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
31 January, 2024
Wind & Solar Generators Couldn’t Care Less When You’re Freezing In The Dark
Solar panels smothered with snow and ice produce nothing; wind turbines frozen solid during breathless, frigid weather produce even less (they actually consume power from the grid to run heating systems meant to prevent their internal workings suffering permanent damage).
So, if you’re sitting freezing in the dark, don’t expect wind and solar power generators to come to your rescue.
No, if the lights and power are on this winter, then you ought to raise a glass for the gas, coal and nuclear power generators separating you and your loved ones from a date with hypothermia and, ultimately, the morgue.
Hundreds died during the Big Freeze that hit Texas in February 2021, thanks to a complete collapse in wind and solar output. Thousands more would have died, but for the reliable output delivered by coal, gas and nuclear plants.
As this piece from Alberta attests, the wind and solar industries couldn’t care less whether you freeze to death when winter bites.
Some things look great on paper until they are tested with the cold, hard reality.
For years, the province of Alberta, Canada looked like a decent place to build large scale wind projects. Alberta has wide open, windy spaces. So, in the name of fighting global warming (AKA raking in government subsidies) wind developers built nearly 4,500MWs of wind capacity as of January 2024. Solar’s installed capacity sits at 1650MWs for a combined wind and solar capacity of just over 6100MWs.
In January of 2024, Alberta’ wind turbines faced one of their most serious tests to date: a Polar Vortex pushed artic air down through Canada and into the United States. Temperatures plummeted, sending Alberta’s grid demand sky high.
CBC news reported on Friday January 12th that “Just before sunrise in Edmonton, temperatures hit lows of –37C (-34.6F), breaking a daily record of –32 (-25F) set in 1998.”
And it got colder.
On Friday night going into Saturday (13th) at Edmonton International Airport, temperatures dropped to -45C (-49F) by 10pm (according to weather.gov.ca).
As astute readers may know, a grid consumes electricity as it’s produced. If Alberta needs 12,000MWs of power, it has to produced 12,000MWs of power at the same instant (more or less). If the real-time supply and demand gets out of whack, the ‘pressure’ on the grid drops, forcing grid operators to call on other generators, force customers to reduce demand, or initiated rolling blackouts.
And no grid should run at 100% capacity. A grid should keep some capacity in reserve. If your largest plant suddenly runs into trouble and has to be pulled offline, you want more than enough standby capacity to plug that gap. And, even the best generators might struggle to provide maximum output during extreme weather. So, to safely operate, a grid wants to keep some standby capacity, well in excess of peak demand.
During the polar Vortex, Alberat’s grid demand skyrocket, hitting 10,000, 11,000, and more than 12,000MWs of demand. To supply that demand, Alberta’s gas plants have run hard, and the province had to rely on imports.
Of course, at night, Alberta’s 1650 MWs of solar were completely useless.
And wind output failed too. On the night of Jan 12-13, during the record-breaking cold temperatures, wind output stood at only 14MWs at 2115hrs. That wasn’t the lowest either. Early in the evening, wind output stood at 8-10MWs. But 8MWs would barely show up on the chart. So, we’re going with output at 2115hrs.
No, that’s not an exaggeration. Basically, Alberta’s wind was missing when the grid needed it most.
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French Farmers Vow To Continue Protests
French farmers have vowed to continue their tractor protests “for as long as necessary” while laying the blame for growing rural anger at the feet of the European Union’s ‘green’ agenda and the globalist government of President Emmanuel Macron.
Building off the momentum of the political gains from farmers in the Netherlands last year and the recent uprisings seen across Germany — not to mention decades of tractor protests already seen in France — French farmers said that they plan to continue shutting down motorways with their tractors at least until the end of the week and maybe even longer if the government fails to heed their demands.
Near Toulouse, hundreds of farmers have been blocking a highway in both directions since last Thursday afternoon, while similar protests have been staged across the country.
Arnaud Rousseau, the president of the FNSEA agricultural union said according to Le Figaro: “I can tell you that from today and throughout the week and for as long as it is necessary, a certain number of actions will be carried out.”
“The anger that is being expressed is not new… what farmers want is to restore a form of dignity to their profession, it is to talk about the questions of income and competitiveness. That is the whole subject of the daily exercise of the profession: how with the over-administration and the European variations of a certain number of rules, we are no longer in line with what is happening,” he continued.
Principally, the farmers are calling for their way of life to be respected by elites in Paris and Brussels.
However, in terms of concrete measures, they have called for a reduction in onerous ‘green’ regulations from the EU and from their government, which recently raised taxes on agricultural fuel.
The French farmers have also expressed anger over unfair competition, with food produced with cheaper labor and lax standards undercutting their prices, including from Ukraine, which the EU gave tariff-free access to the single market last year.
This has been further compounded by a lack of enforcement of laws surrounding the annual negotiation of prices between supermarket chains and farmers.
While recently installed French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal has promised to make announcements on initial changes to agricultural policy within the week, it is unclear if the government will be able to restore trust with rural communities ahead of the upcoming European Parliament elections in June, in which farming is set to become a key political issue throughout the bloc.
As has been the case in the Netherlands and Germany, the populist right in France has aligned itself with the farmer protest movement.
The President of National Rally, Jordan Bardella, said that his party is the champion of the farmers while visiting wine growers over the weekend. In contrast, Bardella said: “Macron’s Europe wants the death of our agriculture.”
Bardella declared that the farmers’ anger is a “cry of a French people who do not want to die, who are attached to their social model, who are attached to their countryside, to their rural life.”
https://principia-scientific.com/french-farmers-vow-to-continue-protests/
**********************************************End the chimera of ‘green jobs’ tomorrow at the expense of real jobs today
The rush to net zero presents a severe threat to industries that have long been the lifeblood of our economy.
Grangemouth Refinery should be celebrating its centenary year in 2024, as Britain’s longest producing oil refinery. Instead, skilled workers at the Falkirk plant face months of worry, after the owners announced in November they will convert the site into an import terminal by 2025 with the loss of 400 jobs.
Instead of adding value to the economy and providing well-paid jobs to British workers – as well as supplying 70 per cent of Scotland’s petrol demand – we will instead ship fuel from abroad, supporting foreign jobs whilst further hammering the UK’s balance of payments. All the while doing nothing to reduce global emissions.
These developments are payback after years of neglect. Whilst the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill is a welcome yet belated attempt to maximise our own resources, it comes after clobbering North Sea operators with debilitating windfall taxes that cratered investment.
Our attitude towards energy security has bordered on dangerous indifference.
By failing to develop shale gas or rushing the closure of reliable fossil-fuelled power stations, we have lumbered ourselves with some of the world’s highest power costs, whilst subsidising intermittent renewables. And we impose some of the world’s highest carbon costs through the UK Emissions Trading Scheme on our industry, whose main competitors in China, India and the Middle East operate under no such burdens.
Furthermore, Grangemouth’s owners pointed directly to the “decline in demand for the type of fuels we produce” as key to their decision to close. The ideological obsession for battery vehicles at all costs can therefore be directly tied to the survival of British industry. Indeed, responding to a parliamentary debate on Grangemouth recently, ministers seemed happy to embrace the “managed decline” of a once proud sector, without considering the ramifications for our standard of living if the EV utopia fails to materialise.
This shameful acceptance of decline from a Conservative government would previously have been unthinkable. The only thing that can be said for the Government’s approach is our opponent’s policies offer even more insanity: “crocodile tears” from the SNP and Greens after years of undermining Scottish industry, and Labour’s eco-zealotry amounting to unfunded billions for the impossible promise of being a “clean energy superpower” by 2030.
Ask people most affected by the “green transition” where their preferences lie, however, and common sense prevails. When given a choice between energy independence or net zero, a recent survey of Scottish voters by pollsters Redfield & Wilton showed 58 per cent prioritising energy security, more than double those wanting net zero.
It is time we accept the same realism as these voters. We cannot burden industries with excessive costs that foreign competitors avoid, whilst expecting them to continue operating in the UK. Nor can we recklessly pursue a transition to EVs by diktat, which ordinary consumers do not want, on the chimera of “green jobs” tomorrow at the expense of real jobs today.
The closure of Grangemouth Refinery is a tragedy, but it is also a wake-up call. I could write in similar terms about the proposed closure of our remaining blast furnaces on the back of high energy costs and more net zero zealotry leaving the UK as the only G20 country without the ability to manufacture virgin steel. Do we continue down this path to ruin? Or do we finally wake up and prioritise true British energy security?
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BP attacked by investor over ‘irrational’ switch to clean energy
BP is facing fresh demands to scrap “irrational” net zero commitments championed by former chief executive Bernard Looney, after an activist investor claimed they have left shareholders £40bn poorer.
The FTSE 100 oil giant was on Monday accused of pursuing an unrealistic strategy by Bluebell Capital Partners, the investor that has taken a minority stake in BP after previously taking on blue chip heavyweights Glencore and Danone.
In a 30-page letter, Bluebell called on BP to scrap its commitment to scale back its oil and gas business by a quarter this decade, halt investment in renewable energy schemes and rewrite its net zero targets to clarify they will be achieved “in line with society”.
Bluebell argued that the targets will artificially constrain BP and leave it at a disadvantage compared to rivals such as Shell and ExxonMobil, which have made no such commitments of their own.
It added that BP’s investment in renewables such as solar and wind are failing to generate strong enough returns.
The activist is also demanding that BP returns an extra $16bn (£12.6bn) to shareholders this decade, and urged the oil giant to sack a board director with links to fund giant Blackrock, which it branded “a world champion of ESG inconsistency and hypocrisy”.
Blackrock has been one of the most vocal supporters of so-called environmental, social and governance investment principles, but has faced criticism over claims that it has prioritised progressive views over investor returns.
Bluebell said BP’s true worth was “at least 50pc more” than its stock market value, which stood at about £80bn on Monday, but had been dragged down by the “ill-conceived” strategy.
Giuseppe Bivona, partner and chief executive at Bluebell, said he spent the day speaking to BP shareholders, as he warned that too many companies were making unattainable green commitments to appear politically correct.
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30 January, 2024
The Impossible Energy “Transition”
After two weeks of negotiation, the United Nations climate conference in Dubai agreed last week to “transition away” from fossil fuels.
The question is how much damage these policies will do before they’re abandoned.
Left unanswered is whether governments are supposed to do that by reducing supply, reducing demand or both. A lot rides on the answer, but neither would affect the climate much.
In the demand-side scenario, technology saves the day with cost-competitive renewables. This is the vision of the International Energy Agency, according to which the more rapid the transition from fossil fuels, the more precipitous the decline in fossil-fuel prices. In its “Net Zero Emissions” scenario, oil demand drops faster than supply this decade, pushing oil prices below $30 a barrel soon after 2030, which corresponds to $1-a-gallon gasoline.
Yet even with fossil-fuel prices near historic highs, effective renewable substitutes are nowhere near cost-competitive. They’d have to get cheaper still to compete with $30-a-barrel oil. And in developed countries, especially the U.S., it’s impossible to get permits quickly enough for the staggering amount of renewable capacity that would be needed.
In the supply-side approach, governments would slash oil production or impose rationing, hoping to make fossil fuels so expensive that renewables are the only option. This is the dark vision of “Stop Oil” and Greta Thunberg. But as long as renewable substitutes aren’t immediately available and oil and gas remain necessary, a small reduction in supply causes prices to soar. That means windfall profits for energy companies, scarcity for everyone else, and electoral danger for the governments responsible. Ms. Thunberg claims that climate change is a “death sentence” for the poor, but the poor are far more vulnerable to disruptions in energy supply. In the 1970s, an oil boycott aimed at the U.S. caused famines in Africa.
While the stop-oil view was popular at Dubai, there were enough adults in the room to keep the conference from committing to it. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5 C” (the Paris Agreement’s proposed limit on 21st-century temperature increases), said conference president Ahmed al Jaber, “unless you want to take the world back into caves.” Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman dared countries to try to choke off the oil supply: “Let them do that themselves. And we will see how much they can deliver.”
Poor countries are clear-eyed about the danger of energy poverty. “We are not going to compromise with the availability of power for growth,” said India’s minister for power, R.K. Singh. China has more coal plants under construction than are in operation in the U.S. Few rich countries have announced plans to stop drilling for oil or gas, and none of those are major producers. Even President Biden ran away from increasing the gasoline tax as soon as prices went above $3 a gallon in the summer of 2021.
The administration’s answer to this conundrum is to defer political consequences via the regulatory state. The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed to require that all coal and natural-gas plants shut down or adopt unproven zero-carbon technologies by 2038. Another EPA proposal would require 62% of all cars sold in America to be fully electric by 2032.
Assuming they survive court challenges and future administrations, they would impose soaring prices and reduced mobility on Americans. They would have almost no impact on global temperatures unless other countries, including China and India, also commit to energy poverty. The question is how much damage these policies will do before they’re abandoned.
https://www.heritage.org/energy/commentary/the-impossible-energy-transition-0
**************************************************Mann v Steyn
Dr. Michael E. Mann is a well-known climate activist. E.g., he was the person who invented the hockey-stick climate graph — which intentionally conveys alarmism.
Mark Steyn is a conservative, outspoken public speaker, writer, TV personality, etc. who has a keen interest in public policies, from COVID to climate.
About 12 years ago, Mark added some comments to an internet post written by someone else. His observations drew a parallel between Jerry Sandusky (the disgraced Penn State football coach), and Mann (also a Penn State employee). Both Mann and Sandusky were investigated by Penn State’s administration in what Steyn characterized as a cover-up. Steyn also described Mann’s famous hockey stick temperature chart as fraudulent.
My understanding is that Mann subsequently told Steyn to retract his comments. However, Steyn refused, saying that what he wrote was accurate. Mann then said that he would sue Steyn if he didn’t retract, and Steyn said be my guest. This began the saga.
There are at least four fascinating aspects of this lawsuit:
1 - Mann’s contention is that this case is primarily about Science.
2 - Steyn’s position is that this is a trial primarily about Free Speech.
3 - Steyn is acting as his own lawyer (i.e. pro se), which is highly unusual.
4 - The case took 12 years to be heard, which seems to violate due process.
I could easily expand on any of those four issues, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll focus on just the Science element.
Mann’s contention about Science is interesting, and (for multiple reasons) seems to be a very weak argument. E.g., it’s fascinating to note that, despite this being a high-profile case about a topic of paramount interest (climate change), it appears that not a single Science organization formally stepped forward to side with Mann! (See here.)
Also very interesting is that (earlier) the Judge denied Mann’s request for certain experts (some of his climate alarmist buds) to testify on his behalf. What is extremely fascinating is the Judge’s reason:
“Applying Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence, and the Daubert standard for scientific evidence, Judge Irving concluded that most of the proffered expert testimony was inadmissible because the experts failed to identify the methodology they used in reaching their conclusions about the contested statements… The methodologies of the expert must be grounded in the Scientific Method, such that another person with similar expertise could replicate them (Daubert 509 US at 591).”
That the Judge is looking for evidence that the Scientific Method is used in the alarmist’s climate arguments is extraordinarily significant, for at least two reasons: 1) alarmists contend that the Scientific Method is not applicable for assessing the validity of climate change claims, as climate is “too complicated,” and 2) as I have explained in earlier commentaries (e.g., here), progressives have specifically attacked the Scientific Method, so that it is no longer taught in almost any K-12 US schools (thanks to the acceptance of the progressive NGSS by some 49 states).
My unsolicited advice is for Steyn to take on Mann about Science. Starting with the definition of Science (“Science is a process”), to what is the main process (the Scientific Method). It’s a major asset that it already appears that the Judge is aware of, and is favorably disposed to, the Scientific Method.
The Scientific Method can be traced back some 4000 years (e.g., here and here) — and was heavily relied on by essentially every notable scientist in history (Newton, Curie, Einstein, etc.). That progressives are trying to now throw it in the trash should indeed be vigorously challenged — and this seems like a superior venue.
Steyn should also make it clear that what Mann calls science is really political science. I can not overstate the significance of this distinction. We are inundated with activist scientists who arbitrarily discard the standards of real Science (the process), and substitute their own. Their rationale for this abrogation is the end justifies the means. This is relevant in this trial, as that appears to be exactly what Mann did with the hockey stick graph. (See this excellent detailed discussion about Mann’s graph.)
Mann and Greta Thunberg are birds of a feather. The most relevant difference is that Mann has significantly more academic credentials. He should know better as to what Science is, what the Scientific Method is, what Critical Thinking is, etc. What that translates to is that considering Mann’s dissipations, the sin is greater for him.
If Steyn plays his cards right, he has a superior opportunity to expose Mann’s turpitudes. Ideally, that in turn, could bring about a penitential response by Mann, to begin to make amends for the horrific influence his actions have had on the world, and on genuine Science.
The takeaway here is that Steyn is an odds-on favorite to win this case, based on the merits of either (or both) Science and Free Speech, plus the fact that the judge seems inclined to be serious about this, rather than play politics.
https://criticallythinking.substack.com/p/mann-v-steyn-and-us
********************************************UK: Does the Climate Change Committee understand the energy storage problem?
Andrew Montford
Yesterday, I reported that four national institutions – the Climate Change Committee (CCC), the National Infrastructure Commission, National Grid, and the Royal Society – have got their energy system modelling wrong and have thus underestimated the cost of Net Zero.
Last night, the CCC’s Chief Executive, Chris Stark put out a long Twitter thread addressing these issues. But while it’s dressed up as a rebuttal, it’s nothing of the sort. In fact, it’s a masterpiece of bureaucratic obfuscation.
Recall firstly that this blew up when the Sunday Telegraph reported Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith’s criticisms of the CCC’s energy system modelling: they had failed to look at the possibility of back-to-back low wind years. This meant that they underestimated the amount of hydrogen storage the system would need, and thus the costs involved.
There are 24 tweets in Stark’s thread. On number 10, we get this:
We could certainly look further at a sequence of years. We are hoping we can do this in later work.
Clearly then, Stark accepts Sir Christopher’s central point. He would have had to, of course, because he had already done so in correspondence with the Sunday Telegraph’s Ed Malnick, who reported in his article:
…in response to further questions from this newspaper, the [CCC] admitted that its original recommendations in 2019 about the feasibility of meeting the 2050 net zero target, were also based on just one year’s worth of weather data.
And since the CCC had the underlying modelling for the 2019 Net Zero report dragged out of them under FOI, we can see in the model itself that only one year’s worth of data is analysed!
But while Stark has to accept the point, in true bureaucratic fashion, he dresses it up so that it appears to be a rebuttal:
quote tweeting someone saying that the Royal Society’s criticisms are misleading
calling the Sunday Telegraph piece “nasty” (it isn’t) but not linking to it
multiple tweets describing the (incorrect) modelling that they did
claiming to have made a strong rebuttal.
saying “there’s nothing ‘right or wrong’ here.
calling it a “silly story”
etcetera.
Stark introduces a 2023 report, for which he says they looked at five different years of weather data, so he is once again accepting Llewellyn Smith’s central criticism, namely that they haven’t looked at back to back low wind years and will thus have got the costs wrong.
He also says:
we modelled two sensitivities looking specifically at the impact of low-wind periods (‘wind droughts’) up to 30 days. An understanding of these extremes is essential to system design (although its impact on the overall net zero transition shouldn’t be exaggerated).
This appears to betray an alarming misunderstanding of the issue. A period of a few weeks with little or no renewable generation (usually referred to as a “dunkelflaute”) is a secondary problem. Dunkelflautes are typically a couple of weeks long, but even one lasting 30 days would only reduce annual output by 10% or so. In simple terms, it would mean that we would need 10% of annual demand in the store at the start of the year.*
I use the term wind “drought” to refer to years in which wind is low over the whole year. In 2021, for example, annual wind output was down 20% or more. To get through a year like that, we’d need 20% of demand in the store. To survive back-to-back wind drought years, we’d need to store 40% of demand (and to have a commensurately larger generation fleet so that we can quickly refill it). Thus the costs will be grossly understated.
That Stark appears not to understand this, even after Llewellyn Smith has explained it to him, should be a cause for concern.
It may be, of course, that bringing dunkelflautes into the thread is just part of his efforts to obfuscate his admission of failure, but we need to be clear. So, does Chris Stark accept that back-to-back wind droughts mean more storage, more generation equipment and higher costs, or doesn’t he?
We need to know.
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Australian conservative leader commits to defunding Environmental Defenders Office under next government
The Coalition will strip funding from the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) if it wins the next federal election, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has promised.
The EDO is an environmental legal centre that runs litigation and offers legal support in climate change and environment cases.
Federal funding to the non-government organisation was cut by former prime minister Tony Abbott in 2013 but reinstated by the Albanese government when it came into power.
The government committed to providing $8.2 million to the EDO over four years, with the rest of its revenue received from state and territory governments or philanthropy.
But the EDO has recently worn criticism for its conduct in court. Federal Justice Natalie Charlesworth ruled the group had confected evidence and coached witnesses in its legal challenge of a Santos gas project in the Timor Sea.
In the wake of that case, Mr Dutton vowed to revive the Abbott-era cuts if the Coalition won government.
"They have obviously been discredited in a recent federal court case but the federal government has had nothing to say about it," Mr Dutton told resources groups in West Australia this morning.
"The same activists are now seeking to use the courts to thwart Woodside's $16.5 billion Scarborough offshore gas field project here in WA.
"It does stymie existing projects and it does stop new endeavours from taking off. "We think it needs to be defunded."
Mr Dutton's commitment follows a pledge by the LNP in Queensland to pull state funding for the EDO if it wins the next election, and calls from former WA Liberal premier Colin Barnett for the group to be abolished altogether.
On Tuesday, EDO chief executive David Morris wrote to supporters acknowledging the court had been critical of "some aspects of the handling of the case", and said the office was treating that with the utmost seriousness.
"We are reviewing the judgement carefully but as the matter remains before the court, we are limited in making further comment," Mr Morris wrote.
"While this decision was devastating for EDO's clients and deeply disappointing for EDO and supporters like you, our determination to continue providing public interest legal services to communities across the continent is unwavering.
"We provide these services in circumstances where, were it not for EDO, access to environmental justice in Australia would be seriously diminished."
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29 January, 2024
Climate and Energy Fantasy and Tyranny
It’s mystifying and terrifying that our lives, livelihoods and living standards are increasingly dictated by activist, political, bureaucratic, academic and media ruling elites who disseminate theoretical nonsense, calculated myths and outright disinformation.
Not only on pronouns, gender and immigration – but on climate change and energy, the foundation of modern civilization and life spans.
We’re constantly told the world will plunge into an existential climate cataclysm if average planetary temperatures rise another few tenths of a degree, due to using fossil fuels for reliable, affordable energy, raw materials for over 6,000 vital products, and lifting billions out of poverty, disease and early death.
Climate alarmism implicitly assumes Earth’s climate was stable until coal, oil and gas emissions knocked it off kilter, and would be stable again if people stopped using fossil fuels.
In the real world, climate has changed numerous times, often dramatically, sometimes catastrophically, and always naturally. Multiple ice ages and interglacial periods, Roman and Medieval warm periods, a Little Ice Age, major floods, droughts and dust bowls all actually happened – long before fossil fuels.
Tornadoes, hurricanes and other extreme weather events are not getting more frequent or intense. You might argue that Harvey and Irma marked a sudden increase in major hurricanes in 2017 – but that’s only because after Wilma there would have been a record twelve years of zero Category 3-5 hurricanes.
We need to ignore the fear-mongering, look at the actual records, and recognize that dangerous upward trends simply aren’t there. We must insist that alarmists distinguish and quantify human influences versus natural forces for recent temperature, climate and weather events – and show when, where and how human activities replaced natural forces.
The only place manmade temperature and climate catastrophes exist is in Michael Mann and other GIGO computer models. These climate models are worthless for policymaking because they aren’t verified by actual measurements, don’t account for urban heat island effects, and cannot incorporate the vast scale and complexity of atmospheric, planetary and galactic forces that determine Earth’s climate.
In reality, people and the planet are threatened far more by global cooling than warming. Even a couple degrees drop in average global temperatures would drastically reduce growing seasons, arable land, plant growth, wildlife habitats and agricultural output – especially if it’s accompanied by reductions in plant-fertilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Plants, animals and people would face starvation.
We’re also told ruling elites could prevent this imagined crisis by switching us to wind, solar and battery power. (They also want to eliminate cows and modern agriculture, over misplaced concerns about methane and fertilizer, but that’s anudder discussion.)
Build a coal, gas or nuclear power plant – and unless governments shut it down or cut off fuel supplies, the plant provides plentiful, reliable, affordable electricity nearly 24/7/365 for decades. Build a massive sprawling wind or solar installation, and you have to back up every kilowatt with coal, gas or nuclear power – or with millions of huge batteries – for every windless, sunless period.
The economic and ecological effects would be ruinous.
Coal, gas and nuclear plants can be built close to electricity-intensive urban centers. Tens of thousands of wind turbines and billions of solar panels must go where there’s good wind and sunshine, far from urban areas, connected by high voltage transmission lines. In fact, for Net Zero, says the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world would need 50,000,000 miles of new and upgraded transmission lines by 2040!
All those “clean, green, renewable, sustainable, affordable” wind, solar and battery systems, backup generators, transmission lines and electric vehicles would require millions of tons of iron, copper, aluminum, manganese, cobalt, lithium, concrete, plastics and numerous other metals and minerals.
Onshore wind turbines require nine times more materials per megawatt – and offshore turbines need fourteen times more – than a combined-cycle natural gas power plant, the IEA calculates. Solar panels and EVs have the same problem.
To get these materials, billions of tons of overlying rock must be removed to reach billions of tons of ores – which then must be processed in huge industrial facilities that use mercury and toxic chemicals, emit vast quantities of greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants, and are powered by coal or natural gas. Many components for these “green” technologies are derived from oil and natural gas.
US and other Western facilities control and recycle these pollutants. Chinese and Russian facilities pay little attention to air and water pollution, workplace safety, or fossil fuel use, efficiency and emissions – yet they supply over 80% of “renewable” energy raw materials, because the West increasingly bans mining and processing and makes energy prohibitively expensive to operate mines and factories.
Pseudo-renewable energy worldwide would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars, would have to be subsidized by trillions of taxpayer dollars, and would dramatically increase electricity rates.
Electric vehicle, appliance and heating mandates would double or triple all these infrastructure, materials, mining and land use requirements, ecological impacts and costs.
American residential electricity prices in 2023 ranged from 10.4¢ per kilowatt-hour (Idaho) to 28.4¢ per kWh (California). British families paid 47¢ per kWh! UK factories and businesses paid up to three times what their US counterparts did. German families, factories and businesses are in the same capsizing boat.
But EU industrial leaders say energy prices must continue rising, to cover the soaring costs of the “energy transition.” If they don’t, factories, jobs and emissions will move overseas. But if they do, families will freeze jobless in the dark.
What many call the Climate Industrial Complex has a monumental stake in perpetuating this situation. Collectively, its members have incredible power, control much of government and education, hold enormous financial stakes in green tech subsidies, and often censor contrarian viewpoints.
Just as ominous, if it becomes clear that the Brave New World of Net Zero Energy cannot provide sufficient affordable electricity and other necessities for modern industries, healthcare and living standards, two-thirds of America’s ruling elites favor food and energy rationing to combat climate change and retain their anti-capitalism, anti-growth agenda. It’s likely the same in Europe and Canada.
The Biden Administration and other governments are already dictating the kinds of vehicles we can drive and what appliances and heating systems we can use. They’re already exploring ways to limit the kind and size of homes we can live in, how warm and cool we can keep them, how often we can travel by air, the kinds and amounts of meat we can eat, and many other aspects of our lives.
Meanwhile, China, India, Indonesia and dozens of other countries are building hundreds of coal and gas generating units – further underscoring the insanity and futility of trying to control energy sources, quantities and emissions.
This is what America’s 2024 state and national elections are about – and elections in Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. The longer these elites remain in power, the more our liberties, lives and living standards will resemble life a century ago under authoritarian regimes. Vote accordingly.
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Many Ways The Climate Scam Isn’t Aligning With The Facts
Much of the U.S. was frosted and frozen by bitter winter weather last week. But this is just further proof of manmade global warming, the media claim.
Because even as America freezes, “most of the rest of the world is feeling unusually warm weather,” which is merely a “contradiction” that “fits snugly in explanations of what climate change is doing to Earth,” says the Associated Press.
Of course what doesn’t fit “snugly” is ignored. And there’s plenty of that.
For instance, [all the right people have assured us for decades] that Arctic ice will disappear due to man’s wanton combustion of fossil fuels.
At a United Nations climate conference in 2009, Al Gore, always a gushing font of climate disinformation, said polar scientists had told him, according to CBS News, “that the latest data ‘suggest a 75% chance the entire polar ice cap will melt in summer within the next five to seven years.’ ”
A couple of months earlier [in 2009], the BBC reported that “the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free and open to shipping during the summer in as little as 10 years,” basing this statement on the word of Peter Wadhams, a University of Cambridge “top polar scientist.”
But the reality is that in the middle of January 2024, “Arctic sea ice for this date stands at its highest level in 21 years,” says Climate Change Dispatch.
No, it’s not summer. It’s the dead of winter in the Northern Hemisphere.
But this peak arrived immediately after Earth went through the “hottest” year on record. (It’s a meaningless claim, as our friend from Junk Science Steve Milloy has shown.)
How could Arctic ice be so healthy after a year that was so warm we’d guess from all the media and political fuss that it broke thermometers all over the world?
Furthermore, Arctic ice levels for the summer months of 2023 don’t show enough of a difference from the long-term averages to be alarmed.
Another fear that is supposed to paralyze us – as well as convince us to surrender our liberties and dollars to the mountebanks who promise they can tame our savage climate – is the loss of land to the rising seas caused by global warming.
The world’s biggest (and of course most important) cities, and the elites’ favorite tropical vacation spots, are on track to be flooded. (Didn’t Barack Obama’s very presence in the White House fix this)?
But reality and the global warming script simply aren’t in sync.
Or as Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado environmental studies professor, puts it, there’s “a large gap between narratives promoted in the media and real-world evidence.”
Pielke writes that “From 1985 to 2015 – a period when global sea levels increased by about 60 millimeters (about 2.4 inches) – the areal extent of global coastal land increased by almost 34,000 square kilometers (about 13k square miles), or about the size of Belgium, home to more than 11 million people.”
The additional terrain is due to “‘landification,’ or the emergence of new land area,” he says.
He cites a team of Dutch researchers who have “warned that popular anecdotes can present a misleading picture of global trends in changes in the Earth’s surface from land to water and vice versa.”
The researchers argue that “general conclusions cannot be drawn from a limited sample of case studies.”
Rather, “planetary-scale monitoring is” necessary if we are “to understand (and disentangle) the causes of detected changes and their attribution to natural variability, climate change or man-made change.”
Everything that proceeds from the mouths of the climate alarmists must be taken with a boxcar of salt. Truth has long been a casualty in their war on fossil fuels.
https://principia-scientific.com/many-ways-the-climate-scam-isnt-aligning-with-the-facts/
***********************************************Dark doldrums in renewable energy
For years, the media has supported politicians, NGOs, and environmentalists in the West who have been warning us about the harm fossil fuels are causing to the environment. We are continuously told that we need to invest in renewable energy in order to prevent a climate catastrophe. This narrative tells us that switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is not only going to save the planet, but it will also significantly lower our energy bills. It will unleash a new post-scarcity green society with cheap, abundant energy that can power the world for eternity. If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
The radical experiment with renewable energy has been underway for some time. The United Kingdom’s carbon emissions target was enshrined in law in 2019 by former British prime minister Theresa May, thereby mandating the nation to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. A crucial aspect of the policy calls for us to shift away from fossil fuels and towards more affordable, sustainable energy sources. In order to achieve net zero, we must have a reliable domestic renewable energy source.
Renewable energy companies in the UK receive a guaranteed price for electricity that is subsidised. The government sets this price before wind and solar farms are constructed. The theory is that government funding will spark a technological revolution and that future innovation will result in more affordable renewable energy projects. But things don’t operate in this manner. The British government raised the cost of offshore wind by 66 per cent, supposedly costing the consumer £44 per megawatt hour. In actuality, the cost rose to £73.
Energy costs have increased in every nation that has adopted the trendy theory of renewable energy. Consider Australia. The federal government wants to generate four-fifths of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, a target of 82 per cent. Australia now produces one-third of its electricity from renewable energy sources, so consumers should be benefiting from lower energy costs. The average wholesale price of electricity was $87 per megawatt hour in the first three months of 2022, a 141 per cent increase from the same point a year earlier. The Australian Energy Regulator attributes the price decline that started around the same time last year to the increased availability of black coal. Supply and demand work.
The same is true in California. Known as the renewable capital of the United States, the price of electricity increased five times faster in this state between 2011 and 2017 than it did in any other. Or Germany, which is among the biggest investors in renewable power in the world. The nation started its transition to a low-carbon, nuclear-free economy in 2010. It plans to phase out coal power by 2038 under a policy known as Energiewende, and it closed its last three nuclear plants in April of last year. As a result, electricity costs increased by 50 per cent between 2006 and 2017 – one of the most expensive in Europe.
But the primary problem with renewable energy sources is unpredictability. They are unreliable because their power generation depends on the whims of the weather. In today’s globalised world, where instant access to power is essential, this is not ideal. During the winter, when we most need electricity, renewables produce very little of it. Winter nights that are longer and colder are not ideal for solar power. It doesn’t help that wind speeds are a lot slower during colder months. The ironic situation is described by the Germans as Dunkelflaute –dark doldrums. Nature is a cruel mistress.
She’s not done yet. There are periods when the sun shines too brightly and the wind blows too fast. This also brings about problems. According to a report from Sky News UK, the Brits gave wind farm owners £215 million to compensate them for the days when the wind was too strong and they had to be turned off. Left to run, they could substantially overload the national grid. The same is true with solar energy: too much heat raises the possibility of blowout. The absurd situation we find ourselves in is having to switch them off on the sunniest days. California pays neighbouring states to take its excess solar energy.
Storage is the answer to the reliability issue. But there isn’t any technology that can store this extra energy in batteries. Building a battery facility in the US that could store solar and wind energy for just 12 hours would cost approximately $2.5 trillion – roughly one-third of all US federal spending, according to the MIT Technology Review.
Then there’s the restriction based on geography. To generate the same amount of energy, a solar farm would need to be 450 times larger than a nuclear power plant, requiring more land and causing real environmental damage. As for net zero? According to a report co-sponsored by the University of Melbourne, more than 120,000 square kilometres of land are needed to produce enough renewable energy to meet Australia’s net zero goal – equivalent to 90 per cent of England’s landmass, or half the size of Victoria.
And such renewables must be environmentally friendly, right? Hardly. Fossil fuels are used in the extraction and production processes. The carbon fibre used to make wind turbine blades needs both gas and oil. Polysilicon, which is produced using coal, is used in solar panels. A decommissioned solar farm, meanwhile, generates 300 times more toxic waste than a nuclear power plant.
Due to the release of energy from fossil fuels, the West has experienced unprecedented levels of material prosperity for the past 250 years. The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 89 per cent in 1820 to just under 10 per cent today. We are living in a time that historian Deidre McCloskey calls ‘the great enrichment’ because of fossil fuels. An activity as elementary as flicking on a light switch is the result of two hundred years of innovation and free trade. Something lost on our green comrades.
Western elites need to be more honest and forthright about the cost of net zero. There’s a reason that only three per cent of the world’s energy comes from renewables. Dunkelflaute indeed.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/dark-doldrums-in-renewable-energy/
*******************************************Climate of naivety Australia's greatest danger
Hubris is a well-known occupational hazard for self-made billionaires. They risk mistaking obsequiousness for admiration and are vulnerable to the knowledge delusion: the conviction that their business acumen qualifies them as experts about everything.
Andrew Forrest took the opportunity to share his wisdom on international security at a sod-turning ceremony at one of his wind turbine plants this month.
He claimed investing in wind and solar would make us safer in a world where bad actors want to control fossil fuel supplies. “I don’t want machine gun-toting, fruitcake extremists in Yemen, firing missiles in the Red Sea, to dictate if I can drive my kids to school here in Dubbo,” Forrest said. “Why would I back oil and gas when it’s controlled by people like Putin?”
You don’t have to be Henry Kissinger to spot the flaws in Forrest’s analysis. Whatever the assumed benefits of stripping native vegetation to erect wind turbines, they are not an obvious deterrent to Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. Warships tend to be more effective.
The Russian President may be a man of some influence, but he does not have the power to impose limits on Australian gas or coal production. Punitive royalties and activist judges are much better at doing that.
Australia is the world’s second-largest exporter of coal, pushing Russia into a distant third. We are the third-largest exporter of liquid natural gas, shipping three times more than Russia. We do less well when it comes to pipelines, but that’s a small price to pay for the security of living on an island continent.
We could be more than self-sufficient in oil if we put our minds to it. Geoscience Australia estimates our identified recoverable reserves of conventional oil at 1.8 billion barrels. There is significant potential for unconventional oil, which could be recovered with fracking.
It would be nitpicking to point out to Forrest that Yemenis sweeten their cakes with honey, not fruit. It is true that Iranian-backed terrorists from this dirt-poor but troublesome country are a not inconsiderable threat to our trade with Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa. They pose little, if any, threat to our oil imports, however.
Less than 40 per cent of international oil exports come from the Middle East, almost all of which comes from the Persian Gulf. The tankers the Houthis delight in setting on fire in the Red Sea are bound in the first instance for Europe and the Mediterranean.
One doesn’t have to travel to Dubbo to guess that electric vehicles are seen less frequently outside its school gates than in Cottesloe. For those concerned about domestic energy security, that’s a good thing. While Australia is rich in lithium, cobalt, rare-earth minerals and almost everything that makes a lithium-ion battery, nearly all of it is sent offshore for processing, predominantly to China. The Chinese manufacture two-thirds of electric vehicles, including the BYD Atto 3 and MG ZS EV, the third- and fourth-best-selling electric cars in Australia.
That’s no problem if you live in Twiggy Land, where the People’s Republic of China is a benign player in world affairs and is the country that will turn the battle against global warming. Back in the real world, however, outsourcing our energy future to the Communists in Beijing is about as stupid as government policy gets.
Turning to wind and solar makes us highly dependent on China. Most of the world’s solar panels come from there, and they are aggressively attacking the wind turbine market. Chinese belligerence is the most significant external threat by far to the security of energy supply as we continue to run down our coal-fired power stations and put obstacles in the path of gas.
The most significant risk to energy security, however, is homemade. Labor’s ambitious 2030 energy target and opposition to nuclear power is driving coal out of the energy mix with no alternative source of base-load energy.
Rising interest prices and lengthy approval processes are stifling the growth in insecure, intermittent wind and solar. Reaching the target of 40 new 7MW wind turbines a month has been a little trickier than Chris Bowen seemed to imagine in his first weeks in the job.
Bowen has precious few opportunities to turn sods, so it is hardly surprising he was prepared to travel to the picturesque NSW Central Tablelands this month for a photo opportunity with Forrest at Squadron Energy’s Uungula wind turbine development.
Uungula was the only commercial wind turbine project to reach financial closure last year. Hundreds of renewable projects are “in the pipeline”, as renewable enthusiasts like to say.
Mercifully for the local communities they are helping to destroy, however, precious few of them are likely to get off the ground. Uungula has been in the planning stage since 2011. In 2016, CWP Renewables, the previous incarnation of Squadron, sought approval for 249 turbines on the site that it claimed would be connected to the grid by 2020.
That proposal has since been scaled back to 69 6MW turbines and is unlikely to be connected until the end of 2025 at the very earliest after submitting neighbouring residents to two years of construction hell.
We must be thankful for small mercies. The original proposal threatened 1880 hectares of native vegetation. The revised proposal’s footprint covers just 639 hectares, an area some 1½ times larger than the Perth suburb of Mosman Park.
Sooner or later, the impossibility of reaching the government’s back-of-the-envelope targets will sink in. Governments in a liberal democracy are bound to obey the laws, including the laws of physics. They will take stock of the energy graphs and realise the last thing we need in the middle of the day is more renewable energy, and the last thing we need the rest of the time is energy we cannot rely on.
In a world that grows increasingly unstable and in which we, or more accurately our friends, are already fighting two wars, we will realise we are indeed the lucky country, blessed with abundant resources which we must learn to mine and process ourselves.
We will learn that the greatest threat to our future is not global climate change but homegrown naivety.
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28 January, 2024
Climate Alarmists Are Coming for Your Coffee
You've heard it before: "The planet is dying!" "Society is going to collapse!" "We are going to run out of water!"
Elite climate alarmists will stop at nothing to throw dirt on the things Americans love and enjoy in order to push the Left's radical Green New Deal.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) now has a new target: Coffee.
During last week's annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Swiss banker Hubert Keller told the WEF panel that too much CO2 is exerted into the atmosphere through coffee production, warning that "they're coming for your coffee."
In a clip posted to social media, Keller pointed to the amount of "tonnes" (metric units equivalent to 2,204 lbs) CO2 coffee makers put into the air globally when producing their product. He said that the "coffee that we all drink emits between 15 and 20 tonnes of CO2 per tonne of coffee. So we should all know that this is — every time we drink coffee, we are basically putting CO2 into the atmosphere."
These are the same global elitists who want us to get our protein from eating crickets and try to make us believe eating meat will cause the world to end.
"Most of the coffee plantation — most of the coffee's produced through monoculture, and monoculture is also affected by climate change. The quality of these nature assets is deteriorating quite rapidly," Keller added.
The global warming fear-monger said that making the coffee industry more eco-friendly is a $250 billion market— no wonder why the world's most elite Leftists want to push their new attack on one of the country’s most beloved beverage.
So, not only does drinking coffee cause damage to the climate, but cars do as well. Having children is irresponsible, and gas stoves are evil. Not only that, refrigerators and freezers are also the planet's enemy.
Journalist Tim Hinchliffe blasted the WEF elitists for putting a guilt trip on coffee drinkers.
"It's all a power grab to seize land and the means of production to carbon tax you and I to oblivion," Hinchliffe said. "When he says production is 'fragmented,' he's saying it has yet to be captured by corporations & centralized. The coffee farmers in the globalist-termed 'global south' are to be stripped of their livelihoods in the name of climate justice."
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Senate Opens Door to Massive Carbon Tax Despite Critical Economic Concerns
This week, Congress took a step toward passing a carbon tax—an inflationary, regressive tax on all products that would lower economic growth; make all Americans worse off; and disproportionately harm poor people, farmers, and small businesses. Politicians have rightly rejected carbon taxes in the past and should continue to do so.
On Jan. 18, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted to send a proposed law to the full Senate that would require the federal government to conduct a study calculating the carbon emissions of a broad range of different products made in America and other countries. These include construction materials, plastics, and fertilizers—all vital to small businesses and corporations that power the economy.
This study is the first step to imposing a carbon tax on these products. The bill, sponsored by Sens. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., and Chris Coons, D-Del., is titled the Providing Reliable, Objective, Verifiable Emissions Intensity and Transparency (PROVE IT) Act.
The bill’s proponents say they are responding to carbon taxes in Europe, which will be implemented in 2024. The European Union, which has 21 countries with a carbon tax, is preparing laws to tax imports based on greenhouse gases emitted in their production. This border tax proposal is meant to prevent companies from shifting production outside the EU to avoid carbon taxes.
The complexity of this proposed European legislation, and the pushback from emerging economies, is one reason that it is unwise for America to follow. Europe’s current carbon taxes do not cover carbon emissions from all products. On average, the carbon tax covers 38% of total national carbon emissions, ranging from a high of 81% in Liechtenstein with a rate of $131 per ton to a low of 2% in Spain with a rate of $16 per ton.
In taxing carbon dioxide, Congress would end up reducing energy use while, according to carbon tax proponents, raising revenue that might permit a reduction of income tax rates to compensate.
The U.S. Treasury estimated in 2017 that a carbon tax of $49 per ton, rising at 2% a year, would raise $2.2 trillion over 10 years. Such a carbon tax would raise taxes on gasoline by 44 cents per gallon, on natural gas by about $2.60 per thousand cubic feet, on oil by $21.50 per barrel, and on coal by $62 to $126 per ton, depending on its carbon content.
The carbon tax is a favorite of individual economists across the political spectrum for restructuring the tax system. Proponents include Tuft University’s Gilbert Metcalf, American Enterprise Institute scholar Alex Brill, and Donald Marron and Eric Toder of the Tax Policy Center. The Climate Leadership Council, which cleverly refers to the carbon tax as “carbon dividends,” has as its founding members former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Harvard professors Larry Summers and Greg Mankiw, and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen (listed on the website as inactive due to her current position).
But a carbon tax has four major disadvantages—it is inflationary and regressive, it causes regional disparities, it is complex, and it drives production offshore. America is stronger without it.
Inflationary and Regressive. One major problem with the carbon tax is that it would raise prices, because all products contain carbon. Inflation is running at almost 4% and has reduced Americans’ real incomes. Since low-income people spend more on energy as a percent of their income than high-income people, a switch to a carbon tax would have to be accompanied by income transfers to low-income groups—i.e., some type of subsidy paid for by taxpayers.
Proponents suggest that offsets, paid for by carbon tax revenues, can be returned to taxpayers through lower income taxes, perhaps with the proceeds going chiefly to poor people who are disproportionately hurt by what is in essence an energy consumption tax.
However, Congress rarely cuts one tax by as much as it raises another tax, so Americans will end up paying more in taxes. Further, many poor people are not required to file tax returns, and they would have to do so in order to be identified and compensated. That means extra work for them and for the Internal Revenue Service.
Regional Disparities. Another problem is that carbon-intensive sectors, such as coal, heavy manufacturing, and agriculture, would be the biggest losers under the new tax. This means higher prices for food and gasoline for everyone, especially in rural areas, as well as companies announcing that they are moving offshore. Farmers in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium are rioting against the new climate provisions.
Complexity. A carbon tax is complex to set up, as can be seen from the PROVE IT Act. The bill selects which products are analyzed and then open to be taxed. Practically all products have some carbon in the content or in the manufacturing process or both, even food and clothing. That is why European carbon taxes range from 2% to 81% of carbon emissions.
Proponents of the tax suggest putting tariffs on imports in proportion to their carbon content so that American companies will not be at a disadvantage. But the precise quantities are complex to calculate, and tariffs might be illegal under World Trade Organization regulations.
Greater Offshore Production Increases Global Emissions. Carbon taxes raise the prices of domestic energy-intensive goods compared to imports from countries without carbon taxes. If American goods were taxed, Americans would prefer to buy cheaper, untaxed imports, and American firms would relocate abroad to avoid the tax or lose business to foreign companies.
This potential relocation reduces the goal of the tax, namely to lower global emissions and global temperatures. It also potentially sends millions of jobs overseas.
With production going abroad to countries with less stringent environmental regulations, global emissions might well rise rather than decline. Without a carbon tax, U.S. carbon emissions declined by 1,000 million metric tons over the past 16 years due to the substitution of natural gas for coal. Other countries do not have America’s inexpensive natural gas and rely more on coal. Therefore, companies relocating overseas would rely on dirtier, coal-produced energy.
A carbon tax would hurt the poor and raise domestic prices relative to the prices of many imports. It would be another add-on levy, with exemptions for political friends and punishments for enemies. The PROVE IT Act is a first step toward the tax, and Congress would be wise to reject the bill.
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Creepy e-bike graveyards
Despite all the green hype surrounding the ‘dockless bike-share’ industry, it is producing an extraordinary amount of waste. Like wind turbine blades, these e-bikes are congregating in Xiamen and Shenyang, among other places, where they are largely left to rot in a sea of metal and rubber.
In some cases, these fields of bikes are several stories high, reshaping the landscape with the failed dreams of green urban enthusiasts. Not only are bikes dumped because they are damaged, some of China’s largest e-bike companies have collapsed. Many more are confiscated by government authorities. It is a disaster.
Even when the bikes are used as intended, they have created a major problem for already squeezed urban spaces. Residents have complained that bike-sharing has left their cities cluttered and a mess, with bikes discarded in the middle of footpaths, in hedges, rivers, parks – anywhere the careless user chooses.
Because bike-shares follow the old socialist principle of ‘people will take care of communal property’, it naturally fails in most places – with China’s problem of mistreated share-bikes repeated in America, Australia, and Europe. The largest measure for the success of a bike-share company appears to be the strict social order of society. Effectively, it operates on trust.
E-bike sharing is another one of those lovey-dovey Utopian ideas that woefully overlooks human behaviour. Just as public housing built on the taxpayer dollar is frequently neglected and destroyed, share-bikes are abused and abandoned because there is no significant punishment for the user. They didn’t buy it and they have no emotional attachment to it.
The globalist philosophy of ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ would likely turn the whole world into a slum. People don’t look after things if they can’t own them. We’re a nesting species, not squatters.
In 2020, there were over 10 million e-bikes in operation in China with the market continuing to grow despite teething problems. Where will they end up? In landfill? In the sea? Leaching into the dirt? In China, particularly, there are millions of early-model e-bikes with lead-acid batteries residing in these graveyards. They will be joined by the newer lithium-ion batteries. None of this is zero emission in the sense that the public expect.
‘Cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen subsequently tightened up policies on bike-share operators to better manage the chaotic environments the oversupply and unregulated bikes have created,’ said the ITDP.
While making cities more ‘bike friendly’ might help the immediate safety requirements, we know from some European countries, which are already well adapted for bikes, that it does not solve the larger issue of customer use.
E-bike sharing in Australia is annoying. If you walk towards Broadway in Sydney, the chances are you’ll trip over one collapsed and abandoned in the middle of the footpath. Sometimes they are left on the road. They all have helmets hanging off the handlebar so you can put your head in the same spot as a hundred other strangers. This is an odd behaviour for the Covid hypochondriacs who still wear masks and overdose on hand sanitiser. They refuse to sit on trains or touch escalator handrails, but shared helmets? That doesn’t count. Woke maths.
Australia’s e-bikes have a history of being thrown into rivers and left in parks. Depressing photos surfaced in 2017 of a barge with a couple of blokes pulling dozens out of the Yarra River in Melbourne. E-bike companies are doing their best to combat poor customer behaviour, but they are like parents trying to get a TikToker to clean their room.
Why do people panicky about the end of the world go to the trouble of using an e-bike only to chuck it in the water?
I’ve seen shared bikes work. In a regional seaside town, old-school bikes are left neatly locked into position beside a major shopping centre right beside the bike tracks. They are unlocked via an app which is relatively cheap to use. If the bikes aren’t back in their little homes within 24 hours, the user is automatically charged the full cost of the bike. Weirdly, this threat sees all the bikes returned without a scratch.
Brisbane has also had some luck with e-bike sharing for two main reasons: the city is very hard to navigate for newbies (and Google Maps has no idea how to help), and there are some scenic purpose-built bike-ways that suit the ‘drop in, drop off’ model.
Riding in Sydney or Melbourne is more like an extreme sport where some bike lanes end on freeway ramps or tram tracks while others channel riders into death traps like lemmings to a cliff.
The dream of shared e-bikes is not evil, and I’m sure plenty of green advocates have an Eden-esque result in mind. What we have to be careful of is that we don’t choke the world with e-waste while trying to ‘save it’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/creepy-e-bike-graveyards/
****************************************More coal coming from Australia
Dartbrook mine set to reopen after 18 years
Australian Pacific Coal and Tetra Resources have finalised a three year US$60 million debt facility with energy and commodity group Vitol Asia.
Dartbrook coal mine near Muswellbrook is a step closer to reopening, 18 years after it was placed into care and maintenance.
Australian Pacific Coal and Tetra Resources announced on Tuesday that they had finalised a three year US$60 million debt facility with energy and commodity group Vitol Asia to cover the cost of reopening the mine through to first coal.
The funding will cover equipment acquisitions, the completion of remediation work and the acquisition of additional mining systems during ramp-up to achieve full capacity.
The companies been working to recommission the mine since September 2022.
"This is a landmark event for Australian Pacific Coal, our shareholders, and the Dartbrook mine," Australian Pacific Coal interim chief executive officer Ayten Saridas said.
"Our ability to secure debt funding for Dartbrook during a period of high inflation and global tension is testament to the quality of the project, the vision and work ethic of the team of people bringing it back to market, and the commitment of our shareholders."
The debt facility will be structured as a loan notes issuance agreement and will involve a three-year facility with repayments commencing after an initial grace period to allow for mine production startup.
"From the moment we engaged with Vitol, they have seen the potential value we can create at Dartbrook," Saridas said.
"They have been thoroughly professional during this process and we are looking forward to working closely with them in coming years.
"Vitol will play a key strategic role in the development of the project following their appointment as sole marketing agent for Dartbrook coal. Dartbrook product is very high quality and we anticipate strong interest from export markets.
The schedule to first coal is under review and will be announced in AQC's quarterly report later this month, Saridas said.
The Independent Planning Commission approved an amended application to reopen the mine in 2019, despite community opposition.
The conditions stipulate that the mine will have to use the Hunter Tunnel rather than transport coal by truck. It must also use existing processing infrastructure and cannot mine the Piercefield Seam to reduce groundwater impact.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
25 January, 2024
Carbon benefits of not using cookstoves overestimated: study
Comment from India
The greenhouse gas-reducing benefit of replacing highly polluting cookstoves has been overestimated by up to 10-fold, researchers reported on January 23.
A peer-reviewed study looked at carbon offset schemes based on getting rid of primitive charcoal- or wood-burning home stoves used by some 2.4 billion people that contribute to global warming and cause millions of pollution-related deaths every year.
Projects to provide cleaner, more efficient alternatives often raise funds by the sales of credits, which are based on estimates of how much carbon the new cookers keep out of Earth’s atmosphere -- one credit should equal one tonne of carbon dioxide.
The problem, according to the study published in the journal Nature Sustainability, is that a lack of methodological “rigour” is causing overestimation.
The scientists evaluated five methodologies used to measure emission reductions of the cookstove projects system, and found them all wanting.
Data covering some 40% of cookstove credits worldwide showed that 26.7 million carbon credits barely avoided a tenth of the carbon dioxide emissions claimed, about 2.9 million tonnes.
In carbon markets, one credit corresponded to one tonne of carbon dioxide.
Extrapolating out across all cookstove projects, the authors estimated credits were overvalued by more than 10-fold.
Carbon credits allow corporations -- or countries under certain conditions -- to offset greenhouse gas emissions by investing in projects that avoid carbon dioxide emissions, or remove carbon dioxide from the air.
Over-crediting damages the credibility of carbon markets, Annelise Gill-Wiehl, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, told AFP.
“No one has trust that one carbon credit represents one metric tonne of reduced emissions”, she told AFP.
“Whoever is buying the credits is allowed to emit one more tonne of carbon dioxide under the premise that they’re not actually emitting it.”
The research caused a stir in the so-called voluntary carbon market even before it was published when a review draft was widely circulated.
Investors, project developers and other industry representatives proactively contacted journalists, urging them not to “exaggerate the exaggerations”.
But the researchers insisted their work would help strengthen the trade in carbon offsets.
“A carbon credit market built on exaggerations is destined to fail,” said co-author Barbara Haya, an expert on offset quality and director of the Berkeley Carbon Trading Project.
“Our study offers specific recommendations that could make clean cookstoves a trusted source of quality carbon credits, and carbon credits a stable source of funding for clean cookstoves and all of their benefits for people and forests.”
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Two thirds of elite Americans favour food and energy rationing to combat climate change, poll finds
The profound disconnect between the attitudes shared by the ‘top’ 1% elites in American society and the rest of the population is laid bare by the results of an illuminating new poll.
Nearly six in 10 elite members believe there is too much individual freedom in America, more than two-thirds favour rationing of food and energy to combat climate change, somewhere between a half and two-thirds favour banning things like SUVs, gas stoves, air conditioning and non-essential air travel, while two-thirds believe teachers should decide what children are taught.
Meanwhile, 70% of those polled trust Government to “do the right thing most of the time”, while among these groups, President Biden enjoys an 84% approval rating.
The poll’s authors note that at a time when most Americans have suffered a loss of real take-home pay, 74% of members say they are financially better off than in the past. “The people who run America, or at least think they do, live in a bubble of their own construction. They’ve isolated themselves from everyday America’s realities to such a degree their views about what is and what should be happening in this country differ widely from the average American,” it is observed.
The poll studied American elites but observations suggest these views are widespread within small highly influential groups in many other countries. Populist parties are rising across Europe and elsewhere, in reaction to open borders, the woke attack on traditional values and cohesive societies, and the savage insanity of the collectivist Net Zero project.
In Britain, this last lunacy is demonstrated with the recent news that steel making is to stop in Port Talbot with the horrendous loss of around 3,000 local jobs. Wherever you look, none of this concerns the new elite aristocracy, insulated and isolated by high state salaries and subsidies, or large, outsized remunerations from corporations and financial institutions with an almost monopolistic lock on commerce and ‘virtue’.
Two polls were conducted last September among 1,000 U.S. elite members, defined as having a postgraduate degree, a household annual income of more than $150,000 and living in an area with more than 10,000 people per square mile. About 1% of the U.S. population are said to meet these criteria.
The results were titled ‘Them v U.S’ and published by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CUP), a Maryland-based non-profit advocacy group founded by the distinguished economists Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore. The methodology was determined after observing numerous surveys indicating that these elite segments of the population consistently exhibited views that were distinct from the general population.
Many of the views expressed are frankly very scary, but they chime with the agenda promoted by similar elites across the world. Climate change is clearly an obsession of the very rich and highly educated, note the authors, adding: “An astonishing 77% of the elites – including nearly 90% of the elites who graduate from the top universities – favour rationing of energy, gas and meat to combat climate change.” More than two-thirds of graduates from elite colleges would ban SUVs, gas stoves, air-conditioning and most air travel.
The cynical will note of course that current elite lifestyles suggest that the favoured few have little expectation that such restrictions will apply to themselves – rather it is a new way of living for the sheeple, the fly-overs, the deplorables or the gammon, or whatever insult is in vogue at any one time.
Attempting to remove a steak dinner from many Americans and substituting it with a bean salad might be considered an unwise course of action, but elites are three times more likely to say there is too much individual freedom than all Americans. Almost six out of 10 graduates from elite colleges think there is too much freedom in a country that has always considered itself the ‘land of the free’.
The authors note that these elites have extraordinary political and societal powers. They determine what the conversation will be about on campus, in the legacy media and corporate boardrooms. They put their trust in big government/media/business/academia because they run all these institutions. As we have seen in the Daily Sceptic, large amounts of green billionaire money is available to promote their destructive agendas, and in the process censor any views not fully backing the pre-ordained narrative.
Only in mainstream media and over-funded academia can the scientific process of climate science be deemed ‘settled’, only a Harvard professor can think there is ‘context’ in calling for the genocide of Jews, and only the very flexible of mind can believe that a woman has a penis. Only a very odd group can give the barely sentient President Biden an 84% approval rating.
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European People’s Party wants to scrap EU’s 2035 ban on petrol and diesel cars
Conservative forces in the European Parliament are considering calling on the EU to drop its 2035 ban on petrol and diesel engines in an embarrassing blow to Ursula von der Leyen.
The European Commission president has made the green deal a flagship policy in the bloc’s push for net zero but there are growing calls to roll back green rules because of the cost of living crisis.
Mrs von der Leyen’s own party, the centre-Right European People’s Party (EPP), plans to oppose the phased ban on petrol and diesel engines.
In September last year, Rishi Sunak delayed the UK’s ban on internal combustion engines from 2030 by five years to 2035, in line with Europe. The Prime Minister said it would protect hard-pressed families from “unacceptable costs”.
The call to ditch the ban is part of the EPP’s draft manifesto ahead of June’s European Parliament elections.
The so-called burden of green regulations is already a hot button issue after recent mass protests by Dutch and German farmers.
‘We reject a ban’
The manifesto, obtained by the Politico website, said: “We reject a ban policy, such as a ban on combustion engines, and will also revise it as soon as possible.”
It would instead rely on “innovative concepts and market-based instruments” and the “expansion of renewable energies”.
The EPP has already led calls to relax strict EU protections for the wolf, which Mrs von der Leyen supported after Dolly, her beloved horse, was killed by one of the predators.
It also opposed the EU’s nature restoration law, which narrowly passed in watered down form last year, after arguing it damaged farmers and food security.
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Australia: Santos’ LNG project to be delayed and cost more after environmentalist lawfare
Santos’ Barossa LNG project will produce its first gas three months later than initially scheduled and the development will cost as much as US$300m ($456.3m) more, as the oil and gas company reveals the toll of two legal challenges.
The updated timings and cost is much less than some had feared, and the outlook sent Santos shares up nearly 1 per cent.
Santos chief executive Kevin Gallagher praised the work of his staff in keeping the project on track and as much on budget as possible.
“The team has done a great job in keeping Barossa close to the original schedule and managing the costs of delay,” Mr Gallagher said.
Mr Gallagher revealed drilling and pipeline work was now fully underway as the outlook for the company continues to brighten.
First gas from the project is now expected in the third quarter of 2024.
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24 January, 2024
'Drill, baby, drill!' Americans by wide margin back Trump's greenlighting of oil and gas projects
Americans by a wide margin endorse President Donald Trump's pledge to 'Drill, baby, drill' and allow oil and gas schemes on federal lands, despite fears of global warming after 2023's searing temperatures, our poll shows.
A DailyMail.com/TIPP Poll reveals that 49 percent of US adults support the former president's pro-fossil fuel policy, while only 40 percent disagree. Another 11 percent said they were not sure.
Trump uses the phrase regularly on the campaign trail — including at a rally in Waterloo, Iowa, last month. The expression has been used by other Republicans these past two decades.
The poll comes at the start of an election year in which Trump looks set to face-off against Democratic President Joe Biden, who touts his switch to renewables and support for electric vehicles as reasons to re-elect him.
Trump instead vows to slash US energy and electricity costs by ramping up domestic production of fossil fuels, with tax breaks for producers of oil, gas, and coal, even as scientists warn about man-made global warming.
He also wants to scrap much of Biden's $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate measure in US history.
Our survey of 1,247 voters this month found that more people supported Trump's policy than opposed it.
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Green ideology is tearing Germany apart
Extortionate energy prices have shattered its industry. Regulations and taxes have enraged hard-working farmers. This should be a warning to the world
Germany has long occupied a special place in the liberal-elite imagination. Over the past few decades, and especially since the world was upended by the votes for Brexit and Trump, Germany has been held up by the great and good as a model nation. As the rest of the West lost their minds, or so the story goes, Germany remained a paragon of economic efficiency, political maturity and environmental stewardship. The last bulwark of the liberal order in an age of rising populism.
This elite Germanophilia is best embodied in John Kampfner’s Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes From a Grown-Up Country. First published in August 2020, it became an unlikely bestseller in the UK. It received rave reviews and was declared ‘book of the year’ by the Guardian, the New Statesman and The Economist. Its central claim is that Germany has forged ‘a new paradigm in stability’ that the rest of the world ought to follow. It is hard to think of any book that has aged quite so badly, quite so quickly.
Indeed, the news coming out of Germany lately paints a wholly different picture: one of economic collapse and interminable political strife.
Even though 2024 is just a few weeks old, Germany has already been rocked by huge farmers’ protests, with thousands of tractors blocking cities and motorway junctions this past week alone. It has been crippled by transport workers’ and doctors’ strikes. Factories in its much-vaunted manufacturing sector are shutting down and shipping production elsewhere. The federal government is struggling to reckon with a budget crisis and is ushering in a new age of austerity. Data released this week showed that Germany had the worst economic performance last year of any major economy. In the year ahead, it is predicted to have the slowest growth in the G20, apart from Argentina.
So far, the German public has focussed its anger mainly on the current government, led by chancellor Olaf Scholz. The Ampel – the ‘traffic-light’ coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats – can only muster a combined share in the polls of 21 per cent, down from 52 per cent at the 2021 federal elections, and only slightly less than the 22 per cent currently enjoyed by right-wing populists the Alternative for Germany (AfD). But Germany’s problems have far deeper roots than just one unpopular government and its hapless leader. They are structural. In fact, so much of the current crisis can be traced back to precisely the aspects of Germany that are so often admired by liberal-elite observers like Kampfner – most of all, its embrace of green ideology and its democracy-dodging elites.
A world leader in green dogma
Germany’s green movement is one of the oldest and most influential in the world. Its Green Party was the first in the West to be in government – initially between 1998 and 2001, and now since 2021. Other mainstream parties were also early adopters of green ideology. Angela Merkel, one of the longest-serving chancellors of the postwar era, wanted the world to know her as the Klimakanzlerin, the ‘climate chancellor’.
It has taken the global energy crisis, prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to truly kill off Germany’s industrial strength. But the death sentence was surely handed down in 2010, when Merkel’s government initiated the Energiewende – the ‘energy transition’ to renewables.
The Energiewende amounted to the world’s largest single investment in wind and solar power. The trouble with this plan was that, unlike fossil fuels, which can be tapped on demand, renewable-energy sources are ‘intermittent’ – they cannot produce electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and the Sun doesn’t shine. And so they need a constant supply of back-up sources, usually fossil fuels like coal or gas, to keep the grid running. This is why, despite Germany’s green reputation, the energy transition has had little effect on CO2 emissions. It is also part of the reason why Germany developed its now infamous dependence on imports of Russian gas.
Madder still was the Atomausstieg, the plan to rid Germany of all its nuclear plants. Despite nuclear power providing plentiful, reliable, cheap and even carbon-neutral electricity, every major political party in Germany is opposed to it, following decades of hysterical, fact-free campaigns by environmentalists. In 2000, the SDP-Green government announced a nuclear phaseout, with the first plants due to be dismantled in 2007. Then, in 2011, following the Fukushima disaster in Japan, Merkel doubled down on the policy. In April last year, the Ampel closed Germany’s last three nuclear plants. It did so even in the grip of the energy crisis, as the government struggled to source alternative energy supplies to Russian gas, such is its devotion to green ideology.
The results of the Energiewende have been stark. Electricity prices rose by 50 per cent between 2006 and 2017, giving Germany the most expensive electricity in Europe. The energy shock of the war in Ukraine then sent prices into the stratosphere. In 2022, the government was forced to spend some €440 billion – or €1.5 billion per day – bailing out energy firms, sourcing new energy supplies and subsidising bills. And still cutbacks had to be made to energy use, as supplies dwindled. Town councils dimmed or turned off street lights and even traffic lights. Large landlords and housing associations turned down the heating on their residents and rationed their hot water.
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No more LNG for you? Biden’s climate obsession threatens Western alliance and Europe’s economies
The Biden administration’s climate-driven rethinking of U.S. natural gas exports is spooking Europe’s fragile energy industry.
The reassessment of how the Department of Energy approves gas export permits, first reported by POLITICO, threatens to stall projects that Europe depends on to meet its energy demands while it tries to counter Russia’s war in Ukraine. It’s just the latest example of how U.S. policy priorities — in this case, reducing reliance on carbon-polluting fossil fuels — can create headaches for European leaders and even frustrate the transatlantic allies’ shared security goals.
President Joe Biden’s supporters in the environmental movement cheered the news that the White House is considering strengthening its scrutiny of how gas exports worsen climate change. But it is causing tensions among the heads of European industry as the Ukraine war drags on.
The European Union has slashed its intake of Russian gas to less than a third of the 155 billion cubic meters it imported in 2021, according to estimates by the EuroGas trade association. It did that by tripling its imports of U.S. liquefied natural gas, which reached 60 billion cubic meters in 2023.
“This LNG has been a relief for Europe and contributed to the stabilisation of gas and electricity prices in Europe for consumers, after a long period of record high prices caused by the Russian supply drop,” Didier Holleaux, president of trade association EuroGas, said in a statement.
A lack of additional U.S. gas-export capacity “would risk increasing and prolonging the global supply imbalance,” Holleaux continued.
One senior EU official said the bloc’s leadership wouldn’t be drawn into “speculating on potential U.S. cuts in production or supply to the EU,” given that Washington hasn’t communicated any such move. The person was granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive political and diplomatic issue.
Biden national climate adviser Ali Zaidi declined to detail how the assessment would proceed, or whether it would result in a slowing of permits from the Energy Department.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/01/19/biden-europe-gas-exports-00136671 ?
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Australia: Will the crash in critical minerals derail the clean energy transition?
Just as stock markets are surging to new records and property is shrugging aside the impact of more than a dozen rate hikes on the hop, those betting on a bold, new carbon free future are nursing huge losses.
Two years ago, the race began in earnest to nail down global supplies of critical minerals as the world embraced emissions reduction targets that eventually would see the phase out of fossil fuels and a shift towards the electrification of the global economy.
It was a race turbo-charged by an increasingly polarised geo-political environment that pitted America against China, the biggest producer and processor of critical minerals and a domination of battery production.
Lithium prices soared as the US embarked upon a hurried program to shore up supplies of the key battery production component in an effort to reduce reliance upon China. And it wasn't just lithium.
Rare earth prices also shot for the moon along with more traditional metals such as nickel, which also is crucial to manufacturing electric vehicle battery components.
Even rival technologies, particularly hydrogen, found themselves in hot demand as big investors threw billions of dollars into what they believed would be the dominant green energy technology by the next decade.
Can Australia straddle the East-West divide?
The dust has barely settled after Australia and China reached an uneasy truce last month, but our abundance of critical minerals and China's stranglehold on them has us in the middle of a geopolitical tug of war, writes Ian Verrender.
It was a boom that promised fabulous riches for countries with large deposits of these raw materials. It just so happened that Australia found itself, once again, the lucky country with bountiful supplies.
But the recent boom looks to have been something of a bubble, yet another example where enthusiasm and expectations overrode reality. Suddenly, the prices for each of these materials has unravelled in spectacular style.
While the long-term future for some of these materials remains solid, there could well be some high profile casualties from the recent madness.
It's been a common story in resources for centuries. A sudden price hike based upon forecasts of huge demand feeds through to a massive lift in exploration and production until suddenly, everyone realises there's a glut.
It seemed like a sure bet at the time
The dire announcements have been coming thick and fast.
Nickel projects that only recently were given the green light have been put on hold while the value of existing mines are being written down.
Lithium miners, meanwhile, are in a world of pain with many explorers and junior operators facing the prospect either of collapse or the task of looking for something else.
Even established, large scale operators like Liontown and Azure — both of which now are within the orbit of Gina Rinehart — are feeling the heat. Both have been beaten up by investors who have been spooked by the sudden collapse in the price of the raw material as the chart below for lithium carbonate prices graphically illustrates.
Mrs Rinehart late last year built a 19.9 per cent stake in Liontown which she used to thwart a $6.6 billion takeover bid from American giant Albermarle.
While that left Liontown scrambling to raise cash to independently fund development of its massive Kathleen Valley lithium deposit, a banking syndicate including Australia's big four quickly rode to the rescue with a $760 million finance package.
On Monday, however, that financing was pulled, sending Liontown's share price tumbling 21 per cent. At just 94c, it is way below the $3 a share Mrs Rinehart paid last year for the stock, leaving the company's fate and its future in her hands.
Meanwhile, nickel prices this week hit their lowest levels in three years, having halved in the past 12 months, prompting a wave of shutdowns and curtailed expansion plans.
In response to the forecasts of higher demand, Indonesia – with the help of Chinese investment –dramatically increased production, sending prices crashing.
One of the most prominent victims is another iron ore magnate, Andrew Forrest. Just six months ago, his private company Wyloo splashed out $760 million for three mines near Kambalda in Western Australia. This week, he decided to shut them.
The nickel collapse has threatened the viability of BHP's Western Australian nickel operations and just a month ago another producer, Panoramic Resources, was put into the hands of administrators.
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23 January, 2024
What Happened With The 'Stranded Teslas' EV Charging Panic In Chicago
Frigid weather and electric cars: it’s known for quite some time now that they’re not the best of friends. Even though this frosty relationship isn’t breaking news, a new furor sparked this week following a FOX 32 Chicago report that showcased several Tesla drivers struggling to charge their EVs at a Tesla Supercharger in Oak Brook, Illinois.
As temperatures in this Chicago suburb plummeted to under zero this week for the first time in ages, the situation seemed to have become dire, with owners having to tow their Teslas out on flatbeds because chargers weren’t working, and their EVs had run out of juice. The TV station didn't mince words: “Public charging stations have turned into car graveyards,” reporters said, while calling depleted EVs “dead robots.” A barrage of similar stories emerged out of this report, with several major publications echoing this voice.
The FOX station mentions that some of the stranded owners were those who had just landed at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, which is just 14 miles north of the Oak Brook Supercharger. Tesla’s official documentation says that its cars use around 1% of its battery per day at idle. But if Sentry Mode—which remotely monitors outside conditions via the car's cameras—is enabled, the car can sap as much as 15% of pack capacity in 24 hours. That means someone who leaves Sentry Mode enabled while parked at the airport may return with a significantly reduced battery capacity.
Fortunately, there are several Supercharging stations close to O’Hare. There’s just one problem: at least three of these stations, including the two closest stations (Rosemont and Oak Brook) were reportedly non-functional. In fact, across 13 stations in the region (which, to be clear, is just a handful of the total number of charging locations near Chicago), nearly 50 stalls were said to be out of order.
Our friends over at The Autopian also found reviews on plugshare about Supercharging problems at many of these locations, some of which outlined fights breaking out between owners looking to charge.
Chemistry And User Error Challenges
Battery chemistry is an issue here too. Tesla most commonly uses two different battery chemistries in its cars: Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LFP) and Nickel-Cobalt-Aluminum (NCA). LFP batteries are found in the standard range-trimmed Model 3, for example. The prismatic cells are cheaper to produce and not as energy-dense as cylindrical NCA cells found in the Long Range and Performance variants of the Model 3 and Y.
While both NCA and LFP batteries are affected adversely by cold weather, LFP batteries perform slightly worse. For starters, the overall range is reduced more so than NCA cells. LFP packs also have a harder time charging in colder weather. This means that if the battery pack is unable to precondition—a process that warms the battery up to an optimal temperature making charging more effective—before arriving at a DC fast charger, the overall charging speed will be significantly slower. Couple that with the reduced range in extreme cold, and you’ve got a recipe for arriving at a Supercharger with a state of charge (SoC) in the single digits.
One major thorn in the process was probably the lack of knowledge about battery preconditioning. Preconditioning itself requires energy, so leaving your EV at a low SoC can hamper that process. Owners have pointed out that preconditioning can consume between 7.5 to 12 kilowatt-hours, and those figures can vary depending on the set defrost level and set cabin temperature.
And since Teslas typically stop preconditioning at a lower SoC to avoid running out of charge ahead of reaching a fast charger, that battery conditioning isn’t started until the car is plugged in, which means a slower fast charging session, assuming the charger is functional. If it’s not, it could mean a SoC too low to reach another Supercharging station, thus leaving the car stranded.
It’s also possible that those who were routing to the out-of-service Superchargers were doing so out of memory. Perhaps those individuals rely primarily on Supercharging due to not having a charger of their own at home. The cold weather sapping the range and efficiency coupled with the lack of preconditioning may have caused these owners to become stranded at the Oak Brook Supercharger.
Moreover, owners have highlighted how charging performance declines in bone-chilling weather. One owner said on Reddit that even after preconditioning the battery for 20 minutes, with an additional 10-minute “preconditioning for fast charging,” the Supercharger didn’t immediately add real driving miles.
It’s something Kyle Conner of Out Of Spec Reviews also highlighted in a video that showcases how batteries behave during “deep freeze” conditions. Superchargers often don’t add range until batteries are first heated to optimal temperatures, and even then, stalls engineered to deliver 150-250 kilowatts only deliver 20-50 kW.
Also, it’s high time we accept the reality of EV range in winter, and instead focus on solutions to optimize it.
During the 2022-2023 winter, battery health and data startup Recurrent collected data from 10,000 EVs to analyze the impact of cold weather on the range. After analyzing over two dozen models in the U.S., Recurrent found that the average observed range in winter—range after factoring in real-world variables like climate, terrain, and driving patterns—was 70.3% of their normal range.
Chicago is a busy hub, and this would be similar to many gas stations running out of fuel with a bunch of cars running on fumes pulling up to the pump. Of course, such failures can attract a lot of media coverage. But our readers told us that the cold weather in nearby Michigan has been just as harsh to chargers in that area—five Supercharging locations with 56 stalls outside of Detroit, 12 were recently reported as unavailable.
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Legacy Manufacturer Slashes Production of EV Truck Biden Drove to Promote Green Agenda
Ford is cutting back production of its F-150 Lightning electric vehicle, a model that President Joe Biden took for a test drive to market his administration’s EV agenda.
Ford made the official announcement that it will be reducing its F-150 Lightning output in 2024 amid slower-than-projected growth in EV demand. Biden test drove a F-150 Lightning in Michigan in May 2021 to promote his administration’s EV agenda, which aims for EVs to make up 50% of all new auto sales by 2030.
“Ford is reducing production of F-150 Lightning, the top-selling electric pickup in the U.S., to achieve the optimal balance of production, sales growth and profitability,” the company announced on Friday. “Ford expects continued growth in global EV sales in 2024, though less than anticipated, and is preparing to launch next-generation EVs.”
The company is not currently sharing specific details regarding changes in production volume for the model, a Ford spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation, but earlier reports indicated that the company could slash production by about 50%.
“We see a bright future for electric vehicles for our customers who value their advantages, especially with Ford EV drivers’ access to Tesla superchargers beginning this quarter,” the Ford spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We are engaged with the regulators to help ensure the emission standards align with the market, and Ford will comply with the standards.”
The F-150 Lightning typically costs approximately $50,000 compared to the conventional F-150’s $36,570 price tag, making the EV version considerably more expensive even with the help of $7,500 consumer tax credits provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Biden administration is using enormous government subsidies and aggressive market regulation to push EVs on Americans. Despite these efforts, the industry as a whole finds itself in a tenuous position to start 2024: Ford and several of its competitors are losing vast sums of money on their EV product lines while executives are backing away from short-term production targets.
Additionally, the nation’s charging infrastructure remains highly concentrated in coastal, densely populated regions rather than in the vast American interior as the Biden administration’s $7.5 billion spending blitz to build out a nationwide charging network has been slow to develop. The charging infrastructure that does exist, meanwhile, does not always function properly, whether because of hardware issues or weather conditions.
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Climate chiefs admitted net zero plan based on insufficient data, leading physicist says
Key committee only looked at ‘a single year of data’ when making controversial green energy claims. Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith says the Climate Change Committee admits that a mistake was made
Britain’s climate watchdog has privately admitted that a number of its key net zero recommendations may have relied on insufficient data, it has been claimed.
Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, who led a recent Royal Society study on future energy supply, said that the Climate Change Committee only “looked at a single year” of data showing the number of windy days in a year when it made pronouncements on the extent to which the UK could rely on wind and solar farms to meet net zero.
“They have conceded privately that that was a mistake,” Sir Chris said in a presentation seen by this newspaper. In contrast, the Royal Society review examined 37 years worth of weather data.
Last week Sir Chris, an emeritus professor and former director of energy research at Oxford University, said that the remarks to which he was referring were made by Chris Stark, the Climate Change Committee’s chief executive. He said: “Might be best to say that Chris Stark conceded that my comment that the CCC relied on modelling that only uses a single year of weather data ... is ‘an entirely valid criticism’.”
The CCC said that Sir Chris’s comments, in a presentation given in a personal capacity in October, following the publication of his review, related solely to a particular report it published last year on how to deliver “a reliable decarbonised power system”.
Enshrined in law
But, in response to further questions from this newspaper, the body admitted that its original recommendations in 2019 about the feasibility of meeting the 2050 net zero target, were also based on just one year’s worth of weather data. The recommendations were heavily relied on by ministers when Theresa May enshrined the 2050 target into law. A CCC spokesman said: “We stand by the analysis.”
In October 2021 The Sunday Telegraph revealed that assumptions underpinning the committee’s 2019 advice to ministers included a projection that in 2050 there would be just seven days on which wind turbines would produce less than 10 per cent of their potential electricity output. That compared to 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018, according to analysis by Net Zero Watch, a campaign group.
Sir Chris’s report for the Royal Society, published in September, concluded that a vast network of hydrogen-filled caves was needed to guard against the risk of blackouts under the shift to wind and solar generation, which the Royal Society described as “volatile” because it depends on wind and sun to produce energy.
The report was one of the starkest warnings to date of the risks faced when relying on intermittent weather-dependent energy sources without sufficient backup.
Overestimate
It stated: “The UK’s need for long-term energy storage has been seriously underestimated... Studies that do not consider long sequences of years underestimate the need for long-term storage. Studies of single years cannot cast light directly on the need for storage lasting over 12 months and overestimate the need for other supplies.”
In a presentation delivered on Oct 31 2023, Sir Chris said: “By looking at one year you underestimate storage and you grossly overestimate the need for everything else. That’s exactly what the Committee on Climate Change have done.”
He added: “The Committee on Climate Change, as I already said, looked at a single year and they have conceded privately that that was a mistake. But they are still saying they don’t differ that much from us. Well that’s not quite true.”
The Royal Society report found that up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed by 2050, to mitigate variations in wind and sunshine. This was based on 37 years of weather data rather than the single year relied on by the CCC.
Real weather data
The report noted that the CCC model required “a much greater level of supply ... from other sources, and/or wind and solar than would have been required if storage had been allowed to transfer energy between years.”
A CCC spokesman said: “Our recent report modelled the 12-month operation of Britain’s power system in 2035 using hourly energy demand and real weather data from a low-wind year, stress-tested to simulate a 30-day wind drought.
“We welcome Sir Chris’ work, which considers other aspects of the energy challenge in 2050, under different assumptions about the future energy mix.” Asked if the CCC disputed Sir Chris’s account, the spokesman said: “We’ve got nothing further to add.”
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Energy bills must rise to pay for Net Zero, says Siemens Energy boss
The German boss of Britain’s biggest wind turbine maker has warned energy bills will have to keep rising to pay for the green transition as he attacked “fairytale” thinking about net zero.
Joe Kaeser, chairman of Siemens Energy, suggested higher energy bills were inevitable as turbine makers grapple with huge losses, forcing them to pass on costs to their customers.
The company is the owner of the UK’s biggest wind turbine manufacturing site, in Hull, and employs thousands of British workers.
Mr Kaeser said manufacturers had become locked in a harmful “rat race” to build ever-bigger turbines and claimed developers and governments were in denial about the costs this entailed.
He also warned that inflation is battering industry balance sheets and warned of separate growing problems with faults and breakdowns in the sector.
Mr Kaeser told The Telegraph: “Every transformation comes at a cost and every transformation is painful. And that’s something which the energy industry and the public sector - governments - don’t really want to hear.
“I believe that for a while [customers] need to accept higher pricing.
“And then there might be innovation – about the weight of the blades, other efficiency methods, technology – so the cost can then go down again.
“But the point is, if there is no profit pool in an industry, why should that industry innovate?”
His comments come after the UK Government bowed to industry pressure in November and increased the power prices offered in future renewable energy auctions, after a competition in the summer received no bids from offshore wind developers.
The earlier auction flop triggered serious doubts that the UK would be able to meet its target of 50 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr Kaeser criticised what he described as “a lot of big mouths but little action” that had gone on for years in the wind industry.
Governments and developers are failing to follow through on their own green transition promises quickly enough, he said, while many are reluctant to admit the full costs of their plans to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
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22 January, 2024
Italian activists now face huge fines
Climate protestors could face fines of up to €60,000 for damaging monuments or cultural sites in Italy.
Under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Italy is cracking down on everything from English language to raves and synthetic meat to ChatGPT.
The right-wing PM’s latest bugbear is climate protestors.
On Tuesday (11 April) the Italian government announced plans to bring in hefty fines for people who damage monuments or cultural sites.
The penalties are aimed at activists who in recent weeks have made headlines for their public stunts highlighting the climate crisis.
Two environmental activists from the Last Generation protest group are the latest to receive a large fine as well as a suspended jail sentence.
Why is Italy ramping up fines for criminal damage?
At the start of April, members of climate activism organisation Last Generation turned the waters in Rome’s La Barcaccia fountain black to draw attention to the country’s water crisis.
This is the latest in a long line of eye-catching protests, ranging from activists glueing themselves to a famous painting in Florence to hurling paint at Milan's La Scala opera house.
Under the new law, actions like this would be punishable with fines of between €10,000 and €60,000. This will be additional to existing fines and prison sentences for criminal damage.
This week, two members of the Last Generation climate protest group were fined €30,000 and given a suspended prison sentence for damages during a stunt last year. The activists glued themselves to the base of the ancient Laocoon statue housed in the Vatican museums.
Italy’s Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano says the fines will be used to cover the cleanup costs of such actions.
The bill also targets vandalism and antisocial activity carried out by tourists in Italy - such as last year’s incident of an Australian riding a moped through Pompeii. It is yet to pass through parliament.
Laws like this one have been criticised as a ‘weapon of mass distraction’ from more urgent issues like the energy and cost of living crisis.
The UK is also cracking down on climate protest tactics
Across Europe, activists have been blocking roads and runways, targeting monuments and disrupting oil refineries to draw public attention to the climate crisis.
The legal response has been most severe in the UK, which ramped up fines and prison sentences last summer for those defacing public monuments.
Damage of less than £5,000 (€5,675) was previously subject to a maximum three-month prison sentence. This has now been raised to 10 years.
This was partly in response to widespread targeting of statues in 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests but also targets an ongoing wave of climate actions.
The UK has also cracked down on ‘disruptive’ protests, giving police wider powers to shut them down and arrest participants. In some incidents, protestors have been detained for six months before trial due to a backlog of cases.
The recently announced Public Order Bill criminalises the protest tactic of individuals attaching themselves to others, objects or buildings to cause serious disruption. The offence will carry a maximum penalty of six months' imprisonment, an unlimited fine, or both
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Are kids starting to see through the climate cult?
Should it really be any surprise that not all teenagers are on the same page as Greta Thunberg? According to a poll by Survation, 31 per cent of Britons between the ages of 13 and 17 agree with the statement ‘climate change and its effects are being purposefully overexaggerated.’
It does rather restore faith in the current generation of teenagers to realise that a third of them can see through this guff
I am not entirely sure what is meant by the now commonplace concept of ‘overexaggeration’ – which presumably means something beyond the optimum level of exaggeration – but never mind. I’ll take it as the teenagers themselves presumably interpreted it: that they are not entirely convinced by the rhetoric thrown at them daily, such as ‘the world is on fire’ (Greta Thunberg) or ‘there will be the slaughter, death, and starvation of six billion people’ (Rogar Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion) or ‘we have five years to save the planet’ (the World Wildlife Fund in, er, 2007) and think that the reality is quite likely a lot more modest than that.
But, no, this can’t possibly be a sign of teenagers thinking for themselves and working out that climate activists are spinning apocalyptical visions to promote their cause. Rather it is a sign that our youth have fallen victim to a dark conspiracy to poison their minds with shameless lies. Or so the Center for Countering Digital Hate (‘hate’ in this case seeming to mean anything which diverges from its own left-wing views) seems to think. It says it has analysed 96 YouTube channels which it thinks might be responsible, including ones which have spread such blatant untruths as ‘climate policies are ineffective or flawed’ (they are, as we all know, fully-baked and 100 per cent effective) or that ‘Clean energy technology or biofuels won’t work’ (it is wrong to single out wind and solar energy sources as being intermittent, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, because gas and coal powered stations sometimes need to be taken offline, too). It also seems to think it is a lie to deny that the world is suffering from more storms – even though that assertion is flatly contradicted by the observational evidence presented by the IPCC.
The world, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, is engaged in an ‘enlightenment battle of truth and science versus lies and greed’. And YouTube and other social media platforms are disgracefully giving airtime to the latter when of course they should only be hosting videos informing us that we are all going to die.
It does rather restore faith in the current generation of teenagers to realise that a third of them can see this guff for what it is: left-wing activism trying to erect a false divide between ‘science’ and unreason. When today’s teenagers reach adulthood and start witnessing predicted doomsdays pass without incident I dare say a few more of them will move into the camp which believes there is quite a bit of exaggeration over climate change.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/are-kids-starting-to-see-through-the-climate-cult/
*************************************************Right, Wall Street Journal, John Kerry Did Fail to Persuade China to Give Up Reliable Energy
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) ran an article noting that despite John Kerry’s failure as President Joe Biden’s climate envoy to get China to curb its coal use in order to save the world from climate change, Kerry is now being brought over to Biden’s reelection campaign. If Kerry does as good a job with Biden’s campaign as he did in changing the course of the world’s fossil fuel use, Biden’s reelection efforts are in trouble. The WSJ is right, Kerry failed in his biggest mission as the U.S. climate czar, curbing greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries, especially China.
Describing Kerry’s lack of success, the WSJ wrote:
For three years Mr. Kerry has been preoccupied with getting China to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. But excluding emissions from land use and forestry, China’s emissions rose 13% between 2015 and 2023, according to Climate Action Tracker estimates. U.S. emissions fell by some 9% over the same period.
You can’t say Mr. Kerry hasn’t tried to persuade China, including the use of green flattery. “China has produced more renewable energy, more solar and wind than any other country,” he said last year.
But China’s CO2 emissions have still soared as demand for electricity surged. In 2022 China accounted for 53% of the world’s coal generation, the Ember think tank says, and new permits for coal power plants in 2022 reached “the highest level since 2015.” That’s the year Beijing signed the Paris climate accord Mr. Kerry negotiated, promising to reduce its emissions starting in 2030.
China also expanded it coal mining, despite Kerry’s efforts, setting a new record for production in 2023.
In September 2023, Kerry’s counterpart, Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said, “It is unrealistic to completely phase out fossil fuel energy,” echoing statement made by China’s President Xi Jinping 2022 that the country’s carbon dioxide policies, “can’t be detached from reality.”
Looking at some of those realities, one can see that regardless of what one believes about humanity’s role (or lack thereof) in climate change. Kerry’s climate outreach to China and elsewhere was largely an expensive fool’s errand.
An article on Turning Point USA points out that the salary for Kerry’s small staff cost U.S. taxpayers $4.3 million each year, with all but one of the 27 employees with the office of Special Presidential Envoy for Climate making more than $100,000 per year. This doesn’t include the costs of office space and equipment, travel, and other associated costs with running Kerry’s independent office. I say independent because Kerry’s position was created by President Biden, reporting only to him. Despite being charged with negotiating international climate agreements, Kerry’s office was outside the normal chain of command. It was not part of the State Department, and Kerry did not report to the Secretary of State.
All that money bought no climate progress. During Kerry’s time as Special Climate Envoy, coal use set new records. In 2023, the International Energy Agency reported:
“The demand for coal is seen rising 1.4 percent in 2023, surpassing 8.5 billion tonnes for the first time as usage in India is expected to grow 8 percent and that in China up 5 percent due to rising electricity demand and weak hydropower output, IEA said in a report released on Friday,” writes Al Jazeera, reporting io the IEA’s findings.
Indeed, data from Statista shows that the capacity of the coal plants announced, permitted, and under construction have risen each year since Kerry was on the job, reversing a declining trend global trend in coal power construction that existed under the Trump administration.
To be fair, John Kerry does not run China, India, or any of the other developing countries where coal use for electric power generation and industrial uses is rising, but his main job was to persuade the leaders of those countries to shift to alternative, less reliable, more expensive forms of energy, as Western Europe and the United States are largely doing. In that task, he abjectly failed. And the reason for the failure is clear, the Biden administration with Kerry as its point man, put climate pipe dreams above economic realities of the developing world.
The result was aptly summed up by the WSJ, writing, “Mr. Kerry’s problem has been a failure to recognize reality, which is typical of America’s climate lobby.”
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Wrong, Harvard, Alarmists’ Media Stories, Not Climate Change, Are to Blame for Mental Trauma
A recent news post at the Harvard School of Public Health “Understanding the mental health consequences of chronic climate change,” claims that climate change, which researchers dub “chronic,” is leading to negative mental health consequences for people around the world. Researchers claim that long-term, gradual changes to the environment are also traumatic. This is false. While natural disasters can traumatize those who survive them, individual weather events can’t be causally linked to climate change, and since environmental changes have always occurred throughout human history, Harvard’s new hypothesis is worthless or empty. In reality, and especially in the Western world, it is frantic and alarmist media coverage that leads to self-reporting of climate change related anxiety.
In answer to a question about gaps in what is known about how climate change impacts mental health, researcher and assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Christy Denckla said that we “already know a lot about the mental health effects of climate-related disasters like hurricanes and wildfires.”
Indeed, Climate Realism has on several occasions, here, here, and here, for instance, refuted claims that suggest climate change itself, through the impact of natural disasters, is causing anxiety and other mental health problems. The reality in those cases is that while suffering through an extreme weather event, during which lives and property may be lost, definitely can be traumatic, no one would blame that trauma on “climate change” had the media not told them the weather event was caused by it.
In one particularly egregious example, several news outlets back in 2023 reported on a study that analyzed individuals who survived the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California, and found widespread diagnoses of PTSD, anxiety, and depression. The researchers blamed those mental health problems on climate change. However climate change did not cause the fire in Paradise, poor maintenance of power lines did. Nor has the modest warming of the past century or so caused any statistically significant change in the number or severity of wildfires on Earth. In fact, data from NASA suggests that the amount of land lost to wildfires each year has declined substantially.
The same goes for hurricanes – there is no statistically significant trend in the number or severity of tropical cyclones and hurricanes.
This new research Harvard is reporting on further expands upon these previously debunked claims into even more nebulous territory. In addition to blaming mental health issues on particular weather events, Denckla goes on to explain that “the most urgent research priority is to understand the mechanisms through which slower-moving aspects of climate change such as temperature variability, ecosystem shifts, and changes in precipitation affect mental health.”
She goes on to say that the effects of climate change disproportionately impact particular populations, like “adolescents and children, indigenous communities, displaced migrants, economically marginalized groups, and nations and regions on the frontline of the climate crisis, such as Africa and countries most vulnerable to climate extremes.”
It is true that the poor and people in the third world are more impacted by natural disasters, in large part because they do not have as storm-resilient infrastructure as wealthier parts of the world do, and have less access to good medical care, and the food abundance delivered by modern agricultural systems built on fossil fuels. Meteorological drought, for example, in a small sub-Saharan tribal community without water storage and transport will produce more severe misery and harm than a similar drought would for the people of a developed city like Phoenix, Arizona.
Denckla seems to suggest that modern warming is a novel situation that uniquely impacts human mental health, however history clearly demonstrates that human civilizations have always suffered from natural disasters and slowly changing ecosystems and landscapes. Nature is never in stasis.
What is certain, however, is that climate change alarmism is the overwhelming narrative consensus pushed by mainstream media and activists. Climate Realism responds to disinformation every day from the media, and despite occasionally acknowledging that the “catastrophe” angle taken on climate-related issues is going too far, they continue to double down. It would be surprising if the constant battering by false and inflammatory climate news did not negatively impact the mental health of media besotted adults and children, alike. The ratcheting up of hysterical coverage, misleadingly linking damage from natural disasters to climate change, while harping on the fact no major climate policies are being passed, is leading to depression and anxiety about the future. It would serve the mental health of the general public better if Harvard devoted some resources to an alternative study, about how fearmongering by the media leads to mental health issues, and better still if its scholars began following and promoting the data which shows that no climate crisis is in the offing.
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21 January, 2024
The Greenland ice sheets are melting much, much more quickly than anticipated
Ho Hum! As usual no mention of subsurface vulcanism. And the ice loss is mostly along the West coast, exactly where the subsurface volcanoes are
To give them their due, the galoots below did NOT attribute the ice loss to global warming, which is rather heroic of them
New data suggests the extent of ice sheet loss since 1985 has been underestimated by as much as 20 per cent, scientists wrote in a new paper published in Nature.
More freshwater ice in the Atlantic could affect ocean circulation, disrupt fish ecosystems and accelerate the melting process, contributing to rising sea levels.
How the ice loss was missed
The paper, Ubiquitous acceleration in Greenland Ice Sheet calving from 1985 to 2022, describes how scientists have failed to consider the full impact of ice calving – when large chunks of ice break off from the edge of a glacier.
“The surprise was just the ubiquity of the signal,” said lead author Chad Greene, a glaciologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. With the exception of “one minuscule little glacier” that grew modestly, Greene said, “there’s just been retreat everywhere we’ve looked. It’s on every corner of the island.”
NASA satellites tracked a rapid decline in the mass of the ice sheet between 2001 and 2021, when it shed 280 billion tonnes of ice a year on average. That marked a significant acceleration compared with the preceding decades and is equivalent to 767 million tonnes of ice lost every day.
The above animation, which is based on data from NASA satellites, appears darker where ice mass was lost between 2002 and 2022. The barely perceptible blue patches represent growth in ice mass, while white means little to no change.
Most of the loss was along Greenland’s west coast, while central high-altitude areas were relatively unchanged. Lower elevation and coastal areas lost five metres worth of water over the 19-year period.
Impact on rising sea levels
Much of the newly discovered lost ice shelf was already underwater, so while the additional mass identified by the team will have affected ocean circulation and temperatures, it will not have contributed to rising sea levels directly.
However, this loss means more of Greenland’s mainland will be exposed to warming waters which, in turn, lead to melting and rising seas.
“What we’re seeing is that the clog in this bottleneck has been removed, and as a result, the glaciers all around Greenland have been able to speed up the melting process,” Greene said. “You take the ice out of the fjord and glaciers speed up and start contributing to sea level rise.”
Disrupting ocean cycles
Large blocks of freshwater ice floating away into the ocean are problematic as they could disrupt the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation, a crucial ocean circulation pattern.
Ice cannot hold salt, so when seawater freezes in the Arctic, the salt sinks to the bottom making the water denser. The denser water then moves south with cold currents, and the warm water rises to the surface and flows north in response. This cycle warms Europe and distributes crucial nutrients for ocean life.
It is not known how the large chunks of ice floating off into the sea will affect this cycle, but they have not been included in climate models. In the long term, it will depend on where the billions of tonnes of freshwater end up – and that is not easy to predict.
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/greenland-s-ice-sheet-is-shrinking-much-faster-than-we-thought-here-s-what-it-means-20240118-p5eya8.html
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Supreme Court Hears Fishermen’s Challenges to Costly Regulatory Authority of Feds
The U.S. Supreme Court took up two cases Wednesday regarding the regulatory authority of the federal government as fishermen argue that government agencies are exceeding their authority by imposing costly mandates.
In Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. vs. Department of Commerce, fishermen are challenging administrative law, dubbed “Chevron deference,” that asserts that when a federal statute is ambiguous about specific regulations, courts should defer to the implementing agency’s interpretation of the law.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration implemented a rule in 2020 forcing fishing companies (such as Relentless Inc.) to pay for federal observers to monitor the fishermen at sea on their own fishing boats—even though Congress did not give the agency authority to do so.
The fishermen argue that the mandate violates the U.S. Constitution’s Article I, accusing the agencies of exceeding their statutory authority.
“Overregulation is imperiling the future of American fisheries and the maritime communities who depend on them,” Jerry Leeman, founder and CEO of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, said in a statement. “Worse still, fishermen have long struggled to fight back, because Chevron deference skews the legal process in the government’s favor. We thank the fishermen plaintiffs in this case, who are truly relentless.”
Paying for the monitors is also expensive, costing more than $700 a day, according to the New Civil Liberties Alliance (the nonprofit organization representing Relentless Inc.), which might often exceed the fishermen’s daily profits for herring, the species the boats and the North Atlantic fishery involved are mostly focused on.
“It is time for the Supreme Court to fish or cut bait on the Chevron doctrine,” said Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance. “This deference charade has gone on long enough. Executive agencies cannot be allowed to serve as judges in their own cases any longer.”
While Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have called for curtailing Chevron deference, Fox News reports, Chief Justice John Roberts’ and Justices Brett Kavanaugh’s and Amy Coney Barrett’s views on the matter remain to be seen. Justice Samuel Alito is seen as entertaining some skepticism of Chevron deference. The three liberal justices, by contrast, are thought to see no constitutional problem with it.
In a press release, the New Civil Liberties Alliance argued that “when a federal judge defers to an agency’s interpretation of law, doing so denies due process of law to the entity opposed to the government in that litigation.”
“Employing such a deference also abandons a judge’s Article III duty of judicial independence,” the release asserts. “The logic of Chevron deference cannot withstand this devastating dual critique.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/17/supreme-court-hears-fishermens-challenges-to-costly-regulatory-authority-of-feds/
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Are Hurricanes Really Getting Worse or Is That Really Just Climate Alarmists’ Hot Air?
Climate alarmists, including President Joe Biden, have consistently said that America could look forward to worsening hurricanes and extreme weather, thanks to climate change.
In fact, at COP28 in Dubai, there was talk about creating a fund to aid countries incurring damages from hurricanes due to climate change.
Don’t take the bait. Such inane arguments do nothing but generate clamor for raising money to solve a nonexistent problem.
Just look at the data. For example, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data in Chart 1 depict the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. mainland from 1851 through 2022.
Hurricanes are categorized according to severity by the Saffir-Simpson Category Index at levels ranging from 1 (least severe, exceeding 74 mph winds) to 5 (most severe, exceeding 157 mph winds).
As the chart illustrates, there has been significant variability in hurricanes since 1851, with no meaningful increase since preindustrial times.
Since the start of the 20th century, America has seen an average of 17 hurricanes per decade, with slightly more than five hurricanes per decade exceeding Category 3 levels. That data also indicates that there were slightly more than two hurricanes at or exceeding Category 4 levels (exceeding 130 mph winds) per decade and thus relatively rare.
Myriad factors affect hurricanes, and the associated variation and unpredictability of such factors make it difficult to isolate trends. For example, oceanic temperature events such as El Nino and La Nina, as well longer-term cycles, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), may contribute greatly to the incidence and severity of hurricanes in particular localities.
When the Atlantic Ocean was cold in the 1960s to early 1990s (negative AMO), Atlantic storms were much less frequent and landfalls were mostly limited to the Gulf Coast. On the other hand, when the Atlantic swung into its multidecadal warm mode in the late 1990s, the activity in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled on average, and some hurricanes made landfall further north, as we had seen in the prior warm period from 1938 to 1960.
A broader, global analysis can allow scientists to see beyond such seesaw effects. Fortunately, good satellite technology to enable comprehensive observation of global—including oceanic—behavior has been available for the past several decades.
Chart 2 provides satellite-based data on global hurricane frequency from Colorado State University since 1980.
As it illustrates, over the past four decades, there has been no clear global long-term trend in either the number of total hurricanes (maximum sustained winds of 64 knots or greater) or major hurricanes (Category 3+).
During the 21st century, Isabel in 2003; Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne in 2004; and Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma in 2005 all made landfall. The year 2005 holds the record for five Category 4 and four Category 5 storms.
At the time, some speculated this would be the new norm for the Atlantic hurricane season due to climate change. The National Academies of Sciences in the United States and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom were just two among many scientific organizations issuing statements about human-caused warming. The devastating 2005 hurricane season hardly seemed coincidental.
However, after the active 2005 season and before the landfall of two major storms on the U.S. in 2017, the U.S. went 4,324 days (just short of 12 years) without a major hurricane landfall, exceeding the prior record eight-year lull in the 1860s.
Obviously, no one ever wants to deal with hurricanes or extreme weather. The reality is, however, such events are inevitable, and we need to be able to adapt to them.
But instead of advocating for damage-mitigation funds for a nonexistent increase in hurricanes, lawmakers should seek to promote, and not stifle, economic growth to enable Americans to have higher incomes.
These types of positive efforts will be the best way to equip people to deal with these and other adverse events that may come their way.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/19/are-hurricanes-really-getting-worse-or-is-that-really-just-climate-alarmists-hot-air/
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Crooked Greenie scientist
The University of Western Australia scientist found by the Federal Court to have “lied” when preparing a report that helped block Santos’s $5bn Barossa gas project had earlier been compelled to make multiple corrections to another disputed piece of work.
But oil and gas giant Woodside Energy says it will not be carrying out any review of the work done by Mick O’Leary that found the undersea pipeline at Woodside’s contentious $US12bn Scarborough LNG project would have little to no impact on archaeological heritage values in the rock art-rich Burrup region.
The findings delivered this week by Federal Court Justice Natalie Charlesworth savaged Dr O’Leary’s research into the potential impact of Santos’s Barossa pipeline on underwater cultural heritage sites and sacred dreaming places of Tiwi Islanders.
In handing down her decision dismissing the Tiwi Islanders’ legal challenge to Barossa, Justice Charlesworth was scathing of Dr O’Leary’s conduct while carrying out cultural mapping.
“Dr O’Leary’s admission was freely volunteered, such that he did not lie to the court. But he did lie to the Tiwi Islanders, and I find that he did so because he wanted his ‘cultural mapping’ exercise to be used in a way that would stop the pipeline,” she said.
“It is conduct far flung from proper scientific method and falls short of an expert’s obligation to this court.”
The court’s findings cast new light on the stoush that has played out inside UWA in recent years, with Dr O’Leary’s colleagues having previously raised issues with some of his methods.
UWA researchers led by geoarchaeologist Ingrid Ward and her husband Piers Larcombe in 2022 wrote a paper that was highly critical of the findings made by Dr O’Leary and others in their research into Indigenous artefacts on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula.
Dr O’Leary and his colleagues fired back with a retort describing the critique as a “wet straw man”. The response dismissed “armchair critics ignorant of recent developments in the field” and said “their critique is detrimental to the development of this entire field of archaeology, as well as damaging to the rights and interests of coastal Indigenous communities throughout Australia”.
But Dr O’Leary also went on to publish in June 2023 a correction to his original report, making multiple revisions to his original text. Those corrections included addressing errors in three statistical analyses and “additional discussion of interpretations”.
That original report was prepared by a group called Deep History of Sea Country, a collection of academics from various Australian universities and which has won more than $2m in funding from the Australian Research Council since 2017.
The group’s project with the biggest ARC grant – worth just over $1.1m – began on July 1 last year, just a fortnight before the corrections to the original report were formally published.
Despite Dr O’Leary’s corrections, in December Dr Ward and Dr Larcombe’s paper was retracted. The journal Geoarchaelogy said the retraction was the result of “evidence confirming that the required university approvals were not sought prior to the research being conducted”.
Dr Larcombe, who had earlier questioned whether Dr O’Leary should maintain his position at UWA in the wake of the Federal Court’s findings, said he still stood by the scientific content of the criticism. The retraction, he said, was “not about the quality of the science” and that the process that led to retraction was still under review.
Woodside, meanwhile, confirmed that it would not be re-examining the work Dr O’Leary did for the company when it was assessing the cultural impact of its proposed Scarborough pipeline.
Dr O’Leary in 2021 helped design a research project to assess areas of archaeological prospectivity along the pipeline route within the proposed development area. Sea level changes since the last ice age mean some artefact-rich and heritage-rich areas of the Burrup Peninsula are now underwater, and Dr O’Leary’s research helped establish that the Scarborough pipeline plans would not damage potentially undiscovered rock art examples. The Scarborough project has attracted opposition from some Indigenous groups, with one of those – Save Our Songlines – last year securing a court injunction against Scarborough’s seismic testing program.
“Woodside does not intend to reassess an earlier scope of work undertaken by Dr O’Leary between 2020 – 2021, which was also subject to independent expert review. Dr O’Leary was one of several contributors to a suite of work relating to the identification of submerged cultural heritage, which also included close consultation with Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation,” a spokesman for the company said.
“Woodside considers Dr O’Leary’s contribution was within his area of expertise and exceeded baseline industry standards.”
The Federal Court’s findings have also sparked scrutiny of the potential conflicts that can arise when academics are commissioned to consult on projects.
Professor Peter Ridd, a physicist who was sacked from his role at James Cook University after he flagged concerns over some of the university’s climate change research, told The Weekend Australian that Santos should consider taking legal action against UWA in the wake of the court’s findings.
He said it would take such a legal challenge for universities to increase the intellectual rigour and scrutiny applied to consultancy work. “If Santos actually takes UWA to court, it will start to concentrate the minds of universities to actually do the job they’re supposed to do,” he said, adding: “UWA should carry a significant fraction of the responsibility for what happened.”
Santos declined to comment on whether it was considering any further legal options.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/earlier-red-flags-for-scientist-at-centre-of-barossa-debacle/news-story/1ced4f7236e30a96d2a52da5efec1ce2
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18 January, 2024
Carbon Tariff Coalition Letter
Dear Members of Congress:
As the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is reportedly going to mark-up the PROVE IT Act (S. 1863) this week, the undersigned organizations want to express strong opposition to carbon tariffs and the PROVE IT Act. This legislation is a gateway for a carbon tax on imported goods and a domestic carbon tax.
It is shocking that legislators would contemplate advancing policy that would increase taxes, drive up prices for American families, harm workers and those on fixed incomes, and punish energy use.
Yet this is precisely what a carbon tariff does. A carbon tariff is two taxes in one. First, a carbon tariff is a tax on imported goods, borne by American consumers, workers, and businesses. Once the structure for imposing a carbon tariff has been established, it can then be used to impose a domestic carbon tax.
To think that the government would develop the administrative infrastructure to impose a domestic carbon tax without following through is naïve, at best. If the United States were to impose a tax on imports based on their carbon intensity, then there would be an expectation that domestic goods would be subjected to a comparable tax-based scheme. In fact, a domestic carbon tax might be required to meet international trade obligations.
The PROVE IT Act is not a benign government measurement scheme that will exist for knowledge purposes. It would create a detailed carbon-emissions measuring system for domestic and foreign goods, putting into place exactly what is needed to implement a carbon tariff and a domestic carbon tax.
Some proponents assert that the PROVE IT Act will help respond to the European Union’s (EU) carbon tax, otherwise identified as a carbon border adjustment mechanism. The United States should push back against the EU’s extreme green policies and not, under any circumstances, accept their disastrous environmental and energy policies.
The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism and carbon tariffs are a way to impose extraterritorial regulations. Recently, we have seen these types of regulations domestically, as American farmers know all too well. Some states have imposed barriers to selling goods, such as eggs and pork, based not on the nature of the goods but due to moral and ethical preferences on how food should be produced.
Just imagine foreign countries trying to impose their moral preferences on Americans by using tariffs as leverage over how the U.S. uses energy or how American farmers produce food. Carbon tariffs and the PROVE IT Act will help establish this precedent.
Maybe even worse than the imposition of all these new taxes is the purpose of the taxes. They are taxes to punish energy use. Since more than 80 percent of the world’s energy comes from coal, natural gas, and oil, which produce carbon dioxide emissions, a carbon tariff is a tax on the energy that makes modern life possible.
It would make medical care, housing, communications, food, and transportation less affordable, especially for people who already struggle to pay their bills. It would have a disproportionate impact on the poor and hurt those on fixed incomes, the elderly, and local institutions like hospitals, libraries, and schools.
The PROVE IT Act and carbon tariffs are not just bad policy, but bad politics. After all, supporting new taxes and opposing affordable and reliable energy is a toxic concoction.
A new survey sponsored by the American Energy Alliance and the Committee to Unleash Prosperity found that most Americans opposed a carbon tariff on imported goods, with 63 percent of Republicans opposed.
This opposition to paying carbon or energy taxes becomes even clearer when respondents were asked what they are willing to pay each year to address climate change. The median response was just $10, and 35 percent (including 17 percent of Democrats) said they are unwilling to pay anything. American Energy Alliance president Thomas Pyle captured the results very well:
The results reconfirm what we already knew: voters are not willing to pay any tax associated with carbon dioxide or energy – including a carbon dioxide or energy tax on imported goods. Those who believe in limited government and free energy markets continue to be allied with the vast majority of voters concerning the destructive and pointless nature of carbon dioxide taxes and on the fundamentals of the climate change issue.
As the markup of the PROVE IT Act approaches, there may be disingenuous gimmicks such as amending the bill to say it may not be used to impose a carbon tariff. Such a provision does not change the fact that the foundation would have been created to impose a carbon tariff and domestic carbon tax. Any new legislation could easily get rid of such a prohibition, and that is exactly what would happen.
The PROVE IT Act and other carbon tariffs efforts show a complete disregard for what matters to Americans. They want affordable, reliable energy to power their homes and lives, not government meddling that drives up their household bills. They don’t want federal schemes that treat energy use as a sin.
We strongly urge legislators to oppose the PROVE IT Act and any other legislation dealing with carbon tariffs.
Sincerely,
Daren Bakst
Director, Center for Energy and Environment
Competitive Enterprise Institute
https://cei.org/coalition_letters/carbon-tariff-coalition-letter/
************************************************Electric Vehicle Mandates Are Coming, but Are EVs Even Practical in Cold-Weather States?
In the lot of Eau Claire, Wisconsin’s, local Ford dealership, dominated by an impressive lineup of F-150 pickup trucks and SUVs, I asked the salesman, Joe, about buying an electric vehicle. It turns out that not many EVs are sold in Eau Claire.
Joe told me that he typically sells about one or two electric vehicles for every 100 gasoline-powered cars. Since there were only a couple EVs he could point to on the lot, we went inside to see an electric sedan, a 2023 Ford Mach E.
It was far more than I could afford, but I inquired about how it performs. Joe said it can take over 40 hours to charge with a standard 120V three-prong wall outlet. Upgrading to a faster charger, the 240V outlet, is costly and requires new electrical wiring to the garage in most cases. This can be difficult or impossible for people who have old homes, rent their homes, or simply can’t afford it.
The car’s advertised range of just 250 miles doesn’t account for driving with the heat on, which reduces the range. While the Midwest had a mild start to the winter season, evading the cold altogether is an elusive endeavor in Eau Claire. Temperatures are expected to struggle to rise above zero degrees Fahrenheit this week, and battery-powered vehicles lose up to 40% of their range in the cold. When the wind chill is 30 degrees below zero, you can bet every car has the heat on as hot as it goes. It’s no surprise that Joe hardly sells any EVs.
When deciding on a vehicle to purchase, Joe suggested considering the environmental implications of driving the vehicle. It’s overly optimistic to assume that the environmental advantages of electric vehicles will outweigh their practical drawbacks. Driving an EV instead of a gasoline-powered car has no discernible effect on the climate.
While electric vehicles do not emit carbon dioxide during operation, they depend on fossil fuels for the electricity needed to charge their batteries, particularly in Wisconsin. With an average of barely three hours of direct sunlight per day in winter, solar power plummets to a third of the summertime capacity (and that’s when the panels aren’t covered in snow).
Additionally, manufacturing an EV emits nearly twice the amount of carbon dioxide compared to manufacturing a gasoline vehicle, and mining for battery components has other environmentally damaging effects.
All of the car, truck, train, and plane emissions in America account for about 3.9% of global carbon emissions. Even if America abandoned all fossil fuels overnight, it would hardly affect our climate.
Kevin Dayaratna, chief statistician at The Heritage Foundation, used government models to show that completely eliminating all fossil fuels from the United States would yield less than a 0.2 degree Celsius reduction in temperature by the year 2100. There may be reasons to purchase an EV, but saving the environment is not a good one. (The Daily Signal is the media outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
While China’s carbon emissions are more than double those in America, President Joe Biden wants Americans to foot the bill for reducing the world’s carbon. Going all-in on electric vehicles means our capacity to supply electricity must necessarily skyrocket.
In return, Americans will get higher electricity bills, a further reliance on China, and no environmental benefits. Biden’s goal of mandating that 60% of new vehicles are electric by 2030 will increase the cost of energy—disproportionately hurting the poor. According to last month’s special report from The Heritage Foundation on affordable and reliable energy, access to affordable energy directly influences access to safe water, health care, food, and cleaner environments.
Biden should leave car-purchasing decisions to individuals and not force them to buy EVs. If electric vehicles surpass gasoline vehicles in functionality or affordability, government subsidies and tax incentives would be unnecessary. People didn’t need tax credits for kerosene when they transitioned from using whale oil for lamps. They bought it because it was more efficient and it burned brighter.
While my trip to the dealership did not end with my joining the 0.1% of Wisconsinites who own an electric vehicle, maybe I’ll consider one when they can outperform gasoline-powered SUVs during a subzero January in Wisconsin.
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UK: Green Tories facing general election wipeout
The Conservatives are heading for an electoral wipeout on the scale of their 1997 defeat by Labour, the most authoritative opinion poll in five years has predicted.
The YouGov survey of 14,000 people forecasts that the Tories will retain just 169 seats, while Labour will sweep to power with 385 – giving Sir Keir Starmer a 120-seat majority.
Every Red Wall seat won from Labour by Boris Johnson in 2019 will be lost, the poll indicates, and the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will be one of 11 Cabinet ministers to lose their seats.
The Tories will win 196 fewer seats than in 2019, more than the 178 Sir John Major lost in 1997.
The poll exposes the huge influence that Reform UK is set to have on the election result. The Right-wing party would not win any seats, but support for it would be the decisive factor in 96 Tory losses – the difference between a Labour majority and a hung Parliament.
The result would be the biggest collapse in support for a governing party since 1906, with an 11.5 per cent swing to Labour. …
Writing for The Telegraph, Lord Frost, the Conservative peer, described the poll’s findings as “stunningly awful” for the party, saying it was facing “a 1997-style wipeout – if we are lucky”.
He said a combination of tactical voting and any decision by Nigel Farage to return to front-line politics could leave the Conservatives facing “an extinction event”.
Lord Frost added that the only way to avoid the likely defeat was “to be as tough as it takes on immigration, reverse the debilitating increases in tax, end the renewables tax on energy costs – and much more”.
James Johnson, a former Number 10 pollster, said the figures suggested any possible path to victory for the Conservatives had “all but vanished”.
He said the data showed the Tories were haemorrhaging the votes of Leave supporters who backed them in 2019 and would be punished by those voters “if they do not get tough on migration – fast”.
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A French-led energy insurrection against renewables
The final days of 2023 were marked by what could end up being a turning point for Europe’s energy and climate policy.
On 19 December, 11 EU countries issued a joint statement urging the EU to take full account of nuclear power – not just renewable energies – when elaborating future policies that will determine how the EU achieves its greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2040 and 2050.
“Nuclear power is indisputably a sustainable and equally valid technology to achieve these objectives for member states that opted to resort to its use,” said the joint declaration led by France and signed by Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden.
Shaping the EU’s 2040 climate policy. The joint declaration from the French-led Nuclear Alliance comes weeks before the Commission publishes its 2040 climate proposal, due out on 6 February. It also comes amid ongoing discussions on the EU’s “strategic agenda 2024-2029”, which will be adopted by EU leaders following the June European elections.
“Looking forward to the future and our collective 2040 and 2050 climate-energy targets, we strongly encourage the European Commission to propose a regulatory architecture that facilitates for member states to achieve carbon neutrality by encompassing our energy diversity,” the declaration adds.
A “low-carbon” target for 2040? If the eleven countries get their way – and they already have a blocking minority in the Council of EU member states – this could mark a paradigm shift for EU policy.
Until now, only renewable energies and energy efficiency have been subject to binding quantified targets to meet the EU’s climate objectives.
“However, we must collectively recognise that these two dimensions are not enough to encompass the diversity of solutions and industrial capabilities across the member states,” the joint declaration insists, saying nuclear power must be considered as well.
So what does the 11-country alliance actually want?
That was spelt out by an official in the cabinet of Agnès Pannier-Runacher, France’s now former energy minister: “We have now reached an impasse,” the official said in reference to the EU’s renewables target for 2030, which was hiked to 42.5% of the EU’s final energy consumption. “If we want to go further in renewable energies, we are going to hit the low-carbon base of certain member states” – something that won’t be acceptable for France.
“So we need to turn the tables and stop thinking about elaborating a fourth renewable directive … but perhaps the first low-carbon directive.”
French rebellion against EU renewables target. The joint statement by the French-led Nuclear Alliance also insists on one crucial point: The choice of energy mix is a matter of national sovereignty under EU treaties – a principle they believe must be upheld.
France pushed this reasoning to the maximum in a draft law on “energy sovereignty,” presented in January, which promotes nuclear power as a way of ditching fossil fuels, ignoring the EU’s 2030 renewable energy goals.
The bill is consistent with France’s draft National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP), presented in December, which had already ignored the EU’s a renewable energy target for 2030.
And it goes even further by scrapping the existing renewable energy goals for 2030, which are a legal requirement under the EU renewables directive.
What now? With its draft “energy sovereignty” bill, France is deliberately putting itself on a collision course with EU-agreed targets. This could be a step too far for pro-renewable countries like Austria, which called on the European Commission to ensure EU law is enforced.
But Paris seems intent on pursuing this policy. When a government reshuffle was announced on 11 January, the energy portfolio was scrapped and moved under the responsibility of the Energy Ministry, suggesting a shift in energy policy primarily focused on the relaunch of France’s nuclear industry.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/a-french-led-energy-insurrection/
***************************************17 January, 2024
Nuclear Phaseouts Strike Again
One of the pivotal issues of last year’s Spanish election was whether the country would continue on course to phase out their nuclear fleet by 2035.
The 2023 election was not a clear-cut victory for any party. Both the country’s left- and right-wing parties were unable to immediately form a government. There were multiple attempts by the right-wing Popular Party, which won the most votes, to form a coalition, but they each failed.
Before the July 2023 election, leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo promised to reverse the country’s nuclear phaseout policy, stating that, “It will be a policy of my government to reverse the planned decommissioning and extend the life of our nuclear power plants.” Feijóo has acknowledged the difficulty of losing more than one fifth of the country’s generation capacity, and the electricity price impacts that such a change would be likely to create.
Following the failure of the Popular Party to form a coalition, Pedro Sánchez of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, who was Prime Minister in 2019 when the nuclear phaseout initially passed, was able to successfully form a government on November 16th.
The Sánchez government has acted quickly to reaffirm its commitment to closing the country’s seven nuclear reactors.
On December 26th, the Council of Ministers (the main decision-making body of the Spanish government), approved the Seventh General Plan for Radioactive Waste. This plan contained the final schedule for the decommissioning process of the country’s reactors. The first closure will occur in 2027, with the final closure slated for 2035.
That same week, the Ministry for Ecological Transition announced 150 million euros in subsidies for 904 Megawatts (MW) of energy storage projects, which will be co-located at solar and wind facilities. This announcement is part of a broader commitment to build renewables and storage.
Closing nuclear plants and attempting to replace them with wind, solar, and storage is no way to run a grid, as Germany recently showed the world.
Germany’s nuclear phaseout has resulted in more expensive electricity. This gave pause to many countries planning phaseouts of their own, so why are Spanish leaders refusing to learn from the mistakes of their neighbor? The lesson of Germany’s nuclear phaseout is one that the Spanish government refuses to learn.
Spain must either maintain (and possibly expand) its electrical output or commit to a lower quality of life for its citizens. Spanish electricity consumption is expected to grow slightly in the coming years. Closing its nuclear power plants will result in rising prices, increased grid vulnerability, and the risk of blackouts.
Policymakers in the United States and globally should certainly not follow the Spanish example.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/01/15/nuclear-phaseouts-strike-again/
**************************************************Britain's Net Zero Disaster & The Wind Power Scam
Net zero was sold to Parliament and the British people on claims that wind-power costs were low and falling. This was untrue: Wind-power costs are high and have been rising. In the net-zero version of “crypto will make you rich,” official analyses produced by the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility rely on the falsehood that wind power is cheap, that net zero would have minimal costs, and that it could boost productivity and economic growth. None of these has any basis in reality.
The push for net zero began in 2019, when the UK’s Climate Change Committee produced a report urging the government to adopt the policy. Part of the justification was historic climate guilt. In the words of committee chair Lord Deben, Britain had been “one of the largest historical contributors to climate change.” But the key economic justification for raising Britain’s decarbonization from 80 percent to 100 percent by 2050—i.e., net zero—was “rapid cost reductions during mass deployment for key technologies,” notably in offshore wind. These illusory cost reductions, the committee claimed, “have made tighter emission reduction targets achievable at the same costs as previous looser targets.” It was green snake oil.
During the subsequent 88-minute debate in the House of Commons to write net zero into law, the clean-energy minister, Chris Skidmore, also asserted that net zero’s cost would be the same as the previous 80 percent target, which Parliament had approved in 2008. Challenged by a Labour MP on the absence of a regulatory-impact assessment, Mr. Skidmore misled Parliament, saying that there had been no regulatory-impact assessment in respect of raising the initial 60 percent target to 80 percent.
The regulatory-impact assessment that Mr. Skidmore says doesn’t exist gave a range of £324 billion (about $412 billion) to £404 billion when the target was raised to 80 percent—an estimate that excluded transitional costs—and cautioned that costs could exceed this range. Unlike today’s political pronouncements, the assessment was honest about the consequences of Britain acting if the rest of the world didn't. “The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak,” it warned.
The Climate Change Act was passed to show Britain’s climate leadership and inspire the rest of the world to follow its example. How did that work out? In the 11 years that transpired from passing the Act to legislating net zero in 2019, Britain’s fossil fuel emissions fell by 180 million metric tons—a 33 percent reduction. Over the same period, the rest of the world’s emissions increased by 5,177 million metric tons—a rise of 16 percent. Put another way, 11 years of British emissions reduction were wiped out in about 140 days by increased emissions from the rest of the world.
Someone who claims that he’s a leader but who has no followers is typically regarded as a fool. It’s different with climate. Politicians parade their green virtue—Mr. Skidmore is to quit the House of Commons, and he teaches net-zero studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School—while voters get mugged with higher energy bills. Analysis of Britain’s Big Six energy companies’ regulatory filings reveals that fuel-input costs for gas- and coal-fired power stations were flat from 2009 to 2020. Still, the average price per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity paid by households rose 67 percent, driven by high environmental levies to subsidize renewable-energy investors. Yet, supposedly, the cost of renewable energy has plummeted.
During Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this year, Rishi Sunak claimed that the cost of offshore wind had fallen from £140 per megawatt hour (MWh) to £40 per MWh, numbers assiduously propagated by the wind lobby and the Climate Change Committee. His claim is flat-out false. The prime minister has been suckered by falling per MWh price bids made by wind investors in successive allocation-round bids for offshore wind subsidies.
The explanation for this is to be found not in falling costs but in a flawed bidding process that rewards opportunistic bidding by wind investors. The government was giving away valuable options that commit the government to honor the prices paid for winning bids but commit investors to nothing. Because investors don’t pay anything for these options, the only way they can get them is by cutting the price they offer—but aren't obliged to take—for their electricity unless they choose to exercise their options much later in the process.
Falling prices in successive allocation rounds are thus an artifact of moral hazard hardwired into the allocation mechanism; they reveal nothing about the trend in the costs of offshore wind. Analysis of audited financial data of wind farm companies undertaken by a handful of independent researchers comprehensively debunks the falling wind costs claim. The unavoidable move to deeper waters offset any cost reductions and operating costs per MWh of electricity for new offshore wind projects; the prices for the move are about double those assumed in the subsidy bids.
Preeminent among these researchers is Gordon Hughes, a former economics professor at the University of Edinburgh and adviser to the World Bank on power plant economics. Mr. Hughes’s analysis shows that by the 12th year of operation, rising per-MWh operating costs of deep-water wind turbines exceed their government-guaranteed prices, squeezing out their capacity to repay their capital and financing costs
The intermittency and variability of wind and solar led the government to create a capacity market to pay for standby generation. In any economic appraisal of renewables, the costs of running the capacity market should be allocated to wind and solar as their intermittency and variability create the need for it. Electricity procured from the capacity market isn't cheap. In 2020, German-owned Uniper’s thermal power stations obtained an average price of £224 per MWh, about four times the typical wholesale price.
Confirmation that offshore wind has huge, likely insuperable, cost and operating difficulties came in June, when Siemens Energy issued a shock profits warning and saw its shares plunge by 37 percent, in part because of higher-than-anticipated turbine failure rates. According to Mr. Hughes, the implication is that future wind operating costs will be higher, and output significantly lower, shortening the turbines’ economic lives. His conclusion is crushing:
“The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger wind turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified. ... It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe, and the United States are based on foundations of sand—naive optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.”
The British government has been conned into placing a massive bet on offshore wind and is forcing electricity consumers to spend billions of pounds on a dead-end technology.
The falling cost of wind deception contaminates official assessments of the macroeconomic consequences of net zero. The Office for Budget Responsibility claims that the cost of low-carbon generation has fallen so fast that it's now cheaper than fossil fuel generation. Similarly, the Treasury erroneously took falling prices in wind subsidy allocation rounds as an indication of falling wind costs. Both see the economy riddled with multiple layers of market failures, while not recognizing the real danger of government policy being captured by vested interests, as, indeed, it has been. Taken to its logical conclusion, theirs is an argument for switching to central planning and a command-and-control economy.
The Treasury argues that “other things being equal,” the added investment required by renewable energy “will translate into additional GDP growth.” Other things, of course, aren't equal. As recent history shows, there’s a world of difference between investors and politicians making capital-allocation decisions. The centrally planned economies of the former communist bloc squandered colossal amounts of capital, immiserating their populations. Few now believe that investment in those economies boosted growth.
We don’t need to hypothesize. Government data disprove the Treasury’s contention and demonstrate that increasing deployment of renewable capacity reduces the productivity of Britain’s grid. In 2009, 87.3 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity, including only 5.1 percent of wind and solar, generated 376.8 terrawatt hours (TWh) of electricity. In 2020, 100.9 GW of generating capacity, with wind and solar accounting for 37.6 percent of capacity, produced 312.3 TWh of electricity. Thanks to renewables, 13.6 GW (15.6 percent) more generating capacity produced 64.5 TWh (17.1 percent) less electricity.
Those numbers are damning for renewables and demonstrate why they make electricity more expensive and people poorer. Before mass deployment of renewables, 1 MW of capacity in 2009 produced 4,312 MWh of electricity. In 2020, 1 MW of capacity generated 3,094 MWh, a decline of 28.3 percent. It’s as clear as can be: Investment in renewables shrinks the economy’s productive potential. This is confirmed by the International Energy Agency’s net-zero modeling. Its net-zero pathway sees the global energy sector in 2030 employing nearly 25 million more people, using $16.5 trillion more capital, and taking an additional land area the combined size of California and Texas for wind and solar farms and the combined size of Mexico and France for bioenergy—all to produce 7 percent less energy.
Britain’s energy-policy disaster has lessons for the United States. The physics and economics of wind power aren't magically transformed when they cross the Atlantic. Whenever a politician or wind lobbyist touts wind as low-cost or says net zero will boost growth, they become accessories to the wind power scam. The data lead ineluctably to a decisive conclusion: Net zero is anti-growth. It's a formula for prolonged economic stagnation. Anyone who wants the truth about renewables should look at Britain and the sorry state of its economy. For the past decade and a half, it has been going through its worst period of growth since 1780.
Unlike in business and finance, there are no criminal or civil penalties for those who promote policies based on fraud and misrepresentation. Rather, net zero is similar to communism. Like net zero, communism was based on a lie: that it would outproduce capitalism. But it failed to produce, and belief in communism evaporated. When the collapse came, it was sudden and rapid. The truth couldn't be hidden. A similar fate awaits net zero.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/britains-net-zero-disaster-wind-power-scam
***********************************************************As Wind and Solar Power Falter, U.N. Climate Agreement Becomes Wishful Thinking
Despite the lip service that governments, nongovernmental organizations and the media continue to pay to wind and solar power, most notably at the recent U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai—where some 200 countries signed a nonbinding agreement pledging their support for “transitioning away from fossil fuels”—some global leaders realize that wind and solar energy won’t do the trick and that fossil fuels will be here for a long, long time.
Sweden, for example, recently announced a major bet on nuclear energy and the United States and others have pledged to triple nuclear capacity by 2050.
Meanwhile, in the third quarter of 2023 alone, China permitted more coal-fired power plants than in all of 2021. Scores of solar and wind energy projects and investments have been canceled or put on hold as costs begin to catch up with reality, and production seems nowhere near where it should be to meet humanity’s needs.
Accepting reality has nothing to do with denying climate change or even that human activity plays a role alongside the natural climate cycle. It’s simply a question of understanding that political decrees and propaganda eventually collide with truth.
The truth is that (1) producing a unit of wind or solar energy requires a significant amount of energy, which defeats the purpose and makes for highly inefficient results, and (2) the declining cost of wind and solar power over the last decade was a function of artificially low interest rates and an abundance of cheap fossil fuels, thanks to the “fracking” revolution.
Regarding truth No. 1, to produce a unit of power output, wind requires three times as much and solar six times as much traditional energy as a combined-cycle natural gas plant. That’s because solar panels and wind turbines require lots of raw materials that depend on fossil fuels.
Regarding truth No. 2, green energy’s low-cost boom appears to be over. Clean energy is getting more expensive. Until recently, wind and solar advocates were touting the dramatic decline since 2010 in the cost of renewables, as measured in dollars per megawatt-hour. But that was a function of cheap capital and cheap energy.
The shale revolution that began 15 years ago turned the world’s biggest energy consumer, the United States, into its biggest energy producer, dramatically lowering energy prices. For example, North Dakota’s Bakken field increased its production sevenfold in the years leading up to 2020.
Other fields, including the Permian basin in west Texas and the Marcellus field in the Appalachian basin (Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York), experienced similar growth.
Unsurprisingly, the price of oil [West Texas Intermediate] declined from $196 per barrel in June 2008 to $73 per barrel in early 2020, pre-pandemic, while the price of natural gas [Henry Hub] fell from $18 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) to $2 per MMBtu.
Given that the wind and solar industries need energy-intensive materials such as steel, concrete and copper, the low price of oil and natural gas kept their production costs down. But that has changed, helping to drive up the cost of solar energy by 60% since 2021 and the cost of wind power by 30%.
Capital was also cheap. The Federal Reserve slashed the federal funds effective rate from 5.26% in mid-2007 to essentially 0% by the end of 2008 and basically kept it there until 2016, when it began to rise slightly, reaching 2.4% in 2019, well below its mid-2007 level, when it began to fall again. The fight against inflation brought things back to reality. The current rate is about 5.33%.
The double whammy of higher energy and borrowing costs that have hit renewables is unlikely to go away in the near future—though one should never underestimate the ability (and willingness) of politicians to do the same stupid thing again and again. Nevertheless, it seems improbable we’ll see trillions of dollars of zero-interest debt again anytime soon.
Given the decline of the shale fields’ output (with the exception of the Permian basin, but that too seems close to its peak) and the scant investment in traditional energy because of the environmental, social and governance-driven political environment, the dynamics of supply and demand do not point to a sustained return of the low energy prices that renewables ironically depend on.
That’s why we will see more green projects canceled, more countries betting on nuclear energy (forgetting their knee-jerk reactions to the Fukushima, Japan, reactor accident in 2011), and oil, natural gas and coal continuing to enjoy a long life.
According to the International Energy Agency, trillions of dollars have been invested in wind and solar power. This year alone, the figure is about $600 billion. Yet wind and solar represent only about 12% of total electricity generation.
Imagine what would have happened had they not benefited from ultra-cheap capital and energy, not to mention the generous taxpayer subsidies many governments provided. A sober rethinking is long overdue.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14776&omhide=true&trk=title
********************************************************Australia: Charity warns vulnerable households bearing brunt of green energy schemes
A leading charity has called for a major shake-up of green scheme costs and tariffs in the power market, saying they were currently disadvantaging poorer and vulnerable households.
St Vincent de Paul, in its latest report into the residential electricity market, found prices for both power and gas rocketed on average last year as part of the hangover from the energy crisis in 2022.
The report found costs across the board rose as turmoil in the wholesale markets collided with increased interest rates for poles-and-wires companies.
It also found that green scheme costs to encourage the uptake of clean energy were rising quickly as governments tried to fast-track the transition.
They now accounted for between nine and 12 per cent of a typical household energy bill, the charity found, and were highest in Victoria at $188 a year for a customer using 6,000-kilowatt hours.
Among the schemes were the federal government's large- and small-scale renewable energy targets, while Vinnies noted each state had its own policies that contributed to costs.
Central to the charity's concerns was the way the costs were recovered.
Costs not shared equitably
Vinnies manager of policy and research Gavin Dufty said these costs were typically moved on to the consumption charges of all customers.
Mr Dufty said variable consumption charges were still the main way power retailers recovered their costs, with fixed supply charges making up a much smaller portion of a household's bill.
He said households which were able to afford and install clean technology such as solar panels, batteries and heat pumps were able to avoid many of these charges by generating and storing much of their own electricity.
However, he said many other households, especially poorer and tenanted ones, did not have the same flexibility.
"I think it's the legacy of the old market," Mr Dufty said.
"We had an old vertically integrated market where households didn't have new technologies that they could bolt onto their homes like batteries and solar.
"So the costs were sort of shared evenly – if you consumed a little bit more, well you paid a little bit more.
"But now that households, through the types of appliances they have, can sort of make significant changes to their consumption, it does become quite regressive.
"The costs aren't shared."
According to Vinnies, the disparity in how green scheme costs were shared was a problem that "warrants a debate around how governments pass on the cost" of the policies.
The group said consolidated revenue and taxation would be more equitable but noted public balance sheets were already overstretched.
Another option, it said, would be "to only apply green scheme costs to usage above a set threshold".
Green gulf to get worse
Regardless, it said urgent changes were needed because the inequity would only get worse as more and more households that were able to added clean technology.
"We're not saying we shouldn't do that," Mr Dufty said of pursuing green energy schemes. "It's about how we allocate those costs."
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16 January, 2024
A Judge in Oregon Refuses to Dismiss a 2015 Climate Lawsuit Filed by Youth
Firstly, attributing extinction-level risks to climate change has no scientific basis.
The IPCC highlights significant threats posed by ‘climate change’, including extreme weather events (which we have not seen a rise in since 2000), sea level rise (sea level will change regardless of the ‘GHG’ concentration), and resource scarcity (green tech requires significantly more resources), these challenges don’t translate to an existential threat to our species.
Technological advancements and adaptation strategies all present avenues for mitigating risks and ensuring human flourishing. To claim otherwise simplifies the issue and disregards population growth of 5X since 1900, while the planet warmed 1.1°C.
In fact, in all of the IPCC reports, there is no mention of the extinction of the human species.
Secondly, relying on emotionally charged narratives instead of established scientific principles sets a dangerous precedent for legal decision-making.
The judicial system thrives on objectivity and impartiality, ensuring that verdicts are based on demonstrable evidence and reasoned arguments, not fearmongering and speculation.
This approach safeguards against rulings swayed by public anxieties and ensures justice remains grounded in verifiable facts.
In this case, allowing a lawsuit grounded in unproven claims of imminent human extinction sets a precarious precedent for future rulings based on contested scientific claims.
Finally, such pronouncements are at the heart of the mental health crisis surrounding climate anxiety.
The specter of an immediate existential threat, while potentially a call to action for climate activists, breeds despair and paralyzes young people’s progress.
When faced with an insurmountable crisis narrative, individuals and institutions often adopt fatalistic attitudes.
https://principia-scientific.com/when-fear-is-allowed-to-trump-facts/
*************************************************Support plummets for socially-conscious ESG funds
Research shows that younger investors are turning their backs on firms that tout trendy environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts — which is often mocked as 'woke capitalism.'
A survey of some 1,000 investors found that millennial and Gen Z respondents had started to allocate their money more like baby boomers, who are keener on turning a profit than lofty principles.
It comes as social media influencers discuss ESG on TikTok and question whether it makes good returns or amounts to little more than greenwashing.
Prof David Larcker, of Stanford Graduate School of Business, who led the research, said support for ESG values among younger investors fell by 'double-digit percentages' between 2022 and 2023.
Previously, young investors said they were 'very concerned about environmental and social issues' and wanted their fund managers to push 'for change, even if it meant a loss of personal wealth,' said Larcker. That 'sentiment has changed dramatically,' he added.
In the survey, preference for ESG investing among millennials and Gen Zers, who are aged between 18 and 41, fell sharply.
The share of those who said they were 'very concerned about environmental issues' dropped from 70 percent in 2022 to 49 percent last year.
The share of those who were worried about social issues fell from 65 percent to 53 percent.
Meanwhile, those concerned about social issues dropped from 64 percent to 47 percent, according to the study from Stanford University, the Hoover Institution, and the Rock Center for Corporate Governance.
The share of millennial and Gen Z investors who said they wanted their fund managers to promote ESG values also tanked — from nearly half of them in 2022 to about a quarter last year.
Their investment preferences became much closer to those of baby boomers, researchers said.
The trend comes as millennial and Gen Z TikTok users who share financial advice on the platform express unease about ESG.
The user known as @kathildahill this month asked followers whether socially conscious investing amounted to 'scam.'
Another finance influencer, @commonstock, warned profit-seekers not to get duped.
'ESG is mostly a marketing term that funds use to try and convince investors that they are investing in good companies,' he said. 'Don't fall for it.'
ESG refers to a set of standards for a firm's behavior that guide investors on where to put their money — for example, by funding wind farms to combat climate change, while pulling out of harmful oil and tobacco giants.
The strategy gets more controversial when it guides funding to firms promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) schemes, which irk conservatives, who say they help women and minorities by sidelining white men.
This has spawned a fractious debate about whether efforts to make society fairer and cut carbon emissions are in the strategic interest for investors, by mitigating the risks of climate chaos and social disorder.
ESG investing boomed in the pandemic, when lockdowns caused energy prices to fall and buoyed portfolios that shunned fossil fuels.
Those same strategies have floundered as lockdowns ended and economic activity resumed.
Sustainable funds faced a sharp slowdown in demand globally last year, even though they outperformed other funds thanks in part to their inclusion of technology stocks, which performed well.
Globally, funds classified as 'responsible investing' recorded $68 billion of net new deposits in 2023 through November 30, LSEG Lipper data showed.
That was down sharply from $158 billion for all of 2022 and from $558 billion for all of 2021.
Prof Amit Seru of Stanford Graduate School of Business, another researcher involved in the opinion survey, said younger investors used to be 'bedrock advocates' of socially-conscious investing.
Now 'they are much less willing to lose personal money to see progress made against issues such as climate change, sustainability, labor conditions, and diversity in the workplace,' said Seru.
'With their confidence down, investors are more cautious about risking their personal wealth to support stakeholder issues.'
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Climate Dystopia: How Life Would Get Worse If Climate Alarmists Carry Out Their Agenda
The global climate is always changing, but contrary to the popular narrative, the science on the exact causes is far from settled. Alarmists claim that humans burning fossil fuels for energy will catastrophically ruin the climate, and they demand a “net-zero” future to save the world.
What would happen if the climate alarmists actually succeeded in the United States?
Although it is impossible to predict the future, early warning signs from President Joe Biden’s policies don’t paint a pretty picture.
Decreased Individual Mobility
First, if the federal government bans gas-powered cars, individual transportation would get less reliable and more expensive.
Americans prefer gas-powered cars over the electric cars favored by climate alarmists. In November, a coalition of nearly 4,000 auto dealers sent a letter to President Biden explaining that his plan to force Americans to buy electric vehicles won’t work.
The auto dealers warned that “the supply of unsold [battery electric vehicles] is surging, as they are not selling nearly as fast as they are arriving at our dealerships—even with deep price cuts, manufacturer incentives, and generous government incentives.”
Despite subsidies to encourage manufacturers to make electric vehicles and tax credits for drivers to buy the cars, only 7 percent of new vehicle sales are electric, compared with Biden’s goal of 60 percent in 2030 and 66 percent in 2032.
Americans have many reasons to prefer gas-powered cars, as explained by Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate and Environment.
Drivers may refuel gas-powered cars in five or 10 minutes at a gas station, while recharging an electric vehicle may take 45 minutes or longer for a full charge. Most drivers of electric vehicles prefer to keep their battery above 20 percent, and the charging process gets longer when the battery reaches 80 percent.
Batteries lose range in cold weather, and electric vehicles cost more than gas-powered cars. Furthermore, not everyone has a garage at home, so charging overnight might present difficulties.
These electric cars may improve over time, but the climate alarmists push an aggressive timetable that limits the chance for a natural transition. President Biden has proposed regulations that would penalize automakers for selling gas-powered cars. California, meanwhile, will require all new-vehicle sales to be electric after 2035.
If cars become less effective and more expensive, Americans may be forced to accept less mobility. Many Americans no longer may be able to afford a car, and may have to move to areas with more reliable public transit.
The suburbs would get more expensive, and Americans would have fewer options in where to live.
Individual transportation may become more expensive and more difficult with government-forced transitions to electric vehicles. But if all vehicles shift to electric, that also may hobble delivery trucks, driving up costs for all sorts of goods that must make it from the manufacturing floor to the sales floor.
Whenever a transportation system becomes more expensive or less reliable, that change worsens the “last mile” problem.
In telecommunications, the “last mile” refers to the final stage of extending a cable or wire all the way to a customer’s home. Similarly, in a supply chain delivering goods to customers, the final leg often represents a rising marginal cost of getting goods from point A to point B.
A less efficient transportation system would make goods more expensive, as sellers pass on the added cost to consumers. Inflation, which already has made life more difficult for Americans in the past few years, would get even worse.
Decreased Quality
Earlier this week, a federal appeals court shot down the Biden administration’s efforts to impose energy- and water-efficiency standards on dishwashers and clothes washing machines, because “it is unclear that [the Department of Energy] has statutory authority to regulate water use” in these appliances.
Yet if the climate alarmists are successful, regulations such as this would become more commonplace, and dishwashers and clothes washers would become less effective. Americans may have to wash their dishes and clothes for longer periods of time, and they may still find food on dishes and stains on clothes after running the machines.
Increasing regulations also would make toilets, showers, and sinks less effective, as government forces a rationing of water.
Increased Electricity Costs
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, about 60.4 percent of all American electricity in 2022 came from fossil fuels. Natural gas represents the largest share, at 39.9 percent, and coal powers about 19.7 percent of the U.S. electrical grid. Nuclear power accounts for 18.2 percent of the grid and renewables 21.3 percent.
If the federal government outlaws fossil fuels, or even just coal, that would prove a tremendous hit to American energy production. Costs would skyrocket, leading to rolling blackouts or electricity rationing. California has gotten a taste for this dystopian nightmare with its rolling blackouts.
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Australia: Federal Court rejects Indigenous heritage claim against Santos gas pipeline
Gas producer Santos is free to install a vital gas pipeline from its $5.5 billion Barossa gas pipeline after the Federal Court rejected claims it could damage Indigenous cultural heritage.
On Monday, Justice Natalie Charlesworth lifted an injunction – which she had imposed in early November and revised two weeks later – on laying the pipeline to allow work in the northernmost part of the route away from the Tiwi Islands.
In her judgment, Charlesworth said differing accounts from witnesses from the Jikilaruwu, Munupi and Malawu people led her to conclude the beliefs and customs that formed the intangible cultural heritage the applicants claimed could be damaged by the pipeline were not broadly accepted within their communities.
Charlesworth said there was a “lack of integrity” in some aspects of an exercise that married science and traditional belief in evidence to show there was an ancient lake near the pipeline route, undermining her confidence in the existence of such a lake.
Concerns over tangible cultural heritage along the pipeline route from the time the area was not underwater were rejected by Charlesworth, who found there was a negligible chance of archaeological remains.
The Barossa project has been dogged by legal challenges based on concerns over protecting Indigenous culture.
In September 2022, the Federal Court found the Adelaide-based company had not adequately consulted traditional owners – led by Tiwi Islander Dennis Tipakalippa – before submitting its plans to the offshore environment regulator NOPSEMA and ordered it to stop drilling for gas at Barossa.
The decision threw the offshore oil and gas sector into turmoil as companies withdrew their plans lodged with the regulator and launched new rounds of consultation to ensure the plans could withstand a similar legal appeal.
After a series of legal hearings, NOPSEMA in December accepted Santos’ revised plan for drilling at Barossa and, according to the regulator’s website, the work will commence in January.
Despite the legal challenges, Santos as recently as October said the key project remained on track to start production in the first half of 2025 within the budget of $US3.7 billion ($5.5 billion).
The Barossa field will supply gas to Santos’s Darwin liquefied natural gas plant that shut down in late 2023 when the gas supply from the Bayu-Undan field in Timor-Leste waters was exhausted.
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15 January, 2024
As more & more counties get more solar farms...here's some truth about solar farms
By George Franklin:
I should start by telling you what bonafides I have for writing this. I am a retired aerospace engineer. A literal rocket scientist if you will. I worked on MX (Peacekeeper) Space Shuttle, Hubble, Brilliant Pebbles, PACOSS, Space Station, MMU, B2, the Sultan of Brunei's half billion dollar private 747 with crystal showers, gold sinks and 100 dollar a yard coiffed silk carpets. I designed a satphone installation on prince Jeffry's 757. I did all of the design work for the structure of Mark 1V propulsion module currently flying on at least 3 spacecraft that I know of. Some of the more exciting projects I have worked on are not shareable.
Solar panels are at best about 20% efficient. They convert almost 0% of the UV light that hits them. None of the visible spectrum and only some of the IR spectrum. At the same time as they are absorbing light they are absorbing heat from the sun. This absorbed heat is radiated into the adjacent atmosphere.
It should be obvious what happens next. When air is warmed it rises. Even small differences in ordinary land surfaces are capable of creating powerful forces of weather like thunderstorms and tornadoes. These weather phenomena are initiated and reinforced by land features as they are blown downwind. It is all too obvious to me what will happen with the heat generated by an entire solar farm. Solar farms will become thunderstorm and tornado incubators and magnets.
Solar panels are dark and and they emit energy to the space above them when they are not being radiated. This is known as black-body radiation. Satellites flying in space use this phenomenon to cool internal components. If they didn't do this they would fry themselves.
So solar farms not only produce more heat in summer than the original land that they were installed on, but they also produce more cooling in winter, thus exacerbating weather extremes.
So I conclude with this. There is nothing green about green energy except the dirty money flowing into corrupt pockets.
There is no such thing as green energy. The science doesn't exist. The technology doesn't exist. The engineering doesn't exist. We are being pushed to save the planet with solutions that are worse than the problems.
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Hertz to sell off EV fleet in shock U-turn. Will re-focus on gas-powered cars
Rental giant Hertz on Thursday said it will sell off about 20,000 electric vehicles from its fleet and buy more gas-powered cars – a stunning reversal after tapping NFL legend Tom Brady to tout its transition to EVs.
The company said the high costs to repair electric vehicles and a lack of demand among renters led to its decision to abandon those plans.
Brady starred in a series of buzzy Hertz commercials in 2021, with Hertz vowing it would order 100,000 Tesla vehicles by the end of 2022 — before Thursday’s sudden U-turn.
“The company expects this action to better balance supply against expected demand of EVs,” Hertz said in a regulatory filing announcing the move.
“This will position the company to eliminate a disproportionate number of lower margin rentals and reduce damage expense associated with EVs.”
The rental service expects to incur about $245 million in “incremental net depreciation expense” related to the move, according to the filing. Those costs will be reflected in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2023.
The cost of maintaining a fleet of electric vehicles has been a source of concern for Hertz executives. Last October, Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr told analysts that “collision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle.”
Scherr insisted at the time that Hertz was “committed” to a “long-term strategy to electrify the fleet.”
Hertz’s used car website lists more than 700 EVs on sale including BMW’s i3, Chevrolet’s Bolt and Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y SUVs.
https://nypost.com/2024/01/11/business/hertz-plans-to-sell-20000-evs-including-teslas/
************************************************New Zealand Government Will Fast-Track New Mines
The newly elected New Zealand conservative coalition government has announced it will introduce legislation to fast-track applications for new mines, signalling a complete reversal of previous policy.
In her 2017 Speech from the Throne, former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced Labour’s commitment to no new mines on conservation land. One-third of New Zealand’s land is classified as being in the conservation estate.
Mining industry lobby group Straterra responded that the proposal “made no sense,” claiming “not all conservation land has high conservation value.” It also pointed to the fact that it would result in the country losing jobs, overseas revenue, investment, export markets, taxes, and funding that could help manage and improve the conservation estate.
The ban, Straterra said, “[risked] destroying livelihoods in important regions and wiping out entire communities.”
Three-quarters of mining on conservation land occurs on the South Island’s West Coast, where there are few other sources of income beyond tourism.
Nationally, 7,000 people are employed in the extractives sector and the economic contribution to GDP is $2.61 billion (US$1.63 billion) annually.
Immediate Problems
The proposed legislation immediately encountered problems, including the risk that it would put the Crown in breach of its Treaty of Waitangi Settlement with the Ng?i Tahu iwi (tribe), which granted it rights to mine pounamu, or greenstone. Ninety percent of the iwi’s pounamu is sourced as a by-product of third-party mining operations.
When initially announced in 2017, the proposal was not supported by Labour’s coalition partner New Zealand First, which now forms part of the current three-party government along with National and ACT.
Progress also wasn’t helped by Labour changing conservation ministers three times in 12 months.
By February of last year—freed of New Zealand First and able to govern alone following the 2020 election—Labour finally got a Bill before the House.
But with a new government in place, boasting an ambitious programme for its first 100 days, many restrictions on business and industry are set to be removed, including allowing projects, like a large gold mine in Central Otago, to not only go ahead but to be able to do so more quickly.
However, Minister for Resources Shane Jones—a New Zealand First MP—has said that environmental protections will remain in place.
Planning Underway for a New Gold Mine
Santana Minerals, which is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange, has estimated its proposed mine at the company’s existing 272 square kilometre site could yield between 100,000 and 150,000 ounces of gold each year, which would earn a minimum of $325 million a year at current gold pricing.
The company’s chief executive Damian Spring characterised the coalition as a “pro-mining government” in a radio interview, and confirmed they had briefed Mr. Jones in December.
The minister has said he wanted to “convince investors, convince the industry, that I can deliver a level of certainty for them, so they can spend their own money and secure the consents within the statutory framework passing for resource management and mining.”
Acknowledging that mining activity could contribute adversely to climate change, Mr. Jones said, “There are always trade-offs. I’m going to ensure that those trade-offs are put in front of the people of our nation and decided upon on the basis of science, economics, and a robust understanding as to what are the cost benefits.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/world/new-zealand-government-will-fast-track-new-mines-5565075
*************************************************************EV charging company ChargePoint pulls the plug on Australia as US-owned network shuts down stations in NSW, Victoria and Queensland
Electric car charging firm ChargePoint will shut down its network of almost 50 stations in a major blow to Anthony Albanese's plan to turn Australia green.
The US-owned company confirmed in an email to company members that it would shut down its charging stations in NSW, Victoria and Queensland from February 1.
ChargePoint told its customers it will 'no longer maintain a presence in Australia' and would cease operations of its 46 charging ports.
Electric vehicle owners have until the end of January to use the charging stations - which can only be accessed with a credit or ChargePoint card - despite the brand's app no longer working.
ChargePoint installed its first EV station in Australia in 2010 and expanded across the country's east coast as popularity of electric cars rose among motorists.
However, in 2020 the brand stopped maintaining its charging ports in Australia, with its network of stations operating via remote support from the US.
ChargePoint claimed it would shut down its charging ports in May, last year, after its local and US divisions split.
However, it took an additional seven months for the company to finalise its exit from the Australian market.
The move comes after ChargePoint announced it would be firing 12 per cent of its global workforce.
The Californian-based company share price reached a peak of $US46.10 in late 2020 but is now sitting at an all-time low of $US2.
Customers who have remaining credit on their accounts after February 1 will be refunded their full amount.
It comes after Australian EV charging company Tritium closed its doors on its local factory before Christmas, leaving the jobs of up to 400 workers uncertain.
The troubled fast-charging firm announced the closure at the company's annual general meeting that it would shut Murrarie, Brisbane factory on December 22.
Tritium confirmed it would consolidate manufacturing operations at its Tennesse base in the US in a desperate bid to save money after its share price plummeted 98 per cent.
The company will keep a research and development business in Brisbane and has claimed only 75 workers will be laid off when the factory shuts, but did not disclose if there will be further rounds of redundancies.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited the factory in March, last year, to publicise it as a shining example of his advanced green manufacturing ambitions.
The Prime Minister labelled the achievements of the Aussie start-up, founded in 2001, as 'extraordinary'. 'This company has grown in a very short period of time to operate in 42 different countries,' Mr Albanese said. 'This is my third visit to Tritium. Every time I come back, I hear about more revenue, more jobs being created, and more countries where Australia is exporting to. 'This is a great success story here... and the capacity that they have to grow further is just extraordinary.'
The federal government refused to step in with a rescue package for Tritium despite the importance of chargers for the increased take-up of electric vehicles.
Tritium submitted an application to the government's National Reconstruction Fund, which aims to rebuild Australia’s industrial base, but was reportedly rejected.
The $15 billion fund was created to provide loans, guarantees, and equity for projects to create secure, well-paid jobs and drive regional development.
However, Tritium failed to secure new funding to safeguard their factory's future and was forced to shut its doors.
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14 January, 2024
More evidence that the Amazon was once highly civilized
Much more detail about Amazonia below:
http://jonjayray.com/amazonia.html
Archaeologists have uncovered a cluster of lost cities in the Amazon rainforest that were home to at least 10,000 farmers around 2,000 years ago.
A series of earthen mounds and buried roads in Ecuador was first noticed more than two decades ago by archaeologist Stéphen Rostain.
But at the time, "I wasn't sure how it all fit together," said Mr Rostain, one of the researchers who reported on the finding on Thursday.
Recent mapping by laser-sensor technology revealed those sites to be part of a dense network of settlements and connecting roadways, tucked into the forested foothills of the Andes, that lasted about 1,000 years.
"It was a lost valley of cities," said Mr Rostain, who directs investigations at France's National Centre for Scientific Research.
"It's incredible."
The settlements were occupied by the Upano people between around 500 BC and 300 to 600 AD — a period roughly contemporaneous with the Roman Empire in Europe, the researchers found.
Residential and ceremonial buildings erected on more than 6,000 earthen mounds were surrounded by agricultural fields with drainage canals.
The largest roads were 10 metres wide and stretched for 10 to 20 kilometres.
While it's difficult to estimate populations, the site was home to at least 10,000 inhabitants — and perhaps as many as 15,000 or 30,000 at its peak, said archaeologist Antoine Dorison, a study co-author at the same French institute.
That's comparable to the estimated population of Roman-era London, then Britain's largest city.
"This shows a very dense occupation and an extremely complicated society," said University of Florida archaeologist Michael Heckenberger, who was not involved in the study.
"For the region, it's really in a class of its own in terms of how early it is."
José Iriarte, a University of Exeter archaeologist, said it would have required an elaborate system of organised labour to build the roads and thousands of earthen mounds.
"The Incas and Mayans built with stone, but people in Amazonia didn't usually have stone available to build — they built with mud. It's still an immense amount of labour," said Mr Iriarte, who had no role in the research.
The Amazon is often thought of as a "pristine wilderness with only small groups of people. But recent discoveries have shown us how much more complex the past really is," he said.
Scientists have recently also found evidence of intricate rainforest societies that predated European contact elsewhere in the Amazon, including in Bolivia and in Brazil.
"There's always been an incredible diversity of people and settlements in the Amazon, not only one way to live," said Mr Rostain.
"We're just learning more about them."
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New EPA Regulations Are a Death Sentence for Small Oil and Gas Producers
Republican Rep. Bill Johnson, chair of the Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials subcommittee, convened the hearing in response to new regulations on methane emissions promulgated by the EPA at the recent COP28 climate change conference in Dubai. Empowered by the Inflation Reduction Act to impose Biden’s radical green agenda on the nation, the EPA has devised inflexible, unworkable regulations for methane emissions that will destroy small and mid-sized domestic oil and gas producers.
New Methane Regulations Burden Small Producers
The full text of these latest EPA regulations can be found in a 1,700-page document — why use one word when 100 will do? — that essentially functions as a death sentence for smaller, independent petroleum producers.
In order to reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere, the EPA now requires that oil and gas producers capture all methane released during drilling, production, and operations, even though this capture is economically and technologically impossible for many companies. The EPA regulations contain novel bans on routine practices used by producers to convert methane into carbon dioxide, a less harmful atmospheric gas. By requiring companies to adopt new practices and invest in new technologies — not to mention pay new taxes and fees — the EPA places a significant economic burden on the domestic energy sector. (RELATED: Green Mytholody Runs Rampant at COP28)
The compliance costs are massive — far too large for small producers. The EPA’s one-size-fits-all regulations fail to recognize the diversity within the domestic energy sector, subjecting small family businesses to the same regulations as massive corporations. While big oil producers can afford to transition their operations to accord with the EPA’s regulations, small producers are watching their livelihoods disappear in real time.
New Costs to Small Businesses
Drew Martin, the managing member and director of finance at Miller Energy, testified that the EPA’s regulations would add an estimated over $8 million in additional expenses. Last year, the company’s total operating budget was $11.1 million.
“That’s over 70 percent cost to my bottom line,” Martin said. “I can’t survive that. I don’t believe many of my peers in Michigan producing marginal wells can survive that.”
Patrick Montalban, who is chairman and CEO of his family oil and gas business in Montana, similarly testified that the “dozens of new EPA reporting requirements alone would be enough to put his small company out of business due to the time and manpower that would be needed to comply.”
Small producers across America like Miller Energy and Montalban Oil and Gas Operations are facing eradication by the EPA. Across the nation, independent producers will be forced to close their doors and abandon productive wells, leaving hardworking Americans jobless in Biden’s nightmare economy.
EPA Representative Breaks Promise to Congressman
Prior to Martin’s and Montalban’s testimonies about the unworkable burdens of the EPA’s new regulations, an EPA administrator gave testimony of his own. Joseph Goffman, who is the principal deputy assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, repeatedly insisted that the EPA had consulted with industry members when constructing the methane regulations.
Rep. August Pfluger pushed Goffman on that claim, asking him to name just two or three of the companies that his department at the EPA had spoken with. Goffman couldn’t — or didn’t want to.
“I’m not sure that anybody at a small, independent level was consulted,” Pfluger said. “Maybe Exxon was, but I’m not sure that the industry [was].”
Pfluger asked whether Goffman would commit to staying and listening to the panel of small producers, Martin and Montalban among them. Goffman immediately committed to listening to their testimony. But as soon as his testimony ended, Goffman and his retinue of EPA underlings stood up and exited the room. Promises made, no promises kept.
Men like Goffman, who say one thing and do another, get to sit in Washington and dream about a quixotic green energy revolution. Meanwhile, across America, hardworking men and women are all but powerless against the encroachments of an administrative state bent on destroying their livelihood. Today, small to mid-sized oil and gas producers are in the crosshairs. But they are only the first casualties in the Left’s advancing green agenda.
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Green Mythology Runs Rampant at COP28
Incoherent logic galore
More than 70,000 attendees of the COP28 conference from around the world flew to Dubai, one of the global hubs of oil wealth, a shining beacon of development in the desert, to commiserate over the state of the world. Unlike many of the climate “warriors” attending a winter party in the Arabian Peninsula, where the daytime temperatures hovered dreamily between 80–90 degrees Fahrenheit and sunsets glowed over the Persian Gulf, I, at least, had flown commercial.
Slogans like “Action Builds Trust” and “Action Creates Hope” were printed on billboards towering over the highways and peppered across the COP28 Expo grounds. Alas, “Action Burns Carbon” went unmentioned. Inside one of the technological expo spaces, Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA) gave a presentation. While most of its power comes from oil, the company has already built one of the largest solar arrays on earth providing power production for a not-insignificant portion of the city and its surroundings electricity needs.
More than 8 square miles of solar panels darken the desert, and the installation includes a concentrated solar power (CSP) system. These mirror systems have been made famous in the Mojave Desert for vaporizing birds in mid-flight with the massive heat generated by the focused sunlight. As I looked at a model of this system that directs concentrated solar energy at a massive tower surrounded by circles upon circles of mirrors, reflecting the sun’s powerful rays to a peak where they heat molten salt to power a turbine to generate energy, I mentioned to a local woman, dressed conservatively, employed by the power company, that the array must produce an incredible amount of heat. “Yes, in fact, we measured 565 degrees Celsius [1049 degrees Fahrenheit] at the apex of the tower,” she replied. “We have to warn air traffic to avoid the airspace for their own safety.” It appears this “green” energy produces a lot of hot air.
A collection of start-ups and existing energy companies wrangle for both private capital and government money to implement “green technology.” Elon Musk has become a billionaire with the help of U.S. taxpayers. The U.S. subsidizes electric car purchases, increasing the national debt while further enriching Musk. His rocket company, SpaceX, is contracted by NASA to spew methane into the atmosphere out of flaming rockets as they are fired through the “greenhouse” and atmosphere upon which life on earth depends.
With his profits off American debt, Musk flies around the world on a fleet of private jets, taking at least 441 flights in 2023, more than double his number from 2022, a year he burned at least 221,358 gallons of jet fuel on 171 private jaunts. Besides jet exhaust, we never seem to be told just how much carbon is emitted in the building of an electric car. From the diesel burned in the mining and extraction of the rare earth metals to produce the batteries, to the materials to build the frame, seats, and dashboard, every part of every electric car leaves a carbon footprint. (READ MORE: Al Gore for President)
One recent congressional bill included close to $400 billion for “clean energy” and “decarbonization.” The problem is that every one of those dollars spent is a petro-dollar in a fossil-fuel-powered market, where everything bought or sold is shipped and manufactured using carbon-burning infrastructure. Can emissions really go down when expenditures, development, deforestation, manufacturing, mining, and construction are going up?
There are not enough precious metals on earth to build all the batteries needed to “transition” the entire global transportation fleet to electric cars, which are being sold as “zero-emission vehicles” (and subsidize Elon’s private jet travel). The solution provided by the green confidence game is to mine asteroids, bringing back precious metals from space to “solve the bottleneck.” But at what point in time will we be able to launch a rocket into space without increasing greenhouse emissions?
It is impossible to make a solar panel without burning fossil fuels. From the mining, crushing, and melting of the silicon to make the panels, to the massive amounts of carbon and water expended in mining and transporting the cobalt, lithium, and rare earth metals that go into the battery arrays to store the energy, it’s a very carbon intensive process. And so every petro-dollar spent on introducing new technology has a corollary carbon footprint. The trucks and ships that are transporting and delivering all the concrete that builds the foundation of all those industrial wind farms are burning diesel gas.
At the conference, I was speaking to a man who works at Total Energy about one of their solar arrays in southern Texas. They have converted 4,000 acres of what was productive farmland, mostly soybean- and rice-growing operations, into what is now a vast solar array dotted with natural gas wells. With a growing human population with inevitable caloric-intake needs, one has to wonder whether solar panels can be recycled back into food.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that covering huge swaths of the earth with dark colored, reflective, heat- and power-generating panels and mirror arrays that focus the sun’s power at towers full of molten salt that raise the surrounding ambient temperatures to nearly 600 degrees Celsius (1,112 degrees Fahrenheit) is going to create a heating effect on the surface temperature of the earth that will, in terms of basic logic, contribute to the ultimate heating of the atmosphere. The scientific discoveries regarding the greenhouse effect were demonstrated in the late 1800s.
Would it be a surprise to discover that harvesting energy from the jet stream with thousands of wind turbines off the coasts of the United States, Canada, and Northern Europe is going to alter the climate and precipitation patterns in Southern and Eastern Europe and perhaps as far away as Australia, China, Saudi Arabia, and Dubai? Here we are, collectively installing jet-stream-energy-harvesting wind turbines around the world at the same time as we are being told that the jet stream is weakening as the result of climate change. I remember learning about the butterfly effect as a middle schooler: that when a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it can create a downstream effect 1,000 miles away.
Action might build hope, but this collective action, subsidized by taxpayers, looks set to further heat up the atmosphere. I’m not arguing that the status quo is clean and sustainable, but I am arguing against printing billions of dollars and putting generations of future Americans in debt to add more carbon emissions and demand through increased development and manufacture of novel technologies of which we don’t understand the long-term consequences.
Republican President Theodore Roosevelt began a campaign to break up the biggest monopolies threatening this republic over 100 years ago because monopoly is the enemy of democracy. Do private interests want the American people fighting “carbon” instead of entrenched monopolistic power? The fortunes of Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos were all born on the internet, a U.S. taxpayer–funded technology that has allowed these men to take control of so much of our collective spending power, intellect, and government. How did we ever get to the point where, instead of being taxed to control their monopolistic power, Bezos and Musk are instead literally being subsidized to the tune of billions of dollars and subcontracted by the U.S. government on U.S. taxpayer dimes to launch rockets into space. Shouldn’t these men whose wealth was built by taxpayer-funded technology be paying down our national debt, not driving it up?
Even if we weren’t calling loudly for controls on the explosive monopolization rising worldwide, perhaps we could all agree to not subsidize billionaires with taxpayer dollars, which only increases their power to purchase our government away from their elected purpose: to represent the citizens who elected them.
To actually clean up the mess we’ve made, we’d have to ban new manufacture of plastics to create a demand for all the plastic we’ve littered the environment with, develop a 100 percent recycling economy, and prohibit companies from making products that are built to break (planned obsolescence). We’d repurpose manufacturing hubs and prohibit the manufacture and sale of chemicals, pesticides, and herbicides that are killing the living web of life around us, exponentially decreasing a healthy earth’s ability to sequester carbon, increasing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, and making us ill. If we actually wanted to cut emissions, wouldn’t we phase out the personal vehicle model and transition to efficient high-speed rail systems? Wouldn’t we repopulate small-town America by demonopolizing the millions of acres of farmland that have been concentrated into the hands of a few giant corporations that are poisoning and depleting topsoil and return it to small-scale, permaculture-based farming operations that build topsoil and sequester carbon while supplying human caloric needs?
If there were ever a use for AI robots, we would have them working constantly to remove all toxic substances and recyclable materials from the world’s dumps and landfills, because we’ve already produced a global surplus of material that we just need to repurpose instead of building more mines and wasting precious fresh water supplies. Instead of doubling down on a planet-wide mental-conditioning system that would have us accept lies as truth and madness as sanity, let’s create an economy that doesn’t manufacture never-ending debt and a big environmental mess.
At COP28 in Dubai, a myth was propagated that we can spend our way into a “clean” energy future by implementing massive technological development when all of that development is destined to remain dependent on the exploitation of fossil fuel resources. It reminds me of the news that was just reported about a group of “scientists” at the South Pole who were celebrating their use of hot water to drill down 600 meters through the ice to the sea floor. To study melting ice, the “scientists” literally melted the ice.
https://spectator.org/green-mythology-runs-rampant-in-the-desert/
***********************************************Over 300 Endangered Eagles Killed or Injured by Wind Turbines in Tasmania: Study
Over the past decade, wind turbines and transmission lines have led to the deaths or injuries of 321 endangered eagles in Tasmania, according to a study.
More cases are believed to be unreported due to a lack of systemic research on wind farms and public information.
Published in Australian Field Ornithology, the study looked at Australia’s two largest raptors, the wedge-tailed and white-bellied sea eagles.
It found that from 2010-2022, wind farms caused the deaths of 268 eagles and injured 53, with state-owned power company TasNetworks reporting 139 deaths, and eagle rescuers witnessing 91 deaths and 50 injuries.
Study author Gregory Pullen said the number of eagle deaths was a “stark reminder” that an urgent solution was needed to mitigate further harm to the vulnerable species.
“The real number can only be higher since surveying at wind farms is incomplete,” Mr. Pullen noted in the study.
“Specifically, it is only close to turbines, is periodic, and does not involve all turbines or all habitat around each turbine, scrub often being excluded.”
Of great concern is that 272 deaths involved the endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, and 49 of the vulnerable white-bellied sea eagles.
Future of Birds Unclear
Both species could face further risk as the expansion of wind turbine construction continues amid the federal government’s net-zero push.
“Accelerated deaths of the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle and white-bellied sea-eagle are a grim reality if thousands of new wind turbines and hundreds of kilometres of transmission lines are erected across Tasmania to meet a legislated doubling of renewable energy production by 2040,” Mr. Pullen said.
The study estimated that less than 1,000 Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagles remain and emphasised ongoing monitoring to ensure the species does not become extinct.
It includes observing the number of eagles, stability of breeding pairs, nesting success and surviving chicks, presence of juvenile birds, and whether disruption to the natural habitat causes dislocation.
While the Tasmanian government has guidelines in place to protect threatened eagles, Mr. Pullen found that these have not contributed to real-life decisions regarding wind farm placement.
For instance, despite great differences in eagle densities across Tasmania, there are currently no designated “no turbine zones.”
Some researchers have suggested Tasmanian eagles be fitted with GPS trackers, but the concept has been slow to establish and has yet to be used in wind farm planning.
The study comes as Tasmanian authorities continue their push towards net zero, recently inking a deal with the German city Bremen.
State Energy Minister Guy Barnett said the collaboration was evidence of the state’s plan to become a leader in large-scale green hydrogen production by 2030 to meet both domestic and international demand.
“This joint declaration demonstrates the opportunity the rest of the world sees in Tasmania and confidence in the government’s renewable energy agenda,” Mr. Barnett said in a statement on Sept. 17.
“Tasmania is well placed, with our 100 percent renewable electricity, abundant water supplies, and excellent port infrastructure to seize these important opportunities with international partners.”
Scientist Questions Wind Power Reliability
There are concerns, however, over the viability of large-scale renewable energy generation.
One Oxford University mathematician and physicist has criticised wind power saying it is historically and scientifically unreliable, noting that governments are prioritising “windfarm politics” over numerical evidence.
Professor Emeritus Wade Allison made the assertion in response to the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, where the “instinctive reaction” around the world was to embrace renewables.
“Today, modern technology is deployed to harvest these weak sources of energy. Vast ‘farms’ that monopolise the natural environment are built, to the detriment of other creatures,” Mr. Allison said in the report, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
“Developments are made regardless of the damage wrought. Hydro-electric schemes, enormous turbines, and square miles of solar panels are constructed, despite being unreliable and ineffective.”
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11 January, 2024
The Death of the 1.5 Degree Climate Target
How many more U.N. climate conferences will it take for the world to admit that the current climate policy path is at a dead end?
Calls by politicians, activists, and journalists to double down ring increasingly hollow in the face of overwhelming evidence that 2024 will be the first year in which average global surface temperature is likely to be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above that of the preindustrial period before 1900. The long-term average increase since that period will pass 1.5 degrees in 2030. Even staying significantly below 2 degrees Celsius—the target that the climate policy community used until 2015 before lowering it in order to galvanize lawmakers—now looks unlikely.
Missing the 1.5 degree target does not mean that we’re all going to boil, bake, and die. Global emissions growth has slowed down enough that the extreme warming scenarios brandished so carelessly in the public debate have become all but impossible. Deaths due to natural disasters, such as floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires, have also declined radically as countries have become richer and more resilient. And economic losses due to climate shocks have decreased fivefold between the 1980s and mid 2000s.
Sticking to an unrealistic temperature target has severe economic and geopolitical effects. Panic over not reaching the target has led to a radical push for an immediate phaseout of fossil fuels, ignoring the fact that they still make up 80 percent of the world’s primary energy supply. That call is being led by rich countries that have become wealthy using fossil fuels and continue to gobble up oil and gas—and which now want to restrict less-developed countries from using these fuels to lift themselves out of energy poverty, a primary reason for their destitution. Development advocates are rightly calling out these unfair policies, enforced through institutions such as the World Bank, as eco-colonialism.
Unrealistic temperature targets combined with continued high consumption of fossil fuels has meant that there is little to no carbon budget available for the poorest countries to grow their energy use. Sticking to the goal of freezing emissions—or even targeting negative emissions to compensate for any overshoot—turns global economic activity into a zero-sum game.
Room for one country to develop, which may require increased use of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, means that another must shrink its economy. The distribution conflict over emissions rights will be epic and bitter, not just between rich and poor countries but also among poor countries themselves, making any new agreements to reduce emissions even more difficult.
Enter Russia and China, which have made it clear that they will not play by Western rules, including those on climate policy. Since launching the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has sought to strengthen its ties to OPEC and secure its role in oil and gas markets. China is investing everywhere in resource extraction, including fossil fuels in Africa and the Middle East. The three main Chinese energy companies—CNPC, CNOOC, and Sinopec—have emerged as major investors in Africa’s oil and gas sectors.
Despite these concerns, Western governments refuse to support investments in poor countries’ energy sectors in hopes that starving the developing world of energy will help meet the 1.5-degree target. This has created a huge opening for Russia and China, which they will likely leverage to strengthen autocracy across these regions.
Paradoxically, acknowledging the demise of the 1.5-degree target in 2024 could reduce tensions between rich and poor countries—provided that governments seize the opportunity to reset climate goals. This could be the year when unrealistic temperature goals and endless theoretical fights over a phase-down versus a phaseout of fossil fuels are replaced by a focus on the three positive ideas that came out of the most recent U.N. climate conference, COP28, which concluded in Dubai in December.
In the conference’s outcome statement, nearly 200 signatory countries agreed on the need for transition fuels in poor countries—in other words, their use of fossil fuels will grow faster than their ability to transition away from them. Second, the signatories agreed that countries have different resource endowments and will therefore follow very different trajectories to decarbonize. Third, there was a strong commitment that nuclear energy can be an important source of clean and reliable power.
For the first time, COP28 officially recognized that transition fuels—a euphemism for fossil fuels tolerated to prevent economic collapse and allow development if abundant green energy is not yet available—“can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.” COP signatories finally acknowledged, albeit implicitly, that poor countries consume only a tiny fraction of the energy gobbled up by rich countries and desperately need more electricity to power homes, schools, hospitals, and factories.
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Protesting farmers use tractors – and piles of dung – to paralyse Germany
Thousands of German farmers blocked motorways and city centres across the country on Monday as they began a week of protests against government proposals to cut their fuel subsidies.
The co-ordinated nationwide demonstration saw furious agricultural workers line up their tractors outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, while more than a thousand were massed on a single stretch of motorway near the city of Mainz.
Police also launched an investigation on Monday morning into piles of dung that were dumped outside constituency offices of Germany’s main coalition parties, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-Left SDP party.
In a sign of rising public anger against Mr Scholz, the protests were held despite the German government announcing a partial U-turn on controversial plans to cut tax breaks and fuel subsidies for farmers.
The funding cuts had been drawn up as the chancellor struggled late last year to fill a massive hole in the German government’s budget, which was created by a surprise court ruling that prevented ministers from drawing on pandemic-era funds to support future projects.
Mr Scholz’s coalition initially planned to abolish agricultural diesel subsidies and vehicle tax breaks for farmers – but after major farmers’ protests in December they abandoned the latter policy.
They also diluted the proposal on diesel so that the subsidies would be gradually phased out over several years rather than cut instantly.
But this has not mollified the German farming association, which has vowed to unleash protests “the likes of which the country has never experienced before”.
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Political climate change in Germany
As Alternative für Deutschland approach 40% support in East Germany, a right-leaning CDU faction announce plans to break away from the Union and found a new party that will cooperate with AfD
In September, three East German states – Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg – will hold elections for state parliament. Alternative für Deutschland are now by far the strongest-polling party in each of these states. In Saxony, for example, they are polling at an all-time high of 37%:
The SPD – the party of federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz – has fallen to just 3% support here, well below the threshold for entering parliament, and support for the liberal FDP has all but evaporated. If these were election results and the Saxon chapter of the CDU insisted on retaining its cordon sanitaire against the AfD, it would have to enter a coalition with either the Left Party (Die Linke) or the Greens or both. This would force the CDU to continue its association with leftist policies that are deeply unpopular with its base, doing further long-term damage to the Union.
The latest poll from Thüringen likewise has the AfD at 36.5%, and when somebody bothers to poll Brandenburg again, we’ll almost surely see similar AfD gains there. Unfortunately it is very hard to peel support from the CDU, even in East Germany; a lot of people from my parents’ generation will just never stop voting for them, no matter what they do. This is why I think, in the present landscape, the ceiling for AfD support in the East stands at around 40%. In Saxony, this is just short of the outright majority necessary to govern alone without any partners.1
The pressure, however, is building within the CDU. Somehow, some way, something will give, and that something might just be a small faction within the CDU/CSU known as the WerteUnion, or the Values Union. The WerteUnion was founded in 2017 by right-leaning members of the Union parties in response to Angela Merkel’s constant flirtations with the left. The WerteUnion understands itself as a traditionalist conservative movement within the party, although CDU leadership refuses to extend the faction formal recognition and regards it with hostility.
Among the WerteUnion founders is Hans-Georg Maaßen, a lawyer and former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Maaßen has become an increasingly outspoken opponent not only of the CDU but of German politics in general. In response, the CDU under Friedrich Merz has further alienated him by instituting proceedings to kick him out of the party, even though Maaßen supported Merz’s candidacy to lead the party.
This week, Maaßen announced his plans to split from the CDU and make the WerteUnion into its own party. If the membership agrees, as it almost certainly will, the WerteUnion could field candidates in the upcoming East German elections. Maaßen says the move is necessary because the CDU establishment under Merz have insisted on “continuing … the left-wing course” set by Angela Merkel, and have “failed to realise the catastrophic state of Germany and are not prepared to deal with Merkel’s disastrous policies.” The WerteUnion will “go its own way,” Maaßen has said, and – crucially – it will “tear down all firewalls.”
By that, Maaßen means that his party will cooperate with the AfD, a step the CDU has long refused. Come the fall, in other words, there will be a new party ready to receive the support of traditional CDU voters who have been alienated by Merkel’s centrism but cannot bring themselves to support the evil populists of the AfD. Note that the WerteUnion wouldn’t have to be wildly successful to change the political calculus. If they can capture just 5% of CDU support in Saxony, they would have enough seats in the Landtag to form a coalition with the AfD. This is clearly the strategy that Maaßen has in mind.
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The warmist craze is still being propped up by those who should know better
In the week leading up to Christmas, two reports were released for public consultation – the CSIRO’s GenCost report and AEMO’s Integrated System Plan (ISP). Both purport to present an enlightened perspective on our electricity system, present and future. Both should be laughed out of existence and the organisations pulled into line, in my opinion.
Always guaranteed to drive the renewables lobby and its political sycophants into a frenzy of adoration and crazed repetition across social media, the reports contain a carefully crafted combination of cherry-picked assumptions and politically-driven scenarios.
Each iteration of the reports’ conclusions are predictably pro-renewables, but the message most copied and pasted by Teals this year is the CSIRO’s findings on the high cost of nuclear power, a technology currently banned in Australia. Why does the CSIRO, while investigating the costs of electricity generation technologies for the Australian market, include nuclear power in its GenCost report? Does any other organisation consider the costs and capability of illegal products for use in Australia?
The question may be asked, why is the CSIRO injecting themselves into the nuclear energy debate? More questions revolve around CSIRO’s coal results.
To understand how GenCost potentially relates to the narrative against coal power, you have to peruse the consultant reports that estimate the capital and operating costs of various power generation technologies.
These consultant reports define the CSIRO’s version of a coal-fired power station. The headlines screaming, CSIRO says new wind and solar cheaper than coal are not referring to the coal-fired power stations currently operating in Australia. Not even close.
Let’s step through how CSIRO approach coal power in GenCost. First, the total build cost for a CSIRO 700 MW coal-fired power station is a touch under $4 billion. This mythical power station is greenfield, with $0.6 billion tied up in the procurement, approval, and development of the site. A CSIRO coal-fired power station then needs 100 km of new rail line to a coal mine, another $0.2 billion.
Before construction has started, CSIRO, in their minds, have spent over $0.8 billion. Retrofit or upgrade of an existing power station is an option not considered by the CSIRO. By excluding these land, development, and rail costs, the equipment and construction reduces to $3.1 billion.
More costs are loaded into the design itself. Using materials and techniques able to achieve higher temperatures and pressures costs more but results in higher efficiency – more electricity generated and less waste created for every tonne of coal burned. This matters when your power station is in Japan and every tonne of coal arrives by ship, but in Australia where most coal-fired power stations are built on top of their own coal mine with a lifetime of fuel reserves, efficiency matters far less and allows the option of much cheaper designs. The CSIRO has chosen the world’s most expensive coal power technology as the example – advanced ultra super-critical – not used in Australia.
These expensive high-pressure and high-temperature designs also require high-quality fuel, equivalent to Australia’s export thermal coal. Most of our local power stations burn lower quality coal that is not exported anyway, and are significantly cheaper to run.
To estimate the higher technology costs loaded into the CSIRO’s assumptions we can compare against a relatively recent super-critical unit – Queensland’s 750 MW Kogan Ck power station. Brought online in 2007 for $1.2 billion, the bill converts to around $1.8 billion today. Even if you unkindly double the original cost to $2.4 billion, the older technology matching the local coal is still $0.7 billion cheaper to build than the CSIRO’s version.
The above discusses capital costs. Operating costs are largely related to fuel, which poses a challenge because the CSIRO does not quantify their fuel assumptions. Instead, they leave us with a ‘low price’ of 4.3 $/GJ, apparently based on the coal price in Japan. By comparison, even AEMO provides fuel costs of just 1.57 $/GJ at Kogan Ck, nearly a third of the CSIRO’s figure.
To recap, the CSIRO’s coal-fired power station would be built on a brand new site, with a new 100 km rail line, using the most expensive coal-burning technology available, costing almost 80 per cent more to build, and 300 per cent more to run than a realistic alternative. This is akin to saying housing is expensive but limiting your search to Darling Harbour.
Australians are rapidly discovering that a grid run by wind and solar is more expensive than a grid run by coal. The GenCost report is an embarrassment for all Australians.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/csiro-tipping-the-scales-on-cost/
***************************************10 January, 2024
France drops renewables targets, prioritises nuclear in new energy bill
Critics are deriding as a step backward a new French energy bill that favours the further development of nuclear power and avoids setting targets for solar and wind power and other renewables.
France, like other EU countries, aims to achieve carbon neutrality in 2050.
The proposed text, which is slated to go before the cabinet early next month and then be submitted to lawmakers, reaffirms France’s commitment to nuclear power to ensure “energy sovereignty”.
The country became a leader in nuclear power generation after the 1973 oil crisis, building over 50 such power plants that produced around two-thirds of the country’s electricity.
But those reactors are ageing and France has yet to bring the first of a new generation of nuclear power plants online.
The proposed text affirms “the sustainable choice of using nuclear energy as a competitive and carbon-free” source of electricity, and targets the construction of at least six but as many as 14 new reactors to pull off the transition to clean energy and meet climate change goals.
But the proposed text sets no such targets for building renewable capacity, in particular wind and solar, whereas previous energy laws did.
The Ministry of Energy Transition said “it is false to say that there is no renewables objective” as the government will set the targets itself later.
But that pledge does not satisfy activists and experts.
“It’s a terrible step back,” said Arnaud Gosse, a lawyer specialising in environmental law.
He recalled that in a 2019 law, parliament stated the desire to debate the share of different energy sources in overall production.
‘Tending’ instead of targets
“If you only quantify nuclear power, you do not know the share of non-renewable energies. As a result, nuclear gets prioritised and, depending on remaining coverage needs, non-renewables will be the subject of floating (future) decrees. It’s no longer a mix,” Gosse said.
To reach its stated ambition of carbon neutrality by 2050 France will have to massively ramp up the production and share of renewables, studies have repeatedly shown.
After years of prevarication, France last year voted through two bills designed to speed up progress on nuclear as well as renewables.
In November, the government put forward initial figures proposing a doubling to 18 GW of offshore wind power in 2035 as well as setting out the annual rate of deployment of solar panels needed to hit 75 GW in 2035, while also aiming for a doubling of onshore wind power capacity to 40 GW in 2035.
Jules Nyssen, president of France’s Renewable Energies Union, declared himself “stunned” after discovering that renewables targets did not appear in the draft.
The text promises to make efforts rather than set objectives and uses formulations such as “tending towards a reduction”.
For Anne Bringault, energy transition manager of the Climate Action Network, “this is an extremely significant step backwards, and totally inconsistent with European objectives.
“Even if the objectives are raised, we no longer have such a strong commitment to them,” she said.
The draft law also drops targets for reducing energy consumption via renovation of buildings.
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Policy Obstacles to Natural Gas Delivery Pose Winter Danger
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) just released its 2023-24 Winter Reliability Assessment and it has concerning implications for the winter ahead.
The report highlighted many points of grid stress, especially during colder months, pointing out that, “a large portion of the North American BPS is at risk of insufficient electricity supplies during peak winter conditions”. Another key element of the report is NERC’s discussion of the importance of reliable natural gas supply chains.
When it comes to grid reliability, policymakers are imposing self-inflicted wounds. The United States has the most natural gas production in the world. But, current policy choices limit our ability to rely on domestic gas. The Jones Act makes it difficult to move natural gas around the country by ship, and the failure to permit new pipeline capacity means that moving it over land is similarly difficult.
This need for reliable gas supplies is especially apparent in New England, which is hamstrung by the absence of good pipeline infrastructure and by restrictions imposed by the Jones Act. The Jones Act bars the transport of goods (including LNG) between two US ports by any ship that is not US-owned, -built, -crewed, and -registered. Unfortunately, there are no Jones Act compliant LNG tankers. As a result, these obstacles make the region predominantly reliant on imports
The NERC report highlights the limited natural gas infrastructure of New England, pointing out that, “potential constraints on the fuel delivery systems and the limited inventory of liquid fuels may exacerbate the risks for fuel-based generator outages and output reductions that result in energy emergencies during extreme weather.”
For grid operators, maintaining adequate gas supplies in cold weather is a balancing act. Some portion of the infrastructure will inevitably be taken out of service during a winter storm or an especially cold period. In these situations, even if the best infrastructure were in place, it’s still difficult to ensure reliable natural gas delivery from well-head to power plant because of the effects of the low temperatures. It’s difficult enough to maintain adequate supply during these periods, artificial constraints on energy supply only make matters worse.
One key example of the supply issues for New England is its reliance on fuel oil for power production on the coldest days. Although most natural gas plants are capable of burning oil, they don’t often do so because it is a comparatively expensive fuel and is also not efficient for electricity generation purposes. Therefore, power plants don’t generally burn oil for power unless the grid is in a pinch for supply. In New England, this option is regularly taken on the coldest days to make up for supply shortfalls (that are created in large part by the region’s lack of gas infrastructure).
In fact, there are even some days in New England where more electricity is generated from oil than from any other source. For example, from Christmas Eve to the Day after Christmas in 2022, freezing cold temperatures throughout the Northeast resulted in oil dominating the grid.
The use of oil for electricity, given all of its shortcomings for power plant operators, shows that something is seriously amiss on the New England grid.
Natural gas-fired generation has reliable output, but its fuel availability is not always similarly reliable, largely due to poor policy choices. Working to ameliorate these issues by permitting new pipeline capacity and reforming the Jones Act would go a long way toward firming up reliability and resilience for winter weather events. The situation in New England serves as an example of the need for pipeline infrastructure, and Jones Act reform.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/01/03/policy-obstacles-gas-delivery-winter/?omhide=true
********************************************************Appeals Court Hits ‘Off’ Switch on Biden’s Dishwasher, Washing Machine Regulations
A federal appeals court on Monday shot down the Biden administration’s efforts to repeal existing regulations on dishwashers and clothes washers.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion in a legal battle between 11 red states and the federal government over the Department of Energy’s efforts to impose energy- and water-efficiency standards for dishwashers and clothes washers that asserted it “is unclear that DOE has statutory authority to regulate water use in dishwashers and clothes washers,” according to the opinion’s text.
The Biden administration has attempted to push new standards for both appliances since coming into office in 2021 as part of a wider push to nudge the market toward more energy-efficient appliances, which in some cases are generally less effective than their other models, the court asserted in its opinion.
In March 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) proposed standards for dishwashers that allow the sale of models that run faster cycles, using more energy and water than standard dishwashers in the process. The Trump administration then adopted similar guidelines as policy in 2020, but the Biden DOE repealed those standards in 2021 before advancing its own standards in May 2023 that crack down on the faster models advantaged by the Trump administration’s rules. (RELATED: Biden Admin Fires Next Salvo In War On Appliances)
“But even if DOE has water-usage authority over the relevant appliances, the Department (b) failed to adequately consider the negative consequences of the Repeal Rule, including the substitution effects of energy-and-water-wasting rewashing, prewashing, and handwashing,” the opinion states. “In promulgating the Repeal Rule, DOE stated that its energy conservation program must promote ‘water conservation’ and regulate ‘water use.’ … But it is unclear how or why DOE thinks it has any statutory authority to regulate ‘water use’ in dishwashers and washing machines.”
The court’s opinion also points out that there is “ample evidence” to support that DOE’s dishwasher standards actually accomplish the opposite of their intent, stating that “they make Americans use more energy and more water for the simple reason that purportedly ‘energy efficient’ appliances do not work.”
Beyond clothes washers and dishwashers, the Biden DOE has also sought to impose energy-efficiency regulations for items such as water heaters, furnaces, and pool pump motors. The administration has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars on helping state and municipal governments pursue building codes.
“In this opinion, the court has forced DOE to follow the law and even noted that one of the positions DOE took in this suit ‘borders on frivolous.’ This decision allows manufacturers to build better dishwashers, not be encumbered by counterproductive federal regulations,” Devin Watkins, an attorney for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said of the opinion.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/09/federal-court-throws-wrench-biden-admins-war-appliances/
***************************************************Australia: Logging operations to continue between NSW and Queensland after judge rejects environmentalists' court bid
Environmentalists have lost a legal challenge to a forestry agreement between the NSW and Commonwealth governments, meaning logging operations can continue within a vast coastal area between Sydney and the Queensland border.
The North East Regional Forestry Agreement was originally signed in 2000 and renewed in 2018.
The North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) asked the Federal Court to declare that the renewed agreement did not meet the definition of such agreements under relevant laws.
On behalf of the alliance, the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) argued the Commonwealth was required to assess environmental values and principles of ecologically sustainable management when it was renewed, but failed to do so.
These included impacts on endangered species, climate change and old growth forests.
Justice Melissa Perry today rejected that argument and ruled the requirement to assess environmental values applied only when the intergovernmental agreement began, not when it was extended.
Summarising her decision, the judge said the effect of a regional forest agreement was not to leave a "regulatory void" with respect to the regions covered by the agreement.
Rather, it provided an "alternative mechanism" by which the objectives of biodiversity laws could be achieved through intergovernmental agreement.
"The question of whether or not to enter into or vary an intergovernmental agreement of this nature is essentially a political one," Justice Perry said.
"The merits of which are matters for the government parties and not the courts to determine."
The evidence considered by the court
A deed extending the agreement was executed under former prime minister Scott Morrison and former premier Gladys Berejiklian.
As part of the extension, there was an assessment report which relied on published data and formal five-yearly reviews of regional forestry agreements.
But the EDO argued there was no "reasonably contemporaneous" assessment of the projected impacts of climate change on forests.
In her full written judgement, Justice Perry said there was no expert evidence presented to court allowing it to assess whether the information relied on to extend the agreement was out of date.
She also noted all parties agreed the Commonwealth was aware of and had published material recognising Australia's weather and climate were changing.
In relation to endangered species, the EDO argued material relied on at the time of renewal was also not reasonably contemporaneous.
But Justice Perry similarly highlighted a lack of expert evidence that would allow the court to assess that claim, including whether historical information was no longer relevant or whether more recent data on endangered species existed.
'People will take to the front lines'
Greens MP and former Environmental Defenders Office lawyer Sue Higginson said it was a disappointing outcome, although it was always a "very ambitious case" by NEFA.
She said the final words from Justice Perry in the court this morning that the matter was in the hands of politicians sent a "very strong message".
"I do suspect people will take to the front lines again, as they've been doing," Ms Higginson said.
"All eggs will be placed in the basket of pressuring those that have the power to change the direction forest management is taking, and that is squarely on our politicians right now."
North Coast Environment Council volunteer Ashley Love said an end to that type of logging is especially important as work progresses on the Great Koala National Park.
The park will connect 300,000 hectares of state forests and existing national parks between Coffs Harbour and Kempsey on the mid-north coast.
Forestry industry relieved
The case was the first challenge to a regional forestry agreement in NSW.
Prior to the decision, NSW Nationals leader Dugald Saunders raised concerns that if the EDO won, "serious ramifications" would follow, including an "almost immediate shutdown" of the forestry industry.
More than 5,000 workers could have been impacted, Mr Dugald said.
He said NSW had "some of the strictest regulations" in the world when it came to forestry operations.
Andrew Hurford said the forestry industry felt relieved by the court outcome on Wednesday.(ABC North Coast: Leah White)
President of Timber New South Wales Andrew Hurford said the industry was buoyed by the court's ruling today.
Mr Hurford said the Regional Forestry Agreement process was designed to managed the resource comprehensively, and that 87 per cent of forest in the region were reserved from harvesting.
"We just need a bit of balance here," he said.
"We manage 12 per cent of the public estate in a sustainable fashion, very careful of the environment and very careful to ensure that we have timber availability into the future."
'It's not the same forest now as it was then'
North East Forest Alliance president Dailan Pugh disagreed with the reliance on an assessment done three years prior to the original agreement.
"It's extremely disappointing that the federal and state governments can do these regional forest agreements based on an assessment done in 1997, and to continually renew them," he said.
He said the assessment was based on "reasonable information available at the time", but argued that more information was now available.
"We know that climate change ... is having a major impact on our threatened species," he said.
"It's not the same forest now as it was then, and our species have continued to decline despite the regional forest agreement.
"The judge has said it's not a legal issue, it's a political decision, so it's up to the politicians to decide whether that is an acceptable approach."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-10/nsw-forestry-court-decision-logging-nefa/103300986
***************************************9 January, 2024
As Temps Drop, The Climate-Obsessed Media Ignore Coal’s Life-Saving Role
On a recent cold winter day, residents of Munich were surprised to see people skiing in the street. Yes, that is how much snow fell in the German city and other parts of Europe during the early winter of 2023-2024.
Despite disruption to both ground and air travel, the Germans survived the freezing weather with access to heating and basic utilities.
But not everyone in our world is as fortunate as those living off reliable energy sources in Western economies. Billions of people all over the world do not have access to secure sources of heat and electricity. For these, winter can be a death blow.
A political war against fossil fuels is making matters worse for those unprotected from frigid temperatures.
The gravity of winter’s hazard has been overshadowed by the prevailing discourse on purported man-made climate change. We have been inundated with warnings about the perils of warming.
But historically, it is the cold that has been disastrous. It has altered the course of history across the world and left people scrambling for food as plant life dwindled.
Winter’s icy chill claims far more lives than scorching summer heat, according to global analyses of fatalities caused by various natural hazards.
A 2023 health study conducted across 854 European cities reveals that an estimated annual excess of 203,620 deaths were due to cold while just 20,173 were attributed to heat.
In comparative terms, only 1 in 10 excess deaths from extreme temperatures were attributable to heat while a majority were due to cold.
The fearmongering around warming aside, winter’s cold bite is going nowhere and will continue to test humankind’s survival mechanisms.
Since August 2023, snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has remained at or above the 57-year mean.
With climate science co-opted by a worldwide political crusade against allegedly human-induced global warming, communities may find themselves ill-equipped to face upcoming winter weather.
In regions with particularly harsh winters and limited access to reliable heating sources, the threat of death and illness due to anti-fossil fuel policies is grave.
In places like Mongolia, where economic hardship and energy converge, staying warm is a continual wintertime focus. This year, the country’s imports of electricity from Russia were disrupted, resulting in load shedding to millions of people in the middle of winter.
At minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit, the people of Mongolia were left to fend for themselves.
To brave this harsh climate, they rely on just two crucial energy sources: internal electricity generation from their plentiful coal reserves and the direct use of coal for heating homes.
When faced with below-freezing snow-blanketed winter days, neither wind nor solar power can guarantee a steady energy supply.
In other countries of the region, the scenario is similar. Destitute communities in Afghanistan rely on coal to endure the winter.
In Kyrgyzstan, the unreliability of hydropower results in a continuous need for coal.
Likewise, people in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan depend on coal for warmth, although the latter is also increasing its reliance on gas.
It is easy for hypocritical politicians who fly in private CO2-emitting planes across the Western world to champion the elimination of fossil fuels. But their activism blatantly ignores the bone-chilling grip of winter on faraway communities.
It is long past time for the Western media to boldly report the critical role of fossil fuels in supporting human life during harsh winter conditions.
Such fact-based reporting would put to rest the false narrative of a world doomed by warming.
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UK: The surge in Net Zero scepticism, silly climate activists and how to beat the Blob
Net Zero scepticism, if not climate scepticism, has exploded, and is now a fixture of the mainstream, albeit a minor part. Former ministers and broadsheet news media began to find their voices in ’23. This is largely confined to the centre-Right, but that may be merely a consequence of the realities of power – a Labour government is going to inherit the same problems of their own making, and it will be difficult to sustain the consensus. The GMB’s interventions shows that the broad Left’s support of the Miliband set’s preferences cannot be taken for granted. However, independent media and analysts are far ahead of the mainstream, which has yet to form robust critiques of green ideology, except in extreme (e.g. XR/JSO) cases, and is still inclined to apologise for climate alarmism, and/or tinker with policy. The cross-party Westminster consensus on climate holds for now.
Cancellation on steroids
Power is doubling down on its predominant ideologies, and consolidating with unprecedented attacks against the conventions of one-time liberal democracy (RIP). Governments throughout the West have given themselves the power to impose increasingly draconian interventions to police speech, under the pretext of protecting the public from ‘online harms’. In 2023, the concepts of ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ fully escaped the dank confines of the Blob’s nucleus, and are now a cancer: A mutation of the principle that might-is-right. The doublespeak extends from passing off official lies as unimpeachable truth to claiming that this ‘protects’ democracy. Financial institutions have weighed in, appointing themselves as regulators of the public space, though debanking scandals have embarrassed the blobs. ESG is toppling globally, especially in the U.S., but seeking surer foundations in Europe and the U.K. Mainstream discussion has yet to properly connect ESG to authoritarianism and rising costs of living. In the U.S., new precedents are being set for using criminal and civil courts as political weapons against critics of all sizes. Blobs are keen to extend this combination of regulation and lawfare into Europe and the U.K. These are, of course, reflections of the facts of political establishments’ loss of moral authority, and the growing gulf between them and publics, forcing them to take increasingly reckless measures against their own failures.
The UNFCC/COP process and climate alarmism is a busted flush
Attempts to consolidate the climate agenda, at all levels of government, using increasingly high-pitched rhetoric are increasingly falling flat on their face. Epitomised by António Guterres’s sloganeering, such as ‘Code Red for Humanity’ and ‘Global Boiling’, the global political agenda is simply embarrassing. Geopolitics is repolarising, with the west committed to harming itself, apparently in the interests of its sworn enemy in the form of the dominant partners of BRICS nations. One time ‘developing’ nations have found their feet, and they are not going to follow the West, leaders of which have no longer any leverage over any but officials of the poorest governments. The world now has (always did) far more serious problems to contend with than can be solved through happy-clappy green idealism, advanced only by billionaire-backed green NGOs and ersatz ‘civil society’ organisations, many of which are merely ESG lobbying outfits in ‘third sector’ drag. Western politicians succeed only in signalling to the rest of the world the failures of the green agenda, and their hypocrisy and lack of competence and good faith in all matters, including the green agenda, financial regulation, rule of law, democracy and security: They will put their self interest and ideological ambitions before the basic needs and interests of their own populations. The putative achievements of COP26 are already collapsing, with global financial institutions falling out of the Bloomberg-centric ‘alliance’ (GFANZ). The most recent COP was an inconclusive mess, which drew most hostility from the green blob itself, and only served therefore to demonstrate the hopeless fracturing of the world into irreconcilable parts.
The world is not decarbonising
Global CO2 emissions reached 37.15 billion tonnes in 2022 – a slight increase over the pre-covid 2019 record of 37.04 billion tonnes. The world consumed 44,854 TWh of coal in 2022 – pretty much where it was a decade ago in 2014, though agencies such as the IEA are reporting this as a “return to record levels”. Reduced consumption in the West has been matched by growth in Asia, where consumption has tripled since 2000. Oil and gas consumption have also been flat since Covid, reflecting recent extremely high prices – which we might expect to have reduced demand more significantly – though 2022 gas consumption is down on 2021. Coal, oil and gas accounted for 26.7%, 31.6% and 23.5% of global energy demand respectively – a total of 81.8%. 14% of primary energy came from renewable sources – up from 9% in 2010, and barely more than a doubling from its historic 6% through most of the second half of the 20th Century. And those figures for renewables depend on the dodgy ‘substitution method’, which multiplies the contribution of renewables by around 2.4, in order to ‘account for’ the inefficiency of fossil fuels, but which are thus an attempt to inflate the apparent viability of green energy.
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Jeremy Clarkson rips apart BBC's climate agenda as he celebrates environmental victory with brilliant swipe
Jeremy Clarkson has celebrated the discovery of over 800 new species of animal heading into 2024 amid the modern world's ongoing climate complaints.
Writing in his last column of 2023, the Clarkson's Farm host lauded the fact that more and more new species of animals are being found despite being told the population is "destroying pretty much all biodiversity on Earth".
Clarkson was reflecting on how he'd like to have more time in the day before he touched upon a report that said last year 815 new species of animal were recorded.
Celebrating how the feat is a major victory in the light of persistent eco moans, Clarkson didn't hold back.
He wrote of the discovery: "This flies in the face of Instagram-level, X-fed thinking.
"We are told by The Guardian and the BBC, on an almost daily basis, that modern living and oil have destroyed pretty much all biodiversity on Earth.
"They say humans in general, and Tories in particular, have wiped out 83 per cent of all mammals and that today just four per cent of the world’s remaining mammals are wild.
"The rest are cows, pigs, sheep, chickens and us. And yet here we are, with the entomologist John Noyes saying, 'I find new species in my back garden without really trying'," he added in The Times.
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Cargo vessel's lithium-batteries fire highlights concerns over EV risks
In a concerning turn of events, a cargo vessel, Genius Star XI, transporting electric vehicle (EV) lithium-ion batteries from Vietnam to San Diego, was engulfed in flames. This unsettling incident underscores pressing questions about the safety and feasibility of accelerated EV adoption in the United States, particularly concerning the transportation and handling of EV components.
The Incident and its Implications
The fire aboard Genius Star XI, a ship carrying nearly 2,000 tons of lithium-ion batteries, was fortunately extinguished and the vessel stabilized. However, the event raises grave concerns about the threat posed by EV battery fires, both on land and at sea. Recent incidents of factory fires in Detroit linked to EVs and an electric vehicle catching fire in Autauga County, requiring an alarming 36,000 gallons of water to douse, have further intensified these concerns.
The Government’s Stance and Public Concerns
The Biden administration is ardently subsidizing EVs to promote their use, despite trepidation from auto workers and dealerships. These subsidies come in the wake of reports of EV fires occurring spontaneously, during accidents, and even while parked. These fires not only present unique challenges to firefighters but also release toxic gases, adding to the overall environmental impact of EV production.
Addressing the Risks
There is a growing need for effective safety measures and stringent regulations for transporting lithium-ion-based cargo. Emphasis is put on maintaining the batteries at a low state of charge to prevent thermal runaway. A study by the FAA revealed that batteries with a state of charge of 30 or less were significantly less prone to thermal runaway issues than those charged at 70 and higher. However, the incident aboard Genius Star XI proves that there is still a long way to go in ensuring the safe transportation and handling of EV components.
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8 January, 2024
Biden Slammed for Pushing 'Energy Colonialism' on Africa
President Joe Biden's "green" energy crusade has done lasting damage to the United States. His often unconstitutional attempts to force a "transition" as part of his plan to "end" fossil fuels gutted American energy independence, drove gas prices to their all-time highs, and sent energy costs skyrocketing — causing the president to drain the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to lows not seen since the 1980s.
It's all part of Biden and his administration's attempts to earn proverbial gold stars from woke ESG types who've convinced the Biden White House to consider "climate change" an existential threat. The costly damage done by Biden's energy transition continues even as congressional testimony explains that there's no dollar amount the federal government could spend that would lower global temperatures. And the damage being done by Biden's energy crusade has expanded beyond our own borders.
In a recent New York Post op-ed, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) and Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-FL), slammed the Biden administration’s decision to export (and force) his "green" agenda on African nations. Explaining that "[e]nergy poverty is at the heart of Africa's development challenges," the Republican lawmakers say that Biden's "decision to impose oppressive, burdensome restrictions on developing African countries attempting to advance and lift themselves from destitution and dependence is profoundly concerning."
Calling Biden's policy in Africa "simply energy colonialism," McCaul and Diaz-Balart noted that the administration "only allows so-called 'green-energy projects' to receive funding and support" from the U.S., rather than "leveraging all available tools to pull Africa out of energy poverty."
As is on-brand for the Biden administration, the lawmakers call the president's Africa policy "hypocritical and a huge waste of money and opportunities."
President Biden’s unauthorized climate envoy, John Kerry, is flying around the world in jet planes while abandoning the African people to the impossible task of solving their serious energy crises with ineffective and counterproductive solutions: solar panels filled with parts made by forced labor in Communist China.
Most recently he and other administration officials, including Vice President Kamala Harris, attended COP28 in the United Arab Emirates, where they pledged billions in taxpayer money to the Green Climate Fund — a slush fund for special-interest projects with no real oversight that has funded projects in China, the world’s second-largest economy.
These pledges of billions in taxpayer money invested only in perceived ‘green’ projects will do nothing to address the true drivers of pollution — like China — or empower the African continent.
[...]
Instead of confronting the world’s second-largest economy, responsible for 27% of global emissions — more than six times the emissions of the entire continent of Africa — the Biden administration is holding undeveloped countries to an unfair standard.
Much like his attempts to crush the U.S. economy and energy sector to appease climate alarmists with actions that won't actually fix the problems they say exist, Biden's policy in Africa won't do anything but harm residents. As McCaul and Diaz-Balart rightly note: "if Africa were to reduce its emissions to zero, the enormous sacrifice that would entail would still have almost no effect on a global scale."
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New York City’s Climate Policies Could Make Life Even More ‘Unaffordable’ For The Middle Class
New York City is moving forward with several climate policies which are likely to make everyday life even more costly for the middle class in one of the country’s most expensive cities.
The city is aiming to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% come 2050, push a sweeping building electrification mandate known as Local Law 97 and impose an automobile traffic congestion fee, each of which will increase the costs of living or working in the nation’s largest city, especially for the middle class, energy and New York policy experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan each already rank within the 15 most expensive places to live in the U.S., according to an analysis conducted by CNBC.
“The city is wealthy because, somewhere out there, people are producing energy, food, clothing and so on, and people are trading all of that in New York,” Dan Kish, a senior fellow for the Institute for Energy Research, told the DCNF. The city’s emissions target “will make things more expensive and drive people away to places like Florida,” he added.
That flight of capital would shrink the tax base, thereby straining the city’s finances further, Kish told the DCNF. “People without the means, working people, do not have the opportunity to just pack up and leave,” Kish told the DCNF. “But it’s easy if you’re Mike Bloomberg.”
Local Law 97, meanwhile, is poised to impose emissions standards that approximately 50,000 buildings in New York City will have to meet starting in 2024, with additional restrictions imposed starting in 2030, according to The New York Times.
Some buildings are easier to retrofit with the appropriate wiring and equipment necessary to comply than others, and a large share of the high costs incurred by landlords and building owners for coming into compliance will almost certainly be passed on to residents, Jane Menton, a mother who lives in a Queens co-op and has led a grassroots effort to fight against Local Law 97, told the DCNF.
“Progressives in Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn are so afraid to go against the narrative that this rule is a climate solution… but it’s unaffordable to convert buildings to electric so they won’t convert to comply with the rule, they will just pay fines which will then allow the city to use the money to plug gaps in the budget,” Menton told the DCNF. “The same politicians and advocates who claim to care about the city’s working class wrote a law that will push them out of their homes… functionally, this law is just a carbon tax on the middle class.”
Notably, other cities, such as Boston, have pushed for similar building electrification policies to fight climate change, and the Biden administration has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help state and municipal governments pursue policies that “decarbonize” buildings as well.
The New York City congestion pricing tax is promulgated by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which is technically not an agency operating under the auspices of the municipal government.
Congestion pricing is meant to reduce emissions and air pollution by charging drivers fees to enter certain sections of the city. Specifically, the MTA has proposed to charge passenger cars $15 and trucks as much as $36 to be able to enter a large swath of Manhattan, according to local outlet NBC 4.
However, the proposal may not significantly reduce the amount of traffic that piles up on the city’s roadways, potentially even increasing the amount of congestion in areas like the Bronx, according to the New York Post. Qualifying low-income drivers who register with the appropriate authorities could also receive a 50% discount on the charges after their first ten trips into the relevant area of Manhattan, according to local digital news outlet northjersey.com
“Congestion pricing should be viewed primarily as a revenue action to cover the MTA’s indefensibly high capital costs,” Ken Girardin, director of research for the Empire Center, a New York-focused think tank, told the DCNF. “As to congestion itself, policymakers have declined to do basic things like enforce parking rules or dial back the parking permits given to public employees or other policy changes that would take cars off lower Manhattan roads because those aren’t things you can borrow money against.”
The policy would also make life more expensive for people who do not live in the city but make the commute each day to go to work, according to Politico. Notably, politicians in London, the U.K’s largest metropolis, have attempted a similar scheme, which Republican New York City Councilman Joseph Borelli of Staten Island described as “a complete disaster” and an “abject failure” when discussing New York’s forthcoming version of the scheme in January.
“If all of New York state went ‘net-zero’ today, United Nations climate modeling indicates that a mere 0.0023° F of global warming would be avoided by 2050. That is far from measurable, much less significant. So nothing would be accomplished,” Steve Milloy, a senior legal fellow for the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, told the DCNF. Businesses will stay in NYC and play along with the climate agenda, including high taxes, as long as costs can be passed on to locals. When profitability stops, businesses will leave… The costs of the climate agenda are regressive. Poorer people will feel them first.”
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Data Falsifies ABC News’ Claim that 2023 Displayed Dangerous Heat Trends
A recent article at ABC News titled, “2023 was the year of record heat temperatures,” makes a slew of claims about global warming in 2023, including that extreme heat is becoming more common and more disastrous. These claims are misleading. While the planet has modestly warmed since the end of the Little Ice Age, and high temperatures were recorded this year in various locations, there is no evidence that recent temperature trends constitute an emergency or signify global change. New local records for both heat and cold are set almost every year. Many of the examples cited by ABC News are misattributed to greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to other human causes and a variety of natural influences that climate scientists acknowledge contributed to this year’s warmth.
A team of four contributors write that “record-eclipsing temperatures will no longer be an anomaly if greenhouse gas emissions that fuel global warming continue at the current pace,” and that “hotter-than-normal temperatures could soon become the norm if fossil fuel extraction does not significantly decrease before 2030.”
ABC also mentions the goal of keeping warming to no more than 1.5 °C – but this value is arbitrary, as admitted by climate scientists and discussed very recently at Climate Realism in “Reason is Right, There is No ‘Climate Cliff’.” ABC neglects to mention that this threshold is not a scientifically established one, but rather a political talking point.
ABC spends the bulk of the article citing the “most consequential” stories about extreme heat this year, including two sections that deal with “warmest month on record” claims and “record stretches of triple-digit temperatures” describing heat records in El Paso, Phoenix, Death Valley National Park, and one four day stretch of allegedly “hottest day ever recorded” worldwide.
While it is true that average temperatures are rising (unevenly), and that the American southern states had some above-average temperatures this year, ABC’s claims are misleading and problematic.
It is notable that most of the temperature records that were broken were exceeded by a tenth of a degree or less, which is hardly alarming. In addition, the claims about record temperatures in cities in the United States are misleading since they are based on measurements from urban temperature stations, which Climate Realism and The Heartland Institute have repeatedly shown are woefully biased by the Urban Heat Island effect. For example, Phoenix, Arizona’s “record-breaking heatwave,” was clearly the result of the urban heat island effect is at work.
Climate Realism discussed this fact in “OilPrice.com Contributor Misses the UHI Influence on Phoenix Warming Trend,” and “Record Phoenix Warmth Not Reflected in Surrounding Weather Station Data.” The summer record high lows at night came from a single station located at major airport. It is widely recognized by researchers that there can be a massive temperature difference between desert cities like Phoenix and the surrounding rural areas at night– up to 20 degrees.
Despite the many summertime heat records, the summer of 2023 was only the 13th warmest summer on record since measurements began in 1895. Climate Realism has likewise repeatedly refuted claims about particular days, months or the whole summer being the hottest ever here, here, and here, for example.
Another section for ABC News’ story, “extraordinary marine temperatures,” correctly states that Atlantic Ocean temperatures were above-average. Unfortunately, rather than soberly discussing the larger trend and possible causes, ABC News cites absurd claim that ocean temperatures off the Florida coast were 101 degrees as proof of the danger. This is particularly egregious fearmongering, as this temperature was recorded by a single buoy located partially inland in the Everglades. No other device recorded this high of a temperature. As discussed at Climate Realism, the buoy was in very shallow water, and may have even been beached at the time of the recorded temperature. Publicly available data from the buoy shows that the record temperature was set at low tide during the hottest part of the day. It is also not the hottest temperature recorded by this buoy, which was in 2017 at 102°F.
ABC claimed Florida’s ocean temperatures caused a mass bleaching event, and worked as “super fuel for hurricanes.” Neither of these claims is accurate. Some coral did bleach this summer, but it is unclear that temperatures were the sole or even primary cause. In addition, coral bleaching is not the same thing as coral death. Most corals are evolved to prefer warmer equatorial waters. The worst disaster for corals and other marine life in the past has been when the Florida Keys suffered freezing cold temperatures. Even after the 2010 die-offs, the reefs bounced back, and there is no reason for believing this won’t be the case this year as well. More importantly, there is no reason to believe that modest warming will cause permanent disappearance of corals in Florida.
Similarly, while warmer waters can fuel strong hurricanes, it’s more complicated than that. Climate Realism has shown the actual data on hurricanes amid global warming dozens of times, there has been no increase in strong cyclones. Also, contrary to the impression left by the ABC News story, there were no record setting hurricanes in Florida this year.
In the section titled “Record melting at the poles” ABC references the usual fearmongering about Antarctica, particularly the so-called “doomsday glacier.” Antarctica is a poor case study for climate alarm, as the continent’s ice refuses to behave the way alarmists claim it should. Antarctica has not displayed any sign of the warming seen other places on the planet, with the exception of some ocean temperatures that have led to melting in the Peninsula region.
However, overall there has been an expansion of ice in Antarctica, as discussed in “Thanks, Frontline News, For Debunking Alarming Claims Made About Antarctica’s Temperature and Ice Trends.” In the areas that have seen melting, the total ice loss per year is around 0.0003 percent of the total ice mass, and the melt is being driven by subsurface geothermal activity and shifting ocean currents.
ABC also makes alarming claims about Arctic warming, claiming that sea ice and snow extent are well below the long-term average. While it’s true that the Arctic has seen sea ice mass loss over time, recent years have seen a decline in the rate of loss, not acceleration.
Most telling is that ABC News makes no mention whatsoever of some of the natural factors that gave 2023’s heat a boost.
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Insect apocalypse: Call to restrict pesticide ‘more toxic than DDT’
For a start, the toxicity of DDT has been greatly exaggerated. In large concentrations it causes adverse effects such as eggshell thinning in some birds but it is completely NON-toxic to people. Populations of many birds allegedly affected by DDT continue to decline depite the banning of DDT so that suggests that the "guilt" of DDT has been exaggerated
And the harm caused to birds has to be balanced by the benefits it has conferred on people. By destroying moquitoes, for instance, it has saved many lives that would have otherwise been lost to malaria.
In September 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared its support for the indoor use of DDT in African countries where malaria remains a major health problem, citing that benefits of the pesticide outweigh the health and environmental risks.
And DDT remains the one really effective eradicator of bedbugs
The studies below which find a diminution in some insect populations completely ignore two causes of the decline which are NOT attributable to agricultural pesticides:
1). Habitat loss. As more and more land is taken over for farming and urban use there is inevitably a loss of habitat for species previously present on that land.
2). People exert considerable effort to eradicate pest insects such as mosquitoes and flies. Other species could get caught up in that. And people are NOT going to become suddenly tolerant of mosquito bites etc
So the alleged link to neonic use is simply not established by the frequency studies set out below
Noticed fewer moths fluttering around outside lights in the evening or that butterflies seem less frequent visitors? Or that your car’s windscreen remains clearer of the haze of dead flies after a long journey than it used to? Part of the problem appears to point towards the use of a range of pesticides called neonicotinoids which Australian authorities are accused of being slow to regulate.
Ecologist Francisco Sanchez-Bayo from environmental sciences at Sydney University pulled together 100 long-term studies of the global fortunes of insects. He concluded that worldwide an average 37 per cent of species were declining, while populations of 18 per cent were increasing – those were agricultural herbivores and nuisance pests. Aquatic insect communities like mayflies, midges and sedges were even worse off: 42 per cent of species were declining and 29 per cent increasing.
The review threw up some interesting highlights. In northern NSW (Murwillumbah, north of Byron Bay), sampled for butterflies over 23 years, the overall abundance of 21 species declined by 57 per cent due to human disturbance.
Changes among 46 butterfly species in a peripheral urban landscape near Melbourne studied since 1941 found 36 to 48 per cent of species declined since 1981.
In Denmark, a small farmland area was sampled using the “windscreen splash” method between 1997 and 2017. Overall abundance of flying insects that crashed car windscreens declined 97 per cent along a 25 -kilometre road.
Sanchez-Bayo said: “In the 1990s, when I used to go to the Macquarie Marshes [north of Dubbo] to do research, as anyone who drove for a few hours to the countryside at that time would know, you had to stop to clean the windscreen. You don’t have to do that any more.
“In the case of Melbourne, the number of butterflies declined due to urbanisation, they were common years ago, but now they are just disappearing. We are talking about global declines, in Finland, Indonesia and the Amazon, everywhere. There is massive abuse with pesticides and other chemicals, fertilisers and so on which have contaminated the environment affecting mainly aquatic insects.”
One particular branch of pesticides, the neonicotinoids (also known as neonics) are used to treat seeds before planting and are claimed to increase crop yields. Scientists are now comparing neonicotinoids with DDT, of which the devastating effects on wildlife were revealed in the 1960s.
Roger Kitching, on the conservation committee of the Australian Entomological Society, says DDT affected vertebrates, particularly birds, but now, equally, insects deserve to be a major cause for concern due to their part in the food chain.
“The substitution of the range of earlier pesticides for the current generation of neonics and others is particularly bad for insect fauna,” he said. “These pesticides are systemic, that is they act from within plants, they are persistent, water-soluble and are very general in the species they target.
“When insects decline in ecosystems there are knock-on effects because of their roles as bird food, pollination vectors, plant munchers and so on – even though neonics do not impact vertebrates directly they have measurable impacts through these food-chain effects.”
In June, US ecologist Mike Miller, who works for Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources, told a fly-fishing podcast that he had found neonics in randomly selected waterways throughout the state. He said a lethal dose of neonics the size of a sugar grain was enough to kill 125,000 honey bees.
“One of those little paper sachets holds between 3 -4 grams of sugar and the comparable amount of neonics is enough to kill 600 million honey bees,” he said. “Neonics are thought to be 7000 times more toxic than DDT.”
The podcast host, fly-fishing guru Tom Rosenbauer, said: “It seems like in the past 10 years or so you hear so many fly-fishers complaining that the hatches [of insects] aren’t what they used to be. There seems to have been a dramatic decline in insects since neonics became popular.”
Miller’s comments were based on a scientific paper by ecologist Dave Goulson published a decade ago, called An overview of the environmental risks posed by neonicotinoid insecticide. Goulson, now at Sussex University, said 5 grams was enough to kill half of 1.25 billion bees and leave the other half just alive [known as an LD50 dose].
“While that figure is accurate, the levels of neonics found in the environment are pretty low and a bee would have to consume several CCs [cubic centimetres] of nectar to get a lethal dose, which it might do in its lifetime, but not in a morning,” he said. “The evidence we have is that bees are probably consuming less than a lethal dose, but that doesn’t mean that we can all breathe a sigh of relief that all is well.
“There is evidence that sub-lethal doses can seriously mess up the bees in a whole bunch of different ways – reduce their fertility, their ability to navigate and their resistance to disease. If their disease-resistance is knocked out by exposure to a pesticide, and then they are exposed to a virus transmitted by the Varroa mite, then there are many people who believe it does explain why bee colonies are collapsing.
“For an aquatic insect, you are not drinking the pesticide, you are bathing in it. The evidence is that anything over about 1 part per billion in a stream, which is the level which is commonly exceeded, it is enough to be impacting on aquatic insects when they are exposed to it 24/7.”
Asked if he felt Australia was behind other countries in regulating neonics, he added: “That would seem to be the case, the European regulators are pretty slow to act, but they thought the evidence was sufficiently compelling five years ago to act, and lots of other countries have followed suit in various ways. Within the developed world, Australia would appear to be at the tail end of the queue to do something about neonics. To ignore the evidence, I think, is probably foolish.
“There is a perception that we banned the really nasty pesticides years ago, we got rid of DDT and modern pesticides are better, but in some senses modern pesticides are much more dangerous because we have invented compounds that are far, far more poisonous to insect life, it means less of them has to go astray, into rivers or whatever, to do harm.
Australian scientists have also found imidacloprid (a neonicotinoid) in the catchment area of the Great Barrier Reef and the reef lagoon. Professor Michael Warne at the School of the Environment, University of Queensland in a research study of 6500 samples from 14 Great Barrier Reef catchment areas found the average concentration of imidacloprid was 0.051 µg/L (micrograms/litre) between July 2009 and June 2017. That concentration is 2.5 times higher than that found in a study of Dutch rivers, which led to an annual decrease in insectivorous bird populations of 3.5 per cent.
In a paper published a year ago, Warne wrote that within the Great Barrier Reef catchment area that imidacloprid was used to control canegrubs in sugarcane and the banana weevil borer in banana crops. He said that in a not yet published work by UQ and Department of Environment and Science suggests the risks from imidacloprid since 2017 may have stabilised or decreased, in part through education programs conducted in collaboration with some industry groups.
But he said: “There are many water samples where the concentration exceeds the proposed Australian and New Zealand water quality guideline for ecosystem protection from imidacloprid.”
Imidacloprids were restricted by the EU in 2018. In June last year, New York State moved to pass the Birds and Bees Protection Act, a first-in-the-nation bill to rein in the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. The Natural Resources Defence Council said in a statement: “Neonics are linked to massive bee and bird losses that impact food production, contaminate New York water and soil, and create human health concerns, especially with recent testing showing rising levels of neonics in 95+ per cent of pregnant women from New York and four other states.”
Pesticides use here is governed by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA). It updated its website page on neonicotinoids in May and lists six neonics approved for agricultural use in Australia. It published a report in 2014 and then announced a review in 2019. It states three of the six neonic pesticides used here were restricted in April 2018 in the European Union to greenhouse use only.
A spokesperson for the APVMA said in a statement: “The APVMA commenced its review of neonicotinoids in 2019 to allow for the consideration of new scientific information about risks to the environment, and to ensure safety instructions on products meet contemporary standards.
“Based on the statutory timeframes, the review is due to be completed in August 2023. The APVMA anticipates publication of proposed regulatory decisions during 2024 and has assigned additional resources to chemical review activities, including the use of external scientific reviewers to progress reviews as rapidly as possible.” However, there has been no update to the statement last May.
The authority was subject of a damning independent report in July which said it was “concerning that a number of chemical reviews have been ongoing for over 20 years”. It said the APVMA appeared reluctant to take compliance and enforcement action against industry.
Recent changes to the APVMA’s staff profile following the relocation of its offices from Canberra to Armidale in 2019, “has most likely impacted corporate knowledge, workload, and work capacity. Only a small proportion of previous APVMA staff relocated”.
Sanchez-Bayo said the APVMA was way behind schedule. “We are behind in many ways and how long it will take them to come up with a final decision we don’t know,” he said. “It is under-resourced and behind the times.
“My understanding is that the APVMA does not have enough staff, they are not properly trained in these issues, there has been a lot of turnover in the last few years. They are not producing the results they are expected to produce.”
Eddie Tsyrlin, a freshwater ecologist and waterbug taxonomist, estimates that as many as to 2000 species of freshwater invertebrates could have already been lost.
“The Ecological Safety section of Safety Data Sheet [for neonics] states that ‘these chemicals are very toxic to aquatic organisms, may cause long-term adverse effects to the aquatic environment’.
“For the adequate protection of Australian fish and invertebrates, testing needs to be done on pollution-sensitive and common species of freshwater invertebrates occurring in streams as well as in still waters. These could be mayfly and stonefly nymphs and sensitive species of midges.”
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7 January, 2024
The Problem With the Power Plant Rule
Earlier this year, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) issued a proposed rulemaking on New Source Performance Standards for greenhouse gas (GHG) Emissions from New and Reconstructed Electric Utility Generating Units (EGUs). It is colloquially known as the “Power Plant Rule.”
This rulemaking suffers from a host of flaws, but one issue—which I focused on in the Institute for Energy Research public comment on the rulemaking—is the issue of grid reliability and the failure to account for a concurrent rulemaking that will have a significant impact on the purview of this rule.
The other proposed rule in question is the Multi-Pollutant Emissions Standards for Model Years 2027 and Later Light-Duty and Medium-Duty Vehicles Rule, colloquially known as the “Tailpipe Rule.” This rule would require a very low fleetwide average for vehicle emissions for model years 2027 and later. In practice this would make the manufacture and sale of ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicles difficult, if not impossible. The Biden administration has made clear that the intention of the rule is to accelerate the transition to electric vehicles.
A rule that would cause a significant portion of the car fleet to transition from gasoline to reliance on the electricity grid would definitionally have an impact on grid requirements and by extension, on both the volume and variety of generation that the grid requires. Grid reliablity might sound like a nebulous and distant concept that will be dealt with far from home, but the impacts of even short blackouts can be both deadly and inconvenient. Power grids mostly fail when it’s very hot or very cold, when people are least equipped to cope without electricity’s ability to insulate them from the weather.
Grid reliability issues are also incredibly costly, and the costs of their disruption are not born only at the utility level. They cause food in people’s refrigerators and freezers to spoil and need to be replaced. Think about how much it would cost you to replace everything in your refrigerator and freezer right now. What if that were happening several times a year? What about a few times a month? These costs would add up quickly, and would be most difficult to bear for those who are already struggling to pay for everyday necessities.
Now consider that many employers would be forced to close without electricity. Some people are salaried and might get a free day off of work, but what about unsalaried hourly workers? For many people, this would mean periodic unexpected days without work (and without pay). The economy wide impacts of this are massive, and the personal impacts are daunting. Grid reliability is essential to the functioning of our economy and everyday lives.
All electricity sources aren’t equally reliable. In order to adequately meet peak demand, baseload sources like natural gas, coal, and nuclear are needed. The Power Plant Rule would have a serious impact on natural gas generation in addition to phasing out coal generation. The EPA study accompanying the Power Plant Rule didn’t take into account the increased volume of electric vehicles on the grid that the Tailpipe Rule would create. This concurrent rulemaking would clearly have an impact on the ability of the grid to meet demand. One rule will raise the demand for electricity, while the other will decrease supply, but we’re to believe that these rulemakings are not substantively related to one another enough to necessitate an analysis from EPA on their compounded impacts.
On the issue of reliability more broadly, a number of analyses have been performed that demonstrate the flaws in the proposed rulemaking.
The Center of the American Experiment has an excellent analysis on what the rule would do, particularly to the portion of the grid operated by MISO (Midcontinent Independent System Operator). In their analysis, Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling found that the rule would impose blackouts in MISO, as well as costing $246 billion through 2055 when the economic costs of blackouts and other impacts were taken into account. Their analysis accounted only for the impacts on the portion of the Grid operated by MISO which covers 15 states and the Canadian province of Manitoba.
From this, it’s reasonable to conclude that grid impacts would be far outside of the scope of the supposed benefits of the rulemaking, given that the EPA’s estimated annual net benefit of the rule is $5.9 billion and $246 billion over the period from now to 2055 is $7.7 billion, again in the MISO jurisdiction alone.
The costs of this rule to grid reliability would outweigh the benefits of the rule, and studying the extent of those costs is made more difficult by the lack of public availability of the model and data used by EPA.
A rulemaking with impacts this broad should have taken grid reliability concerns more seriously and acknowledged the impacts of the concurrent Tailpipe Rule. Could it be that the Biden administration’s abstract commitment to the vision of an all-electric future is preventing a candid assessment of the cost, in dollars and dysfunction, of getting there?
https://blog.independent.org/2024/01/02/power-plant-rule-problem/?omhide=true
************************************************The Endangered Species Act has done little for endangered species
WHEN THE Endangered Species Act was signed into law 50 years ago, nothing about it was controversial. The legislation had passed unopposed in the Senate and by a near-unanimous majority (355-4) in the House. No one in Congress, the news media, or the scientific community seems to have had any qualms about enacting what is now one of the most potent and rigorous environmental laws on the federal books.
"Essentially no skepticism was expressed about either the law's conservation goals or its regulatory strategies," University of California, Berkeley professor Holly Doremus, a leading environmental law scholar, wrote in the Journal of Law & Policy. "Legislators appear to have regarded it as an opportunity to deliver ringing rhetoric that would please the environmental movement without facing any immediate political costs."
Accepted at face value was the assurance that with the new statute in place, endangered plant and animal species would be protected and their populations restored to healthy levels. That was the reason for the Endangered Species Act, explicitly spelled out in the text. Section 2(b) says the law's purpose was "to provide a program for the conservation of such endangered species and threatened species." The law also defined those key words, "conserve" and "conservation." They mean "to bring any endangered or threatened species to the point at which the measures provided pursuant to this chapter are no longer necessary."
Measured against that yardstick, the Endangered Species Act has been a failure.
To begin with, there are more endangered and threatened species than ever before. When the law went into effect in 1973, fewer than 130 species were on the government's list of domestic plants and animals at risk of going extinct. Today, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, there are well over 1,600. And just as the ESA has not prevented the endangerment of many additional species, it has not achieved its mission of bringing endangered flora and fauna populations back to health. All told, only 57 domestic species (3 percent of those listed) have recovered, while 11 (1 percent) have gone extinct. After a half-century under the stringent safeguards established by the law, 96 percent of the endangered-species list is still, by the federal government's reckoning, endangered.
Attempting to put lipstick on a pig, defenders of the status quo cheer the fact that 99 percent of listed species haven't gone extinct. But as Jonathan Adler of the Center for Environmental Law at Case Western Reserve University observes, that is like celebrating because 99 percent of patients admitted to the emergency room years ago are still on life support. The whole point of treatment is for patients to get well, not to linger in ill health.
Similarly, the whole point of the Endangered Species Act was to conserve at-risk plants and animals, not just to list them. What went wrong?
The essence of the problem lies in how the law treats property owners. The ESA makes it illegal to harm an endangered species, including by destroying or changing the habitat where that species lives. Since two-thirds of species on the endangered list are found on private property, owners can face crippling restrictions on the use of their own land. Rather than encourage property owners to protect the habitat on which such species rely — for example, by reimbursing them for the profit they stand to lose if a planned development is halted or a stand of timber goes unharvested — the law threatens them with painful losses if they don't. Often their response has been to preempt that threat by eliminating the evidence before the government learns about it.
"When it comes to private land, ESA encourages not preservation of endangered species, but their quick shooting," science writer Ronald Bailey wrote in 2003. "If an endangered species is found on a farmer's property, she has every incentive to, as they say, 'shoot, shovel, and shut up.'"
Sam Hamilton, a career Fish and Wildlife Service official who became the agency's director under President Barack Obama, grasped the issue. "The incentives are wrong here," he once said. "If I have a rare metal on my property, its value goes up. But if a rare bird occupies the land, its value disappears. We've got to turn it around to make the landowner want to have the bird on his property."
Sadly, Hamilton died just months after being named to head the Fish and Wildlife Service and was never able to effect that turnaround. As the Endangered Species Act embarks on its second half-century, it is clearer than ever that the law needs an overhaul. Will it take another 50 years to make that happen?
https://jeffjacoby.com/27428/the-endangered-species-act-has-done-little-for
********************************************A 1.3 GW offshore wind project has been cancelled by its developers, dealing a blow to Biden's wind energy targets
BP and Equinor have canceled plans for a 1.3 GW offshore wind energy facility off of Long Island's southern coast, the companies jointly announced Wednesday.
Empire Wind II is the second stage of an offshore wind project in New York state waters with 2.1 GW in proposed capacity, enough to provide electricity for 700,000 homes.
The project was the subject of substantial backlash from community groups in Long Beach, NY (where a transmission cable was planned to be placed); Governor Kathy Hochul vetoed a bill to expedite its construction in October, a premonition of the project's ultimate fate.
The first stage, Empire I (800 GW capacity), received regulatory approval from the New York State Public Service Commission in December, and is expected to come online in 2027. But BP and Equinor's 50-50 joint venture in New York appears to be drastically limiting its scope, at least for the time being.
Macroeconomic conditions continue to hamper offshore wind development in the United States, with Empire Wind II's cancellation following similar news of scrapped or downsized projects in New Jersey and Massachusetts in 2023.
"The decision recognizes commercial conditions driven by inflation, interest rates and supply chain disruptions," Equinor said in a press release Wednesday.
"Commercial viability is fundamental for ambitious projects of this size and scale. The Empire Wind II decision provides the opportunity to reset and develop a stronger and more robust project going forward," Molly Morris, president of Equinor Renewables Americas, said Wednesday.
BP and Equinor each expressed their desire to participate in a new round of offshore wind auctioning started by the New York state government in November, as the state aims to install 9 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2035. So as BP and Equinor walk away from Empire Wind II, it may represent more of a delay than a death knell for renewable energy targets in New York.
While New York state may eventually reach its wind energy targets from new projects, albeit later than originally expected, Empire Wind II's cancellation may serve more consequential to the Biden Administration's green energy ambitions—Biden aims to install 30 GW in new offshore wind capacity by 2030.
With the US presidential election ten months away—and former president Donald Trump vocally opposing offshore wind energy on the campaign trail—the Biden Administration may have a limited window of opportunity to secure new offshore wind projects before the regulatory environment changes drastically in 2025.
Empire Wind II had received approval from the US Department of Interior in November; neither the Department of Interior nor the Department of Energy has yet released a public statement on the matter.
https://www.ibtimes.com/bp-equinor-scrap-plans-empire-wind-ii-project-new-york-3721545
****************************************************Should We Be Concerned Over Climate Change?
The climate is changing, but is the change cause for concern?
“There are natural climate cycles, which are normal,” research scientist Roy Spencer says, adding that “If you move beyond the temperature to things like storminess, you know, hurricane activity, there have been no demonstrable, long-term changes in anything other than a modest, relatively benign increase in temperature.”
When it comes to climate change, Spencer, a meteorologist and research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, says he’s “been hearing the rhetoric and the fearmongering since the 1970s.”
Asked if he personally worries about climate change, Spencer says: “No, if I was seriously worried about it, you know, I’d be worried for my children’s future and my grandchildren’s future. And I’m not.”
“I’m more worried about what our government is doing on a number of fronts, including regulatory mandates, which is going to make life much more expensive for them and therefore reduce their standard of living,” adds Spencer, who has researched climate change for 40 years.
The “natural fluctuations in weather are normal,” argues Spencer, currently a visiting fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)
Spencer joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” for the final episode of a three-part series on climate change. In it, he explains what we know and don’t know about the root causes of climate change and the appropriate response to a changing climate. Spencer also provides insight into how the climate may change in coming years
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/05/should-concerned-over-climate-change/
**************************************4 January, 2024
2023 was an unusually bad year for appliance regulations, and future years won’t be much better unless Congress finds a way to stop the nonsense.
It all started last January when Richard Trumka Jr., a commissioner on the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), announced an investigation into the safety of natural gas stoves and boasted that a ban on them was “a real possibility.”
That sparked a powerful consumer backlash, followed up by strong denials from the Biden administration that any such ban was in the works.
But CPSC has still gone ahead with its inquiry, and in February, Team Biden launched a second regulatory attack on stoves, this time in the form of a new Department of Energy (DOE) efficiency standard.
A careful read of the proposal reveals that it is much tougher on gas stoves than electric versions — part of the administration’s multipronged attack on natural gas use that it justifies on climate grounds.
It isn’t just gas stoves; Biden regulators have launched proposed regulations for other appliances that are likely to be as bad or even worse.
As with the rest of the Biden administration’s energy agenda, these regulations put the climate change agenda ahead of the best interests of consumers:
1. Dishwashers
Dishwashers may already be the most over-regulated appliance, having been subjected to four rounds of successively tighter limits on the amount of energy and water they can use.
These DOE regulations are the reason dishwashers now take two hours or more to clean a load of dishes, up from about one hour for models predating the federal standards.
Cleaning performance has also suffered. Many consumers report having to rinse their dishes by hand before or after running them in the dishwasher, which is not only an inconvenience but also undercuts the energy and water-saving rationale behind the rules.
But having learned nothing, DOE now proposes to make the requirements more stringent, insisting that doing so will benefit consumers and help fight ‘climate change‘.
2. Air Conditioners
Residential central air conditioners are being hit by regulations from both DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the cumulative impact is large and still growing.
A new DOE efficiency standard that took effect in 2023 is boosting the installed cost of a new unit by $1,000 or more.
And climate change measures coming from the EPA in 2024 will raise the cost of refrigerants needed to repair existing systems while further increasing prices for new models.
Adding insult to injury, the new climate-friendly air conditioners about to be introduced come with increased flammability risks.
3. Washing Machines
Like dishwashers, washing machines have endured tighter and tighter water and energy use limits in 1994, 2004, 2007, 2015, and 2018.
They now use so little water that homeowners have had to improvise to get clothes clean. Some have learned to add a bucket or two of water midcycle to improve performance, while others risk voiding the warranty by tinkering with their machines to increase the flow.
Mold accumulation — which was never a problem before Washington regulators got involved with washing machines — is now common and can cause bad odors and staining of clothes.
A sensible government agency would be looking at ways to fix these problems, but the Biden administration’s DOE is proposing to exacerbate them with tougher energy and water limits.
4. Furnaces
No two homes are exactly alike, which is why it makes sense to allow a wide variety of furnaces on the market. But DOE doesn’t see it that way, and its recently finalized efficiency standard for furnaces effectively outlaws the kind of natural gas furnaces that make the most sense for millions of homeowners.
Specifically, the rule eliminates the option of non-condensing gas furnaces in favor of condensing versions.
Condensing furnaces are more efficient and thus comply with the rule, but they are more expensive and not easily compatible with the venting systems in many homes that currently have non-condensing furnaces.
The biggest victims of such one-size-fits-all standards will be the disproportionately low-income owners of older and smaller homes for which the replacement of an old non-condensing furnace with a new condensing model will prove very difficult and costly.
The only good news is that Congress is starting to fight back. The House of Representatives has passed bills preemptively rescinding any stove regulations and is considering doing the same for other appliances.
It won’t be easy — any repeal bills would have to pass both the House and Senate and be signed into law by a president who invariably refuses to admit regulatory mistakes and rarely if ever takes the side of homeowners over bureaucrats and climate activists.
But commencing the fight for appliance sanity now will set the stage for corrective measures if and when the political winds change enough to make them possible.
https://principia-scientific.com/biden-wants-americans-to-be-cold-and-dirty/
*********************************************Chevron Tells California Why They’re Losing Jobs And Investment: Anti-Energy Policies
Congratulations to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is succeeding at his goal of driving away fossil fuel investment and jobs, even while failing to reduce global CO2 emissions.
See Chevron’s announcement Tuesday that it is writing down its upstream assets in the Golden State owing to “continuing regulatory challenges.”
Chevron’s write-down acknowledges what the company has been telling California lawmakers for some time: Their energy policies are making the state uninvestable.
These include the state’s cap-and-trade program, low-carbon fuel standard, penalty on “excessive” refiner margins, and a 2022 law limiting new drilling within 3,200 feet of homes and schools.
California policies have made it “riskier than investing in other states, with projects being lower in quality and higher in cost,” Chevron’s Americas Products business president Andy Walz wrote last month in a filing with the California Energy Commission.
“Chevron alone has reduced spending in California by hundreds of millions of dollars since 2022.”
“We have rejected capital projects” and canceled some “due to permitting challenges,” Mr. Walz noted, adding that California’s “arbitrary attacks on a disfavored industry … signal to every industry, entrepreneur, manufacturer, and employer that California is closed for business.”
They’ve gotten that signal. Employment in California has declined by 77,700 over the last year.
In California’s oil-rich Kern County around Bakersfield, unemployment is 7.8%—more than two times the national average.
California’s policies aren’t reducing oil production or CO2 emissions in the U.S. or around the world. They are merely driving oil jobs and investment elsewhere.
Chevron is increasing investment in U.S. shale and offshore Guyana with its $53 billion acquisition of Hess.
U.S. oil production has surged to a record 13.2 million barrels a day despite higher interest rates and President Biden’s best efforts to crush the industry.
One reason is that shale fracking is predominantly occurring on private and state land in places like Texas and North Dakota.
The courts helped by blocking Mr. Biden’s moratorium on oil and gas leasing on federal land.
Oil production in the Permian basin in the Southwest exceeds its pre-pandemic peak by about one million barrels a day, which has more than offset the 100,000 barrels a day decline in California.
Over the last decade, production in California has fallen by nearly half amid increasing climate regulation while output from the Permian has quadrupled.
Mr. Biden has frackers and Republican-led states to thank for why gas prices nationwide aren’t $5 a gallon as they are in California.
************************************************
To Biden’s Dismay, Appeals Court Deals Death Blow To Berkeley’s Natural Gas Ban
A federal appeals court rejected a petition Tuesday to rehear a case related to a natural gas ban proposed by the City of Berkeley, California, which the panel ruled was illegal last year.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ultimately denied Berkeley’s petition for rehearing en banc — a motion that received support from the Biden administration, Democratic-led states, and environmentalists — after it failed to receive majority support from the court’s non-recused active judges
Berkeley filed the motion last year after the court in April that a Berkeley law banning natural gas pipes in new construction violated federal statute.
Following the panel’s filing Tuesday, the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI), which had argued Berkeley’s law was illegal, applauded the court for ensuring consumer choice.
“Naturally, AHRI and particularly our member companies that manufacture products and equipment that use natural gas, are very pleased that the full court denied Berkeley’s appeal, thereby allowing the residents of Berkeley, and likely elsewhere, to continue to have choices with respect to energy sources for home and water heating,” AHRI President and CEO Stephen Yurek said in a statement.
“We look forward to continuing to work with states and localities to formulate solutions that help them meet their energy conservation and emission reduction goals without unduly impacting consumer health, safety, comfort, and productivity,” Yurek added.
In July 2019, Berkeley’s city council passed the ban which was set to go into effect in January 2020, making the city the first in the nation to approve such a measure.
Berkeley Councilwoman Kate Harrison, who authored the legislation, said at the time that it was part of the city’s effort to take “more drastic action” on climate change and curb greenhouse gas emissions.
However, months after it was approved, the California Restaurant Association (CRA) filed a federal lawsuit challenging the city’s ability to pass a law banning new natural gas hookups.
After a lower court ruled in favor of Berkeley in July 2021, the CRA filed an appeal, leading to the Ninth Circuit ruling in April.
The Ninth Circuit concluded that Berkeley’s law violated the federal Energy Policy and Conservation Act (EPCA) of 1975, which prevents local regulations from impacting the energy use of natural gas appliances.
“Instead of directly banning those appliances in new buildings, Berkeley took a more circuitous route to the same result,” Judge Patrick Bumatay wrote in the opinion of the court. “It enacted a building code that prohibits natural gas piping into those buildings, rendering the gas appliances useless.”
“In sum, Berkeley can’t bypass preemption by banning natural gas piping within buildings rather than banning natural gas products themselves,” he continued in the ruling. “EPCA thus preempts the Ordinance’s effect on covered products.”
CRA President and CEO Jot Condie said at the time that Berkeley’s attempt to ban natural gas hookups was “an overreaching measure beyond the scope of any city.”
After Berkeley then filed its petition for rehearing, the Department of Justice (DOJ) in June filed an amicus brief in support of the city’s gas hookup ban. …snip…
The case has drawn the attention of industry groups that supported CRA — including the American Gas Association and AHRI — and environmental groups and other jurisdictions across the country that supported Berkeley’s ordinance, including the National League of Cities, California, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and New York City.
***********************************************
And finally: Germany to keep coal power longer than expected
The energy regulator, known as BNetzA, determined that “systematically relevant” coal plants need to be available as back-up power sources in the event of an emergency.
Two of Germany’s largest energy providers will keep some coal plants in service longer than previously expected, following a regulator’s decision to prohibit the closure of the facilities before March 2031.
Uniper SE and EnBW Energie Baden-Württemberg AG had both sought to phase out units earlier than that date. Now, the plants may have to remain on standby at least.
The energy regulator, known as BNetzA, determined that “systematically relevant” coal plants need to be available as back-up power sources in the event of an emergency, newspaper Die Welt first reported Thursday. The agency later confirmed the move. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, has relied more heavily on coal after Russia cut natural gas supplies and after shutting its last nuclear plants this year.
https://www.mining.com/web/germany-to-keep-some-coal-units-in-service-longer-than-expected/
***************************************3 January, 2024
Premature Coal Closures Pose a Serious Threat to Grid Stability
A recent article at Hot Air claims that climate-focused energy policies, including premature closures of coal power plants, threaten the reliability of the U.S. electrical grid. This is true. Multiple utility operators have issued warnings over recent months that shutting down reliable energy sources without suitable backups will result in rolling blackouts and grid instability.
The article, “Will the Sierra Club Apologize If the Lights Go Out in Baltimore?” written by Hot Air contributor Beege Welborn, describes the situation many states are facing, but especially the New England region, as green and net-zero emissions policies are taking their toll on electric power generation in the states. Welborn writes:
I’m no math major (although I play one here at HotAir), and even I can see – without a whiteboard presentation – that (the numbers of incoming people + conversions to all-electric household/businesses + some unreliable minimal generation renewable power sources) – shutting down functioning, reliable, megawatt fossil fuel plants ? enough power when you need it.
He lists several instances of utilities being forced to apologize for blackouts, including Duke Energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and PJM.
The Sierra Club, a large, well-funded environmental activist group, is apparently directly involved in some of these coal plant shutdowns. Welborn points out that a major Maryland coal plant even entered an agreement with Sierra Club to shut down in order to avoid lawsuits from the green group. That particular shutdown is forecast to potentially reduced the grid reliability for more than one million electricity customers, Welborn reports. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Mark Christie warned that the shut down was “potentially catastrophic.”
Such warnings are being issued more and more often, and in more urgent language, as Climate Realism has reported in previous posts detailing the so-called energy transition, here and here.
In the first linked Climate Realism post, the same FERC Commissioner, Christie, described at a House Committee hearing the danger of a too-rapid shutdown of fossil fuel infrastructure, “we’re heading for potentially very dire consequences,” and that the reason is “a shortfall of power supply[.]”
The intermittent nature of wind and solar make them bad candidates for replacing fossil fuels, a fact confirmed by utility companies and grid operators like PJM Interconnection, which recently released a report explaining that you need multiple megawatts of wind or solar to replace just 1 MW of a fossil energy source, plus battery storage.
The catch is, the needed battery storage to replace all of the Northeastern United States’ electric power plants with renewables is physically and economically impossible. A recent study (Fekete, et al.) crunched the numbers and determined that three months of electricity storage are needed, at a minimum, to make a renewables-only grid work. Battery technology to hold several months of energy does not exist, but even it if did this project alone would cost trillions. To replicate it throughout the United States would likely cost four times more than the entire Gross National Product.
These facts don’t seem to bother activists, however, because additional coal plants are being shut down with regularity, with nothing reliable, and sometimes nothing at all, to replace them. Hot Air is correct to point out these problems with green policy and the looming threat to the electric power grid. Losing electricity regularly would not just be inconvenient, it would be dangerous, deadly, and citizens and utility customers have a right to know this fact.
*********************************************
Climate facts restrain panic
Hannah Ritchie, 30, was born in Falkirk and studied environmental sciences at Edinburgh. She is now head of research at Our World in Data, whose mission, according to Ritchie, is “to present data that helps us understand the world’s largest problems and how to solve them – that’s everything from the environmental metrics that I tend to cover to poverty, health, democracy and war”. Ritchie, who lives in London, is also a senior researcher at Oxford University. Not the End of the World – described by Margaret Atwood as “an inspiring data-mine which gives us not only real guidance, but the most necessary ingredient of all: hope” – is her first book.
You write that “I used to be convinced that I didn’t have a future left to live for”. What changed?
I grew up with climate change. I don’t really remember a time when it wasn’t talked about, so I became obsessed with it – a big part of my life was worrying about it. Then I went to university and that was all I was studying. The environmental metrics were getting worse and worse. I was also assuming that extreme poverty and hunger must be getting worse. This fed into the notion that humans were incapable of solving problems. A key turning point was discovering the work of [Swedish physician and academic] Hans Rosling. He did these Ted Talks, mainly focusing on human metrics, where he would show how the world was changing, through data. And it turned out that most of the human wellbeing metrics that I’d assumed to be getting worse were actually getting better. Take child mortality: 200 years ago, almost half of children would die before reaching puberty, and that’s now less than 5%. Now, the world is still terrible, and we have a lot of progress to make. But the realisation I came to was that we have the opportunity to improve both of these things at the same time: we can continue human progress while addressing our environmental problems.
You write that doomsday messages are often no better than climate denial. Why?
It’s appropriate to say that climate change is a really serious problem that has a large impact. We need to get across a sense of urgency, because there is a lot at stake. But there’s often this message coming through that there’s nothing we can do about it: it’s too late, we’re doomed, so just enjoy life. That’s a very damaging message – because it’s not true, and there’s no way that it drives action. The other thing about doomsday predictions is that they’re a dream for climate deniers, who weaponise poor forecasts and say: “Look, you can’t trust the scientists, they’ve got this wrong before, why should we listen to them now?”
There are definitely flaws with capitalism. But we do not have time to dismantle it and build something else
Explain why you think we are in a “truly unique” position to build a sustainable world.
I break down sustainability into an equation of two halves. One half is environmental sustainability: we should have a lower impact so we don’t remove opportunities from future generations and other species. The other is caring about people who are alive today. You only really achieve sustainability if you’ve achieved both of these things. People have the notion that we’ve only become unsustainable very recently, when we discovered fossil fuels, and I don’t think that’s correct. Our ancestors in many ways had a lower environmental impact but they never really achieved the first half of the equation of providing high standards of living. Now we’ve tipped that the other way. We’ve achieved amazing human progress but at the cost of the environment. My proposition is that we can be the first generation that achieves both at the same time.
Capitalism has been a great accelerator of climate change and other environmental crises, but you don’t challenge it much in your book. Do you believe capitalism can right its wrongs? Or that it’s the best system to get us out of this mess?
I accept that there are definitely flaws with capitalism. What I would push back against is the notion that we can just dismantle capitalism and build something else. The core reason is time. We need to be acting on this problem urgently, on a large scale, in the next five to 10 years, and to me it does not seem feasible that we’re going to dismantle the system and build a new one in that time. I think capitalism does drive innovation, which is what we need to create affordable low-carbon technologies.
Would you describe yourself as a techno-optimist?
I would probably get put in that camp. I’d prefer to say I’m a techno-realist. But yes, I am optimistic about the power of technology to change the world, and in terms of our fight against climate change it’s the strongest lever that we have by far.
Are you concerned that growing chaos in global politics could thwart positive action and fuel yet more climate breakdown?
I think there are some risks of that on short timescales, where a political event slows things down or there’s a small rebound in fossil fuels for a year or two. With the Ukraine-Russia war, people were initially very concerned that Europe was going to burn lots more coal because they were putting restrictions on Russian gas. That was a very temporary effect. Coal use went up a small amount, but since then there’s been a significant decline in coal again, and also a decline in gas, so in some sense it actually pushed countries towards decarbonisation rather than away from it. So I’m sure there will be events that could set us back a little bit, but I think the overall trajectory is towards decarbonisation. And many of these events will fuel us to do more rather than less.
What did you make of Cop28 and the “landmark deal” to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems by 2050?
I’m a bit meh. I don’t think it’s that historic to say: “OK, we’ve now decided that climate change is happening because of fossil fuels.” We knew this decades ago. What’s more important are some of the nearer-term targets that are in there, so tripling renewable capacity by 2030, or doubling energy efficiency by 2030. If you set targets for 2050, it’s easy for politicians to put it off until 2040, whereas if you have a quite ambitious target set for 2030, we need to act on this now.
How can you be sure that the stats you work with are trustworthy?
We are really strict on data quality issues in Our World in Data. We rely on international data providers that have a very high reputation. What’s important is that, if you then look at alternative data sources, they all tend to quite closely line up, so you can be pretty confident in the narrative and direction of travel. Also, we have a lot of eyes on our work and we have a very good feedback process, so if there were really large data flaws, they would be flagged.
How does your research affect your own lifestyle choices?
For me, it relieves a bit of the stress of trying to optimise absolutely everything. I still do the recycling and try not to be wasteful, but I don’t get really stressed about it. If I turn up at a supermarket and have to get a plastic bag, it’s not a big deal. In terms of the bigger lifestyle changes, I’m a vegan. I don’t have a car because I live in a city and I don’t need one. I rent a flat so I can’t install a heat pump and put a solar panel on it, but when I can afford a house I will optimise for these big decisions that reduce my carbon footprint.
You begin the book by talking about people of your generation being afraid to bring children into the world. Do you feel more optimistic about this now?
Yes. For me personally, I would like to have children and I don’t think that climate change would stop me from doing that. If anything, it would make me more determined to build a better future for them. There are a lot of people working on climate change who know the impacts and the trajectory we’re on, and they are still making the decision to have children. That’s a bit of a signal.
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China Plans to Dominate the New Era of Green Shipbuilding
China wants to extend its lead in global shipbuilding to a new generation of vessels that burn cleaner fuels.
The nation is targeting building more than half of global vessels powered by lower-carbon fuels including liquefied natural gas and green methanol by 2025, according to a joint statement released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and four other departments.
The goal is in line with Beijing’s plans to future-proof its massive industrial complex by focusing on sectors that will gain prominence as the world tries to reduce emissions over the next few decades. China already dominates global production of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles.
China’s shipyards built more than 50% of the world’s ships over the first 11 months of 2023. But shipbuilding is on the cusp of a massive transformation, with fleet owners beginning to replace oil-powered vessels with ones that burn cleaner fuels as they try to reach an International Maritime Organization pledge of zeroing out emissions around 2050.
Last year, orders for ships powered by slightly cleaner LNG jumped to near 40% of the total, from about 15% in 2019, according to BloombergNEF. Green methanol, a fuel with little to no lifetime emissions, has seen orders more than double this year, BNEF said in an August report.
In addition to the target for building such vessels, China also plans to speed up research and design of new types of ships powered by liquefied ammonia, hydrogen and even carbon dioxide. A unit of China State Shipbuilding Co. has secured more than $1 billion in contracts to build methanol container ships for A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, local media reported earlier this month.
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Australia: Broken power system still fuelled by calls for subsidy
A plea by energy retailers for higher prices to compensate for the rising use of household rooftop solar is an inevitable and predictable confirmation of the dysfunction that now characterises Australia’s electricity system. It represents another chapter in a tale of cascading subsidies that have become necessary as a system rooted in baseload generation from coal is forcibly switched over to one dependent on variable sources of renewable energy such as wind and solar.
If retailers get their way, energy users who have been forced to subsidise renewable energy projects, including rooftop solar, will be asked to pay more for the projects that these renewables were designed to force out of the market in the first place. The new cost would be included as part of the regulated price that retailers are allowed to charge. The power retailers also are largely the owners of the coal-fired power stations that still supply most of the nation’s electricity but are being rendered unprofitable by design and forced to close.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has upped the ante on the subsidy regime with a turbocharged Capacity Investment Scheme that will underwrite the profitability of 32 gigawatts of new renewable projects, up from 6GW previously. Like rooftop solar, the overbuild of large-scale renewables is needed to meet Labor’s target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. This target also is being revised upwards.
A large amount of wind and solar is required to deal with the fact individual projects will produce for only some of the time. But when they are all working together it is likely there will be a glut, as is the case with rooftop solar on sunny days when there is low demand. Wholesale prices are now often negative in the middle of the day.
But regardless of how many wind and solar projects are built, it’s likely there still will be periods of shortage that must be plugged when intermittent power generation is not sufficient. The experience in Britain has been that baseload generators have demanded subsidies to be available still when needed under a capacity market. Renewable generators that are producing power that is not needed have demanded to be paid as well.
Projects designed to help, such as the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro and expanded transmission network, are proving to be slower and more expensive than promised. Under Mr Bowen’s latest scheme, taxpayers will be on the hook to ensure all of the projects approved as part of the 32GW target achieve a minimum rate of return. Ironically, the subsidies will make renewable energy, the so-called cheapest option, more expensive than it otherwise would be. But a price guarantee and overbuild ensure that other options such as nuclear will struggle to find space in the market to justify their cost.
If adopted, the latest call for assistance from electricity retailers will be felt directly by energy users. Retailers want a higher price because of fierce competition from rooftop solar as well as the looming impact of batteries and offshore wind that will depress prices in the evening, after the sun has stopped shining and when wholesale prices traditionally have spiked. Retailers are urging the Australian Energy Regulator to factor the rise of solar into its considerations when determining the default market offer from July.
After two years of big increases in the default market offer price, the political pressure will be for the AER not to approve another big increase. But the laws of physics dictate that power will have to come from somewhere and private sector economics suggests absorbing sustained losses is not an option for generators.
This leaves taxpayers and users on the hook to continue Band-Aiding a system that has been broken by ideology and a lack of proper planning.
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2 January, 2024
Ross McKitrick: The only thing wrong with the globalist climate agenda — the people won’t have it
It’s tempting to dismiss the outcome of COP28, the recent United Nations climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates, as mere verbiage, especially the “historic” UAE Consensus about transitioning away from fossil fuels. After all, this is the 28th such conference and the previous ones all pretty much came to nothing. On a chart showing the steady rise in global CO2emissions since 1950 you cannot spot when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol entered into force (2002), with its supposedly historic language binding developed countries to cap their CO2 emissions at five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, which they didn’t do. The 2015 Paris Agreement also contained “historic” language that bound countries to further deep emission reductions. Yet the COP28 declaration begins with an admission that the parties are not on track for compliance.
Still, we should not overlook the real meaning of the UAE Consensus. COP agreements used to focus on one thing: targets for reducing greenhouse gases. The UAE Consensus is very different. Across its 196 paragraphs and 10 supplementary declarations it’s a manifesto for global central planning. In their own words, some 90,000 government functionaries aspire to oversee and micromanage agriculture, finance, energy, manufacturing, gender relations, health care, air conditioning, building design and countless other economic and social decisions. It’s all supposedly in the name of fighting climate change, but that’s just the pretext. Take climate away and they’d likely appeal to something else.
Climate change doesn’t necessitate such plans. Economists have been studying climate change for many decades and have never considered it grounds to phase out fossil fuels, micromanage society, manage gender relations and so on. Mainstream scientific findings, coupled with mainstream economic analysis, prescribe moderate emission-pricing policies that rely much more on adaptation than mitigation.
The fact that the UAE Consensus is currently non-binding is beside the point. What matters is what the COP28 delegates have said they want to achieve. Two facts stand out: the consensus document announced plans that would cause enormous economic harm if implemented, and it was approved unanimously — yes, by everyone in the room.
The first point is best illustrated by the language around eliminating fossil fuels. Climate policy is supposed to be about optimally reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As technology gradually allows emissions to be de-coupled from fuel use, there may eventually be no need to cut back on fuels. But activist delegates insisted on abolitionist language anyway, making elimination of fossil fuels an end in itself. Such fuels are of course essential for our economic standard of living, and 30 years of economic analysis has consistently shown that, even taking account of emissions, phasing out fuels would do humanity far more harm than good. The Consensus statement ignores this, even while claiming to be guided by “the science.”
The second point refers to the fact that all representatives of all governments worldwide endorsed policies that will, if implemented, do extraordinary harm to their own people. Where governments have made even small attempts to take these radical steps, the public has rebelled. This calls into question whom the COP28 delegates actually “represent.” A few elected officials did attend, but no one voted for the great majority of attendees. And have no doubt: even if some heads of state, whether courageous or foolhardy, did go to COP intent on opposing the overall agenda, they would almost certainly be browbeaten into signing the final package.
The UAE Consensus is the latest indication that the real fault line in contemporary society is not right versus left, it’s the people versus (for lack of a better word) the globalists. A decade ago this term was only heard on the conspiracy fringe. It has since migrated to the mainstream as the most apt descriptor of a permanent transnational bureaucracy that aspires to run everything, even to the public’s detriment, while insulating themselves from democratic limits.
A hallmark of globalists is their credo of “rules for thee but nor for me.” Thousands of delegates fly to Davos or to the year’s COP, many on private jets, to be wined and dined as they advise the rest of us to learn to do without.
On both COVID-19 and climate change, the same elite has invoked “the science,” not in support of good decision-making, but as a talisman to justify everything they do, including censoring public debate. Complex and uncertain matters are reduced to dogmatic slogans by technocrats who force-feed political leaders a one-sided information stream. Experts outside the process are accorded standing based solely on their obeisance to the preferred narrative, not their knowledge or qualifications. Critics are attacked as purveyors of “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Any opposition to government plans therefore proves the need to suppress free speech.
Eventually, however, the people get the last word. And despite nonstop fear-mongering about an alleged climate crisis, the people tolerate climate policy only insofar as it costs almost nothing.
The climate movement may think that by embedding itself in the globalist elite it can accelerate policy adoption without needing to win elections. In fact, the opposite is happening. Globalists have co-opted the climate issue to try to sell a grotesque central planning agenda that the public has repeatedly rejected. If the UAE Consensus is the future of climate policy, climate policy’s failure is guaranteed.
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Revisiting the greenhouse effect—a hydrological perspective
Demetris Koutsoyiannis & Christos Vournas
Abstract and figures
Quantification of the greenhouse effect is a routine procedure in the framework of hydrological calculations of evaporation. According to the standard practice, this is made considering the water vapour in the atmosphere, without any reference to the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2), which, however, in the last century has escalated from 300 to about 420 ppm. As the formulae used for the greenhouse effect quantification were introduced 50-90 years ago, we examine whether these are still representative or not, based on eight sets of observations, distributed in time across a century.
We conclude that the observed increase of the atmospheric CO2 concentration has not altered, in a discernible manner, the greenhouse effect, which remains dominated by the quantity of water vapour in the atmosphere, and that the original formulae used in hydrological practice remain valid. Hence, there is no need for adaptation due to increased CO2 concentration.
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How Science Exposes Man-Made Global Warming & Pandemic Fakery
Independent scientists are making the link between the two biggest science frauds – climate and the pandemic. In a new video presentation Dr Denis Rancourt reveals how the junk science has been crafted to fool us all.
Too many scientists fear to objectively describe what is a man or woman or say how many genders there are because of wokeism and poisonous post-normal science. That is the canary in the coal mine to this systemic woke dismantling of sane, objective reasoning.
But pushback is coming from advocates for the traditional scientific method. One such champion is Dr Denis Rancourt, a former professor of physics at the University of Ottawa. In his latest public address captured on video There Was No Pandemic and There is No Climate Change, Dr Rancourt puts forward the case that almost all that ails modern science and medicine has a root cause.
We are hearing more about The Big Picture – a broad-view urged on us by independent scientists from diverse disciplines who, in their online community forums, are typifying much of what my own organisation has worked so hard to do since foundation in 2011.
For well over a decade Principia Scientific International has been calling for more high caliber multi-speciality scientists and researchers to join together to resist the rise of monolithic corporate and political misuse of science, heavily influenced by secretive NGO’s.
We have been faced with the most well-funded psyop dominating public institutions and mainstream media. Only those with the intellectual acumen and intuitive curiosity to address the underlying malaise of western society will identify the true causes and shine a light on the challenges faced in turning around our decline.
Dr Rancourt offered this Reality check:
“There is a large structurally embedded industry of doomsday narrative. In addition, individuals are reared in a dominance hierarchy and therefore constantly seek messaging about fitting in. The result is that we adopt the State religion. Even if the State is occupied by an exploitative elite, we continue to uphold and follow any State religion that has been sufficiently implanted.
In this case, the State religion is that we are cared-for by mother earth but that our bad behaviour is poisoning mother earth and that we are therefore all at risk, unless we adopt the new stringent conditions that should be imposed globally. Non-believers should be rooted out and isolated. We should demand that all our peers and our representatives do what is proscribed by the State religion.
Meanwhile corporate criminality, while dressed in the colours of the State religion, will continue at an accelerated rate, and our minds and bodies will continue to be occupied.3”
At Principia Scientiific International our path coincided with Dr Denis Rancourt over half a dozen years ago when he entered the online debate over the scientific cornerstone of the man-made global warming hoax – the greenhouse gas theory.
Our groundbreaking book, Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory earned widespread favorable reviews.
As a team of mostly applied scientists we proved that carbon dioxide is not a devil, it is a saintly blessing. It is not the climate control knob, it is essential plant food. Not only that, this trace atmospheric gas (a mere 0.04 percent of the atmosphere) cannot possibly make our climate warmer as Industry Experts show: CO2 Worse Than Useless In Trapping Heat/Delaying Cooling.
In fact, award-winning Dr Pierre Latour, a senior scientist at DuPont specialising in real-world CO2 applications showed that carbon dioxide cools our planet in four provable ways. [1]
Our latest book, Slaying The Virus And Vaccine Dragon similarly debunks vaccine lies during the COVID19 pandemic. [2]
Dr Rancourt is succeeding in helping shift the discussion towards joining all the dots. Not just redolent in academic argumentation befitting a seasoned university professor, he is open to public debate, unlike the academics on the alarmism gravy train.
Like us, Rancourt discerns that the key players in these scams share a Malthusian malcontent about the success of capitalism and their intent is to decimate the world’s population on the altar of ‘saving the planet‘ by introducing unelected one world government communism as per “You will own nothing and be happy.”
https://principia-scientific.com/how-science-exposes-man-made-global-warming-pandemic-fakery/
**************************************************Major backflip by Australian government on electric vehicles outrages environmentalists
A promise by the Albanese government to unveil mandatory pollution caps for new vehicles sold in Australia by the end of 2023 has been broken, sparking fears its landmark EV policy will be put on ice.
In April, Labor committed to introducing a new fuel efficiency standard, with a favoured model to be unveiled 'before the end of this year'.
Under the standard, automotive brands will be penalised when they sell cars with high-polluting internal combustion engines in an effort to spur the uptake of electric and other low-emissions vehicles.
Aside from Russia, Australia is the only developed nation without fuel efficiency standards.
As a result, passenger vehicles can emit as much as 50 per cent more carbon dioxide than in similar overseas markets, as less efficient cars are still imported to Australia.
At the same time, just eight per cent of new cars sold in Australia in the last 12 months were electric vehicles, while this figure was almost 17 per cent in Europe.
But despite assurances of long-awaited fuel efficiency standards by year's end, Transport Minister Catherine King is still yet to unveil the proposed legislation.
In September, modelling work undertaken by ACIL Allen for the proposed standard which was due to be completed in August was extended through to January 30 2024.
Weighing on the proposal are fears that against a backdrop of the rising cost of living, the standards - which could potentially limit the number of cars available to consumers or increase the cost for some high-polluting models - could open the government up to Coalition scare campaign in the lead up to the next election, industry sources said.
Others said Ms King had been consumed by other matters across her portfolios including her controversial decision to block Qatar Airways' bid to increase flight capacity and the independent review of Australia's $120 billion infrastructure pipeline.
In a statement, a spokesman for Transport Minister Catherine King would not provide a timeline for when the proposed standards could be released.
'Designing the best possible fuel efficiency standard (FES) to suit Australia's circumstance is complex, and the Australian Government is committed to taking the time to get it right,' the spokesman said.
But with Australians heading back to the polls by May 2025 at the latest, advocates for a more ambitious standard feared the policy could be shelved in its entirety.
Independent member for North Sydney, Kylea Tink, who has spearheaded calls for stringent fuel efficiency standards in federal parliament, said the Albanese government had demonstrably failed to meet its commitment.
'It's definitely a pretty clear case of a broken promise,' Ms Tink said.
'It's worse than frustrating that we're going to end 2023 without fuel efficiency standards ... there is no line of sight on them.'
Citing the failed commitment by two previous Labor governments to introduce a similar efficiency standard, Ms Tink said it was imperative that the government was held to account on its promise.
'Up until now, at least the government's been prepared to say: 'Yes, they're definitely coming and here's the timeline',' Ms Tink added.
'Now there's no timeline - that really concerns me.'
The Climate Council's head of advocacy, Dr Jennifer Rayner, agreed that it was critical that the government delivered on its commitment, ensuring access to cleaner and cheaper-to-run cars.
'Every day we delay putting a fuel efficiency standard in place, Aussies are missing out on the three-in-one benefits of cheaper costs, cleaner air, and greater choice,' Ms Rayner said.
However, car dealers and their industry association representatives have urged the government to take a more cautious approach to the new standards, citing the need the for strong community support for the change.
Tony Weber, chief executive of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, said despite the delay, it was paramount that time was taken to ensure the standard reflected the demands of the Australian car market.
'It's absolutely critical that the government takes time and gets this right. That's critical for environmental outcomes and for consumers,' Mr Weber said.
'There's no point in going for what others are calling for - a stringent target - which means essentially in the very near future, the only cars that will be able to be sold will be complete electric vehicles.
'There are so many segments of the market that there is not an electric vehicle capability among mainstream brands - and that's before we talk about price.'
Mr Weber also pointed to the need for a scale-up in supporting infrastructure to drive the uptake of the low-emission vehicles.
'We need to have the product supported in the marketplace ... rather than people who just purely talk about a target.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12913993/Albanese-backflip-electric-vehicles.html
***************************************1 January, 2024
Ominous Rumblings From the Climate Change Cult
In the past, I’ve referred to the well-funded, well-organized, but scientifically vacuous climate alarmists as a “cabal” with an explicitly socialist agenda. Indeed, in a political context that’s exactly what they are. But in a religious context, they’re a cult fanatically pushing a rigid dogma.
The climate change dogma is roughly this: The concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere has increased markedly over the past century (true); human activities have contributed to that increase (true); Earth has warmed by more than a degree since escaping the harsh Little Ice Age in the 19th century (also true, thank goodness!); temperatures will continue to rise to dangerous, catastrophe-inducing levels (unproven, unknowable, and unlikely) unless human society is radically transformed by drastically curbing the human use of fossil fuels (a power-seeking agenda that would inflict widespread impoverishment and suffering on billions of human beings).
In connection with the United Nation’s recently completed annual extravaganza in climate change propaganda and hysteria—COP28—long-time alarmist Al Gore (who still wants today the “wrenching transformation” of society that he called for in his 1992 jeremiad “Earth in the Balance”) lamented the fact that some people actually disagree with the wildly speculative alarmist predictions (guesses) that he and his fellow alarmists are making about the future. He blamed social media and algorithms for spreading what he considers disinformation (in more neutral terms: differences of perception and understanding) about climate change.
Mr. Gore explicitly called for the ban (the censorship) of social media algorithms—implicitly, those that present apostate points of view, such as de-emphasizing the role of CO2 in climate change or maintaining that Earth isn’t on the brink of climate catastrophe. (Here’s a link to the video. Start at the 22:00 minute marker to hear him say it.) He asserts that the algorithms pull listeners down into “rabbit holes” where they enter into “echo chambers.”
The “echo chamber” assertion is hugely ironic, a classic case of psychological projection. It’s the climate change cabal/cult that sets up echo chambers at events like COP28, whereas outside of those echo chambers, there’s a wide diversity of scientific research that calls into question key parts of the cultists’ dogma from many different angles—the very opposite of an echo chamber.
Here are several recent examples of scientific dissent from the alarmist projections of the climate change cult:
In Hydrological Sciences Journal, Demetris Koutsoyiannis and Christos Vournas found that the post-1900 increase in the CO2 concentration (from 300 parts per million to 420 parts per million) “has not altered, in a discernible manner, the greenhouse effect, which remains dominated by the quantity of water vapour in the atmosphere.”
Writing in the journal Earth’s Future, W. Jackson Davis “documents an overall negative correlation between global temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations over the last 210 million years,” according to NoTricksZone.com. A “negative correlation” —i.e., when the atmospheric concentration of CO2 rises, more often than not temperatures fall.
Like other scientists in earlier years, Allan T. Emrén, writing in the International Journal of Global Warming, “found that the rate of change in CO2 concentration is controlled by global temperature rather than vice versa.”
Norwegians John K. Dagsvik and Sigmund H. Moen (a statistician and civil engineer, respectively), writing in a Statistics Norway discussion paper, concluded that “the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.”
Other scientists believe that the “hottest ever” summer that the climate change cult has hyped in 2023 (which actually, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data, was the 15th hottest since 1910 on mean temperatures and 22nd hottest for maximum temperatures) wasn’t triggered by CO2, but by a significant increase in solar radiation and/or by the 2022 eruption of the Tonga-Hunga volcano having caused a 10 percent increase in water vapor in the atmosphere.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to the climate change cultists’ belief that CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming is a study published in Nature partner journal Climate and Atmospheric Science by H. Nair and colleagues. Those scientists came to the arresting conclusion that “we would expect from a 100% switchover from fossil fuels to zero-emission renewables, the net radiative heating would increase drastically.”
This, according to NoTricksZone.com, is due to “a dramatic reduction in climate-cooling aerosol (pollution) emissions,“ and, ”Because aerosol emissions have a relatively greater climate impact by reflecting shortwave radiation, the net effect of transitioning to renewables will be to ‘drastically’ increase Earth’s temperatures over the coming decades.”
The above examples of scientific studies running counter to climate-change-cult orthodoxy indicate that the science surrounding the issue is anything but settled in the alarmists’ favor.
Let’s switch from the science to the economics of transitioning away from fossil fuel usage. If the climate change cult succeeds in radically suppressing fossil fuel usage, human societies would be much poorer. That would be a tragedy with potentially deadly consequences. While human beings can no more tame the climate than the legendary King Canute could control the tides, the fact is that it’s prosperity that best enables human beings to cope with the adverse weather events that will periodically assail us regardless of whether the world cools or warms.
Fossil fuels not only have the advantage of being much more reliable and steady than wind and solar, but they’re also more efficient and economical. The ever-astute Rupert Darwall computed, “Thanks to [Britain’s increased use of] renewables, 13.6 GW (15.6 percent) more generating capacity [in 2020 compared to 2009] produced 64.5 TWh (17.1 percent) less electricity.” This is a path to energy and therefore societal impoverishment.
The economics of wind energy are brutal for taxpayers. Jonathan Lesser computed that “the average subsidy for each green job created will be over $2 million per year.”
It’s clear that there are plenty of reasons to slow down, if not halt, the frenetic drive to eliminate fossil fuels. The pell-mell charge toward renewables isn’t rational; rather, it’s the fanaticism of a quasi-religious cult.
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Climate Scientists Say We Should Embrace Higher CO2 Levels
According to Patrick Moore, chairman and chief scientist of Ecosense Environmental and co-founder of Greenpeace, the climate change messaging isn’t based in fact.
“The whole thing is a total scam,” said Mr. Moore. “There is actually no scientific evidence that CO2 is responsible for climate change over the eons.”
Mr. Moore said that over the past few decades, the climate message has continually changed; first, it was global cooling, then global warming, then climate change, and now it’s disastrous weather.
“They’re saying all the tornadoes, all the hurricanes, all the floods, and all the heat waves are all caused by CO2. That is a lie. ... We’re part of the cycle,” he said.
“We don’t need CO2. For us, it’s a waste product—we need oxygen. But plants are the ones who made the oxygen for us, and we’re making the CO2 back for them.”
He said the burning of fossil fuels—which emit CO2—is a good thing for plant life.
“We are replenishing the atmosphere with CO2 up to a level that is much more conducive to life and growth of plants, in particular.”
Weather-related deaths and climate disasters have in fact declined “precipitously” over the years, according to John Christy, a climatologist and professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and the director of the Earth System Science Center.
In 1925, there was an average of 484,880 climate-related deaths worldwide, according to Human Progress. Since then, it’s steadily decreased, with the latest report from 2020 showing there was an average of 14,893 climate-related deaths worldwide.
“CO2 is portrayed now as the cause of damaging extreme weather. Our research indicates these extremes are not becoming more intense or frequent,” Mr. Christy told The Epoch Times. “Thus, CO2 cannot be the cause of something not occurring.”
The U.N. is planning for countries to cut emissions to as close to zero as possible by 2050.
The plan is “collective suicide,” says Malgosia Askanas, a senior research and development associate at Aurora Biophysics Research Institute.
Ms. Askanas said the concern over CO2 is not based on science.
“It started with the hysteria of the New Ice Age and a little-known CIA report in 1974 that claimed that a major climatic change was underway,” she said.
“Later, the ‘global cooling’ alarmism morphed into its opposite, by employing the false notion of global warming due to excess CO2—which is chemically a falsehood.”
Carbon Dioxide and Life
Mr. Christy said the earth’s climate has “tremendous natural variability” and that it’s currently in a gradual warming phase.
“CO2 has been unfairly demonized because it is actually plant food in its atmospheric form, and it is the consequence of generating carbon-based energy, which unquestionably improves lives around the world,” he said.
He calls CO2 the “currency of life.”
“In past epochs, there were many times more CO2 levels in the atmosphere than today.”
Mr. Moore pointed to a graph that charts CO2 and temperature over the past 500 million years. “It’s very clear that CO2 and temperature have been out of sync more often than they’ve been in sync,” he said.
“That more or less negates the whole idea that there’s a direct cause-effect going on there.”
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Nuclear Fiasco Exaggeration: Nuclear reactors have been very safe and dependable
The proliferation of articles written to scare or intimidate average Americans seems to be increasing. We have become a country obsessed with regulating risk out of existence. Many new ideas are viewed as too risky, too toxic, or too expensive. Take, for example, the recent letter “Nuclear Fiascos Revisited?” by Jack Duckworth, published in the Oct. 11–17 edition of “The Readers’ Turn.” The author begins with an assertion that over 55 nuclear accidents have occurred and that safer, more reliable nuclear power plants are unattainable.
Except for the notable exceptions of Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl, nuclear reactors have been very safe and dependable. Can you name another nuclear accident? Human error and black swan events (e.g., the earthquake and tsunami in Japan) have contributed to the three major events. But over the past 50 years, the nuclear energy track record has been very good and the learnings have been great.
The author further suggests that the competition to design new power plants is somehow imprudent or that competitive bidding is unwise. Most interestingly, he excuses the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s engineers from doing the very job that they are expected to perform. Specifically, the NRC is supposed to encourage competing reactor designs, they are supposed to review these proposals and select the best design. The fact that several alternative designs are proposed is a positive feature.
Concerning costs, the NRC stipulates thousands of requirements that collectively add millions of dollars to the price tag—effectively making nuclear energy artificially prohibitive. Consider something simple like the dome of the reactor. Should construction of the dome be thick enough to withstand a direct hit by a small jet or a Dreamliner? Design engineers will quickly admit that the safety features of today’s reactors are drastically improved over the installed base—similar to the safety differences of a 1966 VW compared to a Tesla. Nevertheless, the public is unaware of these new safety features because much of the installed base lacks these upgrades.
Globally, about 300 nuclear reactors exist; about 95 are active in the USA. Most of these reactors have been running seamlessly for 40 years or more. Almost 20 percent of our American electricity is nuclear generated. Global economies increasingly rely on cheap, reliable energy. China, France, and Germany are investing in nuclear energy. High-paying manufacturing jobs require cheap energy.
The author also states that the U.S. experience with nuclear power has been an “unmitigated disaster.” Besides Three Mile Island, nuclear energy in the U.S. has been extraordinarily successful. Finally, the author believes that a singular design would be beneficial. That is in fact a responsibility entrusted to the 3,000 engineers employed by the NRC. They are to review and approve the best design. Today, a standard design reactor might be advisable, but the notion that a “design flaw or shortcoming can be rectified quickly” ignores the fact that any repairs to an active nuclear reactor are fraught with obvious operating risks.
Nuclear energy is not perfect, and spent fuel is an issue. However, all the nuclear waste produced since 1970 could fit onto a football field, 30 feet high. Nuclear energy remains a golden opportunity to produce cheap, reliable, clean energy. China is strategically building 21 reactors as they move away from coal and reduce their manufacturing costs. America doesn’t need to mimic the French; they need to encourage innovative designs and enable nuclear energy to grow as a clean, reliable source of electricity.
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Wrong, Kansas City Star, Climate Change Isn’t Worsening Weather in Kansas or Missouri
The Kansas City Star ran an opinion piece claiming climate change is already making weather more extreme in Kansas and Missouri. This is false. There is no data supporting the claim that either flooding or drought, two specific extreme weather events cited in the story, are worse now than they have been historically. Almost all the records for such events in both states were set nearly a century or more ago, when global average temperatures were cooler.
Joel Mathis, the writer of the Kansas City Star story, “We’re watching the climate change in Kansas and Missouri. Why don’t more of us care?,” opines:
Climate change is already taking a toll on Kansas and Missouri, and not just in the form of wintertime vegetation. Both states are enduring long-running droughts that have challenged the region’s farmers and forced some communities to start hoarding their drinking water. That’s probably just the beginning.
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Climate change is going to make the extremes more extreme — more intense rain and snowstorms, but also more extended periods of drought. Our big swings will get bigger and more destructive.
But Mathis’ sees an even worse problem, in particular, that the majority of people aren’t that concerned about climate change.
“Last week, Heatmap News reported its new poll found that Midwesterners are ‘consistently blasé about climate change,’” writes Mathis. “Fifty-two percent of folks in our region — a slim majority, but a majority nonetheless — say warming ‘poses little or no risk to their region.’”
The residents of those two states are right to be unconcerned about climate change making their states’ respective weather worse, since historical evidence and data show that neither drought nor flooding amid recent decades of modest warming are worse than they have been historically. Indeed, as Mathis himself notes, Kansas and Missouri are not strangers to droughts, floods, and rapidly changing weather extremes.
“The Midwest is already a ‘high variability’ weather region,” writes Mathis, who discussed this fact with Chuck Rice, a professor of soil microbiology at Kansas State University who served on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007. “Think about all the times you’ve heard the joke that if you don’t like the weather around here ‘just wait five minutes.’”
Although it is true that parts of Kansas and Missouri are currently suffering from various degrees of drought, it is not a long-term drought, nor is it historically severe. A short-term drought is no evidence of climate change. Droughts in the early and mid-twentieth century, 70 and 90 years of global warming ago, were more prolonged and severe than the droughts experienced in either state since the beginning of the 21st century. Since official record keeping began, Kansas and Missouri both experienced their most sustained droughts in the 1930s, only to both also experience a sustained drought again in the 1950s. Longer term records developed from proxy data show even more severe and sustained droughts, multiple decades long, have not been uncommon throughout the region’s history.
What’s true of drought across Kansas and Missouri is also true of excessive rainfall and flooding. Kansas experienced its worst flood in 1844; Missouri’s largest recorded flood was 1785, with the flood year of 1844 being its second greatest flood. More costly damage has been done by floods in both Missouri and Kansas since then, in 1903, 1951, 1993, 1998, and 2007.
But the reason that more people and property were harmed by the more recent floods is not higher rainfall totals or deeper flood waters, but rather purely demographics. More people and development had taken place in the areas flooded than existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries when heavier flooding occurred. Neither recent rainfall totals nor floodwater depth have been greater in the 21st century than in the past.
Neither a single flood event, no matter how severe, nor single instances of drought, no matter how widely covered in the media, are evidence climate change is making weather in Kansas or Missouri worse or less predictable. Only a long-term sustained trend of either or both types of weather events might implicate climate change in weather changes, but there are no such worsening trends for either state. In short, data provide no evidence that climate change is making weather worse in Kansas or Missouri, so residents there are displaying common sense when they downplay the threat of climate change in their lives. The media should follow the public’s lead on this point. Follow the science, Mathis and the Kansas City Star, rather than hyping a false climate alarm narrative.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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