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 July, 2023
New York will ban single-use plastic silverware beginning Monday
I loved the heading above. NYC has plastic silver?
If you order takeout food, you might be accustomed to receiving a packet of plastic cutlery with your food to prevent you from needing to potentially needing to use your fingers or perhaps a comb to consume your food. However, if you live in New York City, you soon won't receive one unless you make it a point to ask for it.
New York City passed a "skip the stuff" law earlier this year that prohibited "restaurants, third-party food delivery services, and courier services from providing eating utensils, napkins, condiment packets, and extra food and beverage containers to customers with their take-out and delivery orders, unless specifically requested."
In explaining the decision the NYC City Council said, "More than 320 million tons of plastic are consumed each year globally, with 95% of plastic only used once and 14% for recycling. The “Skip the Stuff” legislation would decrease the amount of plastic in our waste stream, and it would reduce expenses for food service establishments."
The law takes effect on Monday, and restaurants who are found to have illegally provided plastic utensils to customers face potential fines ranging from $50 to $250. To soften the blow of the new law, the city has promised that restaurants will only be issued warnings for violating the law until July 1, 2024, when the fines will become mandatory.
The "skip the stuff" law is the latest salvo in New York City's war on takeout food packaging and accoutrements. In 2019, the city banned styrofoam containers for takeout food, and a ban on plastic straws went into effect in 2021.
The new law also places the onus on third-party delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash to ensure compliance with the law as well.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/new-york-will-ban-single-use-plastic-silverware-beginning-monday
***************************************************The UN’s climate alarmism has gone too far
Ross Clark
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has declared that ‘the era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived’. As if that were not enough, Guterres declared that ‘the air is unbreathable, the heat is unbearable’.
Something is raging out of control but it isn’t the temperature: last week’s famous ‘heat domes’ have subsided, with only a few patches of southern Europe over 30ºC this afternoon. It is hyperbole over the climate.
What does Guterres – who appeared to be breathing normally as he delivered his speech – hope to achieve by using language that tries to make out that life on Earth is no longer sustainable?
We are in an arms race of extreme language, with everyone falling over each other to outdo each other. The world falls in on anyone who seeks to pooh-pooh the narrative around global warming – climate scepticism was one of the reasons Coutts cited for closing Nigel Farage’s bank account – yet no one ever seems to get into trouble for exaggeration.
Just as with Covid, there is a price to be paid for scaring people. For the past week, we have been shown footage of holidaymakers fleeing from fires on Rhodes, the impression given that the island has become permanently uninhabitable. Yet, as the island’s deputy mayor said today, actually only one hotel has been burned down. As it attempts to recover from the fire, Rhodes’s tourist industry has been greatly harmed, certainly for this season and possibly well beyond. Despite the apocalyptic language, as I wrote here the other day, wildfires are not on the rise globally, in spite of hotter and drier conditions in some places.
You might as well sit in a deckchair and listen to the band rather than seek a place in a lifeboat. That is the attitude that Guterres and his like are breeding
There is a wider point: if you are going to tell people they are effectively doomed, and a depressing number of children and young people appear to believe this. A 2021 poll by the University of Bath of 10,000 16 to 25-year-olds around the world found that 56 per cent of them agreed with the statement that humanity is doomed. What, then, is the incentive to do anything about it? You might as well sit in a deckchair and listen to the band rather than seek a place in a lifeboat. That is the attitude that Guterres and his like are breeding.
Three years ago, I wrote a satirical novel, The Denial, in which a future government kept renaming the Department of Climate Change so that it became, in turn, the Department of Climate Crisis, the Department of Climate Emergency, the Department of Climate Cataclysm, Department for the Climate Apocalypse, and the Department of the Climate Armageddon. (It also, incidentally, saw a character debanked for his views on climate change). Guterres has brought that hysterical world a little bit closer.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-uns-climate-alarmism-has-gone-too-far/
****************************************************It's not climate change that's causing heat waves this summer but no one wants to explain why
Every summer, heat waves inevitably hit the U.S. and other parts of the world, causing climate alarmists and left-leaning media outlets to demand dramatic, disastrous changes to the global energy system. Unfortunately, this summer is no different.
On Tuesday, U.S. media outlets published a wave of stories about supposedly "historic" heat waves in Europe and North America. For example, The Washington Post published an article titled "Heat waves in U.S., Europe ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change, study finds."
Similarly, Axios published a story titled "Historic and enduring U.S. heat wave, by the numbers."
Although certain parts of the U.S. have undoubtedly experienced strong heat waves this summer, there’s no reason to believe these weather events are evidence that the world is hurtling toward a climate change catastrophe. In fact, the best available evidence suggests that heat waves recorded a century ago were more problematic than anything we’re seeing today.
Government researchers have been tracking heat waves for more than 100 years. According to data from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, which is made available by the Environmental Protection Agency, the annual heat wave index for the contiguous 48 states was substantially higher in the 1930s than at any point in recent years. In some years in the 1930s, it was four times greater or even more.
Additionally, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a large database of daily temperatures that goes back to 1948. NOAA used 1,066 weather stations located across the U.S. to collect this data.
According to NOAA, huge swaths of the U.S. have experienced a significant decrease in abnormally hot days recorded since 1948, especially in the Midwest and northern and eastern Texas.
Although it’s true that some parts of the U.S. have seen the number of hotter-than-usual days increase over the past 70 years — including in California and the New York metropolitan area, both of which happen to be areas where a large number of media outlets are located — most weather stations have shown no meaningful changes or even declines.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who works with me as a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, analyzed NOAA’s data in detail and found that 81% of the weather stations used in NOAA’s database reported that since 1948 there has been "either a decrease or no change in the number of unusually hot days."
If the available data so clearly reveal that there is no heat-wave crisis, why are media outlets suggesting the opposite is true? The answer is sloppy, irresponsible media reporting, combined with cherry-picked data.
Anyone who wants to show a long-term warming or cooling trend can do so by selectively choosing starting and ending points in datasets that will provide the answer you’re looking for.
For instance, if you start your examination of historic temperatures with figures collected in the 1970s, when temperatures were unusually low compared to the rest of the century, then current temperatures look abnormally high.
United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry lashes out in House hearingVideo
If you start around 2010, then temperatures over the past decade appear to have dipped below "normal" and are only now recovering.
When many media outlets and left-wing politicians talk about climate change data, they almost always selectively choose a range that offers an incomplete picture of the larger available dataset. This makes it appear as though today’s temperatures are "historic" when they are actually well within normal historical ranges.
Another problem is that media outlets have been using temperature forecasts in their news reports as if those figures were actual temperature data. A forecast is, by definition, a guess, and some alarmist analysts have recently made a bad habit of incorrectly predicting insanely high temperatures that never come to fruition.
For example, the Telegraph, one of the largest papers in the U.K., published an article on July 18 in which the author claimed, "The European Space Agency said thermometers could tip 48C in Sardinia and Sicily, while the temperatures in Rome and Madrid could both reach the mid to high-40Cs. In drought-stricken Spain, temperatures were set to reach highs of 44C in Catalonia."
If the available data so clearly reveal that there is no heat-wave crisis, why are media outlets suggesting the opposite is true? The answer is sloppy, irresponsible media reporting, combined with cherry-picked data.
None of these predictions came true. In fact, some of them were off by several degrees or more.
Heat waves happen every year, but this isn’t evidence that Americans are facing a global warming crisis. When heat-wave data are put into their proper historical context, it’s clear that everything humans are experiencing today has been witnessed in the past.
The ugly truth behind climate alarmism is that much of it is driven by a radical ideological agenda that is seeking to transform the global economy and American society, not by science. The best way to fight back against it is to use cold, hard facts. And those facts plainly show that there is no reason to panic about our ever-changing climate.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/not-climate-change-causing-heat-waves-this-summer-explain
********************************************************Why Australia's energy transition needs a price tag
On the ABC’s 7.30 earlier this month, presenter Sarah Ferguson asked Energy Minister Chris Bowen to forecast a time when power prices would come down.
After name-checking the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bowen answered: “very clearly, the policy agenda indicates getting more renewables into the system, backed up by storage and by firming … (that) is the best way of seeing the cheapest possible energy prices”.
But is it? This is the multibillion-dollar question Australia’s future hinges on.
Bowen’s view that an ever-increasing share of renewables will lead to a reduction in power prices largely rests on one document: the CSIRO’s GenCost report. Updated on a yearly basis, this document is produced by a small team led by energy economist Paul Graham.
Although the document is treated as gospel by many, it has received surprisingly little scrutiny in the public arena. Given it is the most important document in Australia’s energy transition this lack of scrutiny may lead to policy disaster. One problem is that describing the problems with the report in accessible terms is no easy task.
Understanding the report requires a technical nous, and even those with industry expertise have found parts of it confounding.
Nevertheless, some experts do not hold back in their criticism. Stephen Wilson, from the School of Mechanical & Mining Engineering at the University of Queensland, told me in an email that the GenCost report is “inaccurate and misleading on total system costs”.
In a submission to Treasury earlier this year, energy economist David Carland points out that the report says nothing about the cost of “firming” of renewables and instead estimates the cost of “integrated” renewables from 2030 onwards – relying on the flawed assumption that firming has already taken place. But the most pointed criticism of GenCost has emerged this week from a Sydney-based data scientist.
Writing in the Fresh Economic Thinking publication, Aidan Morrison points out that the CSIRO’s claim that renewables are the “cheapest” form of energy rests almost entirely on a misapplication of the “sunk cost” assumption.
A “sunk cost” is economics jargon for money already spent. The sunk cost fallacy applies when you have already spent dollars and you try to recover them after they are gone. Say you buy a cake and put it in the fridge. You come to it later in the week but it has gone stale. You tell yourself you should eat it because you have spent money on it. In that situation – if you ate it – you would be committing the sunk cost fallacy. It would be better to just chuck it in the bin and reach for an apple.
In many situations, it makes sense to account for sunk costs. But the concept should always apply to money spent in the past, not in the future. By definition, costs that have not been incurred yet are avoidable, and are not yet sunk. This is common sense but, in the GenCost report, the CSIRO treats future spending on renewables as sunk – even before the spending has occurred – allowing the analysis to exclude this expenditure from the total cost of renewables.
This creative accounting method is how the GenCost report arrives at the conclusion that “integrated renewables” are the cheapest form of energy by 2030 onwards.
“By use of a bizarre ‘sunk-cost’ assumption in their modelling, CSIRO cleaves the cost of infrastructure built prior to 2030 (when we would supposedly already have reached over 50 per cent renewable penetration) from any solar and wind generators built thereafter that might depend on that infrastructure,” Morrison writes in Fresh Economic Thinking.
The CSIRO lists the projects that are written off as sunk: “Snowy 2.0 and the battery of the nation pumped hydro projects … various transmission expansion projects … New South Wales gas peaking plants at Kurri Kurri and Illawarra … The NSW target for an additional 2GW of at least eight hours duration storage is assumed to be met by 2030.” In response to this list, Morrison quips: “I’m losing count of the billions.”
“Every economist, politician, and policymaker relying on this report simply must hear about this,” he writes.
Morrison argues that a circular logic has taken root: “Politicians build transmission and storage because they think solar and wind are cheap because science says so. Science (ie, CSIRO) says solar and wind are cheap because high transmission and storage costs required to facilitate these renewable generators are an already built ‘sunk cost’ and ignored in their calculations.”
Of course, there may be good reasons why the CSIRO uses the sunk cost assumption for future and not past spending, and Morrison’s critique itself is worthy of scrutiny. But the problem is that we do not have a balanced conversation in this country about the true cost of our energy transition, and engineers who have expertise in alternative clean energy sources – such as nuclear – are frozen out of the conversation.
There is also a growing awareness internationally that when the full cost of firming renewables is incorporated into cost-of-generation metrics, the analysis looks rather different from what the CSIRO produces.
In a paper published in the journal Energy, German-American energy economist Robert Idel finds that when taking into account the full cost of renewables to an energy system, solar is 14 times more costly than nuclear energy, and wind is 4.7 times more costly.
In Texas, his methodology calculates that solar is 3.3 times more costly than nuclear, and wind is 2.3 times more costly. Such information is crucial for a balanced conversation about Australia’s energy transition. Especially in the context of power prices that just keep on rising.
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30 July, 2023
Cutting Through the Climate Fog
Of course, hot days in July and August are nothing new. Those of a certain age might recall growing up without air conditioning. True, our fond memories aren’t always accurate (we also remember walking miles to school, uphill both ways), yet somehow we lived through it and we loved summer anyway.
But today it seems that everything is controversial, and weather is no exception. And for context, I must also point out that the summer of 2023 is shaping up to be exceptionally hot, breaking records in many places. It is one more reminder (as if we needed reminding) that steadily warmer summers are a manifestation of climate change, a very real and serious matter.
We might be inclined to take that serious matter more seriously if media coverage were more balanced. Several off-balance examples caught my attention in the past couple of weeks:
A sub-headline on a Washington Post news article noting that this summer’s extreme heat has environmental policymakers very worried.
Political commentary to the effect that despite the record-shattering heat, Republicans still do not believe that climate change is real.
Widely covered pronouncement from the scientific community that three days last week (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) were the earth’s hottest days in 120,000 years. (Yes, 120,000 years!)
My immediate thoughts about worried policymakers: Mother Nature couldn’t care less about them or their policies. There is an enormous chasm between climate change policy (ours or the world’s) and the weather that shows up on our doorsteps — and in some cases, they’re not connected at all.
Despite the trillions of dollars spent or pledged to battle climate change, we’ve not even nudged the needle. That should be no surprise to anyone. Those massively complex computer analyses that have convinced us that man-caused emissions of greenhouse gases pose an existential threat to the planet also tell us that our very ambitious (and thus far unachievable) emission-reduction targets will produce, at best, a barely detectible decrease in global warming.
One example: Our government-mandated transition of the entire automobile industry and supporting infrastructure to electric vehicles may in fact lead to sweeping changes in Americans’ car choices, driving habits, and personal finances, but it’s unlikely to produce even slight changes in the occurrence of forest fires, the intensity and frequency of hurricanes, or summer temperatures anywhere. Our own analyses tell us so.
Regarding belief in climate change, just about everyone with a pulse (GOP included) acknowledges its reality. What some of us deny — with very good reason — is the efficacy of the climate change agenda advocated by the Left. It’s unaffordable, drives cost of electricity up and availability down, and achieves little or nothing in return.
And the recent scientific assertion that this summer’s high temperatures were the highest in 120,000 years is, in my view, an embarrassing — and very telling — indicator of the mind-numbing hubris of those upon whom we rely for guidance in environmental matters.
The point here is not to throw cold water on the climatological studies conducted by scientists around the world. Theirs is a necessary and challenging endeavor. But it’s hard to buy into precise assertions about daily temperatures more than a thousand centuries ago when produced by the same analytical methods that consistently fail to predict what will happen next year. Worse, my own skepticism hit the flashing red light zone when one of the leading proponents of the recent analysis asserted, “We know exactly what the problem is, we know exactly how to fix it, and we have all the solutions we need.”
No. Wrong on all counts. That kind of unwarranted confidence in computer analyses can get us in big trouble.
Here’s what we do know. We know that over its lifetime, our planet has gone through both extreme cooling and extreme warming cycles, at times becoming barely habitable; we know that man-made emissions, and particularly the combustion of fossil fuels, since the Industrial Revolution (only two centuries ago) has contributed to global warming; and we know as well that factors unrelated to greenhouse gas emissions, such as changes to earth’s orbit around the sun, have also caused global warming.
We know that there are now nearly eight billion inhabitants on this planet (that’s about 100,000 for each human who lived on the planet 120,000 years ago) consuming food, sharing our natural resources, and relying on electrical and other energy sources. We know that we must wean ourselves from reliance on fossil fuels — but at the same time we must find the energy and resources needed to support all eight billion people.
And we know that our long-term survival will hinge on our ingenuity, resilience, and capacity to adapt to whatever curveballs Mother Nature throws at us.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/99184-cutting-through-the-climate-fog-2023-07-27
************************************************Batteries
Depending on your outlook, the Net Zero movement could result in anything from the seven horses of the apocalypse riding across the sky to the delivery of some sort of Nirvana for humankind.
No matter what your view, some facts are clear and undisputed.
Fact one. It is going to cost a fortune and you will be paying the bill. Fact two. If investments in intermittent wind and solar didn’t provide significant returns, no one would invest in them. Fact three. Intermittent and unreliable generators will always deliver intermittent and unreliable electricity.
Which brings me to batteries…
The media seems to love the concept of batteries, storage of intermittent wind and solar-generated electricity, and a proposed end of coal and gas all hail this part of Nirvana. Unfortunately, pesky facts get in the way.
Batteries are storage devices, not some sort of perpetual motion machine that doesn’t abide by the laws of physics. They must be recharged after use, have fire risks that most people I think are unaware of, and are very, very expensive.
Storage first. In very simple terms a 2.4-kilowatt-hour battery could run your fast-boil kettle for an hour, or potentially your clothes dryer and your fast-boil kettle at the same time for 30 minutes. Assuming it was fully charged and could run until it’s completely exhausted. You see where this is going. If tomorrow it rains or isn’t windy, the likelihood of your battery system recharging fully while your intermittent generators hopefully provide electricity to your household is low. Imagine living in the north where the monsoon can set in for weeks.
Batteries, especially lithium-based batteries burn hot. Really hot. In fact they are so hot that emergency services around the country have special procedures regarding how to deal with them and they are worried. In an interview with the ABC in February this year, Electrochemistry Professor Paul Christensen, from Newcastle University in the United Kingdom said:
‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big, big fan of lithium-ion batteries. But I believe they’ve penetrated far faster at all levels of our society than our understanding of the risks.
‘What people had reported as being smoke was actually vapour cloud vented by the lithium-ion batteries, which is explosive as well as toxic. If that vapour cloud ignites immediately you get long, rocket-like flames, 1,000 degrees centigrade.’
You don’t have to look far to see emergency services and first responders have concerns and they are growing. Fire and Rescue New South Wales give this advice on its website for electric vehicles:
Keep clear of the vehicle and warn passers-by to keep at a safe distance (at least 30 metres), even if there is no visible smoke, vapours, or flames.
An electric vehicle that has been involved in a collision, a fire, or has been submerged, must be treated with caution as the high voltage battery pack may be compromised. Damaged EV batteries may ignite hours, days, or even weeks after the initial incident.
For household batteries Renew Magazine in March 2020 provided the following advice on home battery installation:
Batteries aren’t allowed in habitable rooms (bathrooms, laundries, pantries, hallways are not habitable rooms), in ceiling spaces or wall cavities, under stairways or access walkways, in an evacuation route or escape route, near combustible materials. Clear space must extend at least 600 mm to either side and 900 mm above the battery. Most likely the installer will add a thick cement sheet unless the wall is already made of cement sheet, brick or concrete. A battery in a garage may need a bollard to protect it from cars.
If its chemistry is lithium or it’s a powerful battery that can create a dangerous arc (arc flash) in the event of a short circuit.
If batteries at home and electric vehicles are your thing, if you can afford them, and if they suit your lifestyle, knock yourself out. But please make informed decisions. In my view it is only a matter of time before more onerous standards are put in place, especially to deal with fire risk. It is only a matter of time before enormous upgrades will be needed in the electricity network to deal with increased demand. It is only a matter of time before disposal becomes regulated and charges are put to the consumer. AEMO estimated that increased demand at peak times could be as much as 60 per cent to deal with electric vehicles alone. It is only a matter of time before there are more fires and injuries associated with this developing technology. While the electric Nirvana supporters continue to howl at the Net Zero moon, there are those out there who think physics, engineering, risk analysis, and minimising environmental impact are just as important.
And whether it is wind turbines, solar panels, lithium batteries, or electric vehicles they all have a design life and must be disposed of at end of life. What on earth do you do with it all?
Wind turbine blades are expected to create approximately 43 million tonnes of waste by 2050 around the world. Just the blades alone. Without counting the millions of solar panels and tens of thousands, growing into millions of batteries.
I’m often asked about the half-life of radioactive waste from nuclear reactors that are producing baseload electricity around the world. In America, generally using older nuclear technology, their nuclear fleet provides electricity to 70 million people a year. And produce enough waste to fill half an Olympic-sized swimming pool per year. Whatever the half-life of that waste is I can guarantee you it is less than the half-life of heavy metals, carbon fibre, lithium, and everything else that goes into what are incorrectly called renewable generators. Because the waste products from intermittent wind and solar last forever.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/batteries/ ?
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Supreme Court Issues Order Allowing Work to Resume on West Virginia Gas Pipe
The U.S. Supreme Court on July 27 allowed Equitrans Midstream Corp. to resume the building of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, granting what some described as a win for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) by lifting a lower-court order that blocked work on the project.
In a brief order (pdf), the high court suggested that it would possibly consider lawsuits issued by environmental groups. “Although the Court does not reach applicant’s suggestion that it treat the application as a petition for a writ of mandamus at this time, that determination is without prejudice to further consideration in light of subsequent developments,” it said.
“The application to vacate stays presented to The Chief Justice and by him referred to the Court is granted,” the Supreme Court added. It didn’t provide any explanation of its decision.
The decision went against the Wilderness Society and other environmental groups that sought an injunction to halt construction. Those groups argued in court that the Mountain Valley Pipeline construction would negatively affect endangered species and said that the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management violated environmental statutes by approving its construction.
Lawyers cited an 1871 Supreme Court ruling that found that Congress can’t prescribe the rule of decision in a particular case, as that would be an unconstitutional intrusion into the separate powers of the judiciary and would allow Congress “to pick winners and losers,” to quote the groups, in litigation before the federal courts.
Lawyers for the pipeline company said they needed quick Supreme Court action to keep plans on track to finish building the 300-mile pipeline and put it into service by the winter, when the need for natural gas for heating grows. Mountain Valley Pipeline said the work is largely complete, except for a 3-mile section that cuts through the Jefferson National Forest.
The $6.6 billion project is designed to meet growing energy demands in the South and Mid-Atlantic by transporting gas from the Marcellus and Utica fields in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
The project has been delayed by a litany of court challenges. One challenge against the pipeline was upheld by the 4th Circuit of Appeals, which has often tossed out the pipeline’s permits over environmental concerns. The Supreme Court on July 27 ruled on two disputes, one brought by the Wilderness Society and one brought by 10 environmental groups.
Those groups wanted a review from the 4th Appeals Court of authorizations that were handed down earlier this year by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the U.S. Forest Service that allowed the pipeline segments in the Jefferson National Forest.
Officials Respond
It also comes as Mr. Manchin and several other lawmakers added items into the debt ceiling bill passed last month that sought to allow the pipeline to continue.
“The Supreme Court has spoken and this decision to let construction of the Mountain Valley Pipeline move forward again is the correct one,” the West Virginia senator, who is up for reelection in 2024, said in a statement. “I am relieved that the highest court in the land has upheld the law Congress passed and the President signed.”
West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, similarly praised the decision by saying that he is “pleased the Supreme Court recognized the importance of this project not only for West Virginia, but for the nation.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/supreme-court-lets-work-resume-on-manchin-backed-gas-pipe-5427310 ?
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Who Wears the Cost of Taking Down Wind Turbines Once They Expire?
Well in Australia, it could be the landholder or farmer.
Andrew Dyer, the country’s energy infrastructure commissioner says he has seen several “questionable agreements” between renewable companies and landholders that could leave the latter saddled with millions of dollars in decommissioning bills.
“Under the law, it will default to the landlord,” Mr. Dyer told a Senate Estimates hearing on May 23. “It’s up to the landlord to make sure that they have … a really good contract in place and you get the appropriate bond set-ups to cover the costs.
“It costs more money to pull a turbine down than it does to put it up, and that probably makes sense when you think about it. The costs of pulling down a turbine may exceed the revenue you get for 25 years. That’s not a good outcome.
“In the case of a turbine in Queensland where the bed plate cracked and you couldn’t go near the turbine because it could fall on your head, that cost millions of dollars to take down with robots and explosives. You could be stuck with some big bills.”
How Hard is it to Remove a Wind Turbine?
The average wind turbine has a lifespan of 25 years before it must be decommissioned and taken apart.
Yet the process of deconstructing and disposing of wind turbines is no simple feat.
“They have an in-ground lump of concrete that can be as much as 800 tons [to support a 200-metre high turbine] and could be left to the landowner or a farmer … to deconstruct what is effectively a giant Meccano [similar to Lego] set,” said federal Nationals MP Keith Pitt in an interview with The Epoch Times on July 28.
“This [net zero movement] is moving so fast that no one has the necessary regulations in place to protect the owners of the land, and potentially the future costs to the Australian taxpayer,” he added.
Mr. Pitt called for financial security or bonds to be made available, like how mining activity features similar arrangements for land rehabilitation once a project concludes.
“That should absolutely happen for intermittent wind and solar. Solar panels that will cover literally millions of hectares, and wind turbines that will dominate the skyline,” he said.
The energy infrastructure commissioner said some renewable energy providers would try to avoid a bond “because the landholder was ignorant to the risk.”
“We put out an updated guideline [pdf] in January this year to help landholders ask the right questions before they sign a document,” Mr. Dyer said.
“There are some questionable agreements out there that were not balanced, in our view, and so we’ve given the community and the landholders a helping hand.”
Mr. Dyer also suggested making bond provisions part of the licensing that goes into building renewable projects.
The march towards net zero has spurred a swathe of logistic, financial, engineering, and even security challenges.
According to the commissioner’s Energy Charter 2023, farmers have said the building of new infrastructure to support renewable energy could come at the cost of farmland.
“[About] 58 percent of surveyed landholders said that transmission infrastructure will result in a direct loss of farmable land or disruption to their land productivity,” the document states.
“Sixty percent also believe transmission infrastructure will impact their use of machinery or equipment. Some landholders also noted biodiversity impacts, which may diminish the natural features valued by the local community and aesthetics of the area.”
Federal MP Pitt said new transmission lines required easements, which need to be kept clear of regrowth to prevent future interference.
“That land generally can’t be farmed and can’t be utilised,” he said. “And it gets in the way of moving around your own property. Generally, no one wants a 200-metre strip of unusable land through the middle of prime agricultural land that impacts not only their operations but the value of their property.”
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28 July, 2023
Ruining the world to ‘save the planet’
The late morning sun danced off the Mediterranean as I took a chair facing Al Gore on the rooftop terrace of the Hilton in Cannes. I was there to interview the ascending messiah, in the foothills of the apocalypse known as AGW. He was to receive awards and accolades for his 2006 film in which (as writer) he addressed An Inconvenient Truth, screened just before we met, at the world’s most prestigious film festival, the altar of cinema.
The West took the message and spread it with fervour, using the film as a platform. Ambassadors were recruited to help sell the gloom, touring schools with a full propaganda kit of slide shows with alarmist claims echoing the film. It was (is!) the first mass hypnosis on a near-global scale. China and Russia (and much of the Middle East) remained untouched by the alarmist onslaught. When your enemy is digging a hole, don’t interrupt…
It wasn’t long, October 2007, that an opposing alarm was sounded in Britain, when a high court judge highlighted what he said were ‘nine scientific errors’ in the film.
The judge made his remarks when assessing a case brought by a Kent school principal and a member of a political group, the New Party, opposed to a government plan to show the film in secondary schools.
The judge ruled that the film can still be shown in schools, as part of a climate change resources pack, but only if it is accompanied by fresh guidance notes to balance Gore’s ‘one-sided’ views. The ‘apocalyptic vision’ presented in the film was not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change, he said.
The mistakes identified mainly deal with the predicted impacts of climate change and include claims that a sea-level rise of up to 6m would be caused by melting in either west Antarctica or Greenland ‘in the near future’. The judge said: ‘This is distinctly alarmist and part of Mr Gore’s “wake-up call”.’ He accepted that melting of the ice would release this amount of water, ‘but only after, and over, millennia’.
Gore, famously within an inch of the US Presidency in 2000, was emphatic; the climate was threatening. ‘I know this about politics. The political system has one thing in common with the climate system: it too, is non-linear. It can appear to change only gradually. But it can cross a tipping point, beyond which it moves dramatically,’ he said.
Ironically, the film quotes Mark Twain’s wisecrack, ‘What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know, it’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so,’ with the unquestioning confidence of the truly ignorant.
The salesman’s tricks in An Inconvenient Truth supercharged the already hyped scare campaign which had begun on June 23, 1988. To emphasise the ‘warming’ at the congressional session hosting NASA’s Jim Hansen as a guest speaker on the subject, Hansen’s Democrat ally Senator Tim Wirth scheduled the hearing on a day forecast to be the hottest in Washington that summer. In addition, Wirth sabotaged the air-conditioning the previous night, hoping to ensure the TV cameras could show everyone sweating in the heat. Wirth later told Deborah Amos (NPR News) how he did it:
‘What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot… The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving this remarkable testimony.’
Nobody questioned why it was NASA spreading the warming message, nor why it was in the political arena instead of a scientific setting.
Throughout the West, living standards, the economy, and yes, even the universally cherished environment itself, have been beaten down, throttled, and endangered by the still unproven theory (unproven theory correct!) that fossil fuel emissions drive warming and threaten the planet. Plants, of course, disagree.
But then, the message has always been borne on the wings of political activism, from Jim Hansen and Tim Wirth to Al Gore and latterly in Australia, the evangelical Chris Bowen. I use the word advisedly: climate change as a political movement is more like a secular religion, as has been noted many times before. It can also be described as ‘a cultural disease haunting Western society’, in the words of Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent. In his new book, The Grip of Culture, Andy West ‘overturns the existing literature, developing a powerful new model of public attitudes based on the interaction of traditional religion and a new culture – a new faith – of climate catastrophism, which is instinctively accepted or rejected. At its centre is a series of measurements of public opinion, culled from major international polls, which make a strong case that society is now in the grip of a major new religion’, according to the back cover synopsis.
It is a supreme irony that climate alarmists justify their activism by reference to ‘the science’ while steadfastly refusing to pay heed to scientific reports that challenge their beliefs, or to debate the subject with climate scientists – those not captured by the ruling orthodoxy. And there are a great many of them.
Nick Cater writes in his July 24, 2023, column in The Australian:
‘There are only 83,000 hectares of wet sclerophyll forest left in North Queensland. Ark Energy is just a ministerial tick away from ripping into a thousand to construct an industrial wind turbine development.’
Killing the environment to save the environment, eh?
In Struggle Street (pace Alan Jones), the energy bill hills have grown into mountains. Eat or heat? is the winter question. Small businesses face extinction.
Encouraged by the alarmism, zealous but disinformed protestors who want to Just Stop Oil rampage through cities and art galleries, disrupting city life, adding stress to urbanites (including this Urban).
The chaos of energy policies, here and elsewhere, is the direct result of attempts to ‘save the planet’ by alarmist scenarios that have children terrified, young couples refusing to have children, and corporates falling over themselves to turn from profit to politics, abandoning their purpose. Don’t they see they are helping politicians to be the useful idiots assisting China to ruin the world – weakening it on the way to controlling it? Without firing a shot; Sun Tzu would approve.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/ruining-the-world-to-save-the-planet/ ?
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Germany’s Irrationality Against Fossil Fuels Has Made It More Dependent on Them
Governments around the West are currently scrambling toward adopting more and more renewable, environmentally healthy energy sources—with the notable and regrettable exception of nuclear energy—and to set a path for a world of zero emissions in the coming decades.
There is no doubt that the goal of reaching a greener and cleaner future is laudable and something conservatives and free marketeers should support. But the top-down, heavy-handed approach by governments is the wrong one and has already caused havoc.
Let’s look to Germany as an example. Europe’s largest economy hastily implemented its Energiewende, that is, its transition to green energy, a little more than over a decade ago.
It was done hastily since it was a sudden decision made by the country’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, who irrationally decided after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster that it was time to get rid of nuclear. Thus, the Energiewende toward a cleaner future started by abandoning what is perhaps one of the best energy sources for getting us to that future.
While this major government-led project was off to a suboptimal start then, it has hardly become better since. The catastrophic consequences, the back-and-forth in policy decision-making, and the economic and social damage of the Energiewende (for instance, the European Commission already estimated in 2014 that the transition would cost a staggering 137 billion euros) have been documented at other points already.
Instead, I would like to highlight the geopolitical effect of Germany having become more dependent on fossil fuels from other countries since the start of the transition. Or, put differently, rather than producing energy itself, Germany has opted to import fossil fuel-based energy from other countries—and Russia in particular.
As the news website Clean Energy Wire has shown, Germany imported 63.7% of its energy from Russia in 2020. Ever since President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany had to completely outsource that to other countries, which has led to skyrocketing energy prices.
There would have been a way even after the invasion, of course, to slow down the increase in energy prices and to actually make Germany more independent again in its energy security. But the German government, which includes the Green Party, opted nevertheless to shut off all nuclear power plants in the spring of 2023. Energy security has thus been a practical impossibility.
To secure their energy supply at least to a minimum extent, certain states in Germany have started setting up new power plants based on natural gas.
For instance, Bavaria, the southern state in which most land is owned by farmers and that is nestled in mountains that are protected for their unique ecosystems (that is, not good places for windmills and solar panels farms), set up a new gas plant in 2021 to ensure a reliable energy supply after the federal government in Berlin had decided to shut down all of the state’s nuclear plants.
And after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the federal government ordered the restart of coal-fired power plants, too. Yet, still, the fuels for these gas and coal plants are coming from foreign suppliers.
Thus, in its irrationality against fossil fuel energy sources and in favor of forcing through an immediate transition to green energy, Germany has instead made itself more dependent on fossil fuels, but now from other countries in the world (and primarily from countries that could not be considered friends of the West).
It is merely one example of how government-led environmental policy has actually done very little for the environment but has hurt the people and businesses on the ground while also funding adversaries.
There is a different way, of course, and that is a more hands-off, pro-market approach toward protecting the environment. A regulatory approach will always be needed—it could be potentially disastrous if businesses simply set up nuclear plants without an already existing regulatory framework.
If the government wanted to truly help the environment, however, it would look to free enterprise to find solutions and use those resources that are abundantly available—for example, hydropower in the Alpine regions or the rivers.
In the end, it will always be environmental entrepreneurs—or enviropreneurs—who will truly help the environment. Industrial policy has never been effective. Until governments realize this, they will merely virtue-signal themselves into more and more disastrous policies.
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Heating Up the Regulatory State
The Biden administration is going to “save” the planet and “save” Americans money by forcing us all to … spend more money. Get it? Neither do we, but according to Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, that’s “Bidenomics” for you.
The growing list of household appliances the Biden administration has unilaterally decided is under its purview is getting more ridiculous. Indeed, the administration cannot deny it anymore. So the excuse now is, Well, it’s not happening immediately.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said as much. Team Biden has gone after “gas stoves, air conditioning units with regulation, refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, now water heaters,” a reporter said in an exchange with KJP. “How many more home appliances will Americans eventually have to replace, then, because of regulations?”
“So, just to be clear,” Jean-Pierre responded, “when it comes to water heaters — and it is — it is — it is proposed, what has been put forward, and if it is enacted, it would not take it into effect until 2029. So let’s not forget that.”
Why put off the regulation for another six years if climate change is such an imminent threat? If the world will end in X number of years, as we’ve been relentlessly told for decades, why wait?
The short answer is because it has nothing to do with the climate.
Likewise, the claim that “Bidenomics” is saving Americans money is just as vacuous.
While the DOE claims that the new regulations would produce $11 billion in annual savings for consumers, that claim quickly runs into a wall called “the real world.”
While these heat-pump systems may indeed be more energy efficient on their face, the real-life situations into which these units are placed have tremendous impact on their overall energy efficiency. Since these heat-pump water heaters take from the ambient warm air surrounding the unit, channeling it to heat the water, the temperature of the air around the unit will dictate its efficiency. Therefore, in hotter climates, this system works well, but in cooler climates, much of that energy efficiency is lost. And, of course, lost energy efficiency means lost savings.
Furthermore, there’s the problem of initial costs. These heat-pump water heaters cost an average of $2,800 more than a standard electric water heater on the market today. That’s no small potatoes for most Americans. On top of the price of the water heater are installation costs, which can run much higher than the installation of a standard water heater.
So, on balance, depending upon a variety of factors such as local climate, house size, and location within a house, the potential energy savings may end up being a complete wash due to the high upfront cost of these water heaters. But again, it’s not about saving money or saving the planet; it’s about empowering Washington’s bureaucratic state and giving excuses for unelected bureaucrats to impose ever more control over the American public.
Ben Lieberman, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, observes, “It seems that almost everything that plugs in or fires up around the house is either subject to a pending regulation or soon will be.” Exactly.
It is also deeply ironic that the party most concerned about democracy being threatened is the party most engaged in building a federal government that increasingly circumvents the democratic process.
If such powers are constitutional at all — which is a big “if” — Congress should be the only branch of the federal government looking to pass laws such as the DOE’s proposed regulations. It’s the only way for citizens to hold their elected representatives accountable. But of course, Congress doesn’t want to be held accountable, so elected lawmakers can hide behind the unelected bureaucratic state while asserting, It’s not our fault.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/99147-heating-up-the-regulatory-state-2023-07-26
*****************************************Australia: Victoria to ban all new homes from having a gas connection
Daniel Andrews' Labor government has taken the extraordinary step of banning the option of connecting natural gas to homes in a bid to halve carbon emissions by 2030.
Energy Minister Lily D'Ambrosio and Planning Minister Sonya Kilkenny announced the changes to energy supply on Friday morning, with the policy set to be introduced on January 1, 2024.
In addition to residential housing, any new public buildings which are yet to reach design stages by the cut off date - including schools, police stations and hospitals - must be entirely electric. Commercial properties will be exempt.
The move has prompted swift backlash from breakfast radio kingmakers Kyle and Jackie O.
Sandilands branded the Victorian Premier a 'wandering eyed flop' in a sensational blow up about the policy.
'I'm sick and tired of everyone thinking we're idiots,' he said. 'These laws are for idiots.'
'That government sucks ass. That wandering eyed flop down there can't have the Commonwealth Games because he can't budget, now he thinks ''I'll get the woke losers to vote for me by getting rid of gas''.
The change comes despite electricity power prices soaring by more than 50 per cent in just one year.
'The gas is getting eradicated yet eletricity is going through the roof and now we're forced to do that? This is some bulls**t,' Sandilands said.
The government hopes these new changes will shave up to $1,000 from household energy bills each year.
There is also a hope that there will be cash savings because households will no longer need a gas connection.
Daniel Wild, Deputy Executive Director of the Institute of Public Affairs, told Daily Mail Australia the changes amounted to a 'direct attack on Victorian families who are facing the ever-increasing dilemma between whether to heat or eat'.
'Gas bills for Victorian families have increased by 50 per cent... This price rise is by far the largest increase of any state, and more than double the national average.'
Mr Wild said it would be 'misleading' to simply blame the Russian invasion of Ukraine for the price hikes - as the Victorian Energy Minister has done in the past.
'Her government has no one else to blame for out-of-control gas price rise but themselves, which has been more reckless than any other state in banning the development of this vital resource,' he said.
'Banning the use of gas is fundamentally out of step with community expectations and is another example of the ever-growing intrusion of the Victorian Government into the day-to-day lives of families.'
New data recently revealed struggling Victorians are increasingly relying on government energy bill relief grants amid the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.
More than 86,000 of the grants have been distributed in nine months.
The Essential Services Commission revealed 67,413 residential customers required electricity bill assistance in March, the highest number since the relief scheme began in 2019.
Another 55,415 households had help to pay their gas bills over the course of the month.
Even still, a 25 per cent hike was brought in on July 1, spiking annual power bills again by $352 for residential customers and $752 for small businesses.
Prominent think tank the Grattan Institute suggested state and territory governments ban new natural gas connections to homes, shops and small businesses just last month.
Victoria is the first state to legislate such changes, and also partially funds the institute.
The Grattan report said Australia would fail to meet its net zero by 2050 carbon emissions target unless gas appliances were replaced with electric ones powered by renewable energy.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12346889/Victoria-ban-new-homes-having-gas-connection.html
***************************************27 July, 2023
Here's fun! Power Companies Could Remotely Switch Off EV Chargers to Reduce Grid Stress
Energy providers could have the option to switch off home EV charging stations remotely to reduce pressure on Queensland’s electricity grid.
The proposal is part of the Australian state’s Queensland Electricity Connection Manual (QECM), which provides a framework for the grid’s operation.
Section 8 of the QECM proposes that EV charging equipment may be limited or switched off by operators Ergon Energy and Energex (distributed network service providers or DNSPs) if it has an output of more than 20 amps—a standard domestic single-phase EV charger uses 32 amps.
The use of such “demand management” schemes is largely unique to Queensland and is also used on residential pool cleaning machines, hot water systems, and air conditioning units under the Peaksmart program.
Peaksmart gives households a cash rebate; in return, the operator can turn off air conditioners remotely during peak operating times (summer) to reduce pressure on the energy grid.
The large-scale roll-out of such programs has been earmarked as a potential catalyst to close down coal-fired power stations faster—amid the net zero push—and to, instead, adopt more intermittent renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and battery.
Federal Nationals MP Keith Pitt, himself an electrical engineer, says a proposal to use demand management on EV charging reveals that operators have little confidence the grid can handle the uptake of electric cars expected in the push towards net zero.
“EV take-up could increase peak demand by as much as 60 percent right across the National Electricity Market,” Mr. Pitt told The Epoch Times.
“That would mean you need a 60 percent increase in generating electricity capacity, transmission, and distribution. So that’s every substation, every cable, every supply point, every house—it will cost an absolute fortune.”
The federal Labor government has set a lofty goal of having 3.8 million EVs on the road by 2030—there are currently 83,000 in use.
Further, the government is also pushing to expand the charging network, aiming for 100,000 for businesses, 3.8 million chargers in households, and 1,800 publicly available fast chargers.
The initiative comes as part of a wider push towards net zero by 2050 and to reduce emissions by 43 percent by 2030. Further, the Labor government hopes to have 82 percent of the National Electricity Market powered by renewables.
Advocacy groups have argued against a demand management system saying it will dampen enthusiasm for EVs. “We know from surveys that average consumers aren’t particularly keen on mandated orchestration of their appliances,” says the Electric Vehicle Council in its submission on the QECM (pdf).
“The Peaksmart program enlists between 10,000 and 15,000 air conditioning units for orchestration each year … out of a total of about 300,000 that get installed. About 95 percent of consumers prefer retaining control of their air conditioning, overtaking the financial incentives on offer.”
Meanwhile, Melissa McAuliffe, acting director of energy services at Energy Consumers Australia, says it would erode consumer trust that the “energy system is working for them.”
“Our 2023 Energy Consumer Sentiment Survey finds that only 35 percent of households are confident that the energy industry and regulators are working in their long-term interests now,” she wrote in a submission (pdf).
“Further, such measures are unlikely to be completely effective for consumers or the system, as consumers may look to workarounds that circumvent giving DNSPs control. For example, through disincentivising the use of EV chargers, consumers may just use regular power points.”
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Hot Weather Does Not Mean Climate Change
As Ambassador Rahm Emanuel once said as chief of staff to President Barack Obama, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” Hillary Clinton is taking this to heart, using summer temperatures to justify Democrats’ profligate spending on green energy in the Inflation Reduction Act.
No matter that hot summer days in cities do not equate to climate change; that climate change models are poor predictors of warming; and that the incidence of hurricanes and tornadoes has not increased over time. A better use of funds would be to buy air conditioners to keep people cool during hot months.
The Sixth U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report stated that the “attribution of certain classes of extreme weather (e.g., tornadoes) is beyond current modelling and theoretical capabilities.”
It is well known that measures of warming are biased upward because temperature readings are taken in urban rather than rural areas and the world has seen increased urbanization over the past centuries. Solar activity also plays a role in warming.
Despite measurement problems, the “climate crisis” is the stated rationale for interfering with Americans’ choices of cars, appliances, and power generation sources. The “climate crisis” is why California aims to allow only battery-powered vehicles to be sold in the state starting in 2035 and why the Environmental Protection Agency has proposed rules that would require two-thirds of new passenger vehicle sales to be electric vehicles by 2032.
But what if we were not in a climate crisis after all, and trillions of dollars in planned tax credits and green energy expenditures are a misuse of taxpayer resources?
New York University professor Steven Koonin has presented data in his bestselling book, “Unsettled,” to show that the science is not as settled as many politicians would have us believe.
Koonin is a respected academic physicist. He was former undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy under President Barack Obama when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state. His portfolio included the climate research program and energy technology. He has a bachelor of science in physics from Caltech and a doctorate in theoretical physics from MIT. Koonin taught for 30 years at Caltech and has published 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Koonin finds that daily record high temperatures have not increased over the past 100 years and daily record lows have become less common. This is directly at variance with media headlines.
Although wildfires made headlines this summer, global areas burned by wildfires have shown a downward, rather than an upward, trend. Tornado activity in the United States has declined since 1970.
The media covers climate change as though doomsday is approaching. Bad news sells, and well-funded organizations support the crisis message.
Take Covering Climate Now, founded by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation in 2019 with over 460 news and media partners, including Reuters, Bloomberg, CBS, NBC, and MSNBC. Covering Climate Now helps “to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom.” It advises news outlets under its “best practices” to show photos of people frazzled in the heat rather than enjoying themselves in a pool. It states, “In the year 2023, there is simply no good-faith argument against climate science.”
“Consensus” on the “climate crisis” as presented by news outlets is not a scientific consensus at all. We need to follow scientific knowledge as it develops and carefully consider the costs and benefits of different alternatives.
This is particularly important for the transportation and energy sectors, which bear the brunt of costs for the “climate crisis.” People need these sectors to be highly reliable and cost effective. Making large changes to transportation and energy in a short period of time decreases reliability and increases prices dramatically.
Even if rising “greenhouse gas” emissions were affecting the climate, actions by the United States will not be helpful in the absence of changes by China and India, the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. If the United States were to get rid of all fossil fuel emissions, this would only reduce global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100.
China, India, Africa, and Latin America are all increasing emissions, and President Xi Jinping announced last week that China has no plans to reduce emissions after 2030, contrary to the Paris Agreement that his nation signed on to.
In fact, American carbon emissions have declined by 1,000 million metric tons over the past 16 years while Chinese emissions have risen by 5,000 million metric tons. Further reductions in U.S. emissions, with their associated costs, will just be a drop in the global bucket. Polls show that many believe protecting the environment is less important to Americans than economic growth.
Additionally, the message that government can create more total jobs by requiring more costly technology is seductive but empty. Yes, some Americans might be employed building the technology, but others lose jobs due to more expensive energy causing businesses to cut back on production and transportation or causing them to cut jobs directly to pay for increasing energy costs.
The EPA’s proposed tailpipe and power plant regulations will reduce economic growth by raising energy prices. As well as reducing jobs in the auto industry—GM, Ford, and Stellantis are closing down traditional auto plants—EPA regulations will also discourage energy-intensive manufacturing.
Raising the cost of energy at any time is poor economic policy, but especially when economic growth is slow. U.S. annualized gross domestic product growth was 2% in the first quarter of 2023, with data for the second quarter expected on Thursday. It’s summer, but now is not the time for Democrats to use the excuse of climate change to slow the economy further with more regulations.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/07/25/hot-weather-does-mean-climate-change/
***********************************************Gulf Stream current could collapse in 2025, plunging Earth into climate chaos
This is an old chestnut. Prophecies of doom about the Gulf Stream have been going on for decades now. The evident truth is that it cannot accurately be modelled
A vital ocean current system that helps regulate the Northern Hemisphere's climate could collapse anytime from 2025 and unleash climate chaos, a controversial new study warns.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which includes the Gulf Stream, governs the climate by bringing warm, tropical waters north and cold water south.
But researchers now say the AMOC may be veering toward total breakdown between 2025 and 2095, causing temperatures to plummet, ocean ecosystems to collapse and storms to proliferate around the world. However, some scientists have cautioned that the new research comes with some big caveats.
The AMOC can exist in two stable states: a stronger, faster one that we rely upon today, and another that is much slower and weaker. Previous estimates predicted that the current would probably switch to its weaker mode sometime in the next century.
But human-caused climate change may push the AMOC to a critical tipping point sooner rather than later, researchers predicted in a new study published Tuesday (July 25) in the journal Nature Communications.
"The expected tipping point — given that we continue business as usual with greenhouse gas emissions — is much earlier than we expected," co-author Susanne Ditlevsen, a professor of statistics and stochastic models in biology at the University of Copenhagen, told Live Science.
"It was not a result where we said: 'Oh, yeah, here we have it'. We were actually bewildered."
AMOC as a global conveyor belt
Atlantic Ocean currents work like an endless global conveyor belt moving oxygen, nutrients, carbon and heat around the globe. Warmer southerly waters, which are saltier and denser, flow north to cool and sink below waters at higher latitudes, releasing heat into the atmosphere.
Then, once it has sunk beneath the ocean, the water slowly drifts southward, heats up again, and the cycle repeats. But climate change is slowing this flow. Fresh water from melting ice sheets has made the water less dense and salty, and recent studies have shown that the current is at its weakest in more than 1,000 years.
The region near Greenland where the southerly waters sink (known as the North Atlantic subpolar gyre) borders a patch that is hitting record low temperatures, while the surrounding seas climb to all-time highs, forming an ever-expanding 'blob' of cold water.
The last time the AMOC switched modes during the most recent ice age, the climate near Greenland increased by 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit (10 to 15 degrees Celsius) within a decade. If it were to turn off, temperatures in Europe and North America could drop by as much as 9 F (5 C) in the same amount of time.
Direct data on the AMOC's strength has only been recorded since 2004, so to analyze changes to the current over longer timescales, the researchers turned to surface temperature readings of the subpolar gyre between the years of 1870 and 2020, a system which they argue provides a 'fingerprint' for the strength of AMOC’s circulation.
By feeding this information into a statistical model, the researchers gauged the diminishing strength and resilience of the ocean current by its growing year-on-year fluctuations.
The model's results alarmed the researchers — yet they say that checking them only reinforced their findings: The window for the system's collapse could begin as early as 2025, and it grows more likely as the 21st century continues.
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Race to salvage sinking cargo ship carrying 3,000 vehicles including 350 Mercedes as it burns out of control in North Sea after fire 'caused by electric car'
The race is on to prevent the sinking of a cargo ship off the Dutch coast which is carrying almost 3,000 vehicles, including 350 Mercedes-Benz, as it burns out of control with an electric car believed to be behind the deadly fire.
At least one crew member died and others were injured after fire ripped through the Fremantle Highway, a 18,500-ton car-carrying vessel. Rescue helicopters and boats evacuated 23 crew members from the Panamanian-registered ship.
Officials have said there are 'many' wounded. Some suffered broken bones, burns and breathing problems and were taken to hospitals in the northern Netherlands, emergency officials said.
Seven crew members jumped overboard and were rescued from the water, while the rest were airlifted by helicopter. Dutch broadcaster NOS reported that all the crew were Indian.
This afternoon, the ship was said to be burning out of control in the North Sea and rescue vessels were working to save it from sinking close to one of the world's most important migratory bird habitats.
'Currently there are a lot of vessels on scene to monitor the situation and to see how to get the fire under control,' coast guard spokeswoman Lea Versteeg told the Associated Press in a telephone interview.
'But it's all depending on weather and the damage to the vessel, so we're currently working out how we can make sure that... the least bad situation is going to happen.'
Asked if it is possible the ship could sink, Ms Versteeg said: 'It's a scenario we're taking into account and we're preparing for all scenarios.'
Early this afternoon, two ships were alongside the freighter hosing down its sides in an attempt to cool them, the coast guard said, but firefighters were still unable to attempt to extinguish flames on the ship and smoke was billowing out of its hold.
The ship's Japanese owner, Shoei Kisen Kaisha, said it was working in cooperation with the local authorities of the Netherlands, a salvage company and a ship management company.
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26 July, 2023
Turbine Failures and Plunging Stock Add to Growing Doubt Over Wind Industry
An increase in the failure of wind turbine components and the subsequent financial fallout are creating uncertainty about the true sustainability of an industry that’s campaigning for green energy.
Siemens Energy announced on June 22 that it would be withdrawing its profit assumptions and initiating a technical review of Siemens Gamesa’s onshore wind farm, which could cost more than $1.1 billion.
“This is a disappointing, bitter setback,” Siemens Gamesa CEO Jochen Eickholt said in a June conference call. “The quality problems go well beyond what had been known hitherto, in particular in the onshore area.”
The mechanical problems could affect 15 percent to 30 percent of the company’s wind turbine farms and take several years to repair.
The day after the announcement, Siemens Energy’s shares fell more than 37 percent.
The company said it expected challenges to “ramp up” offshore as well.
Siemens Energy is a subsidiary of the German conglomerate Siemens. Siemens Energy’s wind farm business, Siemens Gamesa, is a global company based in Spain that constructs onshore and offshore turbines in Europe and the United States.
The company began an investigation into a damaged turbine at the Santo Agostinho wind farm that French energy company Engie SA is building in the northeast of Brazil, Bloomberg reported.
The installation—which is part of Siemens Gamesa’s new 5.X model of onshore wind farms, with turbine blades as long as 262 feet—has faced numerous quality control issues and has been shut down for the investigation.
Since Siemens Gamesa’s announcement, a spokesperson confirmed to Recharge on July 5 that a blade had broken at the Santo Agostinho wind farm.
‘More Severe Than I Thought Possible’
Media outlets and spokespersons blame the issues on the increasing costs and decreasing availability of raw materials caused by the COVID pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which has left competing companies with challenges in meeting deadlines while rattling the confidence of investors.
Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch said during a June conference call that the setback is “more severe than I thought possible.”
“Siemens Gamesa will incur high losses this year and will take longer to reach an appropriate level of profitability,” Mr. Bruch said. “We also have to see that we have an urgent requirement to fix the corporate culture. Too much has been swept under the carpet.”
In 2022, Siemens Gamesa announced a layoff of 2,900 employees, with further cuts predicted, EnergyWatch reported.
“It is never easy to make such a decision, but now is the time to take decisive and necessary actions to turn the company around and ensure a sustainable future,” Mr. Eickholt said. “We need to build a stronger and more competitive Siemens Gamesa to secure our position as a key player in the green energy transition.”
‘Uncharted Territory’
Nicholas Green, head of industrial technology at the global asset management firm AllianceBernstein, told CNBC that the rate of expansion has pushed wind energy into “uncharted territory” that has led to “an industry-wide issue.”
“It wasn’t that Siemens Gamesa is a bad operator, as such, it’s that actually some of the normal protocols and time in use, operational data in use, is relatively limited,” Mr. Green said.
In addition to the availability of materials, the rapid expansion is creating challenges not only for supply and demand, but also for engineering.
Christoph Zipf, a spokesman for WindEurope, told CNBC that 20 years ago, a normal wind turbine would have a capacity of 1 million watts, while today, they’re testing at 15 megawatts (15 million watts).
“This means that turbines have become bigger as well, posing challenges to components (quality, materials, longevity),” Mr. Zipf wrote in his statement....
During a visit to the Block Island Wind Farm in Rhode Island in late May, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm praised America’s first offshore wind farm as a model that should be followed throughout the rest of the country, The Providence Journal reported.
“We want to replicate this, even bigger, all up and down the Atlantic seaboard, but also in the Pacific and in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Great Lakes,” Ms. Granholm said. “We want to be able to generate clean energy all across America.”
However, the Block Island Wind Farm, like other installations, has faced multiple problems.
Meghan Lapp, a representative for a commercial fishing company in Rhode Island who also works in fishery management, told The Epoch Times that the installation is “rarely working” and has frequent maintenance issues.
“A couple of years ago, 4 out of 5 of them went offline for months because they have stress fractures in the rotors,” Ms. Lapp said. “This year, one of them will be offline all summer for repair. It’s been one disaster after another.”
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How to silence a climate change zealot
I’ve never understood the fascination dogs have with the wheels of cars which is demonstrated as they come running out to bark as you drive by, but there are few funnier things in life than watching what happens when the dog catches the car.
One time I was in a street looking for an address, and as I slowed, a dog came running out at me. About 100 metres down the road I found the address I was after and pulled over. As soon as this happened, the barking and snarling dog came to an abrupt halt. It stopped barking. A look of puzzlement came over its face, and it timidly turned and trotted away.
The same thing can happen with Climate Change zealots. I’ve worked out how to silence them, deflate them, and see them trot timidly away, hopefully with a few questions to ask themselves.
How do we do this? Well, we simply let the dog catch the car.
A while ago I wrote an article where I assessed the various approaches that can be taken to debunk the ‘climate change’ orthodoxy. In brief, our choices are:
The world isn’t warming.
If it is warming, we aren’t causing it.
If it is warming, it’s not a bad thing.
If it is warming, we can’t do anything about it anyway.
Most sceptics focus on one of the first two approaches. For years, I’ve been prosecuting the third one. In my article, I argued that we take a leaf out of Konstantin Kisin’s book and abandon these in favour of the last one.
That is, we say ‘What can we do about the climate crisis?’ We no longer argue against the existence of a ‘crisis’ and say ‘What can we do about it?’ Metaphorically, we let the dog catch the car. ‘There’s a crisis? Okay – what do we do about it?’
I’ve been pursuing this process on my Twitter account (@ThugRaffles) for a couple of months now, with fascinating results. In fact my pinned tweet says: ‘The question that, it seems, no one can answer is, “What do we do about the #climatecrisis #ClimateActionNow #ClimateAction #climatechange #ClimateEmergency”?’
At the time of writing it has been viewed about 400 times, and not a single reply. That is, it has been seen by people that make liberal use of these hashtags, but no one can answer it.
So I have taken a proactive approach and pursued it with various accounts that post using these hashtags. Mostly, I just get no reply. This, of course, puts you in a position where you can say, ‘I didn’t get a reply to my question. Do you really believe in action on climate change, or are you a denier?’
One account replied with a general tweet about climate change, to which I replied, ‘Do you acknowledge that there is a climate emergency?’ The response was, ‘I’m not here to discuss policy.’ My reply was, ‘I didn’t ask about policy – I just asked if there was a climate crisis. Do you acknowledge there is a climate crisis or are you a denier?’ After several more iterations, in which he continued to evade what ought to have been an easy question, he blocked me.
Another account said that we needed to reduce greenhouse gases, which led to the following exchange (paraphrased and summarised):
‘You mean CO2?’
‘Yes.’
‘Cool. So what’s the current level of CO2?’
‘I don’t think that’s the real issue.’
‘I don’t understand. Didn’t you say that CO2 was too high? I googled the result and came up with 0.0421 per cent. Is that right?’
‘That’s carbon, not CO2.’
‘Fair enough, what’s the real figure then?’
*blocked*
I haven’t kept track of how many times I’ve asked this question of people, but it’s now clear that the question will not be answered. I suspect the non-repliers fall into two categories. Firstly, there is Joe Public, who has vaguely heard that we need to ‘take action’ but has no idea what the consequences will be.
This ignorance extends to the level of CO2 in our atmosphere and the change that would ensue if we all went and lived in solar-powered caves. I saw a Senate enquiry in the US where some bureaucrats on a government committee regarding energy policy were asked, ‘How much CO2 is in the atmosphere?’ Amid all the puzzled looks, none of them had the slightest clue, with most people settling on ‘about 4 per cent’ which is out by a factor of 100.
In the second category are ‘climate’ scientists who know the answers to these questions, but keep quiet about it as they know that any changes made to human CO2 emissions will be a drop in the ocean.
At about this point, a serious sceptic will raise this issue – how can I, in good conscience, pretend to agree there is a climate crisis when I know there isn’t? It’s a fair question, but the good news is you don’t have to. There are essentially two ways around this:
When a person says that there is a climate crisis we simply abandon any attempt to contest the issue and say, ‘Okay, so what do we do about it?’ This question does not acknowledge the truth of what they are saying, but essentially asks them what we should do if it’s true.
If put on the spot by a believer, we simply tell the truth and say, ‘I’ve not seen any evidence of the climate crisis myself, but acknowledge that if it is true, we should do something. You say it’s true? Fair enough – what should we do about it?’
So this is a memo to Rowan Dean, Andrew Bolt, Jennifer Marohasy, Senator Malcolm Roberts, and Ian Plimer. Twenty years of trying to prove that either the world isn’t warming, or if it is, we aren’t doing it, or if we are, a warmer world isn’t a bad thing have failed. And not only failed, but failed spectacularly, with not a single journalist, scientific body, or major political figure straying from the orthodoxy. Not one.
As the saying goes, one definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome. It ought to be obvious that if it hasn’t worked yet, it’s not going to suddenly start working now.
The only journalist prosecuting this case is Chris Kenny who has asked the very simple question, ‘How will the climate change as a result of Labor’s Net Zero policy?’
So let’s try something new – get in the Nicholas Reece’s of this world and put the question to them, very simply, about how we address climate change.
You will probably find most or all of the following are true:
They don’t know the atmospheric concentration of CO2 as a percentage. Some know it as ppm, but this doesn’t have the immediate significance of quoting it as a percentage.
They don’t know how much CO2 is man-made.
They don’t know how much man-made CO2 comes from Australia.
They don’t know by how much the atmospheric CO2 concentration will change if Australia went to Net Zero.
They are unable to say by how much the global temperature will change if these changes are made.
They are unable to say how the climate will change as a result of these changes.
And the point is this – anyone that says that we need to ‘take action’ ought to know these things. They ought to be able to tell us, in exact terms, exactly what this action should be and what effect it will have. They ought to be able to say, ‘Net Zero will reduce global CO2 to X, which will lower global temperatures by Y degrees. This will result in a Z per cent drop in cyclones etc.’
In other words, if they cannot rattle off these figures off the top of their heads, then they are fools to ask us to take action with unknown outcomes – and if they are being honest with themselves, they know it. The goal of the polemicist is to simply make them be honest with themselves.
The issue becomes not the figures themselves, but the fact that they don’t know them. We can say things like, ‘You don’t know how much CO2 is in the atmosphere? How do you know it’s too high then?’ Or, ‘You can’t say by how much CO2 will change if we go to Net Zero? Why not? Why are you calling for action when you don’t know what the outcome will be?’ And, ‘You can’t say by how much global temperatures will change if we go to Net Zero? Why not? Isn’t that the whole point of the exercise?’
In short, you put the onus on the believer to explain why they do not have this information at hand. And I’d be asking questions like, ‘Can you see that these are reasonable questions? Can you see that if you’re calling for a reduction in CO2 emissions you ought to be able to say what effect those emissions will have?’
This is such an obvious issue that I cannot but help think that in their mind a little voice will say… ‘Actually, he has a point – you should know the answers to these questions.’ They may walk sheepishly away as they start asking themselves some questions.
But let’s consider what happens if the discussion gets to the point where numbers are discussed. The latest figure I can find forCO2 levels is 421ppm. The point about this is that it is measured to three significant figures. That is, it is 421, and not 421.0 (four significant figures) or 421.00 (five significant figures).
To explain this concept, let’s say we measure a length of a running track at 100m. Strictly speaking this means only that it is between 99.5 (since by convention. 5 is rounded up) and 100.4. If we now say the running track is 100.0m, we are saying the length is between 99.95 and 100.04m and so on.
So that means that a CO2 concentration of 421ppm is between 420.5 and 421.4 ppm. Let’s now perform some calculations and see what numbers pop out.
Man-made CO2 is 3 per cent of the global budget, and 1.3 per cent of that comes from Australia. Thus, 421 x 0.03 x 0.013 is 0.16. If we subtract that from 421 we arrive at 420.84 ppm. As the original figure was only three significant figures, we can only quote this figure to three significant figures, which gives us a value of 421 ppm.
The three significant figures quoted for CO2 measurement would represent the LOD (limit of detection) of the measurement technology. This would be a handheld device (using a Wheatstone bridge) that would give you an on-the-spot reading to three significant figures.
Is greater sensitivity available? Yes, it is, with laboratory-based measurements. A GC-FID measurement will measure down to a further order of magnitude, to give us four significant figures. This means that only with the most sensitive measurements possible, it may be possible to measure at a level that would detect a change in global CO2.
Thus, we can say that as a result of Australia going to Net Zero, the concentration of atmospheric CO2 will change from 0.0421 per cent to 0.0421 per cent which is a change so small that it is undetectable by normal measuring technologies.
Of course the follow-up questions may be these:
How many coal-fired plants does Australia have?
How many coal-fired plants does China have?
At what rate are China building coal-fired plants?
How many weeks will it take for China to build more coal-fired plants than the total number in Australia?
Once again, if the goal of the exercise is reducing global CO2 levels, the Climate Change zealot ought to have these numbers to hand. And the answers make a mockery of any efforts of Australia to reduce CO2. In order, they are 14, about 1190, 2 per week, and 7 weeks.
In discussing this issue there is, however, a fascinating irony. This is that most people that say that they are taking an evidence-based approach to the climate issue do not practice what they preach.
Suppose that I said that I’d developed a device that would reduce the fuel consumption of your car by 10 per cent. You fit the device to the car, conduct extensive tests over 20 years, and conclude that it didn’t work. What manner of idiot, then, would say, ‘Oh but let’s keep trying it. It’ll work soon.’
And yet that’s what most climate sceptics do. They’ve spent twenty years prosecuting arguments that just haven’t worked! An entire generation of youth have now been indoctrinated with climate hysteria, and it’s the mantra of every mainstream media organisation and political party.
Not one, not a single individual has been persuaded by all the books, social media posts, and op-eds. Not one!!!
And yet, astonishingly, these people still keep trying to use arguments that haven’t worked. It brings to mind a classic scene from Blackadder Goes Forth. The grand plan of the British High Command is to make a frontal assault on the German lines. Rowan Atkinson says, ‘You mean the same thing that we’ve tried seventeen times previously and hasn’t worked?’ Regretfully, this satirical comment reflects the approach of most climate sceptics.
So why do these arguments persist? Because they are right! All these arguments are factually and scientifically correct. The world isn’t warming, CO2 is not driving the climate, and there is nothing bad about a warmer world. These are all true – but here is the point – people have been indoctrinated to believe the experts (who say what the government want them to say) and these arguments are simply never going to work.
So what do we do? We agree with the experts. We let the dog catch the car! Then we stand back and watch the fun as we say to the experts, ‘Okay, what do we do now…?’
The choice then is this. We can take the Blackadder approach, and try something different, or we can take the General Melchett approach and make a frontal assault on the German lines because, you know, this time it will work…
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/how-to-silence-a-climate-change-zealot/
***********************************************Electric Vehicles: Costly Virtue Signaling Forced on America by Left
The Left likes to treat skeptics of electrical cars as if they were Luddites. Truth is, making an existing product less efficient, but more expensive, doesn’t really meet the definition of innovation.
Even the purported amenities and technological advances EV makers like to brag about in their ads have been a regular feature of gas-powered vehicles going back generations. At best, EVs, if they fulfill their promise, are a lateral technology.
Which is why there is no real “emerging market” for EVs in the United States as much as there’s an industrial policy in place that props up EVs with government purchases, propaganda, state subsidies, cronyism, taxpayer-backed loans, and edicts. The green “revolution” is an elite-driven, top-down technocratic project.
And it’s increasingly clear that the only reason giant rent-seeking carmakers are so heavily invested in EV development is that government is promising to artificially limit the production of gas-powered cars.
In August 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to set a target for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be zero-emission. California claims it is banning combustion engines in all new cars in about 10 years. So, carmakers adopt business models to deal with these distorted incentives and contrived theoretical markets of the future.
In today’s real-world economy, Ford projects it’s going to lose $3 billion on electric vehicles in 2023, bringing its EV losses to $5.1 billion over two years. In 2021, Ford reportedly lost $34,000 on every EV it made. This year, it was losing more than $58,000 on every EV. In a normal world, Ford would be dramatically scaling back EV production, not expanding it.
Remember that next time we need to bail out Detroit.
Then again, we’re already bailing them out, I suppose. Last week, the U.S. Energy Department lent Ford—again, a company that loses tens of thousands of dollars on every EV it sells—another $9.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for a South Korean battery project. One imagines no sane bank would do it. The cost of EV batteries has gone up, not down, over the past few years.
Ford says these upfront losses are part of a “start-up mentality.” We’re still pretending EVs are a new idea, rather than an inferior one. But scaremongering about climate and a misplaced romanticizing of “manufacturing” jobs have softened up the public for this kind of waste.
In the real world, there is Lordstown. In 2019, after General Motors—which also loses money on every EV sold—shut down a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, then-President Donald Trump made a big deal of publicly pressuring the auto giant to rectify the situation. CEO Mary Barra lent Lordstown Motors, a new EV outfit, $40 million to retrofit the plant. Ohio also gave GM an additional $60 million.
You may remember the widespread glowing coverage of Lordstown. After Biden signed his “Buy American” executive order, promising to replace the entire U.S. federal fleet with EVs, Lordstown’s stock shot up.
By the start of this year, Lordstown had manufactured 31 vehicles total. Six had been sold to actual consumers. (Most of them would be recalled.) The stock was trading at barely a dollar. Tech-funding giant Foxconn was pulling its $170 million. And this week, the company filed for bankruptcy.
Without massive state help, EVs are a niche market for rich virtue-signalers. And, come to think of it, that’s sort of what they are now, even with the help. A recent University of California at Berkeley study found that 90% of tax credits for EVs go to people in the top income strata. Most EVs are bought by high earners who like the look and feel of a Tesla. And that’s fine. I don’t want to stop anyone from owning the car they prefer. I just don’t want to help pay for it.
Really, why would a middle-class family shun a perfectly good gas-powered car that can be fueled (most of the time) cheaply and driven virtually any distance, in any environment, and any time of the year? We don’t need lithium. We have the most efficient, affordable, portable, and useful form of energy. We have centuries’ worth of it waiting in the ground.
Climate alarmists might believe EVs are necessary to save the planet. That’s fine. Using their standard, however, a bike is an innovation. Even on their terms, the usefulness of EVs is highly debatable. Most of the energy that powers them is derived from fossil fuels. The manufacturing of an EV has a negligible positive benefit for the environment, if any.
And the fact is that if EVs were more efficient and saved us money, as enviros and politicians claim, consumers wouldn’t have to be compelled into using them and companies wouldn’t have to be bribed into producing them.
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Europe Demonstrates False Underlying Assumption of Mainstream Environmental Policy
A July 2022 International Monetary Fund working paper found that in Europe, within the prior year, “oil prices had doubled, coal prices tripled, and natural gas prices increased more than fivefold.”
Further, about half of all inflation could be linked to this increase in energy prices. And perhaps most importantly, the study noted: “Higher energy prices tend to be regressive: They typically hurt poorer households more than richer ones.”
Much could be said about why this energy calamity has occurred. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is undoubtedly the main component. But we should not forget—as politicians in Europe are fond of doing, perhaps for political expediency—that the invasion would not have had such a profoundly damaging effect had Europe, and Germany in particular, heeded the yearslong warnings not to make their economies all too dependent on Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Those warnings were ignored, especially by then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
What’s perhaps most remarkable, however, is that neither the German government nor the European Union has changed its tune since toward a more sensible energy policy.
The sensible thing would have been, at the very least, to leave the nuclear plants open, or even better, to expand nuclear energy.
Energy dependence would have been diminished had such a course of action been taken. Alas, with the Green Party being part of the German government, nuclear power is a boogeyman that needs to be destroyed by any means necessary—even if “the science” tells them that it could be a great boon for the energy transition that Germany has been so keen to pursue.
Thus, this spring, Germany shut down its remaining nuclear plants in the middle of an economic and energy crisis and soaring inflation.
The nuclear phaseout, in conjunction with soaring energy prices that hit poor households in particular, is just the tip of the iceberg of a major problem of environmental policy today around the world; namely, that to protect the environment, to save the planet, and to transition to a cleaner energy future, average people and the economy overall have to suffer. (And they had better stop complaining!)
Most of European environmental policy has followed this scheme over the past decades: To help the environment, the government determines an environmental problem and then does everything it can to eliminate it by limiting its supposed economic or industrial source.
Thus, the approach is largely regulatory and prohibitive.
It follows the precautionary principle that tries to eliminate any risks, but also eliminates any possibilities for innovation. That’s the case also when it comes to nuclear skepticism, in which massive opportunities for a cleaner environmental future are eliminated due to irrational fears of some activists—despite the support for nuclear among the general population.
“Verbotskultur,” as the Germans call it—“prohibition culture”—has been the name of the environmental game in Europe.
This need not be the case, however. In fact, by eliminating any opportunities for entrepreneurship and innovation, governments are eliminating the most promising ways of solving what they see as a climate crisis.
As such, a rethinking of both environmental and energy policy is needed.
It would need to be a path in which government takes a step back and expands freedom for the participants of the market economy to do good. It would be an approach that empowers those environmental entrepreneurs by leaving room for them to improve the world.
That’s the proven way of free enterprise.
This isn’t mere theory. It has been reality for decades, and we can see it not only in individual cases of market environmentalist success stories, but economy-wide.
If one compares The Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom with the Environmental Performance Index, one thing becomes abundantly clear: The more economic freedom there is, the cleaner an economy is.
The “science” is clear: Economic freedom and environmental quality go hand in hand. Thus, we can also say that economic growth (which is the result of economic freedom) goes hand in hand with a green future.
Three years ago, Christopher Barnard of the American Conservation Coalition and I presented more proof on this very point in our book “Green Market Revolution.” But unfortunately, current events in Europe prove that much more needs to happen to move environmental policymakers and activists away from the false dichotomy of economy versus the environment.
The false choice between growth and clean air is a dangerous delusion that we need to overcome as we work toward a future that is both pro-growth and pro-planet.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/07/20/false-underlying-assumption-mainstream-environmental-policy
***************************************25 July, 2023
NYC Democrats whine about Con Ed hikes caused by their own dumb policies
Better sit down before you open your next Con Ed bill: Rates are set to soar, starting next month — and double over the next two years.
If you’re a progressive, you can’t complain. What did you think would happen, based on your anti-fossil-fuel, big-spending, anti-business agenda?
On Thursday, the state’s Public Service Commission OK’d hikes of 9.1% for electricity and 8.4% for gas, starting in August, along with additional jumps though 2025. At that point, typical bills will have doubled, from about $70 a month to $140 — or an extra $840 a year.
A whining letter from the City Council demanded that Gov. Kathy Hochul use her executive powers to stop the pain.
The letter called out an “already dire affordability crisis” and included specious worries about poor New Yorkers.
That “affordability crisis,” notably, is also of the left’s own making, thanks to its anti-housing, inflation-fueling polices.
Why is Con Ed hiking rates?
True, execs at the company did enjoy a pay bump in 2022, with CEO Timothy Cawley getting a 4% hike in base compensation.
But the central driver is idiotic green policies, both at the state and federal level — clamping down on fossil-fuel use, forcing infrastructure improvements to handle the shift, taxing utilities to the hilt, etc.
That fuels costs that get passed on to consumers.
This week, Team Biden struck yet another blow in its war against domestic energy production, jacking up costs for drillers on federal land: Royalty rates will rise from 12.5% to almost 17%; minimum per-acre lease bids will quintuple.
The administration estimates this will cost producers some $1.8 billion over the next eight years — with the possibility of yet more cost hikes to come.
A perfect prescription to discourage future exploration and make extraction more costly.
And the same progs whinging about Con Ed rate hikes applaud this nonsense.
Just as they applauded the state’s insane Climate Leadership and Action Plan.
That brainchild of Albany Dems, signed into law by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2019, aims to make New York’s power generation 100% emissions-free by 2040.
The costly upgrades demanded by that plan, in preparation for our (still nonexistent) transition to green energy, are a big contributor to Con Ed’s rising costs.
And this followed Cuomo’s painful ban on fracking (a source of much cleaner fuel for power) and came as he moved to shutter a major source of emissions-free power, the Indian Point nuclear plant.
On top of all that, 21% of the average consumer’s electric bill goes to cover Con Ed’s New York state property taxes.
The fallout from this, as anyone capable of basic arithmetic could have foreseen, is higher power costs for consumers across the board.
And those costs hit low-income families, who can least afford it, hard.
That’s never part of the affluent greenies’ calculus, of course. No doubt they figure they can always somehow squeeze the rich to subsidize the higher costs. (Until that money runs out, too, anyway.)
The truth is, progressive fantasies about high-tech windmills and solar panels won’t keep costs down; they’ll keep boosting them — unless, of course, they trigger blackouts. Then no one will have to pay a dime, while they sit in the dark, with no AC.
https://nypost.com/2023/07/21/democrats-whine-about-con-ed-hikes-caused-by-their-own-dumb-policies/
***********************************************Biden Climate Plan Gives 'Dark Money' Foreign Group Approval Over US Military Contracts
Buried deep in the weeds of a proposed federal rule is a piece of bureaucratic jargon that is stirring fears that an outside group with troubling connections could be making decisions that impact America’s defense contractors.
The rule, with the federal ID number of FAR-2021-15, is still in the drafting process, with a report taking the hundreds of comments received into consideration due on July 26.
The rule’s purpose is to “require major Federal suppliers to publicly disclose greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risk and to set science-based reduction targets,” according to a federal procurement website.
The draft version of the rule says that large defense contractors must develop “science-based targets” for reducing greenhouse gases and that “these targets must be validated by SBTi.”
The draft rule then notes that “SBTi is a partnership between CDP, the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), the World Resources Institute (WRI), and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF, also known as the World Wildlife Fund).”
A less glowing report in the Washington Free Beacon claimed that the London-based group “is funded by the Democratic Party’s main dark money network.”
The site alleged that one group managing SBTi is the “We Mean Business Coalition,” which it called “a front group for a $900 million left-leaning dark money organization called the New Venture Fund.”
The Free Beacon said the New Venture Fund is on the hot seat over its political activities during the 2020 election year.
Aside from potential twists and turns of the organization’s money trail, having it in the middle of a federal procurement system irks many.
SBTi would be “operating in a quasi-regulatory stance,” said former SBTI board member Bill Baue, a sustainability expert who is no longer affiliated with the group.
“And yet it doesn’t have the kind of checks and balances or transparency for such an organization … certainly there’s reason to be concerned,” he said, touching on areas such as financial conflicts, ethics issues or proper governance.
BP America filed a comment against the rule saying, “We believe that by appointing a third-party arbiter of companies’ eligibility to be major contractors, the proposed regulation could be damaging and counter-productive, both for the proposal’s underlying decarbonization goals, which bp supports, and for the effectiveness and competitiveness of federal major procurements.”
“By effectively appointing a third-party arbiter to determine which companies are eligible to be major contractors, without the requisite degree of federal government involvement in or oversight,” the statement continued, “we believe that the proposal is at variance with recommendations of the Administrative Conference of the United States, presenting risks to the integrity and legal durability of the proposal.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce poked holes in the plan by noting that another outside group — CDP — would be reviewing company data and plans and being paid in the process.
“Major contractors would have to submit this disclosure by filling out the questionnaire of a private entity — CDP — and by paying CDP thousands of dollars in fees,” its statement said.
“The Proposed Rule would further require major contractors to develop ‘science-based targets’ for reducing GHG emissions in accordance with specific and stringent requirements developed and maintained by a private entity, the Science Based Targets initiative (‘SBTi’) (which is not subject to the legal and political constraints that apply to federal administrative agencies) and to have those targets ‘validated’ by the same entity. All in all, these additional requirements would tack millions of dollars onto each ‘major’ contractor’s total annual compliance spending,” it wrote.
Travis Fisher, a senior energy research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the concept is a loser, according to the Washington Free Beacon.
“I think Americans will be upset when they realize the Biden administration is trying to put a bunch of unelected bureaucrats and a climate activist group — headquartered in London — in charge of long-term planning for our national defense contractors,” he said.
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Giant windfarm off Norfolk coast halted due to spiralling costs
The government’s green energy ambitions have been dealt a blow after plans for a giant offshore windfarm off the Norfolk coast ground to a halt due to spiralling supply chain costs and rising interest rates.
The Swedish energy giant Vattenfall said it would stop work on the multibillion-pound Norfolk Boreas windfarm, designed to power the equivalent of 1.5m British homes, because it was no longer profitable.
The state-owned company said costs had climbed by 40% due to a rise in global gas prices which have fed through to the cost of manufacturing, putting “significant pressure on all new offshore wind projects”.
“It simply doesn’t make sense to continue this project,” said Anna Borg, Vattenfall’s chief executive. “Higher inflation and capital costs are affecting the entire energy sector, but the geopolitical situation has made offshore wind and its supply chain particularly vulnerable.”
Vattenfall won a government contract to build the Norfolk Boreas project last year after bidding a record low price of £37.35 per megawatt hour (MWh) for the electricity generated.
Borg said it was “so obvious to everyone that the situation has changed dramatically since last year”, meaning the price would now need to be “significantly higher” to make financial sense.
According to its latest results, the decision to stop work has cost the company 5.5bn Swedish krona (£415m) but Borg said the move was “prudent” given the impact of costs on the project’s future profitability.
“The market framework is simply not reflecting the market situation,” Borg said. “Something needs to happen. It’s important to understand that our suppliers are being squeezed. They have problems in their supply chain so it’s not so easy to mitigate these situations.”
Borg said Vattenfall has called on the UK government to adapt the financial framework which controls the price and was in “constructive discussions” with officials.
Industry experts have said that without an overhaul of the government’s financing approach to take into account the steep climb in costs, the UK risks missing its target to increase its offshore wind capacity fivefold to 50GW by 2030.
Jess Ralston, the head of energy at the thinktank the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said the government had set the starting price for the next contract auction before the global rise in market prices, meaning it was now too low.
“There are some concerns that this could be too low for projects that have suffered supply chain price inflation, excluding them from entering the auction,” she said. “The sensible strategy would be to seek to involve in auctions as much capacity as possible.”
Under the government’s scheme developers can compete in the auction for a contract which gives a guaranteed price for the electricity generated. If wholesale market prices are below this level the project receives a “top up” payment through a levy on energy bills. But if market prices are above the “strike price” the project must pay back the difference to consumers, leading to lower bills.
Setting the auction’s starting price at a higher point would still result in contract prices well below the current market rate, according to Ralston, meaning windfarms will continue to pay money back to households for the foreseeable future.
Dan McGrail, the chief executive of RenewableUK, said ministers would have to take into account global inflationary pressures “which have significantly changed the economic landscape”.
“We need a stronger industrial strategy for the sector, which the chancellor should support with new measures in the autumn statement as a matter of urgency,” he said.
“The government needs to step up with a robust response to enable industrial growth throughout Britain.”
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Making war on motorists in Britain
Since Boris Johnson quit as an MP last month, Labour has been confident about winning the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election. Yet not so confident that Danny Beales, the party’s candidate, felt he could get through the campaign without lambasting Sadiq Khan’s plans to expand London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez) to cover the capital. ‘It’s not the right time to extend Ulez to outer London,’ he told a hustings a fortnight ago. ‘It’s just not.’
From the end of next month, anyone driving a non-compliant vehicle – which in practice means most diesel cars sold before 2015 and petrol cars sold before 2005 – is liable to pay a daily charge of £12.50. If they fail to do this, and are caught on a network of number-plate recognition cameras, they are liable to pay a fine of £180. Taking fees and fines together, Ulez raised £224 million last year – a figure which will almost certainly rocket upon expansion to the whole of London.
The London mayor may be refusing to back down on his signature policy, but many others in the Labour party have realised that Ulez is a political disaster for the working people whose support it needs to win next year’s general election.
People such as Tracy Buckle, one of many thousands of small-business owners who rely on road vehicles, but whose lives are about to be made a misery because of the Ulez expansion. She runs a family gardening business, Everlush Lawn Care, in Beckenham. ‘We have two vans, one of which is only five years old, but when I put the registration number into the computer it shows up as non-compliant,’ she says. ‘It would cost us £600 a month to pay the Ulez charges, so we are thinking of downsizing the business. The van cost us £20,000, and we can’t afford to replace it. My daughter-in-law is a teacher who drives six miles to work in Orpington. She can’t afford to replace her car, and the only alternative is to take three buses.’
The phrase ‘war on motorists’ has often been overused, not least by drivers who feel aggrieved after being caught speeding. But hostilities have reached a level at which it is hard for ordinary drivers not to wonder whether there is a systematic campaign to ease them out of their vehicles – or else to milk them for revenue.
It is not just London and Ulez: low emission zones, low traffic neighbourhoods and parking, bus lane and box junction fines are proliferating across the country. Birmingham has had a low emission zone since 2021, Bristol since November. Glasgow began enforcing its zone last month. Cambridge is planning a £5 a day congestion fee, while Oxford and Canterbury will soon limit motorists from driving between one area of their city and another.
Ostensibly, Ulez, like all these schemes, is about air quality. Khan’s office claims, as justification for the extension, that central London has seen since 2019 a reduction of 46 per cent in nitrogen oxides and a 41 per cent reduction in PM 2.5 pollution (particulates which are less than 2.5 micrometres in diameter). You don’t have to sniff too hard, however, to smell a rat. The mayor’s study arrived at these figures by comparing actual roadside measurements with what it guesses pollution levels would have been had there been no Ulez for cars. Yet the graph showing the predicted path of emissions in 2020 and 2021 without Ulez looks remarkably flat – in spite of a collapse in traffic due to the pandemic. According to the mayor’s modelling, emissions would have fallen by 10 per cent in 2020, the year of two lockdowns. Department for Transport data shows that traffic in central London decreased by much more than this in 2020 – by 22 per cent in Westminster, for example, and 19 per cent in Camden. Pollution might also have been expected to fall thanks to a suspension of construction work.
A more independent source is an Imperial College study which looked at pollution in central London for 12 weeks before and 12 weeks after the original Ulez was introduced in 2019. It found that overall nitrogen oxide levels fell by just 3 per cent and there was no significant reduction in PM 2.5 pollution. In some sites, pollution actually worsened. One of the authors concluded: ‘Our research suggests that a Ulez on its own is not an effective strategy to improve air quality.’
In fact, air pollution has been on a long downward trend for more than 50 years, beginning long before Ulez. Nationwide, emissions of nitrogen oxides have fallen by 77 per cent and PM 2.5s by 85 per cent since 1970 – a result of less coal-burning, cleaner vehicles and many other factors. Cars have become steadily cleaner over that period, though not to the extent that would justify charging a new car nothing.
This is what has offended so many people about Ulez: its highly regressive nature. While the owners of old cars are hammered, the £12.50 daily charge does not fall on the owners of supercars who turn up every summer to speed around the streets of Kensington. Nor does it fall on the owners of electric cars, even though the vast bulk of particulate pollution emitted by vehicles comes from brakes and tyres, not engines.
Khan claims to have the public on his side for expanding Ulez, and there are certainly a large number of young non-motorists in London who are not directly exposed to the charges. But it all rather depends on how you ask the question. A YouGov poll commissioned by the mayor asked people whether or not they supported Ulez expansion, beginning with the statement that it was being enlarged ‘to tackle air pollution’. It found that 51 per cent were in favour of the scheme being implemented and 27 per cent were against. However, the Conservative party commissioned its own YouGov poll, this time prefacing the question with the statement that it was being introduced to raise extra revenue. The situation was reversed, with 34 per cent saying it should be expanded and 51 per cent saying it shouldn’t.
There is a growing backlash against Ulez expansion. The Tories’ new mayoral candidate, Susan Hall, has pledged that, if elected, she will ensure ‘Sadiq Khan’s disastrous Ulez expansion will stop on day one. No ifs, no buts’. Several Conservative-controlled councils have also launched a judicial review of the scheme. But it would be a mistake to see the war on motorists as a partisan affair. Councils of all colours have set their sights on drivers to raise revenue, as their grants from central government have been whittled away. In London in 2021, 7.5 million penalty tickets (for parking, infringements of bus lanes, box junctions and others) were handed out, a rise of 41 per cent in a single year. Across the country, councils are raising £800,000 a day in parking fines.
Until May’s local elections, the Conservatives were proposing to introduce a traffic scheme in Canterbury which would split the city into zones, with large fines for residents who drove from one zone to another. Council leader Ben Fitter-Harding, who had championed the scheme, lost his seat as a result.
The concept of low traffic neighbourhoods, where access to side roads is blocked off and through traffic kept to main roads, is nothing new, and until recently such schemes attracted little controversy. What is different is the scale of the schemes, isolating whole neighbourhoods, and the use of ubiquitous penalty charge notices.
What’s also new is the disturbing tendency for objectors to these anti-motorist schemes to be dismissed as followers of right-wing conspiracies – or as being in association with the vandals who have been creeping out at night to destroy cameras being installed for Ulez.
In Oxford, plans for a low traffic neighbourhood would mean that motorists who needed to travel a short distance to, say, a super-market would be forced to undertake a long diversion via the bypass. When, understandably, the plan inspired a protest march, local drivers were bewildered to find their objections treated as a far-right conspiracy – ‘How 15-minute cities turned into an international conspiracy theory’, asserted a CNN headline about the march. True, this being Oxford, the demonstration did attract some high-profile outsiders, and opponents have exaggerated by calling the scheme a ‘climate lockdown’. But surely residents are entitled to complain about something that will have a huge impact on their livelihoods without being treated as if they are somehow in cahoots with conspiracy theorists.
In any case, those who assert that Ulez, low traffic neighbourhoods and congestion charges are about something larger than mere traffic management have a point. The government’s target to achieve net zero by 2050 is only going to intensify the war on motorists. It is already becoming clear that, short of a miracle breakthrough in battery technology, net zero is not compatible with motoring for the masses. The idea that electric cars would be on a cost parity with petrol and diesel ones by 2024 – promoted by Bloomberg among others just two years ago – has proven a forlorn hope. Not only are electric cars much more expensive to buy, they also cost more to run at current petrol prices. They will become even more costly once the government – inevitably – seeks to make up for the £28 billion a year in fuel duty that it stands to lose as petrol and diesel cars are forced off the road. Moreover, electric vehicles aren’t really carbon-neutral or anything like it. Once the industry is forced to decarbonise the steel, plastics and battery materials which go into the cars, purchase costs will be going upwards too.
Volkswagen is already complaining about a ‘general reluctance to buy electric cars’ and, beyond Tesla, shares in manufacturers have slumped over the past year. Shares in Polestar and China’s Xpeng are down by more than half. As reality has set in, it has become clear there is a limited market for these cars.
While the banning of petrol and diesel cars tends to steal headlines, it is less understood that part of the plan for net zero involves the outright reduction in use of road transport. In its Sixth Carbon Budget, the government’s Climate Change Committee writes: ‘Effective demand-side policy is also essential – we identify significant opportunities, and advantages, to reducing travel demand, but this will not happen without firm policies.’ In its net-zero strategy for 2021, the government sets an ambition for half of all journeys in towns and cities to be walked or cycled by 2030. Given that in 2021, 57 per cent of such journeys in England were by car, 32 per cent walking, 2 per cent by bicycle, 4 per cent by bus and 3 per cent by train, this envisages quite a change.
Making life awkward for motorists may come to be seen as a form of preparatory work for what lies ahead – weaning the greater part of the population off their cars altogether. But motorists are not going to go quietly.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/highway-robbery
***************************************24 July, 2023
Warming in Antarctica?
Only using ‘creative’ statistics
Much has been written in the tabloids, and repeated by the fashionable, about it being very hot through June – even in Antarctica. Really, I wondered. Is Antarctica melting?
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has measured air temperatures at the Mawson weather station in Antarctica since early 1954 – this is one of the longest continuous surface temperature records for that part of the world. The Russians did not establish the more famous and isolated Vostok weather station until 1957. The satellite temperature record doesn’t begin until 1979.
The Bureau makes very few adjustments to the temperatures as measured at Mawson that oscillate within a band of some few degrees – mostly below freezing. These same temperatures show no statistically significant long-term warming trend, at least not since 1954. There are longer proxy temperature series, based on ice core records, and they show an overall cooling trend, considering the last 1,900 years. Here, again, I am referring to data from published studies, for example, the temperatures of East and West Antarctica were reconstructed by a team led by Barbara Stenni including scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division, British Antarctic Survey, and Russian Antarctic Research Institute. It is only remodelled proxy series that show warming over this same period.
Last month (June 2023), Antarctica was reported as ‘hot’ in various publications including Vox.com. Yet the average maximum temperature for Mawson was minus 12.6 degrees Celsius, which is not quite as cold as the long-term June average for all years since 1954 which is minus 13.5 C. When the June maximum temperatures for Mawson are ranked highest to lowest, June 2023 comes in as the 29th hottest, and 42nd coldest – suggesting temperatures in Antarctica were not particularly newsworthy and rather cold.
Yet the tabloids, and fashionable, are claiming June 2023 as hot – even in Antarctica. It is all nonsense.
Some of these claims have their origin in the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations. So, they represent a remodelled average. Indeed, there is not a single place where anyone, can measure the average temperature of the Earth – or Antarctica. Rather, when it is announced that it is the hottest it has ever been, reference is made to a statistic.
This average temperature is necessarily a number that has been derived from other numbers. There will perhaps have been some measuring done here and there, and then some adjusting, and then some adding up and some adjusting again. This is how it is with the calculation of regional and global average temperatures – whether from satellites, tree rings, ice cores, or thermometers. To be sure, every year we are told it is getting hotter, and back in the late 1980s, this was achieved for the globally averaged thermometer record by dropping out some of the colder weather stations. This had the effect of increasing the overall average global temperature, at a time when temperatures at many individual sites were dipping somewhat.
Those who have followed the politics of measuring temperatures may also remember the infamous line in the Climategate emails, whereby the globally averaged temperatures based on tree rings, which also show a decline after 1980, are ‘corrected’ by substituting the globally averaged temperature from thermometer records – never mind that the dip in that record had already been ‘corrected’ by removing data from a great many high latitude Canadian and Russian weather stations.
Drawing from this sordid history of calculating global and regional temperatures, I can think of a large number of ways that the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer could possibly generate a higher-than-average temperature for Antarctica and especially the Earth. Indeed, the larger the geographic area covered, the more opportunity for creative accounting, for which corporates using similar techniques would go to jail, while climate scientists are more usually promoted.
The solution is to perhaps give up on believing the nonsense news headlines, especially when there is no reference to a specific weather station, like Mawson. Or do away with a random selection of weather stations and focus instead on a simple index based on a good sample of well-sited weather stations with long histories, like Mawson.
Such a concept could be based on the Dow Jones Averages or the S&P 500. No one ever tries establishing an impossible-to-define ‘average stock price’ — including many stocks of doubtful provenance — and nobody cares. Rather the solution is to have a pre-selected index of certain representative stocks, that are then followed over a long-time span. So why not have an index of agreed weather stations?
The only problem is, the tabloids and the fashionable, might then have nothing to talk about – should they limit reporting to the same weather stations and with temperatures reliably measured, which will require some modification to current methods and of course, no subsequent adjusting.
There may be no catastrophe to report at least not when it comes to weather as a measure of climate, for which the lack of reliable measures, and the great number of potentially creative solutions, are currently being exploited over and over to justify rather large expenditures on all manner of things.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/warming-in-antarctica
***************************************The hottest day
Ian Plimer
In my lifetime, the hottest days I have enjoyed were in Jeddah (55°C), Adelaide (47°C), and Death Valley (46°C). For some strange reason, these were in summer in a dry climate.
The atmosphere is a natural air conditioner that modulates air temperature by the evaporation and precipitation of water. The adiabatic heat of the evaporation of water shows that to vaporise water, energy must be taken from the air, soil, plants, lakes, rivers, and seas. This is why your skin feels cool when wet. To precipitate water from the air as rain or snow, heat is given out.
Townsville and Mount Isa are at almost the same latitude. Air in Townsville is humid and contains about 4 per cent dissolved water vapour, the main greenhouse gas. Summer temperatures rarely exceed 28°C. At Mount Isa where the air contains less than 2 per cent water vapour, summer temperatures often exceed 42°C. Winter nights in Mount Isa are freezing whereas in Townsville they are quite balmy.
Both Mount Isa and Townsville have the same atmospheric carbon dioxide content. The only variable is water vapour as humidity and clouds which modulate temperature. It is humidity and rain that stops the planet from having an excessively high air temperature, runaway global warming, or any other concocted crisis on the catastrophist climate menu.
When the news cycle is quiet, people are away on summer holidays and, if there are a few warm summer days in a row, then it’s time to scare people witless. Tell them it’s the hottest day for the last 10 years, since Wimbledon started, since records were kept, or for the last 125,000 years. Make sure the colour of the background on temperature maps is changed to fiery red.
This is aimed at keeping the climate gravy train on the rails with the implication that the alleged hottest day must be a result of human activities. If record winter lows in the other hemisphere are ignored, then the narrative is enhanced. This is fraud and the media perpetually promote such climate disinformation.
If asked whether the planet is heating or cooling, the only answer to give is ‘Yes’. For the last 50 million years, planet Earth has been cooling. We have warmed up at least 10°C since the cold dry Younger Dryas 12,900-11,700 years ago, a time when no fossil fuels were used by humans. Since the peak of the current interglacial 7,000-4,000 years ago, there has been a long-term cooling trend with spikes of cooling and warming.
If told the planet has warmed, then the reply must be ‘Since when?’ We have cooled since Roman times, warmed since the Dark Ages (535-900 AD), cooled since the Medieval Warming (900-1300 AD), and warmed since the Little Ice Age (1300-1850 AD). What would you expect after the Little Ice Age? Bitterly cold times or warming. The unsolved scientific question is: which part, if any, of modern warming is of human origin? To talk about warming or hot times without discussing climate cycles is misleading and deceptive.
How do we measure temperature? Is it by mercury thermometers which have been used for a couple of centuries? Is it by the homemade secret thermal probes used by the taxpayer-funded Bureau of Meteorology? Is it by infrared probes? Is the measuring station correctly located? What is measured at the measuring station? Is the spot maximum temperature or the average maximum temperature over time used? Has the measuring station been moved over its history? Have buildings, airports, roads, and air conditioning units encroached on the measuring spot? How has the urban heat island effect influenced the measurement?
Do we get told that the bulk of global ground measuring stations are in the US and EU giving a very biased land measurement record? Not all measuring station data is used. Why not? Those in extreme climatic and remote areas are being closed, especially in Russia. The Bureau of Meteorology ignores the long-term record of rural land-based stations. Some 70 per cent of the planet is covered by water yet most measuring stations are on the land. The average temperature from an irregularly biased array of measuring stations cannot be calculated. As soon as the words average global temperature are used, you know you’re being conned.
Atmospheric temperature, mainly above the land, has been measured from the millions of weather balloons released year in and year out. Over the last 40 years, the 24/7 measurement of atmospheric temperature in 3D up to the stratosphere of the planet has been measured by satellite. Satellite is the most accurate measurement of temperature but is not used. It does not give scary data hidden away by some taxpayer-funded institution and is much harder to ‘adjust.
To compare the measurement of modern temperature with less accurate temperature deduced from proxies is invalid. Modern temperature measurements with an accuracy of ± 0.1°C are combined with older measurements with an accuracy of ± 0.5°C and then it’s claimed that the 20th-century average has risen by 0.86°C. A school child educated 60 years ago learned that every measurement must be accompanied by an order of accuracy and they could have shown that the claimed 20th-century average temperature rise is invalid. It is doubtful whether an ‘educated’ teenager today could see the flaw.
Proxies have an order of accuracy of 0.1-0.5°C, depending upon which proxy is used and how far back in time it is applied. A great diversity of proxies have been used to determine the past temperature record. The geological record shows us that the hottest days ever were 600, 500, 400, 200, and 100 million years ago. They were Thursdays!
Over the last 500 million years, the temperature has been up and down many times between numerous hothouse and icehouse conditions. As a result of cooling for the last 50 million years, we are currently living in one of the coldest times on planet Earth for 300 million years.
If Antarctica would just break up into microcontinents or move away from the South Pole, we would reach the planet’s normal wet warm greenhouse planetary conditions with a high sea level. Antarctic rift valleys and 150 sub-glacial geothermal areas and volcanoes show that the fragmentation has started.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-hottest-day/
*****************************************G20 energy ministers fail to agree on plan to reduce fossil fuels
Energy ministers from the group of 20 nations meeting in India on Saturday failed to agree on a roadmap to phase down the use of fossil fuels in the global energy mix.
A final statement after the meeting did not even mention coal, a major contributor to global warming.
The dirty fuel is also a key energy source for many developing economies such as India – the world's most-populous country – and China, the world's second-largest economy.
The failure to reach agreement in Goa comes despite G7 leaders agreeing in Japan in April to "accelerate the phase-out of unabated fossil fuels" and with global temperatures hitting record highs, triggering floods, storms, and heatwaves.
Explaining the stalemate, G20 president India said that some members had emphasised the importance of seeking a "phase down of unabated fossil fuels, in line with different national circumstances".
But "others had different views on the matter that abatement and removal technologies will address such concerns," it added.
Can't afford to delay
A coalition of key EU economies – including Germany and France – and some of the most vulnerable island states this week urged the G20 to accelerate plans to reach net zero emissions and phase out fossil fuels, adding: "Humankind cannot afford to delay".
They called for greenhouse gas emissions to peak by 2025 at the latest and be cut by 43 percent by 2030, compared to 2019 levels, in line with recent updates from UN climate experts.
But many developing economies argue that the developed West must pay more as a legacy polluter and greenhouse contributor.
They insist that any transition needs huge capital and new technology, while giving up on polluting fuels without affordable alternatives will condemn their huge populations to poverty.
No clear time frame
G20 host nation India is itself only pledging to reach net zero by 2070, 20 years later than the commitment made by many other countries.
A report prepared for its G20 presidency estimated the cost of the energy transition at $4 trillion a year and emphasised the importance of low-cost financing for developing countries and technology transfers – a key demand of New Delhi's.
Some of the biggest energy-producing economies, such as Russia and Saudi Arabia, have also resisted a quick transition away from fossil fuels.
Emirati oil boss Sultan Al Jaber, who will head up the COP28 talks, has said he expects fossil fuels to continue to play a role with the use of often controversial technologies to "abate", or neutralise, the emissions.
He has said that a phase down of fossil fuels is both "inevitable" and "essential", but has been reluctant to spell out a time frame.
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Yes, climate change is real. But the prophets of doom ignore some very inconvenient truths...
Was there anything more ludicrous during last week's European heatwave and worries about global warming than the BBC's climate editor travelling from London to Spain (and back again) to report on the high temperatures?
Addressing viewers from Alicante, Justin Rowlatt, the Corporation's prophet of doom, said: 'We're getting the blast of the heat today in Spain, it's going to go across into Italy. It's already very hot in Italy but it's going to get hotter there, and finally it will end in Greece. All accentuated, exaggerated by the effects of climate change.'
Lucky for some, many viewers may have thought, as they sat in cooler Britain. In southern England, daytime temperatures did peak last week at 25C but for much of the country, temperatures struggled to push beyond 17C, well below the seasonal average. It is not unusual in the summer for the Mediterranean to be hot and Britain a lot cooler. That is, after all, why millions go there on holiday every year.
Yet it seems we are no longer allowed to enjoy the prospect of a hot summer's day, whether in Britain or the Med. Sun-kissed beaches, for Rowlatt and his ilk, are a portent of doom and a symptom of the fast-gathering 'climate emergency'.
What's more, we are encouraged to feel guilty – partly because of all those carbon emissions spewed out by holiday jets.
Thus the irony – and hypocrisy – of Rowlatt taking a return trip (believed to be by gas-guzzling plane) to Spain when he could have delivered the same message from London, or the BBC could have used one of its many Spain-based correspondents.
It must be stressed that climate change is a problem but there is evidence to suggest it is not the apocalypse that the eco-lobby wants us to believe. True, the incidence of heatwaves has increased in recent decades as the world has warmed. Mean maximum daily summer temperatures in Britain, for example, have risen by one degree Celsius in the past 60 years – with most of that increase occurring between the late 1980s and early 2000s.
However, the trend in summer temperatures has been flatter in the two decades since, according to the State of the Climate Report published by the Royal Meteorological Society. In Spain, according to a study in the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, maximum daily temperatures in summer have increased by a little more – by 1.9C since 1960. But none of this justifies the hyperbole served up over the past week. There is nothing unprecedented about the temperatures recorded in Europe. The continent's record of 48.8C – in Sicily two years ago – has not been passed nor has the second-highest temperature (48C in 1977).
Further afield, the global high temperature record – 56.7C in Death Valley, California, in 1913 – has not been broken.
Just as with Covid, fear is being used to try to convince us that the heat is more dramatic than it is. An analysis of the weather maps shown on TV over the past week proves this. During last year's heatwave, such maps showed areas experiencing 40C in deep red. Now, these areas have turned a lurid pink – or white. Even Britain was depicted on some maps as red.
Another move has been to quote ground temperatures, rather than air temperatures. During heatwaves, the temperature of dry, dusty ground can reach 60C – which can be up to 20C warmer than air temperatures. Film of burning trees, too, sends the message promulgated by climate activist Greta Thunberg that 'the world is on fire'. Yet, according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System, 2023, so far, has been an average year for forest fires in Europe, with a total of 150,000 hectares burned.
In the worst years, 500,000 hectares have burned by the middle of July. Besides, wildfires have, for millennia, been a natural part of the ecosystem in many climates. Some plants – called pyrophytes – need fire in order to germinate.
Last Tuesday, Sky News' Kirsty McCabe told viewers ready to holiday in the Med: 'You won't be able to have the traditional beach holiday, you want to be staying inside.'
Actually, temperatures at the coast, as usual, were more moderate than the hotspots inland. In the Algarve, at 3pm that day, they ranged from 21C to 29C, the Costa Brava 27C to 29C, and the Costa del Sol 27C to 31C. There was no reason why anyone should not have been able to enjoy the beach as usual.
How many times were we told during the past week that last year's heatwave killed 60,000 people in Europe? The figure is derived from a study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, published in the journal Nature Medicine last week.
And yes, it is true that hot spells tend to see 'excess deaths' above the average. But what the reporting omitted was that, each year, deaths from the heat are vastly outnumbered by deaths from cold weather – and that cold extremes are falling as the Earth warms.
The most comprehensive study of temperature-related deaths globally was made by Monash University, Australia, in 2021. It concluded that five million deaths annually could be attributed in some way to extreme temperatures (with other underlying causes) but that deaths from extreme cold outnumbered those from extreme heat by more than ten to one. This was true even in Africa.
Moreover, while deaths from high temperatures increased by 0.21 per cent between 2000 and 2019, deaths from extreme cold fell by 0.51 per cent over the same period. The net result, as the world warms and we experience fewer cold temperature extremes, is that the world is seeing fewer temperature-related deaths by the year. This point is rarely made because it doesn't fit with the fear-mongers' narrative that we are headed for climatic Armageddon – and that it is all our fault.
Sure, climate change is real and the world is seeing a greater frequency of extreme high temperatures. But, no, the world is not becoming unliveable. It was Spain, after all, which gave us the concept of a siesta to avoid the hottest part of the day. Air conditioning, storm warnings, flood defences and technological advances all help mankind deal with extreme weather.
Indeed, as temperatures in Spain have increased, the country's excess death-rate has gone in the other direction. Similarly, in New York, where summers have for centuries been known for their oppressive temperatures. Since the 1960s, deaths attributable to heat have fallen by two-thirds.
You might expect higher than normal temperatures would be a prerequisite for those preaching climate catastrophe. But, according to the BBC, even this year's below-average July temperatures in Britain are a symptom of man-made climate change.
Ten days ago, in an online explainer – entitled Where Has The UK Summer Gone? – BBC weather presenter Ben Rich wrote that our current 'dropped temperatures' and more rainfall are due to a blocking pattern in the air circulation over the North Atlantic. Even so, he concluded that 'some studies suggest climate change might make blocked patterns more common'.
In other words, we all risk going to hell in a handcart – or, in Justin Rowlatt's case, gallivanting 1,800 miles there and back by jet.
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23 July, 2023
Fox host Stuart Varney challenges Morano over heatwave-climate link
Stuart Varney: Marc Morano from the Climate Depot joins me now. We just heard in Phoenix, they had 19 straight days above 110 degrees. Now, wait, you’re a climate skeptic, is this not the result of climate change?
Marc Morano: “This is not outside the normal bounds of hot summer weather. Yes, it’s a record year. It could be one of the hottest, but here’s the thing. Joe Biden’s EPA has a chart of the heatwave index going back to the 1930s. The 1930s are probably 8 to 10 or 12 times hotter in the United States than anything we’re currently seeing.
Morano: 75% of all state temperature records were broken before the 1950s — these records still stand. Now. This is a way that statistics — when you heard things like CNN or New York Times or others have said this is the ‘hottest’ in Earth’s history. Those claims were based on climate models, which even the NOAA –National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration — backed away from. They are weaponizing hot summers, heat waves to turn it into some kind of call for climate action. This is not outside the bounds of normal weather, I’m sorry.
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Biden Administration Rule Would Ban Nearly All Portable Gas-Powered Generators
After seeking to reduce the use of gas stoves, the Biden administration is pushing a proposal to ban the sale of almost all portable gas generators—which some experts have said would be disastrous for the millions of Americans who rely on such generators during power outages.
The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) has proposed a policy (pdf) that would remove nearly all existing portable gas generators from the market. The new rule restricts the amount of carbon monoxide that generators can emit by forcing these generators to switch off when they reach a certain level of emissions.
Smaller gas generators would have to cut carbon monoxide emissions by 50 percent, and larger generators would have to cut emissions by up to 95 percent. Nearly all models currently available are expected to not be in compliance with the new standard.
Once the proposed rules come into effect, manufacturers would have to comply with them in just six months, a process that usually takes several years. The rules would also ban manufacturers from stockpiling noncompliant generators before the new standards are enacted.
Generator Manufacturers Speak Out
In a June 28 press release, Susan Orenga, executive director of the Portable Generator Manufacturers’ Association, pointed out that CPSC’s proposal will “create a shortage of essential portable generators during regional and national emergencies because it will prevent the sale of portable generators that are currently available on the market.”
“Furthermore, the timing of the CPSC’s proposed changes are particularly concerning, given repeated warnings that two-thirds of North America is currently facing an energy shortfall this summer during periods of high demand,” she said.
Nearly 5 million households across the United States use gas powered generators during power outages, and they are particularly important during hurricane season, when powerful storms often knock out electric utilities.
In May, the North American Electric Reliability Corp. warned that two-thirds of North America could face blackouts and brownouts between June and September if there are “wide area” heat waves, wildfires, and droughts, and the agency attributed some blame for the problem to the Biden administration’s push for renewable energy.
The CPSC proposal came after the Department of Energy unveiled its Energy Policy and Conservation Program in February, which aims to establish new standards on consumer cooking products, including gas stoves. The rules are expected to ban the sale of at least half of U.S. stove models.
The Department of Energy is also focusing efforts on mandating standards for dishwashers.
In a bid to improve efficiency and cut energy usage, the agency has proposed new regulations for power and water usage for standard-size and compact dishwashers during their regular cycles.
“This Administration is using all of the tools at our disposal to save Americans money while promoting innovations that will reduce carbon pollution and combat the climate crisis,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a statement about the regulations.
Emission Harms and Safety Standards
The CPSC is justifying its proposed new rules by arguing that carbon monoxide (CO) emissions have been extremely harmful to human health.
“From 2004 through 2021, there were at least 1,332 CO-related consumer deaths involving portable generators, or an average of about 74 lives lost annually, with thousands of non-fatal poisonings of consumers per year,” the CPSC report reads.
“Fatalities have increased in recent years. For example, for the three most recent years for which complete data are available (2017 through 2019), generator-related CO deaths have averaged 85 per year.”
CPSC expects the proposed rule to prevent 2,148 deaths over 30 years.
In its press release, the manufacturers association points out that more than 300 portable generator models across 35 brands already comply with a voluntary safety standard and implement a carbon monoxide detection and automatic shutoff feature.
Such voluntary standards prevent more than 98 percent of fatalities that could have resulted from the misuse of portable generators, it stated.
Ms. Orenga said, “[The CPSC proposal] could lead to higher costs for consumers and create unintended consequences of more safety concerns of fires and burns, as we do not believe that the CPSC has adequately evaluated the safety hazards of their newly proposed rule.”
In a July 6 letter to the chairman of the CPSC, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) mentioned another potential consequence of the proposed rule: “Engine-driven portable welders are a vital piece of equipment for construction workers across the country. These welders are not consumer products, but rather industrial machinery used on construction sites.”
Finalizing the CPSC rule in its present form “will not only have a detrimental effect on manufacturers of these products and their suppliers, but also negatively impact the welders who rely on this equipment,” he wrote.
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When super-fit cyclist Andrea Sechi collapsed and died from a heart attack in Sardinia last weekend, it was instantly blamed on global warming
In defiance of the facts
Within hours of his death, Andrea Sechi was being held up as the latest climate change martyr. While riding his racing bike along the southern coast of Sardinia with friends last Saturday, the keen amateur scientist had collapsed and, though efforts were made to revive him, he died at the roadside.
First to report the incident was a popular local news website. Since Mr Sechi was only 48 years old and seemingly super fit, and as the island was in the grip of a heatwave, they declared that his fatal heart attack was 'probably linked' with the freakishly high temperatures.
And as the mercury soared across southern Europe, turning dramatic TV heat maps from dark red to black and starting a stampede for alarmist headlines, the news that a weekend cyclist had fallen victim to global warming was seized on by foreign news outlets and internet doom-mongers.
This hasty assumption was perhaps inevitable. For here was a human story that perfectly played into the narrative of the moment, which held that Armageddon had reached our very doorstep.
That, with the politicians still wringing their hands over how to reduce carbon emissions, the continent had already been plunged into a lethal, and perhaps irreversible catastrophe.
However, there is a rather inconvenient problem with using Mr Sechi's death to support this frightening conjecture.
Though the heat has been unbearable in parts of Sardinia in recent days, and one can well imagine it killing people who are frail or elderly, his family assure me it played no part in his death.
Indeed, they are deeply upset that his misfortune has been cynically 'weaponised, as his brother, Stefano, puts it, by those seeking to sensationalise the heatwave's impact.
'It did get very hot later that day, but my uncle was riding at 8.30am when the temperature was only around 22c, normal or even a bit chilly for this time of year,' says the cyclist's niece, Laura Sechi, adding that he was being fanned by a stiff sea breeze.
'The doctors have told us it was most likely not caused by the heat. Andrea probably suffered a heart attack or a brain haemorrhage, but the Italian media just published what they wanted. They should have got their facts straight. It adds to our pain.'
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Australia: Power bills are up but Labor is going to do more damage the energy sector
Say what you like about a Labor government but, good or bad, they don’t normally waste their time in office. Unlike the Coalition, they’ve got a bevy of friendlies in the public service to help get things done, plus an increasing number of virtue signalling corporates to sell their message, campaigning millions from their union mates and a largely compliant media that gives them the sort of positive coverage rarely afforded their Liberal counterparts.
And nowhere is this more evident than in dealing with the so-called climate emergency. The front line in the war against emissions thus far has been energy. For almost two decades, we’ve been fed an official line that renewables would make our power bills cheaper. At the election last year, the now Prime Minister even put a figure on the savings – $275 per household per year. How’s that going? Because if you’re paying the same bills that I am, they’re only going up.
But if you think the climate attacks on energy are bad, just wait for what’s coming next as the Albanese government prepares to inflict the same transformations on other parts of our economy that have already been wreaked on the energy sector.
And you will pay the price, either as taxpayers, consumers or both – that’s been estimated to cost Australia $1.5 trillion by 2030, says expert group Net Zero Australia comprised of energy specialists at the Universities of Melbourne, Queensland and the USA’s Princeton.
Last week, with all the fervour of a TV evangelist, Energy Minister Chris Bowen announced that the Climate Change Authority was now working on “sectoral net zero plans”, for the manufacturing industry, the built environment, agriculture and land, transport, and resources. These will be part of what he declared would be Labor’s “strong” 2035 emissions reductions targets, on top of the already legislated 2030 targets most energy engineers think can’t be met.
Naturally enough, this was rapturously received by the Clean Energy Council whose climate zeal happily coincides with the multibillion-dollar subsidies they’ve received for the past 15 years. Just as in energy, in these further sectors, there will soon be small armies of regulators to impose this climate socialism, plus plenty of businesses already trying to work out how they can pass the costs onto consumers.
So far, the brunt of the climate pain has been felt via power bills. It’s only now, with the coal-fired power stations that still provide more than 60 per cent of our electricity coming to the end of their lives, and with their zero-emissions replacements still largely a pipe dream, that the extent of the climate con is becoming apparent. The question is, will Australians wake up before it’s too late or will we allow government to do to agriculture, transport, mining and everything else what they have done to our energy sector and power bills?
And for what? Even if we did dramatically wind back our standard of living to save the planet, has Canberra forgotten that Australia emits less than 1.3 per cent of global CO2 emissions and let’s not also forget, that China, our main strategic competitor, has emitted more CO2 in the past decade than Britain has since the Industrial Revolution.
So what’s ahead of us as the Albanese government pushes ahead with its plans to reduce our animal herds because of their methane gasses, move us all into electric cars or onto public transport, scrap manufacturing jobs, even tell us what sort of stoves we can have?
In Britain, trying to accelerate decarbonisation has led a nominally Conservative government to ban all petrol and diesel car sales from 2030 and to decree that future domestic heating must be provided through less effective heat pumps rather than gas boilers. Here in Australia, the Victorian government is considering a ban on all gas cooktops and heaters.
Some years ago, Barnaby Joyce was ridiculed for talking about the $100 Sunday roast; and my former boss Tony Abbott for predicting the demise of Whyalla as a steel town. Yet this is precisely where we’re headed if agriculture and manufacturing must be “net zero” by 2035, given that most agricultural emissions come from herd animals and, thus far, it’s simply impossible to make “green steel” at a price anyone would pay. And no one should underestimate the quasi-religious zeal that Minister Bowen and the green acolytes who now populate so many of our institutions bring to their climate goals. Just have a look at the Voice where the Yes push is driven by so many corporates and governments despite more and more voters saying they reject it.
So far, the Albanese government’s climate convictions have been quite impervious to the reality that we still rely on fossil fuels to keep the lights on. But that same climate evangelism will lead to herd limits, car bans, manufacturing shutdowns, and mandatory changes in your home unless someone in authority is prepared to shout “stop this madness” while we still can.
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21 July, 2023
Why Germany’s energy blunders offer others a stark economic warning
German thoroughness was once applied to antisemitism, with disastrous results. It has now been applied to another political fad, global warming -- again with disastrous results. They have thoroughly destroyed their economy in pursuit of a Green chimera
Since the 19th century, the phrase “Made in Germany” has denoted quality and reliability in manufacturing. This reputation, and the exports that have flowed from it, has enabled Germany to build the fourth-largest economy in the world - sometimes described as the enginehouse of the eurozone.
But in recent years some of Germany’s most famous brands have moved their manufacturing offshore, and the head of the German Industry Federation, Siegfried Russwurm, has warned that energy prices are so high the country risks losing many of its companies altogether.
Entering a recession in the first quarter of this year, Germany’s recovery has been slower than expected. The Federation of German Business recently found that 16 per cent of businesses surveyed are already in the process of leaving the country, with another 30 per cent planning on following suit. Tesla has halted plans to build factories near Berlin, and the European Commission predicts Germany will be one of the slowest-growing economies this year.
Of course, the factors contributing to this economic decline are complex, but one key policy decision made in the mid-2000s appears to have played a pivotal role. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that during her tenure as chancellor, Angela Merkel embarked upon a decision that would prove to be one of the greatest policy mistakes ever made.
A decade ago, Germany had 17 nuclear plants in operation and sourced around one-quarter of its energy from nuclear energy. Although the nation has always had a vocal “dark green” environmentalist movement that advocated for “degrowth”, Merkel originally resisted calls from anti-nuclear advocates, describing their policy preferences as “absolutely wrong”.
But that all changed in 2011, in the wake of Fukushima. The New York Times reported at the time that Merkel “reached the momentous decision to phase out nuclear power by 2022 after discussing it one night over red wine with her husband, Joachim Sauer, a physicist and university professor, at their apartment in central Berlin”. It would prove to be a monumental mistake.
Earlier this year Germany shuttered the last three of its remaining nuclear plants, to the celebration of local Greens and anti-nuclear activists. However, environmentalists outside Germany were aghast. And even Greta Thunberg observed it was a mistake. Data from 2022 indicated that the use of coal had increased by 8.4 per cent on the preceding year, and that coal remained Germany’s dominant power source.
Despite the hundreds of billions spent on renewables (that’s billions not millions), Germany’s carbon emissions persist at double the rate of neighbouring France and nearly triple the rate of Sweden. The country also grapples with electricity prices three times the global average.
As Judith Sloan wrote earlier this week, the disappointing situation in Europe provides a stark warning to Australia.
While in Germany recently, Anthony Albanese signed on to the “Climate Club”, a group of nations with lofty decarbonisation ambitions. But Germany should not be offering lessons on how to achieve decarbonisation – on the contrary, its example should be seen as a cautionary tale.
One economic analysis of Germany’s nuclear phase-out estimates that the nuclear phase-out has cost the country at least $12bn, and has contributed to thousands of preventable deaths from the air pollution generated from the burning of coal. Germany’s spot on the Yale Environmental Performance Index has slid backwards, and analysts note its electricity grid is the third-most carbon-intensive in all of Europe.
Since embarking on the Energiewende, Germany has experienced escalating electricity costs tied to feed-in tariffs and instability during periods of low wind and solar energy generation. Integrating fluctuating renewable energy sources into the power grid has plunged it into uncertainty, creating a volatile mix of surplus and shortfall.
On the other hand, nations boasting the lowest carbon emissions in Europe have not staked their fortunes on wind and solar power alone. Sweden, for instance, charted a course toward nuclear energy in the 1970s, and now emits a mere 3.42 tonnes of carbon per capita compared to Germany’s 8.09 tonnes. Over the past two decades, Sweden’s economy has thrived, boasting a growth rate twice that of Germany’s.
Given the energy intensity of an industry such as manufacturing, it is not entirely surprising that energy policy blunders have precipitated the German economic malaise.
Rather than transforming the country into a renewable energy superpower, Germany’s Energiewende has created a rust belt.
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Finland’s New Reactor is Already Lowering Electricity Prices
It has been a while since a new nuclear reactor was built in Western Europe; 16 years since the last reactor came online in France. At least that was the case until April of this year.
The day after the final shut down of Germany’s last three operating reactors, April 16th, Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 (OL3) a 1600 MW European Pressurized reactor (EPR) began regular power output to the grid. There is an irony in Germany’s once 17 reactor fleet pittering out the same weekend that Europe’s largest reactor ever is brought up to commercial power. As Germany ensured its future energy insecurity, Finland was ushering in a newfound security in electricity production.
This new reactor is a big deal both because of the long gap in new nuclear construction in Europe, and it is also important because it’s a new type of reactor. This is the first EPR built in Europe, with the first two units anywhere having been built at the Taishan Nuclear Power Plant in China in 2018 and 2019 respectively. Reactors of this design are currently planned in both France and the United Kingdom.
The Olkiluoto 3 project has not been all sunshine and roses, though. Construction on the project began in 2005, and the initial plan was to have the unit operational by 2009. The initial budget set out for the project was 3 billion euros, but by completion 8 billion had been spent, and the project was 14 years late. This is a major cost overrun, but when the 60 year projected lifetime of the reactor is considered, along with the significant size of its output, there is less sticker shock when it comes to the price.
This unit alone supplies 14 percent of Finland’s electricity demand, while the three Olkiluoto reactors provide a combined 30 percent of the country’s electricity.
But despite the costs and the time it took, the project is starting to pay off for the Finish grid already. After significant electricity price spikes following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Finland’s banning of energy imports from the country. The threat of electricity shortage had begun to loom during that period, as it did across much of Europe.
Spring floods and their concomitant hydropower production coupled with the capacity of the new 1600 MW nuclear reactor have caused the average monthly retail cost of electricity to come down considerably. Spiking at 261.53 Euros per megawatt-hour in August of 2022, the price was sitting at 26.52 Euros per megawatt-hour in May of 2023. The last time the price was that low was July of 2020, and the figure is below any of the pre-pandemic 2019 prices.
Now that price reduction is not solely due to the addition of the nuclear plant, the price was already back into the 70 Euro per megawatt-hour range in the early months of 2023; but the addition of so much new capacity has certainly contributed to both the price improvement, and to a newfound sense of energy security.
Finland has also recently finished construction on the world’s first geologic repository for spent fuel, further solidifying the future continuation of its nuclear fleet.
This new reactor coming online is a good sign for both energy costs in Finland, and the country’s energy security and independence. It is especially worthy of note given the very different reality for energy elsewhere in Europe as Germany has voluntarily hobbled its own energy independence. For a country as small as Finland, a single new nuclear reactor, especially one of this size, can make a huge difference in the energy economy.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2023/07/12/finland-reactor-lowering-electricity-prices/
*************************************************Warming in Antarctica?
Only using ‘creative’ statistics
Much has been written in the tabloids, and repeated by the fashionable, about it being very hot through June – even in Antarctica. Really, I wondered. Is Antarctica melting?
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has measured air temperatures at the Mawson weather station in Antarctica since early 1954 – this is one of the longest continuous surface temperature records for that part of the world. The Russians did not establish the more famous and isolated Vostok weather station until 1957. The satellite temperature record doesn’t begin until 1979.
The Bureau makes very few adjustments to the temperatures as measured at Mawson that oscillate within a band of some few degrees – mostly below freezing. These same temperatures show no statistically significant long-term warming trend, at least not since 1954. There are longer proxy temperature series, based on ice core records, and they show an overall cooling trend, considering the last 1,900 years. Here, again, I am referring to data from published studies, for example, the temperatures of East and West Antarctica were reconstructed by a team led by Barbara Stenni including scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division, British Antarctic Survey, and Russian Antarctic Research Institute. It is only remodelled proxy series that show warming over this same period.
Last month (June 2023), Antarctica was reported as ‘hot’ in various publications including Vox.com. Yet the average maximum temperature for Mawson was minus 12.6 degrees Celsius, which is not quite as cold as the long-term June average for all years since 1954 which is minus 13.5 C. When the June maximum temperatures for Mawson are ranked highest to lowest, June 2023 comes in as the 29th hottest, and 42nd coldest – suggesting temperatures in Antarctica were not particularly newsworthy and rather cold.
Yet the tabloids, and fashionable, are claiming June 2023 as hot – even in Antarctica. It is all nonsense.
Some of these claims have their origin in the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations. So, they represent a remodelled average. Indeed, there is not a single place where anyone, can measure the average temperature of the Earth – or Antarctica. Rather, when it is announced that it is the hottest it has ever been, reference is made to a statistic.
This average temperature is necessarily a number that has been derived from other numbers. There will perhaps have been some measuring done here and there, and then some adjusting, and then some adding up and some adjusting again. This is how it is with the calculation of regional and global average temperatures – whether from satellites, tree rings, ice cores, or thermometers. To be sure, every year we are told it is getting hotter, and back in the late 1980s, this was achieved for the globally averaged thermometer record by dropping out some of the colder weather stations. This had the effect of increasing the overall average global temperature, at a time when temperatures at many individual sites were dipping somewhat.
Those who have followed the politics of measuring temperatures may also remember the infamous line in the Climategate emails, whereby the globally averaged temperatures based on tree rings, which also show a decline after 1980, are ‘corrected’ by substituting the globally averaged temperature from thermometer records – never mind that the dip in that record had already been ‘corrected’ by removing data from a great many high latitude Canadian and Russian weather stations.
Drawing from this sordid history of calculating global and regional temperatures, I can think of a large number of ways that the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer could possibly generate a higher-than-average temperature for Antarctica and especially the Earth. Indeed, the larger the geographic area covered, the more opportunity for creative accounting, for which corporates using similar techniques would go to jail, while climate scientists are more usually promoted.
The solution is to perhaps give up on believing the nonsense news headlines, especially when there is no reference to a specific weather station, like Mawson. Or do away with a random selection of weather stations and focus instead on a simple index based on a good sample of well-sited weather stations with long histories, like Mawson.
Such a concept could be based on the Dow Jones Averages or the S&P 500. No one ever tries establishing an impossible-to-define ‘average stock price’ — including many stocks of doubtful provenance — and nobody cares. Rather the solution is to have a pre-selected index of certain representative stocks, that are then followed over a long-time span. So why not have an index of agreed weather stations?
The only problem is, the tabloids and the fashionable, might then have nothing to talk about – should they limit reporting to the same weather stations and with temperatures reliably measured, which will require some modification to current methods and of course, no subsequent adjusting.
There may be no catastrophe to report at least not when it comes to weather as a measure of climate, for which the lack of reliable measures, and the great number of potentially creative solutions, are currently being exploited over and over to justify rather large expenditures on all manner of things.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/warming-in-antarctica
***************************************The hottest day
Ian Plimer
In my lifetime, the hottest days I have enjoyed were in Jeddah (55°C), Adelaide (47°C), and Death Valley (46°C). For some strange reason, these were in summer in a dry climate.
The atmosphere is a natural air conditioner that modulates air temperature by the evaporation and precipitation of water. The adiabatic heat of the evaporation of water shows that to vaporise water, energy must be taken from the air, soil, plants, lakes, rivers, and seas. This is why your skin feels cool when wet. To precipitate water from the air as rain or snow, heat is given out.
Townsville and Mount Isa are at almost the same latitude. Air in Townsville is humid and contains about 4 per cent dissolved water vapour, the main greenhouse gas. Summer temperatures rarely exceed 28°C. At Mount Isa where the air contains less than 2 per cent water vapour, summer temperatures often exceed 42°C. Winter nights in Mount Isa are freezing whereas in Townsville they are quite balmy.
Both Mount Isa and Townsville have the same atmospheric carbon dioxide content. The only variable is water vapour as humidity and clouds which modulate temperature. It is humidity and rain that stops the planet from having an excessively high air temperature, runaway global warming, or any other concocted crisis on the catastrophist climate menu.
When the news cycle is quiet, people are away on summer holidays and, if there are a few warm summer days in a row, then it’s time to scare people witless. Tell them it’s the hottest day for the last 10 years, since Wimbledon started, since records were kept, or for the last 125,000 years. Make sure the colour of the background on temperature maps is changed to fiery red.
This is aimed at keeping the climate gravy train on the rails with the implication that the alleged hottest day must be a result of human activities. If record winter lows in the other hemisphere are ignored, then the narrative is enhanced. This is fraud and the media perpetually promote such climate disinformation.
If asked whether the planet is heating or cooling, the only answer to give is ‘Yes’. For the last 50 million years, planet Earth has been cooling. We have warmed up at least 10°C since the cold dry Younger Dryas 12,900-11,700 years ago, a time when no fossil fuels were used by humans. Since the peak of the current interglacial 7,000-4,000 years ago, there has been a long-term cooling trend with spikes of cooling and warming.
If told the planet has warmed, then the reply must be ‘Since when?’ We have cooled since Roman times, warmed since the Dark Ages (535-900 AD), cooled since the Medieval Warming (900-1300 AD), and warmed since the Little Ice Age (1300-1850 AD). What would you expect after the Little Ice Age? Bitterly cold times or warming. The unsolved scientific question is: which part, if any, of modern warming is of human origin? To talk about warming or hot times without discussing climate cycles is misleading and deceptive.
How do we measure temperature? Is it by mercury thermometers which have been used for a couple of centuries? Is it by the homemade secret thermal probes used by the taxpayer-funded Bureau of Meteorology? Is it by infrared probes? Is the measuring station correctly located? What is measured at the measuring station? Is the spot maximum temperature or the average maximum temperature over time used? Has the measuring station been moved over its history? Have buildings, airports, roads, and air conditioning units encroached on the measuring spot? How has the urban heat island effect influenced the measurement?
Do we get told that the bulk of global ground measuring stations are in the US and EU giving a very biased land measurement record? Not all measuring station data is used. Why not? Those in extreme climatic and remote areas are being closed, especially in Russia. The Bureau of Meteorology ignores the long-term record of rural land-based stations. Some 70 per cent of the planet is covered by water yet most measuring stations are on the land. The average temperature from an irregularly biased array of measuring stations cannot be calculated. As soon as the words average global temperature are used, you know you’re being conned.
Atmospheric temperature, mainly above the land, has been measured from the millions of weather balloons released year in and year out. Over the last 40 years, the 24/7 measurement of atmospheric temperature in 3D up to the stratosphere of the planet has been measured by satellite. Satellite is the most accurate measurement of temperature but is not used. It does not give scary data hidden away by some taxpayer-funded institution and is much harder to ‘adjust.
To compare the measurement of modern temperature with less accurate temperature deduced from proxies is invalid. Modern temperature measurements with an accuracy of ± 0.1°C are combined with older measurements with an accuracy of ± 0.5°C and then it’s claimed that the 20th-century average has risen by 0.86°C. A school child educated 60 years ago learned that every measurement must be accompanied by an order of accuracy and they could have shown that the claimed 20th-century average temperature rise is invalid. It is doubtful whether an ‘educated’ teenager today could see the flaw.
Proxies have an order of accuracy of 0.1-0.5°C, depending upon which proxy is used and how far back in time it is applied. A great diversity of proxies have been used to determine the past temperature record. The geological record shows us that the hottest days ever were 600, 500, 400, 200, and 100 million years ago. They were Thursdays!
Over the last 500 million years, the temperature has been up and down many times between numerous hothouse and icehouse conditions. As a result of cooling for the last 50 million years, we are currently living in one of the coldest times on planet Earth for 300 million years.
If Antarctica would just break up into microcontinents or move away from the South Pole, we would reach the planet’s normal wet warm greenhouse planetary conditions with a high sea level. Antarctic rift valleys and 150 sub-glacial geothermal areas and volcanoes show that the fragmentation has started.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-hottest-day/
***************************************************20 July, 2023
Democrat Demagoguery Heats Up 'Climate Reparations'
America’s Climate Czar, John Kerry, is in China this week meeting with its top officials about climate change, which today means everything from droughts to floods to inevitable heat waves. There was never any Senate confirmation for this office, yet Kerry reports directly to Biden without transparency for Kerry’s large staff.
The House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability caught up with Kerry last Thursday to ask a few obvious questions. His answers were more alarming than anything genuinely caused by forever-changing weather patterns.
The committee Chairman, Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL), asked Kerry, “Are you planning to commit America to climate reparations? That is to say, we have to pay some other country because they had a flood or they had a hurricane or a typhoon or a wildfire.”
While many today are familiar with the concept of slavery reparations, being seriously considered by the liberal California politicians, climate reparations have been demanded by some countries for several years now. Natural disasters have occurred worldwide since the beginning of time, but are blamed now on energy use by industrialized nations such as ours.
“No, under no circumstances,” was Kerry’s response to Rep. Mast’s question about whether the Biden Administration will obligate our country to pay climate reparations to foreign governments. But a close review of what Kerry publicly stated elsewhere suggests that there could be a “mental reservation” lurking here.
Well known to philosophers, biblical scholars, and legal experts, a mental reservation is an incomplete response due to a perceived greater good, by relying on a private interpretation of the question asked. To reduce this, the oath taken by Members of Congress includes the phrase “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion.”
“We have to pay” was the premise of the question, connoting a legal obligation that Kerry denied. But voluntary climate reparations are definitely being considered, and are on the agenda for the upcoming United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 28) scheduled to occur on Nov. 30 to Dec. 12 in the oil-rich kingdom of Dubai.
The vehicle for climate reparations is a global “loss and damage fund,” about which Kerry needs to be pinned down. Already some NATO countries in Europe have committed to send taxpayer dollars to this fund, which has existed since last year under the UN Environment Programme office.
In an interview last January with Britain’s left-wing newspaper The Guardian, Kerry indicated the U.S. would contribute to the loss and damage fund for the benefit of foreign countries claiming to be damaged by climate change. So he considers it a voluntary contribution, but it would burden American taxpayers with a legal obligation.
“How can you look somebody in the eye, with a straight face, and not accept the notion that there are damages, there are losses? We see them all around the world,” Kerry declared earlier this year to the British press.
Kerry made similar comments to the congressional committee. Incredulous, Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) asked Kerry “why do the good folks in east Tennessee – they work very hard for their dollars – why do they have to pay for a flood in Africa or South Asia?”
Kerry responded, “We’re not specifically paying for a flood in Africa although sometimes money may go to something like that but the United States is proudly the largest humanitarian donor in the world … we try to help the world.” That opens the door to the Biden Administration sending hard-earned American dollars to the globalist “loss and damage fund,” which is climate reparations by another name.
Meanwhile, our competitors like China are using the most cost-efficient energy, coal, to its maximum benefit. In 2021, China had its biggest increase in coal use and energy consumption since 2011, and Kerry is doing nothing meaningful about that.
China approved more coal-fired power plants in 2022 than any year since 2015. Yet Kerry praised China on Monday for what Kerry called its “incredible job” of increasing renewable energy, which supplies only a tiny fraction of total energy consumption.
Kerry merely chastised China gently about coal for which it “has six times as many plants starting construction as the rest of the world combined.” We won’t be able to compete with China if our economy shifts to inefficient wind turbines and solar power.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), showing that he is not intimidated by Deep State bullying of him in seizing his cell phone while on a family vacation, interjected in Kerry’s testimony to explain why world leaders give lip service to the global warming agenda. “Because they’re grifting like you are, sir,” Perry told Kerry when he invoked foreign leaders who side with Democrats, while expecting reparations.
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Opposition Grows to Biden Admin’s Climate Crackdown on Dishwashers
A coalition of over a dozen industry and consumer groups has issued a scathing criticism of the Biden administration’s proposed regulatory crackdown on dishwashers as part of a sweeping fight against the perceived dangers of climate change.
After first aiming at gas stoves to cut greenhouse gases, the Biden administration has turned its attention to other home appliances, with dishwashers finding their way into the crosshairs.
On May 5, the Department of Energy (DOE) proposed congressionally mandated standards for new dishwashers, claiming the move would reduce consumer costs while cutting the amount of carbon emitted into the atmosphere.
The proposed rulemaking (pdf), published in the Federal Register, seeks to impose separate new efficiency standards for power and water usage for standard-size and compact dishwashers during their regular cycles.
As part of the public comment process on the proposal, the coalition of 19 industry and consumer groups led by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) on Tuesday submitted a detailed criticism of the proposal.
The groups urged the Biden administration to withdraw the rule, arguing that existing dishwasher standards are already causing “serious problems” for consumers and that tightening them further would worsen the problems and undercut consumer protections.
“While each of the Biden administration’s recently-proposed appliance measures raises a unique set of risks for consumers, the proposed dishwasher rule at issue here is particularly harmful,” the groups wrote in the submission.
The current energy and water efficiency standards for dishwashers have already caused significant dissatisfaction among consumers due to far longer cycle times, the groups said.
Tightening these measures further by way of the proposed rule would likely worsen the situation but offer minimal additional savings, they argued.
“We believe the proposed rule should be withdrawn and that the Department of Energy (DOE) should shift its focus to addressing the drawbacks caused by its existing dishwasher regulations,” the coalition wrote.
More Details
The DOE proposal seeks to cut energy use by 27 percent and water use by 34 percent in new conventional household dishwashers made in the United States or imported into the country, starting three years after the publication of the final rule.
This means that the maximum estimated annual energy use for standard-sized dishwashers would be 223 kWh/year, and the maximum per-cycle water consumption would be 3.3 gallons.
Compact dishwasher models would, under the proposed rulemaking, see a 22 percent reduction in power use and an 11 percent lower water usage. Specifically, this would mean that compact dishwasher models made in or imported into the United States would have a maximum annual energy use of 174 kWh/year and maximum water consumption of 3.1 gallons.
If the new rules are adopted within the DOE’s suggested timeframe, they would come into effect in 2027. The agency estimated that the new rules would save consumers nearly $3 billion in utility bills over 30 years.
“This Administration is using all of the tools at our disposal to save Americans money while promoting innovations that will reduce carbon pollution and combat the climate crisis,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a statement at the time that the proposal was announced in May.
The CEI-led coalition, however, insisted that the proposed rule would not work as promised and would lead to both longer cycle times and reduced dishwasher performance.
“Longer cycle times are not the only problem,” the coalition wrote in its comments to DOE, pointing to reduced performance in terms of reliability, cleaning, and drying.
“Though not well documented, the previous efficiency standards have led to other performance drawbacks. For example, those who repair dishwashers have seen changes in reliability” resulting from DOE’s earlier actions.
“Both the frequency of repairs as well as their cost have risen,” the groups continued.
Cleaning performance has also seen adverse impacts, the coalition stated, noting “more instances of consumers running loads twice to get them sufficiently clean.”
Many models that comply with the DOE’s earlier standard don’t dry dishes fully, they continued, adding that the advantages of using dishwashers over washing by hand would be further undermined by the agency’s new draft rule.
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French Bill Accelerates Nuclear Construction and Removes Cap
France, the country with the highest proportion of nuclear power on its grid, and the second overall highest in raw gigawatts, has for years been embroiled in political battles over the country’s energy future. There has been a push to phase out nuclear power in the country that gets around two thirds of its electricity from its nuclear fleet at present. Current French President Emmanuel Macron has wavered on the issue over the years, but currently appears to favor the continuation of the nuclear centric approach to electricity production that the country currently employs.
On Tuesday May 16th, the French Parliament voted to adopt the proposed law entitled, “Bill on the acceleration of procedures related to the construction of new nuclear facilities near existing nuclear sites and the operation of existing facilities” which will simplify the procedure for constructing new nuclear reactors and repeal the provision from the Energy Code under the Energy Policy Objectives heading that sought “To reduce the share of nuclear power in electricity production to 50% by 2035.” Nuclear’s share of electricity production in France was 63 percent last year, and 68 percent in 2021. Because of this, the regulation coming into effect would have essentially required the idling or closure of some of the country’s existing nuclear fleet.
The target date of the 50 percent cap was initially 2025, and the 2014 bill that established it, the Energy Transition for Green Growth bill, also established a cap on nuclear capacity at 63.2 GW.
In 2018 a new energy plan changed that date to 2035 and stipulated that France would shut down 14 reactors, two of which, Fessenheim 1 and 2, were retired in 2020. In addition to removing the 50 percent cap set for 2035, the new bill also removes the 63.2 GW cap, essential for new nuclear construction without closures. Now that these provisions have been repealed, it will be interesting to see whether the other retirements materialize, but that appears far less likely now.
The new bill also contains provisions to simplify the planning and approvals process for new reactor construction. The bill will allow non-nuclear related preparations such as parking lots and fencing to begin before a creation authorization decree is formally issued by the Nuclear Safety Authority. This allows projects to get going before they would otherwise be able to, and will be helpful to a project at the Penly power plant which currently has one operating unit, in operation since 1990, and where future units are planned.
France has the highest nuclear concentration in the world, and it’s good to see them take a substantive step away from voluntarily squandering that resource. This is especially true in the wake of the final German exit from nuclear power earlier this year and its consequences to electrity prices and availability. It looks as though other countries, especially in Europe, are learning the lesson of Germany’s failed energy policy, and are taking steps to prevent the same thing from happening to them.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2023/07/12/france-removes-cap-nuclear/?omhide=true
*****************************************************Study casts doubt on electric vehicles' climate, cost benefits: 'Won't achieve the goals intended'
A new report published by the Manhattan Institute threw cold water on the purported climate and cost benefits of electric vehicles (EVs) widely touted by lawmakers and automakers.
Overall, the rapid electrification of the U.S. transportation sector would increase consumer costs, make the electric grid more vulnerable to blackouts, threaten national security and may not even lead to fewer greenhouse gas emissions, according to the paper titled "Electric Vehicles for Everyone? The Impossible Dream" and authored by Manhattan Institute senior fellow Mark Mills.
"I think it's morally consequential. It's geopolitically consequential and socially, economically consequential," Mills told Fox News Digital in an interview. "The subsidies and the mandates run the risk of causing maybe the biggest misallocation of capital in modern times in the industrial markets. Hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be spent chasing these mandates, requirements."
"And it won't, as the report shows, it won't achieve the goals intended and the attempt to do so will have enormous economic and social costs because the underlying premises are either incorrect, too poorly understood or too difficult to quantify in order to take the actions that are being taken," he continued.
Mills said the government push to aggressively electrify the transportation sector over the coming years is based on the premises that it will both help the environment by lowering economy-wide carbon emissions and help save consumers money through lower fueling costs while keeping car prices co-equal with current prices.
However, Mills' report highlights that emissions and costs are subject a wide range of conditions.
"It depends on when and where you charge the vehicle," he told Fox News Digital. "Then you have to add to that, the emissions that occur before you get the vehicle in your driveway for the first time because all vehicles entail CO2 emissions associated with the energy you use to build the vehicle. You use of materials and machines to build everything."
"For an internal combustion engine, something on the order of 15 to 20% of the emissions that is associated with the vehicle over its lifetime of operating occur before you drive it," he continued. "With an electric vehicle, the share of emissions range from 15% to 100% of total lifecycle emissions. And they're far greater than the conventional vehicle because you're building a fuel tank, a battery, on difficult-to-acquire metals."
Mills added that there are "realistic scenarios" where driving an electric vehicle will cause greater global emissions than driving an internal combustion engine.
His report, meanwhile, comes as lawmakers at the federal and state level continue to take aim at traditional gas-powered vehicles while boosting EVs.
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19 July, 2023
EPA’s New Vehicle Emissions Rule Would Drive Cars and Trucks Off the Road. It’s Also Illegal
Since the 2020 election, President Joe Biden has made clear his intention to drive America’s gasoline- and diesel-powered cars and trucks right off our roads.
In May, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed a new rule that would impose such strict emissions limits that carmakers would only be able to comply with them by switching the vast majority of their production to electric vehicles by 2027.
The EPA estimates that under its new rule, nearly 70% of all new cars and trucks produced in America would be fully electric by 2032.
But the proposed rule is based on a flawed interpretation of the Clean Air Act. The act gives the EPA the authority to regulate air pollutants from vehicles, but not to dictate what types of vehicles consumers can own. It requires the EPA to set emissions standards that allow manufacturers enough time “to permit the development and application of the requisite technology, giving appropriate consideration to the cost of compliance within such period.”
The proposed rule would have negligible environmental benefits but enormous economic and social costs. It would increase electricity demand and strain the electric grid, while annihilating funding for building and maintaining highways, which is derived almost entirely from taxes on gasoline and diesel.
It would harm consumers by taking away their right to decide what kind of vehicle to buy. Low-income and rural Americans in particular would face higher transportation costs and reduced mobility options. The new rule would also undermine U.S. competitiveness internationally and national security by making us more dependent on foreign sources of critical minerals and batteries for EVs.
The proposed rule is not only bad policy, it is also “arbitrary and capricious” because the Clean Air Act does not authorize the EPA to force a transition to EVs.
The proposed rule’s legal problems start with its definition of the “class or classes of vehicles” to which the emissions would apply. In order to kill off gasoline-powered cars, the EPA is defining the relevant classes as vehicles of various sizes that include both gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles as well as electric vehicles of those sizes.
The phrase “class or classes of new motor vehicles” cannot mean just whatever the EPA wants it to mean. The phrase could not, for example, include both electric scooters and gasoline-powered cars under the same emission standard, even though both are “motor vehicles” under the Clean Air Act.
Common sense dictates that the act cannot be read as authorizing the EPA to force car manufacturers to produce electric scooters instead of cars in order to comply with emissions standards for cars.
As I explained in The Wall Street Journal last summer, the Supreme Court recently struck down a similar attempt by the EPA to regulate power plants under the Clean Air Act in West Virginia v. EPA.
The Supreme Court observed in that case that the EPA’s 2015 Clean Power Plan would have “resulted in numerical emissions ceilings so strict that no existing coal plant would have been able to achieve them without engaging in [generation-shifting].”
The court went on to note:
Rather than focus on improving the performance of individual sources, it would improve the overall power system by lowering the carbon intensity of power generation. And it would do that by forcing a shift throughout the power grid from one type of energy source to another. … There is little reason to think Congress assigned such decisions to the Agency. … We presume that Congress intends to make major policy decisions itself, not leave those decisions to agencies.
The same may be said of the EPA’s attempt to kill traditional cars and trucks. Its emissions limits are so strict that no manufacturer of combustion engine vehicles will be able to comply with them, except by switching to the production of a completely different type of vehicle.
The switch from traditional cars to EVs is the definition of a major policy decision, and nowhere in the Clean Air Act does it say that Congress wanted the EPA to make the choice of where, how, and when that switch should happen.
The EPA’s new proposed standards build on a 2021 EPA rule that significantly tightened emissions standards for vehicles starting with model year 2023. Most auto manufacturers had already completed their design cycle for their 2023 models by the time the rule was promulgated. The 2021 rule is currently being challenged in federal court by a coalition of states and stakeholders in the case of Texas v. EPA. That case will likely decide the fate of this newly proposed rule as well.
No agency has come closer to claiming virtually totalitarian powers to reshape American society as the EPA has. The sooner federal courts rein in the runaway EPA, the better for everyone.
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ESG is a surprise boon for fossil fuel giants
ESG, or environmental, social and corporate governance, has taken the financial world by storm. It first hit the scene in a 2004 United Nations report that argued the financial sector could rack up more profits if it focused on carbon dioxide reduction and UN-approved progressive causes and has ballooned into a big, green financial juggernaut. In 2021, ESG assets under management hit an estimated $35 trillion. Bloomberg projects that by 2025 $53 trillion will be invested in ESG vehicles — that’s over one third of global assets under management and over five times 2007’s total of $10 trillion of ESG assets.
The main thrust is to hasten the renewable energy transition to solve climate change by diverting capital from fossil projects to various green projects. At least, that’s how it’s advertised. But what if that’s not the case? What if ESG is also a way to shovel tens of billions of dollars into fossil fuel titans?
New reporting from Bloomberg reveals the truth: ESG, through sloppy accounting, has dumped nearly $30 billion into one of the world’s largest oil and gas companies. The beneficiary is Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s national oil and gas firm.
The company never intended to benefit from ESG. In fact, it’s been hostile to the entire project. Amin Nasser, Aramco’s chief executive, has criticized ESG for its bias against traditional energy projects, especially those using fossil fuels. So how did this happen?
In 2021, Aramco sold off 49 percent of two of its subsidiaries — Aramco Oil Pipelines Company and the Aramco Gas Pipelines Company. Through bridge loans, EIG Global Energy Partners LLC and BlackRock Inc. led consortiums that purchased the subsidiaries.
“In order to generate cash to repay the bank loans, the EIG and BlackRock consortiums created two special purpose vehicles: EIG Pearl Holdings and GreenSaif Pipelines Bidco, both registered at the same Luxembourg address,” reports Bloomberg. “These SPVs then sold bonds, which, since they had no direct links to the fossil-fuel industry, ended up getting an above-average score in a widely-used JPMorgan Chase & Co. sustainability screening based on third-party ESG scores.”
Those bonds then landed in JP Morgan’s ESG Indexes — an embarrassing turn of events for ESG advocates. They can no longer claim their green mantle and Bloomberg intimates that more fossil securities are likely to shimmy into indexes due to their opaque and loophole-ridden structure.
But the bad news for ESG doesn’t stop there. A new report out of Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy reveals that ESG explicitly cuts the world’s only large-scale decarbonizer, nuclear energy, out of the mix. The report shows that most banks (57 percent) exclude nuclear from their sustainable bond frameworks, with the rest (40 percent) remaining silent. No major bank lists nuclear energy as part of its ESG taxonomy.
So, ESG both funds fossil fuel giants and excludes the most powerful decarbonization tool humanity has at its disposal. If only this was just some kind of bad joke. But this is real money, which means there will be real consequences. The financial world is diving headfirst into what will pan out to be one of the largest misallocations of capital in human history.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/esg-is-a-surprise-boon-for-fossil-fuel-giants/ ?
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9th Circuit denies bid by environmentalists and tribes to block Nevada lithium mine
The latest bid by conservationists and tribal leaders to block construction of a huge lithium mine already in the works along the Nevada-Oregon line was denied by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday.
A three-panel judge of the San Francisco-based appellate court rejected a half-dozen arguments the opponents had put forth in their appeal seeking to overturn federal land managers' approval of the project.
That included claims it violates multiple environmental laws and would destroy lands tribal members consider sacred because they say dozens of their ancestors were massacred there in 1865.
Lithium Nevada Corp.'s mine at Thacker Pass near the Oregon line, 200 miles (320 kilometers) northeast of Reno, has pitted environmentalists and Native Americans against President Joe Biden’s plans to combat climate change. The mine would involve extraction of the silvery-white metal used in electric vehicle batteries.
On Monday, the judges didn't specifically address the claims that the project fails to comply with a new opinion the 9th Circuit issued last year that blocked a copper mine in Arizona based on a more stringent interpretation of the 1872 Mining Law regarding the use of neighboring lands to dispose of waste.
Rather, they more generally differed to the expertise of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which approved the mine in 2021, and the decision by U.S. District Judge Miranda Du earlier this year to allow construction to go forward even though she concluded the mine was not in complete compliance with the new interpretation of the Civil War-era mining law.
The bureau's approval of the mine “was not arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion or otherwise not in accordance with” the National Environmental Policy Act, the 11-page ruling said.
The bureau approved the mine in 2021 on an accelerated basis under Donald Trump's administration. The Biden administration has continued to embrace it in an effort to ramp up U.S. production of lithium needed for electric vehicles that are an integral part of his clean energy agenda.
Lithium Nevada officials say the Thacker Pass mine’s reserves would support lithium for more than 1.5 million electric vehicles per year for 40 years.
Conservationists say the open pit mine, deeper than the length of a football field, will pollute the groundwater and destroy precious habitat for sage grouse, pronghorn antelope and other species in violation of environmental laws.
Their lawyers had argued that Du illegally exceeded her authority when she refused to revoke the mine's operation plan in March despite her conclusion that federal land managers had violated the law in approving parts of it.
“This is the first time in public land history that we have a major project violating a number of provisions but is allowed to go forward,” Roger Flynn, the director of the Colorado-based Western Mining Action Project, told the 9th Circuit panel during oral arguments in Pasadena on June 27.
“In the meantime, thousands of acres of public land are essentially being clear-cut,” he said Tuesday about the high-desert sagebrush that serves as critical habitat for the imperiled bird species sage grouse.
The 9th Circuit ruling Monday said Du applied the proper legal standard and found the bureau's sole error in approving the project “weighed against” vacating the entire approval of the mine partly because “there was at least a serious possibility that the (agency would) be able to substantiate its decision on remand.”
Lithium Nevada, a subsidiary of the Canadian-based Lithium Americas, spent more than $8.7 million on the environmental analysis and permitting process, even altering the original plans to move it outside of environmentally sensitive areas, said Laura Granier, a lawyer for the company. She said investments in mitigation, legal costs and initial construction already have exceeded $150 million.
Government lawyers said much of the evidence the Western Shoshone and Paiute tribes presented about the sacred nature of the land came after a formal decision had been issued and that none of it clearly established the actual location of the massacre.
The 9th Circuit ruled Monday that bureau acted “reasonably and in good faith” in its consultation with tribes potentially affected by the mine.
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Australia: Coal-fired Power Station's life set to be extended
Delta Electricity could extend the closure of Vales Point Power Station from 2029 to 2033, amid concerns about delays with renewable energy projects and the "early closure" of other coal-fired plants.
The company said it had advised the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) of "a 2033 technical life assessment" for the power plant on the southern shore of Lake Macquarie.
Delta's interim chief executive David Morris said Vales Point "continues to provide high levels of availability to the system and is expected to continue to do so through to 2033".
Nature Conservation Council of NSW CEO Jacqui Mumford said a 2033 closure for Vales Point would "make it almost impossible for NSW to reach its emission reduction targets".
"If this extension goes ahead, Vales Point would therefore account for 70 per cent of NSW's electricity emissions," Ms Mumford said.
Greens MP and spokesperson for climate change Sue Higginson said extending Vales Point would be "reckless, dangerous and foul play".
"Have we forgotten the climate induced fires and floods? We are in a climate emergency, young people are suffering from climate anxiety and many across the country are doing all that they can to ensure we have a liveable planet in the years ahead," she said.
Delta said the purpose of the plant's assessment was to examine the condition of "the existing generation equipment, ash dam capacity and general condition of the facility".
The previous closure date had been set for 2029, based on "a nominal 50-year asset life".
A Delta statement noted the "delays being experienced by new generation and transmission projects, along with earlier closure dates being announced by owners of other coal-fired generators".
"Given the uncertainties surrounding the capacity of electricity resources over the next 10 years and the urgent need to maintain system security throughout this period, Delta considers it a responsible step to advise AEMO of the availability of Vales Point Power Station's capacity."
Ms Mumford said it was "incredibly disappointing that the community hasn't even been asked if they want such an extension".
Billionaires Trevor St Baker and Brian Flannery sold the Vales Point plant in December last year to Sev.en Energy, a company owned by Czech billionaire Pavel Tykac.
"We know that Sev.en has been lobbying the government to extend the life of this plant since they acquired it earlier this year," Ms Mumford said.
"And why wouldn't they - the exemptions granted to this power plant are a bonanza for a company willing to profit from causing serious harm to our climate and human health."
Ms Mumford urged the NSW government to "rule out any support to keep Vales Point operating longer than 2029".
"In an era of increasing climate catastrophe, we cannot allow such reckless disregard for our future."
Delta's statement said its announcement "does not denote a commercial commitment to operate the facility".
"The energy system is in transformation, and this brings higher levels of uncertainty when forecasting market conditions for the longer term," Mr Morris said.
Delta said the Vales Point plant "continues to be a key asset in the transitioning energy market".
It provided "essential firming capacity" to support the "growing integration of renewable energy" and ensured "a reliable and secure source of electricity".
"Currently the Vales Point Power Station generates approximately 10 per cent of NSW electricity needs," the company said.
Ms Higginson said there was also speculation about Eraring Power Station remaining open beyond 2025.
"If we let Eraring and Vales Point coal fired power stations continue beyond their planned closures, we lose hope of reducing our emissions and meeting our net zero targets. We need to make big, bold changes and we need to make them now," she said.
The Newcastle Herald reported on Wednesday that the federal government had declared the nation's second offshore wind zone off the Hunter coast.
Power-generating wind turbines will cover 1800 square kilometres from Port Stephens to Swansea, 1000 square kilometres smaller than the zone proposed in February.
The declared area will start 20 kilometres from the coast at Port Stephens, about 9km further offshore than first proposed, and more than 35km from the coast at Swansea.
The Hunter Community Environment Centre released a report in May, titled Delta's Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap.
The report said Vales Point was responsible for the loss and degradation of vast areas of seagrass and marine life, but Delta dismissed it as misleading
https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/8270648/vales-point-power-station-life-set-to-be-extended/
***************************************18 July, 2023
The Grip of Culture: The Social Psychology of Climate Catastrophism
by Andy West
My book ‘The Grip of Culture’, subtitled ‘The social psychology of climate change catastrophism’, is now published.
“Climate change catastrophism is a cultural disease haunting Western society. Andy West’s excellent study of this problem explains the different drivers of this disease. It is an important contribution to a debate where reason must prevail.” – Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent
You can find it in paperback on Amazon US, UK and Germany, plus it is also available as a FREE pdf from my publisher, the GWPF, see here.
The rear-cover synopsis reads:
“Attempts to explain attitudes to climate change, and the refusal of large parts of society to accept the idea of an imminent catastrophe, have largely foundered. This ground breaking book overturns the existing literature, developing a powerful new model of public attitudes based on the interaction of traditional religion and a new culture – a new faith – of climate catastrophism, which is instinctively accepted or rejected. At its centre is a series of measurements of public opinion, culled from major international polls, which make a strong case that society is now in the grip of a major new religion. That case is made still more powerful because the model is able to predict real-world outcomes, such as the deployment of renewables and the prevalence of climate protest groups in different countries.
The book ends with a warning. Cultures can bind societies together and cause great civilisations to grow and prosper. But they can also lead them to disaster. If society is truly in the grip of a new cultural entity, we should be very concerned.”
My book overlaps with some social aspects explored in Judith’s book, including the catastrophe narrative, the social nature of consensuses, and the highly tangled territory where group biases interact with, and damage, the enterprise of science. However, regarding the social aspects generally I see my book as exposing the ultimate root cause of the biases and the deep social need for arbitrary consensus.
It does not explore much detail about what specific institutions and efforts are undermined by which biased advocate individuals or organisations, and indeed it does not delve into climate science or the IPCC procedures at all (see the note at the end of this post).
The main presence of climate catastrophism is outside of science, and its culture can be characterised and measured from its footprint in global publics (inclusive of public authorities). However, climate catastrophism works to undermine all institutions that provide ‘rationality at social scale’, including democracy, the law (chapter 14), and science (which is considered generically).
https://cliscep.com/2023/07/14/the-grip-of-culture-the-social-psychology-of-climate-catastrophism/
***************************************Why Global Warming Lawsuits Deserve to Fail
A county in Oregon has filed a lawsuit against a dozen or so oil and coal companies and their trade association, basically repeating the allegations (and lies) of lawsuits filed in other jurisdictions around the country. All these lawsuits deserve to fail.
The plaintiffs in County of Multnomah v. Exxon Mobil Corp. et al. are demanding some $50 billion “for damages and equitable relief for harm caused to Multnomah County by Defendants’ execution of a scheme to rapaciously sell fossil fuel products and deceptively promote them as harmless to the environment, while they knew that carbon pollution emitted by their products into the atmosphere would likely cause deadly extreme heat events….”
This is nonsense.
The argument that “Exxon knew” is based on combing through hundreds of thousands of pages of old corporate documents released by Exxon early on during discovery (at the time, many of us said that was a mistake) and selectively quoting those that seem to make damning concessions.
How many times did bureaucrats in Exxon’s vast hierarchy make just the opposite statements, but those are being hidden by the plaintiffs? Given the size of the database and new AI-assisted search tools, scores or even hundreds of opposing statements could be found.
The defense should demand to know if the plaintiffs searched for such statements, if they did what they discovered, and if they didn’t, why not? And then … the defense should do it themselves.
In truth, there must have been an on-again, off-again debate inside Exxon and other fossil fuel companies over the course of many years regarding how seriously they should take the claims of climate alarmists. Encouraging internal debate and discussion is good management. It is not a crime.
The contention that the climate scientists funded by the fossil fuel industry represent “fringe views” is easily debunked, and not merely by referencing the Global Warming Petition Project, signed by 31,478 American scientists. Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch (both alarmists) found only 48% of the respondents to their 2015 survey of scientists said they agree “very much” with the statement that “most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, the result of anthropogenic causes.”
Ditto Bart Verheggen’s 2015 survey that found fewer than half of contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) own reports agree with its claim more than half of the warming since the mid-20th century can be attributed to human activity.
In truth, there is no scientific consensus now and there never was. QED, the fossil fuel industry was not backing scientists with “fringe views.”
The dollar amounts contributed to conservative and libertarian think tanks reported in these suits are always exaggerated, partly by describing amounts given over the course of a decade or longer and partly because oil companies, like virtually all public companies, contributed large amounts to both liberal and conservative public interest groups during this time.
Only a small fraction of those amounts (or none at all) went to studying or advocating on climate change. The defense team should demand to know how much of Exxon’s and API’s largess actually was spent on the climate issue, and if the plaintiffs can’t say, stipulate that it was less than 5%. Then demand to know how that amount compares to the income of ideologically driven groups on the other side of the issue. If they can’t say, stipulate that is less than 5%.
In truth, money contributed to nonprofit groups by the fossil fuel industry to address climate change was trivial compared to the vast amounts spent by other groups engaged in the climate debate.
As independent investigator Russell Cook repeatedly points out, there is no evidence that any of the scientists and policy analysts who accepted money either directly or indirectly from the fossil fuel industry were “paid to lie.” There are no letters or contracts, just innuendo and libels spread by leftist activists.
Probably 99% of the money spent by the fossil fuel companies went to organizations, not to individuals, as was the case when the much-maligned Willie Soon was paid by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and those organizations had policies in place to protect the integrity and independence of their staff.
In truth, most of the scientists and experts engaged in the climate debate benefit financially in some way for the work they do (otherwise they couldn’t do it!) but very few think they are shading the truth in return for that support. They never agreed to do that. They believe they are speaking the truth.
And what about those dollars given to academics and environmental advocacy groups, including those affiliated with the United Nations, to make the opposite argument? Were those contributions made before there was solid evidence that a problem existed? In that case, was the motive to mislead the public into supporting public policies that financially benefited those groups?
Did the funding persist even in the face of compelling evidence that the global warming scare is based on junk science? In that case, was the motive to cover-up their earlier crimes? How much did Greenpeace, Sierra Club, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers, etc. know, and when did they know it?
In truth, the climate alarmism industry was engaging in the very unethical and fraudulent practices that it is accusing the fossil fuel industry of performing.
The actual statements produced and ads run by the defendants and their “front groups” reproduced in this lawsuit are invariably reasonable, compelling, accurate, and data-based. I always chuckle when the plaintiffs reproduce these statements or ads in full since they remain fair and convincing even today, decades later.
The defense in these cases ought to eagerly present more of them, especially the Mobil ads, Patrick Michaels’ excellent newsletter, and Willie Soon’s peer-reviewed research, no less than 100 or 200 pages, and let the judge or the jury decide how credible they are. Then display those articles and ads opposite fundraising appeals from Greenpeace, Environmental Defense Fund, etc. The difference could hardly be more striking.
In truth, the environmental groups are engaged in propaganda and made false claims to advance the agendas of their funders while groups funded by the fossil fuel industry did not.
Lastly, I always look for references in these lawsuits to the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change and its five-volume “Climate Change Reconsidered” (CCR) series. I didn’t find a single reference to it in this lawsuit (but I didn’t search the document for it).
Attorney Peter Ferrara liked to say CCR was to climate alarmists “like holy water and a crucifix are to demons.” When he cited CCR in contentious debates online or in email, the other side invariably went silent, unable to admit that such a reference work even exists.
The most recent volume (Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels) lists 117 scientists, economists, engineers, and other experts as authors, contributors, or reviewers. Just the fringe? Maybe, but the previous four volumes each typically listed just as many contributors and thousands of peer-reviewed articles.
In truth, global warming skeptics have just as much intellectual fire power as the alarmists, maybe even more. That’s just a fact.
One hopes the defense teams and the judges (or their clerks) hearing these cases are smart and honest enough to recognize all this.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2023/07/commentary-why-global-warming-lawsuits-deserve-to-fail/
*****************************************UN report on growing world hunger criticised for climate hype
Net Zero Watch has criticised the UN and news media for claiming that 'climate change is pushing millions of people into hunger,' a claim widely reported in the media.
A new UN report, “The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2023”, claims that 122 million more people are facing hunger than in 2019, and that global food insecurity has worsened in recent years due to the pandemic and repeated weather shocks and conflicts, including the war in Ukraine.
Whilst Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine have both disrupted food supplies and pushed up energy and food inflation, it is not true that food production is declining because of extreme weather events.
Even Pakistan, which was affected by severe flooding last year, has just reported a record harvest.
The UN's climate claims are also contradicted by its own data, which shows worldwide food production continuing to climb. New records were set in 2021 for cereal output and the value of agricultural production. Last year recorded the second highest cereal production on record, and this year is now forecast to set yet another new record for wheat.
According to the new report's methodology, the UN's claims are not based on actual data at all. Their index for hunger is derived from computer modelling, while their measure for food insecurity is calculated from household surveys.
Climate researcher, Paul Homewood, comments:
“The Director of the UN's Food & Agriculture Organisation has remarked that the world's food systems could entirely collapse. This is grossly irresponsible and a complete denial of the remarkable success of the world's agricultural industry.
If the UN is concerned about world hunger, maybe they should call a halt to all of the agricultural Net Zero and rewilding projects being undertaken in Europe and elsewhere, all in the name of climate change”
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Australia: Labor’s net zero fantasy will wreck our future
When it comes to energy costs and climate change, too many Australians have come to believe the lies peddled for the best part of two decades by both sides of politics. We’ve been told that there’s a climate emergency so therefore the economy must be decarbonised at breakneck speed.
But that there’s no need for worry because doing so will actually save us money, as wind and solar (supposedly) are now the cheapest way to generate electricity.
Peak deception was Labor’s pre-election modelling purporting to show that meeting its emissions reduction targets would create 604,000 jobs by 2050, and spur $76 billion in investment, as well as reduce household power bills by $275 a year by 2025.
Last week, it was revealed that some customers’ power bills had soared by 45 per cent from July 1, to cover the costs of building new generation and infrastructure, plus the rising cost of gas.
The reality in NSW is that all the big three electricity retailers have just increased their average charges by over 20 per cent, or about $500 per household per year.
This is what happens when our power grid is run to reduce emissions rather than to produce affordable and reliable electricity.
Also last week, it was revealed that the cost of meeting the Albanese government’s net zero target, including 43 per cent emissions reduction by 2030 with 82 per cent of electricity from renewable sources, would be $1.5 trillion – that’s TRILLION – within the current decade, rising to $9 trillion by 2060.
To put these truly gargantuan figures into perspective, Australia’s annual GDP is currently about $2 trillion. So achieving the 2050 emissions reduction – which both sides of politics have signed up to – will cost about four years of our total economic production. And achieving Labor’s 2030 target will cost almost one year of production within the current decade.
What’s more, these cost estimates aren’t from sceptics trying to scare Australians out of the policies supposedly needed to combat climate change.
They were published this week by an expert climate advocacy group, Net Zero Australia, a collaboration of interdisciplinary teams from the universities of Melbourne and Queensland, plus Princeton University in the US, led by Professor Robin Batterham, a former chief scientist.
He says that the magnitude of what’s necessary and desirable (at least in his mind) would be “in line with the US-led Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after World War II”.
Labor has now legislated to enshrine its 2030 target in law, but making something legally mandatory doesn’t mean that it will happen in practice.
As the former boss of Snowy Hydro, Paul Broad, said recently, achieving Labor’s emissions goals “is not just looking impossible, it IS impossible, it cannot be done”.
He said that we are “blindly charging on, simply because of political ideology” and that “to suggest that all of this is going to be at a price point that reflects past prices is absolutely false”.
Other experts, such as former Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott, Engie Australia boss Rik De Buyserie, and Origin Energy boss Frank Calabria essentially agreed with Broad, only in more restrained language, doubtless due to the fear of retribution from a minister and a government that’s still insisting that the impossible is achievable.
Meanwhile, an Ipsos poll, showing that cost of living should trump climate, highlights the government’s political quandary.
Concern about cost of living is now at the highest level in the past decade.
Yet even though it’s the cost of power that’s rising fastest, largely driven by climate policy, Ipsos found that 65 per cent believe Australia should be “doing more to address climate change” and 61 per cent say that Australia should be “a global leader in emissions reduction”.
Go figure.
When reality collides with the myth assiduously created by weak or fearmongering politicians over decades, sooner or later a crisis ensues. Even people inclined to subscribe to the “need to do something about climate” view now think we face a slow-motion train wreck – a power system that is neither affordable nor reliable but that is inevitable under current government policy.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is slowly trying to draw attention to the looming disaster but is still not prepared clearly to state the obvious, at least not yet: namely; that no more coal-fired power stations can close until there’s a reliable alternative, that new gas fields need to be developed as a matter of extreme urgency, and that – if achieving net zero really is necessary – the only way to get there without wrecking our prosperity is via nuclear energy.
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17 July, 2023
Is this the Dutch farmers’ moment?
Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister for over 12 years, has announced he is resigning and leaving politics. He delivered the news on Monday morning, after the collapse of his coalition government on Friday.
The immediate cause of the government’s collapse is a row over the Netherlands’ growing immigration crisis. The issue has plagued the government for months, after chaotic scenes at a migrant-registration centre in Ter Apel near Groningen last autumn. People were sleeping outside for days and a baby was left to die in a crowded sports hall.
Rutte and his People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) wanted to impose tighter curbs on immigration. But the other three parties in the coalition objected. And so Rutte, unable to break the deadlock, gave the government’s collective resignations to King Willem-Alexander on Friday. Rutte and his cabinet will stay on in government in a caretaker capacity until a General Election, which is expected to take place in November.
A row over immigration may have been the immediate cause of the government’s downfall. But its problems went far deeper. As with almost everywhere else in Europe, crippling Covid lockdowns have cast a long shadow. There was also the child-benefits scandal in 2021, in which 26,000 parents were wrongly accused of making fraudulent claims. Now there is an energy crisis and a cost-of-living crisis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, polling suggests that voters feel Rutte and his cabinet have been doing a bad job in general.
Arguably, the Rutte government’s biggest challenge came from the agricultural sector. Indeed, Dutch farmers have been in open revolt against the government for four years now. And for good reason. Under pressure from the EU, the Dutch government has been trying to cut nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands by half in order to meet Net Zero targets. This policy would be devastating to farmers’ livelihoods. It amounts to an order to significantly reduce fertiliser use and to cut livestock numbers. To ensure emissions are reduced, the Dutch government is targeting around 3,000 of the most polluting farms for closure.
In response, the Dutch farmers have staged large-scale protests in towns and on highways. And, in November 2019, they formed a political party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB). Throughout this time, the farmers have won considerable popular support. At the Dutch local elections in March, the BBB inflicted heavy losses on Rutte’s VVD, and became the largest party in the senate. Recent polls put the BBB in a tie for the lead with the VVD.
So the BBB and its supporters will see the upcoming General Election as a real opportunity to gain significant political power. This would be a chance not only to stop the destruction of farmers’ livelihoods, but also to make a decisive break with the politics of the Dutch establishment.
It will not be easy. The BBB knows that in order to halt the closure of thousands of farms, any future government would butt heads with the EU. It would have to resist the EU’s Net Zero crusade. And everyone knows how ruthlessly the EU tends to respond to resistance from member states. While some Eurosceptic voters might relish a conflict with the EU, this prospect could also put off some voters who are otherwise sympathetic to the BBB’s cause.
Furthermore, the resignation of the unpopular Rutte could end up leading to a revival of the VVD’s fortunes. It’s entirely possible a new leader might be able to rebuild some of the bridges he broke over the past few years. A renewed VVD might start to look like a safe option for voters again.
So, in the run-up to this winter’s General Election, the Dutch farmers and their supporters will need to be brave. They will need to show that they are willing and able to take on the EU – and that there is an alternative to the Dutch establishment. The whole of Europe will be watching.
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Beware the habitual El Niño hype
The world is once again in the grip of a semi-regular climate alarm. I’m not referring to the latest onset of the El Niño cycle, declared in action on July 4th by the United Nations, but the amplified rhetoric about the pace and scale of warming temperatures that always accompanies such El Niño periods.
Do you remember what happened last time we had a record El Niño in 2015/16? Global temperatures increased rapidly – as they do during such an event – and, according to some, it was full speed ahead to a runaway thermal apocalypse … until global temperatures started to fall again.
Earlier this month, the world broke global temperature records for several days, inevitably leading to renewed speculation about the onset of runaway global warming. The Guardian asked if we have entered a more erratic and dangerous phase with the onset of an El Niño event on top of human-made global heating.
Well, not really, or at least not on the basis of the data we have so far.
The global temperature data which started these claims are of course preliminary and are in any case a mixture of real data and input from models so a note of caution is needed. Nonetheless it is expected that the temperature records will be confirmed in coming months.
The real situation is, as they say, a little more complicated than many of the exaggerated claims.
In recent months the atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic has been unusual. The Azores High – a semi-permanent area of high pressure – was much weaker than normal. To put this into context, for the past decade the Azores High was about or above average at this time of year. This years variation resulted in low wind speeds occurring at the same time as a so-called marine heatwave in the north Atlantic.
The lower wind speeds lead to a reduction in the mixing of surface water with the cooler water below, allowing the sea surface temperatures to increase. Another consequence is a reduction in the transport of dust from the Sahara westward over the north Atlantic. Usually Saharan dust reflects solar radiation back into space before it reaches the ocean surface, thereby cooling it. Another contributing factor is the decreasing particulate pollution over the northern hemisphere as the air gets cleaner over Europe and North America.
Now add all those effects to the multi-decadal fluctuation of north Atlantic circulation and the consequential transport of heat about which we have a very incomplete understanding.
Then there is the El Niño starting to snake its way across Pacific equatorial waters. All of this is against a backdrop of a global warming trend which, aside from the El Niño, hasn’t shown much of an increase, if at all in almost the past decade.
So looking at the events of the past few months, and the records broken, you would have to say it’s complicated and best left to a post-El Niño analysis. No such caution for the Met Office and the Guardian however: “If a few decades ago, some people might have thought climate change was a relatively slow-moving phenomenon, we are now witnessing our climate changing at a terrifying rate,” they quote Prof Peter Stott, who leads the UK Met Office’s climate monitoring and attribution team.
Given the complexity and disparity of recent events I look forward to the Met Office’s post-El Niño analysis of such extreme and rather premature hype.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/beware-habitual-el-nino-hype/
********************************************The religious cult of climate catastrophism
Andrew Montford
I HAVE been working in climate and energy for nearly 15 years, and it’s fair to say that it’s not often I find something that makes me radically change the way I look at the domain. But a new book, by Andy A West, has done just that.
The Grip of Culture makes the case that climate catastrophism is cultural – akin to religion or one of the extreme political movements that have assailed the world from time to time. This is not an entirely new idea; lots of people have alluded to the possibility that a religion has formed around the belief that we are facing a weather wipeout. You can certainly see lots of behaviour among climate zealots that is identical to that of zealots from other, older religious systems. So opponents are demonised, and waverers are threatened with expulsion to keep them on the straight and narrow. They have a hallowed text that few have tried to read, and fewer can understand. There are prophets and prophetesses, and a dizzying and ever-changing narrative of fear and redemption which is impossible to escape.
Circumstantially then, climate catastrophism looks exactly like a religion. Intriguingly though, West argues that he can prove the point, and at the heart of the book is a set of measurements of public attitudes to global warming from around the world. At first these seem very strange – inexplicable even – with national publics apparently simultaneously greatly concerned by climate change and not at all keen to do anything about it. Bizarrely, the more religious a country is, the more worried the populace is about the issue, and the less inclined to prioritise addressing it.
West shows that these apparently schizophrenic attitudes can be explained as the interaction between traditional religion and a new faith of climate catastrophism. The measurement chapters are really rather remarkable, with extraordinarily strong statistical relationships emerging between national religiosity and climate change attitudes: correlations where questions invite virtue signalling responses (‘How worried are you about climate change’) and equally strong anti-correlations when hard reality gets involved (‘How much are you willing to spend each week to reduce climate change’). Opinion polling on the subject will never be the same again.
It’s deliciously counterintuitive, and very powerful. For example, West shows that you can use the results to predict real-world phenomena such as the spread of renewables across different nations. Remarkably, he gets a better result from using religiosity as a predictor than, say, GDP, political inclination. And if you think sunshine hours should be a great predictor of solar power usage, think again; not only is religiosity far better, but absurdly there turns out to be a much stronger commitment to solar in cloudy (European) nations than in sunny ones!
This is a lot of fun, but there is an extremely serious message to the book. Religions – cultures, that is – are powerful influences on humanity. They bind societies together, and enable us to work towards a common goal. In this way they have been central to the rise of every great civilisation. But they also function subconsciously, and therefore without any reference to rational thought. It’s as though the culture has a mind of its own. So the common goals that end up being pursued are as often self-destructive as they are beneficial. The book outlines appalling stories of societies which have been torn apart and even ruined themselves in this way.
We are therefore warned. If we are truly in the grip of a new culture, then we need to be very worried about where it is taking us, because it could be to the brink of disaster and beyond.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-religious-cult-of-climate-catastrophism/
*******************************************Offshore wind: A perfect storm of costs
In the renewable energy industry hope ever springs eternal, with Australia and the US forging ahead with plans to build a host of offshore wind turbines just as the UK is realising its large offshore wind sector is only adding to its power woes.
After years of assurances from renewable energy advocates that the UK’s offshore wind farm sector will deliver cheap and plentiful power, with the equivalent of more than 15 gigawatts of capacity now installed, the country’s power prices are amongst the highest in all Europe.
A major reason for the increase is the price of gas, with wholesale power from gas plants three times more expensive than before the crisis, according to the UK media, but wind power is simply adding to the problem. By some estimates power from the offshore turbines is even more expensive than gas power during the crisis.
The costs of building wind turbines capable of surviving major storms well out to sea are immense and increasing, as are the costs of maintaining generators mounted at the top of 200-metre poles far from land. Despite subsidies and a system for allocating power contracts which greatly favours the industry, UK wind lobby groups have written to the government asking for a vast increase in assistance, including tilting the auction system for power contracts further in their favour.
However, Australia and the US seem determined to repeat all the mistakes of their UK cousins and add a few of their own. In Australia, plans for offshore wind are still in the early stages. A wind farm zone has been designated in the relatively shallow waters off Victoria’s southern coast east of Melbourne which also happens to be within easy range of major transmission lines. Although considerable interest in building 300-metre tall towers (the same height as the Eiffel tower in Paris) has been reported, the project is not expected to deliver power until 2032. Other wind zones are still being discussed.
In the US, the country’s third offshore wind farm was given federal government permission in early July, with several more in the approvals pipeline. However, the latest project, including 100 turbines to be built within sight of the tourist havens of Atlantic City and Ocean City, has generated considerable opposition from community groups objecting to the beach view being spoiled.
All these proposals come with the usual blather about how cheap such power will be, despite the fact that in the UK the cost of the ruling Tory government’s obsession with wind farms is now becoming apparent.
As an example, the UK Telegraph states that the offshore wind farms Hornsea Two and Moray East were completed in 2022 with capital costs of about £2.75 billion ($A5.28 billion) per GW, or more than four times the cost of closed cycle gas turbine capacity. Estimates of maintenance costs, according to the Telegraph, are as high as £200 million per GW installed, per annum. That adds up to a nominal cost of offshore wind generation of £170/MWh, or about the same or somewhat higher than for gas turbines, even in these dire times of high gas prices.
On top of that figure must be added the costs of accommodating the variable output of such turbines. This includes keeping conventional, that is fossil-fuel, capacity on standby to fill the power gap when wind dies. In addition, in the UK, a large, and growing, contribution to these balancing costs involves paying a wind farm not to put power onto the grid when there is an excess, say when it is windy in the middle of the night. (In Australia, wind farms over a certain size are simply required to stay off the grid when directed by power grid managers.)
According to the energy news website Energy Live, in 2022 the UK grid spent more than £4 billion on balancing costs, or many times the costs of balancing the grid in the pre-wind era.
In addition to balancing costs the UK has a contracts for difference system which, details aside, guarantees prices paid to wind farms for power delivered. The subsidies required for this system are raised through a statutory levy on electricity suppliers and ultimately passed onto power consumers.
The wind industry is now saying that despite all that assistance offshore wind farms are not making enough to keep their own lights on. RenewableUK, the country’s trade association for renewable energy, announced in early July that the leading wind energy lobby groups have collectively written to the government saying that various projects are under threat unless they get more money, and the tendering system for contracts is changed.
The letter itself does not seem to be available and the mainstream media have largely ignored the story. But from RenewableUK statements and available commentary, it is apparent the wind industry is saying the budget for fixed-foundation offshore wind alone has to be at least two-and-a-half times higher than its current level. That means the industry has it’s hand out for more than £165 million.
In addition, the sub-sector of floating wind generators should be given its own budget pot and the auction rules changed. Winners are not determined by lowest bids but by an administrative decision that weights bids according to their ‘value’ in contributing towards the net-zero targets.
To justify all of this the wind industry points to a surge in supply chain costs pushing up the price of wind turbines, while increases in global interest rates have raised refinancing costs substantially. Those cost pressures have pushed several projects into the red just a year after they won government contracts. A widely reported winning bid in that round of contracts was for about £75 per MWh, as opposed to the Guardian newspaper’s estimated cost of £175 per MWh
Then there are the problems at Siemens Energy’s wind turbines division, Siemens Gamesa, which bills itself as a leader in renewable energy, particularly in offshore wind in which it holds 44GW worth of projects.
According to the latest quarterly report for Siemens Energy the division managed to lose £386 million on revenue of £2.44 billion for just the three months to the end of March, with the parent company warning of ‘deeper quality problems’. The quarter’s loss was blamed on inflation, supply chain challenges, the ramp-up of offshore activities and the effects of ‘onerous projects’.
Offshore wind, it seems, is not a solution to anything but a perfect storm of costs which governments in the US and Australia are doing their best to replicate.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/gone-with-the-wind
***************************************16 July, 2023
The end of ESG investing as we know it as investors rush for the exit
After having a golden decade where the money rolled in and few questions were asked, ESG is now facing a perfect storm.
In recent months the general trend across investment markets is a swing away from shares and towards the safety of bonds and cash, but ESG has often been impervious to broader market cycles. Not any more.
Politically, ESG is getting hit hard from all sides.
On the right of politics, US Republican states have led a strong campaign against ESG as it currently operates. Florida in particular has created a new legislative framework which limits government and corporate activism in ESG investing.
Florida governor and Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis is now demanding that all investing done on behalf of the state’s taxpayers is prudent and “does not include the furtherance of ideological interests”. This US law will, by definition, reduce the amount of money flowing into ESG investments.
On the other side of Atlantic, European Union leaders – politically miles away from US Republicans – are pressing for more accurate and transparent ESG regulations.
In effect, both sides of politics are trying to achieve the same thing, a more honest and effective version of ESG than we have just now. But the political heat represents a pincer movement against ESG at a time when investors are returning to conservative investments with rising rates and the threat of a global recession.
As Alex Dunnin at Rainmaker sayss: “The serious players who want to last the distance are toughening up. It’s not just about a few cliched divestments here and there. This should see a bit of a shake-out down the track.”
Bandwagon’s bust
The outstanding problem for ESG is the hijacking of the entire sector by those who simply jump on the bandwagon to get both the money in the door and the scores on the board.
Examples are too numerous to mention, but it’s hard to beat this year’s ESG ratings from the highly regarded S&P Global group which hit the headlines for all the wrong reason in assessing the electric car maker Tesla.
Guess what? The Chevron oil company ranked higher than Tesla when it came to the E (environment) score.
But that was not the top prize for double standards. In the G (governance) category, cigarette maker Philip Morris came out on top of Tesla for disclosure.
In everyday business big companies manage ESG just like any other issue. An oil company can improve its ratings by offloading dirtier assets to private companies who don’t even try to score on the ESG spectrum.
It this sort of box-ticking that has even the most earnest ESG investors worried.
Separately, investors who may have been assured in the past by seeing the biggest names in finance staunchly defend both the aspirations of ESG investing and the need to follow its core themes are now changing the script.
The world’s most famous ESG advocate has been Larry Fink, head of the world’s biggest investment house Blackrock.
In recent weeks Fink has banned the term ESG. His explanation is that the term has been corrupted by politicians on the Left and Right. This is what Fink said: “I’m not going to use the word ESG any longer because it’s been misused by the far Left and the far Right. Instead we will talk about decarbonisation or we will talk about government or social issues.” But the end result is that Blackrock no longer supports ESG as we know it.
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Anglers, Whales Will Be Burdened by Onerous NOAA Rules
When the Biden administration isn’t attacking hunting, it’s setting its sights on recreational fishing and boating.
I’ve extensively written about the Commerce Department’s proposed Atlantic Ocean 11.5 mile-per-hour (MPH) vessel speed rule for upwards of seven months of the year. Supporters claim it’ll “protect” the endangered North Atlantic right whale. But both whales and anglers - commercial and recreational - will suffer from misguided policy making here.
A similar National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Fisheries rule, filed in May 2021 with even more onerous stipulations, has been proposed in the Gulf of Mexico to protect yet another endangered whale: the newly-identified Rice’s whale with just about 50 known individuals.
NOAA Fisheries recently solicited comments for its proposed “Endangered and Threatened Species; Petition To Establish a Vessel Speed Restriction and Other Vessel-Related Measures To Protect Rice's Whales.” The comment period ended July 6th, 2023.
Who is behind the petition that spurred this rule? Radical preservationist environmental groups - Earthjustice, Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Biological Diversity, and Defenders of Wildlife -proposed the draft rule to establish a year-around 11 mph slow-down zone stretching from “Pensacola, Fla. to south of Tampa.” These groups, mind you, frequently attack and sue to block lawful hunting on public lands.
The petition also deliberately conflates commercial vessels with recreational ones and would impose unenforceable conditions on recreationists. The rule, if adopted, will bar recreational vessels from hosting overnight offshore trips, mandate observers on all trips in the proposed speed zone, and embolden radical environmentalists to report on “non-compliant” recreational vessels, for instance.
Boating United, a group of leading fishing and boating organizations, lambasted the Biden administration for not consulting them. They also contend there’s no recorded incident involving a recreational vessel hitting a Rice’s whale.
“The recreational boating and fishing community is committed to marine wildlife protection and ensuring our cherished waters are safe for wildlife, including the Rice’s whale, and boaters alike. A blanket approach such as vessel speed restrictions covering large swaths of the Gulf will do little to address the protection of the Rice’s whale population and puts recreational boaters, anglers, and communities that rely on economic activity from these industries at risk,” said Frank Hugelmeyer, president of the National Marine Manufacturers Association.
“Once again, proponents of vessel speed restrictions are acting as if small recreational boats are the same as large cargo ships. They are not,” added Jeff Angers, president of the Center for Sportfishing Policy. “We invite NOAA to join with us in identifying 21st Century technological advances that can help tell mariners where whales are instead of effectively barring public access to America’s marine waters.”
“It's impossible for NOAA Fisheries to expect to be able to handle the volume of calls they would receive,“ Captain Dylan Hubbard, co-owner of Hubbard’s Marina in Madeira Beach, Florida, told me on the District of Conservation podcast.
Hubbard also joined Jesse Watters Primetime this week to discuss how the rule would adversely impact the $200 billion Gulf Coast recreational fishery.
He told Fox News, "A lot of people access the fishery — our economy, the whole southeast region is driven by recreational boating — and it's a $214 billion industry, and this has a huge impact proposed, and basically closing an area from 100 to 400 meters deep, or about 300 to 1,300 ft."
Last year, NOAA Fisheries received $82 million from the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” and Fiscal Year 2023 appropriations funds to expand whale monitoring programs.
"We have high hopes for improving technology, but right this moment we don't have existing technology that can track and monitor and detect and avoid vessel strikes sufficient to prevent the fatalities,” NOAA Assistant Administrator Janet Coit told E&E News.
A bipartisan group of Congressional lawmakers, in turn, drafted a bill to delay funding here until the agency modernizes its north Atlantic right whale monitoring system. Lead sponsors include Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA) and Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK).
“Like most of my colleagues, I am concerned about the long-term health of our marine mammal populations, including the North Atlantic Right Whale. This rule, however, has too many potential unintended consequences for small boat operators who need flexibility to maintain their safety at sea. Alaskans know that the ocean is unpredictable; limiting a vessel’s speed can have catastrophic consequences for human life and new regulations should not create additional hazards for our nation’s mariners,” Rep. Peltola said.
Per NOAA Fisheries own Marine Recreational Information Program trip data and vessel registration data, the likelihood of a recreational vessel striking an endangered whale is “less than one in a million.”
If both the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico were subjected to these obtuse vessel speed rules, anglers and boaters- key drivers of conservation funding administered by the Dingell-Johnson Amendment - will be displaced from waters.
Basing rulemaking on emotion over science is detrimental to true conservation and has no benefit to marine mammals either.
This wholly unscientific petition must be rejected. Anglers and boaters aren’t the whales’ enemies; preservationist environmentalists and overregulation are.
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Electric Cars Are a Scam
Almost useless in a Northern winter
The left likes to treat skeptics of electrical cars as if they were Luddites. Truth is, making an existing product less efficient but more expensive doesn't really meet the definition of innovation.
Even the purported amenities and technological advances EV makers like to brag about in their ads have been a regular feature of gas-powered vehicles going back generations. At best, EVs, if they fulfill their promise, are a lateral technology.
This is why there is no real "emerging market" for EVs in the United States as much as there's an industrial policy in place that props up EVs with government purchases, propaganda, state subsidies, cronyism, taxpayer-backed loans, and edicts. The green "revolution" is an elite-driven, top-down technocratic project.
And it's increasingly clear that the only reason giant rent-seeking carmakers are so heavily invested in EV development is that the government is promising to limit the production of gas-powered cars artificially.
In August 2021, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to set a target for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be zero-emission. California claims to ban combustion engines in all new cars in about ten years. So, carmakers adopt business models to deal with these distorted incentives and contrived theoretical markets of the future.
In today's real-world economy, Ford projects it will lose $3 billion on electric vehicles in 2023, bringing its EV losses to $5.1 billion over two years. In 2021, Ford reportedly lost $34,000 on every EV it made. This year, it was losing more than $58,000 on every EV. In a normal world, Ford would be dramatically scaling back EV production, not expanding it. Remember that next time; we need to bail out Detroit.
Then again, we're already bailing them out, I suppose. Last week, the U.S. Energy Department lent Ford -- again, a company that loses tens of thousands of dollars on every EV it sells -- another $9.2 billion in taxpayer dollars for a South Korean battery project. One imagines no sane bank would do it. The cost of EV batteries has gone up, not down, over the past few years.
Ford says these upfront losses are part of a "start-up mentality." We're still pretending EVs are a new idea rather than an inferior one. But scaremongering about climate and a misplaced romanticizing of "manufacturing" jobs have softened up the public for this kind of waste.
In the real world, there is Lordstown. In 2019, after General Motors -- which also loses money on every EV sold -- shut down a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, then-President Donald Trump made a big deal of publicly pressuring the auto giant to rectify the situation. CEO Mary Barra lent Lordstown Motors, a new EV outfit, $40 million to retrofit the plant. Ohio also gave GM another $60 million.
You may remember the widespread glowing coverage of Lordstown. After Biden signed his "Buy American" executive order, promising to replace the entire U.S. federal fleet with EVs, Lordstown's stock shot up.
By the start of this year, Lordstown had manufactured 31 vehicles in total. Six had been sold to actual consumers. (Most of them would be recalled.) The stock was trading at barely a dollar. Tech-funding giant Foxconn was pulling its $170 million. And this week, the company filed for bankruptcy.
Without massive state help, EVs are a niche market for rich virtue signalers. And, come to think of it, that's sort of what they are now, even with the help. A recent University of California at Berkeley study found that 90% of tax credits for EVs go to people in the top income strata. Most EVs are bought by high earners who like the look and feel of a Tesla. And that's fine. I don't want to stop anyone from owning the car they prefer. I just don't want to help pay for it.
Really, why would a middle-class family shun a perfectly good gas-powered car that can be fueled (most of the time) cheaply and driven virtually any distance, in any environment, and any time of the year? We don't need lithium. We have the most efficient, affordable, portable, and useful form of energy. We have centuries' worth of it waiting in the ground.
Climate alarmists might believe EVs are necessary to save the planet. That's fine. Using their standard, however, a bike is an innovation. Because even on their terms, the usefulness of EVs is highly debatable. Most of the energy that powers them is derived from fossil fuels. The manufacturing of an EV has a negligible positive benefit for the environment, if any.
And the fact is that if EVs were more efficient and saved us money, as enviros and politicians claim, consumers wouldn't have to be compelled into using them, and companies wouldn't have to be bribed into producing them.
https://townhall.com/columnists/davidharsanyi/2023/07/14/electric-cars-are-a-scam-n2625710
************************************************************More Claptrap From the Climate Czar
John Kerry is the gift who keeps on giving, and he gave generously this week.
Did you know, by the way, that he served in Vietnam? That he, ahem, earned as many Purple Hearts as Audie Murphy? That he once spent Christmas in Cambodia? It’s true, honest. He has the hat to prove it.
All kidding aside, we here in our humble shop owe His Haughtiness a debt of gratitude. He’s the gift who keeps on giving, the Botox beta-tester who lets us love our crow’s feet, the French-looking climate czar who on an otherwise slow news day gives us something to write about.
And so it was this week, when all the world’s attention was focused on Hunter Biden’s bag of blow, John Kerry was preparing to meet with representatives of Chinese President Xi “Don’t Call Me Dictator” Jinping, there to discuss a climate deal.
The Washington Free Beacon sets the stage: Back in 2014, under a newly installed Xi, “China unveiled a plan — to much fanfare from the American press — to cap its annual coal consumption at 4.2 billion tons by 2020. China’s commitment to lower emissions, former president Barack Obama said at the time, ‘shows what’s possible when we work together on an urgent global challenge.’ Today, the Chinese have blown past that number and burn more coal than the rest of the world combined.”
What a useful idiot, that Barack Obama. After all, when it comes to hammering out an emissions agreement with the lying, thieving, live-organ-harvesting ChiComs, what’s not to trust?
As it turns out, nothing’s not to trust — at least not for a diplomat as sharp and seasoned and set on selling us down the river as John Kerry is. As the Free Beacon continues: “Kerry has nonetheless argued that, in the case of the Chinese, words alone are proof of climate ‘progress.’ He has lauded the genocidal dictator for using the term ‘climate crisis’ and for pledging to cut emissions as part of an ‘ecological strategy.’”
Xi must be thanking his lucky yellow stars for the good fortune of being able to negotiate with a pantywaist like Kerry instead of men like former President Donald Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.
Trump seemed to embrace the advice of the intrepid Hong Konger who once warned him of the sphincter-like qualities of the Red Chinese.
As for Pompeo, he could’ve advised Kerry on China with a single word: reciprocity. “If the Chinese can buy land near our military facilities,” he said back in January, “we should be able to buy land near their military facilities. … If they can use propaganda on the telephones of our children, we should be able to put our propaganda on the phones of their children. … The theory of the case is, we’ve let them have one set of rules, and we’ve bent the knee and kowtowed to them and had an entirely different set of rules, and that can’t continue.”
On the other hand, Kerry has a history of dastardly diplomacy. As our Nate Jackson wrote back in 2018, shortly after Kerry had been caught undermining our nation’s foreign policy by conducting secret meetings with the Iranians: “One thing that displays this haughty self-importance is his habit of taking on foreign-policy negotiations without the authority to do so. From his treasonous negotiations with the North Vietnamese in 1971 while still an officer in the U.S. Navy to private negotiations with the Palestinians last January, Kerry thinks his foreign policy trumps America’s.”
Kerry insisted this week that such “shadow diplomacy” is just fine, “depending on what it does.”
How can we trust this guy to negotiate a nuke deal with the mad mullahs? Clearly, with Joe Biden as president, we’re getting the foreign policy we deserve. And we’re getting it good and hard.
But wait. There’s more. Yesterday, Kerry appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability. At one point, Kerry spouted off indignantly in defense of his means of travel: “I just don’t agree with your facts, which began with the presentation of one of the most outrageously persistent lies that I hear, which is this private jet. We don’t own a private jet. I don’t own a private jet. I personally have never owned a private jet. And obviously it’s pretty stupid to talk about coming in a private jet from the State Department up here. I just honestly— if that’s where you want to go, go.”
Florida Republican Michael Waltz, himself a former Green Beret, had heard about enough, and his grilling of Kerry is good stuff:
As Power Line’s Scott Johnson quipped: “My vocabulary of opprobrium is insufficient to do justice to Biden administration climate czar John Kerry. There is no leftist bromide he can’t spout with suffocating self-regard.”
True that. Or, as the girls back in Saigon used to say, He so haughty.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/98851-more-claptrap-from-the-climate-czar-2023-07-14 ?
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13 July, 2023
Georgia Nuclear Reactors: Firing Up Vogtle 3 And 4
On May 29, the Vogtle 3 nuclear reactor was brought to 100% power for the first time. It's getting closer to adding another 1100 MW to the grid, with its sister plant, Vogtle 4, not far behind. This is significant because the Vogtle reactors are the first new nuclear power plants built in the U.S. since the 1979 Three Mile Island meltdown.
The Vogtle plants will be the first of the advanced AP1000 reactor designs to be built in the US (another two – Turkey Point 3 and 4 – are still in the planning stage, and there are six AP1000 reactors that have come online in China since 2018). This reactor design represents a huge step forward, leapfrogging at least three decades of reactor design. You can catch up on how to design a nuclear reactor here, but it’s worth looking at what’s different about the AP1000 plants.
The very first reactors were used to demonstrate that a self-sustaining nuclear reaction could be initiated and controlled as well as to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, i.e., the Manhattan Project. The first generation of commercial nuclear reactors were prototypes and research reactors, intended largely to develop the technology and to learn how to make reliable nuclear power reactors. These reactors served as the basis for the nuclear reactors that would be put in the first nuclear submarines and surface ships.
Even as the Generation I reactor design was being tweaked, refined, and made larger, the Generation II reactors were being designed to take advantage of what had been learned – most currently operating reactors are Generation II plants, designed and built between about 1965 and 1996. The main distinctions are that the Generation II plants were designed to operate reliably and safely for at least 30 years (when the construction loan was paid off), and many have had their lifespan extended to more than a half-century. They also tended to be huge and complex. The Watts Bar reactor in Tennessee is likely to be the last of this generation to be built in the US. And that brings us to the AP1000 – a Generation III reactor plant.
Generation III
The Generation III and III+ reactors are not a revolutionary improvement over the Generation II designs – that’s the Generation IV reactors that are still on the drawing board. The Generation III is characterized as an evolutionary design that offers significant improvements without straying too far beyond the boundaries of Generation II technology. Generation III and III+ reactors take advantage of over three decades of operational experience, increased understanding of materials science and reactor physics, and vastly improved computer design techniques. As a result, the Gen III and III+ reactors are
simpler in design
designed to last for at least 60 years
employ safety features that take into account lessons learned from the Three Mile Island and Fukushima accidents.
This last point – enhanced reactor safety features – warrants additional discussion.
Acting Less, Doing More – Passive Safety Systems
Reactors generate heat, and it must be removed, even from a shutdown reactor, to prevent the core from melting. Gen II reactors accomplish this by running reactor coolant pumps powered by the grid, emergency diesel generators, or other means. Fukushima demonstrated that any power source could be lost if things go bad; Gen III and III+ reactors have passive safety features that can help out when needed.
For example, when water warms, it becomes less dense and rises, allowing denser and cooler water to flow in to replace it. Hot water rises into a heat exchanger where it transfers heat into the atmosphere or water in a cooling pond, the heat sink, after which it’s dense enough to sink into the core once more…this is called natural circulation. Another form of passive cooling is to have a large water tank situated at a higher level than the reactor core; in the event of a leak or loss of power, the water in the tank (or pond) simply flows through the core due to gravity.
Another safety feature of many Gen III and III+ reactors is a “core catcher” that’s there in case the emergency cooling system runs out of water or otherwise fails to operate correctly. Suppose a loss of cooling causes the core to heat to the point of melting. In that case, the molten materials (called “corium” by some) will fall or flow into the core catcher instead of melting through the bottom of the reactor vessel and onto the floor of the containment building. This helps to protect the integrity of the containment structure, reducing the risk that large quantities of radioactivity will be released into the environment. The idea is to not rely on the operators to take the correct action (or, indeed, to take any actions). According to nuclear engineer James Mahaffey in his book Atomic Accidents, a number of nuclear reactor accidents would have been less severe or averted altogether had the operators simply sat on their hands and relied on the automatic systems – this suggests that including passive cooling systems that require neither electricity nor actions by reactor operators is a good thing!
Both Vogtle reactors will add over 2200 MW of carbon-free electricity to the grid when online. Generating this energy using natural gas would pump more than 7,700 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere yearly; fuel oil and coal are twice as bad. Over the half-century, they’re expected to be operational, that’s nearly 400,000 tons of carbon dioxide that will not be produced because these two reactors went online. That’s not bad.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2023/06/20/us-nuclear-reactors-firing-vogtle-3-and-4-17149
***********************************************Wrong, USA Today and Other Media, U.S. States Haven’t Set New High Temperature Records This Summer
USA Today followed the lead of several other mainstream media outlets claiming that during a recent summer heatwave in early July that the world, along with several U.S. states, have set new all time high temperature records. This is false. Although it has been hot, had the outlets bothered to check the historical records they would find none of the high temperatures hit in the states mentioned in recent days approached their historic highs.
The USA Today story, “Heat record after heat record will be broken in 2023. Here’s how to make sense of it all,” claims that all time high temperature records were broken in Florida, Arizona, and Texas. These claims mirror similar claims made by other media outlets, for instance, The Guardian and Axios.
“The Earth’s unofficial average temperature broke records last week,” wrote USA Today. “Daily high temperatures broke records in South Florida and Arizona. A Texas heat dome broke records in June and it was the planet’s warmest June on record.”
As has been discussed by numerous other analysts, here, here, and at Climate Realism, here, for instance, claims that the Earth set all-time temperature records last week were based on flawed computer model “reanalyses,” not hard data recorded by satellites, weather balloons, and surface stations. Computer models consistently project much hotter temperatures than those actually recorded.
Indeed, despite the headline grabbing attention given to the asserted record setting global temperatures, when USA Today asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about the record setting claims, the agency said surface temperature data did not confirm that global high temperatures were broken in early July.
Although high temperatures for particular dates may have been broken in some cities in the states discussed in the last week, there is no evidence that long-term climate change is to blame for a single date’s or week’s spike in temperatures, especially when there are more likely causes for the recorded temperatures.
The earth has recently entered an El Nino phase, a natural weather pattern, that the National Weather Service points out causes a widespread increase in surface temperatures. In addition, the Atlantic Ocean is simultaneously experiencing a period of extremely low North Atlantic Oscillation, which also drives warmer sea surface temperatures.
Also, each of the cities or areas where it is claimed records were broken have temperature stations badly compromised by the urban heat island effect (UHI). Tremendous population growth has occurred in the locations discussed in the various stories since the previous records were set. For example, San Angelo, Texas was among the areas that the media is reporting broke its all-time high for a date in early July, with a temperature of 114?, breaking the previous record of 111?, set first in 1933 and tied repeatedly since then, in 1943, 1944, and 1960 (the latter three years during a time when the Earth was cooling modestly). What the stories neglect to mention, however, is that since the prior record was set and tied, San Angelo has grown substantially, with more attendant artificial heat sources. From the early 1930s to the present San Angelo’s population has grown approximately 294 percent, and since 1960, the last time the previous temperature record was tied, San Angelo’s population has grown more than 69 percent.
It is worth remembering that Texas’s all-time record high temperature, of 120? was recorded in two locations both with populations then and now of fewer than 10,000 people: Seymour in 1933 and Monhans in 1994. Both locations have a fraction of the population of San Angelo. San Angelo’s recent high doesn’t seem that dramatic in context.
Population has grown even faster and is much larger in Florida and Arizona, two of the nation’s fastest growing states. For example, whereas USA Today vaguely references daily high temperature records being set in Arizona, The Guardian gives some details, pointing out that Phoenix may have tied it second hottest day on record of 121?, a record set in 1995. Yet, since 1990 Phoenix’s population has increased more than 67 percent. For Arizona as a whole, the current high temperature record, of 128?, was set in 1994 at Lake Havasu City. In 1990, Lake Havasu City’s population was just 2.5 percent of Phoenix’s and despite more than doubling in size since then it is still only 3.4 percent of Phoenix’s size. In sparsely populated Lake Havasu City, it is exceedingly unlikely that the UHI compromised Arizona’s all-time high temperature record. By contrast the UHI almost certainly factored into Phoenix’s recent non-record setting but high temperature readings.
And as for Florida, its record temperature for heat, 109?, was set more than 90 years of global warming ago on June 29, 1931 in Monticello, then under 2000 people. That’s 19 degrees above the temperatures in Daytona Beach in early June that USA Today expressed such concern about.
Have and will some high temperature records be set this summer? Almost certainly. It’s almost always the case that during the summer new temperature records are set somewhere, on some date. This will be especially likely this year with the combination of existing oceanic circulation patterns in place. However, because there is no long-term trend in an increasing number of heatwaves or in consistently record setting temperatures, climate change cannot be blamed for any new records.
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We Must Remove All Barriers to Oil and Gas Pipelines
The world liquefied natural gas (LNG) market has changed significantly since the first LNG ship carried cargoes from Louisiana to the UK, proving the feasibility of transoceanic LNG transport in 1959. This change has been even more significant in the U.S.. Over the years, we have been both an importer and an exporter of LNG, albeit more of a net importer until recently. Today, the U.S. is a major exporter in global markets thanks to an abundance of natural gas supply, brought about by advancements in fracking technologies.
If these changes are evaluated in a bubble, it is a success story for the U.S. energy industry and the nation. After all, being energy independent – or at least a net energy exporter – is one of the most important things for national security, as we have seen recently with the impacts of Russia and Ukraine war. And that independence can have bigger implications: according to CSIS experts, “Energy security in Europe – and globally – now rests on U.S. natural gas exports.”
Despite the strategic importance of U.S. natural gas in global markets, the domestic discourse around the issue has been less than celebratory. The discussion among policymakers revolves around two big issues: potential price impacts on U.S. consumers of increased LNG exports and the impact of increased production on climate change.
Price impacts became a big concern since the onset of the Ukraine-Russia war disrupted global energy markets significantly, creating short-term price spikes. Opponents of U.S. LNG exports claim that any increase in the U.S. supply to global markets could limit the amount for the domestic consumption and could have negative impacts for both residential and industrial users of natural gas. This argument is not new and over the years research, including research conducted or commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, has shown that the U.S. has ample supply and that price impacts would be small since the export supply would come from the increased domestic production.
But given the significant change in the dynamics of the global energy markets, we asked NERA Economic Consulting, who conducted similar studies in 2012 and 2018, to revisit the potential implications of increased U.S. LNG exports on prices. NERA considered various increased demand scenarios, such as increased U.S. demand or European supply diversification. The results of the study showed that price impacts were small, ranging from 5 to 10 cents per MMBtu in 2025, validating the results of prior studies.
We went one step further and asked NERA to evaluate how the access to natural gas, in the form of extended pipelines, might change these price dynamics and that is where we got interesting results: building adequate pipeline infrastructure lowers prices by about 10%, or 25 cents per MMBtu in 2025, under all scenarios and between 25 and 40 cents per MMBtu in 2035. These results also underline the importance of recent calls to reform the permitting process, which is key to the expansion of energy infrastructure in the U.S. Conclusions show that U.S. policymakers should be rooting for energy infrastructure development rather than blocking energy exports if their main concern is U.S. consumers.
Assuming existing studies answer the price question, how about climate change? According to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel operations “generate over one third of all methane emissions from human activity.” The Environmental Protection Agency shows that gas production was responsible for 41% of the methane emissions in 2020. Even the industry’s main association lists methane emission reduction as one of their top priorities and voices their support for cost effective policies and direct regulation of methane for new and existing sources across the supply chain. Global consumers and investors are also demanding cleaner gas.
However, recent global developments have highlighted the integral role of natural gas in energy markets, and simply replacing or blocking its development is not in the cards in the short- and medium-term. During this past winter, many European and Asian countries resorted to coal, which has a significantly more damaging environmental impact. Given the growing role of natural gas globally, industry needs a public-private partnership to address methane emissions – the Achilles heel of natural gas. Increased efforts to address the problem are already underway in the U.S. In addition to private sector efforts to deal with methane emissions, the U.S. Department of Energy recently announced nearly $47 million in funding for 22 research projects to develop new and innovative measurement, monitoring, and mitigation technologies. Government funding of new technologies as it did with carbon capture and storage technology, could help significantly reduce methane emissions from natural gas production.
The U.S. has an ample supply of natural gas, that could help both domestic and international markets. We should work on providing access to this low-cost energy to U.S. consumers through expanded pipelines and create a system that encourages adoption of cleaner development of this resource.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2023/07/we-must-remove-all-barriers-to-oil-and-gas-pipelines/
*************************************************Australian trial of seaweed cow feed fails to achieve hoped-for methane cuts
One of the world’s longest commercial trials of a seaweed supplement that the global meat industry hopes could slash methane from beef cattle has recorded much lower reductions in the potent greenhouse gas than previous studies.
Putting the supplement into the diets of 40 wagyu cattle in an Australian feedlot for 300 days cut the methane they produced by 28%.
The supplement was derived from the red seaweed species Asparagopsis, which has been widely promoted as being able to cut methane by more than 80%, with some experiments suggesting reductions as high as 96%.
Globally, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, methane from burping cattle – known as enteric emissions – releases about 2.1bn tonnes of CO2-equivalent a year, compared with the 37.5bn tonnes of CO2 from burning fossil fuels.
But because methane is about 80 times more potent than CO2 at warming the planet over a 20-year period, cutting methane is seen as a way to slow global heating faster.
The trial, reported by the red meat industry’s marketing and research group Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA), also found animals given the supplement ate less food and weighed 15kg less by the time they were sent for slaughter.
Dr Fran Cowley, a livestock scientist at the University of New England who led the trial, said it was the longest run so far using the red seaweed.
She said more research was needed to understand why the wagyu in the trial had not delivered the same level of emissions reductions as other experiments.
One factor could be the way the methane was measured in the trial, which used an open-air system in a feedlot compared with animals measured in dedicated indoor chambers.
But the trial report noted that other experiments over shorter timeframes using the same open-air measurement technique had recorded higher methane reductions.
“This was the biggest and longest trial so far and [the supplement] has not performed to the levels seen in the headlines people might have picked up. But that doesn’t mean it can’t,” Cowley said.
Cowley said she thought cuts of 90% “in the real world” were possible but there would also be economic factors that commercial producers would have to take, such as factoring in the cost of the supplement against the market benefits of methane reductions.
The seaweed was mixed in canola oil and added to the animals’ feed. In this trial it was given to the animals at slightly lower concentrations than other experiments that showed much higher methane reductions.
Cowley said it was also not clear why the animals on the supplement ate less food and put on weight more slowly.
Accounting for the extra 35 days the animals would have taken to reach the same weight would have theoretically meant the emissions savings were cut from 28% to 19% as they would have been alive for longer, all the time emitting methane.
Wagyu is considered a higher-end and more expensive beef. The trial found the seaweed supplement had no effect on the meat’s properties, including flavour.
Dr Rob Kinley is a pioneer of the Asparagopsis supplement and the chief scientist at FutureFeed – the Australian company that holds the intellectual property for its use globally as a livestock feed supplement.
He said it was not surprising the trial had seen lower results given the differences across breeds, measuring techniques, diets of the animals and the amount of supplement given to the animals.
But Kinley said it should be celebrated that the supplement was able to cut methane over such a long period and is confident other trials would deliver far higher reductions.
“The golden lining is even though it was just under 30% emissions reduction, it stayed that way for 275 days – it hardly faltered at all and I was impressed by that,” he said.
The Australian government funds a $29m research program to test different methane-reducing livestock supplements, including red seaweed.
The latest trial was financially backed by the country’s biggest beef producer, the Australian Agricultural Company (AACo), which helped run the trial and provided the animals.
The AACo chief executive, David Harris, said the company had anticipated bigger methane cuts but “reducing emissions by almost 30% is still significant”.
“There is no silver bullet to eliminating enteric methane emissions, but we’ll keep trying and we’ll discover how to make it work in our environment,” he said. “The important thing is that we are determined to get there.”
Most trials of methane-reducing supplements report emissions reductions only while animals are in the feedlot. Only 12%-15% of AACo’s emissions occur while the animals are in a feedlot.
An MLA spokesperson said: “Each time a new research project concludes, it places another piece into the puzzle, helping us understand the various products that might incorporate Asparagopsis and also helps us to understand further questions that need to be answered.”
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12 July, 2023
Climate change threatens to cause 'synchronised harvest failures' across the globe, with implications for Australia's food security
What rubbish! Crops are positively influenced both by warming and high levels of CO2. Global warming would produce MORE food worldwide
New research shows scientists have underestimated the climate risk to agriculture and global food production. Blind spots in climate models meant “high-impact but deeply-uncertain hazards” were ignored. But now that the threat of “synchronised harvest failures” has been revealed, we cannot ignore the prospect of global famine.
Climate change models for North America and Europe had previously suggested global warming would increase crop yields in the short term. Those regional increases were expected to buffer losses elsewhere in global food supply.
But new evidence suggests climate-related changes to fast flowing winds in the upper atmosphere (the jet stream) could trigger simultaneous extreme weather events in multiple locations, with serious implications for global food security.
I have been examining opportunities to manage agricultural risk for 25 years. Much of that work involves learning how agricultural systems can be made more resilient, not only to climate change but to all shocks. This involves understanding the latest science as well as working with farmers and decision-makers to make appropriate adjustments. As the evidence on climate risk mounts, it’s clear Australia must urgently adapt and rethink our approach to global trade and food security.
Building resilience to shocks
Unfortunately, the global food system is not resilient to shocks at the moment. Only a few countries such as Australia, the US, Canada, Russia and those in the European Union produce large food surpluses for international trade. Many other countries are dependent on imports for food security.
So, if production declines rapidly and simultaneously across big exporting countries, supply will decrease and prices will increase. Many more people will struggle to afford food.
The prospect of such synchronised harvest failures across major crop-producing regions emerges during northern hemisphere summers featuring “meandering” jet streams. When the path of these fast flowing winds in the upper atmosphere shifts in a certain way, the likelihood of extreme events such as droughts or floods increases.
The researchers studied five key crop regions that account for a large part of global maize and wheat production. They compared historical events and weather to modelling. Yield losses were mostly underestimated in standard climate models, exposing “high-impact blind spots”. They conclude that their research “manifests the urgency of rapid emission reductions, lest climate extremes and their complex interactions […] become unmanageable”.
Free trade or food sovereignty
Australia has been a big advocate for free trade, reducing barriers to trade such as tariffs and quotas. But the new research revealing the climate risk to food security should trigger a change in policy.
We have already experienced the limitations of an over-reliance on trade to access food. The system has wobbled during the COVID pandemic and the global financial crisis of 2008, when millions of people were thrown back into food insecurity and poverty.
Encouraging free trade in agriculture has not significantly improved global food security. In 1995, the World Trade Organisation implemented the Agreement on Agriculture to liberalise agricultural trade. That agreement constrained the ability of national governments to protect their agricultural industries, and many more people have become food insecure since its introduction.
Australia needs to reconsider its short-term focus on the advantages of selling goods internationally. Conceptualising food more as a human right than a commodity might initiate such a shift.
The global poor do not have the buying power to influence market demand and increase food supply for their benefit. As they face hardship, many are becoming angry, sparking conflict and undermining food security further.
The long-term goal needs to be a global food system that will be resilient to shocks, including climate change. Trade policy may need to respond by allowing governments to prioritise sovereign food security in a world dominated by risk.
Prior to the COVID pandemic, the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics was spruiking the nation’s food security. But it isn’t that simple. Even though there has been a lot of food available across Australia since early 2020, access has declined. Local food insecurity increased as the pandemic disrupted supply chains, with rising poverty on one hand and inflation on the other.
Climate change risks are likely to dwarf the impacts of COVID on Australian food systems.
Australian agriculture is highly exposed to climate change because rainfall and temperatures are so strongly influenced by El Niño. The drying phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation is expected to strengthen with climate change.
As atmospheric circulation changes, global weather patterns are shifting towards the poles. This is partly why early modelling of climate change in the cold-constrained agricultural systems of North America projected production would increase with global warming. But not anymore.
In Australia, modelling has rarely suggested the country would benefit from climate change. The Murray-Darling Basin, the heart of the nation’s food bowl, is expected to suffer warming, drying, reduced streamflow and more extreme events.
Australian agriculture is also highly sensitive to climate shocks because it is mostly rainfed – literally dependent on water that falls from the sky. Projected increases in droughts, evaporation and reduced average rainfall are going to challenge production systems.
Recent floods have also had shown how extreme weather events can have widespread impacts on agriculture and food prices. La Niña “rain bombs” (flash flooding from short duration, heavy rainfall events) damaged oranges and mandarin crops in 2022, downgrading produce.
To reduce the risk we need to adapt. Until recently, it was only rising land prices that enabled many Australian agribusinesses to remain viable for long periods of poor terms of trade.
Australian agriculture’s ability to withstand shocks relies on a range of structural factors that need more recognition, including:
our research and development capacity, which has been eroding with stagnant public investment
the sustainable management of key resources, such as the waters of the Murray-Darling and high-quality agricultural land, both of which we have struggled to protect
the resilience of farming communities, even though many are lacking key services and support.
Australia is fortunate to be one of the few countries that produces more food than it needs, but it has other responsibilities towards global food security. Policy will need to respond to the new understanding of how food security will be affected by climate change.
There are a number of ways Australia could respond to the new evidence. To drive that change, there needs to be a new level of awareness of the true extent of the risks to agriculture.
On a global scale, governments may need to rethink their strong advocacy for food trade liberalisation.
Locally, Australia will need to invest in adaptation to ensure that agriculture, and our food systems more broadly, are resilient to the gathering storm, because this one will be like nothing we have ever seen.
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America Faces Chronic Electricity Shortages in Push for Renewable Energy
Whether you live in the summer-scorched South, the winter-frozen North or along one of our nation’s coasts, electricity is central to your life. Yet the Biden administration—ignoring reality—continues to push policies forcing the shutdown of coal-burning power plants before reliable replacement power from renewable energy becomes available.
From the heating, cooling and lighting of homes and businesses to powering the production and operation of our economy, Americans would be immeasurably poorer and less healthy without uninterrupted connection to the electrical grid. How that electricity is best generated has been transformed from a question involving engineering and economics to one hinging on politics and the competing interests of powerful pressure groups, especially the “green” lobby and fossil-fuel industry.
Looming electricity shortages are not a climate-change denier’s doomsday scenario. If we see a repeat of last summer’s heat waves, as Texas has been experiencing, and people fail to heed warnings to conserve power, peak electricity demand in more than half of the country will outstrip available supplies. The risk of winter power shortages is even more worrisome, since many homeowners could be left freezing in the dark.
Electricity reserves in the mid-Atlantic, Midwest, West and Central states from Texas to the Dakotas are far less than adequate, according to the North American Electricity Reliability Corp. (NERC). Reserves are dropping because coal, gas and nuclear power plants are being retired faster than they’re being replaced. As a result, “the system is closer to the edge,” John Moura, NERC’s director of reliability assessment, said recently.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has warned of dire consequences from the accelerating loss of baseload capacity. Appearing recently before the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee, headed by Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., FERC Commissioner Mark Christie said “the United States is heading for a reliability crisis. I do not use the term ‘crisis’ for melodrama, but because it is an accurate description of what we are facing.”
Christie said the core problem is that too many available generating resources—coal, natural gas and nuclear plants—are being mothballed too quickly, threatening utilities’ ability to keep the lights on. Last December during a frigid winter storm, coal, natural gas and fuel oil provided 94% of the additional power consumed when demand peaked.
Yet even as FERC was warning that the country is at elevated risk of blackouts in the months ahead, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency exacerbated the problem by issuing new power-plant emissions standards that, in effect, will dismantle baseload coal and natural gas capacity by 2030, undermining the grid just as the administration ramps up its vision of an all-electric, all-renewable future.
How much electricity will be required? The projections are stunning, showing that switching industrial processes to run on clean electricity supplied by solar and wind farms—so-called “electrification”—could increase annual electricity demand by 6,000 to 10,000 terawatt hours. Just 1 terawatt hour, according to Duke Energy, is enough power to “light over 1 million homes for a year.” The 6,000 to 10,000 that would be needed is, at a minimum, about 50% more than today’s total national electricity demand (4,300 terawatt hours).
Another problem is that adding solar and wind power to the nation’s electricity system requires modernizing the grid, an extremely slow and costly undertaking. According to FERC, just 552 miles of new high-voltage electric transmission lines, which minimize distance-related power losses, were added in the first 11 months of 2022. That’s less than half the previous year, and far below what is needed to accelerate the move to solar and wind power.
PJM’s grid, the nation’s largest, supplying electricity to 65 million people from Delaware to Illinois, is a case in point. Annual spending on power transmission in the PJM region (most of it low-voltage) has increased 14% since 2014, but the bulk of it has gone to maintaining existing lines. Spending on new transmission infrastructure fell 67% in the same period.
The threat of brownouts and blackouts squashes the idea that solar and wind power can replace fossil fuels fully anytime soon, if ever. Coal continues to play a vital role in many states and communities, providing energy security and ramping up supply during periods of surging demand. We can’t walk away from baseload coal generation if we are going to produce the large amounts of power required for electrification in the years ahead.
The Biden administration sees climate change as an existential threat. But it’s pushing the United States down a dangerous path that risks chronic electricity shortages in much of the nation.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14605&omhide=true&trk=rm
*****************************************************Unsold electric cars are piling up on dealer lots
The auto industry is beginning to crank out more electric vehicles (EVs) to challenge Tesla, but there's one big problem: not enough buyers.
Why it matters: The growing mismatch between EV supply and demand is a sign that even though consumers are showing more interest in EVs, they're still wary about purchasing one because of price or charging concerns.
It's a "Field of Dreams" moment for automakers making big bets on electrification — they've built the cars, and now they're waiting for buyers to come, says Jonathan Gregory, senior manager of economic and industry insights at Cox Automotive.
Driving the news: Cox Automotive experts highlighted the swelling EV inventories during a recent midyear industry review for journalists and industry stakeholders.
EV sales, which account for about 6.5% of the U.S. auto market so far this year, are expected to surpass 1 million units for the first time in 2023, Cox forecasts.
A Cox survey found that 51% of consumers are now considering either a new or used EV, up from 38% in 2021.
Tesla’s rapid expansion, plus new EVs from other brands, are fueling the interest — 33 new models are arriving this year, and more than 50 new or updated models are coming in 2024, Cox estimates.
Yes, but: Sales aren't keeping up with that increased output.
Details: The nationwide supply of EVs in stock has swelled nearly 350% this year, to more than 92,000 units.
That's a 92-day supply — roughly three months' worth of EVs, and nearly twice the industry average.
For comparison, dealers have a relatively low 54 days' worth of gasoline-powered vehicles in inventory as they rebound from pandemic-related supply chain interruptions.
In normal times, there's usually a 70-day supply.
Notably, Cox's inventory data doesn't include Tesla, which sells direct to consumers.
Genesis, the Korean luxury brand, sold only 18 of its nearly $82,000 Electrified G80 sedans in the 30 days leading up to June 29, and had 210 in stock nationwide — a 350-day supply, per Cox research.
Other luxury models, like Audi's Q4 e-tron and Q8 e-tron and the GMC Hummer EV SUV, also have bloated inventories well above 100 days. All come with hefty price tags that make them ineligible for federal tax credits.
Imported models like the Kia EV6, Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Nissan Ariya are also stacking up — likely because they're not eligible for tax credits either.
Tesla's price-cutting strategy could be taking a toll, too: The once-hot Ford Mustang Mach-E now has a 117-day supply. Ford says that's the result of ramped-up production in anticipation of stronger third-quarter sales.
The intrigue: Hybrid vehicles have much lower inventory levels, supporting Toyota's argument that consumers want a stepping stone to fully electric cars.
There's a relatively tight 44-day supply of hybrids industrywide, according to Cox.
Toyotas are in particularly short supply — under 30 days each for Prius and RAV4 hybrids and plug-in hybrids.
Of note: Toyota's only fully electric model, the Bz4X, has a 101-day supply.
While Toyota recently announced a 3-row electric SUV and new battery technology that could double the range of future EVs, it's sticking with a mix of hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and pure EVs for the foreseeable future.
What to watch: More charging infrastructure is coming, and EV prices should reach parity with gasoline vehicles around 2025, according to Bank of America Securities auto analyst John Murphy.
Until then, automakers will be left waiting for EV buyers to show up.
https://www.axios.com/2023/07/10/unsold-electric-cars-are-piling-up-on-dealer-lots ?
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Climate Models Come With ‘Dangerous’ CO2 Warming Baked In, Code Review Finds
In November 2021, one of the main programmers of the NASA climate model Gavin Schmidt told readers of the Spectator that the track record of models going back to the 1970s, “shows they have skilfully predicted the trends of the past decades”.
Now that laughter has finally subsided, we have an expert analysis of NASA’s GISS Model E with its 441,668 lines of pre-historic (circa 1983) FORTRAN code. With water that doesn’t freeze and “negative” cloud cover, it is said that the claim the model is ‘physics-based’ is a term used in the same way that Hollywood producers say a movie is ‘based on a true story’.
The detailed examination has been written by the experienced computer programmer Willis Eschenbach and his paper Climate Models and Climate Muddles has been published by Net Zero Watch (NZW). Andrew Montford of NZW discussed the paper in a recent edition of the Daily Sceptic, noting that climate models are at the centre of the global warming scare and back all the weather alarms promoting the collectivist Net Zero project. But what if the climate models were all junk, he asked. Somewhat alarmingly, Eschenbach’s work shows “this is indeed the case”.
Eschenbach argues that the current crop of computer climate models are far from being fit to be used to decide public policy. To verify this, he says, you only need to look at the endless string of bad, failed, crashed-and-burned predictions they have produced. Pay them no attention, he cautions. “Their main use is to add false legitimacy to the unrealistic fears of the programmers.” If you write a model under the working assumption that carbon dioxide controls the temperature, then guess what you’ll get.
According to Eschenbach, climate models have a hard time replicating the amazing stability of the climate system. They are ‘iterative’ models, meaning the output of one timestep is used as the input for the next. As a result any errors are carried over, making it easy for models to spiral the Earth into fire and snow balls. NASA gets around polar water refusing to freeze and ‘negative’ amounts of cloud forming (what do minus-two clouds look like?) during model runs by replacing bad values with corresponding maximum or minimum values. “Science at its finest,” comments Eschenbach. He notes that he is not picking on just NASA. The same issues, to a greater or lesser extent, exist within all complex iterative models. “I’m simply pointing out that these are not ‘physics-based’ – they are propped up and fenced in to keep them from crashing,” he observes.
This is the graph produced by Professor Nicola Scafetta plotting 38 of the major climate models showing their temperature predictions set against the thick green line of the actual satellite record.
As can be seen, the predictions started to go haywire 25 years ago, just as the global warming fright started to gain political traction. In his Spectator article, Gavin Schmidt, a one- time ‘fact checker’ of the Daily Sceptic, noted that most outcomes depend on the overall trend and not the “fine details of any given model”. In fact the record shown above seems to back up Eschenbach’s view that all a computer model can do is “make visible and glorify the understandings and, more importantly, the misunderstandings of the programmers”.
The case against relying on computer models to back an insane global de-industrialisation campaign grows by the day. The latest nonsense, peddled by the BBC among many media outlets, is that a world’s hottest day temperature record was broken three times last week. As climate journalist Paul Homewood noted, the idea that global temperatures could shoot up by 0.22°C in just three days is physically impossible. The entire propaganda exercise is the product of computer modelling – any reader of Eschenbach’s diligent work might not be surprised to discover.
There is a great deal of excitement in alarmist circles about a new El Niño weather oscillation that is starting to brew and might come to the rescue with a little extra heat. Hence all the recent useful-idiot coverage of ‘boiling oceans’ and record heat days. Any El Niño warming will of course be entirely natural but, cynics might note, it will alleviate the need for surface datasets to make yet more upward retrospective adjustments. The dramatic effect of El Niños can be seen in the latest anomaly data from the accurate satellite temperature record.
The two high points shown in 1998 and 2016 were both very powerful El Niño years that pushed global temperatures up. If one takes the high point of 1998, a case can be made that global warming ran out of steam at this point. It is of course just one year, but it was 25 years ago and temperatures have only twice passed this peak since – in the dramatic El Niño of 2016. A small amount of warming can be discerned since, but hardly enough to justify the worldwide panic caused by manufactured climate models and heavily adjusted surface temperature data.
The widespread use of Armageddon model predictions was highlighted recently by research from Clintel. It showed that 42% of the gloomy forecasts made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on climate model scenarios that even the UN body admits are of “low likelihood”. They assume temperature rises of up to 5°C within less than 80 years. Almost nobody now believes the scenarios are remotely plausible. Yet it has been shown that around half the impacts and forecasts across the entire scientific literature are based on them. It is a fair bet that almost 100% of the increasingly hysterical climate headlines found across mainstream media are corrupted by these fantastical notions.
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11 July, 2023
Matt Ridley: I'll be buying a brand new petrol car just before the 2030 ban
Britain’s electric vehicle transition and the ban on petrol car sales from 2030 are a slow-motion car crash. The technology is not ready, the cost will be vast, the logistics are forbidding, the reliance on China is worrying and the backlash from the public is likely to be harsh.
Worst of all, the benefits are derisory at best and may not even exist.
Yes, you read that right. It is possible that we could replace all of Britain’s cars and vans with electric vehicles and still find that carbon dioxide emissions are higher, not lower. Cost-benefit, hello?
First, though, consider the politics. Most electric-car batteries are being made in China and its hold on the market is growing thanks to huge investment in lithium and other minerals, low labour costs and a cheap, coal-fired grid. Chinese company BYD overtook Tesla as the biggest manufacturer of electric vehicles last year and, in a truly sinister development, has just agreed with Tesla to jointly promote ‘core socialist values’ while dominating the market and apparently fixing prices.
Switching transport to electric in a short timescale will inevitably mean buying Chinese. Are we really about to force ourselves to become even more reliant on a totalitarian regime that stamps out freedom in Hong Kong, commits genocide against the Uighurs, threatens war on Taiwan and refuses to be transparent about how a pandemic began near its leading virus laboratory?
To wean ourselves off China over the next seven years would require 100 times as much battery capacity as we have now, which is neither affordable nor feasible. To lure battery-makers to the UK, despite our sky-high energy prices (caused by the massive investment in wind power and the refusal to tap shale gas), the Government is having to throw armfuls of taxpayers’ money at battery and car manufacturers.
Britishvolt failed to build its ‘Gigafactory’ in Blyth for lack of taxpayer subsidies.
Lord (Zac) Goldsmith thinks we are falling behind in the race to subsidise ‘green’ energy. Yet handouts rarely make industries competitive. If America and the European Union want to spend a fortune trying — and probably failing — to catch up with the Chinese, why should we join in?
But don’t expect industry bosses to tell you the truth about the impossibility of this transition. Huge taxpayer subsidies to force consumers to switch products are just what they love, whether the plan makes sense or not.
To paraphrase Gulliver’s Travels, if you asked Rolls-Royce or Tata to devise a plan to make sunbeams from cucumbers, they would have a jolly good crack at it — and only tell you it was impossible after spending a couple of billion pounds of your money.
This raises the question: why are we doing this again? We’re deliberately killing a profitable British car industry for minimal benefit to please a few posh activists and crony capitalists.
There is no sign of ordinary people demanding this transition. Electric cars still cost almost double their petrol equivalent.
So, just as producers need taxpayer subsidies to supply electric cars, consumers need subsidies to buy them. An industry dependent on taxpayer support at both ends of the chain is not sustainable.
Nor can Britain’s electricity infrastructure be adapted easily or quickly to cope with the extra demand implied by the transition — without further subsidies.
Just to supply the extra electricity for a fully electric fleet would mean a near-doubling of the number of wind farms (plus necessary gas-fired back-up), or an equivalent new supply from nuclear, a technology that takes decades to build.
Then there’s the practicality of distributing that energy. On our current grid, people are struggling to get fast chargers installed at home because of lack of capacity in the wires and transformers. That will only get worse as that capacity is taken up with demand from heat pumps.
So, unless the Government throws yet more money at upgrading the network, after 2030 we will be faced with five-hour recharge times, compared with five-minute petrol or diesel refuels today.
As Andrew Montford of Net Zero Watch argues, upgrading the distribution grid on these timescales is impossible, so meeting the target will mean many people will be forced to forgo a car entirely.
These are practical reasons why the transition cannot and won’t happen. But would it even help if it did? Let’s do a simple sum. Suppose the UK does manage to shift all cars and vans to electric in the 2030s, banning petrol and diesel cars as it does so. Cars and vans generate about 70 per cent of transport emissions and transport is 25 per cent of all emissions.
Meanwhile, an optimistic estimate of the emissions savings of electric cars over petrol or diesel is 25 per cent per vehicle and the UK generates 1 per cent of worldwide emissions, then that means we will have reduced global emissions of carbon dioxide by — wait for it — [0.7 x 0.25 x 0.25 x 0.01 = 0.0004375 or] 0.044 per cent.
Less than one half of one tenth of one per cent. You would probably have more effect on the climate if you dropped a couple of ice cubes in the Thames once a week.
And that’s the best we can hope for. In reality the effect will be even smaller. The notion that switching from petrol to electric saves 25 per cent of emissions is, as I say, optimistic, perhaps wildly so. In fact, the number may actually be negative.
Here’s why. First, it requires a lot more carbon dioxide emissions in a lot of extractive industries to make an electric car than a petrol car. This is especially true for the battery.
As Mark Mills, an energy expert with the Manhattan Institute, explained in a recent article: ‘To match the energy stored in one pound of crude oil [from which petrol and diesel are produced] requires 15 pounds of lithium battery, which entails digging up about 7,000 pounds of rock and dirt to get the minerals needed — lithium, graphite, copper, nickel, aluminium, zinc, neodymium, manganese and so on.
‘Thus, fabricating a typical single half-ton EV battery requires mining and processing about 250 tons of materials.’
That requires a lot of diesel and electricity.
So there’s a huge up-front emissions disadvantage before an electric car even takes to the road. As Professor of Engineering Science at Oxford University Gautam Kalghatgi calculates, an electric car with a 60 kWh battery will start with a deficit of 7.5 tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, before it has driven a single mile.
Even when running, an electric vehicle is not ‘zero-emission’ because Britain’s electric grid is powered by gas (which emits some carbon dioxide) and wind turbines (whose manufacture requires a lot of coal and which get replaced every 20 or 30 years). Even nuclear has a carbon footprint (all that concrete and steel), though it’s much the smallest.
Take all that into account and you can calculate how many miles an electric car has to drive before it has ‘broken even’ with a petrol car on emissions.
Many estimates of this number are not worth the paper they are written on, because they make absurdly unrealistic assumptions about the size of battery needed, the scale of the up-front emissions and other factors.
But some are a bit better. Volkswagen compared a diesel Golf with an electric Golf and estimated that the electric car has to be driven 80,000 miles before its emissions are lower than the diesel car in a typical European country.
In Germany, where the grid still depends partly on coal, it’s more like 125,000 miles. In China, you would never reach break even and electric cars might as well be called coal cars. This emperor has no clothes.
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Green Hydrogen Is No Miracle Solution for Carbon Free Energy
The Daily Caller (DCNF) recently posted an article by contributor John Hugh DeMastri describing significant issues likely to limit the effectiveness of the Biden administration’s plans to invest up to $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to “green hydrogen.” DCNF’s analysis correctly concludes that green hydrogen is expensive and adds complexity to power generation that makes little sense when other fuels are available.
The Department of Energy (DOE) says they will develop green hydrogen infrastructure with a “demand side support mechanism,” which they say will “provide multi-year support for clean hydrogen produced by competitively selected projects,” which are affiliated with the DOE-supported Regional Clean Hydrogen Hubs.
Hydrogen fuel itself is not new, it can be made from natural gas or methane, but “green” hydrogen, as opposed to other methods of generating hydrogen, uses only renewables like wind or solar to convert water into hydrogen for fuel.
In the DCNF article, “Biden’s Billion Dollar Hydrogen Program Makes No ‘Economic Or Common Sense,’ Industry Experts Say,” various energy sector experts explain why, despite the technology’s long existence, it hasn’t found large scale commercial success.
From the post:
The process of manufacturing green hydrogen — known as electrolysis — converts water into hydrogen using renewable power, and the hydrogen it generates is nearly 14 times as expensive as natural gas to generate the same amount of power, Isaac Orr, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment told the DCNF.
While proponents of green hydrogen “envision massive facilities” using electrolysis, such facilities are not cost-effective, Jonathan Lesser, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute studying energy, told the DCNF. In addition, hydrogen is difficult to transport, because it can damage the steel used in existing oil and gas pipelines and has the potential to leak, creating an explosion risk, said Lesser.
Lesser told DCNF that there are no large-scale power plants that use green hydrogen because it is prohibitively expensive, and because hydrogen’s low density means it requires much more storage space than other fuels. In addition, electrolysis requires larges volumes of water.
Lesser is correct. While the calorific value (energy content) of hydrogen is high by mass, it is very low by volume because of the low density of the fuel. In fact, The Engineering Toolbox reports that hydrogen has a gross calorific value of only 341 BTU/ft3, compared to natural gas at 1090 BTU/ft3. In other words, natural gas by volume has three times the energy content of hydrogen.
This is a similar issue with biofuels like ethanol, or wood-pellet biomass, as explained in several Climate Realism posts, here and here, for instance, where their low energy density makes them poor substitutes for fuels like natural gas and coal.
Additionally, the pipeline issue has already become a stumbling block. The extent of existing hydrogen pipelines is limited and existing natural gas pipelines cannot, in their current state, carry hydrogen. The DOE’s Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies office describes a few issues with using existing natural gas pipelines:
Existing pipelines would need to be altered to accommodate widespread hydrogen use. The DOE says that while a mixed gas like methane + hydrogen would require only “modest” modifications, a pure green hydrogen pipeline “may require more substantial modifications.”
For example, since hydrogen is a much smaller molecule than methane, existing pipelines would likely suffer far more leaks carrying pure, pressurized hydrogen. Add that to the fact that hydrogen is highly explosive, and there is an added safety hazard with widespread hydrogen use.
Since hydrogen fuel is already so much more expensive than natural gas to make the same amount of power, these investments would substantially increase energy costs.
DCNF reports in the article that Energy Secretary Granholm said that the hundreds of millions of dollars in investment funds would clear up “market uncertainty” that “too often delays progress” on green hydrogen projects. That is, the government will use tax dollars to make sure it is implemented even though it makes no economic sense and is, in fact, a net economic loss. So much for waiting for demand to motivate green hydrogen adoption, its supply side all the way.
The Biden administration expects green hydrogen will be able to replace natural gas in home use and transportation, as well as provide backup electricity for when solar and wind fail.
Expanding green hydrogen to all those functions is unreasonable, because if land-hungry sources like wind and solar are used to power electrolysis to generate green hydrogen, and hydrogen power is supposed to provide backup electricity for when wind and solar don’t work, there would need to be a massive expansion of wind and solar. Expanding it to every home will require retrofitting the pipes into every home and to every appliance using the fuel.
Climate Realism has described the issues with just expanding wind for electricity generation on its own, here, here, and here, for example. If solar is used for the hydrogen generation, the best regions of the world for solar, like the American Southwest, also happen to be the ones that struggle with water issues, which green hydrogen production would surely exacerbate.
Hydrogen burns clean, with only water as its output, and is already widely used in industrial applications, but when it is made “green” it suffers from high costs, complex infrastructure, and limited usefulness, the same as other green tech. The Biden administration seems to be hoping that subsidizing the technology enough will make the issues disappear. However, like The Daily Caller correctly explains, there are more than just price tag issues holding mass expansion of green hydrogen use back.
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Wrong, Bloomberg, Climate Change is Not ‘Coming for Your Cabernet’
A recent article in Bloomberg, titled “Mother Nature Is Coming for Your Cabernet,” makes the oft-repeated claim that climate change is threatening wine production, in this case, focusing on South Africa. This claim, as always, is false. In reality, wine production in South Africa in particular has done well over the past decades of modest warming, with no sign of any looming disaster.
The writer and senior executive editor at Bloomberg, Timothy L. O’Brien, described a conversation he had with a vintner in South Africa during a recent trip. He notes that winemaking is “just another version of farming” and that it’s “hard, unpredictable work.” This is true. All agricultural production is subject to sometimes unpredictable weather patterns over both short- and long-term time periods. Weather disasters are occurring all around the world at all times, so somewhere, some produce is being impacted. This is not new, and is not indicative of long-term effects from climate change.
O’Brien goes on to declare that climate change may make some of the most famous regions for wine production “inhospitable to grape production.” This statement is protected by the use of the word “may,” but in the context of the article, is clearly meant to be taken seriously. The possibility of major producing regions becoming “inhospitable” amid warming is extremely low, especially since data indicate that despite the last hundred-plus years of warming, grape growing and winemaking have not suffered.
Indeed, the opposite is true, especially for South Africa. The available United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FA0) data on wine production in South Africa show that since FAO records began in 1961 both grape production and wine production have improved. The all-time record for wine production in South Africa occurred in 2014, and the all-time highest grape production was as recent as 2017.
Bad seasons will happen on occasion—they are all but guaranteed to for any agricultural business, but this is nothing new. As explained in almost a dozen previous Climate Realism posts on climate change and wine or grape production, winemakers and wine consumers are usually aware that some growing seasons produce better wines then others, hence the collecting of particular vintages from particular vineyards. It is the overall weather of the growing season that results in those differences from one vintage to the next, and for some wines it is more noticeable than others.
O’Brien made another puzzling comment, that grapes used for wine “require very specific conditions to grow,” and it’s certainly true that each grape variety prefers certain conditions, but the implication that wine all around the world is threatened because conditions may change is more alarmist than accurate. As O’Brien himself points out, major vineyards can be found all around the world in different climates and with different soil conditions, and the kinds of grapes that are selected for each growing region are based on what produces the best product for the region. There is no reason to suspect that vintners will stop selecting the most suitable grapes for their climate.
The owner of the South African vineyard O’Brien visited, Jean Engelbrecht, said that not only can weather patterns impact different regions in unpredictable ways, but nearby vineyards can see different weather as well. O’Brien explains that, while there was drought in South Africa that recently “sideswiped many of Jean’s local competitors,” in Jean’s area, “robust rainfalls plumped some of his recent harvests.”
This in itself indicates that local weather, not long-term climate change, is responsible any difficulties vintners face.
Bloomberg and O’Brien would do well to temper their impulse to attribute every weather-related seasonal, regional crop production decline to climate change, and instead look at the long-term data and trends to verify whether climate change might be playing a role. Concerns about wine and climate change are unsubstantiated by available data, history, and common agricultural knowledge.
https://climaterealism.com/2023/07/wrong-bloomberg-climate-change-is-not-coming-for-your-cabernet/
*************************************************Damaged electric cars ‘quarantined’ over fears they will explode
Electric cars that sustain minor bumps are being kept 15 meters apart in repair yards over fears they might explode, adding to insurance bills.
Government guidelines recommend electric vehicles with damaged batteries should be “quarantined” from other vehicles due to the risk of battery fires. Damaged batteries pose a risk of “thermal runaway” where the energy stored in the battery releases rapidly, creating temperatures of up to 400C.
But the practice threatens to increase costs for the insurance industry by more than £600m, costs which ultimately could be passed onto drivers in increased premiums, according to a report by automotive risk firm Thatcham Research.
It said insurers would need to spend an additional £900m a year on quarantine facilities for damaged cars as a result of the safety measures by 2035, as more battery-powered vehicles take to the roads. The extra costs risk adding £20 a year onto all car insurance premiums, rising to £28 by 2050 when there are expected to be some 360,000 electric cars on the road network.
Just two damaged electric cars can fit into the same space that would otherwise fit 100 petrol or diesel cars, under current the DVLA and Transport Department guidelines.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/insurance/car/damaged-electric-cars-quarantined-fears-explode/
***************************************10 July, 2023
Now scientists say climate change is making us BLIND
The usual shaky logic beolow. Places with warm clmates differ in many ways from places with cool climates. There is no way of knowing if the warmth is the critical influence. The heavier pathogen load in warm climates is an obvious possibility
Climate change may be speeding up the rate of blindness, a study suggests. Canadian researchers compared rates of vision problems among 1.7million people across all 50 states in the US. They found those who lived in warmer regions were up to nearly 50 percent more likely to suffer serious vision impairment compared to those in cooler places.
Exposure to stronger ultraviolet light damages the cornea, lens and retina and also risks irritation and infection.
The experts said the findings were 'very worrying' in the context of global warming, which has seen global average temperatures rise by two fahrenheit (1.1 Celsius) since the late 1800s.
Study co-author Esme Fuller-Thomson, a gerontologist at the University of Toronto, said: 'With climate change, we are expecting a rise in global temperatures. It will be important to monitor if the prevalence of vision impairment among older adults increases in the future.'
Dr Thomson, who is also the director of the University of Toronto's Institute of Life Course Aging, added: 'This link between vision impairment and average county temperature is very worrying, if future research determines that the association is causal.'
The study, published in the journal Ophthalmic Epidemiology, looked at people aged 65 years and up between 2012 and 2017.
For the survey, participants answered the question: 'Is this person blind or does he/she have serious difficulty seeing even when wearing glasses?'
Those who answered 'yes' were considered to have severe vision impairment.
In the paper, conditions patients were likely to have had included cataracts, where the eye's lens becomes cloudy and is one of the leading causes of blindness in the US, glaucoma, when the optic nerve is damaged, and conjunctivitis, or inflammation of the eye lining due to irritation or infection.
Compared to people living in states with an average temperature below 50F like New York and Maine, those in states with temperatures above 60F — Florida, Texas and Georgia — faced the highest risk.
Those who lived in areas with an average annual temperature of 55 to 59.99F — such as Virginia, Kentucky and California — were 24 percent more likely to have vision problems.
People in states with an average temperature of 50 to 54.99F were 14 percent more likely to struggle.
Scientists warned that the study was observational, meaning it could not prove that warmer temperatures were leading to vision problems. They said further research was needed.
But in the paper, the University of Toronto-led team suggested several hypotheses for how warmer weather was raising the risk of vision problems.
One theory suggested that the increased exposure to ultraviolet light from sunlight was leading to more damage to the lens and other sections of the eye, raising the risk of conditions like cataracts.
Higher temperatures could also raise the risk of vision problems by increasing the chance of catching an infectious disease, they said, such as fungal keratitis — when a fungus infects a part of the eye.
Warmer weather also leads to more pollutants in the air, which scientists warn can change the structure of parts of the eye.
In their conclusion, the scientists said: 'If the association is found to be causal, the predicted rise in global temperatures could impact the number of older Americans affected by severe vision impairment and the associated health and economic burden.'
More than 24million Americans are affected by cataracts every year, one of the most common conditions of the eye and the leading cause of blindness in the US.
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Massive phosphate deposit discovery could meet global battery and solar panel demand ‘for next 100 years’
Phosphate is also a major source of fertilizer and Greenies have been going on for decades about an imminent shortage of it. I remember George Carrard moaning about it very superciliously back in the '70s. There have been many discoveries of phosphate since. He is now worried about global warming, predictably
A huge phosphate rock deposit discovered in Norway contains enough minerals to meet the global demand for batteries and solar panels for the next 100 years, according to the mining company that controls it.
Norge Mining said up to 70 billion tonnes of the non-renewable resource may have been uncovered in south-western Norway, alongside deposits of other strategic minerals like titanium and vanadium.
Phosphate rock contains high concentrates of phosphorus, which is a key component for building green technologies but currently faces significant supply issues.
Phosphorus was first discovered in 1669 by German scientist Hennig Brandt, who was searching for the philosopher’s stone. While it proved ineffective in turning ordinary metals into gold, it has become an essential component in lithium-iron phosphate batteries in electric cars, as well as for solar panels and computer chips.
Russia previously controlled the world’s largest ultra-pure phosphate rock deposits, with the European Union warning that these “critical raw materials” have a high supply risk.
The EU is currently almost entirely dependent on imports of phosphate rock from the rest of the world, according to a report from The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, with China, Iraq and Syria also home to large deposits.
The report, which was published before the discovery of the massive Norwegian deposit, warned that the EU should be “concerned about phosphate rock shortages”.
An article in the scientific journal Nature last year warned of imminent supply disruptions of phosphorus, citing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent economic sanctions as a potential cause of market volatility.
The global economy consumes an estimated 50 million tonnes of phosphorus each year, with scientists warning earlier this year that the planet could face a “phosphogeddon” if supply trends continue.
“The buyers’ market is becoming increasingly crowded by limited trade – due to political instability in several source countries, as well as international sanctions imposed on others,” Norge Mining noted in a June blog post. “This is forcing importers to fear an impending crisis.”
Norway’s minister of trade and industry, Jan Christian Vestre, said last month that the government was considering fast-tracking a giant mine in Helleland once analysis is completed on 47 miles of drill cores. If approval is given, the first major mine could begin operation by 2028.
The politician said Norway’s “obligation” was to develop “the world’s most sustainable mineral industry” following the discovery of the minerals.
The mining plans already have the support of the European Raw Materials Alliance, according to local reports, while local consultations continue.
A spokesperson for the European Commission described the discovery as “great news” for meeting the objectives of the Commission’s raw material objectives, with Norge Mining telling Euractiv that the projected 4,500-metre-deep ore body would theoretically be capable of meeting global demand for the next century.
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Report paves way for EU to renew use of Roundup herbicide
The European Food Safety Authority said on Thursday it had not found "any critical areas of concern" preventing the controversial and widely used herbicide glyphosate from being reauthorised for use in the EU.
Environmental groups lashed out at the announcement, saying there was scientific evidence that glyphosate may cause cancer, poison aquatic life and can be fatal to key pollinators like bees.
The European Union agency's long-awaited assessment report noted there were gaps in the data in some areas, and that it had "identified a high long-term risk to mammals in 12 out of 23 proposed uses of glyphosate".
But the EFSA said it only considered a concern "critical" when it affected all proposed uses of the substance, which would prevent it from being renewed.
The study, which was submitted to the European Commission and member states, will serve as a basis for the EU's upcoming decision on whether to renew the use of glyphosate in the bloc for another five years.
The current authorisation runs out on December 15.
The full report, which is expected to be released by the end of the month, is based on some 24,000 studies, as well as responses from 90 experts from member states, the EFSA said.
The agency said that because of a lack of data it had not finalised its risk assessment of glyphosate's impact on aquatic plants.
It also did not give advice on the risks of food consumption, "due to incomplete data about the amount of glyphosate residues in rotational crops such as carrots, lettuce and wheat".
But it added that this was not expected to lead to toxicological safety levels being exceeded, "so no critical concern was identified".
Environmental campaign group Greenpeace reacted with dismay to the news.
"For years the evidence of glyphosate's toxicity for people and the environment has been stacking up but the European Food Safety Authority has once again decided to sweep it under the carpet," said Greenpeace EU pesticides campaigner Eva Corral.
Another campaign group, Corporate Europe Observatory, said the EFSA's advice "is a slap in the face".
"How could EFSA give glyphosate a thumbs-up based on primarily shoddy, corporate-led scientific studies?" the group said.
Glyphosate is the main ingredient in the widely used Roundup weedkiller from US agrochemical firm Monsanto, which was bought by German chemicals giant Bayer in 2018.
Bayer has since faced a wave of lawsuits in the United States over claims that glyphosate causes cancer. The firm denies such claims, but has paid out billions of dollars to settle legal disputes.
The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer said in 2015 that glyphosate was "probably carcinogenic".
France's medical research institute INSERM said in 2021 that glyphosate has a "moderate presumed link" with the cancer non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Despite that, the European Chemicals Agency said last year the available evidence did not justify classifying the substance as a carcinogen.
Bayer welcomed the EFSA's conclusions, saying they laid the foundation for glyphosate's approval to be renewed in the EU.
The EFSA had originally planned to release its study in the second half of 2022, but said it delayed publication due to an "unprecedented" number of comments on the issue.
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The BBC is falling short on its climate protest coverage
According to a YouGov poll this week 64 per cent have an unfavourable view of Just Stop Oil (only 17 per cent have a positive view and the rest aren’t sure). Unfortunately, however, none of these people appear to feature in the contacts books of BBC producers.
The Today programme this morning attempted to have a discussion on the tactics of Just Stop Oil on disrupting sports events such as Wimbledon and Ashes test matches. The whole exercise was somewhat hampered by the fact that the two guests which the BBC saw fit to invite, Chris Packham and Lord Deben, could hardly bring themselves to say a negative word about the pressure group. Rather they both wanted to say that if we didn’t want to see such protests it was down to the government to do more to cease oil production.
On climate change at least the BBC is falling a long, long way short
That anyone might disagree with the immediate cessation of exploration for new oil supplies in the North Sea, for example, didn’t seem to enter into Today’s concept of the spectrum of public opinion. Such a view is treated as if it is beyond the pale, like kicking away the crutches of old ladies.
Nor does the Today programme seem at all keen to represent the view – somewhat common among the general population – that Just Stop Oil are a bunch of privileged, middle class people who feel a sense of entitlement to have their views adopted by society at large, and who will resort to unscientific hysteria about an ‘unliveable Earth’ in order to advance their demands.
Lord Deben was allowed to repeat, entirely unchallenged, the spurious claim made by his Climate Change Committee that achieving Net Zero will cost a mere 1 per cent of gross national product. The Treasury, by contrast, refuses to come up with an estimate, saying that it is impossible to do so, given that many of the technologies required to achieve it have yet to be invented or commercialised.
The BBC is making a habit of soft treatment of Just Stop Oil and other climate groups. In April I wrote here of how an episode of Newsnight had employed a similar lopsided sense of balance, holding a discussion on Just Stop Oil’s tactics between an activist from Just Stop Oil and, er, an activist from Extinction Rebellion. Our national broadcaster simply isn’t serving the public with balanced coverage of climate change, rather it is campaigning on the issue.
That wouldn’t bother me were the BBC an independent organisation funded by people who watch and listen to it. Yet it is a public service broadcaster funded by a hypothecated tax on TV sets. It could soon be even worse.
In an interview with the Daily Telegraph, former chairman Richard Sharp says he would favour a levy that was levied on all households, regardless of whether they own a TV, or perhaps on broadband connections. And he is supposed to be a Conservative. Keir Starmer may well be taking note.
If we are going to have a public service broadcaster then it is absolutely imperative that it demonstrates balanced coverage. On climate change at least the BBC is falling a long, long way short.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-bbc-is-falling-short-on-its-climate-protest-coverage
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Jim Jordan Launches Probe Into Financial Giants’ ‘Radical’ Plans To ‘Decarbonize’ Economy by Phasing Out Fossil Fuels
The House Judiciary Committee will soon begin an investigation into some of the nation’s largest financial institutions for so-called collusive agreements that seek to “decarbonize” the world economy. This comes as the panel prepares for a flurry of summer activity that includes testimony from top Department of Justice officials, anti-censorship activists, and those charged with enforcing immigration law.
The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Congressman Jim Jordan, sent a letter on Thursday to the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, which according to the group’s website is “a global coalition of leading financial institutions committed to accelerating the decarbonization of the economy.” The letter was first reported by the Daily Caller.
Mr. Jordan sent the missive to Mayor Bloomberg, who serves as the Glasgow Alliance’s co-chairman, as well as the group’s vice chairwoman, Mary Schapiro, who once served as the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission. “The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of the adequacy and enforcement of U.S. antitrust laws,” the letter states.
“We write because the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero and the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative are potentially violating U.S. antitrust law by coordinating their members’ agreements to ‘decarbonize’ their assets under management and reduce emissions to net zero.” Mr. Jordan also claims that the organization’s alleged collusion with asset managers will have “potentially harmful effects on Americans’ freedom and economic well-being.”
Beyond the Glasgow Alliance, the letter was sent to three of the nation’s largest asset managers — BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. Combined, those three firms hold more than $20 trillion in assets under management.
When reached by The New York Sun for comment, a spokesman for BlackRock, Chris Van Es, said his firm will cooperate with the Judiciary Committee. “BlackRock’s sole focus as a fiduciary is seeking the best financial outcomes for our clients, consistent with their investment objectives,” Mr. Van Es said in a message. “We look forward to engaging with the Committee on how we do that.”
The Glasgow Alliance, Vanguard, and State Street did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The letter was also signed by the chairman of the subcommittee that handles antitrust issues, Congressman Thomas Massie, as well as a member of the conservative Freedom Caucus, Congressman Dan Bishop.
The letter further describes what the congressmen call “radical” aspirations to decarbonize the economy, including eliminating more than 90 percent of coal and oil production, as well as halting the sale of internal combustion passenger cars by 2035.
The crux of the committee inquiry is whether the Glasgow Alliance and its members are violating American antitrust law by “limiting production” of certain commodities to coercively change consumer behavior. The organization was founded in 2021 in order to facilitate “the net-zero transition,” its website states.
The document sent by the Judiciary Committee chairman and his colleagues is not a legally binding subpoena, though the full panel could consider such a move in the coming months. The letter asks that the Glasgow Alliance transfer to the committee all documents and communications related to the formation of the organization, the development of its climate goals, the commitments made by asset managers in joining the group, and how the group plans to track net-zero goals, among other things.
Mr. Jordan, in his letter, asks that such documents be presented to the Judiciary Committee on or before July 20. He further states that the Glasgow Alliance “should construe this preservation notice as an instruction to take all reasonable steps to prevent the destruction or alteration, whether intentionally or negligently, of all documents, communications, and other information” related to the topics addressed in his letter.
Investment practices that take into consideration factors such as companies’ environmental impact are known as environmental, social, and corporate governance strategies, or ESG. The use of such environmental and social considerations in deciding which companies to invest in has come to the attention of conservatives in recent years, many of whom label ESG as “woke finance.”
Earlier this year, the Republican-led House and the Democrat-controlled Senate passed a resolution that would have struck down a Department of Labor rule that encouraged asset managers to consider ESG when making investment decisions. The episode culminated in President Biden issuing the first veto of his presidency.
Mr. Jordan, who is also the head of the select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which falls under the Judiciary Committee, has already planned a busy summer that will put him in the spotlight on a host of issues ranging from investigations into Hunter Biden to so-called Big Tech censorship to immigration.
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Why Won't the Media Admit When Mass Murderers Are Environmentalists?
On Friday, a federal judge sentenced the El Paso Walmart mass murderer, who killed 23 people and wounded another 22, to 90 consecutive life sentences. He still faces additional charges from Texas, where he could receive the death penalty.
With the sentencing announcement, over and over, the news media, such as USA Today, Forbes, and the Dallas Morning News, describes this monster as a “white supremacist,” the Washington Post as a “white nationalist,” and the Texas Tribune, a racist who “wanted to shoot as many Mexicans as possible.” Headlines for the Associated Press claimed, “White gunman to be sentenced for killing 23 people in a racist Walmart attack in a Texas border city,” and Rolling Stone noted, “White Supremacist Who Killed 23 at El Paso Walmart Receives 90 Consecutive Life Sentences.”
All that is true. But it is only part of the story. And it is a part of the story that the media wants to ignore.
Since the murderer’s vicious attack on August 3, 2019, the news media has constantly described the El Paso murderer as “far-right” in Newsweek and raised this case as an example of “right-wing extremism in the U.S.” at NBC. Indeed, attacks such as the El Paso mass murder are counted by the Anti-Defamation League as right-wing extremists.
But the El Paso murderer was not a right-winger by any normal definition. His views clearly match up much closer with the views of Democrats. The news media views anyone who is racist as a right-winger.
But the El Paso murderer was a racist because of his environmentalist views. In his manifesto, he wrote: “The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations … The next logical step is to decrease the number of people in America using resources. If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can become more sustainable.”
Nor is it just the El Paso murderer. The Buffalo, New York, and Dayton, Ohio, mass murderers were also racists who were clearly of the left. The Buffalo mass murderer labeled himself an “eco-fascist national socialist” and a part of the “mild-moderate authoritarian left.” He worried minorities have too many children and that it damages the environment. “The invaders are the ones overpopulating the world,” he claimed. “Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation, and by doing so, save the environment.” His views were no different than the El Paso murderer, but he also has been continually labeled a right-winger.
These deranged killers made minorities their principal target. But they’ve done so out of a crazy environmentalist determination to reduce the human population by whatever means necessary.
The news media and politicians who constantly warn about the world’s imminent end can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the environmental connection, even though climate activists time and again agree that overpopulation is part of the problem. “It does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question: Is it okay to still have children?” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019. She also warned that the “‘world will end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
Similarly, President Biden fans the flames of alarmism when he claims that “climate change poses an existential threat to our lives … this is code red.”
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other news outlets intend to constrain any racist as a conservative right-winger. But they aren’t. And if there’s any ideological cause that really is sparking violence, it’s environmental extremism. But even when they aren’t labeling these mass murderers as right-wingers, they refuse to admit the real ideology driving these killers.
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Beware of Far-Left Energy Policies Coming For Red States
The anti-energy radical left is getting arrogant. Following its implementation of successful radical initiatives in liberal states like California, New York, and Washington, which have cost tens of thousands of jobs and driven up the costs of home heating oil, gasoline, and natural gas, its members are starting to turn their sites to red states. And now they are seeking to reshape the American energy landscape in all 50 states — even energy-producing ones like Alaska.
Rather than call for an outright ban as they did in California, these anti-energy advocates are trying to convince Republican members of the state legislature in Juneau to jeopardize hundreds of thousands of blue-collar jobs and their state’s most reliable energy sources. With the state facing fiscal challenges, they are presenting this self-destructive policy as necessary to raise needed revenue.
They neglect to mention one of the most reliable laws of basic economics: the more you tax something, the less you get of it. Natural gas generates over $19 billion of the state’s annual GDP (and over two-thirds of its tax revenue). That’s the highest percentage of economic contributions from oil and natural gas in the nation. Alaska takes drilling so seriously that every year, each of its residents receives a dividend check for the state’s oil and natural gas profits. But if the radical left gets its way, this resounding economic success story will be put at risk.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Biden administration’s war on energy has helped leave Alaska with a massive fiscal crisis. So how is the radical left seeking to fix this problem? They’re of course not advocating President Biden stop his war on energy and help restore American energy independence. And they’re surely not advocating for the removal of job-killing state regulations. Instead, they’re trying to push Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy to impose new taxes and costly fees that will only make the problem worse.
There is no place in America more synonymous with the old refrain “drill baby drill!” than the Last Frontier State. Though that mantra has served them well in good times and bad, the left is determined to see oil and gas disappear for good. However, this time they are cleverly dressing their goals in free-market talking points.
It’s unlikely that Dunleavy will take their bait. He’s a strong fiscal conservative who has previously pledged to protect the energy industry and not raise taxes. If he does, however, it can signal the beginning of a dangerous nationwide trend — a red wave of far-left energy policies gaining nationwide steam.
Some leftists are saying that it doesn’t matter because the Alaska energy industry is a dying industry. This is the furthest thing from the truth. As Steve Moore put it, “Some analysts say that the days of wine and roses in Alaska from the state’s oil and gas bonanza are long gone. Nonsense. Alaska has only skimmed the surface of its vast pools of energy. Oil drilling projects Willow and Pikka on the North Slope have bountiful resources and are critical for Alaska’s economy and America’s energy security. Half of the nation’s coal reserves are also way up north.”
Even President Biden administration seems to recognize the folly of the far-left’s anti-Alaska energy crusade. Earlier this year, it approved the Willow Project in northern Alaska — one of the largest U.S. oil drilling projects in decades.
Alaska isn’t the only red state the far left is trying to squeeze with this “free market” anti-energy playbook. Alabama, Missouri, Texas, and a consortium of other right-leaning ones have all faced similar proposals cloaked in free-market talking points. What will it mean if Alaska, one of the most energy-critical red states in the nation, bucks to pressure and moves forward with this leftist anti-energy proposal? Nothing good, that’s for sure.
The goal of the far-left is not to be fiscally responsible but to end all oil and gas production in the entire United States. Alaska cannot be the first red domino to fall.
Saying no to this reckless, job-destroying assault on Alaska’s energy production should be a no-brainer. For the sake of Alaska and the nation, let’s hope it is.
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Republicans Bash Biden’s Woke EV Rule As ‘Unlawful’
Democrat’s obsession with sounding the alarm and causing hysteria over the Earth combusting one day due to so-called “climate change” has taken another turn in the wrong direction.
President Joe Biden is being criticized over its proposed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule that would force auto manufacturers to make more electric vehicles.
The proposed rule would force auto manufacturers to grow today’s 8.4 percent share of light-duty new electric vehicle sales to 67 percent by 2032.
Republican Attorneys Generals are bashing Biden’s proposed plans, calling them “unlawful and misguided.”
Attorneys general for Kentucky and West Virginia are leading a letter signed by more than 20 Republican state attorneys to argue that Biden’s rule would pose risks for “consumer safety, economic stability, and national security.”
While billed as tightening existing standards for “criteria pollutant and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from” certain motor vehicles, id. At 29,186, the Proposed Rule is, more accurately, the next phase in a top-to-bottom attempt to restructure the automobile industry … And the Proposed Rule’s approach will create more problems than it purports to solve. We urge EPA to adopt instead possible standards that maintain our nation’s air quality without risking consumer safety, economic stability, and national security,” the letter states.
Mike Sommers, president, and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, also slammed the president’s rule, arguing it missed the mark.
“While not an explicit ban on internal combustion engines, this proposal is a de facto ban that will eliminate competition, distort the market, and restrict consumer choice while being potentially more costly to taxpayers,” Sommers said.
The Republican AGs said more time is needed to develop better solutions, arguing that mandating fast and extreme transformations before supply chains, national security, or consumer confidence will backfire.
Alliance for Automotive Innovation argued that the market is not ready for a surplus of electric vehicles even if consumers are ready to buy one.
Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron criticized the Democrat’s escalated panic and his attempt to use “the power of government to force a massive shift in demand for automobiles, with the government putting its thumb on the scale in favor of EVs.”
“This is the latest head-in-the-sand approach to achieving the left’s impossible green-energy fantasies,” Cameron said.
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7 July, 2023
Hotter Than the Fourth of July!
It was widely reported recently that July 4th, 2023 was the hottest day in Earth's recorded history.
Paulo Ceppi, a climate scientist at London’s Grantham Institute stated: “It hasn’t been this warm since at least 125,000 years ago, which was the previous interglacial.” And, of course, it was reported that it was our fault due to our "sins of emission."
This didn't meet the smell test for the scientists at the CO2 Coalition. We know that previous warm periods were warmer than our modern temperatures. For example, during the Roman Warm Period there was citrus being grown in the north of England and barley was grown by Vikings on Greenland 1,000 years ago. Why aren't they grown there now? It's quite simple: Lower modern temperatures.
So, here at the CO2 Coalition, we did what scientists are trained to do:
We looked at the available data. Our Science and Research Associate Byron Soepyan reviewed temperature data from the US Historical Climatology Network and found that both the number of weather stations reporting temperature over 100 degrees F and the Maximum Average Temperature for July 4th were slightly declining since the record began in 1895 – not increasing – as Ceppi claimed.
newsletter@co2coalition.org
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The Energy Transition Isn't
We are inundated with claims about the “energy transition.”
In February, E&E News, reporting on the State of the Union speech said, “President Joe Biden laid out his vision for the energy transition Tuesday night.” In March, a reporter for Politico declared “The U.S. energy transition is well underway.”
Also in March, during a speech at the CERAWeek conference in Houston, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said that "As this transition progresses, our energy mix will change." Or consider the March 9 press release from the White House, which said “The Administration is continuing to implement the Inflation Reduction Act, which is already galvanizing our clean energy transition and making clean and energy efficient technologies more affordable for American families.”
I could list many more examples like the ones above. But the hard truth is this: the energy transition isn’t. The numbers from the just-released Statistical Review of World Energy show, once again, that despite rapid growth in wind and solar, those two forms of energy are not even keeping pace with the growth in hydrocarbons. That’s true both globally and in the U.S.
In 2004, hydrocarbons provided 86% of global primary energy. The balance came from hydro, nuclear, and biomass. By 2022, hydrocarbons’ share of global primary energy had dropped by four percentage points, to 82%, wind and solar made up 5%, and the balance came from hydro, nuclear, and biomass. But in absolute terms, hydrocarbon consumption grew by 110 exajoules, (EJ), while wind and solar grew by just 32 EJ. Thus, the growth in hydrocarbon use over that time frame was 3.4 times faster than what was seen in wind and solar.
And here’s the key point: hydrocarbons are prevailing despite staggering amounts of spending on wind and solar. According to a January report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance, some $6.7 trillion was spent on alt-energy globally between 2004 and 2022, with the vast majority of that, some $4.8 trillion spent on renewables. And the vast majority of that $4.8 trillion — about $4.1 trillion — was spent on wind and solar.
I’ll come back to the U.S. numbers — which like the global numbers, show hydrocarbon growth outstripping wind and solar — in a moment.
Before I do so, it’s important to provide some context and to understand why we are hearing so much — call it what it is, propaganda — about the energy transition.
First, the context. Yes, wind and solar are growing rapidly. In 2022, nearly all of the growth in global electricity generation (about 645 terawatt-hours) was met by the surge in wind and solar production, which grew by 251 and 263 TWh respectively. Global wind output grew by 13% in 2022 and solar increased by 24%. The U.S. saw almost identical percentage increases, with wind and solar generation growing by 15% and 24%, respectively. Those are impressive increases. As the EIA reported on March 27, in the U.S., “generation from renewable sources — wind, solar, hydro, biomass, and geothermal — surpassed coal-fired generation in the electric power sector for the first time.” It also noted that generation from all renewables “surpassed nuclear generation for the first time in 2021.”
These increases are important. But electricity only represents about a fifth of final energy demand. (Final energy, as Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data explains, is what “a consumer buys and receives, such as electricity in their home, heating, or petrol at the fuel pump.”) So if growth in hydrocarbons is outstripping the growth in wind and solar, why are we being flooded with claims about the energy transition? The short answer: it’s part of a media campaign that has surged under the Biden Administration.
Evidence of the marketing effort can be seen in the number of times the phrase in question has appeared in the New York Times over the past few years. From 2015 to 2020, “energy transition” occurred only a few times per year. But in 2021, the year Biden took office, the mentions doubled, and then tripled to 146 mentions in 2022.
The energy transition claims are increasing because that narrative is relentlessly promoted by alt-energy NGOs like the Rocky Mountain Institute (2022 revenue: $115 million) that have massive budgets and scads of sympathetic reporters at legacy media outlets. Those NGOs are part of the anti-industry industry, which is collecting untold millions of dollars in dark money to push claims about the energy transition and the fiction that the global economy can be run solely on wind, solar, batteries, and a dollop of hydropower and hopium.
Last month, the Rocky Mountain Institute published a report which claimed “this is the pivotal decade in the energy transition,” and that “solar and EVs will rise to dominate sector sales by 2030” and renewables will hit “price tipping points in every major area of energy demand.”
It's essential to note that the Colorado-based NGO has been leading the effort to implement a nationwide ban on the use of natural gas in homes and businesses.
Despite the fortunes being spent by the climate claque to promote claims about renewables and the energy transition, global hydrocarbon use and CO2 emissions continue to rise. That’s also true here in the U.S.
In 2022, the U.S. had the world’s third-largest increase in CO2 emissions, 57 megatons. (U.S. emissions last year totaled 4,826 Mt.) The U.S. followed only Indonesia (172 Mt) and India (131 Mt) in that category. China’s emissions fell slightly, by 0.1% or 13 Mt, in 2022. That said, China’s emissions are, by far, the biggest in the world, at 10,550 Mt.
According to BNEF, between 2004 and 2022, U.S. spending on wind and solar totaled some $591 billion. Despite that massive investment, just the growth — repeat, just the growth — in natural gas consumption in 2022 was twice the growth in wind and solar combined. Coal demand fell by 0.7 EJ. Oil use grew by 0.6 EJ and gas grew by 1.6 EJ. Thus, the net growth in hydrocarbon use in the U.S. in 2022 was 1.5 EJ, or 1.9 times the growth seen in wind and solar combined. (An exajoule, an SI unit, is 1018, or 1 quintillion joules. An exajoule is roughly equal to one quadrillion Btu. It’s also roughly equal to the energy contained in 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.)
Domestic gas use in 2022 jumped by a whopping 5.4% and hit a record 85.3 billion cubic feet per day. In March, the Energy Information Administration reported that gas consumption set monthly records in 9 of 12 months in 2022. Not only did annual use hit a new record, but the U.S. also set a new record for daily high demand. On December 23, U.S. gas use hit 141 billion cubic feet. The previous record was 137 billion cubic feet per day.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-energy-transition-isnt
**********************************************Solar industry facing bankruptcies, leaving many with roof panels that don't workNobel Laureate Dr. John Clauser: “I Don’t Believe There is a Climate Crisis”
Nobel laureate Dr. John Clauser, a CO2 Coalition Board of Directors member, delivered a keynote lecture at Quantum Korea 2023 Seoul on June 26, 2023.
Regarding climate, Dr. Clauser stated “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis” in his keynote address.
From Seoul Economic Daily:
“In the era of AI, scientists should play the role of discerning truth from falsehood.”
“The world we live in today is filled with misinformation. It is up to each of you to serve as judges, distinguishing truth from falsehood based on accurate observations of phenomena.”
He stated, “Misinformation is being spread by those with political and opportunistic motives.” Furthermore, he remarked, “Even chatbots like ChatGPT can be better at lying than humans,” emphasizing that “distinguishing truth from falsehood is a challenging task for both humans and computers.”
During his keynote speech aimed at young Korean scientists and engineering students, Dr. Clauser urged scientists to fulfill their social role by verifying facts and informing the public, particularly in light of the potential drawbacks of interactive artificial intelligence (AI) systems that generate and provide unverified information to users. He emphasized the importance of scientists in society and called upon them to engage in fact-checking and dissemination of information.
He delved into the controversial subject of quantum mechanics and used his past research experience to illustrate his point, stating, “True truth can be found through the observation of natural phenomena.” He continued, “Scientists have obtained information through careful observation and experimentation, and they have prevented the spread of misinformation through papers and peer reviews.” He added, “In an era of rapid advancement in AI technology, the role of scientists as judges is necessary.”
Dr. Clauser, known for his stance against climate change, diagnosed the current situation as not being a climate crisis and criticized the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for spreading misinformation. He stated, “I don’t believe there is a climate crisis” and expressed his belief that “key processes are exaggerated and misunderstood by approximately 200 times.” Dr. Clauser, who is recognized as a climate change skeptic, also became a member of the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition last month, an organization that argues that carbon dioxide emissions are beneficial to life on Earth.
Dr. Clauser received the Nobel Prize in Physics for experimentally elucidating the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, which forms the theoretical basis for quantum cryptography. He majored in physics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and worked as a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley campus. As a keynote speaker at Quantum Korea 2023, he delivered a keynote lecture on the topic of quantum entanglement and also personally awarded prizes to students who won quantum-related competitions
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6 July, 2023
The electric car ‘revolution’ is a disaster before it’s begun
The electric car revolution is stalling, of that there can no longer be any doubt. It has left the big global carmakers floundering, uncertain of how to proceed in a race they reluctantly entered in the first place.
Electrification was initially met with fierce resistance. But once politicians held a gun to the heads of company bosses with a series of cliff-edge deadlines for phasing out the combustion engine, carmakers had little choice but to go all-in.
Century-old business models were declared dead and ambitious plans hurriedly drawn up to electrify entire portfolios from small city run-arounds to family saloons and SUVs, at astronomical cost. Even Ferrari has embraced the movement – much to the consternation of petrolheads everywhere.
But with electrification barely off the starting grid, one by one the big carmakers are already pulling back as demand badly falters.
Volkswagen is so concerned about flagging sales that it has taken the extraordinary decision of halting electric vehicle production at one of its biggest plants. Assembly lines for electric models will be paused for six weeks at the Emden factory in northwest Germany and 300 of its 1,500 staff laid off after sales fell 30pc short of forecasts.
This means production of the new VW ID.7 electric model, which had been due to commence in July will be pushed back until the end of the year. The ID.4 electric SUV and the upcoming ID.7 electric sedan will also be delayed.
“We are experiencing strong customer reluctance in the electric vehicle sector,” plant boss Manfred Wulff said.
That is remarkably plain language from the largest car manufacturer on the planet, and a company that recently announced plans to invest €120bn (£103bn) over the next five years in “electrification and digitalisation”.
It comes months after Ford poured cold water on the shift to electric with thousands of job losses in Europe. Electric vehicle production is unable to support anything like the same number of jobs that petrol and diesel models are able to sustain, it said. Boss Jim Farley estimates that 40pc fewer staff will be needed to develop battery versions.
A generation of pure electric vehicle makers has hardly fared any better. On Tuesday, Lordstown Motors, the US electric truck specialist that Donald Trump once heralded as the saviour of a depressed Ohio town, filed for bankruptcy protection.
Even Elon Musk has been forced to repeatedly cut the price of Teslas in a desperate effort to prop up demand and protect market share.
But it’s the setback at VW that stands out, raising serious questions about whether politicians are making the catastrophic mistake of forcing electric cars on a public that doesn’t want them. Indeed, the decision to impose strict deadlines for the phase out of petrol cars could turn out to be one of the most ruinous policy decisions of our lifetimes.
Think about it for a second: an entire industry not only forced to abandon a product that the vast majority of people still want and use, but also bullied into channelling all its resources into making something on a colossal level that there simply isn’t the market for – at least not within the horrendously short timeframe that is being imposed on car manufacturers.
It’s industrial self-sabotage and a commercial, economic and social catastrophe in the making. But what’s worse is that the damage risks being far greater in the UK than anywhere else in the Western world thanks to the Government’s myopic obsession with arbitrary net zero targets.
While the rest of the industrial world seems to have largely settled on a 2035 deadline for petrol and diesel phase out, ministers, for reasons destined to remain a mystery, have decided Britain needs to hit this milestone five years earlier than everyone else.
It makes no sense at all, and yet the ramifications threaten to be huge. By diverting capital into something that lots of people essentially don’t want, it risks inflicting massive losses on an already fragile UK car industry.
It is pure fantasy to imagine that Britain – with a dearth of battery factories (consultants Alix Partners estimates as much as a third of Britain’s battery requirements will need to be imported), a paucity of chargers and dramatically higher energy costs – will be in any position to go fully electric in the next seven years. And the Government simply isn’t capable of solving any of these challenges in time, if at all.
The UK risks becoming the unfortunate guinea pig in a costly and dangerous experiment that persuades the rest of the world to push their own deadlines out even further, turning this country into an example of how not to become a nation of electric car owners.
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Wind turbine troubles have sent one stock tumbling. There are fears it could be a much wider issue
Siemens Energy stock plunged by around 37% on June 23, while other wind companies also saw shares retreat as investors worried that the problems at Gamesa might be a symptom of a wider issue for the industry.
“We have been aware for some time that turbine failure rates across the industry can — and should — be more widely understood,” Evgenia Golysheva, vice president of strategy and marketing at ONYX Insight, told CNBC.
Industry body WindEurope denied that industry-wide technical failures could be on the horizon, insisting that “the problems at Siemens Gamesa are limited to Siemens Gamesa.”
Costly failures at wind turbine manufacturer Siemens Gamesa last month sent shares of parent company Siemens Energy tumbling, and analysts are concerned about wider teething problems across the industry.
The German energy giant scrapped its profit guidance in late June, citing a “substantial increase in failure rates of wind turbine components” at its wind division Siemens Gamesa.
Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch told journalists on a call Friday that “too much had been swept under the carpet” at Siemens Gamesa and that the quality issues were “more severe than [he] thought possible.”
Siemens Energy stock plunged by around 37% on June 23, while other wind companies also saw shares retreat as investors worried that the problems at Gamesa might be a symptom of a wider issue for the industry.
Nicholas Green, head of EU capital goods and industrial technology at AllianceBernstein, told CNBC that the pace of expansion, and the fact that many components of larger turbines haven’t actually been in use for very long, means there could be inherent risks throughout the sector.
“We have to acknowledge that putting brand new machinery — whether it’s on-shore or even more difficult off-shore wind farms — and the pace of change in that machinery has put us into slightly uncharted territory,” he said.
“Although it’s hard to tell at the moment, my best guess is that this probably actually is an industry-wide issue. It wasn’t that Siemens Gamesa is a bad operator as such, it’s that actually some of the normal protocols and time in use, operational data in use, is relatively limited.”
Siemens Gamesa’s board is now due to conduct an “extended technical review” into the issue, which is expected to incur costs in excess of 1 billion euros ($1.09 billion). The company’s shares have recouped some losses, but remain down over 33% in the last month.
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As predicted, wind industry blackmails the UK – demands yet more subsidies
Net Zero Watch has urged the Government to stand up for consumers and businesses by rejecting the wind industry’s latest demands for more subsidies.
In a move that gives the lie to years of propaganda claiming falling costs, the wind industry’s leading lobbyists have written to the Government, threatening to abandon the UK unless there are hugely increased subsidies for their companies (see RenewableUK press release).
The industry is claiming that unforeseen rising costs now necessitate and justify three actions:
1) A vast increase in the budget for the fifth auction (AR5) of Contracts for Difference subsidies, with an increase of two and half times the current levels for non-floating offshore wind alone;
2) Special new targets and thus market shares for floating offshore wind, one of the most expensive of all forms of generation, and, most importantly of all,
3) a revision to the auction rules so that the winners are not determined by lowest bids but by an administrative decision that weights bids according to their “value” in contributing towards the Net Zero targets.
This would in effect not only increase total subsidy to an industry that was until recently claiming to be so cheap that it no longer needed public support, but also provide it with protected market shares, all but entirely de-risking investors at the expense of consumers.
It would also be an open invitation to graft and corruption.
The Government should reject these self-serving demands on three grounds:
1. The UK economy cannot be expected to continue to subsidise a sector that is still uneconomic after nearly twenty years of above-market prices and guaranteed market share. The wind experiment has failed and must be wound down.
2. UK consumers of all kinds, from households to businesses, are already experiencing extreme pressures on budgets, and a further burden on the energy bill simply cannot be tolerated. Government must recognise that households and businesses are unable to afford yet more subsidies to the wind industry.
3. The industry’s current cost difficulties are neither unforeseen nor unpredicted but have been obvious to careful observers for over a decade.
Dr John Constable, NZW’s energy director, said:
"It would be both absurd and counterproductive for government to bail out the wind industry in spite of the evident failure to reduce costs. A refusal to learn from mistakes will be disastrous."
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No, Forbes, Climate Change is Not Behind the Sriracha Shortage
A recent Forbes article claims that the recent shortage of the popular hot sauce “Sriracha” is likely due to climate change. This is false. Natural weather patterns in the region of Mexico Sriracha’s chili peppers are grown are not due to the modest warming the earth has experienced over the past decades. Furthermore, a few years of poor production in one region is not evidence of a long-term impact.
The article, “Why Sriracha Prices Are Surging, And Why Climate Change Might Have Something To Do With It,” claims that a production shortage of the chili peppers used by the Hoy Fong company to make sriracha hot sauce is due to “an ongoing drought exacerbated by human-caused climate change,” as well as “back-to-back La Niña events that prolonged it in northern Mexico, where the chilis are grown.”
The recent drought in the southwestern United States and northern Mexico has been held up as proof of the impacts of climate change by many alarmists. The Forbes article repeats the claim that the drought, which has now abated according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, is part of the “the driest 22-year period in more than 1,200 years,” quoting a popularly cited study in Nature Climate Change.
The drought has been overhyped, however. This particular paper published in Nature Climate Change has been covered by Climate Realism writer and meteorologist Anthony Watts previously, in “Sorry, New York Times and NPR, Megadroughts Have Been Far, Far, Worse Than Today,” along with a similar study here.
In the first post, Watts explains that the study authors narrowly defined “megadrought” in order to compose the narrative that the recent 22-year dry spell was the worst in 1200 years.
Other studies that also use tree ring data, like the Nature Climate Change paper, show much longer and more intense dry periods in the southwest in the past, especially in the Middle Ages.
Since the recent drought is not outside of natural variability, what about the triple-dip La Niña events?
La Niña is also a natural event, not due to climate change. It is the cool-phase counterpart to the warming phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a naturally-occurring sea surface temperature pattern in the Pacific. La Niña involves cooler-than-normal water temperatures, and usually causes unusually dry weather in the southwestern United States and Mexico, and unusually wet weather in Western Pacific areas like Australia. While the three La Niña events in a row is a rare situation, it’s not unprecedented. La Niña is not getting more intense due to climate change, as covered by Climate Realism, here, for example.
The Huy Fong sriracha sauce got its start on a small scale in the mid-1980s, meaning the company should have been around for previous extended La Niña events, but it is unclear the company was producing such a volume of hot sauce, or even getting peppers from the same region, during that period.
On the agricultural side of the claim, publicly available data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) for chilies and other peppers grown in Mexico show indeed there has been a recent decline in production, since about 2019 through 2021, and presumably into 2022, which corresponds with the recent La Niña events. (See figure below)
Chili pepper production in Mexico hit an all-time production record high as recently as 2018, and in fact saw production records broken fifteen times between 1990 and 2020, a timeframe which has supposedly seen warming which alarmists claim is “catastrophic.”
Fortunately, with the forecasted return of the warmer El Niño this year, the issues hindering Huy Fong’s chili source in northern Mexico should decline, if indeed La Niña conditions were to blame instead of some unmentioned agricultural issues.
Regional weather patterns and agricultural shortages are not proof of impacts from climate change, nor can climate change be blamed for those shortages.
Data does not indicate that the regional weather in Northern Mexico since 2019 is more extreme because of the modest warming of global average surface temperature, nor are chili pepper crops in general in any danger. If they were, one would expect evidence to show up in agricultural production data over time.
In fact, crop production woes of a single hot sauce company are not indicative of any kind of widespread climate chaos, or weather issues. Even if Huy Fong sriracha sauce is not currently on shelves, other companies’ similar sriracha chili sauces that have the same ingredients are still widely available, and Forbes would have been wise to point that out, instead of doom-peddling over a particular brand.
https://climaterealism.com/2023/06/no-forbes-climate-change-is-not-behind-the-sriracha-shortage/
***************************************5 July, 2023
Catastrophic climate 'doom loops' could start in just 15 years, new study warns
And pigs might fly. This is just speculation. They even admit: "the study of tipping points is a young and contentious science""
Earth's ecosystems may be careering toward collapse much sooner than scientists thought, a new study of our planet's warming climate has warned.
According to the research, more than a fifth of the world's potentially catastrophic tipping points — such as the melting of the Arctic permafrost, the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet and the sudden transformation of the Amazon rainforest into savanna — could occur as soon as 2038.
In climatology, a "tipping point" is the threshold beyond which a localized climate system, or "tipping element," irreversibly changes. For instance, if the Greenland ice sheet were to collapse, it would also reduce snowfall in the northern part of the island, making large parts of the sheet irretrievable.
Yet the science behind these dramatic transformations is poorly understood and often based on oversimplified models. Now, a new attempt to understand their inner workings, published June 22 in the journal Nature, has revealed that they may happen much sooner than we thought.
"Over a fifth of ecosystems worldwide are in danger of collapsing," co-author Simon Willcock, a professor of sustainability at Bangor University in the U.K., said in a statement. "However, ongoing stresses and extreme events interact to accelerate rapid changes that may well be out of our control. Once these reach a tipping point, it's too late."
Unlike the well-established link between the burning of fossil fuels and climate change, the study of tipping points is a young and contentious science.
To understand how rising temperatures and other environmental stressors could cause complex ecosystems to break down, scientists use computer models to simplify ecosystems' dynamics, enabling them to predict the fate of those ecosystems — and when their tipping points could be reached.
But if these simulations miss an important element or interaction, their forecasts can land decades off the mark. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the United Nations' most important body for evaluating climate science) said in its most recent report that the Amazon rainforest could reach a tipping point that will transform it into a savannah by 2100.
The researchers behind the new study say this prediction is too optimistic.
According to the researchers, most tipping-point studies build the math in their models to focus on one predominant driver of collapse, for example deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. However, ecosystems aren't contending with just one problem but rather a swarm of destabilizing factors that compound one another. For example, the Amazon also faces rising temperatures, soil degradation, water pollution and water stress.
To investigate how these elements interact and whether these interactions can, in fact, hasten a system's demise, the scientists behind the new study built computer models of two lake and two forest ecosystems (including one which modeled the collapse of civilization on Easter Island) and ran them more than 70,000 times while adjusting the variables throughout.
After testing their systems across multiple modes — with just one cause of collapse acting, with multiple causes acting and with all of the causes plus the introduction of random noise to mimic fluctuations in climate variables — the scientists made some troubling findings: multiple causes of collapse acting together brought the abrupt transformation of some systems up to 80% closer to the present day.
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UK: Why I handed my electric car back with less than 5,000 miles on the clock
One Sunday last December, it was snowing when I finally admitted it to myself: I had made a dreadful mistake in buying an electric car.
I was driving through a blizzard in heavy traffic on the M6 to collect my mother, who was coming to stay with us for Christmas.
My middle daughter had insisted we listen to an audiobook throughout the interminable journey — on the motorway I hate most in the world.
The wipers on my Renault Zoe were struggling against the snowfall — and even though it was 2pm, the headlights were on.
The farther north we travelled towards Mum's home in Lytham St Annes, the lower the temperature outside dropped. The car's heater was on full blast — and its battery was draining before my eyes.
My 'range anxiety' — always present when I was at the wheel — was in overdrive. Just 30 per cent was left, so perhaps a few dozen miles given how the heater was sucking up all the power.
'Where are the chargers in Lytham?' I asked my daughter.
She checked her phone. 'There's one in Booths supermarket car park — only the app says it isn't working.'
I can't repeat my reply.
Available fast chargers, I had come to realise, more or less vanished north of the Watford Gap. That wasn't in any government policy paper I had read.
And the thing is, I had really wanted an electric car.
I loved the fact that the noise on my street in London had fallen so much over the past few years, as electric cars are so much quieter than their petrol equivalents.
I support the push to cut Britain's carbon emissions to 'net zero': it's a policy that's creating thousands of jobs and helping the environment. Cleaner air means we, our children and grandchildren can live longer, healthier lives.
I used to support the Government's target to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles by 2030, too — but that was before a pandemic, before Putin invaded Ukraine and before the cost of electricity shot through the roof.
Now, I believe that the target should be delayed. The cost of charging an electric car is bad enough — but the infrastructure to power millions of them simply isn't there.
Even in London, as I learnt with my Renault, finding a working charger can be difficult. And for longer journeys, like going to pick up my mum, it could be a huge issue.
So, back to that journey north last Christmas.
'Let's pull off at Stafford services,' said my daughter, as the illuminated 'Welcome' sign pierced through the freezing fog. 'They have working chargers there.'
It sounded so simple. We cruised around the car park for ten minutes but could see only Tesla chargers, and I'd heard it was difficult to connect my car to that network.
Elon Musk has installed convenient forecourt chargers on the foggy M6. He's nailed it — as long you buy his products. At the back of the lorry park and behind a petrol-station forecourt, we eventually found a charger we could use.
Once I had connected it, it took ten minutes to kick in, with a loud and worrying bang coming from a metal box about five yards away. Eventually, the electric juices were flowing. God, it had been a stressful day.
With a wait of at least half an hour, we decided to go into the service station to buy a coffee.
But from the back end of the lorry park, that involved a long and wet walk in the freezing rain. I would not have felt safe doing it on my own.
So, that was it for me. Early in the New Year, I returned the car to the dealer with less than 5,000 miles on the clock. Now, every time I jump into my Discovery Sport — a hybrid, I'm pleased to say — I feel a sense of relief.
I've had a charger fitted at home and I'm glad to do all my local mileage on the battery.
But I also feel safe in the knowledge that when it runs out, or I have a long journey to make, the petrol kicks in.
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It's all over: East European countries veering away from 2030 climate goals
Central and Eastern European countries display low ambitions with their National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs), raising concerns about the region’s ability to meet EU climate goals, campaigners warn.
NECPs are an essential building block in the EU’s climate policy architecture because they lay out the specifics of how each country plans to achieve the collective goals agreed upon at a European level.
Only three EU countries – Spain, Croatia and Slovenia – have met the EU’s annual 30 June deadline to submit their updated national energy and climate plans, campaigners say.
But it is already clear that Central and Eastern European member states are falling short of meeting EU expectations, according to a new report by CEE Bankwatch Network, a green umbrella group.
NECP progress reports “have not always been taken seriously in some countries, such as Slovakia, where data are missing,” the report says. And with the outbreak of war in Ukraine, many have fallen back into old habits by supporting gas and coal consumption instead of renewables.
“This trend is particularly evident in central and eastern European countries, where measures have been taken to slow down the transition away from fossil fuels, backtrack on previous commitments, or even de facto recarbonise the economy,” the report says.
The CEE Bankwatch study echoes warnings by the European Court of Auditors (ECA), which issued a report earlier this week saying EU countries had only submitted vague plans to decarbonise their economy and risked missing their collective climate goals.
The risk is that the whole NECP process ends up being a mere “box-ticking exercise” for Eastern EU member states, CEE Bankwatch warns.
This is no surprise to Klaus-Dieter Borchardt and Christopher Jones, two former senior officials at the European Commission’s energy directorate, who are now with consulting firm Baker McKenzie in Brussels.
“We all knew that achieving the 2030 Green Deal targets would be challenging,” Jones and Borchardt said in emailed comments to EURACTIV.
“However, there is an increasing number of worrying indications that we are far from being on track to achieving them,” they added. “Not only the CEE Bankwatch paper, but also Monday’s Court of Auditors Report, casts doubt that we are on track, even with revised National Energy and Climate Plans,” the two former officials said.
For instance, Hungarian authorities have responded to the 2022 energy crisis by increasing domestic production of fossil fuels and delaying the phase-out of coal power, says the report by CEE Bankwatch. In Bulgaria, previous commitments to decarbonise the power sector could also be reversed, it adds.
Europe risks missing 2030 climate goal, EU auditors warn
EU countries have so far filed only vague plans to meet their climate targets, with early indications pointing to a significant financing gap to meet the EU’s objective of reducing emissions 55% below 1990 levels by 2030, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) said in a new report on Monday (26 June).
Renewables deployment lacking
For Pawel Czyzak, senior energy and climate analyst at think tank Ember, this is a missed opportunity, as National Energy and Climate Plans offer “a perfect opportunity” for clean energy deployment in the region.
“But in most CEE countries no significant announcements have been made yet with regards to updated climate targets,” Czyzak told EURACTIV.
Instead, renewable energy is overlooked, even though there is significant potential for solar and wind power in the region.
“Central European countries can only meet their required share of the EU’s new renewables target by deploying more wind energy,” said industry association WindEurope in a joint statement with think tanks and other trade groups.
Another worrying finding in the CEE Bankwatch report is the lack of transparency and civil society engagement in the process of drafting the updated NECPs. With most negotiations happening behind closed doors, there is little opportunity for public consultations, the report highlights.
“CEE Bankwatch rightly points out that public participation is a key element of this process. Including relevant actors in the NECP update will increase buy-in for the measures,” said Rebekka Popp, policy advisor for E3G, a think tank.
A green transition could yield significant benefits for the region, Christophe Jost, the author of the report, told EURACTIV. It would secure energy supplies, limit price volatility, facilitate access to EU funds and strengthen value chains – but under the strict condition that the transition happens properly, he said.
“This pathway is not yet enough sought by member states, as they are currently not fully reaping the benefits of EU funds to achieve the green transition,” he continued.
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Australia: Road to net zero paved with coal
Professor Alan Finkel launched his new book Powering Up this month, describing global and Australian pathways to net-zero carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions via renewable energy technologies (solar, wind, hydropower, and battery storage).
In describing our clean energy future Professor Finkel says, ‘Think forests of wind farms … and endless arrays of solar panels disappearing like a mirage into the desert.’ We may or may not like his vision, but there is some arithmetic we have to consider along the way.
Finkel endorses Australia’s goal of a 43 per cent emissions reduction target by 2030, with 82 per cent of electricity generated by renewable energy (wind, solar, and batteries).
A sobering counter-claim by Paul Broad, former chief executive of Snowy Hydro, suggests that it will take 80 years, not eight, to generate 82 per cent of Australian electricity from renewables.
Given that the Snowy 2.0 pumped storage project including its connection to electricity grids has seen a time blowout of six or more years and a cost blowout from $2 billion to a likely $20 billion, maybe Broad knows a fairy-tale when he reads it.
The Hunter Coast near Newcastle in New South Wales, and the Gippsland Coast in Victoria are two of six Australian regions under evaluation for offshore wind-energy farms.
To get an idea of the potential cost we can look at recently completed Hornsea 2 project which sited 165 turbines off the coast of Yorkshire, England. The construction cost was A$5.2 billion per GW of electric power. This is double the estimated cost of a modern coal-fired power station.
Australia generates over half of its electricity from coal-fired plants, according to Australian Energy Regulator figures for 2023. These plants for the most part use obsolete technology and receive minimal maintenance because they are being shut down progressively.
New technology where boilers run at higher temperatures and pressure are vastly more efficient with lower CO2 emissions. The tragedy is that our clever country has not adopted these ultra-supercritical (USC) or high-efficiency low emission (HELE) plants.
Many countries in the West have these plants as well as ten countries in Asia from India and Bangladesh in the west to Vietnam, China, and Japan in the east which have USC technology installed and have additional plants under construction.
What might such technology achieve in Australia? Large coal-fired power plants (think Loy Yang A in Victoria or Eraring in NSW) have output capacities of about 2 to 3GW. A detailed study by engineering group GHD in 2017 found that a USC plant would cost $2.5 billion per GW in today’s dollars or about $5 billion for a 2GW plant. International Energy Agency estimates and Korean experience suggest an average construction time of four to six years for a USC power plant.
Australia has about 20 GW of conventional coal-fired power plants spread over the eastern states which generate the larger part of the nation’s baseload electricity. These obsolete plants could be replaced with state-of-the-art USC plants for about $50 billion.
If we include Western Australia’s coal-fired generators, and allow additional costs for Victoria’s generators which use brown coal, the national cost may be in the order of $60 billion, with no additional costs for transmission lines since the existing infrastructure already serves these plants. The benefits? A 30 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions using available technology that provides baseload power, removing the threat of blackouts on cloudy or low-wind days.
Finding $60 billion to finance this conversion is challenging, but as a nation, we face bigger demands. Our Aukus nuclear submarines are estimated to cost up to $368 billion over three decades which is justified on national security grounds. Providing energy security for the nation’s industry and its citizens over the next decade is surely deserving of similar serious consideration.
The federal budget last year allocated $20 billion over four years to Rewiring the Nation, a project which is designed to ‘upgrade, expand and modernise Australia’s electricity grid’. How much more secure we would be if we put a similar amount of money into modernising our generators rather than our transmission lines?
The coal-fired plants envisaged in this discussion will not be the forever solution for our power needs. Over two to three decades, aided by our Aukus nuclear submarine development, small modular nuclear plants will become available. Such plants, like USC coal plants, can be sited at existing power stations.
Finkel is confident that the availability of nuclear plants by 2040 will be too late due to the growth of renewable energy sources however, the growth of nuclear power stations overseas (planned, new, or re-commissioned from mothballed plants) suggests his view is likely too pessimistic.
The US Westinghouse Electric Company, with an established record of manufacturing nuclear power plants, has announced the development of small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) for civilian power generation, targeting operation on the electricity grids by 2033.
The estimated cost of these nuclear plants is equivalent to A$5 billion per GW which is twice the cost of established USC coal technology and may well be subject to cost and time blow-outs. But the crucial point is that over the next decade, USC coal-fired power is the efficient, secure, and achievable option and replacement with nuclear and/or renewable energy should follow as alternative sources become proven, stable, and fit for purpose. We also note that the SMR option is comparable in estimated cost with the actual cost of the Yorkshire offshore wind farm discussed above.
If Australia wishes to pursue the goal of net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050 without nuclear technology the costs may be far greater than the proponents of green energy admit. Former Chief Scientist Professor Robin Batterham led an international consortium which which released their Net Zero Australia report in April. It was written by a team of over 40 collaborators drawn from two Australian universities and two international groups who conducted two years of detailed study and modelling. It covers more than just net-zero power generation detailing the steps needed to create a true net-zero economy covering power, mining, agriculture and exports.
The numbers are sobering. It estimates a cost of between $7,000 billion and $9,000 billion by 2060 covering five different scenarios. The fraction attributable to net-zero electric power generation is not explicitly identified but is likely to be in the range of 25 per cent to 50 per cent of the total cost depending on the pathway chosen.
The analysis incorporates coal-fired power generation as a necessity until 2040 and envisages a continuing need for gas-fired peak power plants through to 2060 with carbon capture and storage technologies designed to remove CO2 to provide a net-zero outcome.
As we contemplate a lower-end estimate of $2,000 billion for Australia to deliver net-zero electricity by 2060, with coal-fired plants operating until 2040, we may well conclude that spending $60 billion over the next decade on efficient, low emissions USC coal-fired power plants is a small price to pay for near-term energy security while we evaluate and implement newer zero-emission technologies such as nuclear and green hydrogen over the next half century.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/road-to-net-zero-paved-with-coal/
***************************************4 July, 2023
Don’t listen to the Climate Change Committee on car bans, British ministers are warned
Net Zero Watch has warned ministers that the Climate Change Committee’s call for a ban of hybrid cars poses an existential threat to Britain’s car industry.
In its latest report the Climate Change Committee urged the government to ban the sale of hybrid cars in 2030, five years earlier than planned.
Industry insiders and MPs have warned that the Committee’s radical proposal risks the closure of car plants and the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs. It would also deprive millions of ordinary Brits the buy an affordable car.
The chair of the parliamentary Net Zero Scrutiny Group Craig Mackinlay MP warned: “The UK’s uniquely stupid net zero policies is likely to lead to the loss of our proud car industry by the end of the decade.”
Net Zero Watch has welcomed the rejection of the proposal by Business Secretary Kemi Badenoch and has renewed its call for Rishi Sunak to follow the EU’s decision to cancel the planned sales ban of conventional cars altogether.
Now that the European ban of the sale of combustion engine cars has been abandoned, the government needs to follow suit if it wants to avoid destroying large swathes of the British car industry.
For millions of Britons electric vehicles will not be a viable solution as they are much more expensive than cars with combustion engines. And electric cars will probably still be more expensive than conventional cars in seven years.
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Italy Returns to Nuclear Sanity. Shouldn’t We?
The Italian parliament, demonstrating confidence in Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, this week formally backed her plan to reintroduce nuclear power plants into Italy’s energy mix, reversing the nation’s 1987 moratorium on nuclear power. Meanwhile, energy-starved Germany is feeling the pinch from shuttering all of its 17 nuclear power plants.
The U.S. has closed 11 nuclear reactors since 2013, with another eight of the 94 remaining reactors scheduled for decommissioning by 2025. Although Presidents Trump and Biden have favored bolstering the U.S. nuclear energy portfolio, America’s bureaucrat-heavy regulatory jungle remains designed to drag out facility permitting and construction for decades.
The sad truth is that the energy crisis is imminent – we don’t have decades to play gotcha political games. Another truth is that wind and solar cannot fully power the U.S. grid.
Meloni’s plan would enable Italy to generate up to 35 MW of power from nuclear energy by 2050 (likely from small modular reactors). The plan adds nuclear to the list of low-carbon technologies with guaranteed sales of the energy they produce. The move towards nuclear also bolsters Meloni’s negotiations over Italy’s participation in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Given the cutoff of Russian natural gas, Germany’s removal of nuclear power from its energy mix makes little sense. Higher energy prices and shortfalls have led many German manufacturers to shut down or relocate to other, more energy-friendly nations. Germany has had negative economic growth since last October.
The German delusion is perhaps best exemplified by Steffi Lemke, minister for the environment and nuclear safety, who glowingly praised the shuttering of the last German nuclear power plants as an “excellent – indeed, visionary – move.” By contrast, fellow Green Party minister for the economy Robert Habeck recently bemoaned that German industries face an existential threat due to high electricity prices.
Habeck’s proposed solution is a massive (Bidenesque) subsidies program that would guarantee a fixed consumer price per megawatt-hour until 2030 – at a back-end cost to the public of 25 to 30 billion euros (not included in the “fixed” price).
As nuclear energy advocate Todd Royal points out, Congress in 2018 passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation Capabilities Act that requires the Department of Energy to “develop a versatile fast neutron test reactor that could help develop fuels and materials for advanced reactors.” It also authorized DOE national laboratories to host reactor testing and demonstration projects.”
Congress in 2018 also passed the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act, which requires the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “develop an optional regulatory framework suitable for advanced nuclear technologies.” This February, the Nuclear Innovation Alliance released draft recommendations for addressing barriers to NRC licensing of advanced reactors.
The draft recommended bolstering staff capacity and capability for licensing advanced reactors; upgrading unaccountable regulatory processes and procedures for scheduling, breadth of scope, and depth of review; developing regulatory processes that streamline rather than inhibit the commercialization of advanced reactors; and establishing practices that increase stakeholder understanding and public trust in the regulatory process.
As a follow-up, in April, five Republican and five Democrat Senators introduced the bipartisan ADVANCE ( Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy) Act, which addresses licensing fees, insurance, and a host of other barriers to moving proposed nuclear reactors from drawing board to full operation.
Today, companies that develop and sell new reactors pay upfront the government’s $290 per hour cost for analyzing license applications. The 18,000-plus hours for reviewing even small test reactors presents a massive financial hurdle, especially for startups with innovative designs.
The bill recommends deferring these fees until the applicant has a license and can generate revenue from sales. The NRC would be compensated from a small rolling fund seeded by the government. A second proposal adds a time cap for reviewing an accepted application, with additional billable hours paid by Congress.
The bill also grants a 20-year extension to the Price-Anderson Act, which pertains to civilian power plants, that would otherwise expire in 2025. The extension gives policymakers sufficient time to tweak the law while reassuring potential investors and developers that its reauthorization will not be a barrier to startups.
Regulatory reform appears to be a hot issue, as President Biden just this week endorsed a reform bill proposed last fall by Sen. Joe Manchin (D, WV) that would streamline permitting for mining of critical minerals and remove barriers for renewable energy.
White House energy spokesman John Podesta said delays caused by the current permitting process “are pervasive at every level of government,” resulting in “we got so good at stopping projects we forgot how to build things in America.”
Manchin stated last fall, “No matter what you want to build, whether it’s transmission pipelines or hydropower dams, more often than not, it takes too long and drives up costs. You can double your cost within a five to six, seven-year period from what the original cost may have been.”
If the regulatory reform momentum that covers transmission lines and mining extends to nuclear, that bodes well for widespread efforts to revitalize the long-bearded U.S. nuclear energy industry. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer is spearheading an effort to restart a decommissioned reactor in her state, with help from Holtec Decommissioning International, whose primary focus is, as its name implies, decommissioning old plants.
Whitmer now says that keeping the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station open “is critical for Michigan’s competitiveness and future economic development opportunities.” But the 800-MW reactor that had provided 5 percent of Michigan’s electricity was plagued with complaints about poor maintenance, including instances of nuclear fuel container weakening – serious issues that forced its shutdown weeks earlier than originally anticipated.
On the other end of the spectrum, Westinghouse just announced the launch of its AP300 reactor, which it calls “the only small modular reactor offering available that is based on deployed, operating, and advanced reactor technology.” CEO and President Patrick Fragman is confident that the $1 billion per unit, 300-MW reactor design can win NRC approval by 2027.
From these developments, it appears the U.S. is aligning itself more with the so-called “right-wing” Italian government than with the Green Party-infused German leadership – at least on nuclear energy. Nuclear energy has powered U.S. submarines since the U.S.S. Nautilus was commissioned in 1954. And nuclear has supplied up to a fifth of U.S. electricity despite heavy propaganda and lack of government support.
Maybe, just maybe, after seventy years of nuclear submarines, America will finally believe – as Todd Royal believes – that carbon-free nuclear power is the nation’s best hope for meeting growing U.S. demand for electricity and global needs for basic economic growth. With worldwide energy consumption expected to grow by 50 percent by 2050, reliance on wind and solar (and, yes, geothermal) alone to meet that demand is a pipe dream.
https://cornwallalliance.org/2023/06/italy-returns-to-nuclear-sanity-shouldnt-we/
***************************************************Wind costs will remain high
The crash in Siemens Energy’s share price on Friday has admirably highlighted an issue with wind costs that colleagues and I have been examining for more than a decade. The painful facts are that (i) wind generation, both onshore and offshore, is more expensive than we are being told and (ii) the performance of wind turbines tends to deteriorate with age, in significant part because of the kind of failures reported by Siemens Energy. There is strong evidence to support these conclusions, which has been presented in reports published by the Renewable Energy Foundation in 2012 and in 2020 for the UK and Denmark, with updates provided by the Global Warming Policy Foundation and Net Zero Watch.
The news about Siemens Energy brings a strong inclination to say ‘you were warned’. However, their travails are a symptom of a much more widespread disease, which affects all of us, either directly through the costs of electricity or indirectly as the owners of wind farms (via pension funds and other investment vehicles). The plunge in the share price of Siemens Energy is dramatic, but that may be written off as a temporary market response to disappointed expectations. We need to look beneath the immediate story to understand the reasons for the disappointment and their implications for the prospects for wind generation.
The announcement by Siemens Energy focused on higher-than-expected failure rates for their onshore turbines. These were ascribed to problems with key components, but newspaper reports suggest more systematic design faults in recent generations of large turbines. Previous announcements have referred to problems with offshore turbines, and the market reaction suggests few believe that the current problems are confined to onshore turbines. Further, while each of the major turbine manufacturers has its own specific problems, Siemens Energy is not unique in experiencing high warranty costs due to higher than anticipated failure rates.
In increasing order of importance, there are three aspects to note:
(a) Siemens Energy and other manufacturers have given warranties on performance that won’t be met because of higher failure rates. They will incur additional expenses, either to replace components or to compensate wind farm operators for any resulting underperformance. Those costs are the basis for the write-offs that Siemens Energy has had to take. Investors will be painfully aware that the company has been declaring profits when they sell wind turbines, but without making adequate provision for future warranty repair costs.
In accounting terms this is known as recognising future profits for new contracts. When it becomes clear that the contracts will be less profitable, the company must write down the value of previously reported profits and, thus, the value of the assets on its balance sheet. In effect, though perhaps entirely innocently, the company has been misleading investors about its past and current profitability. Senior managers should be feeling very uncomfortable about their positions since the problem was predictable (and predicted).
(b) Warranties have a limited period – often 5 to 8 years – but the higher failure rates will persist and affect performance over the remainder of the life of the wind farms where the turbines have been installed. Their future opex costs will be higher than expected, and their output will be significantly lower. This will reduce their operational lifetimes, which are determined by how the margin between revenues and costs changes as wind farms get older. Lower revenues and higher costs bring forward the date at which replacement or repowering is necessary. These changes will reduce, often quite substantially, the returns earned by the financial investors – pension funds and other – to whom operators sell the majority of the equity in wind farms after a few years of operation.
(c) Siemens Energy and other manufacturers may argue that they can – with time – fix the component and design problems which lead to high failure rates. They may well be correct. The history of power engineering is littered with examples of new generations of equipment which experienced major problems when first introduced but which were eventually sorted out. Many companies have found themselves in severe financial difficulties or even forced into bankruptcy by these “teething” problems. The error in this case has been to pretend that wind turbines were immune to such failures.
The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger 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 – the whole development process has been a case of too far, too fast. Again, this was both predictable and predicted. The idea that wind turbines are immune to the factors that affect other types of power engineering was always absurd. The consequence is that both capital and operating costs for wind farms will not fall as rapidly as claimed and may not fall significantly at all. It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe and the United States are based on foundations of sand – naïve optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.
In the longer term it is (b) and (c) that are the big story. With respect to (a), serious analysts have long since recognised that claims made about future wind costs and performance by the wind industry should not be taken seriously. It has been obvious that they were kidding themselves and their investors ever since the last 2010s. Unfortunately, we have now been tied into a high energy-cost future, with all the implications that has for the economy and standards of living.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/siemens-and-wind-costs/
****************************************************Still Waiting For The Magical Future Of Free Wind Power
Wind power: It’s clean. It’s free. It’s renewable. Google the subject, and you will quickly find fifty articles claiming that electricity from wind is now cheaper than electricity from those evil, dirty fossil fuels. So why doesn’t some country somewhere get all of its electricity from wind?
In fact, despite now several decades of breakneck building of wind turbines, no country seems to be able to get even half of its electricity from wind when averaged over the course of a year, and no country has really even begun to solve the problem of needing full backup when the wind doesn’t blow.
Germany is the current world champion at trying to get its electricity from wind. (It also gets a small contribution from solar panels, but since it is the world’s cloudiest country, those don’t help much.). According to Clean Energy Wire, December 2022, in 2020 Germany got 45.2% of its electricity from wind and sun. Then that declined to 41% in 2021, due to lack of wind. In 2022 they appear to have bounced back to 46%. Germany has enough wind turbines that they produce big surpluses of electricity when the wind blows at full strength. But they still haven’t cracked the threshold of meeting 50% of electricity demand with wind and sun over the course of a year.
It’s no better over in the territory of co-climate crusader UK. Despite a crash program to build wind turbines (also accompanied by a smidgeon of solar panels), the UK’s percent of power from wind in 2022 was 26.8%, according to the BBC on January 6, 2023. Solar added a paltry 4.4%.
Well, maybe this project isn’t as easy as the central planners thought it would be. News of the past week brings to light a few more speed bumps on the road to energy utopia.
At the website Not A Lot Of People Know That, Paul Homewood on June 21 presents a calculation for the UK of how much wind turbine capacity would be necessary to supply the country with all its electricity needs by building extra wind capacity and using it to electrolyze water into hydrogen. The calculation was initially prepared by a guy named John Brown, and provided to Paul. For those interested in reviewing the calculation, it is available by emailing Mr. Brown at jbxcagwnz@gmail.com
For starters, Homewood notes that average demand in the UK was 29 GW in 2022, and it has 28 GW of wind turbine capacity already. As you can immediately see, the fact that 28 GW of “capacity” only supplied 26.8% of average demand of 29 GW indicates an average capacity factor of under 30% for the wind turbines. The total demand for the year came to 262 TWh, but the wind turbines only produced 62 TWh.
Brown then calculates how much wind turbine capacity would be needed to generate enough electricity to supply all of the demand, either directly, or by electrolyzing water to make hydrogen and burning the hydrogen. He comes up with 370 TWh of total production needed from the wind turbines — 262 TWh to supply existing demand, and another 108 TWh for the various losses in the processes of electrolysis and then burning the hydrogen. The 370 TWh is about 6 times the current wind turbine capacity of the UK. Homewood:
The reason why the total generation needed, 370 TWh, is so much higher than demand is the hopelessly inefficiency of the hydrogen process. John has assumed that electrolysers work at 52% efficiency, and that burning hydrogen in a thermal generator works at 40% efficiency. Both assumptions seem reasonable. In other words, the efficiency rate for the full cycle is 20.8%. In simple terms, you need 5 units of wind power to make 1 unit of power from hydrogen.
Brown and Homewood do not go into detail on the costs of this project, other than to note that the cost of the wind turbines alone for the UK would be about 1 trillion pounds (or $1.3 trillion). Since the U.S. is more than five times the population, that would mean more than $6.5 trillion for us. And that’s before you get to the cost of building the electrolyzers for the hydrogen, the costs of transporting and storing the stuff, and so forth. Let alone dealing with doubling the demands on the grid by electrifying all home heating, automobiles, transportation, etc. A multiplying of costs of electricity by around a factor of 5 to 10 would be a good rough estimate.
In other words, this is never going to happen. The only question is how far down the road we get before the plug gets pulled. As I wrote in my energy storage report, the only thing to be said for hydrogen as the means of backup for a decarbonized economy is that it is less stupid than using batteries as the backup.
And in other news relating to the future utopia of wind power, we have a piece in the Wall Street Journal of June 23 with the headline, “Clean Energy’s Latest Problem Is Creaky Wind Turbines.” The first sentence is “The ill wind blowing for clean-energy windmills just got stronger.” The article reports that shares of German wind turbine giant Siemens Energy fell 36% on Friday after the company withdrew profit guidance for the rest of the year and stated that components of its installed turbines are wearing out much faster than previously anticipated. Thus costs of fulfilling warranties will greatly increase; but also, the expected replacement cycle for the turbines needs to be shortened. The writer (Carol Ryan) comments, “The news isn’t just a blow for the company’s shareholders, but for all investors and policy makers betting on the rapid rollout of renewable power.”
Barron’s on the same date (June 23) quotes the CEO of Siemens wind turbine subsidiary Siemens Gamesa as follows:
In a call with reporters, Siemens Gamesa CEO Jochen Eickholt said “the quality problems go well beyond what had been known hitherto. . . . The result of the current review will be much worse than even what I would have thought possible,” he added.
And then there’s the comment from parent company CEO Christian Bruch:
In the call with reporters, Siemens Energy CEO Christian Bruch called the developments “bitter” and “a huge setback.”
Those are by no means the usual types of words uttered by ever-optimistic public company CEOs.
In the short run, don’t expect the climate doom cult to walk away from any of their grand plans. The immediate answer will be more, and still more government subsidies to keep the wind power dream alive. But at some point this becomes, as they say, unsustainable.
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3 July, 2023
Oregon’s Latest Climate Lawsuit Threatens America’s National Security
What began as a trickle of climate change lawsuits has become a stream in recent years, with litigation filed nationwide in state and local courts, the latest from Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes Portland. Multnomah County officials and other plaintiffs hope to collect billions in damages from American energy companies by blaming them for the global phenomenon of climate change.
The problem? Suing energy producers has major - and possibly catastrophic - implications for America’s energy security, foreign relations, and national security. Given the potential fallout, plaintiffs should think twice before suing over climate change.
By suing American energy companies, as Multnomah County just did, plaintiffs risk tilting the advantage to America’s adversaries, including state-owned energy companies that produce more carbon-intensive fuels and whose interests are routinely hostile to America’s national security. Successful lawsuits could shift the bulk of production to America’s adversaries, jeopardizing America’s energy security and rolling back the considerable progress we’ve made toward shedding our dependence on energy imports.
Evidence speaks clearly to this threat. In October 2021, the New York Times reported that foreign state-owned companies will likely increase oil and gas production if U.S. and European companies reduce supply because of climate concerns. In fact, economist Michael Lynch forecasted foreign-owned energy producers in OPEC will boost their share of the global oil and gas market from 55% to 75% by 2040. This trend could intensify if Western companies are forced to cut back production as they defend themselves from a barrage of lawsuits.
Ironically, climate lawsuits haven’t targeted foreign state-owned energy companies such as Saudi Aramco, PetroChina, Gazprom, Rosneft, and PDVSA, all exceptionally high emitters from adversarial regimes. In other words, the climate litigation lobby has absolved these high emission trouble spots while targeting American producers, a strategy that could force more production into the arms of some of the world’s biggest emitters. This fact shows the clear hypocrisy of the climate litigation lobby.
With oil and natural gas experiencing increased demand, energy prices remaining volatile, and U.S. officials seeking to reduce Russian energy imports, it’s clear that strengthening America’s energy security is critically important. It makes no sense, then, to constrain the domestic energy companies who provide essential products that Americans continue to demand. Doing so not only makes achieving these objectives more difficult; it also threatens energy supplies that could bring much needed downward pressure on energy prices for American families and businesses.
The narrative told by plaintiffs has at least two major plot holes. First, the entire world emits greenhouse gases through our daily activities, which means American firms aren’t solely responsible for climate impacts. When lawsuit activists speak of global warming, they themselves acknowledge the phenomenon is worldwide. Despite that, their lawsuits exempt foreign state-owned energy producers.
Second, there is a strong nexus between the fossil fuels spotlighted by these lawsuits and national security. The American military’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels won't likely change for decades, a point underscored in an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court filed by Air Force General (ret.) Richard Myers and Navy Admiral (ret.) Mike Mullen, both former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They argued that “energy security and national security go hand-in-hand” and that “reduction in fossil-fuel use can be accomplished only through comprehensive international, multi-lateral negotiations and treaties led by the Legislative and Executive branches. This is how reduction of nuclear weapons was achieved during the Cold War.”
Given the broad implications of climate lawsuits for both American energy security and national security matters, it makes no sense to adjudicate them in state and local courts whose judges lack the core competency to address challenges of such global magnitude. Nonetheless, elected leaders in over two dozen jurisdictions continue trying to make American energy producers liable for global climate change, using our courts to address an issue more appropriately handled by elected lawmakers.
Climate lawsuits aren’t intended to fight climate change and certainly aren’t aimed at benefiting Americans. Their goal, as plaintiffs freely admit, is to saddle American energy producers with damages so large that they raise energy prices drastically or go out of business. According to a lawyer representing Colorado plaintiffs, the goal is to drive up prices at the pump and create even higher household electric bills. Who is left unscathed? The foreign state-owned energy producers, who will gladly welcome greater market share and increased geopolitical influence from the aftermath of climate lawsuits against their Western competitors.
It’s time for state and local politicians to stop aiding and abetting our foreign adversaries by making American energy producers defend themselves in court for making products we all demand. The risk to America’s energy security and national security status is simply too high.
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Britain’s Offshore Wind Industry Is Running Out Of Air
Championed by politicians as a controversy-free alternative to onshore wind and solar farms, the Government wants offshore wind capacity to surge from 13 gigawatts today to 50 gigawatts by 2030.
“Offshore wind provides a secure and resilient source of energy,” Grant Shapps, the Energy Security Secretary, told MPs last month. “And we are already global leaders.”
Yet behind the scenes, the picture looks far less rosy.
A string of major projects is under threat from spiraling costs, sclerotic planning rules, and shrinking subsidies.
Industry sources warn that it risks tilting the economy into negative territory. “Things are very hard out there right now,” one source says.
Schemes developed by Ørsted, Vattenfall, and Red Rock Power are among those understood to be most at risk, despite them only winning subsidy contracts last year.
Adding to concerns is a sense that ministers are not listening to the industry’s warnings, with more than one senior figure describing Shapps as a “remote” figure who rarely meets with them.
“It’s not like he’s beating down the industry’s door, let’s put it that way,” says one insider.
The malaise is triggering fresh questions about whether the Government’s 2030 target is still achievable – and if the long–assumed maxim that offshore wind costs will keep falling can hold.
“It has turned into a perfect storm for the industry,” says Ana Musat, executive director for policy at industry group RenewableUK.
Britain’s offshore wind industry exploded over the past decade, with most development concentrated off the east coasts of Scotland and England.
Capacity has grown tenfold since 2010, when it stood at just 1.3 gigawatts, with ever-bigger turbines boosting output.
One example is Dogger Bank, a phased development in the North Sea that will eventually generate enough power for six million homes.
It will use turbines more than twice as tall as Big Ben and will be the largest offshore wind farm in the world.
But rising supply chain costs globally – fueled by energy prices that jumped after the Ukraine war – have slammed the breaks on this progress.
Inflation has also forced loss-making manufacturers of components such as turbine blades and nacelles to demand higher prices, just as rising interest rates are making it more expensive for projects to secure financing.
General Electric’s renewables business, which makes the 260-meter-tall Haliade X turbines used at Dogger Bank, reported a $2.2bn (£1.7bn) loss in 2022. The division has been loss-making for eight straight quarters.
Rival manufacturers Siemens Gamesa, Vestas, and Nordex also posted further cumulative losses of €3bn in the same year, notes Kathryn Porter, an independent analyst at energy consultancy Watt Logic.
“There has been this narrative that wind-farm costs are falling and will keep falling, but the reality is these prices are too low.
“Turbine manufacturers have effectively been selling at a loss – and those losses have become huge now.”
Other factors are aggravating the situation too. The “bigger is better” approach to turbines is leading to more failures, costing manufacturers more in warranty claims, Porter says. …
In an effort to cut costs, some developers are attaching the turbines using cheaper foundations on the sea floor, the executive adds.
“Offshore wind is not the Nirvana that everybody thinks it is,” they add. “The risks are enormous. And the rewards are not very good.
“Everyone is going for the biggest turbines, the cheapest foundations, and they’ve all gone for cabling solutions that mean if you get a failure, you could lose the wind farm.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/25/britain-offshore-wind-industry-at-risk/
**************************************************Wrong, CNN, Attribution Groups Prove Nothing About Extreme Weather and Climate Change
A recent article on CNN relies on the opinion of climate attribution groups, claiming that these groups are able to calculate exactly how much impact climate change has had on various weather events. These claims are always false. Attribution claims are unverifiable, untestable, and rely on the presupposition that climate change did make an individual weather event more severe.
The article, “Without climate change, these extreme weather events would not have happened,” relies on the testimony of the World Weather Attribution Initiative, whose members assert that climate change is indeed making weather events more severe, or severe weather more likely. The CNN post goes on to claim that extreme weather like “droughts, storms, wildfires, and heat waves” are becoming more intense and frequent.
But this is false, as Climate at a Glance shows: the data isn’t clear about whether droughts are becoming more intense according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; storms like hurricanes and tornadoes show no increasing trend; wildfire data in the U.S. indicates forest policy has more to do with them than warming does; and heat anomalies, especially in the United States, show no increasing trend.
The CNN post breaks weather events into two categories, “Impossible events,” which allegedly couldn’t happen without man-made global warming, and “more likely or severe” because of climate change. Both of these categories are nonsense.
Under “impossible,” CNN climate writer Rachel Ramirez cites several heat waves from around the world over the past few years, as well as drought from last year in the northern hemisphere and horn of Africa.
One of the examples she gives is the heat wave from 2021 in the Pacific Northwest, which at the time, all the media touted as evidence of climate change’s impact largely because of the World Weather Attribution Initiative’s say-so. In a Climate Realism post, here, colleague Anthony Watts points out that a single weather event is not evidence of climate change, and quotes from meteorology professor Cliff Mass, Ph.D., who conducted his own analysis of the heat wave alongside historic data. Mass found that there is no increasing trend for record highs in that part of the country over the period of recent warming.
Not a single one of the events listed by CNN was definitively linked to climate change—this link was assumed first, as with all climate attribution studies.
As Climate Realism has previously shown, climate attribution is a game of confirmation bias using computers, not falsifiable science.
Statistician Dr. William Briggs does the best job of describing the flaws of attribution science’s methodology, in a paper compiled by the Global Warming Policy Foundation:
All attribution studies work around the same basic theme. . . . A model of the climate as it does not exist, but which is claimed to represent what the climate would look like had mankind not ‘interfered’ with it, is run many times. The outputs from these runs is examined for some ‘bad’ or ‘extreme’ event, such as higher temperatures or increased numbers of hurricanes making landfall, or rainfall exceeding some amount.
The frequency with which these bad events occur in the model is noted. Next, a model of the climate as it is said to now exist is run many times. This model represents global warming. The frequencies from the same bad events in the model are again noted. The frequencies between the models are then compared. If the model of the current climate has a greater frequency of the bad event than the imaginary (called ‘counterfactual’) climate, the event is said to be caused by global warming, in whole or in part.
Attribution that claims to put a percentage likelihood or a percentage of intensity to weather events are not science, as Dr. William Briggs explained, they cannot be checked against existing data.
Although the CNN alarmist writer says the events were “impossible” or “all but impossible,” the events were labelled as “almost impossible,” “virtually impossible,” hundreds of times “more likely,” etc. This is not scientific.
Those classified as “made much more likely or more severe by climate change,” includes the “black summer” fires from Australia in 2019-2020, Hurricane Ian, Western US drought, and the flooding in Pakistan from 2022, Climate Realism has debunked every single one of these as they came up over the years.
For example, in a guest post, “Pakistan’s floods and the climate attribution con,” Dr. David Whitehouse explained that when it came to the flooding in Pakistan, World Weather Attribution Initiative members couldn’t honestly claim that recent warming made the flooding worse than it otherwise would have been.
Dr. Whitehouse wrote:
But then they admit the event is well within the range of historical natural variability pointing out that 2022 was the wettest years since err…1961! And let’s not forget that only a few years ago climate scientists claimed that “our analysis found that the summer monsoon rainfall is decreasing over central South Asia – from south of Pakistan through central India to Bangladesh.”
Pakistan’s flooding was neither unprecedented nor definitively connected to climate change in the attribution scientists’ own research, despite what headlines claimed.
This kind of rapid attribution without referencing historical data isn’t new, attribution scientists will make these claims for every weather event that makes headlines.
The World Weather Attribution team asserts that they use both “real-world data” and computer models, but comparing real data to fictional data is not appropriate or useful, except as confirmation bias. CNN should know better, and take more care when they craft their article titles and content, if they care at all about truth and not just promoting alarm.
***********************************************************
Love that gas!
Judith Sloan, writing from Australia
I love our gas heater. In these cold months, there is nothing better than getting home, switching on the gas heater, backing in the derriere and suddenly feeling much better.
In the past, I loved the open fire place we had in our family home but, let’s face it, they are a bit of hassle – getting it started, waiting until the heat really begins to radiate and, of course, cleaning it out. And just as the environmental hysterics can’t abide gas heaters, they can’t abide open fire places either.
Call me cynical, but does anyone believe these new studies that seek to demonstrate that gas heating is very bad for a person’s health? Why is it that these studies are only now emerging? Could it be a classic case of the tail wagging the dog, with authors determined to establish yet another reason to demonise fossil fuels?
And if it were really the case, why are age-adjusted life expectancies not significantly lower in Victoria where gas heaters and appliances are much more common than in the other states?
Now while I’ve got you in the box, can I make another confession, two actually? I love our gas stove. To be sure, I don’t do a lot of cooking these days but when I do, I really appreciate the quick response time of the gas stove. Very high and very low – both settings work well. Compared with our induction stove at our other place – that’s my other confession – the gas cook-top is far superior.
Indeed our relatively new, very expensive and rarely used European induction stove at our other place had the temerity to conk out while we had guests. It turned out to be a defective motherboard, which seems a very sexist description for a component of a stove – only kidding. It cost an arm and leg to replace it, but it would have cost several arms and legs to replace the whole stove with a newer induction model.
Evidently, having a second house, indeed having a spare bedroom, is now regarded as equivalent to a mortal sin by progressive thinkers. According to their astonishing insights, if only everyone could just share what accommodation is available, there would be no housing shortage and rents wouldn’t be rising. And if these undeserving rich bastards can’t be forced to offer up their spare accommodation, then they should be taxed to high heaven. (Note here the religious theme).
Returning to the issue of gas, gas, gas –OK, just gas – the little darlings down at the Grattan Institute have been jumping on the anti-gas bandwagon, telling everyone that they should be replacing their gas appliances and instead relying on the unreliable electricity grid. You know it makes sense – or not.
To be sure, no immediate wholesale replacement of gas appliances is being suggested, although government subsidies to push the process along are seen as necessary. Needless to say, all new housing should be deprived of the benefits of gas connections, according to the great minds from Grattan.
But here’s one of the problems with the central recommendation: if some residents abandon their gas appliances, then the economics of the domestic reticulation of gas begin to falter. It’s not worth servicing some areas unless a high proportion of residents use their connections. At that point, many people might be forced into abandoning their much loved gas heaters, gas stoves and gas hot water services but won’t be in a positon to fund the conversion. It is also likely that there will be insufficient replacement appliances and qualified tradies to do the installation at the time. The politics don’t look great.
But here’s the thing: when we are talking about gas, which is widely regarded as the only feasible transition fuel, it’s not clear why you would bother nagging households about their appliances. The majority of natural gas is used by industry and power generation and, if anything, we need to sharpen the incentives to ensure we have an adequate gas supply into the future.
And isn’t there an irony as the gas supply in the Bass Strait dwindles and any further extraction of gas in Victoria is essentially prohibited, that Dan the Man complains about Queensland gas being exported? That’s right: he thinks the federal government should limit gas exports so Victorians can have a plentiful supply while banning gas extraction in his state. But I guess lying straight in bed has never been Dan’s long suit.
Talking more generally about how the energy transition is going, if B1 (Chris Bowen) really understood matters, he would be losing a lot of sleep. There is no way that we are getting to 82 per cent renewables by 2030 – the target in Victoria is 95 per cent by 2035 – and there is no way that electricity prices are coming down, let alone falling by $275 per year as promised by Labor during the last election campaign.
In Victoria, it has dawned on the political masterminds there that the state’s land mass is actually not large enough to accommodate the necessary onshore wind and solar installations. One study has estimated that 70 per cent of the state’s land currently used for agriculture would have to be repurposed to generate sufficient (intermittent) electricity to replace coal and gas. Let’s face it, that’s not going to happen, even with Dan in charge.
It’s one reason why offshore wind is seen as the answer, with Gippsland waters nominated as the place for a renewable energy zone. It’s just a pity that offshore installations are so expensive and have much shorter lifespans than onshore ones.
It’s dawning on pretty much everyone, including even B1, that even if renewable energy projects go ahead at the pace he dictates – they aren’t and they won’t – the delays in the construction of the additional transmission lines constitute the biggest and most expensive obstacle.
It has been estimated that 10,000 additional kilometres of transmission lines are needed between now and 2030 but we will be doing well to achieve 500 to 600 kilometres per year. Thankfully, the completely understandable resistance of farmers and regional communities will ensure a slow rollout. Why should they bear the external cost of having unsightly high voltage pylons cutting a swath through their landscapes so the inner-city luvvies can pretend that the planet is being saved?
Back to the drawing board or should that be the gas heater?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/in-the-confessional-box/
***************************************2 July, 2023
Wash Post: 'Extreme heat kills more people in the United States than any other weather hazard'
This opening assertion is not backed up by any shred of data and is plainly false. Blind Freddy knows that winter is the big time of dying, not summer. Cold is the big killer, not warmth. See the facts below:
https://alarmistclaimresearch.files.wordpress.com/2022/07/cold-is-the-threat-not-heat-final.pdf
Extreme heat kills more people in the United States than any other weather hazard, and the risk of longer and more frequent heat waves is only expected to increase as climate change worsens.The Post is tracking the potential for dangerous heat this summer using the heat index, which accounts for the combined impact of temperature and humidity — the higher the humidity, the more difficult it is for the body to cool itself off through sweating. Heat disorders such as heat stroke, heat cramps and heat exhaustion are possible with any extended exposure to a heat index at or above 90 degrees.
Heat illness can set in quickly — in as little as 10 to 15 minutes — when your body overheats and can’t properly cool itself off. This can lead to muscle cramps or spasms, heavy sweating, weakness or tiredness, abnormal pulse rate, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, headache, confusion, fainting, loss of consciousness or death.
Multiple days of extreme heat, including warm nights that don’t allow our bodies to cool down, are especially dangerous. A Washington Post analysis of data provided by the nonprofit First Street Foundation estimated that the average number of Americans experiencing at least three consecutive days of temperatures 100 degrees or higher each year will climb from 46 percent today to 63 percent over the next 30 years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/interactive/2023/heat-waves-map-us-tracker/ ?
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Real Legal Scandal: Billionaire-Backed Climate Activists Infiltrate the Courts
It’s safe to assume that few readers of this page will have heard of the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) or the Climate Judiciary Project. But many will be aware of the story “broken” last week by the left-wing activist group ProPublica about a fishing trip Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito took with a hedge fund manager.
Why is that?
The latter story has benefitted from widespread pickup by the mainstream media and commentariat, part of what Dan McLaughlin of National Review called an “obviously coordinated progressive assault on the Supreme Court’s public legitimacy.” And it will no doubt have a long shelf life with conspiracy-mongering senators like Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin, whose pinboard-aided ramblings on the Senate floor have decried the alleged influence of "dark money" on conservative judges for years.
Yet similar networks of spending and influence exist on the judiciary's left. But their overtly ideological spending is treated as entirely unremarkable, even salutary, when it is mentioned at all.
The ELI and Climate Judiciary Project examples are illustrative. They’re part of a story about a handful of unaccountable billionaires who have for years quietly funneled massive sums to activist groups, law firms and even news outlets—all working to push unpopular leftist climate policy through the courts.
Hawaii’s activist Chief Justice
In May, Fox News reported that Hawaii State Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Rectenwald participated in a course with an obscure legal nonprofit called the Environmental Law Institute (ELI), as part of its Climate Judiciary Project. The project is ostensibly designed to educate judges around the country about climate change litigation; its real purpose seems to be biasing judges who preside over lawsuits against oil companies.
During the institute’s training sessions, "judges can ask questions and discuss topics openly without maintaining the neutrality required in court,” ELI’s Robin Craig said of the Climate Judiciary Project. Rectenwald’s presentation for one such session was titled "Rising Seas and Litigation: What Judges Need to Know About Warming-Driven Sea Level Rise."
The problem? Chief Justice Rectenwald is currently presiding over a significant climate lawsuit between the City of Honolulu and several energy companies. Meanwhile, as Fox News reports, ELI has worked closely and shared personnel with the law firm Sher Edling, which represents the City of Honolulu in climate litigation. Put another way, the plaintiff's lawyers are training the judges tasked with adjudicating their cases.
A “non-partisan” program
ELI paints the Climate Judiciary Project as “neutral, objective” and “non-partisan,” but this is clearly false. ELI belongs to the vast network of environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) that litigate climate lawsuits and advocate for harsh environmental rules and progressive court reforms.
EarthJustice, a pro bono law firm that has been involved in numerous climate lawsuits, is a member of ELI’s Public Interest Program. Its past clients include hundreds of ENGOs: the Sierra Club, NRDC, Greenpeace, and League of Conservation Voters (LCV) being the most prominent.
Vickie Patton, General Counsel to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), sits on ELI’s Leadership Counsel. Harvard Professor Richard Lazarus sits on EDF’s board and chairs its Litigation Review Committee, “which oversees all proposals for engaging in litigation, including on climate change.” He also recently gave a keynote address at a conference sponsored by ELI on pending Supreme Court climate change litigation.
Several left-wing donors provide the bulk of ELI’s funding, including the Hewlett, MacArthur, Walton Family, Robert Wood Johnson (RWJF) and Sloan Foundations. Since 2016, these organizations have given ELI nearly $2 million, and their IRS filings reveal overlapping funding for prominent ENGOs such as EDF and EarthJustice.
Even Sheldon Whitehouse, the Senate’s supposed judiciary watchdog, is a beneficiary of this largesse: one of his top donorsis the League of Conservation Voters. Several ELI donors, including MacArthur, RWJF and Hewlett, contribute to LCV. In turn, the League has supported the campaigns of Democratic attorneys general, many of whom are involved in active climate lawsuits. The Hewlett Foundation also gives to progressive groups that push for judicial reforms like court-packing, including Alliance for Justice and Fix the Court.
The real dark-money scandal
Several of ELI’s donors also contribute to the nonprofits managed by the dark-money Arabella Advisors group, described by the Wall Street Journal as “a for-profit consulting firm founded by a Clinton administration alumnus who previously worked at the League of Conservation Voters.”
Arabella Advisors receives consulting fees to manage five left-wing nonprofits, including 501(c)3s and 501(c)4s that support a myriad of progressive organizations. These include the New Venture Fund, Hopewell Fund, and Windward Fund, all of which receive significant contributions from several of ELI’s donors.
And, as Capital Research Center has shown, Arabella Advisors plays a shell game to pass money around from the 501(c)3s to the (c)4s to lobby for “ambitious” climate action. Arabella-backed groups contribute to many of the same activist outfits, including EDF, LCV and Union of Concerned Scientists.
So while reporters obsess over a 15-year-old fishing trip, there is a real scandal in progress that has grave implications for environmental policy and our legal system. Billionaire-backed activist groups are trying to force their fringe climate agenda through the courts, because voters have already rejected their scaremongering. If the media really want to expose judicial corruption, they should start there.
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Look What a Few Minutes of Baseball-Sized Hail Did to Massive Nebraska Solar Farm
Renewable energy is the alternative that Democrats and other environmental nuts want to replace reliable oil, gas and coal.
But time and time again, people who rely on wind and solar power have had to learn the tough lesson that such alternatives are both undependable and susceptible to the same elements they are supposed to harness.
Nowhere was that more true than in Nebraska, where a thunderstorm dumped baseball-sized hail on a solar farm on Friday at a speed of 150 mph — destroying the facility in just a few minutes.
Cowboy State Daily reported a storm moved east out of Wyoming where it wreaked havoc just across the state line on a solar farm in Scottsbluff, Nebraska.
The facility previously touted its benefits for the area on its website.
“Scottsbluff, Nebraska’s 5.2 MW Community Solar project is a part of NPPD’s Sunwise program,” the facility states. “The solar array has over 14,000 solar panels, which are installed on trackers that will follow the sun throughout the day.”
It doesn’t look like the panels will be tracking anything for the foreseeable future. The facility appears to be a total loss:
Scottsbluff City Manager Kevin Spencer told Cowboy State Daily, “Just by looking at it, it looks destroyed to me.”
Writing for the outlet, Kevin Killough reported, “The hail shattered most of the panels on the 5.2-megawatt solar project, sparing an odd panel like missing teeth in a white smile.”
He added, “The Federal Emergency Management Agency ranks this area in its highest category for hail risk on the national index.”
Given that information, it is confusing as to why the Scottsbluff facility was ever constructed in the first place.
Of course, government-encouraged green energy projects with today’s lack of reliable technology often deny logic while they also decimate wildlife.
The region of the country in question is not a proper place for a solar farm by any objective metric, and yet there are plans to build another one of these eyesores.
Killough reported, “Wyoming has only one commercial-scale solar farm, but a second project is under construction south of Cheyenne.”
Brilliant!
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/look-minutes-baseball-sized-hail-massive-nebraska-solar-farm-pictures ?
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Ford’s Bad Battery Bet
What the heck is Ford thinking? Or perhaps a better question is: What does Ford know about our automobile future that the rest of us don’t?
And the answer is: Buckle up, because the fix is in for battery-powered vehicles, and that means the century-old American love affair with the gasoline-powered automobile is headed for heartbreak.
Oh, and you’ll be less free because of it. More on that in a moment.
At issue is a jaw-slackening $9.2 billion loan that Ford is taking out from Joe Biden’s Department of Energy, which the iconic automaker will use to finance electric-vehicle battery plants in Tennessee and Kentucky.
We’re not exactly sure where our broke federal government got all this money to throw around. Nor are we able to lay our finger upon that article of the Constitution that gives Scranton Joe Biden the authority to loan-shark the money of his constituents in pursuance of a ruinous and idiotic “green” energy agenda. Nor do we have any idea why an agency that was founded by Jimmy Carter in 1977 to oversee our national energy policy and manage the development of the nation’s nuclear power and nuclear weapons is meddling in the transportation business.
But all that stuff is neither here nor there. As The Wall Street Journal reports, “The commitment adds to a clean-energy spending spree that has been accelerated by last year’s climate law known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which gave the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office more firepower to dole out money to critical infrastructure projects.”
Not surprisingly, this is the biggest “investment” in the loan program’s checkered history, which spans nearly 20 years. And it could well end up being the worst if the American people continue to jam on the brakes in resistance to our headlong march toward EV nirvana.
But in terms of bad loans, let’s just say the bar has been set pretty low. Indeed, as our fellow skeptics from the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page note, “This is the same shop that under Barack Obama doled out billions to Solyndra, Fisker Automotive, and A123 Systems, among other green businesses that went bust.”
Nothing says “left-wing government graft” like Solyndra.
Ultimately, the future of the American automobile will hinge on whether the other 49 states will follow the lead of Gavin Newsom’s California, whose Air Resources Board voted last August to phase out sales of gas-powered cars in the state by 2035.
Knock yourselves out, we said at the time, given the state’s already notoriously overburdened electrical grid, and given that experts say significant investments in grid infrastructure will need to happen to make Cali’s pipe dream a reality.
But since that time, plenty of other lemming-states have fallen in line behind the one that brought us tent cities, poop patrols, and free shoplifting.
“Why would these other states surrender their sovereignty like that?” asked one unionized Ford employee from the Ford truck plant in Dearborn, Michigan.
We wish we had an answer. Unfortunately, the writing may be on the wall. All the major car manufacturers are investing heavily in EVs, even though the American people have made it clear that they don’t want them.
Don’t want their ungodly expense. Don’t want their limited range. Don’t want their dependence on an unreliable energy grid. Don’t want their subordinance to the whims of Big Government.
EVs certainly are too expensive — which is why the federal government insists on taking your money to artificially prop them up. As the Journal’s editors note: “The Inflation Reduction Act’s (IRA) $7,500 consumer tax credits are merely a down payment.” They aren’t kidding. As the Mercatus Center’s Christine McDaniel points out Biden’s battery production tax credit will cost up to $152.8 billion before it’s done.
No matter. Joe Biden has already declared war on gas cars. And in doing so, he’s declared war on our fundamental freedom to move around as we please.
“Remember when Ford’s slogan was ‘Quality is Job One’?” asked the editors of The Wall Street Journal. “Those were the days. Now pleasing the government is job one as the Detroit auto maker shovels up taxpayer subsidies to fuel its government-mandated electric-vehicle transition.”
As the editors continue: “Ford isn’t in financial danger now, but its EV investments are squeezing profits and forcing layoffs. The auto maker last year lost $3 billion on EV sales. In the first three months of this year, its EVs posted a negative 102% operating margin, meaning losses exceeded sales revenue.”
We can practically hear the Ford execs now: Keep ‘em coming, boys! We’re losing money with every EV we produce, but we’ll make it up on volume!
https://patriotpost.us/articles/98414
***************************************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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