manchin, it’s bigger than just him.”
Even if American political inertia hasn’t changed, the world certainly has – the last seven years were the planet’s hottest on record, cataclysmic wildfires are now year-round events in the US west and deadly flooding swamps basements in New York, picturesque towns in Germany and subways in China. There is mounting fear that the world, including the US, does not have the time for yet another futile American effort to address the unraveling climate crisis.
“Unfortunately, politicians getting fossil fuel money are standing in the way and sacrificing the rest of us once again,” said Vanessa Nakate, a climate justice activist from Uganda. Nakate pointed out that Africa was suffering from climate change even though it is responsible for just a small fraction of global emissions.
“We are so reliant on the choices others make,” she said. “Our lives are literally in their hands.”
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President Xi Jinping is clear that climate change goals will not be allowed to impact energy security and economic growth targets
China, the world's biggest source of climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions, has been under pressure to "enhance ambition" and take more drastic action to tackle global warming.
But amid mounting economic challenges, China is worried about the risk to jobs and growth, especially as it prepares to hold a key Communist Party conclave that is expected to extend Xi's rule.
Xi told senior Communist Party leaders in a speech published late on Monday that China needed to "overcome the notion of rapid success" and proceed gradually.
"Reducing emissions is not about reducing productivity, and it is not about not emitting at all," Xi was quoted by state news agency Xinhua as saying.
"We must stick to the overall planning and ensure energy security, industrial supply chain security and food security at the same time as cutting carbon emissions," he said.
Since a national economic work meeting held at the end of last year, Chinese policymakers have repeatedly stressed that the country would "prioritise stability" in 2022.
The approach has already started to feed into policy making, with Zhang Bo, Chief Engineer of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, telling reporters earlier this week that the country would not impose strict water quality targets on local governments, and would instead encourage them to "consolidate" previous gains.
With energy supplies still a major concern after a wave of shortages hit manufacturers last year, Xi also told Party leaders that "the gradual withdrawal of traditional energy must be based on the safe and reliable replacement by new energy."
China has promised to accelerate the shift to renewables, but will only start to reduce coal consumption - a major source of CO2 - after 2025.
China's state planning agency also said in December that it will loosen blanket restrictions on energy consumption in order to ensure environmental targets do not erode growth.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/chinas-xi-says-countrys-low-035348343.html
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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January 26, 2022
An Australian perspective on sea levels
Australia is a good place to study sea level change. Unlike Britain, Australia wasn’t covered in an ice sheet during the last ice age. Ice sheets complicate things because when all the ice melts – as Scotland’s ice sheet did a little over 9,000 years ago – part of the landmass may gradually rebound dragging its bottom half under. So, the north of the British Isles is rising, while the south has been sinking up to 0.6mm per year for the last 1,000 years – about 60 centimetres in total since the time of William the Conqueror. The sinking of this landmass is sometimes confused with rising sea levels, and it is claimed that this is occurring due to rising carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution.
Where I live, about halfway down the east coast of Australia, sea levels began to rise about 16,000 years ago with the melting of Antarctica. By 9,000 years ago, sea levels around the world had risen by 12,000 centimetres, or 120 metres, the equivalent of a 25-storey building! The extent of this rise dwarfs the 36-centimetre rise that occurred over the last 150 years and the subsidence in places like Lincolnshire which adds up to just a few centimetres over the same period, both of which are worrying the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Indeed, it is uncontroversial, at least in peer-reviewed journals, that global sea level rise at the end of the last ice age occurred at a rate 10 times faster than the modern rate of about 3mm per year – which is about how much Scotland is rising due to isostatic rebound.
After being buried under several kilometres of ice, much of Europe and North America is experiencing uplift. For example, the ice retreated from Sweden 9,900 to 10,300 years ago and large-scale uplift is still occurring to the extent that the tidal gauge in Stockholm shows sea levels have fallen by about 50 cm over the last 129 years — an average annual rate of fall of 3.9mm per year. The uplift at Juneau, in Alaska, is even more extreme: in just 80 years sea levels have fallen by 120cm at a steady rate of minus 15mm per year. This reality jars with the notion of catastrophic sea level rise, so the IPCC ‘detrends’ the measurements from these tidal gauges, until they show sea level rise.
These numbers don’t make easy reading and may seem extraordinary, but sea levels really did rise globally by 120 metres at the end of the last ice age. Yet this inconvenient fact tends to be excluded from political summaries on climate change that rely on remodelled data.
According to the latest IPCC report on climate change – Assessment Report 6, published just before the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) in Glasgow late last year – global temperatures are the warmest they have been for at least the last 125,000 years. There is no mention that in between it got quite cold, and Scotland (where that meeting was held) was covered in a lot of ice.
Given the landmass of Australia has not sunk or risen much over this time period, if the IPCC report is correct the waves should cover my favourite 125,000-year-old platform each high tide and I should be washed away.
The highest tide for this year was forecast for Monday 3 January at 8.27am. A four-metre-high swell was also forecast because ex-tropical Seth was lingering just off-shore. That morning, I wondered: am I finally going to be washed away?
I scrambled down from the lookout and put my drone up. It captured footage of the huge swells, which did make it to the very bottom of the cliff face and washed over the very wide platform I usually stand on.
But I wasn’t washed away. I had positioned myself up a ledge. There are ledges at three different heights in Noosa National Park – and along the coastline all the way to Sydney. This is evidence etched in stone that there have been times in the past when sea levels were even higher than they are now. Why? Because the climate has always changed.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/01/aussie-life-53
**************************************************EPA Finalizes Aggressive Vehicle Emissions Standards for 2023 and Beyond
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced new, more stringent emissions regulations on everyday passenger cars and light duty trucks to be imposed on the model years 2023 through 2026.
The EPA says the updated standards were necessary to carry out President Joe Biden’s August 2021 Executive Order 13990 “Protecting Public Health and the Environment and Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis,” and to meet the goals contained in his August 5 Executive Order, “Strengthening American Leadership in Clean Cars and Trucks.” The latter order set a goal of 50 percent of all new passenger vehicle sales in the United States being zero emission vehicles by 2030.
The revision represents a shift from the Trump administration’s ‘‘The Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule for Model Years 2021–2026 Passenger Cars and Light Trucks,’’ which focused on moderate carbon dioxide emission reductions while keeping affordability and vehicle safety at the forefront.
Toughest Emissions Standards Yet
The EPA’s news release says the new standards are more stringent than any in American history.
Under the new rules average fleet emissions would have decline substantially each year between model years 2023 to 2026, for cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks releasing an average of 161 grams of carbon dioxide per mile by 2026. This is equivalent to a roughly 40 mpg fuel economy standard across the fleet of vehicles sold.
“The standards finalized today are the most ambitious vehicle emissions standards for greenhouse gases ever established for the light-duty vehicle sector in the United States.” The EPA Press Office said.
The final rule emphasizes the EPA’s efforts to concentrate more on greenhouse gas emissions, and less on the costs of implementation and compliance.
“In this rule, the agency is changing its 2020 position and restoring its previous approach by finding … that it is more appropriate to place greater weight on the magnitude and benefits of reducing emissions that endanger public health and welfare, while continuing to consider compliance costs, lead time, and other relevant factors” the EPA said in the rule.
The EPA estimated the rule will result in sales of zero emission car sales rising from approximately 5 percent of all sales today to 20 percent by 2026.
EPA Ignores Safety Concerns
In pursuit of the Biden administration’s climate goals, the EPA ignored long-recognized safety concerns related to increasing fuel economy standards, says Devin Watkins, an attorney with the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).
“In issuing these new rules, EPA has failed to even address what its own independent scientific experts said,” Watkins said, “The EPA’s claims of PM 2.5 harms had ‘unstated, untested, unverified, or mistaken assumptions’ including the failure ‘to distinguish between true exposure values and estimated exposure values in analyzing and presenting information,’ the agency’s expert reviewers wrote.
The EPA also ignored the unnecessary injuries and deaths research has shown past increases in fuel economy standards have resulted in, an issued raised by CEI during the comment period on the rules and in lawsuits, says Watkins.
“Additionally, EPA fails to even mention, let alone explain, the thousands of additional lives that could be saved with a less stringent standard.” Watkins said. “EPA inappropriately dismissed safety concerns raised by CEI in our public comments on the proposal.
“CEI sued EPA to have it address these safety concerns, and EPA asked the court to put that case on hold, allowing it time to addresses this problem in this new rulemaking, which it has now failed to do,” Watkins said.
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Australia's wind leader is actually running on gas and coal
Approaching breakfast-time SA is importing half of its power from Victoria and 94% of the local generation is gas. The turbines are running at 2% of capacity and providing 5% of demand.
Victoria is generating a small excess of power but not enough to prop up SA without help from Tasmania and NSW. The Victorian windmills are running at 12%, just above wind drought level, and providing 8% of local generation, with coal delivering three quarters of the supply and gas 5%.
Across the NEM the wind is delivering 3.7% of consumption, running at 8% capacity and the fossils are giving 83% (coal 75%).
RE enthusiasts need to realise that SA is the leader in demonstrating that we will never run on wind and solar power until the storage issue is resolved and that is nowhere in sight, certainly not in the next decade or three.
The International Energy Agency (a green organization) is projecting record coal consumption this year with coal consumption holding up past 2040. The fossil fuel contribution to worldwide energy use has declined all of 2% from about 87% to 85% over recent years despite the tens of billions that have been spent to make power more expensive and less reliable
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2022/01/25/sa-the-wind-leader-running-on-gas-and-coal/
*************************************************Team Biden seeks to stop yet another pipeline even as gas prices rise
If you needed any more proof that the anti-American, pro-Russia, pro-Iran, pro-China, anti-Israel wing of the Democrat Party has captured the White House flag, last week we learned Team Biden plans to put the kibosh on a natural-gas pipeline with US involvement that would reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian energy.
The Eastern Mediterranean Gas Pipeline, which would carry Israeli and Cypriot natural gas, is yet another energy resource serving America’s strategic interests that the Biden White House wants gone. EastMed joins a long list that started on Day One with the Keystone XL pipeline, a ban on oil and gas leases on public lands and the October federal court ruling that ended drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska.
All these actions, demanded by “climate change” alarmists, have reversed America’s long-sought energy independence won at great political cost by President Donald Trump.
They have not only made us dependent once again on foreign oil; they have sent oil prices skyrocketing, enriching America’s adversaries in Russia and Iran.
The EastMed pipeline would offset supplies that otherwise would come from Russia.
The Trump administration backed the $7 billion EastMed pipeline, a project of Israel, Cyprus and Greece, well before it was signed in January 2020. The 1,200-mile-long pipeline would bring 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Israel’s Leviathan and Tamar offshore to Europe, offsetting supplies that otherwise would come from Russia. Plans called for doubling capacity in future years.
US oil major Chevron is the main operator of the Israeli gas fields. And thanks to the Abraham Accords that opened trade and diplomatic relations between Israel and four of its Arab neighbors, the United Arab Emirates bought a 22% stake in the Tamar field from Israeli interests in May.
But Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan sought to undermine the deal from the start. His foreign ministry called it “the latest instance of futile steps, aiming to exclude Turkey and the [Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus] from the region. Any project disregarding Turkey . . . cannot succeed.”
Erdogan sent warships and deep-sea exploration vessels to put teeth into that threat, conducting military patrols in disputed waters between Greece and Turkey. In December 2019, he signed an agreement with the disputed government in Tripoli, Libya, that created a “maritime corridor” between Turkey and Libya that essentially cut off Israel from any access to Europe.
So Erdogan flexed his muscles at both Israel and Cyprus — and Team Biden’s move is to reward him.
The State Department sent its newly minted adviser for global energy security, Amos Hochstein, to Israel in November to give a heads up on the administration’s plans to ditch support for the pipeline.
And this month, it quietly sent a “non-paper” to the government of Greece, which leaked to the Greek and Turkish press, warning that the pipeline posed a security threat to the region. The US embassy in Athens finally clarified the American position: “We remain committed to physically interconnecting East Med energy to Europe,” its statement read, but “are shifting our focus to electricity interconnectors that can support both gas and renewable energy sources.”
Funny: The president didn’t have a problem giving waivers to Russia’s non-green pipeline to Europe, Nord Stream 2.
Erdogan crowed out loud. If Israeli gas “will be brought to Europe, it can only be done through Turkey,” he told journalists last week, saying Israeli President Isaac Herzog “could visit us in Turkey” to discuss the pipeline.
America’s relationship with Turkey soured mightily during the final Trump years when it booted Turkey from the F-35 program because Ankara was buying Russian S-300 and S-400 missile-defense systems and could not provide guarantees it would not share sensitive US technology with the Kremlin.
While Erdogan revels in throwing his weight around, he also is desperate to get back in America’s good graces, meeting with Biden at the G20 summit in Rome in October in an attempt to patch things up.
And Biden? His woke national-security and foreign-policy B-team seem more eager to subsidize electric cars for the rich than to provide cheap oil and gas to the American middle class or to deter America’s adversaries.
https://nypost.com/2022/01/24/gas-prices-keep-rising-but-team-biden-seeks-to-stop-a-pipeline/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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January 25, 2022
Brandon Wanted to Spend Nearly $30 Billion on a “Civilian Climate Corps”
At a time when inflation is becoming a major problem, the government is tens of trillions of dollars in debt, and the money supply has increased by about 20% in one year alone, it would make sense to start pinching taxpayer pennies and not spending money on random pipe dreams.
Unfortunately for America, Brandon fully intends on spending taxpayer money on such random pipe dreams, blowing both what the tax collectors have brought in and what Jerome Powell’s money printers have printed on random leftist objectives.
One random such objective is a “Civilian Climate Corps,” which would have been like FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps, except completely useless because it would have focused not on building and marking trails in the wilderness or preparing America’s young adults to follow orders, but instead on the phantom menace of global warming.
As Brandon’s Executive Order put it, the Civilian Climate Corps “shall aim to conserve and restore public lands and waters, bolster community resilience, increase reforestation, increase carbon sequestration in the agricultural sector, protect biodiversity, improve access to recreation, and address the changing climate.”
All noble objectives to be sure, as most relate to the great outdoors, but those are things that volunteers normally do, not government bureaucrats.
And how much did Brandon want to pay for the Civilian Climate Corps, which would theoretically be doing activities that volunteers normally do? A massive $27 billion. As RealClearPolicy reports:
In Biden’s Build Back Better proposal, he calls for hiring 300,000 Americans at a cost of anywhere from $10 to $30 billion for his Climate Corps, at a cost of between $40,000 to $70,000 per member. That’s low for some Congressional Democrats. Sen. Ed Markey and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez have introduced the Civilian Climate Corps for Jobs and Justice Act, asking for $132 billion for a corps of 1.5 million members.
The CCC is currently in Biden’s Build Back Better proposal that passed the House of Representatives on November 19, 2021, and includes about $7 billion for staffing the CCC. The bill stalled in the Senate after Sen. Joe Manchin announced he wouldn’t vote for it, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has vowed to call a vote on it again.
The real CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps, was created by FDR in 1933 and performed all manner of tasks, from cutting trails to building roads and infrastructure. It employed millions of people in the 9 years it existed, built hundreds of thousands of dams, constructed about 100,000 miles of roads and trails, and built tens of thousands of bridges.
It was a roaring success, building many pieces of infrastructure that America needed and employing hundreds of thousands of Americans a year at a time when the Depression was still ravaging the economy and keeping people out of work.
Focused as it is on a leftist pipe dream rather than realistic infrastructure objectives, it’s doubtful Brandon’s CCC program would be as effective as FDR’s. It probably won’t help that there’s Brandon, a senile, gaffe-prone fool, in charge, rather than a brilliant politician like FDR.
https://trendingpolitics.com/brandon-wanted-to-spend-nearly-30-billion-on-a-civilian-climate-corps
*********************************************U.S. fossil fuel production set to hit record highs in 2023
America’s production of fossil fuels is expected to hit a record high in 2023, as continued improvements in drilling efficiency in oil and gas and high enough oil prices will support increased output of all fossil fuels, including coal, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said on Friday.
The combined production of fossil fuels—natural gas, crude oil, and coal—rose in 2021 by 2 percent to 77.14 quadrillion British thermal units, following a decline in 2020, when the pandemic hit. The administration expects U.S. fossil fuel production to continue rising both this year and next, exceeding 2019 production levels and reaching a new record in 2023.
Last year, dry natural gas accounted for the largest share, 46 percent, of the total U.S. fossil fuel production. Crude oil accounted for 30 percent, coal for 15 percent, and natural gas plant liquids (NGPLs) for 9 percent. Those shares to remain similar through 2023, the EIA said.
Dry natural gas production rose by 2 percent last year in 2021, the administration estimates, and predicts that improvements in drilling efficiency and new-well production will contribute to production increases of 3 percent in 2022 and 2 percent in 2023.
Coal production last year is estimated to have jumped by 7 percent due to higher demand for electricity generation on the back of rising natural gas prices. This year, coal production is set to rise by 6 percent as coal-fired electricity generators rebuild inventory levels. In 2023, coal production will rise by only 1 percent as demand for coal in the electric power sector declines, the EIA said.
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What Solution Do Renewable Energy Advocates Offer For The Problem Of Storage?
The import of all of these studies is that as renewables come to dominate the mix of electricity generation, and particularly as their share of generation goes above 50% and on towards 100%, and fossil fuel backup gets phased out, then the cost of necessary storage becomes far and away the dominant cost of the overall system. Therefore, any meaningful proposal to replace fossil fuel generation with renewables must grapple with this issue.
So what is the solution that the dissenting commenters offer for the problem of increasing need for expensive storage? They don’t offer any at all. Instead, they appear to think that the whole problem can be assumed away or ignored.
The dissenting commenters were three in number, and posted under the pseudonyms “Johnathan Galt,” “GKam,” and “reneawbleguy.” Galt and GKam each posted only one comment, but “reneawbleguy” posted over forty.
The gist of all these comments really comes down to the same thing, namely that the renewables are rapidly becoming cheaper than fossil fuels to generate electricity, if they are not so already, and therefore fossil fuels are a dying industry. Mixed in with this point is a good deal of snide and accusatory language, essentially asserting that anyone who may disagree as to the relative full cost of renewables must necessarily be both ignorant and politically motivated. (e.g., GKam: “More science nonsense from this group of political hacks. . . . Give it up You have already lost.”). Meanwhile, all three fail to deal in any real way with the storage problem inherent in expansion of generation from the renewables.
Here is “reneawbleguy” on the relative cost of fossil fuel electricity generation versus renewables:
Energy costs savings. RE will be cheaper that FF business as usual. 10.43 cents per kw-hr FF 7.81 cents per kw-hr RE. Dollars into our pockets is a clear difference favoring RE. Clear difference.
Money cost savings per person.
No source is cited, but I would agree that approximately these numbers can be found in some studies of relative costs of the renewables versus fossil fuels. But the studies that get these numbers do so by ignoring the entire storage problem completely.
Similarly, from Galt:
[T]he only consideration to consumers is, was, and always will be “what is the delivered cost to me?” That is neatly quantified in Lazard’s excellent publication providing LCOE.
As I have pointed out on this blog numerous times, the Lazard numbers for “LCOE” (Levelized Cost of Energy) specifically omit any inherent costs of necessary storage. Since the cost of storage is the dominant cost of the all-renewable system, LCOE is the opposite of a “neat quantification” of comparative electricity generation costs, and rapidly becomes completely misleading as the percentage generated from renewables increases beyond 50%.
GKam is even less sophisticated, simply relying on his own personal experience with a home getting its power from rooftop solar panels:
My entire household and both electric cars are powered by the PV system on our roof, as "Galt" can tell you, and it gives us free power having paid back in three years.
GKam does not enlighten us as to how he gets his electricity at night, or overcast days in the winter, or whether he has purchased batteries sufficient to store up power from the summer for use during those long winter nights. If he lives in the United States, it is almost certain that he relies on his local grid — in other words, on fossil fuel backup, with perhaps some nuclear thrown in — for power during those times.
Of the three dissenting commenters, the only one who addresses the storage issue at all is Galt. He asserts, with great confidence, that new battery technologies are coming to make the storage problem go away:
At least two separate technologies, Ambri and Form Energy, will almost certainly have their first large factories up and running within 5 years. Both use common materials (antimony and calcium, iron), both are environmentally safe. Ambri’s battery is 100% recyclable, and in theory may last more than 100 years. Form Energy’s product is likewise 100% recyclable, should cost only 20% that of Lithium Ion, and although the lifespan is not yet advertised it has the potential for similar lifetime of use (simply a “reversible rusting” process).
So the proposal is that a government-mandated total transformation of the entire energy system of our economy should depend on one or another of two not-yet-invented-or demonstrated-at-scale technologies, which may or may not work, and the cost projections of which may be wildly off. Galt does not do any actual numerical calculations. But at a cost of “20% that of Lithium ion” the storage systems he is talking about would still imply a cost of around $100 trillion in Ken Gregory’s spreadsheet, some 5 times current U.S. GDP. Shouldn’t this be acknowledged as a problem? And how can you advocate use of Lazard’s “LCOE” numbers for relative costs of energy sources when those calculations omit a $100 trillion item applicable to wind and solar but not to fossil fuels?
So I say to these three commenters: it’s time to step up your game. Don’t just make unsupported assertions that wind and solar are cheaper. Give us a spreadsheet with a numerical demonstration of how much storage a fully wind/solar/storage electricity system for the U.S. will need, what technology will be used to provide it, and how much that will cost. Without that, you are just dealing in fantasy. I for one will be happy to have the all-renewable system if someone can demonstrate that it can be built and will work at reasonable cost.
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A ban on conservatories is exactly the sort of idiocy that could finish off Boris and ‘net zero’
The clue’s in the name: the Conservative Party. How can the Conservative Party even think of banning conservatories? Did they miss the memo? How could they be unaware that an attack on conservatory-dwellers is an attack on everything it means to be a Conservative: aspirational, home-owning, family-oriented – and rather proud of the garden? The proposed restrictions on conservatory building in the name of “net zero” are a red rag to the already enraged core of Britain’s Tory voters.
Such obvious facts are no longer visible from the inner ring of the death spiral that Boris Johnson’s premiership appears to have entered. Instead of throwing things desperately out of the tornado, in the hope that they will catch onto something – Boats! Sonic blasts! Ghana! The BBC! – No 10 ought to reflect upon why the Boris operation is so damnably short of grappling hooks.
Here and there it drifts, sustained only by the occasional outburst of brilliant oratory, like air blasted into a hot-air balloon. The only thing needed to burst the bubble was the pinprick of a scandal like Partygate and hey ho, down it goes.
Soon, however, if Mr Johnson can last that long, the party rage will be spent and he will have an opportunity to do something other than flounder. Here is something he could actually do that would genuinely improve people’s lives: he could start to solve the critical situation in our energy supply.
This situation, unlike supply chain congestion, is entirely a mess of our own making. Rising household bills are now one of the main contributors to inflation, which is outstripping wage growth. Later this year, in spite of the price cap, costs are expected to smash all records set over the last decade, taking us from an average annual bill of around £1,200 to one potentially over £1,500.
At present, the debate on what to do about this centres on fiddling about with VAT, which accounts for 5 per cent of your bill, or company profits, which account for 1-2 per cent. Thanks for nothing, Westminster.
Politicians could move the dial a bit by suspending various green levies and boiler schemes. But the “social” costs loaded onto consumers are in fact mostly made up of redistributive policies like giving discounts to poor households. That is not something it would be wise to suspend during a price spike.
By far the biggest share of our bills is made up of the simple cost of energy on the open market. If the Government is not prepared to pull any levers that increase our energy supply, then there is little it can do to bring down costs.
In fact, for 20 years, governments have been doing the opposite: shutting down coal generation and only partially replacing it with renewable generation, which depends on the weather. They claimed they were “diversifying” supply by building up our ability to import gas. But guess what: it turns out that when gas is choked off at one end of the European continent by pernicious Russian policy, it affects us at the other end, no matter how many pipelines and terminals we have built.
Fortunately for Boris, there is something he could do about this relatively quickly. He could put together a package of incentives to ramp up exploration and production of gas in the North Sea.
Gas producers wouldn’t be able to fill demand in time to affect prices this year, but they could almost certainly raise production enough in the next few years to take the pressure off households and stabilise energy costs for the next decade, giving us valuable time to build a large-scale nuclear energy programme to replace all those coal plants that were hastily shut down.
After all, Norway, whose gas explorers operate just the other side of the North Sea, has managed to keep its reserves steady over the past 30 years, while Britain’s gas industry, treated recklessly as a cash cow by successive governments, has gone into sharp decline.
Nor would this approach mean junking the Government’s net zero aspirations. At present, we import more than a fifth of our gas in liquid form on tankers, one of the most energy inefficient and expensive ways to use the fuel. Domestic production would simply displace a large slice of that consumption and see us through to the low-carbon era.
In the long run, a far more ambitious nuclear programme, improvements in energy storage and a carbon tariff to prevent emissions being moved offshore would enable the UK to deliver lower emissions without becoming the poster-child for how to impoverish yourself through reckless green policies.
There is only one reason why a Conservative Government would shy away from this policy: it’s afraid of the environmentalist movement.
Green protesters are peculiarly parochial in their view of carbon emissions. They think that if the UK produces more of its own gas, it mechanically increases the amount of gas the world uses, ignoring the fact that markets are dynamic. There is no point trying to convince the most zealous of these believers. There will always be another bevy of them waiting to throw themselves onto motorways or block bridges. And if the Government gets serious about reviving domestic energy markets, you can bet the Extinction crew will stop at nothing to sabotage the plan.
Rather than cowering before their roadblocks, Boris should go into battle. It is unacceptable that a tiny minority should determine policy for the rest of the country when households are struggling to manage an extraordinary hit to living standards.
Voters want to see a Prime Minister willing to stand up for their interests with policies that will deliver a noticeable improvement to their lives. They would warm to someone who is tough enough to take a battering dished out by the green establishment. They are tired of instead listening to a dithering man without a plan promising he will “unleash Britain’s potential” by banning conservatories and kiboshing our gas hobs.
I’m among those who believe that a shift to “net zero” energy production is necessary and that Britain can benefit from being at the forefront of it. But there is no future for this agenda if it simply becomes a proxy for a sustained assault on our quality of life, first through our gas bills and then via our home improvements. And there is no future for a prime minister who follows up outrage and scandal with platitudes and joyless, environmentalist finger-wagging.
It’s time to stop telling us what we can’t do and start telling us what we can and will do to improve our lot. Otherwise, Boris might as well just give up now.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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24 January, 2022
EVs risky to tow. Mistakes expensive
Unfortunate and very costly damage to a Ford Mustang Mach-E battery from a tow truck was recently reported on the MachEforum.com.
While it's just an example case, it's worth noting so that we all can avoid similar problems. Electric cars are still new and relatively rare, which means that there are plenty of inexperienced technicians.
In this story, a Mach-E driver on the route from Canada to Florida was forced to stop the car due to a "Pull over Safely" error message and lack of power. Through Ford Road Side Assistance, a tow truck was dispatched to take the car to the nearest Ford dealer.
Unfortunately - according to the info - improper service resulted in damage to the battery pack - specifically, the battery rail. There could also be other issues, as the owner wrote: "Seems the batteries are leaking," which suggests a damaged cooling system. The forum post does not explain what caused the original "Pull over Safely" error message.
According to the owner, the car was hooked up wrongly. See some additional images here. The result is a $28,000 bill that no one wants to take responsibility for:
"On the recommendation of Ford Customer Care, they arranged to have the car transported down to a dealership in Florida. The tow company hooked into the battery rail and damaged the batteries. $28,000 repair bill."
The manual points out how to tow the car and how to lift the car up. There are special areas strengthened specifically for the purpose.
In the case of lifting the car up, if the lift isn't positioned correctly, it could come into contact with the battery guardrail, and then the battery might be damaged.
It's actually similar to most conventional cars, although, in the case of EVs, the battery pack is the single most expensive part, which means that it's important to double-check whether technicians know what they are doing.
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Energy crisis bursts green shares bubble
The energy crisis has burst a multibillion-pound bubble in green stocks as gas prices surge and the world confronts the true cost of net zero.
Shares in renewable energy companies have tumbled to their lowest level in 16 months, almost completely unwinding gains made during a stampede into companies aiding the shift away from fossil fuels.
It comes as new figures revealed that private equity snapped up oil and gas firms worth almost £12bn last year, a huge increase from £232m in 2020 as the sector ploughs investment into renewable energy.
A basket of global clean energy shares, which includes renewable giants Iberdrola, Vestas and Orsted, has tumbled 45pc since the record peak a year ago, wiping tens of billions of pounds off their “excessive” value.
Rising material costs, frothy valuations and escalating interest rates have dampened investor enthusiasm after a flood of money into the sector.
Surging gas prices are also thought to have raised concerns, because they highlight the challenge of ditching fossil fuels.
Stewart Cook, co-head of European markets at Berenberg, said: “Clean energy stocks were caught up in the record moves higher in non-profitable, almost concept-like themes such as ESG and electric vehicles. These moves and valuations were exaggerated by huge inflows to investors and liquidity chasing these relatively small, embryonic sectors.”
Renewable stocks have fallen by a fifth since the start of December after being hit by a wider shift by investors out of pandemic winners, particularly in tech, into more traditional sectors as interest rates rise.
Solar shares have slipped 45pc from their record peak, while wind firms have dropped by a quarter.
Mr Cook said there were some “excessive valuations and asset price moves” on wider markets that have “burst”. However, he added that many clean energy stocks still “have great fundamental reasons to own for the long-term”.
Analysts have warned that a rush into environmental, social and governance-friendly assets risks creating ethical stocks bubbles.
Buyout firms are cashing in on the gas price crisis by swooping in as listed companies flee the oil and gas sector in fear of climate campaigners.
Private equity firms spent £11.9bn on European oil and gas businesses in 2021, compared to just £232m in 2020, according to global law firm Mayer Brown. Deals involving UK firms were worth £2.4bn.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/01/22/energy-crisis-bursts-green-shares-bubble/
************************************************World second largest wind turbine maker Siemens Energy declared “uninvestible” by analysts
Siemens Energy AG fell the most in six months in Frankfurt after slashing its outlook due to mounting losses at its wind-turbine business, which warned that the soaring cost of raw materials would squeeze margins in 2022.
The German engineering firm said its revenue could slip by as much as 2% this financial year after previously seeing at worst a 1% drop. It also trimmed its operating profit margin forecast to a range of 2% to 4%, from 3% to 5% previously.
The downgrade comes after its Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy subsidiary reported a loss of 309 million euros ($350 million) for the first quarter of its 2022 fiscal year and warned that inflation will continue to weigh on margins.
Siemens Energy declined as much as 10% in Frankfurt, while Siemens Gamesa plunged as much as 16% in Madrid, its steepest intraday decline since July. Denmark’s Vestas Wind Systems A/S, one of Siemns Gamesa’s main rivals, slumped as much as 7.8% in Copenhagen.
Turbine makers are grappling with rising commodity costs and pandemic-related disruptions to supply chains. Surging prices for energy, steel and copper have squeezed profits for Siemens Gamesa and its rivals. That’s leading to difficult conversations with customers, who may not be able to cope with higher costs.
“We are increasing prices. The whole industry is increasing prices,” Siemens Gamesa Chief Executive Officer Andreas Nauen said during a call with analysts on Friday. “That brings business cases for customers to the limit or over the cliff.”
Project Delays
The renewable-energy firm also said it’s facing difficulties scaling up one of its new turbine models, known as the 5.X platform. Volatile markets have impacted investment decisions by some of its customers, resulting in project delays.
The issues at Madrid-based Siemens Gamesa already weighed on Siemens Energy’s results last year, frustrating the German firm’s management and fueling speculation the parent might try to buy out other investors to seize full operational control of the struggling unit.
“It would be nice to believe this is the ‘final’ writedown,” Berstein analysts led by Nicholas Green said in a note late Thursday. “Siemens Energy is trapped in a narrative it cannot control, and this makes it uninvestible.”
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Solar panels prices skyrocket 50-60%
Solar panel prices are up 50-60% year on year as power shortages and now Omicron disrupt Chinese production
Chinese supply chains have been hit with a one-two punch: the country’s power consumption limits combined with lockdown measures against the highly contagious Omicron variant of Covid-19.
The Biden administration is now reportedly monitoring the situation in mainland China to see whether the government’s lockdown measures under the “dynamic zero infections” strategy will hurt the country’s industrial outputs – and pose a risk to the United States’ own supply chains.
However, diversifying supply chains in many sectors is easier said than done. That’s especially the case with solar panels, of which China currently supplies more than 80% of the photovoltaic modules to the world.
Even as most countries are trying to accelerate their plans to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, many of their solar developers have slowed down their own projects after solar panel prices increased by 50-60% from a year ago. The best they can hope for is that the problem will prove short-lived, with improvement showing as early as April or May.
https://menafn.com/1103576499/Solar-panels-a-portrait-of-China-supply-chain-risks
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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23 January, 2022
Greenie authoritarianism
Greenies are intrinsically authoritarian. They are constantly trying to tell others what to do. We see below an open admission of that
Abstract
Is authoritarian power ever legitimate? The contemporary political theory literature—which largely conceptualizes legitimacy in terms of democracy or basic rights—would seem to suggest not. I argue, however, that there exists another, overlooked aspect of legitimacy concerning a government’s ability to ensure safety and security. While, under normal conditions, maintaining democracy and rights is typically compatible with guaranteeing safety, in emergency situations, conflicts between these two aspects of legitimacy can and often do arise. A salient example of this is the COVID-19 pandemic, during which severe limitations on free movement and association have become legitimate techniques of government. Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach. While unsettling, this suggests the political importance of climate action. For if we wish to avoid legitimating authoritarian power, we must act to prevent crises from arising that can only be resolved by such means.
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Climate change impacts Coral Reefs A Tale of Two Media Perspectives
A Google news search for the term “climate change” today turns of a flood of stories discussing the recent discovery of a previously unknown and evidently pristine coral reef off the coasts of Tahiti. Most news outlets covering the story, like CBC, France 24, and the New York Post, only mentioned climate change in passing, noting this coral reef seems untouched by the myriad factors impacting neighboring coral reefs. CNN, perhaps predictably, tried to turn a story of wonder and hope, into a horror tale, warning the reef had to be protected from climate change.
The CBC story, titled “This huge coral reef has only just been discovered, and it’s undamaged by climate change,” was typical of most of the news coverage of the newly discovered, diverse and healthy reef. CBC writes:
Discovery of reef, deeper than most, suggests there may be more unknown large reefs in oceans.
Scientists have discovered a pristine, three-kilometre-long reef of giant rose-shaped corals off the coast of Tahiti, in waters of the southern Pacific Ocean thought to be deep enough to protect it from the bleaching effects of the warming ocean....
The reef off Tahiti lies in the “twilight zone” 30 to 120 metres below the surface where there is still enough light for coral to grow and reproduce. The discovery off Tahiti’s shores suggests there may be many more unknown large reefs in our oceans, given that only about 20 per cent of the entire seabed is mapped, according to UNESCO scientists.
“It also raises questions about how coral reefs become more resilient to climate change,” UNESCO’s head of marine policy, Julian Barbiere, told Reuters.
CBC and others said very little about climate change related to the reef because there was little to say, other than to imply warming waters affected other reefs nearby. Most of the coverage of the reef were hopeful in tone, uniformly covering the fact that the reef was healthy, diverse, proof reefs are can be resilient to climate change, and indicating, there could be untold numbers of reefs similar to it in the 80 percent of the world’s oceans and seas that have yet to be explored
CNN’s slant on the discovery, by contrast, took a decidedly alarmists tone.
“Deep in the ocean off the coast of Tahiti, scientists made an incredible discovery in November: acres of giant, pristine, rose-shaped corals blossoming from the sea floor in what’s known as the ocean’s ‘twilight zone,’” wrote CNN. A single paragraph later it turned a hopeful tale of discovery into climate change horror story.
“That a coral reef so large and so beautiful had yet to be discovered emphasizes how little we still know about the world’s oceans, scientists say,” said CNN. “And its impeccable condition — with no evidence that the reef has yet been harmed by the climate crisis — suggests the need for urgent action to protect the ocean’s remaining healthy reefs.” (emphasis mine).
Rather than touting the coral reef’s apparent resilience in the face of the myriad threats to coral health, the least of which, evidence suggests, is modestly warming oceans, CNN immediately presents the discovery as a cautionary tale about the dangers of climate change.
“Warming oceans and acidification caused by the climate crisis has led to widespread coral bleaching,” continued CNN. “Last year, scientists found the global extent of living coral has declined by half since 1950 due to climate change, overfishing and pollution.”
Thankfully, almost everything CNN said about the threats to and the abundance of coral reefs is false.
As explored in previous Climate Realism reports, here, here, and here, for example, corals evolved when the oceans were much warmer than at present and require warm waters to thrive. As a result corals have been expanding their range in response to modestly warming ocean waters. Most of the corals that have bleached in recent years, have recovered. Where corals have not recovered, their bleaching and death has been tied to coastal pollution, including from chemicals contained in sun screen, siltation from development, and agricultural run-off.
Indeed, research reported in Phys.org suggests coral reefs are far from threatened.
According to the Phys.org story, titled “Half a trillion corals: World-first coral count prompts rethink of extinction risks,” the number of corals in the Pacific Ocean alone exceed half a trillion. There are likely trillions more globally.
The scientists involved in the research say the sheer number of corals and coral species means the risk of extinction due to climate change is vastly lower than previously claimed.
“In the Pacific, we estimate there are roughly half a trillion corals,’ said the study lead author, Dr. Andy Dietzel from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University,” writes Phys.org.
“This is about the same number of trees in the Amazon, or birds in the world.”
“Dr. Dietzel said the eight most common coral species in the region each have a population size greater than the 7.8 billion people on Earth,” says Phys.org, continuing, “The findings suggest that while a local loss of coral can be devastating to coral reefs, the global extinction risk of most coral species is lower than previously estimated.”
This research exposes the fact that although the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) list 80 coral species to have an elevated extinction risk, 12 of those species have estimated population sizes of more than one billion colonies.
When the discovery of this unexpected, pristine, massive coral reef in Tahiti’s waters was announced, corporate media outlets had a choice, the high road of truth, or the low road of false climate alarmism. Most media outlets took the high road, presenting the facts about the reef, its location, extent, and uniqueness, and discussing the marvels that this reef presented and the good news it might be telling about the abundance of corals in as yet uncharted waters. They limited their speculations about climate change.
CNN, as is its usual practice, took the low road, briefly describing the Tahitian reef’s discovery and its wonders, and then making the story about climate change. Along the way CNN presented half-truths, misleading information, and gross speculation about the threat climate change poses to coral reefs worldwide, in an attempt to say this newly discovered pristine coral reef is endangered, even though there is no evidence this is true, from human greenhouse gas emissions. Shame on CNN.
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Revisiting the Keystone XL Pipeline and Joe Biden's False Promise of 'Green Jobs'
America's hard earned energy independence is in jeopardy as a result of deliberate public policy decisions flowing from the Biden White House that disadvantage American workers and consumers while strengthening America’s strategic adversaries.
Joe Biden began his train wreck of a presidency a year ago by putting America last and never looked back.
On his first day in office, he canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have supported thousands of well-paying jobs while lowering energy prices. If constructed, the 1,200 mile pipeline would have carried 830,000 barrels per day of oil from Alberta, Canada and North Dakota to Nebraska and from there converge with a completed portion of the pipeline that carries oil to the Gulf of Mexico.
Biden incessantly points to climate change as a rationale for canceling domestic energy initiatives that benefit average Americans. But his arguments don’t hold up under scrutiny. The Institute for Energy Research, a nonprofit group that supports free market polices, cites figures that show the greenhouse gas emissions that would have resulted from transporting 830,000 barrels per day of Canadian oil would amount to 150 million metric tons per year, which is the equivalent of about 0.3% of the world total. That’s what you call tiny.
Canadian oil is still being produced in the absence of the Keystone Pipeline, but with a heavier environmental footprint that Team Biden leaves out of its equation.
“Without the pipeline, railroad capacity will grow, overall safety will decline, emissions will be higher and economic costs will be higher since rail and truck shipments are more expensive than pipeline shipments,” IER warned at the time Biden canceled the project. “Pipelines are simply safer for humans and the environment than alternative forms of transport.”
The statistics bear this out.
Pipelines carry roughly 70% of the ton-miles of crude oil and petroleum products in the U.S. while water transport accounts for about 23%, trucking 4%, and railroads 3%. Yet accident data shows that “pipeline incidents per ton-mile” are only about a quarter of those for rail transport and about 3% of those for truck transport.
So far, Biden’s decision to cancel Keystone made just one year ago has been a loser for the American people both economically and environmentally.
But what about those green jobs that were supposed to replace the jobs lost when Keystone was canceled? Now would be a good time to revisit some of the forecasts made by political figures and environmental activists who support wind, solar and other forms of green energy. The U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs held a hearing on “Opportunities in the Clean Energy Economy in April 2021 that is worth reviewing now that Keystone workers have lost their jobs.
David Kreutzer, a senior economist with IER, offered testimony during the hearing where he highlighted government reports that described how green job creation fell “pathetically short of its goal” during the Obama years. A Department of Labor inspector general’s report found that job placement was only 10% of the target level while a subsequent report from the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics found more than 20% of the certificates and degrees went to recipients who had only one day of training.
Keep in mind that Biden has pledged to create 10 million “well-paying jobs” in the green energy sector. In his testimony, Kreutzer explained why there is good reason to be skeptical about the potential for the green jobs to boost the most economically disadvantaged members of society. He points out that the green expenditures that were part of the 2009 Stimulus Package failed to deliver any meaningful relief to unemployed workers.
“With history as a guide, there is reason to think that these programs will be encouraged and then usurped by the politically well-connected and the economically powerful,” Kreutzer observed in his testimony. “We saw this in 2009 and we have seen it more generally for decades. Big government expenditure too often helps the well-connected and powerful instead of the supposed beneficiaries.”
But there’s more at stake than just raw questions of economics and the feasibility of green jobs. Biden’s antipathy toward the oil and gas industry has real world consequences that were on display when a severe snowstorm hit the Washington D.C. area in early January. Recall that more than 50 miles of Interstate 95 was closed to traffic leaving thousands of people stranded for hours while households and businesses lost electricity. Severe weather speaks to need for diverse, reliable, affordable supplies of energy. But with Biden and blue state governors attempting to coerce the public into accepting intermittent forms of energy to power their homes and cars, blackouts could become the norm in emergency situations.
Biden’s repeated missteps on energy policy are not just a problem domestically as they also have geopolitical ramifications
The Keystone XL pipeline would have enabled the American consumers to draw oil and gas supplies from a stable, friendly neighbor to the north. By restricting domestic energy production, Biden is putting the U.S. in a position where it must rely more on imports at the expense of American consumers. That’s tragic since the U.S. became energy independent in 2019 for the first time in 50 years – meaning U.S. energy exports exceeded U.S. energy imports.
That hard earned independence is now in jeopardy as a result of deliberate public policy decisions flowing from the Biden White House that disadvantage American workers and consumers while strengthening America’s strategic adversaries.
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UK: Stop posing. Start drilling
The current energy crisis, with domestic bills set to rise some 50 per cent in April, has confronted Net Zero-loving Westminster elites with the stark reality of the choices they’ve made. Twenty-five retail energy companies have gone bust, another has been nationalised, along with a fertiliser plant — so that it can produce carbon dioxide for fizzy drinks — all now featuring as extra costs on either bills or taxes. We are shipping fracked gas from the United States while banning fracking here, and we have undermined investment in the North Sea, while allowing Putin to use Nord Stream 2 as a bargaining chip over the future sovereignty of the Ukraine. It is literally the case that we are using public money to import gas to manufacture CO2, while claiming to lead the world on tackling climate change. Unsurprisingly, no one is following.
This mess is a feature not a bug of Net Zero
This mess is a feature not a bug of Net Zero, or more accurately the ideology that the driving mission of the British Government should be domestic decarbonisation, at any price.
This wasn’t always the case. British energy policy, in recent memory, used to be far more pragmatic. In the 1980s and 90s we led the world in liberalising markets, ending the dominating role of dirtier coal as the dash for gas reduced both costs and the environmental impact of generation. Governments didn’t pick winners; consumers and companies did, and as a result they chose the best and cheapest technology first.
As climate change rose as a concern, we adopted the energy trilemma as our guide. We understood that there were no easy choices and there would always be trade-offs between security of supply, affordability and decarbonisation. We further understood that that was the order in which they should be prioritised when making those choices.
Without security of supply, we don’t have affordability. We end up paying peak capacity prices of £2,000/MWh or more (as we did in November) to stop the lights going out.
Without affordability, we decarbonise more slowly. Treasure expended on overpaying for already redundant “green crap” cannot then be expended on innovation for cheaper better stuff in future.
With more expensive insecure energy, we cannot competitively manufacture energy intensive products, including the component parts of wind turbines, nuclear power stations and solar panels. Net Zero ideology creates a “green growth paradox” where measures designed to encourage export-led green growth instead deliver imports and offshoring to regimes with lower efficiency and higher emissions. That is why global emissions are still rising despite the West’s self-flagellation.
These simple truths of Net Zero are met with a wall of denial akin to utopian communism
These simple truths of Net Zero are met with a wall of denial akin to utopian communism that believes the only real problem is that we haven’t been pure enough. A typical response to concern about current gas prices for example is to claim that we are suffering due to a failure to invest fast enough in new nuclear and renewables decades ago.
Neither proposition stacks up. Nuclear is the little train that couldn’t. Our early experience of trying to “lead the world” in nuclear is a legacy for which we are still paying the bills today. We repeated the mistake recently by signing off Hinkley Point C, despite spiralling costs (£50bn more than claimed) and delays (the Finnish sister plant is ten years late). Nuclear power is not dispatchable; it’s baseload. In the UK this means the maximum contribution of nuclear power to the grid is close to the 20GW of capacity required in summer, not the additional 40GW needed for winter.
Most renewables (wind and solar) provide neither baseload nor reliable dispatchable power. They are weather dependent, meaning they need storage or back-up plants to provide security of supply. It was the fall in wind that caused last year’s price spike through the capacity market. It also takes 5-7 years to plan and deploy. Alongside nuclear, you would need at least 160GW of wind power with 40GW of back-up solutions to ensure security of supply from this source.
The only option for that back-up now, and for at least the next 20-30 years, is gas. Hydropower is geographically restricted, tidal power is hopelessly expensive, battery storage even more so with questions about the availability and sustainability of the materials used to make them. Adding carbon capture and storage to gas power just makes it less efficient, requiring even more to be burnt to create the same output
https://thecritic.co.uk/stop-posing-start-drilling/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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22 January, 2022
This ship's cargo will make world history when it leaves an Australian port next week - and there are high hopes it'll be a great leap forward in the fight against climate change
This is a heap of nonsense. Hydrogen itself is a non polluting fuel but producing is needs LOTS of energy and emits lots of CO2. We read:
"Hydrogen produced in this way is not a zero-emission fuel. Carbon dioxide is emitted through the combustion and thermal decomposition reactions, and is also a product of the reaction between carbon monoxide and water to make hydrogen and carbon dioxide."
The Suiso Frontier, will depart the Port of Hastings in Victoria next week en-route to Japan with the world's first ever cargo of liquified hydrogen from the Hydrogen Energy Supply Chain (HESC) project in the La Trobe Valley.
Under the HESC project Victorian brown coal will be converted to hydrogen using a gasification process before it is loaded onto the Suiso Frontier for exporting.
The $500million project is being led by a mix of Japanese and Australian companies including Japan’s energy giant J-Power, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, Shell and AGL.
The ship will undergo a two-week journey to Kobe, loaded with Australian-made hydrogen, in a world-first shipment of liquid hydrogen to hit an international market.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the initiative as a 'world-first that would make Australia a global leader' in the hydrogen industry.
'A successful Australian hydrogen industry means lower emissions, greater energy production and more local jobs,' Mr Morrison said in a statement on Friday.
'The HESC project puts Australia at the forefront of the global energy transition to lower emissions through clean hydrogen, which is a fuel of the future.'
The project has received $100 million from both the Victorian and federal governments. An additional $7.5m in funding was also announced to support the $184m next stage of the project which aims to make 225,000t of carbon-neutral hydrogen each year. Another $20m has also been pledged for the next phase of the CarbonNet project.
This would reduce global emissions by 1.8m tonnes a year, according to the Morrison government.
Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor said the Suiso Frontier's arrival was a huge milestone in Australia's commitment to reducing emissions.
'The HESC project has the potential to become a major source of clean energy which will help Australia and Japan both reach our goals of net zero emissions by 2050,' he said.
However, the initiative has been criticised for using a coal-based process when cleaner and renewable methods can be used to produce hydrogen.
Under the current process only three tonnes of hydrogen can be produced per year from 160tonnes of brown coal.
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Global agency sows fear with misinformation
A recent report by the World Meteorological Organization claims that there has been a dramatic increase in the number of natural disasters over the last 50 years. According to the WMO Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water Extremes (1970 – 2019), there were more than 11,000 reported disasters attributed to these hazards globally, with just over 2 million deaths and U.S. $ 3.64 trillion in losses.
The report claims that the number of disasters “has increased by a factor of five” since 1970 and that human additions of carbon dioxide are to blame. Referring to this data, WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas stated:
“The number of weather, climate and water extremes are increasing and will become more frequent and severe in many parts of the world as a result of climate change. That means more heatwaves, drought and forest fires such as those we have observed recently in Europe and North America.” He further warned: “The warming of the oceans has affected the frequency and area of existence of the most intense tropical storms.”
The claims of increasing numbers of these severe weather events should generate alarm if they were correct. Fortunately for the peoples of the world, the facts fly in the face of the reporting. The WMO and its authors chose to misrepresent disaster data as gathered by one of the most reputable agencies in the world, the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in their EM-DAT database.
The claims of a five-fold increase in the numbers of disasters appears to be supported by a significant increase in calamities from 1970 until 2000 and a decline over the last twenty or so years. Why the change from increasing disasters over the first 30 years of data and a decline thereafter?
It turns out that the period from 1970 to about 2000 are the years in which CRED was building a data collection system that depends heavily on external reporting. Please note that the title of the WMO chart is “Number of reported disasters,” not “number of disasters.”
That the chart was driven by reporting rather than numbers was confirmed by CO2 Coalition Science Research Journalist Kip Hansen when he first questioned the validity of the data after its publication in 2019. At the time, he emailed Regina Below, CRED database manager and documentalist, asking her to confirm that the increase in the early period represented an increase in reporting, rather than an increase in actual natural disasters. Her response via email?
“Thank for your e-mail. You are right, it is an increase in reporting.”
In other words, the CRED system’s counts rose as it received reports from more and more sources over the years. Comparing totals from the 1970s with 21st century data is not only inappropriate, but also a blatant misuse of statistics to bolster a pre-ordained conclusion of increasing destruction.
To restate: The WMO released a “study” claiming climate disasters were increasing based on numbers that the authors knew were misleading at best. The actual numbers of disasters since proper reporting has been in place show a decline in disasters over the last twenty years, exactly opposite the hyperbolic claims of the WMO.
The World Meteorological Organization should immediately retract this flawed study and issue a formal statement publicly correcting the record.
https://ussanews.com/global-agency-sows-fear-with-misinformation/
************************************************Climate industrial complex left clueless as fossil fuels proliferate
It has been a little more than a month since the United Nations climate meeting at Glasgow, yet global use of fossil fuels has increased rapidly.
For instance, U.S. President Joe Biden cancelled domestic oil projects and vowed to stop funding for international fossil fuel projects. But as fuel prices rose, Biden responded to his self-induced energy insecurity by releasing 50 million barrels of oil reserves and even called for an increase in domestic oil production.
Within a span of a few months, the U.S. president went from being a climate savior to climate villain. Though many may classify his actions as temporary solutions (to a non-existent problem), the rest of the world sees through the veneer of climate politics and the hypocrisy within.
There is nothing that the climate industrial complex can do about the situation in the U.S. or other parts of the world. In fact, in Asia, production of fossil fuels is proliferating.
India and China Go Full Throttle on Coal
As climate doomsayers met in November in Glasgow for the annual U.N. meeting, Asian political leaders promoted policies that sought to increase fossil fuel production — largely because of lessons learned from acute coal shortages in India and China earlier in the year.
The Indian government has opened more coal mines and has allocated new mines to private players through auctions. India’s coal minister has asked the government’s coal production arm, Coal India Limited, to meet an annual target of 1 billion tonnes by 2024.
Meanwhile, China is taking similar measures to ensure its coal supply. Coal production for November hit record highs as Beijing scrambled to ensure enough of the fuel to meet winter needs. October 2021 witnessed the highest monthly production since March 2015. Overall, the first 11 months of this year accounted for 3.67 billion tonnes of coal, which is 4.2% higher than 2020.
Though India and China have managed to overcome the recent shortage in coal reserves, domestic production must be complemented by imports. Hence, the price of coal from Australia and Indonesia remains high. With the Omicron variant expected to have only a minimal impact on the economy, we can expect sustained demand for coal through 2022.
Oil Futures on a high and India cashes in on imports
India is also keen on securing its oil sources as OPEC has forecasted a high global demand in 2022. Oil from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq were bought in large quantities by Asian countries.
India’s Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas reported that the country would acquire “massive additional areas for oil exploration and production” by 2025. “As far as the government of India is concerned, we are going to step on the accelerator in terms of exploration and production in a very big way,” said the minister in November.
An UAE firm owned by India’s richest man is all set to import crude oil, petroleum, and petrochemical products in December. The country’s major state-owned oil firms and refineries have already secured supply for the first half of 2022.
Gas prices at fuel stations remained high in India throughout the year. However, the federal government intervened by releasing millions of barrels of oil from strategic reserves, prices have come down drastically. Meanwhile, the country’s aviation minister has made an open call to states to reduce jet fuel prices in order to “increase air-traffic.”
So, if anyone is thinking that fossil fuels are dead, they should think again. The 2.6 billion people in India and China will continue to use fossil fuels as their primary energy source until 2070. Even the most advanced European and Scandinavian countries are witnessing a revival of the fossil fuel sector.
It is as if the anti-fossil climate conference never happened this year. As if promises to end fossil fuels are nothing but vapors from the incense offered at the altar of climate drama — only to be consumed by an inescapable energy reality.
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Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing
A first-of-its-kind “green” Shell facility in Alberta is emitting more greenhouse gases than it’s capturing, throwing into question whether taxpayers should be funding it, a new report has found.
Shell’s Quest carbon capture and storage facility captured 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the hydrogen produced at its Scotford complex between 2015 and 2019. Scotford refines oil from the Alberta tar sands.
But a new report from human rights organization Global Witness found the hydrogen plant emitted 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in the same timeframe—including methane, which has 80 times the warming power of carbon during its first 20 years in the atmosphere, and accounts for about a quarter of man-made warming today.
To put that in perspective, the “climate-forward” part of the Scotford plant alone has the same carbon footprint per year as 1.2 million fuel-powered cars, Global Witness said.
“We do think Shell is misleading the public in that sense and only giving us one side of the story,” said Dominic Eagleton, who wrote the report. He said industry’s been pushing for governments to subsidize the production of fossil hydrogen (hydrogen produced from natural gas) that’s supplemented with carbon capture technology as a “climate-friendly” way forward, but the new report shows that’s not the case.
In an email, Shell said the facility was introduced to display the merits of carbon capture technology, but didn’t directly respond to the allegation that its hydrogen component emitted 7.5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases.
“Quest was originally designed as a demonstration project to prove (carbon capture) technology and overall has met or exceeded our expectations,” said Shell Canada spokesperson Stephen Doolan.
Doolan also said that as of today, Quest has captured 6 million tonnes of carbon, but Global Witness noted that as time passes and the facility captures more carbon, it will also emit more.
Quest is the world's first commercial-scale carbon capture facility and one of few like it around the world today. But Global Witness’ findings throw into question whether carbon capture and storage technologies are as green as oil companies claim, or whether they amount to “greenwashing.” Lately, industry players have been saying that carbon capture technology is a key component in reaching net-zero.
“Shell has described the carbon capture facility at its Alberta plant as showing that carbon capture technology is an effective way of reducing carbon emissions, whereas our investigation shows that’s clearly not the case,” Eagleton said. “This should be a wake-up call for governments, not just in Canada, but across the world.”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kb43x/shell-quest-carbon-capture-plant-alberta
****************************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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21 January, 2022
Tesla owners in Alaska and Canada say car heating systems are failing
To use the car's battery to produce heat directly would flatten the battery in double quick time so the car draws in heat from outside the vehicle using a heat pump. That works a lot of the time but when the temperaure outside is very low, the heat pump has to work hard to grab heat and can overload and fail when trying to do so. Electric cars are just not suited to the very cold environments often experienced in Northern North America.
Tesla owners living in Alaska and western Canada are being forced to drive their vehicles without heat in the cabin when temperatures are dropping far below freezing.
The issue, which has plagued Model 3 and Model Y vehicles since last winter, started when a new heat pump system was added to the vehicles and persisted with a software update.
Tesla owners have taken to Twitter to share this frustration, as Elon Musk is the only person on the company's customer service team, with one customer saying his family could have been killed.
Tyler Selvig explained in a tweet that the heat stopped working in his Model Y while temperatures had dropped to -40F.
'Our Model Y could have killed my family today when the heat stopped working in -40c Called service and the reset and auto didn't fix. Hour away from any service,' reads the tweet.
Musk, however, has acknowledged the issue on Twitter, saying fixing this issue was a 'high priority' at Tesla, and this weekend, he announced that the automaker is rolling out a software fix for it: 'Firmware fix to recalibrate heat pump expansion valve is rolling out now,' He posted.
However, some Tesla owners shared images of their vehicle's heat pump, which appears to be damaged or is just not working.
This suggested a simple over-the-air update may not fix the problem.
'Heat pumps are not designed for areas that get under 20F… the colder it gets there, the longer/more difficult it gets to draw heat. Add in wind and ice, and things really just don't work,' the tweeted.
Wick H continued to explain that refrigerant is unable to be transfer heat at such low temperatures.
Several customers plagued by the issue opted to have their vehicle serviced instead of waiting around for an update from Tesla.
Twitter user 'Tapic' tweeted directedly at Musk saying: 'Are you going to comment on the fact that my Tesla is completely useless right now. My heat pump not working at -20c and the next service date is Jan 28. Is this acceptable? Seems to be a common issue. FIX IT!'
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and Transport Canada have also opened investigations into the defected heating system over 'potential safety concerns.'
NHTSA said it 'is aware of the issue and is continuing to gather information, discuss the issue with Tesla and evaluate potential safety concerns.'
And according to Transport Canada, the issue 'may affect windshield defogging/defrosting and therefore driver visibility.'
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Greenies target PR and ad firms they accuse of spreading disinformation
More than 450 scientists on Wednesday called on the executives of major advertising and public relations firms to drop their fossil fuel clients and stop what the scientists said was their spread of disinformation around climate change.
They sent a letter to the executives of major global public relations and advertising firms, including conglomerate WPP, Edelman and IPG, as well as the CEOs of their clients who tout sustainability goals including Unilever, Amazon and Microsoft.
"As scientists who study and communicate the realities of climate change, we are consistently faced with a major and needless challenge: overcoming advertising and PR efforts by fossil fuel companies that seek to obfuscate or downplay our data and the risks posed by the climate crisis," the scientists wrote.
None of the advertising and PR firms or their clients were immediately available to comment on the letter.
There has been increasing scrutiny of the role that PR and advertising firms play in helping oil and gas companies to play down their role in exacerbating climate change or "greenwashing" with claims the companies offer climate solutions.
A U.S. House panel questioned oil company CEOs in October about their role in spreading climate change misinformation and subpoenaed them for documents related to money they spent on PR and marketing firms as well as social media firms.
The panel's investigation is expected to dig into these third party companies.
Several lawsuits accuse major oil and gas companies of "greenwashing," citing ad campaigns that make what the suits allege are unsubstantiated claims meant to deceive customers into believing products are environmentally friendly.
Climate scientist Michael Mann, a signatory to the letter, said the ad campaigns minimize environmental risks. “We climate scientists have been trying to raise the climate crisis alarm for decades, but we've been drowned out by these fossil fuel industry-funded PR campaigns,” said Mann.
A campaign led by Clean Creatives, a group pressuring ad and PR firms to drop fossil fuel clients, had called on Edelman to drop its oil and gas clients. Edelman said earlier this month it would not but said it would set up a panel of "external climate experts to offer input and guidance on strategy and on assignments and client situations of concern.”
In a statement to Reuters in December 2020, WPP said: “WPP recognizes the importance of its role in addressing climate change by applying rigorous standards to the content we produce and helping clients to accelerate the world’s transition to a lower-carbon economy.
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Worldwide demand for solar panels presents global warming risk through aluminum production
As countries around the globe push towards net zero emissions targets, new research has highlighted an area of environmental concern in the production of solar panels.
An Australian study has found that to reach net zero milestones, the world will need almost 60 times more solar power, which will cause "concerning" levels of global warming.
Photovoltaic engineering researcher Alison Lennon said part of the problem was the emission-intensive production of aluminium, with solar panel components made with mostly aluminium frames, inverter casings, rooftop cells and mounts.
"The emissions that could be generated in producing that aluminium are really concerning," Professor Lennon said.
"Australia is actually the largest producer of bauxite, and one of the largest producers of alumina – so there's a real opportunity for Australia to play a big role in this growth of renewable energy."
The study revealed that for the global community to reach net zero by 2050, about 60 terawatts of solar power along with 480 megatons of aluminium would be required.
Currently, there is 0.8 terawatts, or 800 gigawatts of solar available globally.
Professor Lennon said that in coming years, as countries consider possible carbon border taxes, Australia's high-emissions aluminium will not be as competitive to the international market.
But if Australia could produce low-emissions aluminium, it would be a valuable export and manufacturing opportunity.
She said Australia has the upper hand over countries such as China when it comes to greening aluminium production due to the location of our refineries.
"In China, where most of the aluminium is currently produced, it's a little bit harder to do that because all their solar farms are way out west," Professor Lennon said.
"There's a lot of solar resources but their smelters and refineries tend to be on the east coast where it's not as sunny.
"In order to convert their smelters and refineries … they would have to build very large transmission lines from west to east."
Professor Lennon said Australia has four smelters, including one in Tasmania which is hydro-powered and produces less than five tonnes of emissions per tonne of aluminium.
She said all of the mainland Australian smelters are powered by coal, producing 'well over' 10 tonnes of carbon emissions per tonne of aluminium.
"That's an awful lot of emissions to produce and it's high because you need a lot of electricity to refine the alumina into aluminium."
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The New Yorker’s OUTRAGEOUS Climate Nemesis: Refrigerators
New Yorker Staff Writer David Owen took a nosedive into eco-extremism. He argued that the refrigerator has become — wait for it — “an agent of climate catastrophe.”
Owen pontificated in a blog headlined, “How the Refrigerator Became an Agent of Climate Catastrophe,” that “[t]he evolution of cooling technology helps to explain why supposed solutions to global warming have only made the situation worse.” Specifically, he identified refrigerators, these unassuming little machines, as the vile culprits “of our unfolding climate catastrophe.”
Really? Owen wrote as if refrigerators are cartoon villains who chomp on cigars while they devise the destruction of the climate. But his article is, in typical liberal fashion, a truth “catastrophe.”
Owen continued fear-mongering that cooling “technology has directly contributed to the crisis…mainly because its history suggests a counterintuitive explanation for why combating global warming has proved to be so hard, and why some of our putative solutions are actually making our problems worse.” That is, beware! The modest “icebox,” home “freezer[s],” and “electric refrigerators” in homes across America may be more dastardly than they appear.
But it gets worse. Owen also fretted that refrigerants known as “hydrofluorocarbons [(HFCs)] are greenhouse gases with hundreds or thousands of times the warming potential of carbon dioxide.” However, as JunkScience.com founder Steve Milloy explained in exclusive comments to MRC Business, villainizing HFCs is misleading.
The “notion that refrigeration is contributing to a ‘climate catastrophe’ is preposterous,” Milloy noted. He also pointed out that the leftist “war against refrigeration” goes all the way back to the 1970s. The “war” has since resurfaced under President Joe Biden’s push for ratification of the radical Kigali Amendment, which seeks to phase out HFCs on a global scale to fight climate change.
Milloy continued: “[W]hile Kigali advocates have the chemistry correct (HFCs are a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide), they have the environmental effects wrong as there are much lower levels of HFCs in the atmosphere and so HFCs make little difference to global climate.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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20 January, 2022
A hot year in North America ... and the world
What an idiotic article! Is it a joke? They admit that the warming is tiny and very gradual -- 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution -- but portray it as catastrophic. There does appear to be some global warming but it is negligible. Occasional atypical hot or cold extremes in some places are rightly called bad eweather but if we want to make statements about any overall process, it is the average we need to look at
Today, our planet revolves at its hottest levels on record — 1.9 degrees (1.1 Celsius) higher than at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The drumbeat has been steady; the past seven years have been the hottest on record. As each year brings unprecedented extreme weather and unfathomable statistics, 2021 was no exception.
Last year, North America was at the epicenter of some of recorded history’s most intense weather and climate extremes, from tremendous heat to brutal cold and from exceptional drought to catastrophic inundation.
Historic U.S. weather events in 2021, by the numbers
Although 2021 tied for the sixth-hottest year on record, it ranked as the warmest La Niña year. La Niña, a phenomenon that slightly cools sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific, may have cooled global temperatures by about 0.06 degrees (0.03 degrees Celsius), but human-emitted greenhouse gas effectively masked the impact.
A closer look at 2021 reveals that the Northern Hemisphere also ranked the sixth-hottest on record. The most profound warming has occurred within the Arctic because of a process called Arctic amplification. The Arctic is warming three to four times as fast as the average global warming rate, and this is accelerating ice melt and contributing to sea-level rise.
Last year was no exception, with the high Arctic, Greenland and high latitudes of North America experiencing some of the strongest warm anomalies (relative to the mid-20th-century average).
For instance, warm summer temperatures caused rain to fall for the first time on the summit of Greenland last year. Greenland’s average December temperature was nearly 18 degrees (10 Celsius) higher than typical.
Rain falls at the summit of Greenland Ice Sheet for first time on record
As global temperatures continued to rise last year, thermometers spiked to record highs in pockets around the world. Eleven countries either broke or tied national heat records in 2021.
The most prolific record-breaking heat wave was in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada. Long-standing heat records were obliterated by large margins, including the all-time Canadian heat record.
Besides the swath of extreme heat records, other weather extremes plagued North America, particularly the United States. The freeze from winter storm Uri in mid-February sent deep Arctic cold all the way to Texas, the costliest U.S. winter storm on record.
The country had its warmest June on record, with unprecedented heat waves and wildfires in the summer. Large portions of the western United States suffered in exceptional drought, exacerbating the spread of unusually early- and late-season wildfires, such as in Colorado.
December was record-warm for the United States, while western Canada shivered in extreme cold. The clash of extreme cold in the north and extreme warmth to the south was a key ingredient in the devastating and unprecedented severe weather episodes in December. The heat in the southern United States smashed December records by large margins. Some places beat all-time November records, too.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/01/18/2021-northern-hemisphere-temperature-records/
**************************************************Biden nominates Greenie for Federal Reserve
President Biden has a chance to remake the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by filling multiple vacancies. This is especially important given inflation’s breakout, yet Mr. Biden’s latest nominees seem less worried about prices than pushing progressive policies that aren’t the Fed’s job.
Mr. Biden on Friday nominated former Treasury official Sarah Bloom Raskin as Fed vice chair for supervision, along with economists Lisa Cook and Philip Jefferson to vacancies on the Board of Governors. All three deserve scrutiny, but especially Ms. Raskin given what would be her regulatory power over banks and finance.
***
Ms. Raskin previously served as a Fed governor from 2010 to 2014. But her recent public statements have focused on climate change, especially using financial regulation to steer capital from fossil fuels to green energy.
In May 2020, with awful timing, she wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Why Is the Fed Spending So Much Money on a Dying Industry?” That was amid the government’s pandemic shutdowns, when the Fed was acting to save the economy from collapse. The Fed established broad-based lending programs to prevent businesses that were otherwise sound from failing due to the shutdowns.
Ms. Raskin wanted the Fed to exclude fossil-fuel companies from these facilities. “The Fed is ignoring clear warning signs about the economic repercussions of the impending climate crisis by taking action that will lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions at a time when even in the short term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment,” she wrote.
This showed colossally bad judgment. The crisis of the hour was Covid and a potential depression, not climate. Yet at that perilous moment Ms. Raskin was urging the Fed to discriminate against an industry that employed hundreds of thousands of people. Had the Fed taken her advice, many more oil and gas producers would have gone bankrupt, and energy prices would be even higher today.
“The Fed’s unique independence affords it a powerful role,” Ms. Raskin added. “The decisions the Fed makes on our behalf should build toward a stronger economy with more jobs in innovative industries—not prop up and enrich dying ones.” By unique independence, she apparently means it is unaccountable to voters. The Fed won’t pay a price at the ballot box if it destroys jobs.
Ms. Raskin expanded on her views in a June 2020 report “Addressing Climate as a Systemic Risk,” for the liberal investing outfit Ceres. “We must rebuild with an economy where the values of sustainability are explicitly embedded in market valuation,” she wrote. This will require “our financial regulatory bodies to do all they can—which turns out to be a lot—to bring about the adoption of practices and policies that will allocate capital and align portfolios toward sustainable investments that do not depend on carbon and fossil fuels.”
Note that phrase “allocate capital.” Among other things, the report recommended the Fed use climate stress tests to make banks account for the risk of government anti-carbon policies such as electric-car mandates and carbon taxes. It also suggested that the Fed deem fossil fuels risky assets and require banks to calculate the carbon emissions of their loans and investments.
Since this forced climate march will especially hurt lower-income Americans, both through destroyed jobs and higher energy prices, the report suggests the Fed use the “community reinvestment process to bolster the resilience of low-income communities to climate change.” Liberals have long used the Community Reinvestment Act to steer more lending to low-income neighborhoods.
Now Ms. Raskin apparently wants the Fed to use the law to force banks to finance green energy—for instance, electric-vehicle charging stations and rooftop solar panels—in minority communities. None of this is the Fed’s job under the law. The central bank’s regulatory command is financial stability, not making policy judgments that are the province of Congress, and not using regulation to allocate capital based on politics.
***
The Fed’s vice chair has extraordinary power to set the agenda on bank regulation. Chairman Jay Powell plays a secondary role. Along with the other new Fed Governors, Ms. Raskin would be in a position to steer lending in ways that could undermine financial stability by punishing some industries while favoring others.
It’s no surprise that Ms. Raskin was pushed hard by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats who want to use regulation to steer bank lending. This political play to control the Fed is ironic given that Democrats opposed Judy Shelton for a regular Fed governor position because she had written favorably about a price rule for monetary policy.
Ms. Raskin’s views should trouble Senators who care about the Fed’s independence. And they should especially concern Democrats, such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Montana’s Jon Tester, whose state economies depend on fossil fuels.
“The @FederalReserve is no place for someone incapable of making policy decisions independent from political calculations,” Sen. Warren tweeted last November. Do Democrats only care about the Fed’s independence when a Republican is President?
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Oil demand to exceed Pre-Covid levels in 2022
Looks like all those electric cars have done nothing
Global oil demand will exceed pre-pandemic levels this year thanks to growing Covid-19 immunisation rates and as recent virus waves haven’t proved severe enough to warrant a return to strict lockdown measures, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.
In its monthly oil market report, the IEA hiked its oil demand growth forecast for the coming year by 200,000 barrels a day, to 3.3m barrels a day. The Paris-based agency also raised its demand growth forecasts for 2021 by 200,000 barrels a day to 5.5m barrels a day.
Factoring in the IEA’s more optimistic forecasts are signs that recent coronavirus variants have been faster spreading but less fatal, helping boost global economic resilience to the virus, and allowing states to continue on a path of gradually winding down lockdown restrictions.
“The number of Covid cases is exploding worldwide but measures taken by governments to contain the virus are less severe than during earlier waves and their impact on economic activity and oil demand remain relatively subdued,” the IEA said.
While the Omicron variant has seen infection rates surge to record levels, its milder nature should help spread immunity to the virus and aid a faster return to pre-virus oil demand, the agency said.
“At the current speed of transmission, a large part of the population will likely have gained immunity by infection or vaccination by the end of the first quarter,” the group said. “As a result, restrictions to mobility could be minimal in the second half of the year.” Total demand this year should stand at 99.7m barrels a day, around 200,000 barrels a day more than 2019 levels, the IEA said. Last month the IEA was expecting this year’s oil demand to be broadly on par with pre-pandemic levels.
A global energy crunch that has seen natural-gas prices soar was another factor supporting the IEA’s forecasts for oil demand. Rocketing prices for natural gas were prompting greater demand for cheaper oil as an energy source, a trend which added 100,000 barrels a day of additional oil demand last month, the IEA said.
While the IEA’s view on demand has grown stronger, the body still expects supply to exceed demand by a narrow margin throughout 2022, despite signs that major producers were struggling to increase their output at agreed-upon levels.
An alliance of the Organisation of the Petroleum Producing Countries and a collection of other major producers including Russia — known collectively as OPEC+--missed their planned production targets by 790,000 barrels a day last month.
Global oil supply rose by a modest 130,000 barrels a day last month to 98.6m barrels a day.
The combination of robust demand and tepid supply hikes are helping to push crude stockpiles lower, something which analysts broadly think will keep oil prices supported this year.
The IEA said that stocks in the wealthier nations that make up the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development fell by 6.1 million barrels in November to a seven-year low of 2.76bn barrels. Preliminary data showed a further decline of 45m barrels in December.
Oil prices this week have risen to their highest levels since October 2014. West Texas Intermediate, the US crude benchmark, added $US1.53 on Wednesday to close at $US86.96 a barrel. Brent, the main international price, rose 1.1 per cent to end at $US88.44.
In its own report issued Tuesday, OPEC offered a similar view that recent virus variants had not weighed heavily on demand, but kept its demand growth forecasts for 2021 and 2022 unchanged.
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Europe's wind energy falters (again)
One of the countless ironies running through current climate policies is that progress may be about to go into reverse, not because of climate change, but because of policies designed to combat it.
One of mankind’s great achievements has been the way that, across an ever-increasing part of the planet, we have reached a level of technological sophistication that has meant that we can go about our business without, extreme events aside, having to worry too much about what the weather is doing.
One of the countless ironies running through current climate policies is that that progress may be about to go into reverse, not because of climate change, but because of policies designed to combat it, and, more specifically, what looks more and more like a premature dash into wind energy. One of the triggers of the prolonged energy-price squeeze in the U.K. was the failure of winds over the North Sea to do what was expected of them in the late summer/early fall.
I wrote a bit about this in mid September, and here’s Joe Wallace in the Wall Street Journal, on September 13:
"Natural gas and electricity markets were already surging in Europe when a fresh catalyst emerged: The wind in the stormy North Sea stopped blowing.
The sudden slowdown in wind-driven electricity production off the coast of the U.K. in recent weeks whipsawed through regional energy markets. Gas and coal-fired electricity plants were called in to make up the shortfall from wind.
Natural-gas prices, already boosted by the pandemic recovery and a lack of fuel in storage caverns and tanks, hit all-time highs. Thermal coal, long shunned for its carbon emissions, has emerged from a long price slump as utilities are forced to turn on backup power sources.
The episode underscored the precarious state the region’s energy markets face heading into the long European winter. The electricity price shock was most acute in the U.K., which has leaned on wind farms to eradicate net carbon emissions by 2050. Prices for carbon credits, which electricity producers need to burn fossil fuels, are at records, too"
Perhaps “leaning on wind farms” to the extent that the U.K.’s ruling establishment (this is more than a matter of Tory incompetence, although the Conservative Party deserves a great deal of the blame) has decided to do was not the wisest course of action, particularly when combined with — and even more of the blame rests with the Tories for this — moving to a more or less just-in-time supply arrangement for gas.
But that failure by the wind to do what it should was a rarity, a one-off, right?
Right?
Now may be a moment to be start thinking of that Anakin/Padme meme.
The Daily Telegraph today:
"Power prices have surged to their highest level in a month as an extreme lull in wind threatens to hit supply.
Prices for Monday evening jumped to £1,161 a megawatt-hour – the highest since December 16. At the same time, wind output is set to slide below 1.5 gigawatts, compared to a 10-day average of 6.3 gigawatts.
The surge in prices highlights the pressure on the UK power market as ageing nuclear reactors are shut down and aren’t immediately replaced."
Oh.
Nasdaq (also today):
"PARIS, Jan 17 (Reuters) – The German spot price jumped on Monday as wind supply was predicted to fall sharply on Tuesday.
Broker Marex said in a short-term comment that power supply would be lower than expected this week.
Wind supply is significantly reduced day on day and residual load is seen up throughout the region, Refinitiv analyst said, adding that residual load is down compared to last week.
The German Tuesday baseload TRDEBD1 stood at 232 euros ($265.01) per megawatt hour (MWh) at 0956 GMT, 58.6% above the price paid last Friday for Monday delivery."
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/another-low-blow-wind-energy-falters-again/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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19 January, 2022
Vehicle with next-generation battery travels 1,200km on a single charge
A Tesla vehicle equipped with a next-generation battery was able to travel more than 1,200km (750 miles) on a single charge.
The first road test of the Gemini battery, developed by Detroit-based startup Our Next Energy (ONE), achieved nearly double the typical range that a standard Tesla Model S is able to achieve, and more than the highest range of any mass-produced gasoline-powered vehicles.
Travelling across Michigan, the results “set a new benchmark for the entire automotive industry”, according to ONE founder and CEO Mujeeb Ijaz.
“We want to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles by eliminating range anxiety, which holds back most consumers today,” he said.
“We are now focussed on evolving this proof-of-concept battery into a new product called GeminiTM, which will enable long distance trips on a single charge while improving cost and safety using sustainable materials.”
Recommended
The proof-of-concept solves the issue of range anxiety with electric vehicles, which until now has been addressed through making charging stations more ubiquitous. This comes with its own issues however, most notably the length of time it takes to recharge an electric car compared to refilling a fuel-powered vehicle.
The battery used in the ONE prototype is an innovative lithium iron phosphate design, which the company hopes will be used in commercial trucks later this year.
The technology was presented at the CES 2022 tech conference in Las Vegas earlier this month, where several other companies and startups displayed ambitious battery life designs.
Mercedes promised a 965km range for its Vision EQXX prototype vehicle, while HyperX’s wireless gaming headphones boasted of a 300-hour charge cycle – a 10-fold improvement on standard wireless headsets.
Energy density limitations of lithium-ion batteries, which are found in most consumer technology products, have been augmented by new anodes and ultra-efficient processors, but researchers are now looking to next-generation batteries like lithium-sulfur.
So far, any breakthroughs with these new battery types are yet to make it out of the lab, but are could one day replace their conventional counterparts due to their vastly superior capacity and improved environmental credentials.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/tesla-battery-electric-car-b1994523.html
*****************************************Climate activists lose court case against UK oil regulator
The ruling, seen by Reuters, is a setback for climate activists who are increasingly taking to the courts to force a reduction in oil and gas production in order to control global warming.
In the case, activists including a former oil refinery worker targeted the OGA's assessment of applications for oil and gas field developments on a pre-tax basis, noting in some years if oil and gas prices were low the government actually returned money to producers rather than benefiting from tax receipts.
This, they argue, is in conflict with both the government's long-standing policy of "maximising economic recovery" of oil and gas in the British North Sea, meaning that oil and gas extraction there should make commercial sense, and with Britain's 2050 net zero emissions goal.
"I reject the contention that the strategy is unlawful because the definition of 'economically recoverable' was irrational. It follows that the claimants' claim fails and is dismissed," Judge Sara Cockerill said in the ruling document.
Britain's treasury received around 248 million pounds from oil and gas production in 2020/21, a drop of 71% on the previous year, according to official data, due to a plunge in oil and gas prices during the pandemic.
The Paid to Pollute campaigners highlight tax years such as 2016/17 when an oil price slump meant the government returned 400 million pounds to oil producers, rather than benefiting from any net receipts.
"We welcome the judgment. We remain firmly focused on regulating and influencing the oil, gas and carbon storage industries to both secure energy supply and support the transition to net zero," an OGA spokesman said in a statement.
OGA lawyer Kate Gallafent had told the court in December the benefits of oil and gas extractions were "a lot wider" than tax revenues, pointing to energy security and jobs.
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Petrol and diesel ban is an attack 'on the working class' - 'only the rich will have cars'
The Government confirmed sales of new petrol and diesel cars will be banned at the end of the decade in 2020 to reduce vehicle emissions. The policy was also planned to accelerate the UK’s green transport future and encourage more to switch to electric vehicles.
However, Express readers have attacked the plans which could leave “poorer motorists” priced away from car ownership.
Express reader Danspill said: “So how are working classes supposed to be able to afford electric cars that are much more expensive than fossil fuel cars. “I buy second-hand cars £300 max which I use to get to work.
“A trip by train would take 3.5 hours and cost £65 return daily having to go into Central London then back out.
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/cars/1551244/petrol-diesel-car-ban-electric-vehicle-ownership
***************************************The Met Office’s bizarre forecasts
Our national weather forecasting service – which derives most of its income from arrangements with government departments – is certainly not going out of its way to make friends in government with its latest ‘forecast’.
The ‘UK Shared Socioeconomic Pathways’ professes to look ahead to the year 2100 and what effect climate change might have had on British society by then. It is produced by academics at the Universities of Exeter and Edinburgh, in association with a forecasting group Cambridge Econometrics but is funded by the Met Office as part of its UK Climate Resilience Programme.
The study looks at five different scenarios of how the UK might tackle climate change. The first scenario – called ‘sustainability’ – seems to be a little over-optimistic. It envisages the people of Britain becoming a bunch of hippies who forsake private property for a life of shared goods, green lifestyles and local food. By the end of the century we have re-joined the EU and ‘poverty has been eliminated’.
But it is the third scenario, called ‘Regional Rivalry’ which will really have the floors of No. 10 rumbling. It begins with a thinly-veiled description of current government policies, starting with the ‘exploitation of a wider supply of domestic natural resources’ – in other words, fracking, and more oil and gas from the North Sea. It continues with a ‘crackdown on environmental activism groups’ – potentially a thinly-veiled reference to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, so loathed by Extinction Rebellion and others.
Simultaneously, universities are forced into ‘aligning their curricula to corporate interests in manufacturing and technology whilst withdrawing from the arts, humanities and environmental sciences’ – abolishing Mickey Mouse degrees, in other words, just as the government has suggested doing.
By 2040, Scotland and Wales have left the UK, and become more left wing while England becomes ever more right wing. So far, so believable, but then? The English population inexplicably reverts to hunter-gathering and feudal warfare. ‘Hunting and fishing for food increases to supplement diets in deprived rural communities,’ it suggests. Tap water becomes unsafe to drink because of a lack of investment, while the NHS collapses.
Child labour returns, as does bartering. ‘Before the end of the century,’ it goes on, ‘military groups... rise to de facto power and compete for control and natural resources, creating their own feudal semi-independent micro-states with their own laws and means to enforce them.’
We have become used to opposition parties attacking government policy with lurid claims about poverty and the collapse of the NHS etc. But the Met Office which is, after all, a branch of the government itself, apparently claiming that Tory policies will lead us back to the stone age? The Prime Minister, who in the past has put a word in for Piers Corbyn’s maverick weather forecasting operation, is unlikely to be amused.
Mr S suspects that next time the Met Office goes round to No. 10 and sticks out the begging bowl for a new super-computer, it might encounter a severe cold front.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-met-office-s-bizarre-forecasts
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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18 January, 2022
Conservation is not the same thing as climate action
There's no such thing as a happy Greenie
Over the last few years, the U.S. has finally started making real progress on combating climate change. Battery and solar prices are falling faster than anticipated, electric cars are moving from niche to mainstream, and there has been substantial federal investment in grid modernization and clean energy research.
But as the pace of electrification picks up, new clean energy projects are facing opposition from what seems like an unlikely source: large environmental organizations.
America’s biggest green groups are over and over again lining up on the wrong side of decarbonization. The Audubon Society is suing to block California wind farms. The Natural Resources Defense Council supported closing nuclear power plants in New York and California.. The Sunrise Movement is supporting a moratorium on large solar projects in Amherst, MA. And the Sierra Club has organized opposition to solar projects in Florida, California, Maryland and elsewhere.
In Nevada, the Sierra Club and groups like it were the primary challenger to a 14-square-mile solar project. The reason? Affection for the plot of land, which also shelters endangered tortoises.
Big environmental groups frequently say they are ardent supporters of decarbonization. But all too often the groups also say that the tradeoffs needed to construct clean energy infrastructure are too great.
What’s going on here?
The core of the problem is that these groups were founded on principles of conservation—an inherently small-c conservative concept. That’s dangerous during a climate crisis that calls for radical action. Meanwhile, their structure has also made them vulnerable to NIMBYism—raising the temptation to value the fate of a few acres of land over potentially game-changing climate solutions.
Many of our largest environmental orgs gained prominence in an era when people thought the main environmental threat was development.
To understand how environmental groups became influential opponents of climate action, it’s worth going back to their renaissance during the 1960s and 70s. The U.S. was coming off of several decades of postwar prosperity. Families had bought cars and houses in the suburbs. But a growing number of folks were starting to notice and lament the negative side effects of sprawl–like smog, water pollution and the loss of wilderness areas close to cities. The cultural backlash against development in this era is captured by songs like “Little Boxes” and “Big Yellow Taxi,” with its now-famous refrain: “They paved paradise, put up a parking lot.”
The environmentalist response was simple and effective: conservation. Slow down development. Stop sprawl. Regulate or prohibit air and water pollution. Protect open spaces.
The movement was extremely successful, both in terms of impact and popularity. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts helped improve air and water quality. Groups like the Sierra Club and Audobon Society spun up local chapters across the country to lobby local governments. And environmentalists succeeded in institutionalizing many of their concerns about local development through legislation like the California Environmental Quality Act that instituted legenthly environmental reviews of proposed construction projects.
Now, though, the problems facing the environment are wildly different–and require more development not less.
Conservation is not the same thing as climate action.
Conservation is a conservative impulse, but right now, the climate threat calls for sweeping changes to our physical environment. Our best shot at mitigating the impact of climate change is to electrify every process in our economy as quickly as possible: We need to preserve clean energy infrastructure like hydro and legacy nuclear power plants. We need to build a ton of new wind and solar fast. And we need to find and harvest the raw materials needed for batteries.
All of these projects pose tradeoffs: They’re important from a climate standpoint, but bad from a conservation standpoint. To state the obvious: If you build a solar farm in the desert, it is no longer a natural desert habitat, it’s a solar farm. Meanwhile, wind farms do kill some birds. Hydro dams (though we aren’t likely to build more since we’ve already used the best sites), do disrupt fish, and nuclear plants still scare people.
So it’s not actually surprising that conservation groups like the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society and the NRDC regularly oppose specific clean energy projects, even while they acknowledge the importance of a rapid energy transition.
The tradeoffs are a hard problem for organizations to wrestle with, particularly when many of our biggest environmental groups were founded specifically with a goal of conservation. The Audubon Society was created to protect birds and the Sierra Club was founded by mountaineers. The Natural Resources Defense Council, meanwhile, grew out of opposition to a hydro-electric project on the Hudson River. Until very recently, their agendas were focused on protecting what already existed–not embracing rapid change.
For its part, the national Sierra Club leadership seems to be trying to put more emphasis on supporting clean energy projects than it did in the past. Its platform calls for 100% clean energy now, and the organization's national magazine even published a story about the threat NIMBYs pose to renewable energy. But when you have an organization that has fought for conservation for over 100 years, and whose entire playbook and tool kit is designed to stop or at least delay change, embracing clean energy development can be hard.
Many conservation groups have a structure that makes them chaotic, and vulnerable to NIMBYs.
One of the reasons the Sierra Club was so successful at advancing its agenda in the late 20th century is that it was organized as a chapter-based membership organization. Local chapters popped up across the country where the most passionate members could organize around local issues, lobby local politicians, and talk to the press, all with the credibility of the Sierra Club name behind them. The Audubon Society, and more recently the Sunrise Movement, followed a similar model.
This structure enabled the groups to take on many more fights than they otherwise would have, and helped broaden their influence within state and local governments across the country. Wherever you went, there was likely a Sierra Club chapter ready to weigh in on local development projects.
Now, that structure means that the groups’ power can be high-jacked to protect members’ backyards. For example, last year, the Sierra Club of Iowa came out swinging against a solar project. The weight of its message was increased by the imprimatur of the national brand—normie voters don’t know the difference—even though the national organization has said it’s pro-solar development. The phenomenon is particularly damaging when it comes to dense, walkable housing developments, which can radically improve each residents’ energy efficiency over single-family housing–but which local nature-lovers tend to object to on aesthetic or conservation grounds.
In 2017, the California Sierra Club helped defeat a statewide upzoning bill the New York Times described as some of the most ambitious climate legislation in state history.
Last fall, the Loma Prieta chapter of the Sierra Club and the Santa Clara Valley chapter of the Audubon Society sent a joint letter (Pg. 25) to the City of Mountain View, California opposing new housing. The reason? The development would reduce the number of trees motorists could see while driving down the highway. Then there was that time the San Francisco Sierra club fought to preserve a parking garage.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-top-environmental-groups
****************************************Global warming has saved 500,000 lives in England and Wales in the last 20 years
Something has
Warmer weather in the UK rarely reaches temperatures that cause direct heat-related harms. While the reduction in deaths may relate to climate change, some evidence also suggests the population has reduced vulnerability to cold
This article estimates the change in deaths and hospital admissions associated with rising average temperatures in England and Wales in 2001 to 2020; the trends are relevant to climate change but may also reflect other factors such as improved healthcare and housing.
These experimental statistics are a step towards regular, transparent Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates of climate-health impacts, which are diagnosis-specific and inform policy-makers and the public. Our methods will develop over time and should be read alongside important government reports and the scientific literature on climate risk.
We found relatively little increase in deaths caused by warmer weather and a reduction in deaths caused by cold winters, leading to a net decrease in deaths; in contrast, there was a net increase in hospital admissions linked to warmer weather, especially from injuries.
Previous research has linked warmer weather to injuries from outdoor activities, increased violence and mental health problems; direct harm from extreme heat is still less common but this is likely to change over time.
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Andrew Orlowski: Hydrogen can’t power the green flight revolution
A scan through the news pages of the aviation press reveals something surprising. Here we find no shortage of designs for new flying machines, from Jetson-style personal e-VTOL (electric vertical take off and landing) models to short haul aircraft. But this is not the renaissance it seems to be.
Instead, it’s a sign of how one of Silicon Valley’s most cynical cultural exports – Demo culture – has come to aviation.
In a Demo, potential investors get to clap eyes on a prototype that doesn’t have to work. Eight figure cheques have been handed over on the strength of a demonstration alone.
But since the “product” is only a mock-up intended to unlock further funding, this practice attracts grifters. Like Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos who was convicted of wire fraud two weeks ago, and who became the embodiment of the Valley’s fake-it-until-you-make-it culture. Holmes realised that a viable product was unnecessary: a good Demo was all you need.
Of the new e-VTOL concepts being unveiled today, boosted by speculative venture capital with nowhere else to go, we can be reasonably sure that few will make it to production, and none will enter commercial service. Except perhaps, in amusement parks.
Aviation is an unforgiving battleground, and when we review the physics, reality bites very quickly. Jet fuel has 70 times the energy density of a lithium battery, so compared to today’s efficient designs, an electric plane can’t go very far, or carry very much.
The forecaster Japan Aircraft Development, which produces the most detailed long-term market estimates, agrees.
It reckons that by 2040 there will be 43,028 commercial aircraft in service, of which 4,160 will be turboprops. However, only 762 will be electric vehicles with 19 seats or fewer – the regulatory category that the start-ups are targeting.
A range of 200 miles is what the most optimistic one might achieve, and in Europe, that will never be competitive with high speed rail.
Another potential fuel source is hydrogen, which is being designed for use by larger aircraft. At first glance, hydrogen has a similar energy density to aviation fuel. But hydrogen must be cryogenically frozen, requiring very cumbersome storage – too bulky to go in the wings, as kerosene does today, it takes up valuable cargo space in the fuselage.
Then it must be carefully balanced throughout the journey, so as not to destabilise the plane. Hydrogen atoms are smaller, so you need thicker pipes everywhere. And the resulting engine is far heavier. One estimate I’ve seen of converting a two engine turboprop from kerosene to hydrogen increases the engine weight from 2 tonnes to 13 tonnes – a deal breaker.
Bear in mind that in a low margin industry, cost increases of 5pc are sufficient to render your fleet uncompetitive. At this point, defenders of electric and hydrogen usually cry: “but technology improves all the time. This is only the start!”
Some technologies do indeed improve, such as the existing aviation technologies we use today, which are dramatically more efficient than they were in the 1960s.
But there’s no bet hydrogen energy will improve – for in 40 years time, hydrogen atoms will still be the same size as they are today, will still need to be generated (as the “fuel” does not occur anywhere in nature in useful quantities, except inside stars). I’ll hazard a guess that the freezing point of hydrogen will be the same as it is today too.
It’s worth noting that not every country is as hydrogen-bonkers as the UK. Others are placing smarter bets on advances in biology, and the potential for microbes to produce sustainable aviation fuel much more efficiently than is possible now.
Given recent advances in gene editing and synthetic biology, it seems more likely that we’ll be able to produce zero carbon fuel that’s a ready replacement for kerosene than we’ll be able to defy physics to make hydrogen commercially competitive.
Last week, Air France-KLM imposed a new levy to fund sustainable aviation fuel research. A bold politician would argue that aviation enriches us so much at so little cost – barely over 1pc of global CO2 emissions – it should be left completely alone. But Europe and the UK have a unique handicap: something I call the “innovation blob”.
Seemingly oblivious to physical reality, we now have an army of civil servants, quangos and academics lobbying for low carbon technologies regardless of their drawbacks, and taxpayers fund this circus. State-funded research competitions are the equivalent of the Demo, allowing officials to dress up as a venture capitalist for a day, but everyone gets a prize.
I wonder if this elite is actually the real target market for e-VTOL vehicles: just as Soviet-era Moscow had Zil Lanes, lanes reserved for the party elite, perhaps we’ll be able to look up one day soon and see an electric vehicle zoom by overhead, conveying an innovation quangocrat and to a very important “work event” – one that’s not too far away, of course.
But how ironic that the flying car – once the most extravagant expression of capitalism, technological innovation and supreme individualism – would become such a vehicle of green grift.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/01/17/hydrogen-cant-power-green-flight-revolution/
***********************************************Hysterical Warmists predict a climate Armageddon
It is a bleak forecast even by the Met Office’s standards – the complete collapse of society leaving armed militias and criminal gangs to roam the land unchallenged.
That is one of the doomsday scenarios set out in a report commissioned by the UK’s weather service to model the potential consequences of climate change.
The extraordinary report, called Shared Socio-economic Pathways and developed for the Government-funded UK Climate Resilience Programme, sets out supposedly ‘plausible futures’ as a result of global warming.
One of those scenarios described by the authors is a surge in ‘Right-wing populism’, resulting in the collapse of ‘political and governance systems’. After that ‘a tipping point is reached when the police and justice system (as known in the past) cease to exist’. Due to ‘past investments in military and defence... without an effective central government, different military groups (militias, criminal groups, etc) rise to de facto power’.
Under a different scenario in the report, a ‘rich elite’ imposes conscription. ‘Society is more divided than ever,’ the report suggests, ‘with the majority of the population having low incomes and poor health, contrasting with a rich ruling elite. Social unrest increases and the prison population skyrockets. To keep the general population in line, governments introduce military conscription by the end of the century.’
The report makes another ‘woke’ political point by claiming that climate change would lead to the privatisation of the NHS.
It says: ‘Because of the high costs associated with reforming the NHS, the preferred solution is to increase privatisation of general and specialised health services and medication provision.
‘Citizens are encouraged to purchase private insurance policies in order to receive better healthcare. This transitional period worsens care for the poorest in society.’
The Meteorological Office report, which was carried out by Cambridge Econometrics, the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and the universities of Edinburgh and Exeter, does however suggest a way of averting this future – by rejoining the EU.
It advances the thesis that the most ‘sustainable’ scenario for surviving global warming would be the ‘establishment of a federal UK, with citizens’ assemblies becoming the “primary” decision-making mode’ and the UK re-entering ‘a progressive and expanded European Union’.
The report says that creating such scenarios ‘are important to climate risk and resilience studies’.
It argues that physical climate change and continued socio-economic change are highly interrelated – and that socio-economic factors determine greenhouse gas emissions and land use changes that cause climate change.
Those factors also determine the ‘levels of vulnerability and capacity to adapt to climate change’ and are ‘plausible socio-economic future outlooks up to 2100 that provide the challenging context within which future decisions... must be determined and implemented’.
A spokesman for the Met Office, a Government agency overseen by the Department for Business, said: ‘The Shared Socio-Economic Pathways project is important in order to understand climate risk and resilience as climate change and socio-economic factors are highly linked.
‘It is just one project as part of a wider programme of science research funded by the UK Government’s Strategic Priorities Fund on UK climate resilience. These include research programmes to protect the environment and communities from the effects of climate change and to support a move to a low carbon economy.’
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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17 January, 2022
Yachts To Be Exempt From EU's Carbon Pricing Plan
According to a new report from Transport & Environment (T&E) titled "Climate Impacts of Exemptions to EU’s Shipping Proposals:
According to the report, in July 2021, the European Commission published a set of proposals to decarbonize the maritime sector. However, what quietly not mentioned, is that the proposed carbon pricing scheme (ETS) and the low GHG fuel standard (FuelEU Maritime) will only apply to ships above 5,000 GT and exclude a number of ship types such as offshore vessels, fishing vessels and.... yachts.
It appears that a size threshold was implemented after the fact precisely the allow yachts to be among the vessels exempt from the regulation. The problem is that by setting the threshold so high, ships accounting for nearly 20% of the EU’s shipping emissions - would be exemplt, double what the Commission originally claimed the exemption would cover.
Or, as T&E puts it, the "EU shipping proposals exempt as much pollution as Denmark's total annual CO2 emmissions."
Again, this is just so Europe's aged oligarchs can invite their 20-year-old Russian mistresses on board their yachts on anchor next to Monte Carlo.
Of course, that will never happen because such a system would no longer exempt yachts. And since the core tenet of the entire Green/ESG farce is to make two sets of rules: one for the 0.001% and another for everyone else, peasants will be told to accept it... and if they dare take their masks off when protesting, they will be send straight to the Australian concentration camps pardon 5-star quarantine facilities.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/yachts-be-exempt-eus-carbon-pricing-plan
*********************************So much for the myriad claims about going “beyond coal.”
According to a new report from the Rhodium Group, U.S. coal consumption jumped by 17 percent last year compared to 2020 levels. That’s a huge increase, which Rhodium says was “largely driven by a run-up in natural gas prices.” Rather than burn gas, which averaged about $4.93 per million Btu last year — more than two times the price in 2020 — many electricity producers chose to burn coal instead.
The surge in domestic coal use is significant for two reasons. First, it proves again that coal remains an essential fuel for electricity producers both here in the U.S. and around the world. Second, it shows that the Biden administration’s pledge to decarbonize the electric grid by 2035 is little more than wishful thinking.
Hate coal if it makes you happy, but the reality is that power producers have relied on it ever since Thomas Edison used it to fuel the world’s first central power plant in Lower Manhattan in 1882. Indeed, the jump in domestic consumption is part of a surge in global demand for coal, which still accounts for about 36 percent of global electricity generation. Last month, the International Energy Agency reported that “global coal power generation is on course to increase by 9 percent in 2021 to 10,350 terawatt-hours (TWh) — a new all-time high.” The agency also reported that “coal demand may well hit a new all-time high in the next two years.”
The increase in coal use provides yet more evidence for what I call the “Iron Law of Electricity,” which says that “People, businesses and countries will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need.” That law was on display in November, at the COP26 summit in Glasgow where India, China and other developing countries rejected a deal that called for a “phase-out” of coal-fired power plants. Instead, the final Glasgow agreement called for countries to “phase down” their use of the carbon-heavy fuel.
While Asian countries account for the biggest share of global coal use — China alone uses more than half the world’s coal — the Iron Law of Electricity also applies to Europe and Japan. During the third quarter of 2021, coal’s share of Germany’s electricity mix increased by 5.5 percent over the same period in 2020. That increase was due, in part, to lower production from the country’s wind-energy sector. France, which usually gets about 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, is also considering burning more coal to replace some of the juice that it was getting from several reactors that have been shut down for repairs. Meanwhile, Japan is planning to build some 21 coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of more than 12,000 megawatts over the next decade or so.
Last week, John Hanekamp, a coal-industry consultant based in St. Louis, told me in a phone interview that global supplies can’t keep pace with demand. He said that domestic power generators are competing for coal with European utilities who are struggling to find enough hydrocarbons to keep the lights on. “There’s a bidding war because there isn’t enough coal to go around,” he said.
In March, the Biden administration pledged to achieve “100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035.” But the rhetoric simply doesn’t match the reality of our electric grid. In 2020, according to BP, domestic coal-fired electricity generation totaled about 844 terawatt-hours, which was nearly two times more than the 475 terawatt-hours that were produced by all of the solar and wind projects in the country. Gas-fired generation totaled some 1,738 terawatt-hours, or more than three times the total of all solar and wind.
The hard reality is that decarbonizing the global electric grid will require finding economically viable — and socially acceptable — substitutes for coal and natural gas. Sure, renewables are politically popular and they are growing. But both wind and solar are facing increasing headwinds because of land-use conflicts. Since 2015, more than 300 local communities from Maine to Hawaii have rejected or restricted wind projects. The backlash against Big Solar is also gaining momentum. Over the summer, Big Solar projects in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Montana were rejected. Among the most recent rejections: In November, regulators in Henry County, Va., rejected two large proposed solar projects.
Speaking of solar, that “clean" energy sector has an embarrassing supply chain issue. Nearly half of the world’s polysilicon, the key ingredient in solar panels, has been coming from Xinjiang province, where the Chinese government has a program of systematic repression and forced labor. Last year, the U.S. State Department declared that China was practicing "genocide and crimes against humanity" against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, including forced labor to produce polysilicon for solar panels.
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Unhappy anniversary: 50 years of climate panic
BJORN LOMBORG
The recent UN climate summit in Glasgow was predictably branded as our “last chance” to tackle the “climate catastrophe” and “save humanity”. Like many others, US climate envoy John Kerry warned us that we have only nine years left to avert most of “catastrophic” global warming.
Almost every climate summit has been branded as the last chance. Setting artificial deadlines to get attention is one of the most common environmental tactics. We have continually been told for the past half-century that time has just about run out. This message is spectacularly wrong and leads to panic and poor policies.
Three years ago, Britain’s Prince Charles announced we had just 18 months left to fix climate change. This wasn’t his first attempt at deadline-setting. Ten years earlier, he told an audience that he “had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world”.
In 2004, a major British newspaper told us that without drastic action, climate change would destroy civilisation by 2020. It stated that major European cities would be sunk beneath rising seas, Britain would be plunged into a “Siberian” climate, and mega-droughts and famines would lead to widespread rioting and nuclear war.
In 1989, the head of the United Nations’ Environment Program declared we had just three years to “win – or lose – the climate struggle”. In 1982, the UN was predicting planetary “devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust” by the year 2000. At the first UN environment summit in Stockholm in 1972, the organiser and later first UN Environment Program director warned that the world had just 10 years to avoid catastrophe.
In 1972, the world was also rocked by the first global environmental scare, the so-called Limits to Growth report. The authors predicted that most natural resources would run out in a few decades while pollution would overpower humanity. At the time, the future was described by Time magazine as a desolate world with a few gaunt survivors tilling freeway centre strips, hoping for a subsistence crop. Life magazine expected “urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution” by the 1980s.
They were all wrong because they overlooked the greatest resource of all: human ingenuity. We don’t just use up resources; we find smarter ways of making resources more available. At the same time, technology solves many of the most persistent pollution problems, as did the catalytic converter. This is why air pollution in rich countries has been declining for decades.
Nonetheless, after 50 years of stunningly incorrect predictions, climate campaigners, journalists and politicians still hawk an immediate apocalypse to great acclaim by ignoring adaptation. Headlines saying sea level rise could drown 187 million people by the end of the century are foolish. They imagine that hundreds of millions of people will remain stationary while the waters lap over them. More seriously, it absurdly assumes that no nation will build any sea defences.
In the real world, ever-wealthier nations will adapt and protect their citizens better, leading to less flooding, while surprisingly spending an ever-lower share of their GDP on flood and protection costs.
Likewise, when activists tell you climate change will make children face twice as much fire, they rely on computer models that only include temperature and ignore humans. Real societies adapt and reduce fire because fires are costly. That is why global fire statistics show less burned area over the past 120 years and why a future with adaptation sees less, not more fire.
These unsubstantiated scares have real-world consequences. An academic study of young people worldwide found that most suffer from “eco-anxiety”. Two-thirds are scared and sad, while almost half say their worries impact their daily lives. It is irresponsible to scare youths when the UN Climate Panel finds that even if we do nothing to mitigate climate change, the impact by the end of the century will be a reduction of an average income increase from 450 per cent to 438 per cent. A problem, but hardly the end of the world.
Moreover, panic is a terrible policy adviser. Activist politicians in the rich world are tinkering around the edges of addressing climate change, showering subsidies over expensive vanity projects such as electric cars, solar and wind, while the UN finds that it can’t identify an actual impact on emissions from the last decade of climate promulgations.
Despite their grandiose statements of saving the world, 78 per cent of rich countries’ energy still comes from fossil fuels. And as the Glasgow climate summit has shown (for the 26th time), developing nations – whose emissions over the rest of this century matter most – cannot afford to similarly spend trillions on ineffective climate policies as they help their populations escape poverty.
Fifty years of panic clearly haven’t solved climate change. We need a smarter approach that doesn’t scare everyone and focuses on realistic solutions such as adaptation and innovation. Adaptation won’t make all of the cost of climate change vanish, but it will reduce it dramatically.
And by funding the innovation needed to eventually make clean energy cheaper than fossil fuels, we can allow everyone – including developing countries – to sustainably go green.
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Climate authoritarians and the lessons of history
To their own peril as well as everyone else's, climate alarmists are increasingly embracing authoritarianism.
A rump group of the environmental movement has always been wedded to authoritarianism. Going back to the beginnings of the environmental movement, Progressive-era politicians such as President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the newly created U.S. Forest Service, believed that democracy and markets were both ill-suited to manage natural resources. Progressives believed natural resources should be controlled, developed, and conserved by elite scientific managers and bureaucrats unbeholden to the wishes of the public.
Later, as detailed by Alston Chase in his powerful book In a Dark Wood, many Nazis were at least in part inspired by an expansive vision of environmental purity.
Although few if any progressives were full-on misanthropes, there have always been some of these within the environmental movement, pushing for increasingly extreme actions in defense of the environment and against human use of natural resources. The misanthropic wing of the movement has referred to humanity as "a cancer," "a virus," and "a parasite," with some openly hoping for a killer virus to come along and wipe out most of humanity. Eco-philosopher Arne Naess, who coined the term "deep ecology," said the ideal human population on Earth is 200 million, and he called for policies and personal actions to achieve that goal as soon as possible. Others have estimated the "optimal" human population as 1.5 to two billion people and claimed this justifies population engineering, including both "active" and "passive" means to get there.
Now even the academic literature is embracing climate authoritarianism as the world's allegedly last best hope to avert supposedly apocalyptic climate change.
The Cambridge University Press journal, the American Political Science Review, recently published an article, "Political Legitimacy, Authoritarianism, and Climate Change," which begins by asking, "Is authoritarian power ever legitimate?" The author, Ross Mittiga, answers with a resounding "yes!" Pointing to the restrictions many governments established in response to COVID-19 as the type of emergency justifying authoritarian limits on freedom, the author states, "Climate change poses an even graver threat to public safety. Consequently, I argue, legitimacy may require a similarly authoritarian approach."
Mittiga says climate change is a greater threat than COVID-19 and therefore justifies long-term restrictions on life choices even stricter than those imposed over the past two years. How the public will respond to that might best be judged by the visible street protests to ongoing or newly imposed restrictions in Europe and elsewhere, and the people widely flouting mask mandates, fighting vaccine mandates, and publicly sharing information about adverse vaccine reactions and COVID-19 cases among the fully vaccinated in the United States. This type of pushback presents a problem for Mittiga unless the type of authoritarian solutions he supports are much more like those of North Korea, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, China under Mao, and Russia under Stalin than what the liberal democracies have dared to attempt thus far.
Based on the evidence, I believe that no climate crisis is in the offing, that science shows that the modest warming of the past century and any reasonably expected warming in the coming century have not caused calamity or even worsening weather extremes and are unlikely to do so. But even if I'm wrong, authoritarianism is the worst possible response to the climate crisis.
Climate alarmists praise China, ignoring the fact that it produces more greenhouse gases than every other industrialized economy on Earth combined, and its emissions are growing.
People like Mittiga and others who embrace authoritarianism as a solution to the climate crisis somehow believe they will be the anointed ones wielding power if liberal democracies are displaced by authoritarian governments. I'm sure Robespierre and Trotsky felt the same, but history tells a very different story. China's treatment of its environmental protesters should be a cautionary lesson. Environmentalism doesn't thrive under authoritarian rule.
If climate alarmists help bring down liberal democracies around the globe and replace them with authoritarian rule, they will most likely enjoy a fate similar to that suffered by Ernst Röhm and the Brownshirts when Hitler no longer needed them and perceived them as a threat to his power.
History shows revolutions resulting in dictatorships typically eat their children and those who they overthrew alike, indiscriminately and with equal fervor and self-perceived righteous indignation.
Authoritarianism is bad, regardless of the cause it purportedly serves. Painting evil green does not make it better.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/climate_authoritarians_and_the_lessons_of_history.html
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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16 January, 2022
The Atlantic Ocean Invaded Its Neighbor Earlier Than Anyone Thought: The saltier Atlantic broke through layers of ice and freshwater, contributing to the Arctic’s warming
The NYTimes (below) reported on November 28, 2021 that the melting of the Arctic began before industrialization. To now blame melting on CO2 emissions is just false propaganda"
Arctic. Atlantic. Long ago, the two oceans existed in harmony, with warm and salty Atlantic waters gently flowing into the Arctic. The layered nature of the Arctic — sea ice on top, cool freshwater in the middle and warm, salty water at the bottom — helped hold the boundary between the polar ocean and the warmer Atlantic.
But everything changed when the larger ocean began flowing faster than the polar ocean could accommodate, weakening the distinction between the layers and transforming Arctic waters into something closer to the Atlantic. This process, called Atlantification, is part of the reason the Arctic is warming faster than any other ocean.
“It’s not a new invasion of the Arctic,” said Yueng-Djern Lenn, a physical oceanographer at Bangor University in Wales. “What’s new is that the properties of the Arctic are changing.”
Satellites offer some of the clearest measurements of changes in the Arctic Ocean and sea ice. But their records only go back around 40 years, obscuring how the climate of the ocean may have changed in prior decades.
“To go back, we need a sort of time machine,” said Tommaso Tesi, a researcher at the Institute of Polar Sciences-CNR, Italy.
In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, Dr. Tesi and colleagues were able to turn back time with yard-long sediment cores taken from the seafloor, which archived 800 years of historical changes in Arctic waters.
Their analysis found Atlantification started at the beginning of the 20th century — decades before the process had been documented by satellite imagery. The Arctic has warmed by around 2 degrees Celsius since 1900. But this early Atlantification did not appear in existing historical climate models, a discrepancy that the authors say may reveal gaps in those estimates.
“It’s a bit unsettling because we rely on these models for future climate predictions,” Dr. Tesi said.
Mohamed Ezat, a researcher at the Tromso campus of the Arctic University of Norway, who was not involved with the research, called the findings “remarkable.”
“Information on long-term past changes in Arctic Ocean hydrography are needed, and long overdue,” Dr. Ezat wrote in an email.
In 2017, the researchers extracted a sediment core from the seafloor of Kongsfjorden, a glacial fjord in the east end of the Fram Strait, a gateway between the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard and Greenland, where Arctic and Atlantic waters mingle.
The researchers sliced up the core at regular intervals and dried those layers. Then came the painstaking process of sifting out and identifying the samples’ foraminifera — single-celled organisms that build intricate shells around themselves using minerals in the ocean.
When foraminifera die, their shells drift to the seafloor and accumulate in layers of sediment. The creatures are crucial clues in sediment samples; by identifying which foraminifera are present in a sample and analyzing the chemistry of their shells, scientists can glean the properties of past oceans.
The team’s original idea was to reconstruct the oceanographic conditions of a region that contained both Arctic and Atlantic waters, going back 1,000 to 2,000 years. But, in the slices of the core dating back to the early 20th century, the researchers noticed a sudden, massive increase in the concentration of foraminifera that prefer salty environments — a sign of Atlantification, far earlier than anyone had documented.
“It was quite a lot of surprises in one study,” said Francesco Muschitiello, an oceanographer at the University of Cambridge and an author on the paper.
The sheer amount of sediment was so high that the researchers could assemble a chronology of past climate down to five- or 10-year increments. Additionally, a molecular biomarker could pinpoint a specific year, 1916, when coal mining began in Kongsfjorden. Since the foraminiferal shift occurred just before this marker, the researchers estimate Atlantification began around 1907, give or take a decade.
When the researchers compared the data from their paleoclimate model with others to see if they overlapped, they found existing climate models had no sign of this early Atlantification. The researchers suggest a number of possible reasons behind this absence, such as an underestimation of the role of freshwater mixing in the Arctic or the region’s sensitivity to warming.
Dr. Lenn, who was not involved with the research, sees a difference between this early Atlantification and the present, rapid Atlantification, which is largely driven by melting Arctic sea ice. “It’s too soon after the start of the industrial revolution for us to have accumulated excess heat in the planetary system for it to be anthropogenic at that point,” Dr. Lenn said.
The authors are not sure of the precise reasons behind the early Atlantification. If human influences are the cause, then “the whole system is much more sensitive to greenhouse gases than we previously thought,” Dr. Muschitiello said.
In another possibility, earlier natural warming may have made the Arctic Ocean much more sensitive to the accelerated Atlantification of recent decades. “Could it be that we destabilized a system that was already shifting?” Dr. Tesi said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/science/arctic-ocean-atlantification.html?smid=tw-share
**********************************************Chemistry Expert: Carbon Dioxide Can’t Cause Global Warming
Written by Dr Mark Imisides (Industrial Chemist)
Scarcely a day goes by without us being warned of coastal inundation by rising seas due to global warming.
Why on earth do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide, when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.
Carbon dioxide, we are told, traps heat that has been irradiated by the oceans, and this warms the oceans and melts the polar ice caps. While this seems a plausible proposition at first glance, when one actually examines it closely a major flaw emerges.
In a nutshell, water takes a lot of energy to heat up, and air doesn’t contain much. In fact, on a volume/volume basis, the ratio of heat capacities is about 3300 to 1. This means that to heat 1 litre of water by 1?C it would take 3300 litres of air that was 2?C hotter, or 1 litre of air that was about 3300?C hotter!
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. If you ran a cold bath and then tried to heat it by putting a dozen heaters in the room, does anyone believe that the water would ever get hot?
The problem gets even stickier when you consider the size of the ocean. Basically, there is too much water and not enough air.
The ocean contains a colossal 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres of water! To heat it, even by a small amount, takes a staggering amount of energy. To heat it by a mere 1?C, for example, an astonishing 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules of energy are required.
Let’s put this amount of energy in perspective. If we all turned off all our appliances and went and lived in caves, and then devoted every coal, nuclear, gas, hydro, wind and solar power plant to just heating the ocean, it would take a breathtaking 32,000 years to heat the ocean by just this 1?C!
In short, our influence on our climate, even if we really tried, is miniscule!
So it makes sense to ask the question – if the ocean were to be heated by ‘greenhouse warming’ of the atmosphere, how hot would the air have to get? If the entire ocean is heated by 1?C, how much would the air have to be heated by to contain enough heat to do the job?
Well, unfortunately for every ton of water there is only a kilogram of air. Taking into account the relative heat capacities and absolute masses, we arrive at the astonishing figure of 4,000?C.
That is, if we wanted to heat the entire ocean by 1?C, and wanted to do it by heating the air above it, we’d have to heat the air to about 4,000?C hotter than the water.
And another problem is that air sits on top of water – how would hot air heat deep into the ocean? Even if the surface warmed, the warm water would just sit on top of the cold water.
Thus, if the ocean were being heated by ‘greenhouse heating’ of the air, we would see a system with enormous thermal lag – for the ocean to be only slightly warmer, the land would have to be substantially warmer, and the air much, much warmer (to create the temperature gradient that would facilitate the transfer of heat from the air to the water).
Therefore any measurable warmth in the ocean would be accompanied by a huge and obvious anomaly in the air temperatures, and we would not have to bother looking at ocean temperatures at all.
So if the air doesn’t contain enough energy to heat the oceans or melt the ice caps, what does?
The earth is tilted on its axis, and this gives us our seasons. When the southern hemisphere is tilted towards the sun, we have more direct sunlight and more of it (longer days). When it is tilted away from the sun, we have less direct sunlight and less of it (shorter days).
The direct result of this is that in summer it is hot and in winter it is cold. In winter we run the heaters in our cars, and in summer the air conditioners. In winter the polar caps freeze over and in summer 60-70{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of them melt (about ten million square kilometres). In summer the water is warmer and winter it is cooler (ask any surfer).
All of these changes are directly determined by the amount of sunlight that we get. When the clouds clear and bathe us in sunlight, we don’t take off our jumper because of ‘greenhouse heating’ of the atmosphere, but because of the direct heat caused by the sunlight on our body. The sun’s influence is direct, obvious, and instantaneous.
If the enormous influence of the sun on our climate is so obvious, then, by what act of madness do we look at a variation of a fraction of a percent in any of these variables, and not look to the sun as the cause?
Why on earth (pun intended) do we attribute any heating of the oceans to carbon dioxide, when there is a far more obvious culprit, and when such a straightforward examination of the thermodynamics render it impossible.
https://principia-scientific.org/chemistry-expert-carbon-dioxide-cant-cause-global-warming/
****************************************************Biden’s Green Energy Kabuki Theater
Kabuki theater is presentational, not representational. Audience members aren’t supposed to suspend disbelief, as with most Western theatrical formats, and immerse themselves in the story. Instead, Kabuki is all about staging, costumes, makeup, vocal intonations, and the actors’ well-practiced facial contortions.
Aficionados know the stories; they’ve seen them dozens of times. When I saw it at the old Kabukiza Theater in Ginza years ago, the crowd’s reaction reminded me somewhat of the midnight screenings of “The Rocky Horror Show” I used to see when I was a student at NYU. Nearly the entire crowd knew what was coming and readied itself to respond when it happened.
I mention Kabuki theater because progressives and the Biden administration seem to have adopted a Kabuki theater motif to their climate policies. President Biden’s executive order signed early last month gives the appearance of urgent and important action, setting critical timelines for federal government adoption of clean energy alternatives, starting as early as 5 years from now.
It all looks spectacular!
Until it doesn’t.
As with Kabuki, the Biden administration doesn’t want us to look beyond what it has presented. And we also know what is coming: well-worn promises of wind farms, solar panels, and electric vehicles that will “end climate change.” Americans are being told our future is in renewables and that we must reduce our carbon emissions or endure a climate catastrophe.
But those of us who look deeper than the presentation see it as but a thin, phony, unsustainable, veneer.
Biden’s “Build Back Better” bill is replete with incentives for us to purchase electric vehicles, millions of dollars in grants to build out charging stations, and mandates to generate electricity from renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
But there seems to be little consideration given to how to affect the changeover or how it will change daily life in the USA.
Take, for example, Biden’s agenda to make natural gas an environmental bogeyman. Efforts to shut down natural gas use have succeeded or are already underway in New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Denver. Bloomberg reports President Joe Biden would like to “edge natural gas out of the power mix within 15 years.”
But Biden also shut down the KeystoneXL pipeline within the first 24 hours of taking office; then, in November, proposed greater restrictions on federal lands. (He had earlier attempted to ban new oil and gas leases on public lands, but was rebuffed by a federal judge.)
Still, as Biden attempted to reduce domestic production, he turned to OPEC to increase production to reduce the rate of price inflation in domestic fuels.
And just recently, CCP China signed a 20-year deal with Venture Global LNG to supply 4 million tons of LNG from the USA every year with nary a whimper about climate change from the federal government. It appears that, for the Biden administration, “Climate change” is limited only to the airspace immediately above the USA.
In much the same manner, nearly all the most important components of the electric cars the Biden administration wishes us to adopt are found in CCP China, our political adversary and prospective enemy. Neodymium, the rare earth element used for permanent magnets that are the most useful for electric cars, and nearly half a ton of which is required for each wind turbine, is mined almost exclusively in CCP China. Both the mining and processing of Neodymium is horrendously damaging to the environment.
Similarly, the solar panels the Biden administration hopes to use to supply so much future electricity are loaded with deadly toxic chemicals.
As with the struggle against the global pandemic, the challenge of reducing human-influenced climate change needs to be a global effort; a “Moon shot” as it were, involving the development of collaborative, clean, energy technology among the most technologically advanced economies of Europe, the USA, and Asia. It’s not something the United States can fix by outsourcing carbon-based fuel consumption and environmentally devastating mining to other countries. Out of sight will not be out of mind.
The absurd Kabuki theater of Biden administration climate policy—made only for appearances to mollify the U.S. electorate while polluting much of the rest of the world—deeply offends American sensibilities. It is a type of environmental imperialism that will, eventually, create troubled, volatile—even belligerent—relations with the nations we pollute and exploit while doing nothing to arrest the disastrous global effects of climate change.
Kabuki theater on climate policy by the USA will lead to a rocky climate horror show for us and the world
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/bidens-green-energy_4206449.html
******************************************Is Australia weathering the climate storm?
Australia has benefited from the effects of two La Nina years, much to chagrin of catastrophists.
In a land of boom and bust, feast and famine, drought and flooding rains, it is a time of plenty. For the nation’s climate catastrophists, an inconvenient set of realities has captured the natural world. Back-to-back La Nina weather systems plunged Australia’s average temperatures in 2021 to their lowest levels in a decade.
Rains that were predicted by experts either not to come or to fall out of phase with agricultural needs have failed to heed the script. The nation’s great river systems have been recharged after a period of extended drought that some thought would never end. Dams and water catchments are full and agricultural production is at record levels. The Great Barrier Reef is tracking levels of healthy coral cover not seen for decades across its entire system, an area the size of Italy.
Scientists insist the underlying warming trend, suppressed by La Nina, is still there. But for nature lovers everywhere the present conditions reinforce a belief that nature is not broken, the natural cycles continue to operate and that resilience persists on land and at sea.
The Great Barrier Reef has become a proxy for the existential threat of climate change. But the latest results from long-term monitoring by the Australian Institute of Marine Science shows that coral growth has been recorded in all regions. Hard coral cover on the Northern Reef has risen from a low in 2017 of 13 per cent to 27 per cent last year. For the Central region, hard coral cover has risen from a low of 11 per cent in 2012 to 26 per cent. In the Southern region hard coral cover has risen from a low of 12 per cent in 2011 to 39 per cent.
According to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the AIMS report “shows that despite a decade of impacts such as marine heatwaves, the Great Barrier Reef is still a resilient ecosystem and can recover from extreme events if disturbance-free periods are long enough”. Despite the bounce-back in coral cover, the Great Barrier Reef remains subject to an international push to have it listed as a World Heritage asset in danger.
For farmers, the news is also positive.
The Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics says the value of agricultural exports in 2021 is a record high. When the final numbers are in, production is expected to have increased year on year for every major livestock commodity and almost every major crop commodity – with farmers forecast to produce the largest volume ever. ABARES executive director Dr Jared Greenville says Australia is enjoying an extraordinary combination of favourable conditions and 30-year price highs. “It would be the first time in at least half a century that production will increase for so many products at the same time,” Greenville says.
Things will change, of course. Booming vegetation fed by healthy rains will dry out once La Nina passes, intensifying the risk of bushfire. There is still a chance that elevated sea temperatures will cause problems for some areas of the Great Barrier Reef this year.
But according to the Bureau of Meteorology annual climate statement, 2021 was the coolest year in nearly a decade and wettest since 2016. By the end of 2021 – and for the first time in five years – no large parts of the country were experiencing rainfall deficits and drought conditions.
This week, Sydney’s Warragamba Dam was at 100 per cent capacity and the average across the Greater Sydney catchment is 96.9 per cent. In southeast Queensland, the Wivenhoe Dam, used for water storage and flood mitigation, is at 52 per cent but other dams in the region are full and spilling across the catchment. In Melbourne, storage levels are at 89.5 per cent.
Announcing BoM’s 2021 temperature data, climatologist Dr Simon Grainger says: “After three years of drought from 2017 to 2019, above-average rainfall last year resulted in a welcome recharge of our water storages but also some significant flooding to eastern Australia.”
In 2021, Australia’s mean temperature was 0.56C above the 1961-1990 climate reference period. It was the 19th-warmest year since national records began in 1910, but also the coolest year since 2012. Rainfall was 9 per cent above the 1961-1990 average, making 2021 the wettest year since 2016, with November the wettest on record.
Visitors to Sydney’s Bondi Beach enjoy the arrival of higher summer temperatures. Picture: NCA Newswire/Flavio Brancaleone
Visitors to Sydney’s Bondi Beach enjoy the arrival of higher summer temperatures. Picture: NCA Newswire/Flavio Brancaleone
Of course, Australia is not the world.
According to figures released by US space agency NASA on Friday, Earth’s global average surface temperature in 2021 tied with 2018 as the sixth-warmest on record. Global average temperatures in 2021 were about or about 1.1 degrees Celsius warmer than the late 19th-century average, the start of the industrial revolution.
A separate, independent analysis by US weather agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also concluded that the global surface temperature for 2021 was the sixth-highest since record-keeping began in 1880.
“The complexity of the various analyses doesn’t matter because the signals are so strong,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS, NASA’s leading centre for climate modelling and climate change research. “The trends are all the same because the trends are so large.”
NOAA says many factors affect the average temperature in any given year, such as La Nina and El Nino climate patterns in the tropical Pacific. NASA scientists estimate the La Nina weather pattern may have cooled global temperatures by about 0.03 degrees Celsius from what the average would otherwise have been.
But at a time when the United Nations has declared “Code Red for humanity” because of climate change, on the ground there is evidence that things are not being received quite as the headlines would suggest. This has implications for green groups wanting to harness public support to push for nature. And for politicians on the hustings looking for advantage in a tightly contested federal poll.
The Australian Conservation Foundation has been testing public opinion on nature and been surprised at what it found.
Ninety-five per cent of those surveyed say it is important to preserve nature for future generations to enjoy.
This sentiment was shared across all voting groups including Liberal, National, Labor and Greens. On the question of feeling deeply connected to nature in Australia, the biggest response was among National voters on 86 per cent, higher than among Greens voters on 79 per cent. Counter to the narrative of environmental doom, respondents overwhelmingly felt the state of the environment was excellent, good or fair. Only 13 per cent thought the state of nature was poor or terrible.
Climate change was listed as a concern by 74 per cent of respondents, behind bushfires, floods and plastic waste. Cost-of-living pressures was the biggest concern for 95 per cent of respondents. Only 32 per cent could be considered “active nature protectors” or “diehard nature worriers”, with the majority “hopeful”, “detached” or “unconcerned”.
According to the report, active nature protectors and diehard nature worriers believe nature is in a fair or poor state while all other segments believe it is good or excellent.
ACF nature campaigner Jess Abrahams says green groups must learn the lessons of the climate wars and have a message other than catastrophe. He uses the cry-wolf analogy of a fire alarm that is tuned out because it never stops ringing. The findings are in line with published research that the indiscriminate use of negative appeals results in emotional burnout and a decreased likelihood of acceptance of any messages – even the important ones.
Abrahams says the survey, conducted by research group fiftyfive5, is a strategy document and represents the new approach that ACF will take.
“We need to speak to more than just the deep green and this has given us a lot of help on how to do that,” Abrahams says.
“It is a love message – tapping into people’s love of nature. People who vote Nationals report a stronger connection to nature than almost the Greens.
“A lot of people who are very sceptical about the climate debate are really knowledgeable and passionate about mangroves and fish breeding and the impacts of dredging. People in regional areas have a deep understanding of these issues.”
For campaigners, there is frustration that positive attitudes to the state of the environment do not properly reflect the full suite of research. That challenges exist will be confirmed in the upcoming State of the Environment report, due for release early this year.
But the results of the ACF research put a fresh perspective on how the major parties can approach their environmental credentials in the looming federal poll. Anthony Albanese has spent the past week on a tour of North Queensland, a vital area for the ALP given its comprehensive loss at the last election on the back of its perceived anti-coal and climate change message. This time, the message from Labor has been love of the Great Barrier Reef but support for mining as well.
Albanese says the market will decide if it was still profitable to dig coal up to burn for energy and, if that was the case, any project that clears environmental hurdles should go ahead.
Albanese told journalists he had no appetite for “these games” on coal.
“We have a positive message for Queenslanders. It’s one of regional jobs. It’s one of making sure there is secure work,” Albanese said in Cairns. “Existing power stations will continue to exist for the lifespan that’s been established. With regard to exports of resources, they’re dependent upon international markets, but they won’t be affected by our policy.”
Albanese says the ALP will “make sure that we provide support for the reef” to “make sure that it’s never ever put on that (World Heritage in Danger) list”.
The challenge for Labor is to narrow the gap between itself and the Morrison government on climate action without surrendering support in inner-city seats where it faces competition from the Greens.
The Morrison government has moved closer to the centre as well, adopting a net-zero target for 2050. The decision was taken in the lead-up to the much-hyped Glasgow climate conference and was in tune with the demands of corporations and international peers. But agreeing to a net-zero target for 2050 has given the Coalition less room to move against Labor. And despite embracing net zero, the Coalition is facing its own challenge in inner-city seats from climate independents bankrolled by businessman Simon Holmes a Court under the C200 banner.
On the hustings, concerns about supply lines and availability of rapid antigen tests are swamping the climate message.
Internationally, two months on from Glasgow, the World Economic Forum has put “climate action failure” at the top of the list in its 2022 Global Risks Report but the global politics of climate change is strained.
Glasgow ended with deep divisions between developed nations and the developing world on plans to stop the use of fossil fuels. Since then, the International Energy Agency has said global demand for coal will reach record levels in 2022 and continue to surge for at least three years.
“All evidence indicates a widening gap between political ambitions and targets on one side and the realities of the current energy system on the other,” the IEA says.
“This disconnect has two clear implications: climate targets are getting further out of reach, and energy security is at risk.”
Increased coal use is being driven primarily by China and India but it is also rising in Europe, Britain and the United States. Rising prices for gas have at least temporarily ended a trend of switching from coal to gas for power generation.
Faced with a shortage of energy partly due to the intermittency of wind generation, the European Union is preparing to approve gas and nuclear energy as “green” fuels, outraging environment groups.
But politicians everywhere are starting to feel the heat of rising energy costs.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who led the push against coal in Glasgow, is being warned the energy crisis represents a threat to his government.
Climate scientists rightly insist that the La Nina cycle, which has cooled temperatures across the globe, does not undermine the longer warming trend.
But the reverse is also true. Peaks in temperature and heightened bushfires that coincide with the El Nino phase must also be considered outliers rather than the norm.
US climate scientist Judith Curry says the latest IPCC report is less alarmist on future warming, discounting extreme scenarios and reducing the best estimate sensitivity of climate to rising levels of CO2.
The big unknown, Curry says, is the future impact of natural climate variability.
“It looks like all the modes of natural climate variability are tilted towards cooling over the next three decades,” Curry says in an interview published on her website.
“It looks like we’re heading towards a solar minimum. Any volcanic eruptions by definition are negative. And we expect the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation to shift to the cold phase on the timescale of about a decade.
“So all of these modes of natural variability point to cooling in the coming decades. This buys us decades to figure out what we should do.”
But despite lower average temperatures in 2021, NASA says there is no less cause for alarm.
“Science leaves no room for doubt: Climate change is the existential threat of our time,” says NASA administrator Bill Nelson. “Eight of the top 10 warmest years on our planet occurred in the last decade, an indisputable fact that underscores the need for bold action to safeguard the future of our country – and all of humanity.”
NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt told the Associated Press the long-term trend is “very, very clear. And it’s because of us. And it’s not going to go away until we stop increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere”.
But Curry says a sustained cooling would force people to reconsider. “If I’m right about natural variability having sort of a cooling effect in the coming decades, this will be the one piece of evidence that people will have to pay attention to,” she says.
“If that transpires, I would say that would be the single most effective thing at bringing this dialogue back to some level of rationality, but how much confidence do I have in that prediction? How much money am I going to bet on that?
“I don’t know, but it’s a very plausible scenario that natural variability will lead to cooling in the coming decades, or at least slow down the warming.
“On the current path, we are not managing this risk in a sensible way that would leave our countries stronger and less vulnerable to whatever may transpire in the future.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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14 January, 2022
Energy dependence ties Europe’s hands in U.S.-Russia crisis
Europe’s growing dependence on Russian gas and oil is limiting the continent’s room to maneuver in the mounting U.S.-Russia crisis over security in the region and making it highly vulnerable in the event of an escalation.
Officials from the U.S., Russia and Europe meet Thursday in Vienna at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to discuss the tensions. Earlier this week, the U.S. and Russia failed to narrow differences over Moscow’s deployment of more than 100,000 troops along the border with Ukraine, a major thoroughfare for gas consumed in Western Europe, and Moscow’s demands for changes to Europe’s security architecture. Russia has denied preparing to invade its western neighbor.
Highlighting the central role energy is playing in the standoff, U.S. senators are expected to vote soon on a bill introduced by Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) requiring sanctions to be imposed on Nord Stream 2, a German-Russian gas pipeline that is expected to get online later this year.
Western officials accuse the Kremlin of withholding extra supplies in recent months to force European regulators to approve the pipeline—a charge the Kremlin denies. U.S. lawmakers and Ukraine say the pipeline would make Europe ever more dependent on Moscow.
Such dependence means European governments aren’t willing to consider sanctions on Russian energy exports—the backbone of the Russian economy—as a possible deterrent against a potential invasion of Ukraine, according to a senior European official involved in discussions on how to respond to the crisis at the border.
They also are nervous about Moscow retaliating by slashing gas exports to Europe, a concern that has grown more acute in recent days as energy prices have started shooting up again, the official said. Despite intense lobbying from the U.S., Germany has yet to say whether it would permanently block Nord Stream 2 if Russia invades its neighbor.
Russia’s saber-rattling on the Ukraine border and its failure to increase—and its occasional throttling of—gas deliveries to Europe already have helped to send energy prices rocketing there, a development that has claimed corporate victims in the U.K. and pushed German energy companies to secure billions of euros in funds.
It highlights Europe’s continued reliance on a supplier that is increasingly willing to use energy as a diplomatic weapon.
“Governments in the region could find themselves on the horns of a dilemma if sanctions are applied and then Russia, even for the short term, cuts off all gas flows to Europe,” said Richard Morningstar, founding chairman of the Atlantic Council’s Global Energy Center and ambassador to the European Union under President Bill Clinton.
Russia has increased its share of Europe’s gas market since annexing Crimea in 2014 and backing separatist forces in Ukraine. Moscow supplied 123.8 billion cubic meters of gas via pipelines to Europe, excluding Turkey, last year, according to S&P Global Platts, more than Norway’s 108.6 billion cubic meters. That gave Russian pipelines a market share of 29%, down from 34% in 2018 but up from 27% in 2014. Russia also exports some liquefied natural gas to Europe on tankers.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown “the world—and Europeans in particular—that the old geopolitics of oil and gas is alive and well,” said Meghan O’Sullivan, the director of the Geopolitics of Energy Project at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. “For the foreseeable future, Europe will remain dependent—and possibly as dependent as ever—on Russian gas.”
Europe has long tried to buy gas from producers in Central Asia, Norway, North Africa and the U.S. while developing renewable energy. But renewables have often proved tough to scale and at times unreliable due to weather patterns, while nuclear energy has been a divisive political topic. Many coal-fired power stations have closed and domestic gas production has nosedived, leaving Europe with no alternative but to keep importing gas even when prices rocketed.
Deprived of Russian gas, the region would have few places to turn. Gas export terminals on the U.S. Gulf and East Coasts were running at 99% of capacity at times last month, according to Helima Croft, head of commodities strategy at RBC Capital Markets. Spring weather that tames demand could be months away.
Gas isn’t expected to flow through Nord Stream 2 for several months because it requires approval in Germany and by the European Union. Once up and running, however, it will form a key part of Europe’s gas-import infrastructure. The pipeline’s capacity would equal that of Nord Stream 1, which also runs straight to Germany and handled 37% of Russia’s gas exports to Europe last year, according to commodities analysis firm ICIS.
Russia has been a major energy supplier to Europe since Soviet times, taking care not to wield oil and gas as a weapon. Back then, Moscow largely saw energy, a key export, as a business proposition and a way to develop commercial and pragmatic relations with Europe. That has changed over the years as relations with the West soured. Russia twice curtailed gas deliveries to Europe during the cold winters of 2006 and 2009 over price disputes with Ukraine.
“Russia in the 2000s decided to use gas as a geopolitical weapon,” Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of R.Politik, an independent political-analysis firm. “Moscow failed to convince the world that it was a pure business argument and damaged its reputation as a stable supplier.”
The International Energy Agency on Wednesday said Russia is in large part responsible for Europe’s gas shortage. Executive Director Fatih Birol said state gas exporter Gazprom PJSC had reduced exports to Europe in the fourth quarter at a time when prices were high and Norway, Algeria and Azerbaijan were pumping more gas to the region.
Crude-oil prices also have risen globally, adding to Europe’s vulnerability and putting extra strains on businesses and consumers while contributing to record inflation in the eurozone. Mild weather and an influx of gas from the U.S. have offered some respite recently but wholesale gas prices in northwest Europe are almost three times as high as they were a year ago. Analysts say frigid temperatures and low gas storage levels could cause price spikes before spring even without interruptions to Russian supplies.
“There is not a common vision of security of supply and in this current crisis it comes to haunt us,” said Georg Zachmann, senior fellow at Bruegel, a think tank in Brussels.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/energy-dependence-ties-europes-hands-in-u-s-russia-crisis-11642069805
**********************************************British Treasury considers cutting green levy to ease cost-of-living crisis for UK households
A green levy on energy bills covering the cost of insulation for the poorest households could be cut to reduce the burden UK households are facing from ultra-high gas prices.
According to The Times, the Treasury is reviewing the Energy Company Obligation (ECO), a £1bn scheme which pays for insulation and new boilers.
This follows 20 Tory MPs and peers publishing a letter in The Telegraph calling for environmental levies and VAT to be scrapped.
ECO is currently viewed as an important part of the government’s attempt to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050, as it provides a £290 yearly saving for the 200,000 UK households that have been improved under the scheme.
However, the levy also adds £29 to the average annual energy bill for consumers who are not improving the energy efficiency of their homes.
Making homes more energy efficient is a key target for the UK government, which has also rolled out plans to offer £5,000 grants to up to 90,000 British households to replace gas boilers with environmentally friendly heat pumps.
As it stands, approximately £159 of the current consumer price cap of £1,277 for average energy usage is spent on governmental social and environmental schemes with a further £61 on VAT.
The price cap is expected to rise by as much as 50 per cent in April to reflect soaring wholesale gas costs, which have contributed to 25 energy firms collapsing or falling into administration since last September.
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The US government spent $1.1 billion on carbon capture projects that mostly failed
Coal should be going obsolete because renewable energy is becoming cheaper, but the US government is keeping it afloat with the promise of capturing carbon emissions and storing them underground. Now, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has said that federal agencies spent $684 billion on coal plant carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects that have mostly failed, Gizmodo has reported. It also spent $438 million on other three CCS industrial projects, two of which were cancelled.
"DOE [Department of Energy] provided nearly $684 million to eight coal projects, resulting in one operational facility," according to the GAO report. "DOE’s process for selecting coal projects and negotiating funding agreements increased the risks that DOE would fund projects unlikely to succeed."
DOE’s process for selecting coal projects and negotiating funding agreements increased the risks that DOE would fund projects unlikely to succeed.
Not only did the Department of Energy use a "high-risk selection" method to choose projects, it negotiated and funded them too expeditiously, according to the report. Coal negotiations lasted just three months instead of the usual year "based on DOE's desire to begin spending American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 funds quickly." On top of that, it bypassed the usual cost controls and supported projects "even though they were not meeting required key milestones."
The DOE recently said that it wants to dramatically reduce the cost of carbon capture technology via a program called Carbon Negative Shot. The aim is to remove CO2 directly from the air and sequester it underground at a cost of less than $100 per ton, deploying it at the gigaton scale.
However, the easiest and cheapest way to cut gigatons of emissions would be to retire costly coal plants completely, according to a report last year the International Renewable Energy Agency (Irena). That's because the costs of renewable energy have plunged in the last decade, making them effectively cheaper than coal. And of course, adding CCS tech to coal would increase costs considerably. All that said, coal and fossil fuels are a charged political subject in the US, despite the global risks of climate change.
In the end, the GAO recommended more congressional oversight for DOE expenditures on CCS. "Absent such a mechanism, DOE is at risk of expending significant funds on CCS demonstration projects that have little likelihood of success."
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The hottest temperature ever recorded in Australia on Thursday
Recorded by whom? The BoM record does not go back very far and gets more unreliable the further back it goes. As Watkin Tench observed, in 1790 in Sydney, birds and bats were dropping dead out of the trees it was so hot. I know of no such incidents in recent times
Australia has recorded its equal hottest day ever on Thursday as large swathes of the country endure hot, humid and sticky weather.
The town of Onslow, on Western Australia's northwest coast, reached 50.7C just before 2.30pm on a sweltering day for the Pilbara.
The previous hottest day ever recorded in Australia of 50.7C was set in the outback South Australian town of Oodnadatta back in 1960.
The weekend is looking milder in other parts of the country with possible rain in Sydney on Friday and Saturday but clearing by Sunday and maximum temperatures not exceeding 30C.
Brisbane will be slightly warmer seeing temperatures reaching the low 30s but there will be relief from the rain with fine weather forecast.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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13 January, 2022
No more research is neeeded
A truly peculiar article below. It is normally an item of faith among scientists that "more research is needed"
ABSTRACT
The science-society contract is broken. The climate is changing. Science demonstrates why this is occurring, that it is getting worse, the implications for human well-being and social-ecological systems, and substantiates action. Governments agree that the science is settled. The tragedy of climate change science is that at the same time as compelling evidence is gathered, fresh warnings issued, and novel methodologies developed, indicators of adverse global change rise year upon year. Meanwhile, global responses to Covid-19 have shown that even emergent scientific knowledge can bolster radical government action. We explore three options for the climate change science community. We find that two options are untenable and one is unpalatable. Given the urgency and criticality of climate change, we argue the time has come for scientists to agree to a moratorium on climate change research as a means to first expose, then renegotiate, the broken science-society contract.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/17565529.2021.2008855
*****************************************US emissions and coal generation increased in 2021, threatening Biden's climate goals
Greenhouse gas emissions in the United States surged last year, putting the nation further off track from meeting President Biden's ambitious climate targets, your Climate 202 host and The Washington Post's Brady Dennis reported this morning.
The sobering analysis from the Rhodium Group, an independent research firm, found that U.S. emissions rose 6.2 percent last year compared to 2020, although they remained below pre-pandemic levels. One main reason: a 17 percent jump in the burning of coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, marking the first annual increase in the nation’s coal generation since 2014.
The analysis demonstrates that the United States is not emerging from the coronavirus pandemic with a greener economy, making it even harder for Biden to deliver on his pledge to reduce emissions 50 to 52 percent by 2030, according to the authors.
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No climate warriors in frozen foxholes
The climate warriors of the Democratic Party aren’t lacking for chutzpah, give them that.
The latest example is a letter from 41 Members of Congress to federal regulators, fretting about “the effect that anticipated increases in heating and energy costs will have on our constituents this winter.” You don’t say?
The letter’s signers include Massachusetts Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the head of the House progressive caucus. This gaggle of greens normally thinks oil is drilled straight from hell, but they’re now asking the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to exercise its “power to influence retail rates for natural gas and electricity.”
Naturally, their theory is that higher costs are a result of “market manipulation,” “profiteering,” and “high oil and gas exports.” Maybe they should read—OK, their staffs should read—the underlying document cited by their own letter. “We expect households that use natural gas as their primary space heating fuel,” the Energy Information Administration says, “will spend $746 this winter, 30% more than they spent last winter.”
Part of that is a forecast for colder weather, but there’s also basic economics. “The main reason wholesale prices of natural gas, crude oil, and petroleum products have risen,” the EIA says, “is that fuel demand has increased from recent lows faster than production.”
The report cites record exports of liquefied natural gas, but selling energy to American allies should be counted as a win, both economically and strategically, since it reduces the leverage of players like Vladimir Putin. The U.S. has enough gas to go around, and abundance is the ultimate fix for high prices.
But President Biden, encouraged by the signers of this letter, has made clear that U.S. fossil-fuel production must be phased out. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the PennEast Pipeline were both canceled even after beating opponents at the Supreme Court. Getting gas to Mr. Markey and Ms. Warren’s Massachusetts is so difficult that sometimes it comes into Boston Harbor on a tanker from Russia. And they wonder why heating prices are high.
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Ketchup and mayonnaise sachets could be banned in new plans to curb plastic waste
Single-use plastic sachets for ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard and vinegar are expected to be banned in the UK as part of government efforts to reduce plastic waste.
The news, which has been reported by The Sun and The Times, has divided social media users, with some criticising the initiative and others welcoming the change.
The plans, which have not yet been confirmed by the department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, come after Environment Secretary George Eustice launched a call for evidence on “commonly littered and problematic plastic items” in November 2021.
“Single-use plastic sachets can cause considerable harm to the marine and terrestrial environment when disposed of incorrectly,” the call said, adding that sachets are unlikely to be recycled due to their small size, which makes it difficult to segregate and clean them.
According to a One Poll survey of 2,000 UK adults, eight out of 10 people think the sachets should be banned in the UK.
The British Takeaway Campaign said that, while it welcomes efforts to reduce plastic consumption, the change must not add “another costly burden on the smallest restaurants”.
“Takeaways need time to find affordable, non-plastic alternatives,” it said in a tweet on Tuesday, 11 January.
The Institute for Economic Affairs, meanwhile, accused the Government of “pursuing petty little projects” while the economy was “in a mess”
The plans have been criticised by the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) as “petty regulation” and “micro-management” of businesses.
“With the economy in the doldrums and inflation rising, banning things seems to be a displacement activity for politicians,” Christopher Snowdon, head of lifestyle economics at the IEA told Mail Online.
“It never seems to occur to them that placing endless regulation on businesses is a large part of the reason the economy is so sclerotic in the first place.”
Social media users are also divided. One person tweeted in support of the ban: “It might seem trivial right now. [But] the waste in sachets is unreal. Who’s ever asked for a sauce at McDonald’s drive through and been handed 4...”
Another said that doing away with plastic sachets in pubs and restaurants during a pandemic could pose a health hazard.
“Surely the environmental benefits of doing away with the single use plastic sachets have to be balanced against the health hazard of everyone getting their hands on the same bottle while eating?” they said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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12 January, 2020
Climate change could spark a rise in KIDNEY STONES: Higher temperatures caused by greenhouse gases will lead to an increase
This is just modelling, which proves nothing. A hot climate actually is associated with more kidney stones but the tiny rise in average temperature of recent times is unlikely to be the cause behind the recent increased incidence. Many other factors can affect the incidence of the stones
More hot days in the future will likely due to greater water losses through sweat, resulting in more concentrated urine and increased formation of kidney stones, researchers in Pennsylvania claim.
Kidney stones are hard deposits made of minerals and salts that form inside your kidneys.
They form when your urine contains more crystal-forming substances – such as calcium, oxalate and uric acid – than the fluid in your urine can dilute.
Previous research has already shown that high ambient temperatures increase the risk of developing these kidney stones.
Not drinking enough water contributes to their formation because more water in the kidneys helps prevent stone-forming crystals from sticking together.
Higher temperatures are therefore more likely to cause dehydration, which in turn leads to the painful condition, which can often require surgery.
The new study was conducted by researchers at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) in Pennsylvania, led by urologist Dr Gregory E. Tasian.
'It is impossible to predict with certainty how future policies will slow or hasten greenhouse gas emission and anthropogenic climate change, and to know exactly what future daily temperatures will be,' Dr Tasian said.
'[But] our analysis suggests that a warming planet will likely cause an increased burden of kidney stone disease on healthcare systems.'
In the US, there is an increase in the incidence of kidney stones from North to South, and there is a rapid increase in risk of kidney stone presentations following hot days.
However, previous studies have not precisely projected how climate change will impact the burden of kidney stone disease in the future.
A study by the Mayo Clinic found an overall increase in the prevalence of kidney stones across three decades.
The rate of confirmed symptomatic stones increased more than 300 per cent in women and 100 percent in men from 1984 to 2012.
While the increase can in part be explained by improvements in medical imaging technology, experts said it could also be linked to the dietary factors driving increases in cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
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Carbon taxes face growing state battle
While President Joe Biden continues to pursue anti-energy initiatives at the national level, those same policies appear to be unraveling at the state level.
The proposed restrictions on oil and gas use that sit at the heart of Biden’s "Build Back Better" agenda would only further accelerate rising consumer costs. The House version of the bill, for instance, is overloaded with new fees and taxes that would greatly increase the cost of domestic energy production. What will this mean for people who need to heat their homes, buy groceries, fill their tanks, and pay utility bills?
The answer comes in the form of a multistate climate change agreement that reflects in microcosm what Team Biden is attempting to do nationally. Recent developments in key states suggest the agreement may be in the early stages of collapse for the same reasons Build Back Better has stalled federally.
In Virginia, Republican Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin has made it clear that he intends to pull his state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative , a " cap and trade " regulatory scheme widely known as RGGI. Youngkin aptly described the initiative as a "carbon tax" that will raise energy costs during his remarks before the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce in December. Dominion Energy, the state’s largest electric utility, is poised to nearly double the carbon surcharge it passes along to consumers for participating in RGGI. Government figures show this charge will boost the average residential customer’s monthly bill by $4.37 beginning in September. The surcharge is estimated to be $2.39 a month.
There are 11 RGGI states in the New England and mid-Atlantic regions that require power plants to purchase carbon allowances at quarterly auctions whenever those plants exceed the cap on emissions established under the climate change compact. Emissions prices for credits hit a record high of $13 per ton in the most recent auction, which will translate into more carbon taxes for consumers. This would help to explain why new member states have been holding out.
In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, had planned on having his state join RGGI this week. But he is running into opposition from lawmakers in both parties. Wolf had issued an executive order in 2019 directing his Department of Environmental Protection to develop regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions in anticipation of joining the initiative. But in December, the Pennsylvania House passed a concurrent resolution disapproving of Wolf’s carbon dioxide budget trading program, which means the regulations cannot be published in the state registry. The state Senate passed the resolution in October.
Assuming Wolf exercises his veto, the resolution will return to the Pennsylvania Senate, which will then have 10 legislative days or 30 calendar days to override the veto. If that effort is successful, the resolution will then go back to the House, which also needs to muster a two-thirds vote. That seems a tall order, but Wolf is drawing opposition from some of his own Democrats, putting a veto override within reach. Rep. Pam Snyder, who represents Greene, Fayette, and Washington counties, is among the Democrats who voted in favor of the resolution.
"RGGI is nothing but an unfair tax on the fossil fuel industry that will devastate the communities I represent," she said in a statement. "RGGI will artificially and prematurely shut down coal-fired power plants across Pennsylvania, the same ones that light our lamps and heat our homes."
There is some debate about how much executive authority Youngkin has in Virginia to end his state’s participation in RGGI. But since state law authorized RGGI participation without mandating it, Youngkin has good cause to believe he has the upper hand.
In Pennsylvania, the proponents of affordable energy have a heavier lift since the governor is not in their corner. RGGI participation hinges in part on how many members of Wolf’s party want to run for office while advocating carbon taxes. Attorney General Josh Shapiro, the Democratic candidate for governor, clearly does not. He’s publicly expressed misgivings about RGGI despite the fact that his office has approved the rule enabling Pennsylvania to join. That’s a politician trying to have it both ways. But that’s not so easy to do with Biden pursuing energy taxes at the federal level while Wolf makes a final push to join RGGI in the run-up to the midterm elections.
Interesting times await.
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British MP Scott Benton: As energy costs soar, we cannot balance environmentalism on the backs of the poor
It is imperative that the government doesn’t become blinded by green ideology in retaining these levies in the midst of millions of working people being plunged into fuel poverty.
The 2019 General Election realigned politics as working class voters in places like my constituency, Blackpool South, backed Boris and the Tories in record numbers.
Whilst this was mainly attributed to Brexit and a dislike of the woke and metropolitan values which the Labour Party had come to symbolize, lifelong Labour voters who switched to the Conservatives were undoubtedly put at ease by a party who was promising to ‘level-up’ and spend record sums on the public services upon which they depended. There was a distinct feeling that the Tory Party of Boris was different and was genuinely on the side of working people in places such as Blackpool, Bolsover and Burney.
Two years since the election, and the view of those former Labour voters towards their old party hasn’t changed. This explains why despite the pandemic and a number of government mishaps, Labour aren’t 25 points ahead in the polls as one might expect. My constituents generally think that the government has done a pretty good job in handling the pandemic, and the vast sums of money which were spent on supporting people’s jobs and businesses, and keeping the NHS afloat, has bought the government some time.
However, there are monumental challenges ahead. Not just managing the pandemic or the NHS, keeping the economy on track or finally rebooting ‘levelling up’, but more imminently, the impending cost of living crisis.
By many standards, my constituency is the poorest in England. Unemployment is double the national average and the majority of those in work are in receipt of benefits. People in Blackpool are already struggling to manage the household budget but with nearly all consumer goods and foods rising in price, and the expected increases in National Insurance and Council Tax also set to kick in, working people are facing a tsunami of rising prices. Factor in the expected £600 rise in fuel costs for the average family and people’s budgets will be stretched beyond breaking point in many circumstances.
If the government is going to maintain the trust and support of those new converts from Labour, and truly demonstrate that it is ‘on their side’, it must act quickly. Although we are already doing a great deal to help working families (raising the income tax threshold for low earners; the Universal Credit taper rate changes; increases in the National Living Wage; and freezing fuel duty, for example) people are facing unprecedented pressure on their household budgets and we must go further, and fast.
One blindly obvious solution to help people with the expected rise in fuel costs from April would be to scrap VAT and the so-called ‘green levies’ on bills. Collectively these make up around 25% of the average fuel bill and scrapping them would save the average household somewhere in the region of £250 pounds per year. Whilst this wouldn’t fully protect consumers against the expected £600 rise, it would go an awful long way towards helping families in the short-term.
It is imperative that the government doesn’t become blinded by green ideology in retaining these levies in the midst of millions of working people being plunged into fuel poverty. If there is one single thing which would demonstrate my Party being out of touch with working people it would be this.
In short, you can’t balance environmentalism on the backs of the poor who are struggling to keep the heating on. In any case, the green levy is spend on some very dubious projects: not least, a £1 billion subsidy to a power station burning wood chip pellets. Doesn’t sound very green does it?
Whilst cutting VAT and green levies would be a helpful short term measure it does not of course solve our energy crisis. Governments of both colours have hopelessly mismanaged our energy policy for decades. A reluctance to properly pursue nuclear energy and a reliance on fair weather green power has brought us to the point where we are dangerously reliant on the whims of a geo-political foe in Russia.
Our long term energy security surely necessitates expanding North Sea exploration and looking again at shale gas where appropriate. Whilst this may be unpalatable to some, the alternative of huge price volatility, the enormous costs to our economy, and working people suffering in cold homes is simply not an option.
Working class voters in red wall seats, like Blackpool South, will decide the outcome of the next election. The test will be whether people feel that the government is truly on the side of people such as them. That’s why the government can’t afford to get decisions such as this wrong.
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Biden’s fuel afflictions
The new year forecasts relentless gasoline pains
That government existing to better the lives of its citizens is self-evident. Happiness can be an elusive pursuit, of course, and leaders are no less likely to zig when they should have zagged than the imperfect folks who choose them. Americans give their chief executive four years to discover the path to betterment, but their patience quickly wears thin when the trouble is intentional. President Biden has launched a flotilla of hardships during his first year in office, but few as harmful as the breakneck surge in fuel prices.
The 230 million Americans who drive spent the past year cringing at the sight of gas station signs flashing an average price of $3.02 per gallon. Fuel price analysts at Gas Buddy warn the worst is yet to come. In 2022, the average is forecast to bolt higher to $3.41 and could reach $4 a gallon by spring. With prices currently hovering around $3.29 nationwide and with trend-setting California already cracking through the stratospheric level of $4.66, the possibility is looking extremely likely.
The extra dollar a gallon hike over a year ago is on course to pilfer consumers’ pockets for an extra $80 billion, raising the nation’s gas bill to nearly $485 billion during 2022. Some happy new year.
In December, when prices were slightly less jaw-dropping, the Pew Research Center pointed out that the nation has endured a long history of gas price spikes. For example, the $4.11 Americans paid for gas in 2008 would have cost $5.20 in today’s dollars.
It is a painful reminder rendered all the more maddening by the realization that by electing Mr. Biden, voters made the fateful decision to rehire the Obama cadre who made those gas prices good and high, including then-Vice President Biden himself.
Viewing the turn of events as simply misfortune is to ignore the deliberate steps Mr. Biden has taken to instigate the price surge: The president canceled the Keystone XL pipeline, which, incidentally, triggered a lawsuit from the project builder seeking $15 billion in damages. Promising as a candidate “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period,” he ordered a temporary halt of oil and gas drilling permits on government property.
Thankfully, a federal court blocked the executive order, but the energy industry heard the message: Fossil fuels are to be phased out. Choosing not to throw good money after bad, companies have responded to the 2020 pandemic energy-use slowdown by opting out of renewed drilling operations. Consequently, active wells across the nation totaled 991 in September — down from the pre-pandemic 2019 average of 1,253, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Willfully squeezing-off fossil fuels threatens the well-being of the nation. The president’s 43% approval rating quantifies his abysmal leadership. A year on, Americans are starting to roll up their sleeves — not for vaccinations — but to throw Team Biden out of office.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/jan/9/editorial-bidens-fuel-afflictions/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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11 January, 2022
Electric cars are more expensive but do lower runing costs make up for that?
Only if you drive a lot and if that is because you drive long distances an electric car may have range problems
An electric vehicle can be powered with virtually free solar energy, and has much lower maintenance costs than an ICE vehicle.
Because of that, you might be willing to buy an electric vehicle even if it costs more, so long as you save money within a few years. So how long does it take to recoup the extra cost of an EV?
Well, there's no simple answer. It will depend on a range of factors including:
the EV you are considering, and the alternative ICE vehicle you are comparing it to
how much you drive, and how far each time
whether you have excess solar generation at your home, to use for charging.
These factors will determine whether you save money within a few years of buying an EV, or whether you break even at all.
One of the cheapest battery-powered electric vehicles available in Australia is an SUV coming in at about $44,000.
Now, let's say you were tossing up whether to buy that car or a similar SUV made by the same manufacturer — one that runs on petrol and costs about $28,000.
You're paying $16,000 more for the EV. So, over a few years, could you save that $16,000 in fuel and maintenance?
Yes — but you'd have to be a big driver, clocking up about twice the national average of 12,000 kilometres per year.
If you had an EV, and could use your home solar panels to charge your car, you might spend just $2,500 charging your EV and another $3,000 on maintenance over the five years.
If that all works out, you'll be about $500 better off after five years with the EV, compared to the ICE vehicle.
Other EVs on the market start at about $50,000 and go up from there. Making enough savings from fuel and maintenance with those vehicles is going to be harder, depending on what ICE vehicle you're comparing it to.
And the less you drive, the fewer the opportunities for savings. If you drive the car rarely, it's very hard to realise any of the savings from an EV.
This is all based on prices today, but prices are projected to continue their sharp decline. As they do, the equation becomes more and more favourable for EVs.
And when EVs cost the same as ICE vehicles, buying one will for most be a no-brainer.
In Norway, government policies have made EVs already roughly the same cost as ICE vehicles, and as a result, nearly 80 per cent of new car sales are battery electric.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-07/can-cost-of-electric-cars-evs-be-recouped-over-time/100704838
***************************************************Revive fracking to tackle rising energy bills
Fracking must be supported in the UK to tackle rapidly rising energy bills, a group of Tory MPs including Yorkshire’s Philip Davies have suggested.
In a letter to the Sunday Telegraph organised by Craig Mackinlay MP, the chairman of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group of Conservative MPs, the group call for the removal of VAT and environmental levies on domestic energy and to end the Climate Change Levy on business energy use.
It comes among rising fears that average household energy bills could double by April following record gas prices and the collapse of multiple smaller energy suppliers.
The 20 signatories, who include Shipley MP Philip Davies and his wife former Cabinet minister Esther McVey, along with influential Brexiteer Steve Baker, argue there should also be “a new approach to our energy security” including a return to shale gas extraction, otherwise known as fracking.
The letter states that fracking in America has helped keep energy bills for US consumers at a lower level.
It says: “On the net-zero strategy, gas and oil will continue to play a big part in our energy needs for a generation. We are seeing the effects of high gas demand and limited supply in the international markets, pushing wholesale energy prices to historic highs. We hardly need to point out the risks of relying on other countries for our energy needs, especially those hostile to us.
"This is an appeal for a new approach to our energy security. This leads to the inescapable conclusion of the need to expand North Sea exploration and for shale gas extraction to be supported.
“It is no accident that American consumers pay a mere tenth of what we do for gas.
“There seems little sense, on any environmental assessment, in importing gas and thereby reducing energy security, increasing risks of price volatility, adversely affecting our balance of payments and exporting jobs.”
Fracking was supported by previous Prime Minister Theresa May who insisted such work would be both safe and financially beneficial to residents living close to planned sites in Yorkshire which had been the subject of mass opposition.
Seven companies had Government licences to explore large parts of Yorkshire to see if fracking was feasible. The technique has not been used in the UK since 2011 after it was deemed to have been the cause of earth tremors in Lancashire.
In November 2019 ahead of the General Election that took place the following month, Boris Johnson placed a moratorium on fracking going ahead in England following a report by the Oil and Gas Authority which found it was not currently possible to accurately predict the probability or magnitude of earthquakes linked to fracking operations.
The Government's announcement of the pause came with the caveat that it would remain in place "unless and until further evidence is provided that it can be carried out safely here".In November 2021, Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng highlighted those findings when asked about the possibility of fracking as a way of tackling rising energy bills.
DUP MP Sammy Wilson said there is “enough gas under the ground in the UK to have us totally supplied for the whole country for 150 years”.
He asked: “Why is the Government not prepared to exploit the resources which we have to deal with fuel poverty, to deal with fuel security and to help the levelling-up agenda in poorer parts of England?”
Mr Kwarteng replied: “We looked at fracking, there were issues with respect to effects on the Richter Scale, earthquakes, that sort of thing, people objected to that and we imposed a moratorium on it.”
Many people will soon be pushed into ‘fuel poverty’ by rising energy bills when the energy price cap changes, the MPs’ letter has suggested.
It states: “We have almost uniquely caused our energy prices, through taxation and environmental levies, to increase faster than those of any other competitive country.
“High energy prices are felt most painfully by the lowest paid.
“Once the current domestic energy price cap is reassessed for implementation in April 2022, the likelihood is that domestic tariffs will increase hugely, feeding directly into a cost-of-living crisis for many and pushing them into what is bluntly called ‘fuel poverty’.”
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Why Toyota says buyers should think twice about electric cars
Toyota’s Australian boss wants drivers to think carefully before buying a new electric car with a massive battery, as it might not be what they really need.
Matthew Callachor, president of Toyota Australia, told reporters on Thursday that drivers who use their cars for short trips may be overcapitalising on electric cars with enormous battery packs responsible for significant carbon emissions throughout their life cycle.
That view was backed by Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries chief executive Tony Weber, who warned legislators not to push battery electric technology to the detriment of other vehicle types.
Speaking with reporters during an annual presentation of the best-selling new cars, Callachor said the popularity of hybrid cars reflected their relevance in Australia. Hybrids were more affordable than battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and would reduce “more emissions, sooner, than BEVs alone”.
Toyota has sold more than 240,000 hybrid vehicles since the original Prius arrived in 2001.
“According to our calculations, those 240,000 hybrids have had the same impact on reducing CO2 as approximately 72,000 BEVs,” Callachor said.
“Yet the volume of batteries we’ve used to produce these hybrid-electric vehicles is the same as we’d need for just 3500 BEVs.
“In other words, we can say that the batteries needed for 3500 BEVs have been used to achieve the CO2 emissions reduction effect of 72,000 BEVs.
“It means that HEVs are an extremely effective way of reducing carbon emissions today – and doing so at a comparatively affordable price.”
Many green customers are attracted to Tesla-like electric cars with big batteries capable of longer distance driving, as opposed to EVs such as Mazda’s MX-30 and the electric Mini Cooper with limited range.
But Callachor said some buyers who insisted on big batteries were missing a key point of electric vehicles – reducing carbon emissions.
“If you’re recharging a 400km BEV every night for an average round-trip commute of around 40 kilometres, then you’re not getting any carbon-reduction benefit from 90 per cent of the battery cells,” Mr Callachor said.
“If we put those unused batteries to use in other electrified vehicles, we could prevent far more carbon from entering the atmosphere.
“We cannot assume that ‘one size fits all’. Even if the best choice for the average person someday becomes a BEV, it will not be the best way for every person to reduce carbon emissions.
“Distributing every battery cell so that we get the maximum benefit means putting them into appropriate electrified vehicles including HEV (hybrid), PHEV (plug-in hybrid) and FCEV (hydrogen fuel cell) vehicles … not just into a smaller number of BEVs.”
Famously slow to adopt pure electric power, Toyota shocked the motoring world with more than a dozen battery-powered concept cars late last year, bowling up everything from cut-price hatchbacks to a rugged ute and Ferrari-fighting supercar.
The brand’s first dedicated BEV, the Toyota bZ4X, will reach Australia this year. When it does, Toyota will join Hyundai as the only brands offering electric, hydrogen, hybrid and conventional combustion cars in 2022.
“In a country as diverse as Australia, we need to offer diverse options that – for example – account for different energy sources as well as large differences in customer usage and needs,” he said.
The FCAI’s Tony Weber said although “there is no doubt EVs are the future”, governments should set carbon emissions targets rather than incentivising battery electric vehicles to the detriment of other options. The UK has banned the sale of petrol, diesel and even hybrid vehicles from 2030, an approach the local car industry hopes to avoid.
“Good intentions are not always the right pathway to good outcomes,” he said.
“We must not lose sight of the overall policy objective here, and that is to release CO2 emissions. “Set the targets and let the market deliver the technology mix.”
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Colorado’s Marshall Fire: Have Funding Needs Corrupted Climate Science?
I was totally shocked to hear the claims by a fire scientist I had once admired and often quoted in my blog posts about wildfire.
In a National Public Radio interview Jennifer Balch said, “Climate change has lengthened the state's fire season”. Then she said “"Climate change is essentially keeping our fuels drier longer. These grasses that were burning, they've been baked all fall and all winter.”
Having studied fire ecology for 30 years and knowing her published science, I could only believe she had been corrupted by the need to attract large amounts of funding, and these days that comes to those who blame the climate crisis. And here’s why I now hold that opinion so strongly.
Colorado’s Marshall Fire was a grassfire that happened with temperatures hovering around freezing. All
fire experts and fire managers know grasses are 1-hour lag fuels. That means in dry conditions grasses can become flammable within hours. Attempting to link CO2 global warming, she and other alarmists were now blaming the Boulder area’s grass flammability on the warm dry conditions from July through November. But dry conditions in the past months are totally irrelevant. Those months could have also been cold and wet, but just one day of dry conditions is all that is needed for grasses to burn.
To minimize recklessly set fire that often occur as people burn away unwanted dead vegetation, the Nova Scotia government felt the need to counter
the Myth that “It's safe to burn grass as long as there is still some snow on the ground.”
The Fact is: “Within hours of snow melting, dead grass becomes flammable, especially if there have been drying winds. Grass fires burn hot and fast and spread quickly around, and even over, patches of snow.”
That’s a fact that Balch and every other fire expert should know! Apparently, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Los Angeles and the Nature Conservancy and acolyte of climate alarmist Michael Mann and Noah Diffenbaugh, also failed to understand grasses are 1-hour fuel. He stated in an interview for NBC’s article How climate change primed Colorado for a rare December wildfire that “Climate change is clearly making the pre-conditions for wildfires worse a cross most fire-prone regions of the world,”
But dry grasses are not the pre-condition to be worried about. The pre-conditions that neither Swain nor Balch shared with the public is well known: Boulder County’s invasive grasses increase fire danger. The “main offender is cheatgrass, which was likely introduced to the area alongside agriculture and ranching” and “is increasing fire danger by 29%”
In fact, in 2013 Balch published, Introduced annual grass increases regional fire activity across the arid western USA (1980–2009), writing “Cheatgrass was disproportionately represented in the largest fires, comprising 24% of the land area of the 50 largest fires” and that “multi-date fires that burned across multiple vegetation types were significantly more likely to have started in cheatgrass.”
It was also very disingenuous for Balch to say ““Climate change has lengthened the state's fire season”. It is the very same meme that every climate alarmist regurgitates that climate change has made “a year-long fire season the new normal”. But in 2017 Balch published in Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States that human ignitions “have vastly expanded the spatial and seasonal “fire niche” in the coterminous United States, accounting for 84% of all wildfires”. Balch’s published graph clearly shows that human ignitions have extended fire season all year long. Based on her own research, a more relevant comment would have mentioned that Louisville, Colorado’s population had jumped 10-fold; from 2,000 in 1950 to about 20,000 today. Does a 10-fold increase in population create a 10-fold increase in fire probability. The Marshall Fire was not naturally started by Lightning.
In 2015, Balch created the Earth Lab program at Colorado University. In 2017 it became part of CIRES, a partnership of NOAA and CU Boulder. Earth Lab, got increasing attention from mass media that’s always seeking click-bait. As Earth Lab’s team began blaming more fires on climate change, it got more attention and Balch got more interviews.
Earth Lab hired Natasha Stavros as Earth Lab’s Analytics Hub Director. In videos posted by the Washington Post, she claimed climate change causes “longer, hotter, and drier fire seasons” reflecting Balch’s conversion to a climate crisis narrative. To get around Balch’s earlier scientific research Stavros deflected, “We are not talking about the ignition source” or the “availability of fuels”, “what we are talking about are the conditions of those fuels”. But in the case of the Marshall Fire, 1-hour grass fuels have nothing to do with climate change. It only takes a few hours to be in highly flammable conditions. That’s weather, not climate!
Although lacking in scientific integrity, pivoting to a climate crisis narrative worked in Balch’s favor. The U.S. Geological Survey has selected the University of Colorado Boulder to host the North Central Climate Adaptation Science Center (NCCASC) for the next five years. Balch, as director of CIRES’ Earth Lab, and now NCCASC Director had attracted $4.5 million in funding. Universities around the country similarly create such centers to attract such major funding. Certainly, blaming fires on a climate crisis attracts more funding than if its director sounded like a “denier” blaming invasive grasses and human ignitions.
The politics of funding research requires a major level of group think. Daniel Shechtman won the Nobel Prize for discovering quasi-crystals that are now used in surgical instruments. But when he first announced his observations, he was kicked out of his lab by his colleagues. They saw him as a threat to the lab’s prestige and funding because observing quasi-crystals contradicted the consensus that was enforced by Linus Pauling that quasi-crystal did NOT exist.
Similarly, esteemed atmospheric scientist Dr Cliff Mass was criticized by Washington University administrator’s for detailing how an episode of problematic acidic waters that had been pumped into the state’s oyster’s hatcheries, was due to natural upwelling events, not climate change. But contradicting the climate crisis angle threatened funding to WU’s Ocean Acidification Center. Up until then Mass had been the Seattle Times go-to person for all weather events, but that stopped when his one analysis didn’t support climate crisis groupthink. Dr Peter Ridd was fired for presenting evidence showing his colleague's claims of coral reef destruction were exaggerated. So, all savvy university professors know you can’t contradict the meme if you want funding, or worse, keep your job.
Climate crisis groupthink, also ignores natural climate change, as did Balch and Swain. But one meteorologist confidently blamed the lack of snow and dryness on a natural La Nina. The science is well established that depending on how colder Pacific surface waters set up during a La Nina, atmospheric currents can carry higher or lower amounts of moisture to different regions. California had record snowfall this December while Colorado snowfall was very low. And if the Marshall Fire had been ignited just 2 days later, there would have been a snowfall to suppress the fire.
However too often, alarmists scientists cherry-pick one-year events. They weaponized this year’s low snowfall while ignoring that last year’s Colorado snowfall was far above normal. In November last year, Fort Collins received more than 15 inches of snow on its way to 80 inches, which is 25 inches more than normal. Again, such variations in snowfall are weather, not climate.
Alarmists also weaponized the dry conditions as solely due to global warming drought. They ignored the drying and warming effects of the Chinook winds that are very common in Colorado. Chinooks are known as “snow eaters” because as the winds pass over the mountains of the western USA they are forced upward and precipitate all their moisture. When those winds descend from the Rockies down to Boulder, temperatures rise adiabatically (due to pressure not added heat) and the warm dry air quickly removes moisture or snow from the surface. Southern California’s Santa Anna winds are similar and drive large fires.
Sometimes Boulder’s winds reach speeds of 100+ mile per hour. NOAA reported The Chinook Wind Events Winter of 1982 during which peak wind gusts more than 100 mph damaged areas around Boulder. Weatherwise journal reported 100+MPH winds over Boulder on January 7, 1969, which snapped power poles and toppled planes as seen in the photographs below. In November 2021 the weather service gave a red flag warming due to the high winds from a Chinook event. But without a coinciding human ignition, there was no rapidly spreading fire.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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10 January, 2022
Calif. To Slash Rooftop Solar Subsidies, Add New Fees for
solar panels on rooftops
Leftists are suckering a lot of people
California regulators are eyeing sharp reductions in subsidies for residential solar systems in what would be the first major reform to a program that helped jump-start the rooftop solar industry, according to Bloomberg.
As part of a proposed series of changes issued on Monday by a judge at the California Public Utilities Commission, residential solar customers would receive a much lower credit for excess energy sent to the grid – with credits ranging from around 30 cents per kilowatt-hour, to less than 10 cents depending on time of day.
The proposal would also stick solar owners with nearly $500 per year in grid-connection fees.
The proposed amendments will undoubtedly impact the business of bolting solar panels on roofs across the U.S., an industry valued at more than $13 billion a year. A deep cut to incentives would likely slow installations in the largest solar state and prompt other sunny jurisdictions to follow. The issue has divided solar firms, consumer groups, environmental advocates and utilities.
New residential rooftop solar customers would get a four-year credit to help them transition to the new rates that would allow them to pay back the cost of a solar and energy storage system over 10 years… –Bloomberg
Net metering
California’s solar incentive program is known as “net energy metering,” and gives residential solar users a credit on their bill equal to the full retail price per killowatt-hour for excess electricity they send back to the grid. The subsidy helped boost the installation of 1.3 million home solar systems across the state – which is around 45% of the nation’s total installations.
Indeed, a key selling point of solar installations is how many years until the system reaches break-even, when the cost of installation is paid for by the savings. The return on net metering is a key component of this.
Critics of net metering says it allows rich homeowners with solar panels to effectively avoid paying their ‘share’ of the cost of maintaining grid infrastructure.
A study by the University of California, Berkeley earlier this year estimated that in San Diego, where home solar accounts for more than 20% of residential power consumption, customers without solar are paying up to an additional $230 on their utility bills per year.
Households with solar panels tend to be wealthier than those without, according to studies
https://climatechangedispatch.com/calif-to-slash-rooftop-solar-subsidies-add-new-fees/
**********************************************Death-Blow to Keystone Pipeline
On his first day in office, President Joe Biden revoked the permit for the Keystone XL Pipeline, the oil pipeline that runs through Canada and part of the U.S. His reason was that it would be harmful to the environment.
Twenty-one states then filed a lawsuit in March against the administration, questioning Biden’s authority to revoke the permit, as NBC News reported. A few months later, in June, Alaska and Florida also joined the lawsuit, bringing the total to 23 states against the Biden administration’s action.
However, in June, TC Energy Corporation, the Canada-based energy company and owner of the pipeline, canceled the project, as Bloomberg reported.
In light of TC Energy’s cancellation, on Thursday, a federal judge dismissed the multiple states’ lawsuit, as The Washington Times reported.
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Electric cars about to lose a lot of people a lot of money
Boom-and-bust cycles get a bad press – but this is one we should be celebrating
Sony is getting into the electric car market, unveiling a snazzy-looking concept vehicle that combines its blockbuster entertainment portfolio with a battery and some wheels.
Amazon is backing a new range of electric vans from Stellantis, the company formed from the merger between Chrysler and Fiat. Mercedes announced plans for a battery-powered car with a 600-mile range.
In the background, Apple is lurking with its own plans for the market, and in a week when Tesla added another $100bn to its market value it is hardly going to be short of the financial muscle to beef up its own range.
The two things we know for sure about the market for electric vehicles is that it is booming, and also that it is getting very, very crowded.
In truth, it is about to turn into a bloodbath. Lots and lots of big companies with very deep pockets are about to throw a ton of money at the industry, and so are the venture capital firms.
A problem? Not really. Sure, some money will be lost. But it will also mean consumers have a lot more choice; the development of the technology will be rapidly accelerated. Boom and bust investment cycles get a bad press – but this is one we should be celebrating.
At this rate, a few more billion of investment will be thrown at the electric vehicle market before the end of January. Every week seems to bring more competitors into the market.
We might think of Sony as a film and music company that also makes TVs but very soon we could be driving around in one of its products as well.
The company that converted the world to the CD and the games console shouldn’t be written off. It has taken cutting edge technology into the mass-market plenty of times before.
Amazon is starting to dabble in the market, both with huge orders for vans, and its investment in the start-up manufacturer Rivian. Mercedes is planning one of the longest range vehicles yet, and, of course, the traditional auto giants are still in the fight.
Volkswagen has an increasingly impressive range of electric vehicles, and Toyota and Ford are ramping up investment. With relatively few moving parts it is a lot easier to get into the electronic car business than it ever was to make old-style combustion engines.
It is going to be about design, connectivity, and the ability to access capital. Lots of different companies have some or all of those skills. The result? The market is about to get very crowded, very quickly, with a pile of money thrown at carving out a slice of the market.
Is that something we should be worried about? Not really. True, some investors are going to lose a lot of cash. Sony might never get a single yen back of the money it has spent on its prototype, and neither might Apple.
Plenty of the VC-backed start-ups will be remembered only by a handful of vintage EV collectors some time in the 2080s, while Mercedes might well find that no one really wants to drive 600 miles without stopping for a coffee and a charge-up. For the rest of us, however, massive over-investment in the sector is great news. Here’s why.
First, consumers will have far more choice, and even better, they will effectively be subsidised by the venture capital firms, and the auto and tech industries.
We will see a bewildering array of different kinds of battery-powered cars. Do we really care that much about range, given we typically only drive 10 or 20 miles a day? Is connectivity to entertain us along the way the key? Does design and prestige matter, as it did with petrol vehicles, or is it just another functional gadget?
Will we actually want to own an EV, or would we prefer simply to rent one via an app for the few hours a week when we need it? The market will decide. The important point is this, however. The market can make a far better decision if it has plenty of options to choose from – and that is what we are about to get.
Next, intense competition, combined with lots of money, will accelerate the development of new technologies.
There is still a huge amount of innovation to come. Different kinds of batteries may still be developed, and they may use more plentiful, cheaper materials. Tesla, for example, is switching the chemistry of its batteries to help it ramp up production, but there is still plenty of scope for new thinking.
We may see different types of bodies to reduce weight, or heating systems to reduce power consumption, while charging times may be dramatically reduced with new types of cable. We will see. The point is all the money pouring into the industry means that will happen a lot faster than it otherwise would.
Finally, it will mean petrol engines are eliminated far more quickly.
Just a couple of years ago, the idea that the combustion engine would be all but eliminated by the end of this decade would have seemed like the stuff of science fiction.
With more than a quarter of the new vehicles sold in the UK last month battery-powered, it hardly seems far-fetched at all. With so much investment, and prices coming down rapidly, it will happen very soon – and that will be better for the environment.
Investment bubbles are usually criticised, especially on the business pages. And no one would deny that they have their downsides. Capital is wasted, time is spent on failed projects, and investors get caught up in the hype and end up losing a lot of money.
And yet a simple fact remains: they are also a great engine of progress – and we are about to see that all over again in electric vehicles.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/01/09/electric-car-bubble-will-burst-good-everyone/
*************************************************Barrier Reef islands are GROWING
Warmists are always prophecying that Pacific islands will go underwater as a result of global warming of the ocean, with coral cays being particularly vulnerable.
But actual evidence below shows us that the opposite is happening. Coral cays are in fact GROWING. Any effect of global warming is more than cancelled out by other processes.
Basing predictions on just one of many potentially influential factors is dumb and very unscientific
A scientific field trip to a small group of deserted islands on the Great Barrier Reef has its roots in a 1928 expedition and has implications for the future of the reef.
A team of researchers from the University of Wollongong led by Associate Professor Sarah Hamylton visited the Howick islands, about 130 kilometres north-east of Cooktown, in far northern Queensland, last year and found the mangroves were expanding.
“What’s particularly interesting for a lot of the islands in the Howick group that we are mapping and investigating is that they are growing,” Associate Professor Hamylton says.
“Most of the islands we have looked at are predominantly made up of broken up corals, which waves then sweep and deposit on the island. This coral sediment is responsible for building up the islands. Add in mangrove forests and you can see that these islands are actually growing. Some mangrove forests are marching forwards by up to five to six metres per year,” she explains.
Associate Professor Hamylton says the group was able to compare aerial images taken by a drone with hand-drawn maps created in 1928 and photographs from 1974.
“This research was started back in 1928 with an expedition known as the Great Barrier Reef Low Isles Expedition.”
In July 1928, British and Australian scientists undertook a journey to investigate the biggest coral reef in the world. They spent 13 months wandering reefs and islands, looking at ocean conditions and growth rate of corals.
“Two members of the Great Barrier Reef Low Isles Expedition were particularly interested in how old the reef islands around here are and how were they formed,” says Associate Professor Hamylton.
“The researchers observed ocean waves and tidal currents transporting loose coral sediments derived from the underlying reef platform and depositing these to form the islands. Sometimes these cays or islands may remain unconsolidated and move around with the seasons. But over time, the larger cays built up to be above the sea level and become covered in vegetation, which stabilises them into more permanent features.”
Forty-five years later, in 1973-74, another group of researchers, the Royal Society and Universities of Queensland Expedition, decided to partially retrace the footsteps of the researchers from the 1928 expedition. They concentrated on remapping the Howick group, as well as other islands further north, in more detail. By remapping the islands and collecting more data on mangrove forest vegetation, the researchers believed they could inspire subsequent studies.
The information caught the eye of Associate Professor Hamylton who has a keen interest in geomorphology, which examines how landscapes such as the islands on the Great Barrier Reef form and are shaped over time.
“When I looked over the maps from 1928, then some aerial photos from 1974, I then compared these maps and images with recent satellite imagery from the internet and could plainly see that the islands had increased in size. Especially since 1974.”
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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9 January, 2022
Industrial Wind Turbines Once Again Demonstrate their Unreliability
The unreliability of those industrial wind turbines (IWT), touted as a key ingredient to save the world from “global warming” by eco-warriors and obtuse politicians, once again demonstrated their uselessness!
Here in Ontario on December 28, 2021 at 4 AM (the middle of the night) they were cranking out power (when demand was low) generating 69.4% (3,072 MWh) of their rated capacity but by 4 PM in the afternoon when demand was much higher their output was a miserly 1.5% (65 MWh) of their rated capacity. To add further context to the foregoing at 4 AM IWT were generating about 22% of total Ontario demand but by 4 PM when demand was much higher those IWT were generating 0.004% of Ontario’s demand.
IWTs bad reliability habit means our grid operator, IESO, has a much more complex system to operate with a transmission grid connecting all of those IWT and requiring gas plants to remain “at the ready” when the wind dies down or picks up. Those manipulations add costs to our electricity system thereby helping to create energy poverty by driving up the per kWh (kilowatt hour) costs for households. It also serves to drive our manufacturing companies to other provinces and U.S.A. states with lower electricity prices meaning job losses are one of the outcomes.
As if the foregoing isn’t bad enough if one looks at just 9 hours starting at 10 PM (when Ontario demand falls) December 27th through to 7 AM (when electricity demand starts its daily increase) on December 28th we learn we exported 23,514 MWh to our neighbours in Michigan, NY, Quebec, etc. as that IWT generation was surplus to our needs. We sold those 23,514 MWh for the average price of $17/MWh (1.7cents/kWh) during those 9 hours. Co-incidently those IWT generated 22,617 MWh during the same timeframe and it also appears we curtailed another 1,100 MWh meaning Ontario’s ratepayers picked up the costs for 23,717 MWh of wind which highlights them as the cause of the exported power at the miserly price of 1.7cents/kWh.
The all-in costs (including curtailed) for the IWT generation over the 9 hours was approximately $3.2 million but we received only $400K in payment for selling a like amount of their generation to our neighbours so; Ontario’s ratepayers and taxpayers picked up the loss of $2.8 million ($311K per hour). Please note the foregoing loss is from only 9 hours out of 8,760 hours in a full year.
Perhaps as a UK website “Net-Zero Watch” recently suggested to the UK’s Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, Ontario’s Minister of Energy, Todd Smith should take heed and do as they recommend and; “compel wind and solar generators to pay for their own balancing costs, thus incentivising them to self-dispatch only when economic.”
Ontario’s electricity sector needs to rid itself of the costs of IWT’s unreliable and intermittent supply so now is the time to bring in some new regulations to stop the bleeding!
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The uselessness of solar energy
You sometimes see newspaper headlines to the effect that, say, a “50 megawatt solar power plant” is being constructed. But you shouldn’t count on getting anything remotely approaching 50 megawatts of power from such an installation. Energy expert Isaac Orr explains:
"Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) show that production from solar panels plummets in the winter. The graph below shows the percentage of electricity generated by solar panels in Minnesota compared to their potential output. This percentage is called a capacity factor in electricity-industry lingo."
Isaac’s analysis applies specifically to Minnesota, but bear in mind that while northern states get fewer hours of sunlight than southern states in the winter, they get more hours of sunlight in the summer. And note that in the best of times, solar panels don’t produce electricity anywhere near half the time.
Minnesota solar panels are most productive in June and July, when they produce almost 30 percent of their potential output. Unsurprisingly, solar panels produce far less energy in November, December, and January, where production capacity factors are seldom above 10 percent.
That is pathetic. We spend billions of dollars on solar panels and transmission lines, and in winter, when we need energy the most, they work only around ten percent of the time.
Another reason for falling productivity in winter is snow cover. Even a thin layer of snow on panels can lead to significant reductions in electricity generation from solar panels, and as Ralph Jacobson, the founder of IPS Solar, has said in the past, it is too expensive to pay someone to clear snow off the panels.
Process that fact: solar panels are such a lame energy source that when it snows, it isn’t worth it to pay someone–high school kids, probably–to shovel them off.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/12/the-uselessness-of-solar-energy.php
*************************************Netherlands Goes Nuclear In Massive Atomic Humanist Victory!
Dutch government will keep existing nuclear plant operating AND build two more full-sized water-cooled plants
Four years ago, the conventional wisdom in Europe was that the continent was transitioning to renewable energies. The cost of electricity from solar panels, wind turbines, and natural gas had declined significantly, and lithium batteries could soon replace natural gas to provide energy when the sun wasn’t shining and the wind wasn’t blowing. And, held the consensus view, nuclear energy was going away; the main question was how soon existing nuclear plants could be dismantled.
Today, the conventional wisdom has changed radically. Energy and electricity prices are at record levels due to Europe’s over-reliance on renewables, inadequate supplies of nuclear energy, and shortages of oil and gas due to under-investment in oil and gas exploration and production. Carbon emissions in Germany rose 25% in the first half of 2020 due in large part to a 25% decline in wind, underscoring the unreliable nature of weather-dependent renewables. In response, both France and Britain have promised a major expansion of nuclear energy.
Not everything has changed. Both Germany and Belgium are moving full speed ahead with plans to shut down their nuclear power plants, and both nations, along with Austria and Switzerland, are lobbying to exclude nuclear energy from the list of energy technologies the European Union will categorize as sustainable. At the same time, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said recently that she believes the EU will nonetheless count nuclear as sustainable in its taxonomy, resistance is growing in both Germany and Belgium to closing nuclear plants, and a new YouGov poll finds that over half of Germans say nuclear should remain part of their nation’s climate policy.
The strongest evidence yet that the conventional wisdom has changed came yesterday from the Netherlands. Its government announced that it will not only keep its existing nuclear power plant operating but also build two additional ones. To signal its seriousness, the government has allocated €5 billion for new plant construction. “We did a market consultation recently,” the Netherlands’ State Secretary for Economic Affairs and Climate, Dilan Ye?ilgöz-Zegerius, told me yesterday, “and parties are definitely interested.”
Dutch pro-nuclear activists were ecstatic. “All year there was the suggestion that the government would merely be launching more ‘research’ into the role of nuclear,” said Joris Van Dorp, co-founder of the Nuclear Pride Coalition, “but now they have gone all the way by putting up the money needed to actually realize projects.”
The transformation of public opinion and conventional wisdom in the Netherlands is striking. “Four years ago, RePlanet Nederland was the only civilian movement to speak out in favor of nuclear energy,” said Olguita Oudendijk, director of the pro-nuclear NGO, “and we were excluded from the Climate Agreement negotiations.” Fast-forward four years later, and the demands of RePlanet, formerly known as the Ecomodernisme Foundation, are at the center of government climate and energy policy.
Explained Ye?ilgöz-Zegerius, “Since my party, the VVD, started the discussion on nuclear energy at the end of 2018, there has been growing support for nuclear energy amongst Dutch people. While some political parties like the Greens still try to tackle climate change with ideology rather than rationality, other political parties have changed their views, based on the facts, rather than ideology. If everything goes well, the new plants will be ready by 2035.”
What happened? Why did a once-marginal cause, pro-nuclear environmentalism, move from the margins to the center of Dutch energy policy? Why did facts trump ideology? The answers to those questions matter not just to people who care about Europe, energy, and climate change, but to anybody who is interested in how social change really happens.
https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/netherlands-goes-nuclear-in-massive
*******************************************Australia: Federal Opposition leader offers cautious policies on climate
Anthony Albanese says his climate change plan has struck the right balance to win over voters in regional Queensland, as he begins a week-long road trip from Cairns to Gladstone in a pre-election campaign in the crucial state.
While Labor’s climate change policies have been an electoral negative in the coal-rich state in the past decade, the Opposition Leader said he would visit resources projects and tell workers the future would be bright if he became prime minister. He will promise to deliver cheaper power bills to ramp up manufacturing in the state and keep the aluminium industry viable.
Mr Albanese said Labor’s climate plan had been “really well received” in North and Central Queensland, which swung heavily against Bill Shorten at the last election due to the party’s ambivalence over the coal industry and the Adani mine.
Mr Albanese’s 2030 emissions target of 43 per cent is similar to the 45 per cent target Mr Shorten took to the last poll.
But this time Labor will go to the election saying its plan would not close any coal mine or coal-fired power station earlier than the Coalition’s policies.
Mr Albanese will also have the cover of the Business Council of Australia calling for a 2030 target of 46-50 per cent – a far cry the group calling Mr Shorten’s 45 per cent target “economy wrecking” ahead of the last poll.
“It is an opportunity to end the climate wars by the election of a Labor government,” Mr Albanese told The Australian.
“It has received support from the Business Council, the Australian Industry Group, the National Farmers Federation and (the) Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, as well as the ACTU and unions.
“That shows that we are where we needed to be.
“Business, industry and farmers want certainty to drive investment and Labor’s powering the nation plan will do just that. Queensland’s regions will particularly benefit from our plan.”
Mr Albanese arrived in Cairns on Thursday night, in the electorate of Leichhardt held by Liberal National MP Warren Entsch on a margin of 4.2 per cent.
On Friday, Mr Albanese will visit the Great Barrier Reef and talk up Labor’s plan to safeguard the natural wonder which is likely to come under strain from rising water temperatures due to climate change.
He will also visit the seats of Kennedy, Herbert, Dawson, Capricornia and Flynn, all held by the Coalition, before campaigning in Brisbane electorates at the end of next week.
Labor has just eight out of 30 seats in Queensland, with Blair MP Shayne Neumann holding the only seat outside of Brisbane.
Mr Albanese said the pandemic highlighted the problems with insecure work and increasing casualisation, which has been a concern for Queensland miners given the growth of labour hire.
“Covid has shown the strength of our society but it has also shown a range of economic vulnerabilities,” he said. “Both for individual workers, in terms of secure work, people in casual employment have missed out.
“Whole sectors have missed out, particularly sectors important for Queensland. The tourism sector, agriculture has suffered from a lack of workers and supply chain issues, climate change continues to make communities and industries vulnerable.
“And the cuts to TAFE, universities and apprenticeships mean that people aren’t getting the opportunities to advance and to fulfil their aspirations which is what we want.”
Mr Albanese will look to exploit the tensions in national cabinet by telling Queenslanders that Prime Minister Scott Morrison had not supported them.
“The Palaszczuk government has done very well protecting Queenslanders during Covid but they have been let down by the Morrison government which has continued to attack Queensland rather than provide it with support,” he said.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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7 January, 2022
German Greens concede defeat: EU green label for gas and nuclear unlikely to be blocked
Germany's Green Party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Liberal Democrats (FDP) reject the EU's proposed classification of nuclear power as a sustainable technology.
However, Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke (Green Party) sees little chance of being able to change the EU's plans for nuclear power. "I doubt whether the proposal can still be changed and whether it can still be stopped," said the Green politician on Tuesday morning in an interview.
A change would only be possible if the majority of member states would say no to this proposal - but this is not to be expected.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had decided last autumn to promote nuclear power as a sustainable form of energy, Lemke said. “France has positioned itself very clearly, as have other countries” - in favour of the EU's plans. Lemke still thinks it was the wrong decision.
The position of the federal government on the question of nuclear power is unanimous, she said. "The SPD, Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz, have all made it clear that from our point of view, from the point of view of the German government, nuclear power is not a sustainable investment."
Lemke told WELT on Monday that the planned EU sustainability label for nuclear power should be called “greenwashing” - even if Chancellor Olaf Scholz does not want to go along with this designation, according to his government spokesman.
Handelsblatt, 4 January 2022
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Will Europe abandon green energy?
The question is how much wealth will be destroyed before greenies admit that their dreams have turned into nightmares.
The European Union has led the way in transitioning from fossil fuels to “green” energy, i.e. wind and solar. But that effort has hit a snag: wind and solar don’t work, and energy costs in the EU are skyrocketing. Now a Reuters report suggests that the EU may be thinking about jumping ship:
"The European Union has drawn up plans to label some natural gas and nuclear energy projects as “green” investments after a year-long battle between governments over which investments are truly climate-friendly.
A draft of the Commission’s proposal, seen by Reuters, would label nuclear power plant investments as green if the project has a plan, funds and a site to safely dispose of radioactive waste. To be deemed green, new nuclear plants must receive construction permits before 2045.
Investments in natural gas power plants would also be deemed green if they produce emissions below 270g of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour (kWh), replace a more polluting fossil fuel plant, receive a construction permit by Dec. 31 2030 and plan to switch to low-carbon gases by the end of 2035."
If CO2 is the alleged threat to the future of the planet, nuclear power is indisputably “green.” Nuclear plants don’t emit CO2. Disposal of spent fuel rods is an issue, but a minor one–a ridiculously minor one if you think the alternative is destruction of the planet. That is why any environmentalist who doesn’t support nuclear power is an environmentalist who doesn’t actually believe the propaganda he spouts.
Likewise, natural gas emits far less CO2 than coal, and “green” advocates have in any case been building natural gas plants like there’s no tomorrow, because gas is what they burn most of the time, when wind and solar fail to produce electricity.
Meanwhile, the EU’s member countries are sharply split on energy issues:
"Austria opposes nuclear power, alongside countries including Germany and Luxembourg. EU states including the Czech Republic, Finland and France, which gets around 70% of its power from the fuel, see nuclear as crucial to phasing out CO2-emitting coal fuel power."
It is notable that Germany has just announced that it will close three of its six nuclear power plants, even though German automakers reportedly have warned their government that they will not be able to compete in global markets if their energy costs continue to rise.
Maybe, for once, the French will save the Germans from themselves.
The fate of this particular EU proposal remains unknown, but the handwriting is on the wall. The “green” dream of an economy powered exclusively (or even mostly) by wind and solar energy is impossible, not because of a lack of political will but because of the laws of physics. The end of this story has already been written. The question is how much wealth will be destroyed before greenies admit that their dreams have turned into nightmares.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/01/will-europe-abandon-green-energy.php
*******************************************Boris's Net Zero agenda would wreck the private rented sector
The Net Zero policy as it is now proposed will do very little to reduce our emissions, but will heap untold misery on thousands of renters caught in the middle.
In 2007, the Government introduced Home Information or Sellers’ Packs. The idea behind these was to speed up the home buying process, prevent gazumping and reduce abortive sales by bringing together a lot of the information that a buyer would need before the sale took place. There was a lot of opposition tor the idea (and some support), and the requirement was scrapped in 2010, save for the Energy Performance Certificate or EPC.
The EPC was supposed to provide a prospective buyer with an assessment of the property’s energy consumption, together with a list of practical measures that could be taken to cut fuel bills and carbon emissions.
The assessments are made by trained Domestic Energy Assessors, although the course can be done in as little as five days and costs less than £1000. The assessment originally produced two ratings, the Energy Efficiency Rating (EER), which calculated the cost of heating space and water in the house, and the Environmental (CO2) Impact Rating (EIR), which estimated the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the property. Over time the EIR has been dropped and the only measure now produced is the EER, now known as the EPC. Its focus is cost, and produces a rating from A – G, with A being the most energy efficient and G the worst. It has been mandatory to produce an EPC to sell or to rent a property for many years, yet most people take little or no notice of them.
As part of its Green Agenda, the Government wishes to improve the energy efficiency of heating our homes. Since April 2020 it has been illegal to let a property in the private sector with an EPC lower than an E and the Government is now proposing to raise that to a minimum of EPC C. We are still waiting for the Bill to be published, but the proposal in the consultation document was that all new tenancies issued by private landlords require the property to have an EPC level of C or above from 2025; from 2028 all privately let properties must achieve this standard.
I believe there will be some serious consequences of introducing mandatory EPC C across the PRS:
1. EPC points are based on cost, not carbon emissions, so they are the wrong measure to use if you want to ‘green up’ housing. Gas scores more highly than electricity even though gas is carbon emitting and electricity can be entirely green. The recommendations given to improve the EPC of a property are often inappropriate & costly – solar water heating and wind turbines, for example – or require tradesmen that we simply do not have enough of – external wall insulation being a common example. The algorithm changes regularly – I have a property that lost 10 points between assessments – with no explanation to the end users. And the assessors are poorly trained and have to make many assumptions, resulting in inconsistent and sometimes simply incorrect results.
2. The Government wants all rental properties to achieve an EPC C by 2028. However, a large proportion of our housing stock is turn of the century, solid walled Victorian and Edwardian terraces. These properties, often highly desirable to tenants and owners, score very poorly on the EPC assessment and will be extremely expensive to bring up to EPC C (£10–15k per property). The work is often very intrusive, requiring tenants to be moved out. Moreover, the cost is deemed to be capital in nature for tax purposes, and so has to be set against future capital gains tax. Any return on my investment is likely to take more than 30 years. I also own more modern properties, with highly efficient electric radiators. However, these are becoming increasingly expensive to run as electricity prices soar, a function of the green subsidies being added to the bills. They therefore score very poorly on the EPC assessment. The EPC recommendation for these types of properties is high heat retention storage heaters, but I do not believe anyone would choose to live with storage heaters. The only reason they are recommended is because Economy 7 electricity is cheaper than standard rates – an advantage that is often lost because of the way storage heaters run and the fact that all daytime electricity is then charged at a higher rate.
3. I have been a landlord for 20 years and I have a portfolio of 10 properties. Like many other landlords of my era, the cost of bringing already renovated properties up to EPC C is too high to be worth it. The time for renovation is when you first purchase a property and as mine have already been brought up to scratch, with new bathrooms, kitchens, boilers, carpets and so on, ripping them apart again to insulate them is extremely unappealing. If EPC C becomes law I will be looking to sell the majority of my portfolio. As you can imagine, it takes time to sell properties, so in spite of the legislation not yet being in place, the first of these will go on the market in this month. I believe many other landlords are also quietly exiting the market and that is the reason that rents are at all time highs, voids are at all time lows and would be tenants are struggling to find homes.
4. If the move towards EPC C continues at the proposed rate and with the complete lack of financial support to landlords I believe a large proportion of properties in the private rented sector will be lost. Once gone, they are unlikely to return, and I believe this could precipitate a housing crisis of immense proportions. We already have a huge number of people trying to access limited social housing because they cannot afford private rents. There is certainly not enough social housing being built to replace those being lost. Build to Rent may replace some, but the numbers are too low at present and they are also not always the type of family homes many small private landlords supply. As the number of private rentals reduces, the rents of those remaining will increase, pushing more people into the arms of unscrupulous landlords, renting out non-compliant, and possibly dangerous housing – think gas safety, electrical safety, smoke alarms, overcrowding in addition to low EPC ratings. I do not believe the Government has thought about the serious unintended consequences of its Net Zero policy.
5. Although the Government is trying to push all housing towards EPC C, I do not believe they will be successful. Our housing stock is too old for the measures currently being offered. Most people do not have the will or the financial resources to go through with these costly ‘improvements’. However, their experiment with the private rented sector (and that is how I see it) may have far reaching consequences for those unable to buy their own home. All the older, lower EPC rated properties will be quietly absorbed in to the owner occupier sector, where few improvements will be made. Landlords wishing to be compliant will buy modern well-insulated boxes and rent them out to the fortunate few at sky-high prices. The remainder will be left trying to access social housing or renting non-compliant properties.
6. The Government’s own proposed solutions are flawed: heat pumps (which ironically score poorly on the EPC assessment because they are powered by electricity) are very expensive to install, and grant funding makes only a small dent in the bill (and funding has only been allocated for 90,000 pumps anyway). They are also entirely unsuitable for older, poorly insulated properties without other extensive upgrades. In fact, even houses built after 2000 may be unsuitable, because they were built with microbore central heating pipes, which would need to be replaced, wrecking walls, flooring and decor. We also have insufficient tradespeople to install the numbers proposed. Hydrogen-ready boilers have also been suggested, but unless we use green hydrogen (very expensive), we will create carbon emissions producing it, and I understand we are nowhere near ready to produce the volume required to make a significant difference. The lack of a credible future-proof solution means that landlords are unwilling to spend large sums of money. For many, the only sensible solution will be to sell.
7. There is time to prevent the Government’s plans causing a housing crisis. A complete review of the EPC algorithm and assessment is required (I believe there are some changes coming in 2022). Reducing the target to EPC D would be a useful step – this is a much more achievable goal and many of the measures required to achieve it are cost effective and unobtrusive – loft insulation, LED light bulbs, double glazing, modern boilers. A longer horizon, with EPC C as the target, would give landlords longer to plan, cost and do the work between tenants, and would also give time for new technologies to give us cheaper and better solutions. We need to bring the issue to public consciousness and allow all of us to engage with the process and make our views known. Devising a policy that everyone supports and can afford is the only way to reduce the emissions of the sector. The policy as it is now proposed will do very little to reduce our emissions, but will heap untold misery on thousands of renters caught in the middle.
Net Zero Watch, 4 January 2022
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China's bid to host a 'carbon-neutral' Olympics derided as a 'sleight-of-hand'
China is pursuing a "carbon-neutral" Olympics for February in what appears to be the latest attempt to signal interest in combating climate change alongside the international community.
According to IEEE, the nation also intends to power all of its 26 venues with renewables. State media also reportedly claims that more than 85% of public transport vehicles at the Olympics will be powered by alternative energy like hydrogen fuel cells.
But critics allege that China, which dominates other countries in emissions, is merely engaging in a "sleight-of-hand" as James Taylor, president of the Heartland Institute, put it.
"China claiming to produce a carbon-neutral Olympics merely highlights the sleight-of-hand of ‘zero-carbon claims,'" Taylor told FOX Business.
"Coal powers the majority of Chinese electricity every day of the year. Coal and oil will power the construction and setup of China’s Olympic facilities. Oil and gasoline will bring China’s construction workers to the Olympic facilities, China’s citizens to the venue and athletes and spectators from around the world. China produces more carbon dioxide emissions than the entire Western Hemisphere combined."
Steve Milloy, a former Trump advisor, agreed.
"China’s bid to put on a ‘green’ Olympics is farcical greenwashing," Milloy said. "China is currently producing and burning record amounts of coal."
The Chinese government has made several assurances that it will transition to alternative energies, something the nation seems uniquely poised to do given its vast resources of raw materials.
The industrial giant has a long way to go, however, to reach its stated goal of net-zero emissions by 2060, 10 years after the U.S.'s target. Just days after China's goal was reaffirmed in a statement last year, the Chinese government reported that output from its coal mines had reached its highest level since 2015.
Nevertheless, it has repeatedly indicated an interest in radically altering energy consumption. More recently, the Chinese government announced a plan targeting its raw materials industry. According to S&P Global, the government said it would target sectors like nonferrous metals and petrochemicals with an eye toward reducing steel consumption.
Any move to renewables could be complicated, however, as China faces international pressure over its use of forced labor to produce materials like silicone. Based on the country's outsized share of key resources, economic sanctions could complicate the global move towards renewables as well.
Just last month, President Biden signed bipartisan legislation aimed at blocking imports from Xinjiang, where the regime has persecuted Uyghurs to the extent that the prior administration designated its activities as genocide. That issue has moved the U.S. into a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Olympic games, with the U.K., Canada and Australia doing the same.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/china-carbon-neutral-olympics-climate
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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6 January, 2022
Bjorn Lomborg says that global warming is real and damaging but the damage is trivial
Academic article:
"Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies"
Abstract
Climate change is real and its impacts are mostly negative, but common portrayals of devastation are unfounded. Scenarios set out under the UN Climate Panel (IPCC) show human welfare will likely increase to 450% of today's welfare over the 21st century. Climate damages will reduce this welfare increase to 434%.
Arguments for devastation typically claim that extreme weather (like droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes) is already worsening because of climate change. This is mostly misleading and inconsistent with the IPCC literature. For instance, the IPCC finds no trend for global hurricane frequency and has low confidence in attribution of changes to human activity, while the US has not seen an increase in landfalling hurricanes since 1900. Global death risk from extreme weather has declined 99% over 100 years and global costs have declined 26% over the last 28 years.
Arguments for devastation typically ignore adaptation, which will reduce vulnerability dramatically. While climate research suggests that fewer but stronger future hurricanes will increase damages, this effect will be countered by richer and more resilient societies. Global cost of hurricanes will likely decline from 0.04% of GDP today to 0.02% in 2100.
Climate-economic research shows that the total cost from untreated climate change is negative but moderate, likely equivalent to a 3.6% reduction in total GDP.
Climate policies also have costs that often vastly outweigh their climate benefits. The Paris Agreement, if fully implemented, will cost $819–$1,890 billion per year in 2030, yet will reduce emissions by just 1% of what is needed to limit average global temperature rise to 1.5°C. Each dollar spent on Paris will likely produce climate benefits worth 11¢.
Long-term impacts of climate policy can cost even more. The IPCC's two best future scenarios are the “sustainable” SSP1 and the “fossil-fuel driven” SSP5. Current climate-focused attitudes suggest we aim for the “sustainable” world, but the higher economic growth in SSP5 actually leads to much greater welfare for humanity. After adjusting for climate damages, SSP5 will on average leave grandchildren of today's poor $48,000 better off every year. It will reduce poverty by 26 million each year until 2050, inequality will be lower, and more than 80 million premature deaths will be avoided.
Using carbon taxes, an optimal realistic climate policy can aggressively reduce emissions and reduce the global temperature increase from 4.1°C in 2100 to 3.75°C. This will cost $18 trillion, but deliver climate benefits worth twice that. The popular 2°C target, in contrast, is unrealistic and would leave the world more than $250 trillion worse off.
The most effective climate policy is increasing investment in green R&D to make future decarbonization much cheaper. This can deliver $11 of climate benefits for each dollar spent.
More effective climate policies can help the world do better. The current climate discourse leads to wasteful climate policies, diverting attention and funds from more effective ways to improve the world.
Previous article in issueNext article in issue
This article will outline how to establish a rational climate policy in the context of many other, competing global issues.
It takes its starting point from the standard climate models as described by the UN Climate Panel, the IPCC, in its latest, fifth assessment (IPCC 2013a) and impact models (IPCC 2014a) along with its special 1.5°C report (IPCC 2018), showing that climate change is real and man-made, and CO? and other greenhouse gasses lead to higher global temperatures, which on average cause a net detriment to humanity.
MORE here
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Mercedes-Benz reveals latest battery tech at CES to overcome EV range anxiety and beat Tesla
Electric cars will travel up to 1000km on a single charge and battery technology will become cheaper to make longer range EVs affordable, thanks to new battery technologies and increased engine and drive train efficiency.
At the CES technology show, Mercedes-Benz is previewing its Vision EQXX concept car offering a range of 1000km plus and a power consumption rate less than 1 kilowatt hours per 100km, according to Daimler. It plans to build it within 18 months.
“The Vision EQXX demonstrates precisely what will make an electric vehicle a Mercedes-Benz in the future, with lightweight design, battery innovations and new materials,” said Mercedez maker Daimler.
The company said it won’t make the EQXX battery bigger or heavier. The new battery will comprise silicon anodes and lightweight materials and deliver 200 watt hours per kilogram. Additionally the EQXX will draw power from solar cells on the roof.
“On a single day with ideal conditions, this can produce up to 25 kilometres extra range for long-distance journeys,” the company said.
Reuters reports that Daimler plans to spend $US45bn by 2030 on EVs including the construction of eight battery factories.
The upcoming second generation Tesla Roadster also purports a 1000km range but you’ll pay more than $300,000 to buy one.
The Tesla Model S Long Range Plus can drive more than 660km, the BMW iX xDrive50 goes for up to 630km, but cheaper electric cars typically offer 300-400 km on one charge.
Developments in battery technology are not the only factor that will extend range and drive down cost, designs and motors are crucial too, but newer batteries are key to long range EVs being affordable.
Solid state batteries are one option and car makers have heavily invested in building factories to make them.
At CES, Korean firm SK Innovation has won an Innovation Award for its NCM9 battery, which is a lithium, nickel, manganese cobalt oxide battery. It says this configuration improves output and driving range, and reduces charging time.
The site metal.com reports that SKI’s decision to increase the nickel content to 90 per cent reduced the cobalt content to 5 per cent, and increased electric vehicle mileage to 700km. It also reduced charging time and, most importantly, greatly reduced cost. In 2020, Ski said its cells required only two quick 10-minute charges to cover more than 800km.
Ford F-150 pick-up trucks planned for 2023 are due to feature these NCM9 energy dense batteries. Rival LG Energy Solution plans to launch a variant – an NCMA (nickel, cobalt, manganese, aluminium) battery and has reached a deal with Tesla.
At CES, Los Angeles firm Nanotech Energy won an award for its nonflammable graphene battery which is another option for cars; Chinese firm GAC, which uses it in its Aion V sedan, claims an eight minute charge time.
Director of industry analysis and business intelligence at the Consumer Technology Association, Richard Koalski, said many of the 119 automotive companies at CES were showcasing EVs. This year’s show included more SUV electric vehicles.
He said BMW was displaying its iX M60 EV which can gain up to 150km range in 10 minutes of charging. Some of the vehicles on display had ranges up to 640km.
There were new EV propositions at CES, for example Vietnamese EV firm Vinfast was promoting a rental model where they replace a car’s batteries after they decline to 70 per cent efficiency.
Several manufacturers are showing off electric boat engines, sparking a new genre of EV boating.
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Tackle cost of living crisis by scrapping energy bill tax, Tories urge Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson has been told he must intervene to address Britain's cost of living crisis, with 20 Tory MPs and peers calling on him to scrap taxes on energy bills.
Five former ministers are among a group of backbenchers who are calling on Mr Johnson and Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, to step in amid fears that household energy bills could double to £2,000 by April.
In a letter to The Telegraph, the MPs argued that while a global surge in wholesale gas prices is contributing to the crisis, the UK is causing energy prices to increase "faster than any other competitive country" through "taxation and environmental levies".
With the cap on energy bills expected to rise by approximately £500 in April, the group warned that the hike will feed "directly into a cost of living crisis for many and push them into what is bluntly called 'fuel poverty'".
"High energy prices, whether for domestic heating or for domestic transport, are felt most painfully by the lowest paid," they wrote.
The intervention will increase the pressure on ministers, who are locked in talks with energy companies and the regulator Ofgem over potential measures to reduce consumer bills.
Urging Mr Johnson and Mr Sunak to use "levers we have to mitigate" the looming increase, the MPs and peers called for the removal of VAT on energy bills, set at five per cent, saying it would be a "small" reduction but a "step in the right direction".
One of the signatories also pointed that, during the Brexit referendum, both Mr Johnson and Michael Gove said leaving the European Union would allow the UK to reduce energy bills by scrapping VAT.
The letter also called for the removal of environmental levies, used to fund renewable energy subsidy schemes, saying they account for 23 per cent of consumer electricity bills. It is thought the two measures combined could shave up to £200 off the average household bill.
Similarly, the MPs noted that the climate change levy, applied to business energy use, is "making domestic energy intensive businesses uncompetitive and again increases the costs to consumers on virtually everything".
The MPs also warned Mr Johnson that his net zero strategy must not undermine the UK's domestic energy supply and urged him to adopt a "new approach to our energy security".
"We hardly need to point out the risks of reliance on other countries for our energy needs, especially those hostile to us," they wrote. "This leads to the inescapable conclusion of the need to expand North Sea exploration and for shale gas extraction to be supported."
Organised by Craig Mackinlay MP, the chairman of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group of Tory MPs, the letter's signatories include Esther McVey, the former work and pension secretary, Robert Halfon, a former schools minister, and Steve Baker, an ex-Brexit minister.
It comes as Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, continues to hold talks with major suppliers who are struggling to cope with record gas prices and the collapse of two dozen smaller companies.
The cost of millions of customers being transferred to new suppliers currently stands at £1.8 billion, and is expected to be recouped through a surcharge that could add an additional £100 to consumer bills.
Ofgem is drawing up plans, backed by the Government, to delay the surcharge and instead recover the costs from consumers over a longer period. According to reports, these costs would instead be taken on in the short term by banks or other financial institutions, who would be repaid by consumers over a longer period with interest.
However, energy companies are also calling on ministers to provide a £20 billion loan to help spread the wider costs of soaring gas prices over a decade – although that sum is said to be viewed to be too high by the Treasury.
Warning Mr Johnson that a bailout would effectively represent taxpayers being double charged, the MPs wrote: "There seems little point in levying against consumers and businesses to then pump money back out to those same consumers and the market, as is the understandable call by energy companies as this crisis grows."
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Big Australian mining company buys battery-powered trains as green shift for miners heats up
Billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest’s Fortescue Metals Group has purchased two battery-powered trains to carry iron ore to the port in the latest sign of the resources industry’s push for cleaner ways to fuel Australia’s hugely carbon-intensive mining operations.
Amid intensifying pressure from shareholders and wider society to do more to combat climate change, companies across the industry such as BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue have earmarked billions of dollars in the past two years to clean up their difficult-to-decarbonise remote mining operations by shifting away from fossil fuels such as diesel and gas.
The new eight-axle locomotives with an energy capacity of 14.5 megawatt-hours would be manufactured in Sete Lagoas, Brazil, the company said.
“The new locomotives will cut our emissions while also reducing our fuel costs and our overall operational expense through lower maintenance spend,” Fortescue chief executive Elizabeth Gaines said.
Across Australia and around the world, the mining industry accounts for a huge share of planet-heating greenhouse gases, both from mining operations themselves and the emissions generated by the end use of the mined resources after they are sold to be burned or processed in factories and power plants.
Mining companies have been under mounting pressure to improve their carbon credentials, with powerful investors seeking to reduce their exposure to the ethical and financial risks posed by rising greenhouse gas emissions and increasingly demanding businesses to do more to help achieve the Paris Agreement’s targets for averting catastrophic global warming.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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5 January, 2022
China leads in fusion research
China's 'artificial sun' nuclear fusion reactor in Hefei has set a new world record after running at 126 million°F (70 million°C) for 1,056 seconds – more than 17 minutes.
This record, set on December 30, marks the longest running duration for an experimental advanced superconducting tokamak (EAST) fusion energy reactor, Xinhua News Agency reports.
EAST already set a previous record in May by running for 101 seconds at a higher temperature – 216 million°F (120 million°C).
Nuclear fusion power works by colliding heavy hydrogen atoms to form helium, releasing vast amounts of energy, mimicking the process that occurs naturally in the centre of stars like our sun.
Fusion joins two light elements (with a low atomic mass number), forming a heavier element. For fusion to occur, hydrogen atoms are placed under high heat and pressure until they fuse together.
Meanwhile, fission splits a heavy element (with a high atomic mass number) into fragments.
In both cases, energy is freed because the mass of the remaining nucleus is smaller than the mass of the reacting nuclei. The reason why opposite processes release energy can be understood by examining the binding energy per nucleon curve. Both fusion and fission reactions shift the size of the reactant nuclei towards higher bounded nuclei.
The breakthrough was announced on Friday by Gong Xianzu, a researcher at the Institute of Plasma Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who is in charge of the experiment conducted in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province.
'We achieved a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees Celsius for 101 seconds in an experiment in the first half of 2021,' said Xianzu, as quoted by Xinhua.
'This time, steady-state plasma operation was sustained for 1,056 seconds at a temperature close to 70 million degrees Celsius, laying a solid scientific and experimental foundation toward the running of a fusion reactor.'
At its heart of EAST and other fusion reactors is the tokamak, a device initially conceptualised in the 1950s by Soviet physicists.
A tokamak uses a powerful magnetic field to confine the hydrogen isotopes into a spherical shape, similar to a cored apple, as they are heated by microwaves into a plasma to produce fusion.
Plasma – often referred to the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid and gas – is produced when the atoms in a gas become ionised.
Plasma is superheated matter so hot that the electrons are ripped away from the atoms, forming an ionised gas.
China says its reactor is designed to replicate the nuclear fusion process that occurs naturally in the Sun and stars to provide almost infinite clean energy.
Located in China's eastern Anhui province and completed late 2020, the reactor is often called an 'artificial sun' on account of the enormous heat and power it produces.
Fusion power plants are set to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the power-generation sector, which is one of the major sources of these emissions globally.
Fusion could eventually combat climate change by replacing energy sources that emit greenhouse gases, such as coal and gas.
Chinese scientists plan to use the nuclear fusion reactor in collaboration with scientists in France working on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).
The Provence-based ITER project is expected to begin delivering power in 2035, and will become the world's biggest reactor once completed.
In the UK, Boris Johnson's government is also planning to build a nuclear fusion power station as part of its 'green industrial revolution'.
Last month, the government shortlisted five sites as the potential home for the nuclear fusion reactor – Ardeer in North Ayrshire, Goole in Yorkshire, Moorside in Cumbria, Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire and Severn Edge in Gloucestershire.
Meanwhile, the SPARC nuclear fusion reactor, a US project involving MIT, is currently in development in Devens, Massachusetts.
South Korea also has its own 'artificial sun', the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR), which has run at 180million°F (100million°C) for 20 seconds.
Fusion is considered the Holy Grail of energy and is what powers our Sun, which burns at roughly 27 million°F (15 million°C).
But achieving fusion is both extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive, with the total cost of ITER estimated at $22.5 billion (£15.9 billion).
This is because causing hydrogen isotope atoms to collide and fuse together to produce helium – the same way as the Sun creates energy – produces an enormous amount of waste heat.
However, in May last year, scientists in Oxfordshire said they'd found a way of dealing with these exhaust gases, cooling them from an extraordinary 150 million°C to just a few hundred degrees, temperatures similar to that of a car engine.
They developed an exhaust system – called the Super-X Divertor – that traps the helium, using a magnetic field, and then diverts it on a longer path until it is cool enough not to damage the reactor's walls.
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Tesla rolled out nearly a million vehicles in 2021
The world's richest man started the new year richer, with Tesla founder Elon Mask adding $32.6 billion to his net worth bringing his fortune to $304.2 billion.
Musk's windfall once again took his worth over the $300 billion mark that he briefly passed in November, becoming the first person to ever do so.
According to Forbes, the controversial social-media savvy billionaire - who is also the founder behind the commercial space enterprise SpaceX - remained at the top of the world's rich list going into the new year.
In second place and $103.6 billion behind Musk is Bernard Arnault, the CEO of French fashion empire LVMH. Amazon founder and former-CEO Jeff Bezos sits in third place, Forbes said.
Tesla's soaring stock price has again been credited for the South African's growing wealth.
On Sunday, the electric car producer announced it had delivered more than 936,000 cars in 2021, surpassing projections by analysts, but also announced that the company had recalled 475,000 of its cars built between 2014 and 2021.
Forbes said Tesla shares increased by more than 13 percent by market close, with the company's market capitalisation again topping the $1 trillion mark, after dropping below that level last month.
As CEO of Tesla, Musk - who was named Time Magazine's 2021 Person of the Year - owns about 15.6 percent of the company's stock.
He has continued to sell shares, finishing the year having unloaded 3 million shares on the open market in order to cover the tax bills on around 5.7 million stock options that he exercised at the same time.
Tesla shares have fallen from their record highs, reached two days prior to Musk's infamous Twitter poll, but are still on pace to end the year up 54 percent from January 1.
The company has this week come under fire after it announced that it has opened a showroom in Xinjiang.
The move has attracted criticism from U.S. rights and trade groups, making it the latest foreign firm caught up in tensions related to the far-western Chinese region.
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A European revelation on climate
Could this winter’s energy crisis be shocking Europe into climate realism? Believe it or not, the European Union is set to include nuclear and natural gas on the list of industries eligible for “green” investments. Someone please pass the smelling salts to the Sierra Club.
At issue is the so-called taxonomy for classifying environmentally sustainable investments. This new list is intended to create a uniform definition of activities that qualify as green for corporate disclosures, climate-oriented investing, and carbon-related government spending. The Brussels green list represents the largest regulatory effort to date to pin down what “sustainable” means in relation to finance.
Wonder of wonders, nuclear and natural gas make the cut. The draft taxonomy released late on New Year’s Eve deems investment in nuclear power sustainable as long as the investment is made before 2045 and a plan is in place to dispose of the waste. The draft also includes natural-gas power plants built by 2030, subject to emissions limits and as long as they replace heavier-emitting plants.
The usual suspects are furious for the usual reasons. Berlin lobbied hard against including nuclear energy on the permitted list. That’s the same Germany where households and businesses pay some of Europe’s highest power prices while the government shuts down the country’s remaining nuclear plants, pursues expensive renewable boondoggles, and burns more coal. Some greens bristle at including any fossil fuel on the list.
The critics are partly right that politics is at play. France, which relies heavily on nuclear energy and where the nuclear industry is an important employer, lobbied Brussels to include that power source. Other European countries lobbied Brussels so they could continue investing in natural-gas power.
This is that rarest of cases in climate policy where the politics aligns with energy reality. If environmentalists mean what they say about the urgency of cutting CO2 emissions, nuclear is the only widely available power source that’s zero-emitting and more reliable than wind or solar. In a world far from ready to wean itself off fossil fuels, natural gas stands out as much lower emitting than others. The growth in natural gas to account for about one-third of United States electricity generation in 2019 helps explain the roughly 14% decline in gross CO2 emissions since the mid-2000s.
In a smarter world, the market would have been allowed to figure this out. The new EU taxonomy still represents a destructive form of winner-picking industrial policy and has flaws. A big one is the arbitrary time limit on investments in nuclear and gas plants.
But at least Europe is correcting some of the errors of its last generation of green industrial policy. Ending the regulatory bias against natural gas in particular will balance the scales after subsidies and mandates for renewables made natural gas uneconomical and steered investment toward cheaper but dirtier coal.
All of this has implications for the U.S., where the Biden Administration is still fantasising that solar and wind power can soon replace all fossil fuels. If Europe can admit the truth, how about the White House?
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Chile prepares to shoot itself in the foot
This could make electric cars more expensive
Chile has lots of lithium, which is essential to the world’s transition to green energy. But anger over powerful mining interests, a water crisis and inequality has driven Chile to rethink how it defines itself.
Rarely does a country get a chance to lay out its ideals as a nation and write a new constitution for itself. Almost never does the climate and ecological crisis play a central role.
That is, until now, in Chile, where a national reinvention is underway. After months of protests over social and environmental grievances, 155 Chileans have been elected to write a new constitution amid what they have declared a “climate and ecological emergency.”
Their work will not only shape how this country of 19 million is governed. It will also determine the future of a soft, lustrous metal, lithium, lurking in the salt waters beneath this vast ethereal desert beside the Andes Mountains.
Lithium is an essential component of batteries. And as the global economy seeks alternatives to fossil fuels to slow down climate change, lithium demand — and prices — are soaring.
Mining companies in Chile, the world’s second-largest lithium producer after Australia, are keen to increase production, as are politicians who see mining as crucial to national prosperity. They face mounting opposition, though, from Chileans who argue that the country’s very economic model, based on extraction of natural resources, has exacted too high an environmental cost and failed to spread the benefits to all citizens, including its Indigenous people.
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And so, it falls to the Constitutional Convention to decide what kind of country Chile wants to be. Convention members will decide many things, including: How should mining be regulated, and what voice should local communities have over mining? Should Chile retain a presidential system? Should nature have rights? How about future generations?
Around the world, nations face similar dilemmas — in the forests of central Africa, in Native American territories in the United States — as they try to tackle the climate crisis without repeating past mistakes. For Chile, the issue now stands to shape the national charter. “We have to assume that human activity causes damage, so how much damage do we want to cause?” said Cristina Dorador Ortiz, a microbiologist who studies the salt flats and is in the Constitutional Convention. “What is enough damage to live well?”
Then there’s water. Amid a crippling drought supercharged by climate change, the Convention will decide who owns Chile’s water. It will also weigh something more basic: What exactly is water?
Chile’s current constitution was written in 1980, by people handpicked by its then military ruler, Augusto Pinochet. It opened the country to mining investments and allowed water rights to be bought and sold.
Chile prospered by exploiting its natural riches: copper and coal, salmon and avocados. But even as it became one of Latin America’s richest nations, frustrations mounted over inequality. Mineral-rich areas became known as “sacrifice zones” of environmental degradation. Rivers began drying up.
Anger boiled over into huge protests starting in 2019. A national referendum followed, electing a diverse panel to rewrite the constitution.
On Dec. 19 came another turning point. Voters elected Gabriel Boric, a 35-year-old former student activist, as president. He had campaigned to expand the social safety net, increase mining royalties and taxes, and create a national lithium company.
The morning after his victory, the stock price of the country’s biggest lithium producer, Sociedad Química y Minera de Chile, or SQM, fell 15 percent.
One fifth of the world’s lithium is produced by SQM, most of it in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile in the shadow of ancient volcanoes, including the oldest and still-active one, Lascar. The Lickanantay, the area’s Indigenous people, call Lascar the father of all volcanoes.
From above, the mine looks as though someone has spread a glistening blue and green quilt in the middle of this pale desert.
The riches lie in the brine underground. Day and night, SQM pumps out the brine, along with freshwater from five wells. Pipes carry brine to a series of ponds.
Then, the sun goes to work.
The Atacama has the highest solar radiation levels on Earth. Water evaporates astonishingly fast, leaving mineral deposits behind. Magnesium comes out of the ponds. Also potassium. Lithium remains in a viscous yellow green pool, which SQM converts into powdery white lithium carbonate for battery makers abroad.
SQM was a state-owned maker of fertilizer chemicals until Mr. Pinochet turned it over to his then son-in-law, Julio Ponce Lerou, in 1983. More recently, it has been fined by Chile’s stock market regulator and by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Mr. Ponce, no longer chairman, retains 30 percent ownership.
Today, SQM is riding a lithium bull market. Carlos Díaz, its vice president for lithium, said the company is seeking to increase capacity from 140,000 tons of lithium carbonate to 180,000 tons by 2022. Mr. Díaz said the firm wants to “produce lithium as green as possible,” including by reducing saltwater extraction by half by 2030 and by becoming “carbon neutral” by 2040.
There is good reason. Nearby, a copper mine, called Escondida, was fined $93 million for extracting water and causing what a Chilean court called “irreparable damage.”
The mining industry is bracing for change. A law to increase royalties is working through the legislature. And the Constitutional Convention is weighing provisions that could require more local decision-making.
Joaquin Villarino, president of the Mining Council, the industry lobby, said both could diminish Chile’s appeal to investors. He voiced particular worry that some of the Convention members appeared to be against mining altogether, though he didn’t name any. “I hope this is not what we will have in our Constitution,” he said, “because Chile is a mining country.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/28/climate/chile-constitution-climate-change.html
*************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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4 January, 2022
6m UK homes may be unable to pay energy bills after price hike, charity warns
The number of UK households living in fuel poverty could climb to the highest level on record by this spring unless the government moves to soften the blow of a looming record high energy bill hike, according to a fuel poverty charity.
Around 4 million homes in the UK were already classed as fuel poor before a surge in global energy market prices triggered one of the steepest ever energy bill hikes in October, but campaigners are braced for a record increase in the numbers unable to pay their energy bills following another hike this spring.
The charity National Energy Action warned that the double blow to household bills could cause at least 2 million more homes to slip into fuel poverty compared with the start of 2021, taking the total to 6 million households. This would be the highest level of fuel poverty across the UK since records began in 1996.
The looming energy price hike has not yet been finalised by the regulator but Adam Scorer, chief executive of National Energy Action, told the Observer that the number of households in fuel poverty would “skyrocket” in April.
This is expected to deepen the UK’s national energy crisis and compound the “year of the squeeze”, predicted by the Resolution Foundation last week, which threatens to trigger a “cost of living catastrophe” for hard-pressed families.
Households are already paying record prices to put petrol in their cars, and can expect the cost of consumer goods to rocket as fuel prices and supply-chain disruptions take their toll on major companies.
“Those on lowest incomes and in less-efficient homes will not just face financial hardship but intolerable living conditions, ill health and, for too many, a shortened life,” Scorer said. “This is not just conjecture. It will happen and we’ve had enough time to see it coming and act.”
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/01/6m-homes-uk-pay-energy-bills-price-hike-fuel-poverty
*********************************************The Tories risk blowing themselves up with gas
Blackouts bring down governments. The Conservative administration of Ted Heath paid such a price at the ballot box in 1974 when it had failed to keep the lights on, having mishandled (to put it mildly) the coal industry. Now gas, rather than coal, is the dominant fuel in heating our homes. While a shortage of the stuff is not so critical as to lead to people freezing through lack of available energy, the effect on domestic bills could have a similar effect, at least among the poorest.
The soaring open-market price for gas combined with a consumer price cap imposed by Theresa May’s administration (as pledged in her 2017 election manifesto) has caused the collapse of numerous suppliers. If the entire industry is not to be rendered bankrupt, the cap will have to be lifted to a level that would at least double the average household’s gas bill.
That is a recipe for mass discontent. But, extraordinarily, it represents success in terms of the government’s energy strategy. While natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels, it is still a hydrocarbon and therefore set for gradual elimination under the government’s “world-leading” commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
To that end, it has mandated the ending of gas boiler sales by 2025. The heat pumps that are to replace them are currently at least five times more expensive to buy, so the government faced the dilemma of whether to clobber the consumer with the tens of billions of pounds this would cost in aggregate, or to subsidise the cost of replacement via increased taxes — which would scarcely be more popular.
But, now, wonderful news! If gas becomes much more expensive, not just temporarily but in the long term, the whole thing would look almost rational. People would be incentivised to move away from fossil fuel heating. They would still be hard hit financially, but the government could at least avoid the impression that it was imposing a form of energy poverty.
Yet it would still be held responsible, as governments always are, even when simply the victims of a global market trend — and as the Heath government was when Opec, under Saudi leadership, used tight conditions in the oil market to drive up prices to previously unimaginable levels. In the present case, however, the British government has actually willed an increase in the cost of hydrocarbons and therefore fully deserves to pay whatever is the political price.
This can be seen with particular clarity in the arguments it made when refusing to consider the benefits of a strategic gas reserve, in effect abandoned when the North Sea storage facility known as the Rough gas field was closed down in 2017. When the gas price began to soar in late September 2021 and it emerged that the UK had reserves in storage equivalent only to the demand of four to five winter days (about a tenth of the supply held in reserve by that other North Sea gas producer the Netherlands), a government spokesman told the i newspaper: “We would be moving in the opposite direction to the rest of the world if instead of decarbonising we started storing more gas.”
Except it so happens that the world’s two most populous nations — China and India — are not moving in the direction claimed, as was demonstrated by their refusal at the Glasgow Cop26 conference to set any date for their own abandonment of fossil fuels, notably coal, which dominates their domestic and industrial energy usage. Last week China announced that it had completed the construction of the first 1,000 megawatt unit of its biggest coal-fired power station to date.
The claim by the British government that the financial cost of going to net zero — which the Treasury has estimated at well over a trillion pounds for the UK — is less than the “costs of climate change” makes no sense at all if the biggest and fastest-growing economies don’t follow suit. Because, since we represent barely 1 per cent of global emissions, we would have all the cost to our own consumers and industries, without any of the notional benefits in terms of a more stable global climate.
This is in stark contrast to the US, which, having tapped previously locked reserves through the production technique known as fracking, now enjoys gas prices about a third of those in Europe. Traditionally the American and European gas markets were aligned, but that has completely changed, with obvious consequences, the most recent being the announcement by the US firm Alcoa last week that it was ceasing its aluminium production business in Spain because of high energy costs.
Indeed the main reason the European gas price fell back to slightly less eye-watering levels just before Christmas — having increased by 350 per cent over the past year — was that two giant tankers carrying liquefied natural gas from the US to China were suddenly rerouted to the Netherlands. But that is hardly a sustainable solution. Things would be different, at least in the UK, if the Conservatives, who originally hailed the discovery of potentially vast onshore gas reserves in geological strata identical to those that have been developed in the US, had not later decided on an effective moratorium on fracking here.
Instead, in the drive to net zero, they have continued to subsidise renewable energy — including billions of pounds in handouts for the Drax power station in North Yorkshire, which burns wood chips imported from forests in Louisiana, among other far-flung places — with levies adding up to a quarter of our total energy bills, according to the chief executive of Eon UK, Michael Lewis. Yet at one point last November, when we had the scarcely unprecedented combination of a cold snap and still weather, our vaunted wind industry was able to supply little more than 3 per cent of UK electricity demand. It was left to gas to supply the majority of our needs. What happens when the gas power stations are all closed?
In response to the current gas price squeeze, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, declared that the government must “immediately remove VAT on household heating bills over the winter”. Hilarious, given that Labour has criticised the government for not moving faster to incentivise people away from hydrocarbon-based energy — and that such a tax cut would most benefit most those with the biggest houses.
In summary, I can’t improve on the description by Andy Mayer of the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank, in his pamphlet The Gordian Knot of UK Energy Policy: “Politicians fight a never-ending intervention race where the latest proposal is designed to correct the bad headlines attached to the last one, while creating new and unintended consequences, and repeat.”
If your energy strategy has been to prioritise emission reductions over security of supply and affordability, this is where you end up. It’s not a good place.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-tories-risk-blowing-themselves-up-with-gas-xhp0c2p9g
***************************************Countryside campaigners have warned that swathes of rural southern England face being ruined by “massive industrialisation” if plans for one of the country’s largest solar farms are given the go-ahead
The approval of plans for a large solar power plant in Oxfordshire has sparked fears of a “tidal wave of solar farms” despoiling rural areas.
There are now proposals for another four huge solar farms covering between 160 to 340 acres each, close to the Chiltern Area Of Outstanding Beauty and the north part the Oxford Green Belt.
One planned for Nuneham Courtenay, near Oxford, would be one of the biggest in England at more than 340 acres, with councillors set to discuss in the coming months whether to give it the go-ahead in the face of mounting opposition from environmental groups.
Enso Green Holdings Limited, a joint venture between Enso Energy and the Green Investment Group, has submitted the plans, which could generate enough power for the equivalent of 13,000 homes each year.
The firm says new grassland habitats would be planted beneath the solar panels, with sheep allowed to graze, and the existing hedgerows and trees on the site would be retained.
Enso Energy said: “We’re determined to use the latest solar technology to make a positive impact on the country and communities we work with.”
The proposed solar farms are part of Britain’s push to reduce its carbon footprint and switch to renewable energy.
But the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) says the scale and “alien appearance” of the Nuneham Courtenay project and other solar farms are an obtrusive impact on the landscape, representing “an unwelcome and inappropriate industrialisation of the countryside”.
The Oxford Preservation Trust has also objected to the scheme, saying it would be “highly visible” in the landscape surrounding the city.
Currently the largest solar farm in the UK is Shotwick Solar Park, near Deeside, in Cheshire, which is spread over 250 acres.
This would be outstripped by the Nuneham Courtenay proposals, along with separate plans for a 270 acre solar farm on farmland near Thame. There are also plans for a 163 acre one near the village of Stoke Talmage, near Watlington.
The single largest British solar farm is set to be built on the north Kent coast after planning permission was given to the 900 acre scheme last year, despite opposition from an alliance of local residents and some environmental groups.
Richard Harding, of Oxfordshire CPRE, warned: “This area seems to be facing a tidal wave of solar farms - on green field sites and on working agricultural land. They represent an industrialisation of the rural landscape.”
“Up until now they have been comparatively small but in the last year a number of proposals have come forward which are considerably larger - covering between 160 to more than 300 acres, essentially whole farms.”
The CPRE argues that solar farms should be built on brownfield sites and not in open countryside.
Last month, South Oxfordshire District Council's planning committee gave the go-ahead for the building of a 193 acre solar farm at Harlseford Farm, near Tetsworth, to generate electricity for thousands of homes over the next 40 years.
A substation and 30 inverters, which will be roughly the size of shipping containers, will also be built on the site, which would produce about 49.99 megawatts of electricity.
Sheila Stoakes, whose family farm the land, said money from the solar farm would ensure it could be kept for future generations.
She said her family was happy that it could make a "meaningful contribution to combatting climate change" by allowing their land to generate electricity for renewable energy company Low Carbon.
The Environment Agency, Highways England and South Oxfordshire District Council's climate action lead officer said they had no objections to the Harlseford solar farm.
The authority's conservation officer said it would result in "less than substantial harm" to the countryside.
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Vaccination skeptics now looking at climate too
Groups spreading misinformation about Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccines are starting to use the same language to spread conspiracy theories about climate change, experts have warned.
As the impact of the pandemic and need for restrictions begins to wane, Covid-19 conspiracy theorists are starting to use terms such as “green lockdowns”, according to analysts at the the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.
The term refers to the belief that, in future, people will be regularly forced to stay at home and restrict their travel and social contacts to reduce carbon emissions and tackle climate change.
Ciaran O’Connor, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), told the PA news agency that coronavirus misinformation on topics such as vaccines and lockdowns could evolve to focus on climate policy.
Mr O’Connor said conspiracy groups “will frame” climate policy as a “loss of civil liberties and loss of freedoms”.
“If you think about the Covid protest movements – be it anti-mask, anti-lockdown, or anti-vaccines – the branding and the language that’s been used by these kinds of conspiracy units has always been around,” he said.
“This is a civil liberties argument.
“The climate dialogue, rhetoric and discussion is gonna be rolled into that kind of civil liberties discussion, I think (that) is where you’re going to see a lot of these groups go.”
Dr Jonathan Bright, an associate professor at the Oxford Internet Institute, agreed, adding that there “could be more activity” from climate conspiracy groups in 2022.
“I think people are going to be thinking about climate change misinformation quite a lot,” Mr Bright told PA.
The experts were also concerned that conspiracy groups and communities have traded mainstream platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter for Telegram – a platform with comparatively relaxed content guidelines.
“Telegram has… taken a very robust ‘we’re not interested approach’ to any media pressure to get it to moderate its content,” Dr Bright said.
Mr O’Connor added: “Telegram has become the platform of choice for far-right, extreme right wing groups, for conspiracy communities, (and) for extremist communities in general. Facebook and YouTube… they do have community guidelines, they do enforce them.
“Telegram takes largely a hands off approach to this. They have bare bones terms of service. That means that essentially they only take down threats of violence and child pornography and things like this.
“What that means is that Telegram is a safe space for conspiracy communities.”
https://au.sports.yahoo.com/sports/experts-warn-covid-conspiracy-groups-080053214.html
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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3 January, 2022
Myopic politicians are wilfully blind to the truth about green energy
How bizarre that politicians will lecture us on poverty, and will then propose to drive up household bills to reach carbon reduction targets
In June 2011, 18 months before going off to serve Her Majesty in another capacity, former energy and climate change secretary Chris Huhne made a remarkable speech in which he asserted that the Government’s green policies, far from costing households, would actually save us money. “Green growth,” he said, can protect the economy by “reducing our exposure to price shocks”. Moreover, the cost of low carbon policies up to 2020 would amount to “just one per cent on the average household energy bill” – and even that assumed that we could always buy oil at “last year’s cheap rate of $80 a barrel”. If, as he expected, oil prices stayed high and gas prices rose to meet them “then our consumers will be winning hands down from our energy policy”.
To be fair to Huhne, he was not the only minister to hold this conceit. It has been a received wisdom among many in government, opposition and in the great green blob that switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy would make us better off. How laughable that claim seems now.
We have had the green energy revolution which Huhne advocated. Last year the Government claimed that for the first time more of our electricity was generated by renewables than by fossil fuels (although only if you count as “renewable” the filthy practice of burning wood chips to generate electricity – an industry which Huhne himself went off to promote post-prison). Coal-fired power stations which in 2011 were still generating 31 percent of our power are now down to 2.1 percent, and will be gone for good by 2024.
But where is the green dividend? Adjusted for inflation, average household electricity bills rose by 19 percent between 2011 and 2020 – from £451 to £571 per year at 2010 prices. But that is just for starters. Far from being protected against price shocks in global energy markets, consumers are looking at their bills possibly doubling in April when the Government’s price cap is revised upwards.
As for the claim that green polices would only add one percent to our energy bills, Ofgem calculates that 25 percent of our electricity bills are now made up of social and environmental levies – ie subsidies for green energy as well as insulation schemes for low income households. We pay a further 2.5 percent on our gas bills.
It is true that the current energy crisis is a global phenomenon precipitated by rising demand from a rebounding global economy. But in Britain it has been made much worse by energy policies which for a decade and a half have doggedly pursued the objective of cutting carbon emissions without any regard to the costs. For years, Conservatives, Labour and the Lib Dems have all attempted to blame rising energy prices on greedy, profiteering energy companies. It never was true – deregulated gas and electricity markets have always run on tight margins – but with dozens of energy suppliers having gone bust in recent months it is an argument that has become impossible to sustain. Neither can you blame fossil fuel markets for rising bills – a barrel of crude oil costs less now than it did when Huhne made his speech, even before adjusting for consumer inflation.
We are paying more than we need be for our energy because the Government has loaded fossil fuels with carbon levies, switched electricity generation to much more expensive renewables, and deprived Britain of what could have been by now a very productive native shale gas industry. The government folded in the face of environmentalists who were determined to squash the nascent industry by ramping up fears of ‘earthquakes’ – or rather minor tremors, most of which cannot even be sensed by humans on the Earth’s surface.
Traditional oil and gas extraction, too, is being deterred by subjecting listed companies to punitive decarbonisation targets. Shell, which should have been developing the Cambo field off the Shetlands, has been driven to pursue other avenues, like providing my broadband. The result is that we are becoming ever more dependent on imported gas – shipping in refrigerated shale gas from Qatar that we could have been producing ourselves. The trouble is that in recent months energy-hungry China has been outbidding us for it, driving up prices.
Ministers love to point out that the unit cost of generating electricity from wind and solar has fallen over the past decade, but that ignores the intermittency problem. Consumers are having to pay through the nose to fire up dormant gas and coal plants to provide power at times when, as in recent weeks, the sun hasn’t been shining and the wind hasn’t been blowing. At one point in November, energy suppliers were forced to stump up £2000 per MWh for electricity – around 40 times the usual wholesale price.
Conversely, when the wind does blow we are forced to shell out to compensate wind farm-owners ordered to turn their turbines off – last year we collectively paid £282 million in so-called ‘constraint payments’ when the national grid was unable to absorb all the electricity they were producing.
We are in this position because we have built more and more wind and solar farms without properly addressing the issue of energy storage. The Government set up so-called “capacity auctions” in 2014 to try to create a market for energy storage by offering subsidies to anyone who can supply large amounts of energy at short notice. But the lucky winners have tended to be owners of gas and coal plants, with just a handful of battery installations.
Why? Because storing energy is horribly expensive. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the US puts the “levelised’ cost of storing energy in large lithium battery installations (that is taking into account capital investment and running costs over the lifetime of an installation) at $336 (£260) per MWh. That is five times as much as the usual wholesale price of electricity – and we have to pay it on top on the cost of generating electricity in the first place. There are times in winter when our wind turbines and solar panels produce next to no power for days on end, yet we only have enough storage capacity to meet 38 minutes’ worth of national electricity demand.
But if consumers are heading for an energy shock in April when price caps are raised it is nothing compared with what is coming later. In 2026 installations of new oil boilers will be banned, followed in 2035 by new gas boilers. From then on, the only practical way to heat most homes will be in the form of electric heat pumps, which cost £10,000 a time, are more expensive to run than gas and which won’t succeed in keeping many older, less-well insulated homes warm.
Motorists, too, will be prohibited from buying new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 – forced to buy electric vehicles which currently cost around half as much again. Forget the spin that they will be on a parity with petrol and diesel cars by 2024 – that’s just another piece of Huhne-style optimism. Surging prices of rare metals needed for their batteries have already led to one Chinese manufacturer jacking up the price of electric vehicles by 20 percent this month.
With living costs creeping up on all fronts, there could not be a worse time to jack up taxes. In April, just as higher energy bills are landing on our doormats, National Insurance rates will rise by 1.5 percent. Labour did at least oppose that, but otherwise where is the opposition? All that Keir Starmer, Ed Davey and Nicola Sturgeon are offering are even more expensive energy policies. Ever desperate to make herself look more “progressive” than Westminster, Sturgeon has committed to cutting emissions by 75 percent on 1990 levels by 2030 – a target which could only be met by a massive replacement of existing domestic heating systems.
How bizarre that politicians who on one day will lecturing us on poverty, and energy poverty in particular, and on the next day will be proposing to drive up household bills to reach carbon reduction targets. The only way they can try to square this impossible circle is to pretend, like Chris Huhne did, that reaching zero carbon will actually save us money. Or by trying to dismiss the issue of cost by claiming that climate change is so serious it will kill us all unless we eliminate all carbon emissions by 2050 sharp.
Sorry, but no. As most people will correctly work out for themselves when they receive their inflated energy bills this spring, the biggest danger they face is not being fried or drowned in a slightly warmer world – it is succumbing to hypothermia because they cannot afford to heat their homes.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/01/myopic-politicians-wilfully-blind-truth-green-energy/
*******************************************‘Energy costs could be the breaking point’: UK’s small businesses being pushed to brink
Thousands of small business owners across the UK will bear the brunt of the national energy crisis that risks driving the UK to a cost of living catastrophe within the next year.
“The future is far from certain,” says Julian Pariera, the owner of Beauchamp Laundry Services in Birmingham. “I’m extremely concerned at how things are panning out.”
Pariera is one of thousands of small business owners across the UK who will bear the brunt of the national energy crisis that risks driving the UK to a cost of living catastrophe within the next year. Before next winter, he will need to renegotiate an energy deal to run the washers and clothes dryers that his customers rely on after a record surge in energy market prices.
“We fix our energy tariffs for up to five years, and every time we renew a deal it seems to double. This time I won’t be surprised if our energy costs quadruple. It’s madness,” he says. “These costs can’t be reflected in our charges because if we put up our prices by this much our customers wouldn’t be able to afford it. So the question I have to ask myself is how we can manage while still protecting our customers?”
“The government talks about getting business back on track after Covid – and I’m not saying they’re doing a bad job – but with these cost pressures it’s just ridiculous. We’ll carry on somehow because this business has been in place for the last 30 years – we’re established – but if we were just starting out we wouldn’t manage,” Pariera says.
For now, it is still more affordable for many of Beauchamp Laundry’s customers to bring in damp clothes and linen to be tumble dried during the winter than to run their own dryers at home, Pariera says. But at some point in the next year he may need to adjust his dryers to offer fewer minutes for each pound spent.
These concerns are shared by small business owners across the country, which employ almost 13 million staff and make £1.6tn in turnover every year. The Federation of Small Businesses has warned that energy costs are the top concern of its members and could prove to be “an existential threat”, particularly for the fragile end of the small business sectors that were hardest hit by Covid-19 restrictions.
Ibrahim Dogus, the owner of three restaurants near the London Eye, says a “vicious circle” of rising costs and falling revenue endemic across the hospitality industry means even longstanding eateries in prime locations are struggling to secure affordable energy deals. Many suppliers refuse to offer contracts to restaurants without a hefty security deposit, or charge eye-watering rates to guard against the risk they might go under, he says.
“Before the recent price hike I’d pay between £2,500 and £3,000 a month for energy at one restaurant. But my latest bill for November was £5,600. At the same time, turnover has fallen to between 10% and 15% of what it used to be. Before the pandemic we might serve 600 people; these days it’s closer to 60. But our costs are still climbing. We’re quite worried,” he says.
Dogus has already cut his staff from 60 to 25, made use of the government’s support schemes, and negotiated payment plans to manage the debt he owes to his landlords and pay business rates. But energy companies are the exception, he says, and this could prove the difference between whether his chain survives or not.
“Energy companies are not interested in helping at all. If you don’t pay in full for a couple of months someone comes to turn off your lights. Never mind that you can’t pay them if you can’t serve customers. It would be over,” he says.
“It’s a very difficult moment for small businesses. There’s been Brexit, there’s been Covid. But on top of everything else, energy costs could be the breaking point,” he says.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/dec/31/energy-costs-uk-small-businesses-restaurants
***********************************************The climate backdowns begin
It’s New Year’s resolution season, and don’t be surprised if politicians world-wide settle into the same informal pledge: Talk as little as possible about climate change in 2022. They’ve gotten a head start on that resolution, working hard at it even before Friday night’s socially distanced parties begin.
The biggest, most entertaining and also most telling climb-downs are happening in the U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson in October unveiled an ambitious policy program to get Britain to net-zero carbon-dioxide emissions by 2050. It was Mr. Johnson’s public-relations coup ahead of the COP26 global climate conference he hosted in Glasgow. It also was unusual in its honesty about what such environmental ambitions will cost individual households and businesses—a point politicians usually avoid for all the obvious reasons.
Sure enough, the backtracks and U-turns began before that document was written. The most controversial component of Mr. Johnson’s net-zero boondoggle concerns an attempt to steer households away from the gas boilers on which 86% of them rely for hot water and central heating.
Mr. Johnson said in October he hopes that by 2035 the government will be able to phase out installation of new natural-gas heating units. That represents a step back from earlier plans to require carbon-efficient heat pumps in new homes as early as 2025, and the extended deadline still faces stiff opposition stemming from the high cost of heat pumps.
And “boiler-gate” is only the beginning of the reversals great and small. Among the great, count the delay to next year (at least) of a formal public-comment process for a beefed-up emissions-trading system. One reason for the holdup, the Telegraph reports, is that Mr. Johnson’s colleagues can’t agree on which corners of the economy should become newly subject to the rules—although apparently they now agree that car and home fuels should be excluded.
Among the smaller reversals, the Transport Department in November backtracked from a plan to require small businesses with parking lots on their premises to install electric-vehicle charging points. The proposed rules governing other structures such as new housing, residential conversions, and new mixed-use developments are so porous as to resemble a well-aerated Swiss cheese, with cost limitation emerging as the primary concern. This difficulty installing charging stations augurs the collapse, sooner or later, of Mr. Johnson’s announced plan to ban new internal-combustion cars by 2030.
Nor is this only a British phenomenon. Set aside the brouhaha surrounding green provisions in Democrats’ Build Back Better spending extravaganza in America. Some of the most surprising climate realism is now emerging in Europe.
French President Emmanuel Macron faces a campaign for re-election in 2022, and he learned the hard way in 2018 how higher fuel prices can trigger debilitating popular protests. His solution is to double down on traditional French industrial policy, especially concerning support for nuclear power. At Mr. Macron’s behest, the European Commission in Brussels may be on the verge of including both nuclear and natural gas on a list of environmentally friendly energy sources eligible for “green investment” from governments and private investors. Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg is dismayed, but she also doesn’t need to persuade anyone to vote for her.
Even in Germany politicians are starting to change course. Households and businesses there pay some of the highest electricity prices in Europe in service of former Chancellor Angela Merkel’s aggressive shift toward renewable power. German voters believe in these goals more than most other electorates, and they elected the environmentalist Green Party into the new governing coalition in September.
But even in Germany there appears to be a limit. The deal cementing the coalition between the Greens, the larger Social Democrats and the smaller Free Democrats hedges its climate commitments. A coal phase-out will happen ideally by 2030—with the newly inserted word “ideally” blunting Green ambitions by marking the whole project as tentative. Carbon neutrality will wait for 2045, if it ever comes, and more-aggressive limits on aviation and automotive emissions are missing.
The net-zero gimmick will be with us for a long while yet, alas. The green true believers (or are they bitter clingers?) are busy devising rear-guard actions by which to insulate environmentalism from real-world political pressures, not least by enlisting gullible or cynical titans of finance to do via pension-fund investment allocations what can’t be done honestly via legislation. The political class remains rhetorically wedded to its earlier foolhardy promises, and the media is too enamored of reality-detached activists such as Ms. Thunberg.
All the smarter then for politicians to resolve to discuss the matter as little as possible in the year ahead. As starving the atmosphere of carbon dioxide becomes a political liability, starving the issue of political oxygen will become the electoral tactic of choice.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/australian-energy-council-warns-on-electricity-market-intervention/news-story/af00cdd9300e6a2df7621782b7e9bdd0 ***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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2 January, 2022
Net Zero: A futile gesture
Charles Moore
As this New Year dawns, I am struck by a parallel from 30 years ago. At the beginning of 1992, the pound was in the Exchange Rate Mechanism (the ERM) of the European Monetary System.
According to the then prime minister, John Major, membership was essential to stabilising sterling and controlling inflation. In fact, however, the ERM’s insistence that the pound must be worth at least 2.7780 Deutschmarks kept interest rates fearsomely high, hitting businesses and mortgages and inducing recession.
Eventually, the markets disbelieved the government’s increasingly shrill promises to do “whatever it takes” to keep the pound in. On September 16 1992 (“Black Wednesday”), they tested Major’s commitment. For a few mad hours, interest rates rose to 15 per cent. Then the government admitted defeat. Britain fell out of the ERM that evening and for ever.
This humiliated Major and demolished the orthodoxy of the time, but reality returned. The pound found its natural level, the British economy recovered. The chances of Britain ever entering the European single currency receded.
Thirty years on, the parallel is with net zero. As with the ERM, which sterling entered with fanfare in October 1990, the Government is proud of its policy. In late June 2019, the dying days of Theresa May’s premiership, Britain became, in its words, “the first major economy in the world to end its contribution to global warming by 2050”. Under the new law, greenhouse gas emissions would have to reduce to net zero by 2050, compared with the previous target of at least an 80 per cent reduction from 1990 levels. Boris Johnson, who succeeded Mrs May, has boasted, notably at Cop26, of this legislation and is acting on it, seeking applause from elites otherwise hostile because of Brexit.
In the course of 2021, however, the measures required to fulfil this edict have grown unpopular. Policies such as banning pure new internal combustion engines by 2030, the imposition of low emission zones in big cities or talk of new mortgages only for energy-efficient homes have caused alarm. Energy costs seem the worst – the impracticality and expense of green technology like heat pumps to replace gas boilers, and the dizzying rise in gas prices.
There is also resentment that our Government is not protecting us from global bad faith. Although net zero pledges have risen in two years from covering 16 per cent of the global economy to 68 per cent, these look highly dubious. Countries such as China, India and Russia are most unlikely to comply with the 2050 timetable. This saddles Western countries with policies that cannot achieve the sole purpose of net zero – a universal reduction of carbon emission levels. So they will hit our consumers and businesses even worse. We are the victims of the attitude satirised in the Beyond the Fringe Battle of Britain sketch: “We need a futile gesture at this stage!”
During 2022, these problems can only increase. Probably the Government can avoid one spectacular day of disaster like Black Wednesday 1992 – although even that might not be true if, for example, there are suddenly drastic power cuts.
Under present policies, detestably high price rises are unavoidable. A recent poll for Net Zero Watch recorded three out of five saying they would not be willing to pay higher taxes on their energy bills to meet net zero targets. As with the ERM/European issues 30 years ago, Tory rebels are picking up on discontents which ministers – and all the Opposition parties in Parliament – ignore.
In April, the energy price cap is expected to rise to £2,000, doubling what it was a year ago. And price caps – which drive smaller firms out of business – are no solution to price hikes, only delaying their impact.
Some price rises are attributable to temporary market problems, but we are trapped in high prices because government has deliberately eschewed alternatives. In the United States, natural gas prices are ten times lower than in this country. Britain’s shale basin is far thicker, and therefore potentially more productive than America’s, but the government’s shale fracking moratorium has left it untapped 10 years after its possibilities became available.
For similar reasons, we are not fully exploiting our offshore drilling capacities, or digging out coal needed for steel production. Yet the absolute need for fossil fuels, because of the intermittency of wind and solar power, remains. Environmental dogma simply raises the prices to distress levels, thus rewarding less green countries.
The economic costs to us ought to be obvious – the loss of competitiveness, of energy-intensive manufacturing and of key advantages which Britain gained from the Industrial Revolution; the vulnerability to foreign politics; the retrograde inconvenience of many green technologies.
So should the psychological damage. The idea that your long-term investment in equipment to keep your house warm is being undermined by vain attempts to meet arbitrary targets (there is nothing scientifically special about the date 2050) is frightening, especially for the old, as is the fear that you could not afford to heat your home or run your car.
At the Greta Thunberg end of the environmentalist spectrum lies a belief that the Western way of life should be destroyed. It is disturbing that a Conservative government seems to toy with such ideas.
Surely it is time to ditch the dogma and coercion and find friendlier ways of controlling emissions. There are signs of this happening in the EU, where the European Commission is changing its “taxonomy” so that natural gas and nuclear power can be treated as sustainable forms of low-carbon energy rather than the work of the Devil.
Why is it that a Government skilled, as we learnt at the general election of 2019, at appealing to public opinion, is so out of touch on these issues?
Again, the ERM comparison is instructive. It is a great feature of the modern world that bureaucracies want to build institutions that increase their power by transcending national borders. It is a founding principle of the European Union that it should be forged not through referendums or elections, but through systems above democracy. The ERM was part of this. Although usually presented in Britain as a technical question of monetary management, it was always intended as the transitional method of creating a single currency and a European central bank, thus stripping each nation state of the right to its own currency.
As the ERM developed in the 1980s, a parallel process (though not a specifically European one) was developing over global warming. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the Conferences of the Parties (Cop), sought to build a new global order. This has involved great deference to “experts”, not unlike that paid to Sage over Covid, and misrepresentations of what the conferences have actually agreed. The tax-paying, energy-using public have been ill-informed about how it will affect them.
As with the ERM, so with net zero, a weird unanimity took over the process, backed by a largely compliant media. John Major repeatedly lamented after Black Wednesday that “everyone” had supported ERM. It was not so, unless by “everyone” he meant most people holding senior official positions. Such people are most likely to be wrong when they are nearest to unanimity. They need watching. As a journalist, Boris Johnson was a genius at detecting when the official orthodoxy ignored the facts of most people’s lives. He will need to recover that skill in 2022 if he wishes to avoid the eventual electoral fate of John Major.
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Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Files an Amicus Brief against EPA Overreach
On Dec 20, 2021 Doctors for Disaster Preparedness filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the biggest energy case in a decade, West Virginia v. EPA, No. 20-1530. DDP urges the Court to end the interference with affordable energy by the Environmental Protection Agency, which was never authorized by Congress.
The question presented in the brief is whether an administrative agency can unilaterally issue rules so far-reaching as to reshape the nation’s electricity grids and “decarbonize” any sector of the economy, with virtually no limit.
“Misuse of science for an agenda of political control is dangerous, and the sort of tyranny by factionalism that the Constitution safeguards against,” DDP argues. The faction of climate change activists seeks broad control of our entire energy sector without authorization by Congress.
“If current trends continue, a handful of unelected bureaucrats could virtually prohibit use of the combustion engine…, and average Americans will become dependent on government allowance of electric charging stations in order to merely travel from point A to B.” Americans would also be dependent on government for access to heating, refrigeration, and lighting, the brief notes.
“Today there is no greater factional ‘zeal’, as James Madison put it, than the demand for increased government control over energy under a theory of a cataclysmic man-made climate change,” DDP argues, urging the Court to “embrace the Constitution and affirm that Congress exists to deal with such factions.”
Under EPA’s expansive interpretation of the Clean Air Act, it could control the lives of more than 300 million Americans under the guise of improving air quality. It is unlikely that even Congress has such power, DDP notes, and “it would be unconstitutional for Congress to delegate such sweeping power to an unaccountable administrator.”
“Continued unfettered delegation to administrative agencies leaves a cavernous hole in the constitutionally balanced structure of checks and balances because agencies are prone to be arbitrary and unaccountable,” DDP writes.
Allowing the administrative state to overstep these boundaries is perilous to liberty, states DDP.
https://www.ddponline.org/2021/12/23/ddp-files-an-amicus-brief-against-epa-overreach/
****************************************EU energy policy is a trainwreck and risks wrecking Europe's industry & economy
There is no telling just how bad the economic situation in the EU can become. There is the obvious immediate effect of many industries becoming uncompetitive given high wage costs, high environmental regulation costs, and on top of it rising energy prices, with occasional rolling blackouts becoming a distinct possibility.
The current high energy price environment in Europe risks becoming more or less permanent, given recent events that center around the Ukraine crisis.
Europe's energy security challenges have their root in the 2014 confrontation over Ukraine. The EU severely misjudged its own natural gas import needs then. It figured that climate change initiatives will severely diminish natural gas demand. It also overestimated LNG availability, especially coming from America's shale boom. It switched from long-term contracts to spot contracts, believing that natural gas will continue to be in the buyer's market state for the foreseeable future. Russia was freed up to shift natural gas to other markets or for internal use as a result.
Contrary to past expectations, EU demand for Russian gas increased about 25% in the 2014-2019 period. In response to further delays to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, it seems Russia may have been nudged towards a final decision on the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline project. If it will be built, it will pit the EU and China against each other for gas from the same fields, with China probably favored as a customer by Russia, given closer relations. If this happens, the EU's energy crisis is set to become permanent, which will devastate its economy. Europe's petrochemical industry is likely to be the first victim, therefore investors should be aware of the more immediate risks.
Russian assets are also likely to suffer a temporary downturn in their value if the Ukraine crisis intensifies, but there should be a swift recovery. Beyond its petrochemical industry, the entire economy of the EU is likely to suffer, therefore most companies with exposure to the EU consumer market are at risk of suffering a hit in coming years.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4477220-eu-energy-policy-is-a-trainwreck
***********************************************Brexiteer MPs campaign against Net Zero EPC targets
Two prominent Brexiteer MPs are spearheading a campaign that claims Net Zero energy efficiency policies are unpopular.
In their launch statement, they reference what they claim to be two unpopular policies central to landlords - the phasing out of gas boilers by 2035, and the mandatory EPC ‘C’ rating by 2025.
MPs Steve Baker and Craig Mackinlay are spokespeople for the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, which includes some 40 MPs.
This survey suggests that three in five UK adults say they would not be willing to pay higher taxes on their energy bills to help reach Net Zero targets - that's including 49 per cent of Labour and Green Party voters.
The poll suggests that 65 per per of UK adults say the public have not been given enough of a say on the government’s Net Zero policies, and while 30 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds feel their voices have been heard, only 10 per cent of all those over 45 feel they have had sufficient input.
In its statement the campaign cites the Poll Tax as bringing down the Thatcher premiership 30 years ago and says:
“With a raft of measures set for introduction, such as the phasing out of gas boilers by 2035, petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2030, and the mandatory EPC ‘C’ rating for landlords by 2025, the current government looks as if it is heading towards a Poll Tax moment of their own. These figures clearly show that the country is not behind either the policies or the direction of travel, and over two-thirds don’t feel they’ve been given a say.”
Mackinlay chairs a new activist body called the Net Zero Scrutiny Group and says: “I didn’t become a Conservative to make my constituents colder and poorer.
“It’s clear, looking at these figures, that the British public are not signed up to the government’s plans. They feel they haven’t been consulted or had their say; the majority don’t feel that government grants for air pumps or electric cars are either relevant to them, or more fundamentally needed to nudge them towards unreliable technologies they don’t want, and there is real worry about the ever-increasing costs of energy bills this winter.
“The general public are quite obviously not onside, and we need to be very careful about just whose shoulders are going to be carrying the very considerable costs of Net Zero.”
Meanwhile Baker - who heads the steering group for the same activist body - adds: “I’ve warned that the cost of Net Zero could deliver a political crisis greater than the Poll Tax, and these figures show that the government are heading straight for such an eventuality."
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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1 January, 2022
UK: Quest for Net Zero has left us with a failed energy policy
If Boris Johnson has seen his approval ratings dip recently, they'll go into freefall when we receive our inflated household fuel bills in April, yet this has been a crisis waiting to happen. Governments across Europe should have been preparing for it but buried their heads in the sand, preferring ideology over common sense.
Increased winter fuel allowances and a relaxation of green levies could help those most vulnerable to plunging temperatures and rocketing bills. Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng met energy bosses on Monday and the news was dire. Wholesale energy prices are peaking just as storage facilities are at their lowest for years and wind power generation has hit a ten-year low, falling by 15 percent this year despite there being more turbines. Russia playing politics with gas supply lines has not helped, just as the EU and UK is embracing a Net- Zero policy that puts all their eggs in a renewables basket.
It's a perfect storm that is going to hit consumers and industry hard next spring when price caps are raised by Ofgem. Already 30 energy suppliers have collapsed this year in the UK and many experts say this is only the beginning of an energy crisis similar to 2008's financial crash that rocked the world.
If Boris Johnson has seen his approval ratings dip recently, they'll go into freefall when we receive our inflated household fuel bills in April, yet this has been a crisis waiting to happen. Governments across Europe should have been preparing for it but buried their heads in the sand, preferring ideology over common sense.
Even the USA, a net exporter of energy just a few years ago, has seen President Joe Biden forced to beg Arab states to pump more oil to bring down gas pump prices at home or face annihilation in next year's midterm elections. The UK, however, appears to have been more blind than other nations, and for longer, to the problems we now face.
Energy expert Clive Moffatt has warned governments since 2010 to take a more balanced approach to decarbonisation, but a Conservative fixation with green targets has skewed their judgment. "We were getting the message very clearly from [government] officials they were very reluctant to endorse any possibility there was even a medium-term future for natural gas," he says.
But with North Sea production of gas and oil going down and imports going up "we become extremely vulnerable," says Moffatt. Add to that a plunging energy storage capability of just 1.7 percent when anything goes wrong with European pipelines or failing renewables, and our present crisis was inevitable whatever else was going on in the world.
"You have to look at it in terms of carbon reduction, affordability and security," says Moffatt. "You can't simply dump two of those and focus on one. If you do that the least well off in society will suffer most." After ten years of such advice, you can't say the Government wasn't warned and yet it merrily carried on its path towards Net Zero, depending more and more on importing energy to allow it to offshore its carbon emissions.
Despite shale gas being put on hold from 2019 and energy giants such as Shell discouraged from exploring the North Sea, latest figures from National Grid ESO reveal that in 2021 we depended more on carbon energy to keep our lights on than previous years.
Wind declined to 19 percent of our energy mix, while nuclear power fell by 10 percent to its lowest proportion since 1982. The gap was filled by natural gas which, of course, is now subject to rocketing international prices as we import almost twice as much from abroad.
FOR a nation that made its industrial wealth from a lucky access to cheap carbon energy beneath our feet, it's an energy policy that is unsustainable. As a result, our government is now having to use taxpayers' money to subsidise power providers to lessen the impact on customers.
"Expecting consumers to shoulder that volatility without any support from government is unrealistic," said Stephen Fitzpatrick, founder of Ovo Energy, this week. "It's a £25billion hit to consumer spending." Potentially the single biggest hurdle to growth next year, it could easily have been avoided by government taking a longerterm, common-sense approach to energy production.
Taking years to build up our storage capacity and a greater variety of energy generation, the Government is now left with little choice but to cut VAT, reduce green tariffs and widen winter fuel allowances or face a hurricane of resentment from voters.
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-express/20211229/281792812359052
*************************************************Solar influences show up in sea level rise, El Nino events and oceanic climatic cycles
The Sun’s energy effects our climate but its influence is often ignored as changes in its intensity are very small. Its effect might be subtle but over decadal periods it adds up to being significant as a series of recent papers show.
Scientists from the University of California, Irvine, the National Taiwan Normal University, and the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, find that the 11-year solar cycle has a significant correlation with sea surface temperature variations in the North-eastern Pacific. They believe that the Sun’s influence is first seen and then amplified in the lower stratosphere, but it then alters the circulation in the troposphere which then affects the temperature of the ocean.
They note that the changes have a structure similar to that of the Pacific meridional mode – an interaction between trade winds and ocean evaporation which is an important trigger of the central Pacific (CP) type of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
It seems that the 11-year solar cycle modulates the CP ENSO and, in particular, is associated with more CP El Nino events during the active phase of the cycle and more La Nina events when the solar cycle undergoes a downturn.
The solar influence is also apparent in other aspects of airflow in the tropics. A team from Oxford University, Aarhus University, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany; Imperial College London, and the Gantham Institute, of Imperial College London, recently provided observational evidence that the solar cycle affects atmospheric circulation over the Pacific on decadal timescales finding that there is a reduction of east–west sea-level pressure gradients over the Indo-Pacific Ocean during solar maxima and the following few years.
This reduction is associated with westerly wind anomalies at the surface and throughout the equatorial troposphere in the western/central Pacific as well as an eastward shift of precipitation that brings more rainfall to the central Pacific. It’s an effect that shows up in some climate models that use simulations considering only solar irradiance variations.
A missed connection
Another recent study shows a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions suggesting that solar variability can drive seasonal weather variability on Earth. If the connection outlined in the journal Earth and Space Science holds up, it could significantly improve the predictability of the largest El Nino and La Nina events. According to Scott McIntosh, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and co-author of the paper.
“The scientific community has been unclear on the role that solar variability plays in influencing weather and climate events here on Earth. This study shows there’s reason to believe it absolutely does and why the connection may have been missed in the past.”
The paper does not examine what physical connection between the Sun and Earth could be responsible for the correlation, but that there are several possibilities such as the influence of the Sun’s magnetic field on the incidence of cosmic rays that bombard Earth.
A team from the Australian National University, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and Australian Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes find a solar influence on the Southern Annular Mode (SAM) – an important pattern of climate variability in the extratropical Southern Hemisphere, with major regional climate impacts.
Whilst the available evidence shows changes in the SAM since the 1960s can be accounted for by climate models earlier trends in palaeo-climate SAM reconstructions cannot be reconciled with more recent simulations.The researchers find that the mean SAM state can be significantly altered by solar irradiance changes. They suggest that the effects of solar forcing on high-latitude climate may not be adequately incorporated in most last millennium simulations.
Researchers from the Jeju National University in Korea and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have looked at the various factors that influence the rate of increase of global mean sea level and detect the influence of the global temperature hiatus.One suggestion for the hiatus was that the oceans absorbed more heat reducing the heating of the surface. Recently however observations have shown that ocean uptake actually slowed down during the hiatus.
They found a “distinct decade-long fluctuation with a peak period of ~12 years,” that was in phase with the hiatus. They also saw a “strong relationship” between global mean sea level and the PDO – a pattern of ocean-atmosphere climate variability centred over the mid-latitude Pacific – with the PDO undergoing a change around 2011 coincident with what they consider to be the end of the hiatus. Others consider that the hiatus went on somewhat longer.
They conclude, “there is an oceanic response to the solar cycle on decadal timescales.”
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Environmentalists' propaganda pics backfire after people notice something fearmongers missed
The hilarity erupted Sunday on Twitter after the left-wing blog DCist ominously warned, “This is what D.C. will look like if the world continues on its current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.”
To stoke climate hysteria, the website attached a hypothetical reimagining of a majestic Lincoln Memorial surrounded by water.
Essentially, DCist — citing research from the nonprofit group Climate Central — suggested that “global warming” would cause ocean levels to rise at alarming rates if left unchecked.
“These images represent predictions of the longterm sea-level rise that will eventually result, if the globe warms 3 degrees,” the article said.
Of course, the irony is that many Americans would be thrilled if the D.C. swamp were engulfed by water.
Moreover, the liberal cesspool actually looks better in the “after” image.
The article conceded that the hypothetical effect of global warming “could take centuries” and there’s nothing we can do to mitigate its supposed future impact.
“This rising of the oceans could take centuries, even after carbon emissions stop, as glaciers and ice sheets melt,” DCist said. “Even if global carbon emissions were to magically end tomorrow, the oceans would still rise several feet due to the greenhouse gasses already in the atmosphere.”
Basically, DCist fomented panic over a hypothetical scenario that it says cannot be stopped no matter what we do.
So what’s the point of breathlessly stoking terror and hysteria? There is no point, and that sums up the left’s propaganda war in a nutshell.
But the fearmongering grift is up, as evidenced by how brutally mocked DCist was when its propaganda backfired in epic fashion.
Tony Shaffer, a former U.S. intelligence officer, tweeted: “LOL- in 50 thousands years…more fear porn from the progressive left death cult…”
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Australia: ANZ bank’s climate policies stand up to scrutiny after activist attack
A bid by Friends of the Earth and three bushfire victims to have ANZ censured over its climate change disclosures and actions has failed, with a determination handed down that the bank’s actions are consistent with international guidelines.
In early 2020, Friends of the Earth and Jack Egan, Joanna Dodds and Patrick Simons lodged a complaint with the Australian National Contact Point (ANCP) – a government office responsible for promoting adherence to the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.
The complaint alleged “aspects of ANZ’s disclosures, target-setting and scenario analysis’’ breached the OECD’s guidelines, and that it had failed to be fully transparent about its “indirect emissions”, or those it contributes to by financing the fossil fuel industry.
Following a failed mediation on the issue, an examiner looked at the bank’s disclosure practices, and had found that while there is ambiguity in the guidelines, ANZ had been “undertaking actions and conduct consistent with (them)’’.
At the time the complaint was lodged, Mr Egan, who on New year’s Eve 2019 lost his home at North Rosedale, south of Bateman’s Bay in NSW to a bushfire, said holding large corporations to account on climate change was deeply personal.
“I saw our front deck catch on fire … the flames of the deck were licking into the window spaces and around the doors,” he said.
While he acknowledged Australia had always had droughts and bushfires, he said he was convinced global warming played a role in the severity of the drought and the fierceness of the blazes.
“Many scientists are saying this is well-predicted and it’s a consequence of the global heating,” he said.
The complaint was based on a similar one brought by Friends of the Earth Netherlands against ING Bank, which it said resulted in the bank committing to stronger climate action.
Friends of the Earth said at the time ANZ “remains the biggest financier of fossil fuels among the big four Australian banks, and it has neglected a number of opportunities to improve its direct and indirect environmental impact’’.
“ANZ’s lack of full disclosure about its climate change impacts prevents consumers from making informed decisions about whether or not to engage with the bank,’’ the complaint said.
The determination from the ANCP said the guidelines themselves did not mention climate change, and greenhouse gas emissions featured in only two paragraphs, which said organisations should seek to improve the environmental performance of themselves and their supply chain, and also “encourage” broad disclosure practices in areas where reporting standards are still evolving.
“There is limited explicit direction about climate change in the guidelines,’’ the determination says.
“There is, however, potential relevance from the guidelines’ statement that an enterprise’s environmental management system should include ‘where appropriate, targets … consistent with relevant national policies and international environmental commitments’.’’
It was recognised in the determination that climate change reporting was evolving in Australia, with the ASX, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission addressing the corporate management of climate risk.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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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. 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
Most pictures that I use in the body of the blog should stay up throughout the year. But how long they stay up after that is uncertain. At the end of every year therefore I intend to put up a collection of all pictures used on the blog in that year. That should enable missing pictures to be replaced. The archive of last year's pictures on this blog is therefore now up. 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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