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, 2024
Why Climate Misinformation Persists
In 2001, I participated in a roundtable discussion hosted at the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) with a group of U.S. Senators, the Secretary of Treasury, and about a half-dozen other researchers. The event was organized by Idaho Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) following the release of a short NAS report on climate to help the then-new administration of George W. Bush get up to speed on climate change.
At the time I was a 32 year-old fresh-faced researcher about to leave the National Center for Atmospheric Research for a faculty position across town at the University of Colorado. I had never testified before Congress or really had any high-level policy engagement.
When the roundtable was announced, I experienced something completely new in my professional career — several of my much more senior colleagues contacted me to lobby me to downplay or even to misrepresent my research on the roles of climate and society in the economic impacts of extreme weather. I had become fairly well known in the atmospheric sciences research community back then for our work showing that increasing U.S. hurricane damage could be explained entirely by more people and more wealth.
One colleague explained to me that my research, even though scientifically accurate, might distract from efforts to advocate for emissions reductions:
"I think we have a professional (or moral?) obligation to be very careful what we say and how we say it when the stakes are so high."
At the time, I wrote that the message I heard was that the “ ends justify means or, in other words, doing the "right thing" for the wrong reasons is OK” — even if that meant downplaying or even misrepresenting my own research.
I have thought about that experience over the past few weeks as I have received many comments on the first four installments of the THB series Climate Fueled Extreme Weather (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). One of the most common questions I’ve received asks why it is that the scientific assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are so different than what is reported in the media, proclaimed in policy, and promoted by the most public-facing climate experts. And, why can’t that gap be closed?
Over the past 23 years, I have wondered a lot myself about this question — not just how misinformation arises in policy discourse (we know a lot about that), but why it is that the expert climate community has been unable or unwilling to correct rampant misinformation about extreme weather, with some even promoting that misinformation.
Obviously, I don’t have good answers, but I will propose three inter-related explanations that help me to make sense of these dynamics — the noble lie, conventional wisdom, and luxury beliefs.
The Noble Lie
The most important explanation is that many in the climate community — like my senior colleague back in 2001 — appear to believe that achieving emissions reductions is so very important that its attainment trumps scientific integrity. The ends justify the means. They also believe that by hyping extreme weather, they will make emissions reductions more likely (I disagree, but that is a subject for another post).
I explained this as a “fear factor” in The Climate Fix:
Typically, the battle over climate-change science focused on convincing (or, rather, defeating) those skeptical has meant advocacy focused on increasing alarm. As one Australian academic put it at a conference at Oxford University in the fall of 2009: “The situation is so serious that, although people are afraid, they are not fearful enough given the science. Personally I cannot see any alternative to ramping up the fear factor.”
Similarly, when asked how to motivate action on climate change, economist Thomas Schelling replied, “It’s a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. . . [P]art of me sympathizes with the case for disingenuousness. . . I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening—you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth—that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
From the opening ceremony of the Copenhagen climate negotiations to Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, to public comments from leading climate scientists, to the echo-chambers of the blogosphere, fear and alarm have been central to advocacy for action on climate change.
It’s just a short path from climate fueled extreme weather to the noble lie at the heart of fear-based campaigns.
Bari Weiss observes the dynamics of the noble lie in how many people refused to acknowledge that President Joe Biden was showing the signs of being an 81-year-old man:
Better to put the thumb on the scale—just the lightest of touches—and make sure we get the right outcome. A few white lies for the sake of the Republic seems a small price to pay.
In The Honest Broker, I devoted a chapter to the dynamics of the noble lie in the context of the fateful decision to go to war in Iraq — WMDs! Noble lies have no partisan or ideological boundaries.
For climate and extreme weather, one important difference from the Iraq War or President Biden is that there is no ending point — a war or an election — that allows for an evaluation or resetting of the lie more in the direction of truth.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/why-climate-misinformation-persists
***********************************************Doctors Being Instructed To Lie To You About The Climate
In theory, people being more political sounds great. Less dreary conversations about the weather and the ‘footie’, and more watercoolers surrounded by colleagues fizzing with enthusiasm about democracy and its pleasures
But the actual practice of this presupposes that we will all be open-minded and curious and – unless we are extremely learned about something – that the opinion of all citizens shall be equal.
This came to mind on reading that the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has this week issued new guidance instructing doctors, as ‘trusted members of the community’, to lecture their poor patients about the ‘dangers’ of ‘climate change’.
This is troubling enough given the average duration of a face-to-face appointment with a GP in England – when you finally get one – is just 10 minutes.
Furthermore, this 11-page document also suggests that doctors should cause even more anxiety to patients by ‘working from home’ and cutting back on tests and prescriptions – in the name of ‘saving the planet’, of course.
So basically doctors are being advised by the RCP to do less of the things doctors have historically been required to do while amping up the scolding about an area they have no training in.
It also urges doctors, after scaring their patients with talk of burning rivers and the like, to keep an eye out for the poor creatures showing signs of ‘eco-distress’ – that is, anxiety and depression allegedly caused by ‘climate change’.
I would venture that if this condition exists in any great numbers, it’s caused not by ‘climate change’ itself but by people banging on about it, alongside the other anxieties that stem from not being able to get a GP appointment, a medical test, or a prescription.
We’re not quite at the stage of those crazy Canucks.
In 2021, a doctor in British Columbia diagnosed a woman with ‘climate change’ – thought to be a world first – after she reported having breathing problems following a hot summer featuring a slew of forest fires.
How many years at medical school did it take to come to this razor-sharp conclusion?
Dr Kyle Merritt opined:
‘She has diabetes. She has some heart failure… She lives in a trailer, no air conditioning.
All of her health problems have all been worsened. And she’s really struggling to stay hydrated.’
I’m sure we’ll get to where Canada is eventually, though. When a society is as single-minded about scaring itself as the Kool-Aid-quaffing Canadians have been for some time, there’s no telling what rabbit holes we’ll race each other to the bottom of.
It’s telling that the RCP document showcases such condescending gems from the World Health Organization as ‘don’t debate the science’ and ‘talk about the health benefits of climate action’.
I wonder what health benefits the people inside the ambulances blocked by Just Stop Oil over the past few years have gained from climate change action?
The NHS isn’t just keen to lecture patients about ‘climate change’, it’s also chasing the ‘Net Zero’ dream.
A rather chilling report published earlier this year in the Telegraph revealed that the NHS plans to introduce electric ambulances to reach green targets.
Paramedics have already expressed concern about the dangerous effect this will have on patients, as ambulances spend hours recharging instead of attending emergencies.
Former chancellor Nigel Lawson once famously said that the NHS is the closest thing that the English have to a religion, which makes doctors the priests.
When the NHS itself follows the new false gods of everything from climate to ‘trans rights’, the stage is set for the mayhem of unbridled magical thinking.
Like the old priests, doctors are often no better than the rest of us; often, they’re worse.
The majority of them may well be driven by the desire to improve the human condition – but the idea that they are somehow holy receptacles of wisdom is absurd.
I’d listen to a doctor’s advice on what to do with, say, a broken leg, because I’m aware that they studied the subjects of sickness and health into their mid-twenties, while I was chasing off to interview gormless pop stars.
But take lessons from them on politics or lifestyle? No thanks.
https://principia-scientific.com/doctors-being-instructed-to-lie-to-you-about-the-climate/
****************************************Dominion’s Proposed Peaker Plant Is a Good Sign for Reliability
In the last decade, many states have made energy policy decisions that prioritize building new renewable energy sources, namely wind and solar, over more reliable forms of power. Often, this comes in the form of renewable portfolio standards that mandate a certain portion of the energy mix comes from wind and solar.
One such state is Virginia. The Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) is a renewable portfolio standard that requires that the state’s largest utilities, Dominion Energy and Appalachian Power, both use 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. Despite this mandate, the state’s utilities are doing what they must to maintain a reliable grid.
Earlier this year, Dominion Energy announced plans to build a new peaking natural gas plant to help meet the state’s growing demand for power. Peaking power plants, otherwise known as peaker plants, are power plants that are able to ramp up and down to compensate for the intermittency of other sources of electricity. Dominion may need to construct up to 8 more similar plants over the next decade and a half.
The state’s unique position in the technology sector may contribute to demand growth. Northern Virginia is currently the number one state for data centers in the US. This gives the state immense importance as artificial intelligence and other data intensive applications develop further and are used more widely. With this economic boon comes an obligation for the state’s utilities to rise to the occasion. That means maintaining reliability.
Dominion Energy is Virginia’s largest utility company. The fact that it’s choosing to invest in new natural gas peaker plant capacity right now is a promising sign for those concerned with reliable electricity.
Jeremy Slayton, a spokesman for Dominion, acknowledged the importance of maintaining reliability. “On the hottest and coldest days of the year, when people are running their air conditioning, they’re running their heater, and that demand goes up and up and up,” and went on to say, “And if we can’t meet that demand that means there will be blackouts.”
Even though the state’s growing need for reliable power is difficult to dispute, the move has faced significant opposition from environmentalists and some lawmakers. In March, a coalition of nine lawmakers, including seven Delegates and two Senators, signed a letter opposing the peaker plant because it, “runs counter to the measures the Commonwealth has taken recently to lower carbon emissions and to diversify energy production and storage”. What these lawmakers fail to understand is that the measures that the Commonwealth has taken run counter to reliably keeping the lights on.
In my recent paper, “How to Keep the Lights On”, I outline 9 principles for a reliable electric grid. The fourth principle is “Government should not dictate the electricity mix.” This is because renewable portfolio standards like the VCEA are prescriptive rather than realistic policies. They assume that a power mix can be made to work because the government decided that it would. This is far from the truth.
A reliable electrical grid doesn’t just come about on its own. It’s the result of good decision making and a prudent understanding of tradeoffs (in addition to the physical infrastructure that makes it up). The problem is that for years now the rhetoric and decision making of lawmakers has been out of line with reality and reliability.
It’s great to see Dominion make a decision that focuses on reliability, even in the face of opposition.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/07/30/peaker-plant-reliability/
***********************************************‘Picking Winners’ has been a costly failure, new study warns
As Europe’s EV industry is on the brink of economic crisis, a new study published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation documents the poor track record of governments who cherry-pick technologies in the hope of achieving a policy goal. It warns that the UK is in the process of repeating costly mistakes in the race to achieve Net Zero.
The study reveals that ‘picking winners’ has rarely been successful and almost always resulted in very costly flops.
Written by Martin Livermore, the paper reviews a range of projects from the last few decades in the UK and summarises the factors contributing to their success or failure.
Unfortunately, politicians have not learnt the lessons of these failures and are in the process of repeating mistakes in the race to achieve Net Zero.
The study reviews current Net Zero projects, in particular:
* electricity generation and storage
* carbon capture and storage
* heat pumps for domestic heating
* electric vehicles as replacements for the internal combustion engine.
Martin Livermore warns:
“In each case, top-down targets have been set and a predetermined route set out, with taxpayers’ money used to drive consumer acceptance of technologies that are otherwise uneconomic. A far better use of resources for both the UK population and, in the longer term, for citizens across the world, is to set broad top-level goals and enable competition between technologies and companies so that better, more economic solutions can be developed.”
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30 July, 2024
Biden Admin Suggests Spending $78 Trillion to Achieve Net-Zero Global Carbon Emissions
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said during a speech in Belem, Brazil, on Saturday that the price tag for a global transition to a low-carbon economy amounts to $78 trillion in financing through 2050.
Yellen said that in order to achieve the goal of net-zero global carbon emissions, there would need to be $3 trillion globally in annual financing for the cause, which she said is a top priority for the Biden administration, according to the speech. In order to contribute to this, Yellen vowed to finance green initiatives in developing countries through multilateral development banks and develop “clean energy technologies.”
“The transition will require no less than $3 trillion in new capital from many sources each year between now and 2050,” Yellen said during the speech. “This can be leveraged to support pathways to sustainable and inclusive growth, including for countries that have historically received less investment.”
“Neglecting to address climate change and the loss of nature and biodiversity is not just bad environmental policy,” Yellen said during the speech. “It is bad economic policy.”
Yellen boasted in her speech about the commitments the Biden administration has put forth toward forwarding these green initiatives to achieve their “climate goals.”
“At home, we are implementing the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate legislation in our nation’s history,” Yellen said during the speech. “It is driving hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in the clean energy technologies and industries that will propel us toward our climate goals and fuel our economic growth.”
The Inflation Reduction Act allocated $370 billion to subsidize climate initiatives like electric vehicles and other technologies that are essential to President Joe Biden’s green agenda.
“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world,” Biden said during a speech addressing climate change in July of 2022. “As president, I’ll use my executive powers to combat climate—the climate crisis in the absence of congressional actions, notwithstanding their incredible action.”
During her speech, Yellen advocated for these climate initiatives to be implemented “beyond our borders.”
“Our ambitions at home are matched by our ambitions abroad,” Yellen said during the speech. “We know that we can only achieve our climate and economic goals—from reducing global emissions to adapting and building resilience, from strengthening markets to bolstering supply chains—if we also lead efforts far beyond our borders.”
The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Debt-Funded GB Energy to Bet on the Costliest Electricity Generation Technologies
Labour has taken to the airwaves to promote the launch of the Great British Energy Bill in Parliament.
The official press release makes a number of bold statements that do not have a very close relationship to the truth.
First, they make several claims about “cheap” renewables such as the claim that the Energy Secretary has “unblocked the production of cheap solar energy”. The Prime Minister claimed the new bill would “bring down energy bills for good” and the investment will be “lowering bills for families and businesses.”
Perhaps as a portent for what is to come, Labour appears to have dropped the pre-election pledge to cut energy bills by £300
The pledge has been reduced to a conditional “should make bills lower in the long term”. This is not surprising because as discussed here, the promised reduction has already been delivered by reduced gas prices.
This is not a surprise because they are committed to investing in some of the whackiest, most expensive energy technologies. As well as offshore wind they are also going to invest in carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, wave and tidal energy. As Figure 3 shows, these are all extremely expensive technologies.
For this financial year, the average market reference price for wind and solar, largely set by gas, has been around £65/MWh. In the latest AR6 renewables auction round they are offering fixed offshore wind £102/MWh, floating offshore £246/MWh, tidal stream £364/MWh and wave power £359/MWh.
All the renewable technologies are more expensive than gas (even when loaded with a carbon tax), with some costing many multiples of gas-fired power. Our bills can only go one way, and that is up.
The press release, the Prime Minister and the Energy Secretary all also claim that spending more money on renewables will lead to more energy security.
They fail to explain what will keep the lights on cold, calm winter evenings when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. Of course, the flexible, dispatchable electricity required will be generated by gas-fired power stations and even more gas will be required if these are fitted with CCS.
The press release makes no mention of their commitment to ban further offshore exploration and development of gas resources in the North Sea. Even the Climate Change Committee and the National Grid ESO recognise we will need gas well beyond 2050, so building more intermittent renewables and cutting gas production both actively reduce domestic energy security.
GB Energy will form a partnership with the Crown Estate to try and accelerate offshore wind developments. GB Energy will be funded by £8.3 billion of (borrowed) money from the Government and the Crown Estate will be granted new borrowing powers.
The Crown Estate estimates this mountain of debt will lead to up to 20-30GW of offshore wind capacity being leased by 2030.. They plan to conduct early development work to de-risk projects for the private sector.
They claim this new endeavour will bring “profits back to the British people”. What they really mean is that bill payers will be stung by the cost of the eye-watering subsidies for these new projects.
And the profits that arise in GB Energy and the Crown Estate will flow through into Treasury coffers. Ordinary people will only pay the costs and receive none of the profits.
It is only a matter of time before we are exhorted to Stay Cold, Protect the Grid and Save Gas, perhaps accompanied by Patrick Vallance giving daily tallies of deaths from hypothermia.
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Air NZ scraps 2030 carbon emissions target as ‘unachievable’
Air New Zealand has become the first major airline to concede ambitious carbon emissions reduction targets are unachievable by 2030, and has made the decision to dump them.
The kiwi carrier had been aiming to slash its carbon intensity by 28.9 per cent compared to 2019 levels, through the use of sustainable aviation fuel, lower emissions aircraft and other changes.
However in a statement to the ASX, Air New Zealand said many of the levers needed to meet the target were outside of its control and remained “challenging”.
Chief executive Greg Foran said it had also become apparent in recent months and weeks, that potential delays to fleet renewal plans posed an additional risk to the target’s achievability.
“It is possible the airline may need to retain its existing fleet for longer than planned due to global manufacturing and supply chain issues that could potentially slow the introduction of newer, more fuel efficient aircraft in to the fleet,” Mr Foran said.
“As such and given so many levers needed to meet the target are outside of our control, the decision has been made to retract the 2030 target and withdraw from the science based targets initiative network immediately.”
He indicated that work had began to consider a new, near-term carbon emissions reduction target that could better reflect the challenges relating to aircraft and alternative jet fuel availability within the industry.
Last year, 600 million litres of sustainable aviation fuel was produced worldwide, which was more than double that of 2022, but still a mere 0.2 per cent of the airline industry’s needs.
In 2024, production was expected to triple to 1.875 billion litres or about 0.5 per cent of the total aviation fuel supply.
Air New Zealand chair Dame Therese Walsh said the airline remained committed to its 2050 net zero carbon emissions target, which had been adopted by the broader aviation industry.
“Our work to transition away from fossil fuels continues, as does our advocacy for the global and domestic regulatory and policy settings that will help facilitate Air New Zealand and the wider aviation system in New Zealand to do its part to mitigate climate change risks,” said Dame Therese.
Air New Zealand has previously been one of the most outspoken on sustainability issues, and was one of the first to announce plans to develop carbon neutral aircraft for regional routes in partnership with Airbus.
At last year’s CAPA aviation summit in Brisbane, chief sustainability officer Kiri Hannifin even challenged other airlines to consider if they were “worth the carbon”.
In a passionate speech, Ms Hannifin said it was a simple matter of fact that airlines “were connecting people but polluting at the same time” and they all needed to do better.
“For us in aviation, we have to ask ourselves ‘are we worth the carbon?’” Ms Hannifin said.
“That should be a driver of how we conduct ourselves as a business and as a society. It’s also a great moral compass — are we worth the carbon?”
Australian airlines remained wedded to their 2030 targets, including a 22 per cent reduction in carbon intensity for Virgin Australia, and 25 per cent emissions reduction for Qantas.
Both were banking on increased production of sustainable aviation fuel and lower emissions aircraft to achieve the interim targets.
As yet Australia is yet to produce any sustainable aviation fuel, despite being rich in the sort of material — agricultural waste and feedstock — used to make the alternative fuel.
******************************************************
Hydrogen nonsense
Mining magnate Andrew ‘‘Twiggy’’ Forrest surprised many in the media on July 17 when he announced he was scaling back his green hydrogen commitments.
Yet, journalists following the global energy debate should have known this holy grail of power storage and pollution-free fuel was running into trouble around the world — even as Forrest continued to make multibillion-dollar announcements with state and federal leaders here and with governments overseas.
This is why politicians should not try to pick winners: the rush of capital looking for taxpayer-guaranteed returns is no measure of a technology’s viability. Nor does history show Australian politicians are any good at making decisions properly left to investment market professionals.
This column has long been sceptical of various firming technologies for variable wind and solar power. Back on October 17, 2022, I wrote: “Perhaps the most important question (in this area) that journalists should be asking relates to the feasibility of green hydrogen, being spruiked around the world … by Forrest.”
It quoted climate campaigner and engineer Saul Griffith estimating Forrest’s hydrogen would be between five and six times more expensive than using wind and solar only for power. Griffith said power would need to be priced at 2c per kilowatt hour to produce hydrogen for the then-new Albanese government’s $2 per kilogram target price.
Most states at the time were charging between 25c and 40c per kilowatt hour.
The week before the latest federal budget this column had a crack at Jim Chalmers for pinning so much of his government’s “Future Made in Australia” ambition on green hydrogen. The piece pointed out industry was expecting more taxpayer funds for green hydrogen in the budget the following week, but even the green evangelist Grattan Institute warned in December optimism about hydrogen was overblown.
Grattan energy specialist Tony Wood said government and industry would be wise to limit hydrogen expectations to green ammonia for fertiliser, green steel and green alumina.
Wood said even confining hydrogen ambitions to these sectors would “require more than 30 gigawatts of electricity, 60 per cent more than we have in the National Electricity Market today”.
Yet, on budget night, May 14, the Treasurer announced a further $19.7bn over 10 years under the “renewable energy super power banner”. Green hydrogen support was extended to $6.7bn over a decade.
Forrest, Chalmers and Anthony Albanese all claimed last week they remained committed to green hydrogen despite Forrest’s lay-off of 700 workers and his scaling back of several projects. He did remain committed to five hydrogen projects here and overseas.
Yet, had Chalmers and the Prime Minister read Saul Griffith’s testimony before the federal parliament last year, they might have been more cautious.
The Renew Economy website on April 6 last year quoted Griffith, also co-founder of Rewiring Australia, telling a parliamentary inquiry committing taxpayer funds to hydrogen would be a costly economic mistake.
“The idea that hydrogen will play a large role in the energy future does not make economic or thermodynamic sense,” Griffith’s written submission to the joint standing committee on the energy transition says. Griffith, like Wood, believes hydrogen will play a role in certain hard-to-abate sectors.
Griffith said people with a strong vested interest had “a heavy hand on the tiller of the hydrogen conversation”.
Forrest’s climb-down from the hydrogen pulpit came as the EU sounded a warning about hydrogen.
The Brussels-based European Court of Auditors said on July 17 — the same day as Forrest’s announcement — the EU’s hydrogen goals were unrealistic, despite the billions of euros already invested.
The EU had committed €18.8bn ($31bn) to make 10 million tonnes of green hydrogen by 2030 and to import a further 10 million tonnes by 2030. Forrest alone claimed he could make 15 million tonnes by 2030.
The following night on ABC’s 7.30, host Sarah Ferguson gave Forrest a rare, almost interruption-free, 11 minutes to obfuscate on the central question: has hydrogen been over-hyped?
It was an interview in stark contrast with her latest nuclear power exchange with opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien. Ferguson talked over the top of him throughout and interrupted during most of the points O’Brien tried to make.
Yet, nuclear power is tried, tested and reliable while green hydrogen is in early development stages and may not be viable at scale.
A paper by the conservative Manhattan Institute released on February 1 this year, Green Hydrogen: A Multibillion-Dollar Energy Boondoggle, gets to the heart of the hydrogen problem. Hydrogen creates less energy than is used to make it.
The study examines various hydrogen technologies and homes in on EROI: energy return on investment.
The EROI of green hydrogen via electrolysis is 0.5. It releases half as much energy as is invested in making it.
The EROIs of traditional power sources are 28 for natural gas, 30 for coal and 75 for nuclear power. This is the science; it’s not about climate denial but the reality of physics and chemistry.
The point of the hydrogen story for a column on journalism? Scepticism is a key quality needed for good and accurate reporting. Journalists need to be especially sceptical in testing claims in-line with their own personal biases.
In the energy transition, conservative-leaning journalists who favour nuclear power have been unable to accept the Coalition’s plan to build nuclear reactors will do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions until 2040.
Therefore, unless a Coalition government were to scrap its emissions reduction targets, it would not markedly slow the rollout of wind and solar technology which, for all its problems, will reduce emissions.
Remember, too, the Coalition plan calls for nuclear as a dispatchable backup rather than a whole-of-system power source. As O’Brien has said, it would eventually operate in tandem with wind and solar.
Similarly, left-leaning journalists like those who dominate the ABC need to test their inherent biases in favour of anything claimed to reduce emissions.
Ferguson has been a prime example in recent weeks. Why the soft approach to Forrest while applying attack tactics in her nuclear interview with O’Brien in March?
Similarly, ABC Media Watch has for decades been on the hunt for any stories it thinks might hide secret climate denial.
Last Monday, July 22, it was again on its favourite hobby horse: bollocking Sky News Australia. This time it targeted the network’s coverage of EVs.
It did acknowledge what has been clear for over a year: while Australian buyers were late to the EV party, buyers in Europe and North America have been walking away from the technology.
Why? The problems reporters at this paper have been describing for almost a decade: range anxiety, price, increasing insurance premiums, fears about battery fires, the cost of battery repair and the high cost of smash repair. The latest EV hot-button issue has been deep price discounting by Tesla which has left recent former buyers out of pocket compared with new buyers.
Media Watch ignored most of these issues and failed to make the central point. Most EVs in Australia, unless powered by a home battery connected to rooftop solar, receive electricity from a power grid still largely fired by burning coal.
Now, that should make any thinking journalist a bit sceptical.
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29 July, 2024
I Wrote An Article For Forbes Defending J.D. Vance From Accusations Of ‘Climate Denialism’. Forty Eight Hours Later, Forbes Un-Published The Article And Sacked Me As A Contributor
Written by Tilak Doshi
An article I wrote for Forbes about J.D. Vance published on July 18th began as follows:
Within a day of ex-President Trump’s announcement of “climate denier” Mr. J. D. Vance as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, the climate industrial complex and supportive mainstream media had the knives out.
Little did I know that within a day of publishing that article, the knives would come out for me.
The editors of Forbes deleted my article, stating that “we had to take down your latest Forbes article about J.D. Vance because it did not meet our editorial guidelines which we take seriously”.
This was followed by a short note stating that I was sacked as a contributor. Similar complaints of not abiding by the magazine’s guidelines were made by an editor on a couple of previous published articles.
What editorial guidelines? “Avoid advocacy, opinion, polemic and rumour-mongering.”
I have yet to read any Forbes piece that avoided opinion, given that Forbes contributors are opinion columnists and not journalists who are hired to merely report the news. The contributor’s role, one would have thought, is to offer opinions and advocate certain lines of argument about current affairs or topics of interest based on a reasonable reading of verifiable data. Otherwise, what is the contributor’s purpose?
But here is the catch. It depends on whether you are “on message”. Are you with or against the accepted narratives? If against, you are cancelled. That is how the establishment operates – within Forbes and in the mainstream media – as I found out.
“Avoid Advocacy”
Here is the lead paragraph of a recent article in Forbes entitled “GOP Platform: Back To The Carbon Age” in the weekly column “Current Climate” by two “Forbes Senior Editors”:
Ahead of the Republican Party’s National Convention that kicks off today in Milwaukee, the GOP released its official platform of key priorities for a second potential Trump Administration. As with any such political document, it’s long on platitudes and slogans, but very short on detail.
But there’s at least one clear takeaway in the document: it prioritises increasing energy from fossil fuels while ignoring the carbon-fuelled climate crisis that’s triggered record-setting heatwaves and earlier and more intense hurricanes.
The authors assert that the GOP official platform “prioritises increasing energy from fossil fuels while ignoring the carbon-fuelled climate crisis”.
They further claim that the “carbon-fuelled climate crisis” has “triggered record-setting heatwaves and earlier and more intense hurricanes”. By these leading statements, the reader is led to believe that both constitute “settled science”.
Here is another example of writing from another recently published Forbes article that allegedly does not constitute advocacy or opinion:
Imagine not being able to get the warning about the approaching hurricane or tornado. How would you know when to evacuate to stay safe or board up your home or business? Or make sure your staff is protected? It’s not a bad dream, it could be the reality if Donald Trump takes office again.
My suggestion that the policy positions of J.D. Vance in support of fossil fuels and sceptical of climate alarmist claims are consistent with the verities of physics and economics got me cancelled. But arguing that if Donald Trump takes over, it would be “a bad dream” is perfectly fine in a Forbes world allegedly devoid of advocacy or opinion.
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UK: ‘Climate Crisis’ Used To Justify Govt’s Record Spending On ‘Renewables’
The Government appears ready to claim that the ‘imminent’ threat of ‘climate change’ justifies what will be the largest taxpayer-funded investment in wind and solar farms in British history
The Telegraph has the details.
Sir Keir Starmer is to unveil the first investment by the £8.3 billion taxpayer-funded Great British Energy, which will back renewable energy projects to help meet the Government’s Net Zero goals.
The Prime Minister will say the Government is “rolling up our sleeves to deliver for Britain” as he announces a partnership with the Crown Estate to help develop the seabed for offshore wind power.
Ed Miliband, the Energy Secretary, said the £8.3 billion investment in GB Energy was vital to meet the “huge challenges” the country faced, including the climate crisis, which was “not a future threat but a present reality”.
“In an unstable world, the only way to guarantee our energy security and protect billpayers permanently is to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels and towards home-grown clean energy,” he said.
“That is why making Britain a clean energy superpower by 2030 is one of the Prime Minister’s five missions, with the biggest investment in home-grown clean energy in British history.”
A Great British Energy Bill will be introduced in Parliament on Thursday to formally establish the company, which will have its headquarters in Scotland.
The company is expected to take a stake in renewables energy projects alongside the private sector. …
In its first major project, GB Energy will provide spatial planning, surveying and grid design assistance to the Crown Estate to help speed up the development of offshore wind projects. …
It is not yet clear how much of the £8.3 billion will be divided between projects such as the Crown Estate deal and other types of investment. …
Josh Buckland, a former civil servant in the energy department and senior fellow at Policy Exchange, said there was a lack of clarity about how GB Energy will operate.
“This includes how any public ownership will be designed in such a way not to distort the market for private investment,” he said.
“Until that is understood, it’s hard to assess how much value GB Energy will deliver in practice to the taxpayer or billpayer.”
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UK may need new gas-fired power stations to decarbonise grid
Labour is likely to have to approve new gas-fired power stations in its attempt to decarbonise the UK’s electricity systems by 2030, in what would be a tricky decision for the new government.
Keeping the lights on for the rest of the decade, and beyond, will require some additional baseload power, and new nuclear power stations will not be built in time, according to a report from the National Engineering Policy Centre.
All the UK’s existing gas-fired power stations are expected to be kept going as long as possible but it is probable that more will be needed. Wind and solar generation are set for large increases but the UK’s nuclear reactors are ageing and coal has almost been phased out.
Nilay Shah, a professor of process systems engineering at Imperial College London and a co-author of the report, said: “There is a reasonable chance that we will need new gas-fired power stations.”
However he called for them to be “genuinely” ready for the attachment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which could be achieved by locating them near potential underground carbon storage sites. He said the number needed would depend on factors such as building new interconnectors between the UK and overseas electricity grids.
Simon Harrison, the head of strategy at the engineering company Mott MacDonald who co-chaired the committee that wrote the report, added that having a small number of gas-fired power stations available would add to the UK’s resilience, even if they did produce some carbon emissions. “We have to not be purist about unabated gas,” he said.
This would be a tough decision for Ed Miliband, the energy and net zero secretary, as he attempts to meet the “stretching” target of decarbonising electricity generation by 2030. Rishi Sunak drew criticism from green campaigners when he announced plans for new gas-fired power plants in March, which campaigners said was the result of the Tory government’s failure to encourage enough new renewable energy generation.
However, Jess Ralston, the head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit thinktank, said: “Keeping a supply of unabated gas plants in 2030 – some new as older ones are planned to go offline before then – in reality would probably mean they are only on for short, infrequent periods of time, rather than being on much of the time like they are today. These plants will probably be expensive to run, and gas prices are predicted to remain volatile, so it is in consumer interests to keep their usage low as well as in the interests of our energy security and, of course, climate change.”
Labour acknowledged in its manifesto the likely need to keep some “unabated gas” – that is, without CCS – for security of supply, and the Committee on Climate Change has also said some gas-fired electricity could be needed even as the UK pushes to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Miliband will also face serious problems in updating the UK’s creaking electricity grid and erecting the new pylons required for the transmission of power from a new generation of onshore and offshore wind and solar farms, according to the report published on Tuesday.
The report found that major work was needed on transmission infrastructure, including new pylons, and that although there could be local objections, the upgrade would produce benefits for people all over the country, from new jobs and the rejuvenation of regional economies, to cleaner air and better health, and helping to reduce the impacts of the climate crisis.
Protests against new pylons have been coordinated by local groups and have been supported by the co-leader of the Green party, Adrian Ramsay, and other Green and Liberal Democrat politicians. The Tory party manifesto contained a commitment to bury pylons, but this would be more expensive than using overhead cables.
“We need to show people the benefits,” said Harrison. “There should be a proper opportunity for public debate about this plan.”
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Court rules in favour of Roundup over cancer query
A great relief. The Greenie jihad against glyphosate has been relentless
Australian farmers are relieved by a Federal Court ruling that the commonly used herbicide Roundup does not cause cancer.
Regarded as a key tool for controlling weeds in agricultural crops, Roundup’s manufacturer Monsanto has been hit by a barrage of legal action across the world in recent years.
A landmark class action in the Federal Court against Monsanto’s Australian offshoot, Huntsman Chemical Company, was filed by 800 on-Hodgkin lymphoma patients in 2020, but judge Michael Lee late on Thursday found the evidence did not prove the glyphosate based herbicide was carcinogenic.
German chemicals and pharmaceuticals company Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, is facing multiple lawsuits in the US and has in some cases been found liable by juries for causing cancer.
National agencies, including the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority, which last considered glyphosate in 2016, European Food Agency and European Chemicals Agency and the US Environmental Protection Agency have all approved use of glyphosate as a weed killer, subject to conditions, after strict safety assessments.
Justice Lee found there was not enough evidence to prove Roundup caused the non-Hodgkin lymphoma of 41-year-old Kelvin McNickle, who was diagnosed with the cancer six years ago after two decades of using the chemical on his family’s property.
The National Farmers Federation said Justice Lee’s decision was reassuring, given the widespread use of the product in the agriculture sector.
“As a farmers and stewards of the land, it’s important we use products that are safe for humans and the environment,” the NFF said after the verdict.
“Glyphosate is one of the most common products farmers and home gardeners use all over the world to combat invasive weeds. It allows us to be more productive and sustainable, often being associated with no or minimal till farming, which preserves soil structure.
“The decision from the Federal Court today reinforces that our regulator is doing its job to ensure the health and safety of our farmers, communities and environment.”
Describing glyphosate as “a critical component of modern and sustainable agricultural production”, NSW Farmers Ag Science Committee chair Alan Brown said Australian farmers were “well aware of how to use this chemical correctly to protect the health of their families and communities”.
“Without access to the chemical, farmers would have to resort to cultivation to manage weeds – degrading our landscape and making it harder than ever to maintain productivity” Mr Brown said.
Bayer said the decision was consistent with worldwide regulatory and scientific assessments and “remains committed to supporting Australian farmers by ensuring safe-for-use and effective products such as Roundup continue to be available”.
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28 July, 2024
UK: I fear Starmer and Miliband are creating a taxpayer-funded white elephant that will decimate our energy security
Keir Starmer has a touching faith in the idea that by giving a grandiloquent name to his new quango – Great British Energy (GBE) – his aspirations for a carbon-free and energy-secure nation will be fulfilled at a stroke.
The whole country would, of course, welcome a green and pleasant land with cleaner air, lower carbon emissions, cheaper fuel bills and reduced dependence on Vladimir Putin and his gas pipelines from Russia to the West.
But the truth is that the Prime Minister and his Energy Secretary, green fanatic and failed Labour leader Ed Miliband, are living in cloud cuckoo land. They will deliver few, if any, of the bold pledges they are making.
Let me explain. In the King's Speech, Sir Keir's new government confirmed that GBE, the state-owned energy company, will develop, own and operate energy projects such as wind farms, using public money to help spur further private sector investment.
But the £8.3 billion of seed money promised by the Exchequer for Britain's energy transformation over the term of the current parliament will be a drop in the ocean.
In spite of the overblown language, this is a fraction of the sums already devoted to 'climate reduction' goals by our UK-listed oil firms Shell and BP, as well as domestically owned power suppliers Centrica and Scottish & Southern Electricity (SSE).
Some argue it is reassuring that GBE will be headed up by the former boss of German multinational Siemens's British arm, Juergen Maier, who might bring some much-needed private-sector experience to the job.
What is less reassuring, however, is the disastrous financial performance of Siemens Energy – which ran up losses of £3.7 billion in 2023 alone. Combined with the desperate track record of past Labour governments to command and control the economy through grandiose quangos such as the National Enterprise Board of the 1970s, it looks almost inevitable that GBE will become yet another vast black hole, sucking in public cash at the expense of other strained public services.
Most critically, by blocking future North Sea oil licences, as Starmer has done, and for the moment holding fire on the prospects for new nuclear production, the nation's energy security is being sacrificed in order to pursue unproven green energy 'solutions'.
In doing so, Starmer and Miliband are exposing the nation to the danger of factories being closed, the elderly and poor freezing in their homes – and lights going out when the wind fails to blow and the sun doesn't shine.
It is also critical that the UK can maintain a minimum level of electricity production at all times – especially if the Government pursues a madcap rush towards electric vehicles (EV) which, in many cases, are proving notoriously unreliable.
That is why Centrica-owned British Gas is investing heavily in renewing the nation's gas storage capacity at Rough off the East Yorkshire coast and exploring other potential sites in Wales.
Not to mention that Starmer and Miliband appear willing to trash 100,000 North Sea oil-related jobs, sabotage Aberdeen and lose £30 billion of new investment in fossil fuels, and the engineering services which go with them, to drive the 'green revolution'. Labour believes that by signing an agreement yesterday with the Crown Estate – which has command over most of the nation's coastal waters – it can somehow magic up £60 billion of new investment. Admittedly, this will be useful. Indeed, the link to the monarchy alone could potentially attract some overseas investors on the grounds of offering a kind of royal imprimatur. But we shouldn't get carried away by Labour's hoopla.
The Crown Estate has much more expertise on redeveloping real estate, such as the shops of London's swish Regent Street, than it does in energy.
Nor perhaps, are all of Miliband's eco-wheezes quite as revolutionary as he would have us believe. Before its new agreement with Labour, for example, the Crown Estate was already in talks with Scandinavian pioneers and Danish offshore energy experts.
And despite the Crown Estate's prestigious reputation, the fact remains that the only thing that will attract investors is a competitive entry price. If the price at which energy generated at the offshore windfarms can be sold is set too low to make the projects viable, it will put off bidders.
We learnt this the hard way in a crucial auction late last year, when not a single company bid to run a new offshore wind farm. Why? Because the Tory government had set the energy price too low. Even more seriously, a major proposed investment off the coast of Norfolk was temporarily put on hold.
The same thing happened in the US last year when Ørsted can-celled £3.3 billion of wind projects because it could not make the returns.
Earlier this year, BP also pulled out of its involvement in New York state wind farms – at a heavy cost to investors – because of the difficulty of getting decent returns.
The ultimate goal in all of these wind farms may have been lower prices for consumers. The reality is that only by offering a higher energy price to investors will they come forward – and the projects be built. It's an uncomfortable truth for Starmer and Miliband, who want to be seen to be providing the cheapest energy possible to voters.
They have been repeatedly questioned about when – or even if – their 'Green New Deal' would deliver lower prices for consumers. They couldn't answer. So much for cheaper bills.
A secondary aim of GBE is to boost our manufacturing sector, creating new skills and new jobs to replace those in fossil fuels.
This may be a perfectly noble aim. But in Britain, we have already sold ourselves out. Most of the solar panels being installed on the roofs of homes and factories across the UK are being built in China at a fraction of the cost they can be made in the UK.
One only has to look at how Beijing is dominating the market for electric cars – and the 50 per cent tariffs erected in the US and Europe to slow imports – to understand how difficult it is going to be to compete with Asian production.
There also is evidence from pressure group Tech Transparency that Chinese suppliers of wind farm equipment are using cheap Uyghur labour to manufacture wind turbines. It will be all but impossible for UK manufacturers (currently responsible for less than 10 per cent of wind farm components) to compete.
It's not all bad news. There is one area of green technology where Britain has a competitive quality and engineering advantage. Rolls-Royce, with the assistance of government funding, leads the world in the development of 'small modular reactors'. These are mini, simple-to-construct nuclear reactors based on the turbines that power nuclear-powered submarines.
Rolls-Royce believes it is capable of capturing a £250 billion global market if it receives the go-ahead from Whitehall for UK production. The Czech Republic has already expressed interest in buying them. Tens of thousands of real jobs – not the Potemkin quango roles envisaged by the new Government – are there to be created.
So far, however, Miliband has been slow to give the green light.
We can all pray for the success of Great British Energy and the zero-carbon nirvana envisaged by our mission-driven Government. But I fear we are creating a taxpayer-funded white elephant which will decimate our energy security.
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Facts at a premium in blustery climate debate
We think we are so clever. The conceit of contemporary humankind is often unbearable.
Yet this modern self-regard has generated a collective idiocy, an inane confusion between feelings and facts, and an inability to distinguish between noble aims and hard reality.
This preference for virtue signalling over practical action can be explained only by intellectual vanity, a smugness that over-estimates humankind’s ability to shape the world it inhabits.
Moonshot? Old news. Supersonic global travel? Been there, done that. Contraceptive pill, heart medication, painkillers, Viagra and antidepressants? Pharmacies are goldmines. Computers, video cameras, internet access to all knowledge of all history, audiovisual communication and electronic transactions? All in the palm of our hands.
Hot water when we want it, cool rooms when we need them, frozen meals, out-of-season fruits, self-driving cars, smart fridges and Uber deliveries. It is a wonder we bother getting out of bed.
As a result we have a tendency to believe we are masters of the universe, that we can control the climate and regulate natural disasters. Too lazy or spoiled to weigh facts and think things through, we are more susceptible than ever to mass delusion.
We have seen this tendency play out in deeply worrying ways, such as the irrational belief in the communal benefits of Covid vaccination despite the distinct lack of scientific evidence. Too many people just wanted to believe the vaccine had this thing beaten.
For that matter, we accepted draconian restrictions such as curfews and outdoor mask mandates when there was no medical evidence presented to support them. With most media operating hand-in-glove to generate fear and trepidation, our political and bureaucratic masters imposed frightening constraints on our freedom of expression, but most people seemed compliant because they wanted to believe we could control the virus and not vice versa.
Still, there is no area of public debate where rational thought is more readily cast aside than in the climate and energy debate. This is where alarmists demand that people “follow the science” while they deploy rhetoric, scare campaigns and policies that turn reality and science on their heads.
This nonsense is so widespread and amplified by so many authoritative figures that we have become inured to it. Teachers and children break from school to draw attention to what the UN calls a “climate emergency” as the world lives through its most populous and prosperous period in history, when people are shielded from the ill-effects of weather events better than they ever have been previously.
Politicians tell us in the same breath that producing clean energy is the most urgent and important task for the planet and reject nuclear energy, the only reliable form of emissions-free energy. The activists argue that reducing emissions is so imperative it is worth lowering living standards, alienating farmland, scarring forests and destroying industries, but it is not worth the challenge of boiling water to create energy-generating steam by using the tried and tested technology of nuclear fission.
Our acceptance of idiocy, unchecked and unchallenged, struck me in one interview this week given by teal MP Zali Steggall. In many ways it was an unexceptional interview; there are politicians and activists saying this sort of thing every day somewhere, usually unchallenged.
Steggall was preoccupied with Australia’s emissions reduction targets.
“If we are going to be aligned to a science-based target and keep temperatures as close to 1.5 degrees as we can, we must have a minimum reduction of 75 per cent by 2035 as an interim target,” she said.
Steggall then patronised her audience by comparing meeting emissions targets to paying down a mortgage. The claim about controlling global temperatures is hard to take seriously, but to be fair it is merely aping the lines of the UN, which argues the increase in global average temperatures can be held to 1.5 degrees with emissions reductions of that size – globally.
We could talk all day about the imprecise nature of these calculations, the contested scientific debate about the role of other natural variabilities in climate, and the presumption that humankind, through policy imposed by a supranational authority, can control global climate as if with a thermostat. The simplistic relaying of this agenda as central to Australian policy decisions was not the worst aspect of Steggall’s presentation.
“The Coalition has no policy, so let’s be really clear, they are taking Australia out of the Paris Agreement if they fail to nominate an improvement with a 2035 target,” Steggall lectured, disingenuously.
“The Labor government, they need to do better, we are currently not on track to keeping temperatures within sound boundaries from a climate risk point of view.”
This was Steggall promulgating the central lie of the national climate debate – that Australia’s emissions reduction policies can alter the climate. It is a fallacy embraced and advocated by Labor, the Greens and the teals, and which the Coalition is loath to challenge for fear of being tagged into a “climate denialism” argument.
It is arrant nonsense to suggest our policies can have any discernible effect on the climate or “climate risk”. Any politician suggesting so, directly or by implication, is part of a contemporary, fake-news-driven dumbing down of the public square, and injecting an urgency into our policy considerations that is hurting citizens already with high electricity prices, diminished reliability and a damaged economy.
Steggall went on to claim we were feeling the consequences of global warming already. “And for people wondering ‘How does that affect me?’, just look at your insurance premiums, our insurance premiums around Australia are going through the roof,” she extrapolated, claiming insurance costs were keeping people out of home ownership. “This is not a problem for the future,” Steggall stressed, “it is problem for now.”
It is a problem all right – it is unmitigated garbage masquerading as a policy debate. Taking it to its logical conclusion, Steggall claims if Australia reduced its emissions further we would lower the risk of natural disasters, leading to lower insurance premiums and improved housing affordability – it is surprising that world peace did not get a mention.
Mind you, these activists do like to talk about global warming as a security issue. They will say anything that heightens fears, escalates the problem and supports their push for more radical deindustrialisation.
Our national contribution to global emissions is now just over 1 per cent and shrinking. Australia’s annual emissions total less than 400 megatonnes while China’s are rising by more than that total each year and are now at 10,700Mt or about 30 times Australia’s. While our emissions reduce, global emissions are increasing. We could shut down our country, eliminating our emissions completely, and China’s increase would replace ours in less than a year.
So, whatever we are doing, it is not changing and cannot change the global climate. Our national chief scientist, Alan Finkel, clearly admitted this point in 2018, even though he was embarrassed by its implications in the political debate. Yet the pretence continues.
And before critics suggest I am arguing for inaction, I am not. But clearly, the logical and sensible baseline for our policy consideration should be a recognition that our national actions cannot change the weather. Therefore we should carefully consider adaptation to measured and verified climate change, while we involve ourselves as a responsible nation in global negotiations and action.
Obviously, we should not be leading that action but acting cautiously to protect our own interests and prosperity.
It is madness for us to undermine our cheap energy advantage to embark on a renewables-plus-storage experiment that no other country has dared to even try, when we know it cannot shift the global climate one iota. It is all pain for no gain.
Yet that is what this nation has done. So my question today is what has happened to our media, academia, political class and wider population so that it allows this debate and policy response to occur in a manner that is so divorced from reality?
Are we so complacent and overindulged that we accept post-rational debate to address our post-material concerns? Even when it is delivering material hardship to so many Australians and jeopardising our long-term economic security?
Should public debate accept absurd baseline propositions such as the idea that our energy transition sacrifice will improve the weather and reduce natural disasters, simply because they are being argued by major political groupings or the UN? Or should we not try to impose a dose of reality and stick to the facts?
This feebleness of our public debate has telling ramifications – there is no way this country could have embarked on the risky, expensive and doomed renewables-plus-storage experiment if policies and prognostications had been subject to proper scrutiny and debate.
Our media is now so polarised that the climate activists of Labor, the Greens and the teals are able to ensure their nonsensical advocacy is never challenged, and the green-left media, led by the publicly funded ABC, leads the charge in spreading misinformation.
Clearly, we are not as clever as we think. Our children need us to wise up.
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Britain's carbon capture target is a chimera
The National Audit Office (NAO) has raised concerns that the UK may not meet its 2030 target for carbon capture and storage (CCUS).
The technology, critical for achieving the UK’s net zero emissions goal by 2050, aims to capture and store 20 to 30 million tonnes of carbon annually by 2030.
The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ)’s plan involves establishing CCUS in four industrial clusters, with two initial clusters in north-west England, north Wales and the East Coast.
The remaining clusters in Scotland and Humberside are planned for later implementation.
However, the NAO’s report highlights “slow progress” in establishing the first two clusters, posing a risk to meeting the 2030 ambitions.
The report emphasises DESNZ’s challenges, including the complexities of launching new technology at scale and uncertainties around storage sites’ capacity and performance.
The NAO notes that managing risks between the government and private investors and within project partnerships is crucial for successful deployment.
Despite efforts to fill capability and capacity gaps, DESNZ is behind schedule in agreeing government support for Track-1 projects, originally planned to be operational by the mid-2020s.
The final investment decision for these projects has been delayed to at least September 2024.
Funding remains a concern, with DESNZ and HM Treasury committing up to £20 billion for early deployment but not specifying which programme elements this covers.
Further funding is required for future stages, and a clear plan for this is needed to provide investor confidence, the NAO suggests.
The report concludes that slower progress with Track-1 projects means DESNZ will struggle to meet its 2030 carbon capture ambitions, with current negotiations covering less than a quarter of the lower target for carbon capture.
Additionally, the lack of dedicated Greenhouse Gas Removal projects under Track-1 adds to the risk of missing the 2030 goals.
In response to the NAO’s report, Ruth Herbert, Cherif Executive of the CCSA said: “We agree with the National Audit Office that it is critical that the DESNZ succeeds with the CCUS programme if the UK is to achieve its legally binding climate ambitions.
“Over the past three years, significant progress has been made on the CCUS Cluster Sequencing Programme, but final investment decisions are yet to be taken.”
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesperson told Energy Live News: “We are taking immediate action to implement our plan for clean power by 2030 while continuing to develop cutting-edge technologies like carbon capture, usage and storage, which the NAO recognises will help to decarbonise our economy.
“This technology is vital to boost our energy independence and the Climate Change Committee describe it as a necessity not an option for reaching our climate goals.
“The initial cluster projects are nearing the first financial investment decisions this year, which are expected to create jobs and bring in billions of public and private investment into our industrial heartlands.”
https://www.energylivenews.com/2024/07/24/uk-may-fall-short-of-2030-carbon-capture-target/
*********************************************Green feels chop over Labor deals: For New South Wales Labor, green morality trumps forestry
Last month, 15 timber harvesting operations were suspended by the NSW timber industry controller Forestry Corporation. The Environment Protection Authority changed the habitat protection rules for the endangered greater gliders, making timber harvesting illegal.
Environmental activists have deployed a Victorian-style lawfare in an effort to shut down native timber production. But no amount of marsupial propaganda masks the human toll inflicted by the government’s betrayal.
Despite the NSW timber industry having more teeth than its Victorian counterparts and some sharp operators like ex-Labor Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, there is limited political interest in the arguments for sustainable management, homes, and sovereign capacity.
Activist environmentalists are cunning; having crippled the Victorian timber industry, they have worked out a successful model and are now replicating it in NSW. They take legal action against government bodies that trigger ‘stop work’ orders. This forces businesses to suffer death by attrition – court actions take years to resolve, and even if they are successful, few businesses are left, and fewer financial institutions are willing to back them.
Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty barely rated a whimper when responding to the crisis, stating that her government was ‘committed to delivering the right balance between protecting the environment and sustaining our state forests’. As to what that means, who knows?!
The Australian Forestry Products Association CEO James Jooste called for an intervention into dispute resolution three months ago, likely knowing full well the impact of the strategy.
‘We need a better resolution-dispute mechanism so we’re not spending six months out of our forests where we have no environmental outcomes and no productive outcomes,’ he said.
This fell on deaf ears, with neither the Minister for Agriculture, Tara Moriarty, nor the Minister for Natural Resources, Courtney Houssos, offering a solution. A surprising betrayal considering Minister Houssos’ commitment prior to the NSW election, where she promised:
‘No net job losses and an independent skills audit to guide investment and incentives and encourage new economic opportunities in the forestry industry.’
The truth is Labor cannot be trusted on forestry. The party has been overrun by inner-city greens, while the political hard-heads of old Labor are too weak to stand up for their traditional base.
This should not be the story for native forestry. The government should ensure that environmental activists cannot abuse the court process. If regulations need to change, then do so in a consultative manner over a period of time. Anything less is a calculated betrayal.
If Labor wants to close the book on native forestry, they should do so with an industry transition over decades, not weeks. Chile and Uruguay fought deforestation by investing in hardwood plantations; today, they have a thriving industry exporting Australian timber species, Eucalyptus Grandis, to the world. The question NSW Labor should be asking is, why can’t we?
Political parties on the centre-left have become unreliable for industry, because the unions which founded them are no longer run by workers. And as a result Green morality has defined many industries as immoral and destructive.
Blaming environmental activists for the final nail in the industry’s coffin is easy, but frankly, the timber industry helped build the box. Over the past decade, industry groups and unions ignored the signposts. Emotive and targeted messaging changed public opinion against the forestry industry, such that ultimately, dead koalas became more powerful than thousands of jobs and millions of homes.
If the industry wants to survive in Queensland, South Australia, and Tasmania, it must make an ongoing effort to change its reputation. This requires sharp and consistent communication to make the case for the importance of timber products to our economy, a demonstration of genuine outcome-driven conservation, and a long-term plan for industry transition.
Several industry organisations are already seeing the light on this, but without the long-term bipartisan backing of government, it may all be too little too late.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/green-feels-chop-over-labor-deals/
***************************************25 July, 2024
Nine July Days Clearly Demonstrate Industrial Wind Turbines Intermittent Uselessness
The chart below uses IESO data for nine (9) July days and clearly demonstrates the vagaries of those IWT which on their highest generation day operated at 39.7% of their capacity and on their lowest at 2.3%! As the chart also notes, our natural gas plants were available to ramp up or down to ensure we had a stable supply of energy but rest assured IESO would have been busy either selling or buying power from our neighbours to ensure the system didn’t crash.
The only good news coming out of the review was that IESO did not curtail any wind generation as demand was atypical of Ontario’s summer days with much higher demand then those winter ones.
Days Gone By:
Back and shortly after the McGuinty led Ontario Liberal Party had directed IESO to contract IWT as a generation source; their “Annual Planning Outlook” would suggest/guess those IWT would generate an average of 15% of their capacity during our warmer months (summer) and 45% of their capacity during our colder months (winter). For the full year they would be projecting an average generation of 30% of their capacity and presumably that assumption was based on average annual Ontario winds!
The contracts for those IWT offered the owners $135/MWh so over the nine days contained in the chart below those 125,275 MWh generated revenue for the owners of $16,912,125 even though they only generated an average of 11.8% of their capacity. They are paid despite missing the suggested target IESO used because they rank ahead of most of Ontario’s other generation capacity with the exception of nuclear power due to the “first-to-the-grid” rights contained in their contracts at the expense of us ratepayers/taxpayers!
Should one bother to do the math as to the annual costs based on the 15% summer and 45% winter IESO previously used it would mean annual generation from those IWT in the summer would be about 3.9 TWh and 11.7 TWh in the winter with an annual cost of just over $2.1 billion for serving up frequently unneeded generation which is either sold off at a loss or curtailed!
Replacing Natural Gas Plants with BESS:
Anyone who has followed the perceived solution of ridding the electricity grid of fossil fuels such as natural gas will recognize ENGO have convinced politicians that battery energy storage systems are the solution! Well is it, and how much would Ontario have needed over those nine charted July days? One good example is July 9th and 10th and combining the energy generated by natural gas from the chart over those two days is the place to start. To replace that generation of 221,989 MW with BESS units the math is simple as those BESS units are reputed to store four (4) times their rated capacity. Dividing the MWh generated by Ontario’s natural gas generators by four over those two days therefore would mean we would need approximately 55,500 MW of BESS to replace what those natural gas plants generated. That 55,500 MW of BESS storage is over 27 times what IESO have already contracted for and add huge costs to electricity generation in the province driving up the costs for all ratepaying classes. The BESS 2034 MW IESO already contracted are estimated to cost ratepayers $341 million annually meaning 55,500 MW of BESS to the grid would add over $9 billion annually to our costs to hopefully avoid blackouts!
The other interesting question is how would those 55,500 MW be able to recharge to be ready for future high demand days perhaps driven by EV recharging or those heating and cooling pumps operating? The wind would have to be blowing strong and the sun would need to be shining but, as we know, both are frequently missing so bring us blackouts seems to be the theme proposed by those ENGO and our out of touch politicians and bureaucrats!
Just one simple example as to where we seem to be headed based on the insane push to reach that “net-zero” emissions target!
Extreme Examples of Missing IWT generation:
What the chart doesn’t contain, or highlight is how those 4,900 MW of IWT capacity are undoubtedly consuming more power than they are generating on many occasions and the IESO data for those nine days contained some clear examples but less than a dozen are highlighted here!
To wit:
July 5th at Hour 11 they managed to deliver only 47 MWh! July 7th at Hours 8, 9, and 10 they respectively generated 17 MWh, 3 MWh and 18 MWh! July 9th at Hour 9 they delivered 52 MWh! July 12th at Hours 8, 9, 10 and 11 they respectively generated 33 MWh, 13 MWh, 13 MWh and 35 MWh. July 13th at Hours 9 and 10 they managed to generate 19 MWh and 39 MWh respectively!
Conclusion:
Why politicians and bureaucrats around the world have been gobsmacked by those peddling the reputed concept of IWT generating cheap, reliable electricity is mind-blowing as the Chart coupled with the facts, clearly shows for just nine days and only looking at Ontario!
Much like the first electric car invented in 1839, by a Scottish inventor named Robert Davidson, the first electricity generated by a wind turbine came from another Scottish inventor, Sir James Blyth who in 1887 did exactly that. Neither of those old “inventions” garnered much global acceptance until those ENGO like Michael Mann and Greta arrived on the scene pontificating about “global warming” being caused by mankind’s use of fossil fuels!
As recent events have demonstrated both EV and IWT are not the panacea to save the world from either “global warming” or “climate change” even though both have “risen from the dead” due to the “net-zero” push by ENGO.
The time has come for our politicians to wake up and recognize they are supporting more then century old technology focused to try and rid the world of CO 2 emissions. They fail to see without CO 2 mankind will be setback to a time when we had trouble surviving!
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Heat Deaths In Summer? Shirley Not!
After several weeks of heat because it is summer, we get a headline about seven people dying, and the cause of death might be heat-related
This from a report shared via Yahoo News:
Record-breaking heat suspected in at least 7 deaths as temperatures soar across U.S.
The sweltering heat wave gripping parts of the U.S. has shattered heat records and sparked an air quality health advisory, and it is suspected of having contributed to at least seven deaths.
At least seven deaths in the Western U.S. are suspected of having been caused by the extreme heat, officials said. Five people have died in Oregon since Friday, and those deaths are being investigated as possibly being heat-related, the Multnomah County Medical Examiner’s Office said.
In Death Valley, California, a motorcyclist died of suspected heat exposure and another was hospitalized for severe heat illness Saturday. Another man, Kevin Gerhardt, of Sacramento, died Sunday because of the heat, NBC affiliate KCRA of Sacramento reported.
Of the seven, five deaths occurred in Oregon—not the desert-like landscape of eastern Oregon though, but Multnomah County, with its lakes and rivers and relatively close proximity to the Pacific Ocean (I find this odd, and wonder if there’s more to the story).
One was a motorcyclist who died in Death Valley…and should be attributed to stupidity. Death Valley has been extremely hot much longer than we have been using natural resources to greatly improve our quality and length of life.
Putting the deaths into perspective:
Over three million people die in the U.S. each year, which equates to around 8,000 per day, and in a few weeks of heat this summer, we get a big story on seven deaths as “possibly being heat-related,” as it serves as fuel to the fire to continue the push to destroy those things that greatly improve our quality and length of life.
(Of course, we don’t ever learn if the people had underlying conditions.)
The best estimate of how many people die of heat-related causes each year is around 1,000, roughly three per day—again, this is out of over 8,000 deaths total per day.
How many people died in Chicago and other cities last week because pro-crime DAs, enabled by Democrats, let career criminals roam the street?
How many people die or are harmed because of Democrat policies at the border? Think of the harm and deaths that drugs, human trafficking, and drug trafficking bring.
And somehow, the Democrats are focused on a couple degrees of temperature rise over hundreds of years after the Little Ice Age ended.
Also, a whopping 492 people died in storms last year in the U.S. (That is less than two per day.)
Now, what happens if we continue to destroy the quality of life for everyone by eliminating affordable energy, and making them purchase flammable electric cars and appliances?
I would expect that number to go up!
What would happen when power is knocked out, and no one is allowed a generator? What would happen if hurricanes come, and everyone is stranded because their EVs short-circuit and explode?
In the United States and Canada, it is estimated that there are more than 40 cold deaths for every heat death, but we rarely, if ever, see headlines seeking to scare the public about cold deaths…because it doesn’t fit the Democrat agenda.
From the New York Post:
More people die of cold: Media’s heat-death climate obsession leads to lousy fixes
Heat deaths are beguilingly click-worthy, and studies show that heat kills about 2,500 people every year in the United States and Canada. However, rising temperatures also reduce cold waves and cold deaths.
Cold restricts blood flow to keep our core warm, increasing blood pressure and killing through strokes, heart attacks and respiratory diseases.
Those deaths are rarely reported, because they don’t fit the current climate narrative. Of course, if they were just a curiosity, the indifference might be justified, but they are anything but.
Each year, more than 100,000 people die from cold in the United States, and 13,000 in Canada — more than 40 cold deaths for every heat death.
Why would anyone make such an effort to cool the world when a warmer world has been a healthier world?
Does anyone really think that Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or anyone else pushing the ‘green’ agenda can point to evidence that our consumption of oil controls temperatures and storm activity?
How many more people will die needlessly from heat or cold if wind and solar can’t keep up with our power needs?
https://principia-scientific.com/heat-deaths-in-summer-shirley-not/
***************************************************Energy Policies of Biden and Newsom Are the Real Existential Threat to Billions
As a refresher for Biden’s and Newsom’s passion for pursuing net-zero emissions, wind and solar do different things than crude oil.
Wind turbines and solar panels only generate occasional electricity but manufacture absolutely NO PRODUCTS for society.
Sadly, others are following the pursuit of ONLY weather-dependent generated electricity, like nongovernmental organizations (NGO), the National Wildlife Federation, the Conservation Law Foundation, and even the Heinz Endowments, the “legacy” of former Senator and Heinz ketchup baron John Heinz.
Even Bangladesh, where the South Asian country’s dominance in the manufacture of clothing, is being threatened with policies toward net zero emissions that Threatens our Future Garment Purchases.
Crude oil is virtually never used to generate electricity, but when manufactured into petrochemicals, it is the basis for virtually all the products in our materialistic society that did not exist before the 1800s. These products are used in infrastructures such as transportation, airports, hospitals, medical equipment, appliances, electronics, telecommunications, communications systems, space programs, heating and ventilation, and militaries.
Both Biden and Newsom do not comprehend that Teslas are 100% made from crude oil!
EV tires, electronic components, upholstery, etc., are 100% made from oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil.
Further, all the parts and components of EVERY electricity generation system (coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar) are also made from the oil derivatives manufactured from oil!
Before the 1800s and before the discovery of oil, we had NO crude oil and obviously NO products, NO electricity, and NO Teslas!
Mandating EVs and electricity generation from wind turbines and solar panels is mandating MORE USAGE of crude oil.
Simplistically, to rid the world of oil usage, STOP using products made from oil.
There is no need for the crusade to over-regulate the “suppliers of oil and gas” when there is no known replacement to meet the “demands” of our materialistic world, but Democrats, armed with their LACK of Energy Literacy, continue their pursuit to eliminate the only known sources of the products that are supporting modern lifestyles and economies:
The American Energy Alliance (AEA) tabulated “225 Ways President and the Democrats Have Made it Harder to Produce Oil & Gas”.
Biden and Newsom are oblivious that without crude oil, there would be nothing that needs electricity! Everything, like iPhones, computers, data centers, and X-ray machines, that need electricity to function, and all the parts of EVs, toilets, spacecraft, and more than 50,000 merchant ships, more than 20,000 commercial aircraft,and more than 50,000 military aircraft are also made from the products based on oil and use the fuels manufactured from crude oil.
Without a replacement, the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss is that crude oil is the foundation of our materialistic society as it is the basis of all products and fuels demanded by the world that now sustains 8 billion people — ten times the population prior to the Industrial Revolution and thankfully has experienced record crop production. This rapid increase in agricultural output is partially attributable to an increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1940. This rise in CO2 levels alone is linked to major yield increases for corn, soybeans, and wheat.
Biden and Newsom’s delusions are that the end of crude oil would be the end of civilization as “unreliable electricity” from breezes and sunshine cannot manufacture anything.
The world has also experienced significant economic growth and prosperity, benefiting from the more than 6,000 productsthat are derived from fossil fuels. These products support infrastructures that were not around a few centuries ago because they all need components and parts made from fossil fuels that were NOT available in the pre-1800s.
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Biden’s Electric Vehicle Mandate Will Leave Western States’ Drivers Stranded
Temperatures are over 100 degrees this month in Twin Falls, Idaho, sapping the distance electric vehicles can travel.
EVs in the Gem State remain relegated to the back seat when it comes to consumers’ choice in vehicles, despite a new Environmental Protection Agency mandate requiring that 70% of new cars sold be all electric by 2032. Idaho had 8,000 registered EVs in 2023, compared to 60,000 and 140,000 in neighboring Oregon and Washington, respectively.
At the Twin Falls Toyota dealership, sales manager Scott Mason said that he could count on one hand the number of fully electric vehicles Toyota has sold in the area. In fact, no fully electric vehicles were available on the lot.
Kent Atkin, project manager at J-U-B Engineers, described how battery-powered EVs “just don’t fit” with life in southern Idaho. His biggest focus as an engineer is the health and safety concerns caused by the unreliability of EVs under extreme temperatures. He said, “We’re expecting people to get stuck in extreme heat and cold. At 105-degree heat in the desert, if you’re stuck out there, you’re done. We’re used to reliability for safety in Idaho.”
EVs cannot match the performance of gas-powered vehicles in extreme weather. Southern Idaho’s wind chill pulls the temperature down to single digits every winter, and summers routinely reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. This weather means that battery-powered electric vehicles fail to achieve their promised range and can leave drivers stranded.
Under extreme cold, batteries use stored-up charge to heat themselves rather than saving the charge for driving. In below-freezing conditions, batteries experience up to 40% range loss.
Under extreme heat, battery ions move faster. As that happens, pressures inside batteries build, creating micro-cracks that permanently decrease battery life and range. With freeway speed limits of 80 mph, batteries pull power faster to keep up with the demands of the roads and, when combined with unpredictable weather, can lose power before reaching the driver’s destination.
Gas-powered cars can handle temperature extremes and guarantee ranges long enough to transport people from one gas station to another, while an EV cannot do this considering how remote charging stations are in rural areas.
Extreme temperatures also affect charging speeds. When drivers plug EVs into chargers, cold weather prompts internal battery heaters to run. This pulls a quarter of charging power away from the battery itself and directs it to attached heaters. If the battery’s sensors detect that the battery temperature is anything less than minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit and the EV is charging, all power will go to the heater, and the EV will not charge until temperatures rise. This is a substantial disadvantage compared to gas vehicles that can refill in five to 10 minutes.
Charging stations in the Gem State are few and far between, with long stretches of remote roads or busy freeways between them. Twin Falls offers 25 public EV charging stations and is about 120 miles from the nearest cities with charging stations. As Atkin remarked later in our call, “If everyone had to drive an EV, they couldn’t” with the current infrastructure.
Upgrading city infrastructure to allow for needed charging stations and transmission lines would cost around $10 million to $20 million for Twin Falls, per Kent’s estimates, and most of it would come in the form of increased taxes for residents. The result of an EV mandate is not only a loss of choice in types of vehicles to drive and more expensive vehicles to buy, but increased taxes for all residents and a less reliable form of transportation.
Another reason Idahoans are not sold on electric vehicles is functionality. On paper, battery-powered trucks claim comparable towing capacity to gas-powered trucks; however, the heavier the load, the greater the loss of range of the vehicle. In head-to-head testing, a Ford F-150 carrying a 1,400-pound load in its bed lost 14% of its projected range. In comparison, a 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning (Ford’s EV model of the same truck) lost almost 25% of its projected range.
When towing a 6,800-pound boat and trailer over flat ground, the F-150 Lightning dropped from a 300-mile range to a 90-mile range. In contrast, the F-150 gasoline-powered truck towing the same load boasted a 231-mile radius, leaving the owner with plenty of leeway to tow up mountains and travel to more remote locations.
The Gem State’s economy is primarily driven by agriculture, manufacturing, food processing, and mining. All of these sectors rely on the ability to reliably transport large loads between distant areas of the state and beyond its borders. Fully electric vehicles cannot meet the demands of rural communities, and the EV mandate from the Biden administration is disastrous for workers there.
The decision on what type of car to purchase should be left to the people of Idaho. And the statistics show that EVs are not yet their vehicle of choice.
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24 July, 2024
Robert Bryce torpedoes Nantucket offshore gigantism
On Saturday, the Nantucket Select Board announced it was considering legal action against Avangrid and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, the foreign corporations that own the $4 billion Vineyard Wind project now under construction in Massachusetts waters.
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The news of the possible litigation, which the Nantucket Current published on Saturday, comes less than a week after tons of debris from the broken wind turbine blade that was part of the massive offshore project began washing ashore on the island. The pollution forced the town to temporarily close many of its beaches during the peak summer tourist season while the debris was removed. The beaches have since reopened.
As I noted here a week ago, the development of offshore wind energy on the Eastern Seaboard has been promoted by some of America’s biggest climate NGOs, including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, National Wildlife Federation, and Conservation Law Foundation, as well as numerous Democratic politicians at state and federal levels. But the disaster at Vineyard Wind — and it is a monumental disaster for the offshore wind industry — is spotlighting the environmental risks posed by installing dozens or even hundreds of massive wind turbines and offshore platforms in our oceans. This disaster happened in calm weather. It doesn’t take much effort to imagine what will happen when a hurricane hits the East Coast.
The NGOs have been shameless in their collusion with foreign corporations, including oil companies like Equinor and Total, that are eagerly queueing up to collect billions in federal tax credits. But the turbine blade failure at Vineyard Wind is only part of a broader crisis facing Big Wind, both onshore and offshore. Before I talk about that crisis, and hurricanes, a bit of background is needed.
The Vineyard Wind project aims to have 800 megawatts of capacity. It will require installing 62 offshore platforms on the Eastern Seaboard in the midst of known North Atlantic Right Whale Habitat. Each turbine will have a capacity of about 13 megawatts. A handful of turbines have been installed and the project began producing power in January.
On Saturday, I talked to Amy DiSibio, a board member of ACK 4 Whales, the Nantucket group fighting offshore wind. “People are pissed,” she said. “They are really upset for a lot of reasons.” (ACK 4 Whales has sued to stop the project, arguing that the federal government ignored the Endangered Species Act when it issued the permit. A federal judge rejected their case in April, but the group is appealing their case to the U.S. Supreme Court.)
One of the reasons for the anger is obvious: the turbine blade began disintegrating on Saturday evening and sent some 17 cubic yards of debris into the ocean. But the owners of Vineyard Wind didn’t notify officials in Nantucket until Monday at about 5 pm. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, which is part of the Interior Department, issued a stop work order at Vineyard Wind, “until further notice.”
On Thursday, as the beach cleanup was ongoing, the remaining portion of the massive turbine blade, a chunk about 300 feet long, fell into the Atlantic Ocean. The Coast Guard warned mariners in the area of the wind project, which is located 15 miles south of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, to “use extreme caution” when passing through the region.
On Sunday afternoon, I talked to Bob DeCosta, a fisherman on Nantucket who started fishing with his father when he was nine. “I’ve been on the water for 56 years,” he told me from his boat. “I don’t have a Ph.D. But like the other fishermen here, I know the tides, and the waters better than anybody. They never talked to us. These wind turbines are getting steamrolled over us. Big Wind is not green. The only thing green about it is the money going to the offshore wind companies.”
DeCosta, who served on the Nantucket Select Board for six years, operates a 35-foot charter boat, The Albacore, with his son, Ray. DeCosta said he steered his vessel through the area near Vineyard Wind early last Sunday morning through thick fog but didn’t know that debris from the shattered turbine blade was in the water. DeCosta said he could have unwittingly hit the debris which would have done significant damage to his boat. “For 48 hours, that stuff was floating around, and we knew nothing about it. It’s unacceptable.”
In addition to the public relations disaster at Vineyard Wind, Big Wind is facing a crisis caused by simple physics. The turbines now being deployed onshore and offshore are failing far sooner than expected. Why? They have gotten too big. Yes, bigger wind turbines are more efficient than their smaller cousins. But the larger the turbine, the more its components get hit by the stresses that come with their size and weight. The GE Vernova Haliade-X wind turbine used at Vineyard Wind stands 260 meters high and sweeps an area of 38,000 square meters. That means the turbine captures wind energy over an area five times larger than a soccer pitch.
But here’s the critical part: its blades are 107 meters (351 feet) long and weigh 70 tons. In addition, the rotor of the massive machine spans 220 meters. For comparison, the wingspan of a Boeing 737 is 34 meters. In other words, the turbines at Vineyard Wind are nearly as tall as the Eiffel Tower and each of their blades weighs more than a fully loaded 737.
https://stophumansacrifice.substack.com/p/slam-the-scam-robert-bryce-torpedoes
********************************************Generator Sales Are Rising… And There’s Good Reason
I bought a house earlier this year, and to my absolute delight, it came with a built in 16 kilowatt (kW)kW generator, plenty of power for a medium sized house.
Given increasing electrical grid unreliability, many Americans are on the market for a new generator. Whether they’re upgrading from a portable generator to a built-in standby generator, or buying a portable one for the first time, many are rethinking their longstanding trust in the reliability of the grid.
When I first bought my house, right as I was moving in, I was there alone late one night scrubbing the walls in the kitchen, getting them ready for a new coat of paint the next day. It was a dark and stormy night (really), and at one point as I was scrubbing away and listening to what was probably an Agatha Christie audiobook, the thunder crashed, lightening flashed and the lights flickered once, twice, and then went out.
At that point I would usually be turning on my phone flashlight and beginning the search for errant candles or the stray flashlight. Instead, I waited with anticipation to see if my generator would work as advertised. Thirty seconds later I heard it thrum on outside, and inside of two minutes my lights were back on as if nothing ever happened.
Now this was just a small thunderstorm, and the outage it caused only lasted a little while. Twenty minutes later I heard the generator shut itself off as power returned. But there will almost certainly be longer storm outages in the future and given the state of most of the country’s power grid, chances are good that there could be blackouts caused by an inability to meet demand rather than from a downed line in a storm.
I’m happy to have found a way to insulate myself slightly from the state of the power grid (I live in Pennsylvania and my power comes from the PJM interconnection). Many other Americans with some combination of the means and foresight to do so are taking the same precaution.
Fortune Business Insights found that the generator sales market in the U.S. was valued at $6.1 billion in 2023, and projected that it will grow to 6.43 billion by the end of this year, and to $10.26 billion by 2032.
I appreciate a clever short-term solution to a problem, and I’m a fan of being prepared to meet any eventuality. I think it’s largely a very good thing that more people are taking the initiative to ensure that they have an alternative power source in a blackout.
What concerns me is both the reasons behind this growing impulse, and those that will be left behind in a crisis.
The grid should be reliable enough that a standby generator feels like a needless extravagance rather than a reasonable precaution. Lawmakers should be working to ensure that power supply problems don’t lead to blackouts.
In my new paper at the Competitive Enterprise Institute “How to Keep the Lights On”, I outline 9 principles that lawmakers should focus on to ensure that power remains reliable, and generators like mine remain a superfluous display of preparedness rather than a constantly relied upon crutch for poor policymaking.
If the principles had already been followed, Americans would be less interested in buying generators because they could rightfully expect that their lights will stay on. Unfortunately, since the importance of reliability has been minimized by some policymakers, many Americans are realizing they could soon find themselves in the dark.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/07/17/generator-sales-reason/
************************************************Britain will never be an energy superpower
Keir Starmer’s victory became assured in the autumn of 2022. This was the moment when the tension between the Bank of England’s attempts to reduce energy-driven inflation and the inability of financial markets to absorb higher interest rates humiliated Kwasi Kwarteng, a rookie chancellor determined to go on a borrowing splurge.
A political party that offered three prime ministers – Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak – in 50 days could not be taken seriously as a governing force. But it was the nature of the economic crisis that trapped the Conservatives in the sumps of unpopularity. The very financial conditions that put Sunak in office in October that year forced his chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, to withdraw most of the energy-support package that Truss had introduced and eschew pre-election tax cuts.
The Labour leadership has internalised the financial markets’ disciplining power. Writing in the Financial Times in September 2023, the then shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, declared that Labour’s commitment to the electorate “starts today with a very simple promise: never again”. Whatever else happens, “with a Labour government, never will a prime minister or chancellor be allowed to repeat the mistakes of the ‘mini’ Budget”. The result is that despite the party’s landslide win, Labour’s approach to public expenditure is unlikely to differ that much from that of the previous government.
But there is little evidence that the Labour cabinet has grasped the acute interaction between this macroeconomic environment and Britain’s energy troubles. If Labour were to achieve its aim of decarbonising electricity by 2030 and reduce bills by doing so, this would still leave around 80 per cent of British energy consumption exposed to another inflationary shock. This would only change if the government also made rapid progress in electrifying the country’s heating and transportation systems. That would be dependent on spending large sums of borrowed money to subsidise consumers buying electric vehicles and heat pumps. Even then, the more electricity that is substituted for fossil fuels in these sectors, the harder it will be to achieve 100 per cent low-carbon electricity.
Prices for fossil-fuel consumption are determined by international markets over which the UK government has scarcely any influence. The gas-price shock of 2021-22 began with a spike in China’s demand for imports and was intensified by Germany’s entry into liquefied natural gas (LNG) markets following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even Joe Biden’s administration – aided by a large domestic oil base and a much larger Strategic Petroleum Reserve – has been unable to drive US oil prices down much below the level it found politically intolerable before the 2022 midterm elections.
Geopolitical tensions, as well as the sense of political uncertainty in Washington, only intensify Britain’s impotence. British naval vessels have been in action since last December in a US-led military operation to reopen the Red Sea to Western shipping, but there were more Houthi attacks in June than in any month so far this year. If he is elected president again, Donald Trump could prove unwilling to continue with Operation Prosperity Guardian, since the US has a limited economic interest in the Suez Canal compared to the Persian Gulf. But since Britain now imports more than a quarter of its gas from the US rather than Qatar, another Democratic administration that insisted on the primacy of its domestic consumers, and which hardened Biden’s move against new LNG export approvals, could be just as much of an energy security risk over the course of this parliament.
Whatever the follies of Kwarteng and Truss, their fall exposed a structural vulnerability in the British economy to crisis dating from 2004, when Britain became a net importer of energy. Britain does not export enough goods to service its rising energy imports, required because of declining North Sea production.
At times of financial market turbulence, the ensuing trade deficit risks a fall in sterling, making dollar-priced energy imports more expensive. In the last year of Britain being a net energy exporter, the current-account deficit was 1.8 per cent of GDP and sterling started 2004 at around $1.80. When the Truss shock hit, the current-account deficit had widened to 4 per cent and sterling had fallen to $1.07. While sterling has recovered from that nadir, it still has only briefly touched $1.30 again.
The Labour leadership will argue that the answer is growth and using the energy transition to boost exports. During the election campaign, Ed Miliband, now the Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero, proclaimed, “The offshore wind industry is the beating heart of our mission to make Britain a clean-energy superpower.” But there will be no electricity-exporting superpowers in the way that Saudi Arabia, Russia and the US are fossil-fuel superpowers, because electricity cannot be distributed across oceans.
Far from being behind the curve on wind, Britain is already a pace-setter. It has the largest offshore-wind capacity in the world, and opened the first ever floating wind farm, off the Aberdeenshire coast in 2017. At the end of 2023 and the start of 2024, renewable electricity, mostly from wind, hit record levels – more than half of the total UK electricity generation.
Yet this success has not translated into any kind of industrial or macroeconomic reward: there is not one UK company in the top-20 wind turbine manufacturers in the world, and in the first quarter of 2024 net electricity imports were higher than ever. Rather than being the basis of an exporting renaissance, a large wind sector locks Britain into a set of hourly trade interdependencies with other European countries to provide electricity when the wind does not blow. Allowing for onshore wind, as Labour now has, cannot change that fact.
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Supporters of arrested Sea Shepherd founder say parallels with Julian Assange are ‘disturbing’
The arrest of the anti-whaling activist Paul Watson in Greenland – where he could face extradition to Japan – has been condemned as “politically motivated” by supporters, who compared the case to the detention of the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.
“The parallels are disturbing,” said Omar Todd, chief executive and co-founder of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation (CPWF).
“We have our own extradition drama going on,” Todd said. “Governments don’t like people to tell the truth or do the right thing.
“Assange’s case was political and Paul’s case is the same. If Julian had been extradited to the US, he knew he was going there to die. If it comes to it and Paul gets extradited to Japan, he could get 15 years in prison … it’s like a life sentence.”
Brigitte Bardot, the former actor and French animal rights activist, has criticised Japan for its “manhunt” of Watson and demanded his release. More than 300,000 people have signed a petition in support of Watson.
Watson, a 73-year-old Canadian-American who lives in France, was an early member of Greenpeace and later founded Sea Shepherd, the marine conservation group known for its direct action tactics.
Watson, who appeared in the Whale Wars TV programme, was arrested and detained in handcuffs on Sunday after arriving in Nuuk, the autonomous Danish territory’s capital, on the Captain Paul Watson Foundation ship, apparently on an international warrant issued by Japan. Greenland’s justice ministry is responsible for deciding if there are grounds for extradition, according to police there.
“He doesn’t have time to play that game,” said Todd. “He has a wife and three kids, including a seven-and-a-half-year-old and a three-year-old, living in Marseille. His wife is very upset.”
Watson’s arrest took place during a stop-off on a mission tracking Japan’s new whaling ship, the Kangei Maru, in the northern Pacific Ocean.
CPWF said it believed his arrest was related to an Interpol “red notice” issued over “Watson’s previous anti-whaling operations in the Antarctic region”, and that the international arrest alert had been issued in March. Interpol could not confirm the date of the notice.
“This development comes as a surprise since the foundation’s lawyers had reported that the red notice had been withdrawn,” the CPWF said in a statement.
Greenland police said Watson had been arrested on Sunday in response to an international arrest warrant. On Monday, a judge ruled that he must be detained until 15 August while the case was being investigated. An appeal against his detention on Tuesday was denied.
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23 July, 2024
Why Are Massive Amounts of the World’s Most Potent Greenhouse Gas Being Ferried Out into the Ocean off the Eastern Seaboard?
If there’s anything Big Wind doesn’t like to talk about it’s sulfur hexafluoride (SF6).
It is universally agreed that SF6 is the most potent and devastating greenhouse gas yet known. This manmade fluorinated compound does not exist in nature. Used as an insulator in high- and medium-voltage switchgear in the electrical industry, once released, this long-lasting compound lives on in the atmosphere for a very long time -- having a half-life of 3,200 years, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
As pointed out by ecos, an environmental organization based in Brussels, in its report, “Worst in class,” SF6 will remain 25,200 times more effective at trapping infrared radiation than an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide for over a century. However, “its growth and use continue virtually unabated.”
Enter offshore wind.
Used in the switchgear (a collection of voltage-regulating tools) of both wind turbines and offshore and onshore substations, SF6 will be utilized in all the wind-energy projects in various stages of development that will effectively fence in the East Coast from Maine to North Carolina.
Even the EPA doesn’t have a handle on what’s going on with Big Wind and SF6. In 2023 the agency contracted with a company to provide an “assessment” to help the agency in “seeking a better understanding…” of SF6 use in offshore wind.
As for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the lead federal agency for all the proposed turbine lease areas, it, too, would rather not have to answer to the public over the use of SF6. So much so that in the draft Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS (which was open to public comment) for the Atlantic Shores South project, the agency stated that “BOEM would require Atlantic Shores to use switchgear that does not contain SF6 but uses alternative insulating materials and technologies to eliminate leakage of SF6 as a source of GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions.”
But that wasn’t exactly true.
The final EIS, issued by BOEM in May of 2024 included a comment* from Atlantic Shores, stating that the BOEM-proposed measure of SF6-free switchgear “…is not technically or economically feasible,” and “Atlantic Shores requests that BOEM revise these proposed mitigation measures to remove the requirement for SF6-free switchgear…”
And BOEM complied, even offering an apology of sorts in its response that the measure was “erroneously included,” and has been “removed.” To cover its tracks, BOEM revised its language now saying Atlantic Shores won’t use SF6 “to the extent practicable based on technical, economic, and supply chain considerations.” (It should be noted that the final EIS is not open to public comment.)
Don’t Look Up
So just how much of this radiation-trapping gas will be used in these different projects?
Consulting the assessment prepared for the EPA that reviewed the permit applications for just six offshore lease areas reveals worrying numbers.
For example, Vineyard Wind 1, with 62 planned turbines 13 miles south of Martha’s Vineyard, expects to use 11,949 pounds of SF6 in its offshore equipment.
Revolution Wind, 15 nautical miles southeast of Point Judith, Rhode Island will use a total of 40,925 pounds of SF6 among its onshore and offshore substations, and in each of the 65 planned turbines.
And within prime viewing distance of Long Beach Island -- 8.7 miles offshore at the closest point -- are the Atlantic Shores lease areas. According to BOEM, both Atlantic Shores projects (north and south), which will consist of up to 200 mammoth wind turbines rising to over 1,000 feet, will utilize more than 47,000 pounds of SF6 in offshore substations.
Despite measures to keep this GHG from escaping, “leak rates” are fully expected during normal operations and maintenance of 0.5 to 1% per year. That, of course, is assuming that there are no accidental releases such as what happened at the Seagreen offshore wind area in the North Sea. Twenty-four pounds of SF6 leaked during routine work in 2022, resulting in the evacuation of 80 workers. While 24 pounds doesn’t sound like much, the EPA warns that a “relatively small amount can “have a significant impact on global climate change.” And even if SF6 use goes uneventfully, BOEM expects emission rates over the lifetime of the two Atlantic Shores projects to be 5.9 U.S. tons. (PDF page 45 at link.)
But the EPA has rules about using this gas, right?
In 2023 an air permit “fact sheet” was issued by EPA Region 1 for Sunrise Wind (30 miles east of Montauk, N.Y.). The agency stated that despite SF6-free switchgear now being manufactured by Siemens and General Electric, most are only suitable for the European Union and Asian markets, and one made by Siemens that does operate on U.S. electrical standards is too big and heavy for offshore wind use.
The EPA did, however, request that repairs of leaky SF6 switchgear be fixed within five “days of discovery.” But even that was shot down by Sunrise Wind, saying that “a precise timeline for repair of SF6 leaks” is not possible. We’ve got potential “adverse weather” and “mobilization logistics” to contend with, it noted. This is an “offshore location” after all.
Regardless of how many federal agencies write memos and fact sheets about this compound, which is rated as having the highest global warming potential of all greenhouse gasses, it’s unlikely that the public will ever learn about leaks or accidents releasing SF6 from these wind energy projects.
And no matter how “green” they try to paint offshore wind, there’s no getting around the fact that it’s an environmental disaster that will only succeed in making certain companies (mostly foreign) a whole lot of green paper.
https://lindabonvie.substack.com/p/why-will-thousands-of-pounds-of-the
**********************************************Waging War on Modern Agriculture and Global Nutrition
The World Economic Forum says the world faces a new crisis, “One-third of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions come from food production.” With the world’s population expected to reach 10 billion people by 2050, it is therefore “urgent” that we launch a “radical” and “comprehensive” transformation of the global food system – from “reinventing” farming to “reimagining” how food is produced, processed, distributed, consumed and disposed of.
Reinforcing this message, Stop Ecocide Now founder Jojo Mehta expanded on Greta Thunberg’s incendiary 2020 rant that “our house is on fire and you’re fueling the flames.” Farming is a “serious crime,” equal to “genocide,” Ms. Mehta told elites at the 2024 WEF meeting in Davos.
Their grasp of agriculture is epitomized by Michael Bloomberg’s suggestion that anybody can be a farmer: “You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, you add water, up comes the corn.”
Modern farming and its supposedly dangerous greenhouse gas emissions are a tad more complicated.
Modern mechanized farming employs oil derivatives as fuel for equipment and feed stocks for herbicides and pesticides, natural gas to dry grain and make fertilizers, and livestock to provide protein.
Tractors, trucks, farmers and livestock emit carbon dioxide, adding to the 0.04% of CO2 in Earth’s atmosphere (equivalent to $40 of $100,000). Cattle emissions add methane to the existing 0.0002% CH4 in the atmosphere (20¢ of $100,000). Nitrogen fertilizers add to the “dramatic” 200-year rise in atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O), bringing it to a still minuscule 0.00003% (that’s 3¢ of $100,000).
These emissions allegedly drive “cataclysmic” climate change and extreme weather, endangering all life on Earth. But then what caused five Ice Ages (including the Pleistocene Era and its mile-high glaciers, which ended 12,000 years ago), the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods, and the Little Ice Age (1350-1850) to come and go?
Of course, natural forces can’t drive climate hysteria and WEF-Gore-Biden anti-fossil-fuel agendas. Fear-mongering political, activist, media and academic elites therefore ignore them.
In the Real World, the wondrous reality is that, after centuries of excruciatingly slow progress, agricultural advances over the past 75 years have been nothing short of astonishing. Dr. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution employed plant breeding techniques that multiplied yields of vital grain crops, saving hundreds of millions of lives.
Since 1950, American farmers increased per-acre corn yields by an incredible 500% and other crop yields by smaller but still amazing amounts – while using used less land, water and fuel … and fewer fertilizers and pesticides per ton of produce. Their exports helped slash global hunger and malnutrition even further.
Meanwhile, despite supposed impacts from manmade climate change, farmers in Brazil, India and many other countries have also enjoyed record harvests.
Multiple miracle technologies contributed. Hybrid seeds combine valuable traits from different related plants. Biotech seeds protect crops against voracious insects and destructive viruses, while reducing water and pesticide demand. Virus-resistant biotech cultivars have even replaced endangered papayas in Hawaii, cassava and bananas in Africa, and other crops.
Nitrogen (ammonia) fertilizers, synthesized from natural gas and atmospheric nitrogen, have joined phosphorus and potassium in supercharging soils. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide spurs plant growth and reduces water demand even further.
Long-lasting herbicides control weeds that would otherwise steal moisture and nutrients from crops – and enable farmers to utilize no-till farming that avoids breaking up soils, reduces erosion, retains soil moisture and preserves vital soil organisms.
Technologies developed in Israel make it possible to grow an amazing array of crops in the Negev and Arava Deserts, which receive a fraction of the annual rainfall that Arizona gets. Desalination plants turn seawater into 80% of Israel’s drinking water, dramatically reducing pressure on the Sea of Galilee, manmade reservoirs and groundwater supplies.
Israelis then recycle 90% of their home, business, school and hospital water – for use in agriculture, where drip irrigation delivers precise amounts of water precisely where crops and other plants need it, minimizing evaporation.
Huge high-tech tractors use GPS systems, sensors and other equipment to steer precise courses across fields, while constantly measuring soil composition, and injecting just the right kinds and amounts of fertilizers and herbicides, along with seeds, to ensure optimal harvests.
Not all these technologies are available across the globe. However, farmer can access information about both the technologies and the modern practices through online libraries and programs on cell phones.
Instead, this progress is under assault – by ill-advised or ill-intended, but well-funded organizations that want to turn the Green Revolution into Green Tyranny, Eco-Imperialism and global malnutrition.
Their hatred of biotech crops is intense and well-documented. But many also despise hybrid seeds. They want modern herbicides and insecticides banned, in favor of “natural” alternatives – which are often toxic to bees, fish, other animals and people and have not been tested for long-term harm to humans.
These agricultural anarchists also demand “natural” fertilizers, which typically provide a fraction of the nutrients that modern synthetic fertilizers do. At the very least, they want global organic farming, which would mean much lower crop yields per acre than conventional farming, and plowing many millions of additional acres of wildlife habitat and scenic land, to get the same amounts of food.
They say people in Africa, Asia and Latin America should practice subsistence farming – which they prefer to call “traditional” farming, Agro-Ecology, “food sovereignty,” or the “right to choose” “culturally appropriate” food produced through “ecologically sound and sustainable methods,” based on “indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices.”
In plain English, Agro-Ecology is rabidly opposed to biotechnology, monoculture farming, non-organic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, and even mechanized equipment and hybrid seeds.
You can imagine how Agro-Ecologists would react if African farmers wanted to assert their food sovereignty, self-determination and right to choose by planting biotech Bt corn, to get higher yields, reduce pesticide use, enjoy better living standards and send their kids to school. The agro-anarchists would vilify them as vile supporters of violence against women, land-grabbing corporations, expropriation of indigenous rights, genocide and other “crimes against humanity.”
They also promote “alternative protein.” They say Africa would be “the perfect laboratory” for testing new foods – such as “crackers, muffins, meat loaves and sausages” made from lake flies. In fact, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Popular Science magazine and many other outfits extol the virtues of “entomophagy” – the clever progressive term for eating bug burgers, instead of hamburgers.
They even offer recipes and techniques for processing “edible insects” into tasty, nutritious products that can improve diets and livelihoods, create thriving local businesses, and even promote inclusion of women. In fact, they say, bugs can have twice as much protein per pound as beef; grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, beetles, ants and cicadas make great snacks, desserts, guacamole and even entire meals; and mealworms have “an earthy flavor, similar to mushrooms,” making them excellent additions to brownies. Sautéed with a little salt, mealworms also make “protein-boosted potato chips.” Yummy!
Who are these guys – these agriculture and nutrition anarchists and revolutionaries? Stay tuned.
https://heartland.org/opinion/waging-war-on-modern-agriculture-and-global-nutrition/
****************************************Italy approves decree banning installation of solar panels on agricultural land
The Italian government approved a decree that will ban the installation of solar panels on agricultural ground, local media reported on Monday, citing officials.
Italian Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida said the ban on solar panels would only apply to productive agricultural land, as quarries would still be allowed to be used for energy production. However, EU-funded projects will be exempt from the ban.
With the decree, 'we put an end to the wild installation of photovoltaic panels on the ground,” Italy's ANSA news agency reported Lollobrigida as saying.
The decree is part of a bigger package of measures to protect farming and fisheries, according to ANSA.
The move comes after energy and climate ministers of the G7 countries, including Italy, agreed last week to end the use of “unabated” coal by 2035 and committed to the implementation of the global goal of tripling installed renewable energy capacity by 2030 to at least 11 terawatts.
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World’s Most Populous Nation Has Put Solar Out To Pasture. Other Countries Should Follow Suit
During his debate with former President Donald Trump, President Joe Biden claimed: “The only existential threat to humanity is climate change.” What if I told you that it is not climate change but climate policies that are the real existential threat to billions across our planet?
The allure of a green utopia masks the harsh realities of providing affordable and reliable electricity. Americans could soon wake up to a dystopian future if the proposed Net Zero and Build Back Better initiatives — both aimed at an illogical proliferation of unreliable renewables and a clamp down on dependable fossil fuels — are implemented.
Nowhere is this better reflected than in remote regions of India where solar panels — believed to provide clean and green energy — ultimately resulted in being used to construct cattle sheds.
The transformation of Dharnai in the state of Bihar into a “solar village” was marked by great enthusiasm and high expectations. Villagers were told the solar micro-grid would provide reliable electricity for agriculture, social activities and daily living. The promise engendered a naïve trust in a technology that has failed repeatedly around the world.
The news of this Greenpeace initiative quickly spread as international news media showcased it as a success story for “renewable” energy in a third world country. CNN International’s “Connect the World” said Dharnai’s micro-grid provided a continuous supply of electricity. For an unaware viewer sitting in, say, rural Kentucky, solar energy would have appeared to be making great strides as a dependable energy source.
But the Dharnai system would end up on the long list of grand solar failures.
“As soon as we got solar power connections, there were also warnings to not use high power electrical appliances like television, refrigerator, motor and others,” said a villager. “These conditions are not there if you use thermal power. Then what is the use of such a power? The solar energy tariff was also higher compared to thermal power.”
A village shopkeeper said: “But after three years, the batteries were exhausted and it was never repaired. … No one uses solar power anymore here.” Hopefully, the solar panels will last longer as shelter for cows.
Eventually, the village was connected to the main grid, which provided fully reliable coal-powered electricity at a third of the price of the solar power.
Dharnai is not an isolated case. Several other large-scale solar projects in rural India have had a similar fate. Writing for the publication Mongabay, Mainsh Kumar said: “Once (grid) electricity reaches unelectrified villages, the infrastructure and funds used in installation of such off-grid plants could prove futile.”
While green nonprofits and the liberal mainstream media have the embarrassment of a ballyhooed solar project being converted to cattle sheds, conventional energy sources like coal continue to power India’s more than 1.3 billion people and the industries their economies depend on.
India saw a record jump in electricity demand this year, partly due to increased use of air conditioning units and other electrical appliances as more of the population achieved the financial wherewithal to afford them. During power shortages, coal often has come to the rescue. India allows its coal plants to increase coal stockpiles and import additional fuel without restrictions.
India will add more than 15 gigawatts in the year ending March 2025 (the most in nine years) and aims to add a total of 90 gigawatts of coal-fired capacity by 2032.
Energy reality is inescapable in a growing economy like India’s, and only sources such as coal, oil and natural gas can meet the demand. Fossil fuels can be counted on to supply the energy necessary for modern life, and “green” sources cannot.
India’s stance is to put economic growth ahead of any climate-based agenda to reduce the use of fossil fuels. This was reaffirmed when the country refused to set an earlier target for its net zero commitment, delaying it until 2070.
The story of Dharnai serves as a cautionary tale for the implementation of renewable energy projects in rural India, where pragmatism is the official choice over pie in the sky.
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22 July, 2024
Global Greening Becomes so Obvious That Climate Alarmists Start Arguing We Need to “Save the Deserts”!
The world is ‘greening’ at an astonishing and rapidly growing rate and deserts are shrinking almost everywhere you look. All due, it seems, to a natural rise in carbon ‘plant food’ dioxide, not forgetting the small annual 4% portion contributed by humans burning hydrocarbons. Inconvenient to the political Net Zero narrative of course – along with high numbers of polar bears, cyclical recovery in Arctic sea ice and recent record growth of coral on the Great Barrier Reef – so there is naturally little mention in mainstream media and politics. “Desertification is turning the Earth barren,” reports the Guardian, and the expansion of drylands is leaving entire countries “facing famine”. Great story, shame about the facts. A recent article in Yale Environment 360 states that rather than shrivelling and dying, vegetation is growing faster and deserts are retreating.
In fact many scientists now think that this process will continue to accelerate into the future. According to the Yale article, CO2 is “fast-tracking” photosynthesis in plants. By allowing them to use scarce water more efficiently, the CO2-rich air fertilises vegetation growth in even some of the driest places, observes Yale. For some time there has been “growing evidence” of global greening in all biomes, not just drylands, evidence that we can note has been ignored by the promoters of Net Zero. A Carbon Brief ‘explainer’ claimed that desertification has been described as the greatest environmental challenge of our time “and climate change is making it worse”.
Carbon Brief is funded by green activist billionaires including Sir Christopher Hohn, a past provider for recently jailed Roger Hallam and Extinction Rebellion. Its desert climate hysteria, like that of the Guardian, is therefore to be expected. Interestingly, Yale Environment 360, which is part of the Yale University School of the Environment, also receives heavy direct and indirect financial support from activist groups including ClimateWorks along with the Hewlett and Ford Foundations. The article is significant since it represents a ‘mainstream’ breakthrough in discussing global greening which has been obvious for some time in specialist scientific circles.
Perhaps it is not surprising that the Yale article tries to rain a little on the greening parade with a dose of climate gloom. Greening created by agricultural irrigation of fields can “obliterate arid-land ecosystems”. But this surely is human-caused and nothing to do with a changing climate. “Save the deserts” may not be a popular environmental message, “but arid eco-systems matter”, continues Yale. Of course there will be many who point out that if a few scorpions have to up sticks to make way for the better nutrition of millions of African children, this is a small price to pay.
The article highlights much of the recent scientific work on global greening that has received coverage in publications like the Daily Sceptic but has been downplayed and more often than not ignored by messengers of the Net Zero narrative.
Ground-breaking work in 2016 saw a team of 33 scientists from eight countries study NASA satellite images, and they found that since 1980 between a quarter and a half of the planet’s vegetated areas had shown an increase in their leaf area index (LAI), a standard measure of the abundance of plant life. Work at this time suggested a 14% increase in vegetation. A 2021 study at the University of California concluded that there had been a 12% increase in photosynthesis, with CO2 fertilisation again the primary cause. A 2020 assessment from scientists at the Woodwell Climate Research Centre found that greening was “much more extensive than previously acknowledged”, and more than three times greater than desertification. Yale noted findings that the greening encompassed 41% of the world’s drylands, from India to the African Sahel and northern China to south-eastern Australia.
Chinese scientists have also been on the case. Last year, researchers at Lanzhou University found a “global divergence” between aridity and leaf area in drylands during the past three decades. This “decoupling” was said to be due to the effect of CO2.
In February, the Daily Sceptic reported on another group of Chinese scientists who found that over the last two decades about 55% of global land mass revealed an “accelerated rate” of vegetation growth. “Global greening is an indisputable fact,” they state.
They produced the above map based on four datasets that showed greening accelerating since 2000 in 55.8% of the globe. Faster growth in India and the European plains (dark blue colouring) was said to be the most obvious. Healthy growth can also be observed in the Amazon region, equatorial East Africa, southern coastal Australia and Ireland.
None of these findings should be a great surprise. CO2 levels have been much higher in the past going back 600 million years. Plants thrive at levels three times higher than current atmospheric CO2 and the near denudation amounts of the last few million years. During the last glacial period up to around 12,000 years ago, levels of atmospheric CO2 dropped to such dangerously low levels that plant – and human – life was severely threated. Even with the small recovery we have seen in the recent past, plants grow larger and utilise existing water resources much more efficiently. This recovery of CO2 levels in the atmosphere holds out hope for higher food resources in many parts of the world that suffer from periodic famines.
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This Is Why Electricity Costs Twice As Much In Britain As In The USA
The peak electricity demand in Britain is in the winter when we need to heat our homes, offices, shops, warehouses, factories etc.
But in the winter solar farms produce almost no electricity in Britain. This is because it is dark for around 16 hours a day and when the Sun does appear it is weak and usually hidden behind thick cloud.
Solar energy may make sense in some countries, for example the countries of North Africa, but building solar farms in Britain is completely brainless.
The new Energy Secretary Ed Milliband has just given the green light to the biggest solar farm in the U.K. He claims that building the Sunnica solar farm in East Anglia will “cut bills for families”. As is often the case with politicians, the opposite is true.
Because solar farms produce almost no electricity in the winter there will need to be back-up electricity generation. So essentially two electricity generation facilities will have to be built and operated, one for the summer and one for the winter. This will increase electricity bills for families not cut them.
Subsidies to companies operating solar farms and wind farms is one of the reasons electricity bills in Britain are already amongst the highest in the world. We pay five times as much for our electricity as China and twice as much as the USA.
The pain that these high bills cause British families is of no concern to the small group of eco-zealots in Government and the TV news who peddle scare stories about global warming and tell half-truths about the cost of renewables.
They want Britain to be a world leader in Net Zero and don’t care about the price the rest of us have to pay for this utterly pointless ambition. Britain is responsible for only 1% of global CO2 emissions so even if we achieved Net Zero tomorrow it would have no measurable impact on global temperatures.
Meanwhile the big CO2 emitters, like China (30% of global CO2 emissions) and the USA (10% of global CO2 emissions), move far more slowly towards Net Zero. They continue to build and operate fossil-fuel power stations.
Unlike solar farms and wind farms, these power stations are both cheap and reliable, they work every hour of every day summer and winter. This is why the electricity bills for Chinese and American families are so much lower than the bills for British families.
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Australia: experts have refuted Leftist claims about nuclear energy water use
ALL power stations vaporize a lot of water for cooling purposes
Leading nuclear experts have rejected Agriculture Minister Murray Watt’s claims that nuclear power stations would take water from farmers and put cropping and grazing land at risk of accidents.
State and territory agriculture ministers from around the country raised concerns on Thursday about potential effects of proposed nuclear power stations on farming land.
A joint statement issued ahead of the quarterly meeting of agriculture ministers called on the opposition to outline plans to protect land used for cropping and raising livestock in the event of an emergency.
Agriculture ministers or government representatives from Labor states endorsed the joint statement, but Tasmania, a Liberal state that is not home to a proposed nuclear reactor, was not included.
Federal Agriculture Minister Murray Watt, speaking at The Australian’s Global Food Forum in Brisbane on Wednesday, said the Coalition’s plan to build nuclear plants on seven coal-fired power station sites in Queensland, NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and South Australia would take water from farmers.
Senator Watt on Thursday rejected Coalition claims that Labor was running a scare campaign, and cited parliamentary research showing there were 11,955 farms located within an 80km radius of the selected sites, requiring “expensive” risk mitigation plans.
“I think it’s about time the federal opposition provided some answers to Australia’s farmers and our ag sector, about where the water will come from, what would happen in the event of a nuclear accident, and what preparations they would be making with the agriculture sector to prepare for such an event,” he said.
“What are those 12,000 farmers going to be expected to do if we do have an accident, and what steps would they need to take to ensure that the food and fibre that they produce is safe?”
The claims have been refuted by nuclear engineering experts and Nationals leader David Littleproud, who accused Senator Watt of misunderstanding the science of nuclear energy production and the comparable rate of water usage between coal and nuclear power plants.
Nuclear engineer and advocate Tony Irwin, an honorary associate professor at the Australian National University, said new technologies meant reactors were safer than ever and could be set up for use with significantly less cooling water.
“Solar and wind farms have far more effects on farming in Australia than nuclear will ever have,” Dr Irwin told The Australian. “There’s far less impact from nuclear plants because they are on existing industrial sites … using existing cooling water supplies.
“I think Labor are getting a bit desperate … Wind and solar have definitely a part to play … but when you start taking farmland for solar and wind, that’s a bad idea.”
Dr Irwin said the concerns around nuclear accidents on farmland were unfounded.
“There’s always fallback plans for any sort of disaster,” he said.
Nationals MP Keith Pitt, a former water and resources minister, said Australians wanted a nuclear energy debate based on facts. “Nuclear reactors in Europe have been operational for decades in agricultural environments and coal-fired power stations already have significant water allocations and storage,” he said.
Minerals Council of Australia CEO Tania Constable said it was disappointing “misinformation” was being used to stir fear in regional communities.
“For decades, operating nuclear power stations have coexisted with productive agricultural regions throughout Europe and North America without any negative impact,” she said.
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Greenie idiots
A sad end to their efforts to prove they were better than everyone else
A couple who embarked on an eco-friendly voyage across the Atlantic were found dead in a lifeboat after seemingly being forced to abandon their yacht.
Brett Clibbery, 70, and British woman Sarah Justine Packwood, 54, were reported missing after setting off from Nova Scotia in Canada in their 42ft sailing boat Theros on June 11 - and were found last week in a washed-up liferaft.
The couple's remains were found on Sable Island, nicknamed the 'Graveyard of the Atlantic', 180 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, the liferaft having washed ashore. They had intended to sail to the Azores 900 miles west of Portugal.
The Theros was a wind and solar-powered vessel piloted by the pair to show how travel can be done without using fossil fuels. The pair also shared videos on their YouTube channel showing them driving across Canada in an electric car.
Investigators are assessing whether the boat may have been struck by a larger vessel. No distress calls appear to have been issued by the couple.
In a message shared on their Facebook page, the pair had written: 'We aim to sail across the ocean, all being well, fair winds and following seas with us!' They labelled the journey part of their 'green odyssey'.
The couple were wed on the Theros in 2016, according to Ms Packwood's personal blog, a year after meeting at a bus stop in London. Mr Clibbery has been described as an experienced sailor and mechanic.
Ms Packwood, from Long Itchington, Warwickshire, was in the process of donating a kidney to her sister, Glory, the Vancouver Sun reported.
They later held a 'handfasting' Celtic ceremony at Stonehenge in April 2017, posting a video of the encounter on their YouTube channel.
Their trip to the Azores was meant to be the first fully 'green' journey on Theros after removing its diesel engine in favour of wind and solar power.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13654791/myster-british-eco-explorer-couple-dead.html
***************************************21 July, 2024
The key to tackling Florida's coral crisis might just be found off the shores of Honduras
This is all a lot of nonsense. "Bleaching" is not the death of coral. It just means that the coral has expelled its algal symbionts. Australian corals regularly undergo bleaching and bounce back with no human intervention.
And if more heat-tolerant species are really needed, there are already plenty in the Red Sea and Northern Australia. Australia's warmest waters are in the Torres Strait which is in the mid tropics. And that is where corals flourish most abundantly in Australia. Like most living things, corals LIKE warmth. Even people do, as Boca Raton shows.
Most bleaching is in fact caused by fluctuating water levels. Corals are close to the surface and do NOT like dessication
Scientists from the University of Miami are collaborating on an effort to address Florida's coral crisis as last summer's record-breaking marine heatwave severely impacted coral reefs in the Florida Keys, pushing them to the brink.
Axios reports that researchers are studying elkhorn coral colonies to develop solutions to the rising ocean temperatures caused by climate change and have suggested an unlikely solution: the research team plans to breed the Honduran corals with Florida's surviving corals to produce offspring capable of withstanding warmer temperature. The report details the process further:
"Led by Andrew Baker, director of the Coral Reef Futures Lab at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School, a team collected the elkhorn fragments from a reef in Tela Bay off the northern coast of Honduras, where the corals have somehow thrived in the same extreme heat affecting Florida's population. They hope to breed them with Florida's surviving corals — a technique called "genetic rescue" — to produce offspring able to survive warmer temperatures, Baker said in a news release.
The extreme heat last summer resulted in the complete destruction of one reef and widespread coral bleaching, a phenomenon where corals turn white due to stress. This die-off led scientists to move thousands of corals to laboratories to protect them until temperatures normalized. As the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service reported back in August:
Essentially, corals around Florida are experiencing extreme levels of heat stress that have never been recorded before. All of the Florida Keys are at Alert Level 2 for bleaching conditions, which means severe, widespread bleaching and significant mortality are likely. Some sites have already been exposed to two times greater the amount of heat stress than when mortality is expected to begin, and so far, the most extreme heat stress is in the lower and middle Florida Keys.
Five years ago, the The Florida Aquarium's Coral Conservation and Research Center in Tampa participated in a coral cross-breeding project using elkhorn corals from Curaçao and coral sperm from Florida. Although the effort produced hundreds of offspring, they could not be released onto Florida's reefs due to genetic differences.
According to experts, the Honduran corals are more closely related to Florida corals, and scientists hope that the offspring from this current experiment will meet regulatory requirements for release into the sea.
Coral reefs are critical, as they provide shelter for a quarter of ocean animals and drive significant tourism in Florida.
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The Titanic Scale Of Floating Wind Turbines Quantified
The global warming craze reaches a new height of insanity
Written by David Wojick on July 19, 2024. Posted in Current News
My regular readers know that I have often referred to the huge size of floating wind turbine assemblies.
They are much bigger than fixed offshore wind turbine assemblies because there is a big float attached. This makes floating wind far more expensive than fixed wind, which is already far more expensive than reliable fuel-fired electric power.
Simple physics says that if you want to put a 2,000-ton generator on top of a 500-foot tower with three 300-foot wings attached on a boat and have it still stand up in hurricane-force winds, it will have to be a mighty big boat.
Happily, Philip Lewis from strategic analyst Intelatus has put some numbers on this nonsense in Offshore Engineer.
See https://www.oedigital.com/news/504812-addressing-the-challenges-of-developing-floating-wind-at-scale
And https://www.oedigital.com/news/514835-preparing-for-floating-wind-leveraging-the-oil-gas-supply-chain
Of course, these are just estimates based on proposed designs, not measurements. Keep in mind that no one, anywhere, has ever built one of these Titanic monsters. Governments are setting huge targets for a technology that does not exist.
Based on UK permit applications, we are looking at a colossal individual floater footprint of around 160,000 square feet. That is roughly three football fields, so a mighty big float. And the UK does not get anything like hurricane-force winds. Maybe 100 mph, but never 160.
Weight-wise, Lewis suggests up to 5,000 tons of steel or 20,000 tons of concrete per float. Mind you, 5,000 tons of steel floaters will not keep 2,000 tons on a tall pole upright. These designs are what are called “semi-submersible”. This means the Titanic float is something like half full of water.
There is enough air to float it but also a lot of water to hopefully weigh it down. I have yet to see the math on all this and have my doubts about its viability, but this is what is reported.
Of course, these huge floaters make floating wind power extremely expensive. The guess is at least three times as much as the already ridiculously expensive fixed-bottom offshore wind power. It could be a lot more.
These enormous numbers are based on 15 MW turbines, which are the biggest built today, although none has yet been installed and operational offshore. But bigger are coming with 18 MW on order and 20 MW advertised. Floater size and weight scale exponentially with turbine weight and height, so the above huge numbers may actually be quite small.
As an engineer, I would build a few of these monster floating assemblies and run them through a few hurricanes to see how they did, especially if they survived. Of course, the hell-bent Biden folks and green States are doing nothing like that.
For example, next month, Biden’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is selling 15,000 MW of floating wind leases in the Gulf of Maine. California just announced a 25,000 MW floating wind target with 5,000 MW already leased by BOEM.
Just to play with numbers, this 40,000 MW of floaters would take just under 3,000 of these monster 15 MW floaters. In addition to filling up a lot of surface ocean, each has to be anchored to the sea floor with at least three mooring cables, more likely around eight each. Plus each has a live wire cable transmitting its energy output.
Lewis says the depths involved are like this: “In the U.S., the first commercial-scale projects will be off California (500-1,300 meters). Future activity is planned off Oregon (550-1,500 meters), the Gulf of Maine (190-300 meters), and the Central Atlantic (over 2,000 meters).” A mile is roughly 1,600 meters.
So we have many millions of feet of mooring cables and hot wires filling the ocean between the floaters and the sea floor. This is a whole new form of harassment that needs to be authorized (or not) under the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
What is really funny is I see no plans for building these thousands of Titanic floating wind assemblies. I recently pointed out that the Biden Transportation Dept was illegally diverting almost a billion dollars to build floating wind fabrication facilities in Maine and California. But, neither facility design has what it would take to actually make this stupendous semi-submersible junk, starting with dry docks.
I strongly suggest we put a big hold on leasing and funding floating wind technology. Let’s first see how and if it works and at what cost.
https://principia-scientific.com/the-titanic-scale-of-floating-wind-turbines-quantified/
***************************************************Global use of coal rises as nuclear power poised to hit record highs
The global use of coal is expected to rise this year, while nuclear power is expected to hit record levels in 2025, the International Energy Agency reports
The IEA said global coal use for producing electricity is expected to increase by just shy of 1 per cent, following growth of 1.9 per cent in the previous year. The IEA said it had expected coal power generation to contract this year but while there had been declines in Europe – growth in Asia would see global usage increase.
While much of the increases in Asia were driven by strong electricity demand growth in China and India, the IEA also noted US coal-fired generation is also expected to remain robust in 2024 amid rising electricity demand and reduced coal-to-gas switching.
The findings underscore the global challenge of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, a pledge supported by nearly all countries
The IEA said global nuclear generation is on track to reach a new high in 2025, surpassing its previous record in 2021. Nuclear generation is forecast to rise globally by 1.6 per cent in 2024, and by 3.5 per cent in 2025. This growth is supported by a steady increase in output by the French nuclear power fleet as maintenance works are completed, by the restarting of reactors in Japan, and by new reactors coming online in various markets, including China, India, Korea and Europe.
Both Europe and Asia are increasingly turning to nuclear power as they attempt to wean themselves of fossil fuels amid a global energy crunch. Europe had been reliant on gas for much of its electricity generation but has in recent years sought to wean itself off Russian supplies amid sanctions on Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine.
Japan, a major user of coal, has been forced to restart its nuclear fleet in a bid to meet its net zero commitment.
Keisuke Sadamori, director of energy markets and security at the IEA said electricity demand is growing globally and while the transition to zero emissions sources is capturing an ever larger share – it remained insufficient.
“It’s encouraging to see clean energy’s share of the electricity mix continuing to rise, but this needs to happen at a much faster rate to meet international energy and climate goals,” Mr Sadamori said.
Australian households and businesses pay some of the world’s highest electricity bills and delays in establishing new sources of energy threaten to increase pressure.
The IEA said Australia’s wholesale electricity price – the cost of generating the power – held steady during the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period one year earlier.
The IEA said steady prices of coal and increased renewable energy generation were the catalyst for the flatline wholesale price, which will be a relief to the government, which must return to the polls by May 2025.
While recent high electricity bills have hit the standing of the Labor government, the IEA’s data illustrates one small benefit – an increase in rooftop solar as households and businesses look for some relief.
Australia has some of the world’s highest proliferation rates for rooftop solar, aiding the government’s aspirations to develop zero emission energy sources.
But the IEA noted the toll on retailers of Australia’s soaring rates of rooftop solar.
The IEA said in South Australia – where rooftop solar is at its highest levels in Australia – the proliferation is causing economic harm to retailers.
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Record five-year jail term for Just Stop Oil’s founder
The founder of Just Stop Oil has received the longest-ever jail sentence for nonviolent protest under new laws designed to crack down on public disruption.
Roger Hallam, 58, was jailed for five years for co-ordinating the protests that disrupted the M25 in London over four days in 2022. Forty-Five protesters climbed gantries on the motorway, forcing police to stop the traffic.
Daniel Shaw, 38, from Northampton, Lucia Whittaker De Abreu, 35, from Derby, Louise Lancaster, 58, from Cambridge, and Cressida Gethin, 22, from Hereford, were each sentenced to four years after being found guilty of conspiring to cause a public nuisance.
The sentences, handed down at Southwark crown court in London, were longer than those given to Just Stop Oil activists who scaled the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge over the Dartford Crossing in October 2022. They were condemned as a “gross miscarriage of justice” by environmental campaigners last night (Thursday).
The group were sentenced under controversial legislation introduced by the previous government to get tougher on disruptive tactics used by environmental protesters, including blockading roads and attacks on sporting events. A 13-week campaign by Just Stop Oil (JSO) last summer cost the Metropolitan Police more than pounds 7.7 million, the equivalent cost of 23,500 officer shifts.
The legislation, which provides for stiffer sentences for protesters who block roads, was backed by Sir Keir Starmer, now the prime minister. But it was condemned by the United Nations human rights commissioner as “deeply troubling” and “disproportionate”.
Last night (Thursday) prominent environmental campaigners, including the millionaire Labour donor Dale Vince and the broadcaster Chris Packham, criticised the sentencing of the so-called Whole Truth Five.
Vince, who has donated almost pounds 1.4 million to the party since 2014, said it “can’t be right” that protesters were jailed in the same week that it was announced that prisoners would be released early to ease the crisis in the country’s prisons. He said that the sentence made the UK akin to “North Korea or Russia”.
The court was told that the M25 protests caused economic damage of pounds 765,000, while the cost to the Metropolitan Police was over pounds 1.1 million.
The protests are also said to have affected more than 700,000 vehicles, and left the M25 “compromised” for more than 120 hours.
Jocelyn Ledward KC, for the prosecution, told the court that the five defendants had joined a Zoom call in which they discussed the planned protests and were aiming to recruit others.
An undercover reporter for The Sun who joined the call pretending to be interested in the protest recorded part of the discussion and passed this to the police, who then arrested the activists.
In sentencing, Judge Christopher Hehir told the activists: “The plain fact is that each of you some time ago has crossed the line from concerned campaigner to fanatic. You have appointed yourselves as sole arbiters of what should be done about climate change.”
Judge Hehir told Hallam: “You are the theoretician, the ‘ideas’ man. In my judgment, you sit at the very highest level of the conspiracy.”
In a statement on his website Hallam said that the sentence was the work of a “kangaroo court”.
The trial was criticised by Michel Forst, the UN’s Special Rapporteur for Environmental Defenders, who described the threat of a long sentence against Daniel Shaw as potentially unlawful. Speaking on the eve of the first day of the trial, Forst warned: “The imposition of such sanction is not only appalling but may also violate the United Kingdom’s obligations under international law.”
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18 July, 2024
1.3 milliseconds is a LONG time, according to a "general agreement"
Based on "observational data and climate models"
The impacts of human-caused climate change are so overwhelming they’re actually messing with time, according to new research.
Polar ice melt caused by global warming is changing the speed of Earth’s rotation and increasing the length of each day, in a trend set to accelerate over this century as humans continue to pump out planet-heating pollution, according to the study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The changes are small — a matter of milliseconds a day — but in our high-tech, hyperconnected world have an important impact on computing systems we have come to rely on, including GPS.
It’s yet another sign of the huge impact humans are having on the planet. “This is a testament to the gravity of ongoing climate change,” said Surendra Adhikari, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a report author.
The number of hours, minutes and seconds making up each day on Earth are dictated by the speed of the Earth’s rotation, which is influenced by a complex knot of factors. These include processes in the planet’s fluid core, the ongoing impact of the melting of huge glaciers after the last ice age, as well as melting polar ice due to climate change.
For millennia, however, the impact of the moon has dominated, increasing the length of a day by a few milliseconds per century. The moon exerts a pull on Earth causing the oceans to bulge towards it, gradually slowing Earth’s rotation.
Scientists have previously made connections between polar ice melt and longer days, but the new research suggests global warming is a bigger influence on time than recent studies have shown.
In the past, the impact of climate change on time “has not been so dramatic,” said Benedikt Soja, a study author and assistant professor of space geodesy at the Swiss university ETH Zurich.
But that could be changing. If the world continues to pump out planet-heating pollution, “climate change could become the new dominant factor,” outpacing the moon’s role, he told CNN.
It works like this: As humans warm the world, glaciers and ice sheets are melting, and that meltwater is flowing from the poles toward the equator. This changes the planet’s shape — flattening it at the poles and making it bulge more in the middle — slowing its rotation.
The process is often compared to a spinning ice skater. When the skater pulls their arms in towards their body, they spin faster. But if they move their arms outwards, away from their body, their spin slows.
The team of international scientists looked at a 200-year period, between 1900 and 2100, using observational data and climate models to understand how climate change has affected day length in the past and to project its role in future.
They found the impact of climate change on day length has increased significantly.
Climate change-fueled sea level rise caused the length of a day to vary between 0.3 and 1 milliseconds in the 20th century. Over the past two decades, however, the scientists calculated an increase in day length of 1.33 milliseconds per century, “significantly higher than at any time in the 20th century,” according to the report.
If planet-heating pollution continues to rise, warming the oceans and accelerating ice loss in Greenland and Antarctica, the rate of change is set to soar, the report found. If the world is unable to rein in emissions, climate change could increase the length of a day by 2.62 milliseconds by the end of the century — overtaking the natural impacts of the moon.
“In barely 200 years, we will have altered the Earth’s climate system so much that we are witnessing its impact on the very way Earth spins,” Adhikari told CNN.
A few milliseconds of additional time a day may be imperceptible to humans but it has an impact on technology.
Precise timekeeping is vital for GPS, which everyone with a smartphone will have, as well as other communication and navigation systems. These use highly precise atomic time, based on the frequency of certain atoms.
From the late 1960s, the world started using coordinated universal time (UTC) to set time zones. UTC relies on atomic clocks but still keeps pace with the planet’s rotation. That means at some point “leap seconds” need to be added or subtracted to keep alignment with the Earth’s rotation.
Some studies have also suggested a correlation between an increase in day length and an increase in earthquakes, said Mostafa Kiani Shahvandi, a study author and a geoscientist at ETH Zurich. But the connection remains speculative and much more research needs to be done to establish any clear link, he told CNN.
A paper on the same topic published in March concluded that while climate change was increasingly slowing the Earth’s rotation, processes in the Earth’s core could be more important and actually be speeding it up, shortening day length.
“What we have done is to go a little bit further and re-estimate these trends,” said Shahvandi. They found any influence from the molten core was outweighed by that of climate change.
Duncan Agnew, professor of geophysics at the University of California San Diego and author of the March study, said the new study still meshes with his research, “and is valuable because it extends the result further into the future and looks at more than one climate scenario.”
Jacqueline McCleary, an assistant professor in physics at Northeastern University who was not involved in the study, said the new research helps inform “a decades-long debate over what role, exactly, climate change will play in the changing length of the day.”
While there is now general agreement climate change will have a “net lengthening effect on the day,” she told CNN, there has still been uncertainty about which processes affecting time will dominate this century. This study concludes climate change is now the second-most dominant factor, she said.
It’s a sobering conclusion, said ETH Zurich’s Soja. “We have to consider that we are now influencing Earth’s orientation in space so much that we are dominating effects that have been in action for billions of years.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/15/climate/polar-ice-melting-day-length-time/index.html
************************************************Biden’s Energy Policies Directly Cost U.S. Households More Than $2,548 Since 2021
Energy prices continue to surge due to President Joe Biden’s radical energy and climate agenda, according to an analysis by The Heartland Institute, a national free-market think tank. The analysis depended entirely on data from Biden’s U.S. Energy Information Administration.
In 2021, household electricity prices increased 8 percent. Electricity price increases accelerated even more in 2022, and continued to rise in 2023. Since December 2020, the last month before Biden took office, residential electricity prices have increased by 23 percent.
Key Points
Over the past three years:
Residential electricity prices have increased 23 percent
Industrial electricity prices have increased 19 percent
Home heating oil prices have increased 69 percent
Oil prices have increased 52 percent
Natural gas prices have increased 32 percent
Gasoline has increased $0.97 per gallon, or 42 percent
After three years of Biden’s energy policies, the average U.S. driver has spent at least an extra $548 per year in higher gasoline costs while the average household has expended $318 in higher electricity costs. Households that use natural gas have spent an extra $586 over the past three years, and those using home heating oil have paid a whopping $3,068 more.
Since Biden entered the Oval Office, the average American household has directly paid at least $2,548 in higher direct energy costs. This is the cost calculated by averaging price increases from January 2021 through December 2023, which means the actual added cost of energy is likely even higher.
The Heartland Institute analysis states: “Rapidly rising energy prices are not accidental. They are the predictable result of Joe Biden’s war on abundant, affordable, and reliable energy. The Biden administration has implemented dozens of policies that have caused energy prices to spike.”
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UK: Science Shock: Met Office Continues to Site New Temperature Stations in Junk Locations
Over eight in 10 of the 113 temperature measuring stations opened in the last 30 years by the U.K. Met Office have been deliberately or carelessly sited in junk Class 4 and 5 locations where unnatural heating errors of 2°C and 5°C respectively are possible. This shock revelation, obtained by a recent Freedom of Information request, must cast serious doubt on the ability of the Met Office to provide a true measurement of the U.K. air temperature, a statistic that is the bedrock of support for Net Zero. Over time, increasing urban encroachment has corrupted almost the entire network of 384 stations with 77.9% of the stations rated Class 4 and 5, but it beggars belief that new stations are being sited in such locations.
The siting situation is just as bad over the last 10 years where 81.5% are rated junk, while over the last five years, eight of the 13 newly-opened stations are Class 4 and 5. Only last year, Arthog No 2 was opened in Wales with a class rating of 4, and the year before another class 4 was sited at Neatishead. It is one thing to inherit a network, one of whose stations goes back to 1794, that has become corrupted, but serious questions must arise as to why the Met Office is planting measuring devices at sites that cannot provide a proper natural air temperature. Using these data to promote the Net Zero project by suggesting temperatures are rising faster than they are, while implausibly calculating warming down to one hundredths of a degree centigrade, risks the state-funded Met Office becoming a national joke.
Citizen journalist Ray Sanders is on the Met Office case and regularly contributes to Paul Homewood’s online blog. He noted that Neatishead was sited just 19 months ago and asked why sites are being opened of such poor quality. He observed that “someone of a suspicious mind might think that they are deliberately adding these junk sites simply to make current U.K. temperatures artificially high”.
The class rating system for temperature measuring stations is set by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). It reflects both human and natural impacts on temperature measurements caused by nearby activities, buildings and other structures. Class 1 is pristine and in a “perfect” world can be considered a “reference” site, notes WMO. Barely 6% of the Met Office stations are Class 1. Class 4 sites are heavily corrupted by artificial temperature changing sources and come with WMO “uncertainties” of 2°C. Class 5 sites have “uncertainties” of 5°C and with no siting requirements could be located by the door of a blast furnace, or, as happens at airports, the super-heated exhausts of jet engines. Under ISO/WMO standard 19289:2014 (E), a Class 5 site “is a site where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”.
Earlier this year the Daily Sceptic exclusively revealed that nearly one in three (29.2%) of Met Office temperature stations were in junk Class 5. And astonishingly, 48.7% were in Class 4. Just 13.7% or a paltry 52 stations are in Classes 1 and 2, where no “uncertainties” are set. The scientific scandal here is that the Met Office has known about the situation for years, but far from improving the network by careful siting of new stations, it appears to be intent on making it worse. To date, the Met Office has resisted giving a public explanation and the Net Zero-obsessed mainstream media have ignored the story. Instead, the legacy press has concentrated on promoting a diet of Met Office “record” and daily high temperatures often set at the same heat-racked sites. “Speaking truth to power” in this case has been replaced with acting as a helpful and unquestioning messenger for Met Office claims. As is usual in these cases, whether it be Covid cover-ups or a spaced-out U.S. Democrat President, mainstream media are nowhere to be seen, although the subject is widely discussed on social media.
Last month, the Daily Sceptic analysed a week of these claimed highs and found the hottest day in the U.K. was set at Heathrow airport no fewer than five times. Every day, many of the same dud sites feature at the top of the local lists. In Scotland, the measuring stations at Edinburgh Botanic Gardens, Glasgow and Leuchars featured on four days out of seven. In England, Hull East Park was joined by Killowen on four days along with Usk, Durham and Pershore College on three.
Does the Met Office consider this is credible scientific information, presenting the same natural mini local heat spots as representative of the U.K. climate, or just Net Zero story telling? It is about time it provided an explanation.
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17 July, 2024
Wrong, Bloomberg, Texas “Deniers” Are Right, Climate Change Had Nothing to Do with Hurricane Beryl
Bloomberg recently published an article which said Hurricane Beryl in particular, and other natural disasters which commonly hit the state, are symptoms of climate change, and that Texas’ pro-fossil fuel policies are partly responsible. Bloomberg’s article is wrong, a classic case of blaming the victim, Texas residents, for something that is 100 percent beyond their control, the weather. Beryl was not the earliest hurricane or tropical storm to ever hit Texas, some media reports to the contrary, and despite modest warming, data show no trend in worsening hurricanes or other extreme weather events in Texas or nationally. In short, contrary to Bloomberg’s unsubstantiated assertions, there is no “signal,” that climate change is causing or contributing to weather disasters in Texas.
In the article, “Hurricane Beryl Makes a Mockery of Texas Climate Deniers,” by opinion editor, Mark Gongloff, Gongloff used Hurricane Beryl as the news hook writing:
On Monday [July 8], the state [Texas] was slammed by the third incarnation of Hurricane Beryl, which had been re-re-fueled by bathtub-warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico after wreaking havoc on several Caribbean islands, Jamaica, and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. It made landfall south of Houston as a Category 1 hurricane, bringing high winds, a storm surge and heavy rainfall, and leaving millions without power in sweltering heat.
That much of Gongloff’s story was accurate, but then he goes completely off the rails, writing:
Pop quiz time: Which US state is the most vulnerable to climate-fueled weather disasters and soaring home-insurance costs but is also growing rapidly and has a government hostile to the very concept of climate change? The most obvious answer is Florida, with its hurricanes and floods and anti-woke, stunt-loving governor. The correct answer, however, is Texas.
No other state has suffered more climate-related damage over the past several decades than the Lone Star State — not even Florida, California or Louisiana. Home-insurance costs rose more in Texas than in any other state last year and over the past five years, according to S&P Global. And though Governor Ron DeSantis has outlawed the mention of climate change in Florida, Texas’ aggressive pro-global-warming policies have real teeth and will continue to do real harm. Especially to Texas.
While it is true that Texas likely suffers more weather-related disasters than almost every other state when one counts hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and flooding, that is because of its unique location (vis-à-vis natural weather patterns), size, and increasingly demographics with more rapid development in regions prone to extreme weather hazard; the number and severity of extreme weather event has not changed.
Long-term trends show no increase in extreme weather as fossil fuel development and use has proceeded apace, despite modest warming. By contrast the state has benefitted tremendously from the development and use of fossil fuels, a significant reason why job, economic, and population growth is strong. Indeed, the top four industries by revenue in Texas are, in order, gasoline and petroleum wholesaling, oil and gas extraction, petroleum refining, and gasoline and petroleum bulk stations which, by themselves, produced more than 1.13 trillion in revenue for the state in the most recent year. This doesn’t account for the billions more in revenue produced by the chemical refining industry, which produces plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, lubricants, and other fossil fuel-based products in broad and common use across Texas, the United States, and the world as a whole. As high as the cost of natural disasters are in Texas, which Gongloff pegged at $350 billion since 1980, those cost are dwarfed by the benefits delivered by fossil fuels over the same period. Indeed, the revenue generated by gasoline and petroleum wholesaling alone in the most recent year, 486.5 billion is greater than the cost of weather-related disasters over the entire 44-year period of Gongloff’s accounting.
And of course, it is unclear that long-term climate change contributed to any of the weather-related costs Texas has suffered since 1980, because there is no evidence it has made hurricanes, tornados, flooding, or wildfires worse or more frequent.
Let’s deal with Beryl and hurricanes more generally, first. Contrary to what has been implied in some reports, Beryl was not unprecedented. On June 26, 1986, Hurricane Bonnie made landfall in south Texas, dumping more than 13 inches of rain, spawning tornados, and killing four people. For those counting, June 26 is almost two weeks earlier than July 8. Also on June 30, 2010, Hurricane Alex made landfall just south of the Texas coast in Soto la Marina, Tamaulipas, Mexico, delivering heavy rains, winds, tornadoes, and flooding to the Texas coast and the Rio Grande valley. Six other named storms have made landfall in Texas in June since 1980 alone – and this doesn’t count any that did so before 1980. In case anyone is wondering, the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, 124 years of global warming ago, remains the deadliest natural disaster in Texas and U.S. history, claiming as many as 12,000 lives.
Concerning hurricanes more generally, real world data clearly show that there has been no increase in hurricanes or major hurricanes as the planet has modestly warmed
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Millions More Spent on Pritzker's Illinois Clean Energy Program
The state of Illinois is pumping millions of tax dollars more to develop a clean energy jobs program in underserved neighborhoods.
The Clean and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA), which was signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker three years ago, funds programs that create clean energy jobs statewide.
Pritzker said the Climate Works Pre-Apprenticeship Program prioritizes underrepresented populations and Illinoisans living in communities that have historically faced economic and environmental barriers.
“Climate Works will provide participants the direct hands-on support and resources that they need to build a career in the clean energy trade while further bolstering our world class workforce development infrastructure,” said Pritzker.
The nonprofits HIRE360 and the 548 Foundation will receive nearly $14 million in taxpayer funding to expand its clean energy careers training program to reach 1,000 graduates in the next 36 months and to place grads into trade programs.
Jay Rowell, executive director of HIRE360, expects the funding will allow the organization to expand its workforce development program to cover all 102 of Illinois’ counties.
“It will allow us to provide the specialized training that individuals need to enter the green trades and build sustainable careers,” said Rowell. “Jobs in clean energy are the future for our state.”
As outlined in statute, the pre-apprenticeship program consists of three regional centers serving the North and Chicago metropolitan area, Central Illinois and Southern Illinois.
While state officials note that people of color, women and other populations have historically been significantly underrepresented in apprenticeship programs, a new study says some may be left behind.
The study, published in Political Geography by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, suggests the state, in attempting to redress historical wrongs, used blinders to define equity in CEJA, which led to perceived injustices for downstate rural, often white communities.
CEJA calls for 100% clean energy in Illinois by 2050.
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Critics Say Small Farmers Are Real Target Of Danish Livestock Emissions Tax
As Denmark prepares to become the first country in the world to tax farmers for livestock ’emissions’, critics say the real goal is to consolidate control over the food supply and shift to corporate-controlled ‘Pharma Food’
A ‘deal’ was reached on June 24th between the Danish government and representatives of the farming industry and unions.
The tax, which specifically targets methane emissions by cows, pigs and sheep, will take effect in 2030, pending final approval by the Danish Parliament, The Associated Press reported.
Beginning in 2030, farmers will be required to pay a tax of 300 kroner (approximately $43) per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. This will increase to 750 kroner ($108) by 2035. After a 60 percent tax deduction, the respective amounts will be 120 kroner ($17.30) and 300 kroner.
CNN, quoting Denmark’s “green think tank” Concito, reported that Danish dairy cows emit, on average, 5.6 tonnes (6.2 U.S. tons) of CO2-equivalent emissions per year. This would result in a tax of 672 kroner per cow ($96) in 2030 and 1,680 kroner ($241) in 2035.
The respective emissions figure for all Danish cows is an average of 6.6 tons of CO2-equivalent annually, according to the AP, which reported that the Danish government aims to reduce the country’s ‘greenhouse’ emissions by 70 percent from 1990 levels by 2030, citing Taxation Minister Jeppe Bruus.
According to CNN, the proceeds from the tax will be used to support the agricultural industry’s ‘green’ transition in the first two years, including the investment of 40 billion kroner ($3.7 billion) for measures including reforestation and establishing wetlands.
After two years, the tax will be “reassessed.”
Denmark is a significant exporter of pork and dairy products, CNN reported. Agriculture is the country’s largest source of ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. The AP reported that, as of June 2022, there were nearly 1.5 million cows in Denmark.
Proponents of the tax emphasized that Denmark is the first country to enact such a policy, characterizing it as a step toward greater environmental ‘sustainability’.
“We will take a big step closer in becoming climate neutral in 2045,” Bruus said.
“We are investing billions in the biggest transformation of the Danish landscape in recent times,” said Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen in a statement quoted by CNN. “At the same time, we will be the first country in the world with a (carbon) tax on agriculture.”
According to Torsten Hasforth, Concito’s chief economist, “The whole purpose of the tax is to get the sector to look for solutions to reduce emissions,” CNN reported. Hasforth noted that farmers could, for instance, change the feed they use, as part of their efforts to reduce emissions.
The Danish Society for Nature Conservation called the tax “a historic compromise,” in remarks quoted by the AP. The organization’s president, Maria Reumert Gjerding, said:
“We have succeeded in landing a compromise on a CO2 tax, which lays the groundwork for a restructured food industry — also on the other side of 2030.”
And Ben Lilliston, director of Rural Strategies and Climate Change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, told PBS NewsHour that methane emissions are “a huge problem … a huge challenge.”
He argued that while methane remains in the atmosphere for fewer years than CO2, it has “about 80 times the potency.”
“If you reduce methane, you can get more near-term results and allow us to have a little longer of a window to reduce carbon dioxide emission,” Lilliston said.
Denmark’s ‘carbon’ tax was enacted despite recent farmers’ protests throughout Europe, including large protests in Brussels, the de facto capital of the European Union (EU) and center of EU policymaking.
The farmers voiced grievances over new environmental regulations and the corporate takeover of European farming.
In recent years, EU member states such as Ireland and the Netherlands have also pursued plans to limit farming and cull livestock, leading to protests in those countries.
New Zealand planned to enact a ‘carbon’ tax, set to take effect in 2025. The tax, passed by the country’s previous center-left government, was repealed last month by New Zealand’s new center-right governing coalition, according to the AP.
Criticisms are now being levied against Denmark’s new ‘carbon’ tax, with some experts arguing that it amounts to an added burden for the agricultural sector — particularly small farmers.
CNN quoted Danish farmers’ association Bæredygtigt Landbrug, which described the new policy as a “scary experiment.”
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Consent bid for huge wind farm off Scotland's east coast
A total absurdity
ONE of the largest floating offshore wind projects in the world has taken a step closer to becoming a reality with the submission of the consent application for its offshore array to the Scottish Government.
The Ossian project is being co-developed off the east coast of Scotland by a partnership comprising leading Scottish renewable energy developer, SSE Renewables, Japanese conglomerate Marubeni Corporation and Danish fund management company Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.
At up to 3.6GW of installed capacity, Ossian would be among the largest floating offshore wind farms globally. Once operational, it would be capable of generating enough energy to power up to six million homes annually.
Development lead Rich Morris said: “We have submitted a comprehensive environmental impact assessment report to the Scottish Government’s Marine Directorate, and we’re committed to continuing engagement with the statutory consultees and wider stakeholder community.
“We are confident this submission will support the timely delivery of the UK’s largest floating offshore wind farm, ensuring Ossian is ready to take full advantage of ongoing grid reforms and National Grid ESO’s move to a ‘first ready, first connected’ model. We have worked hard to reach this significant milestone.”
Ossian has consulted with regulatory and industry bodies across nature conservation, fisheries, aviation and shipping and navigation to ensure the application is reflective of their views.
Extensive surveys have also gathered large amounts of data relating to the wind farm array. This includes Ossian’s collaboration with other ScotWind developers to document the habits of bird populations in the wider North Sea region. The survey involved aircraft collecting high-definition images across an 11,550sq km area in the North Sea.
A year-long data gathering campaign collecting information relating to wave height, currents, tides, and sediment movements was concluded earlier this year. The data and samples provided are crucial to understanding the engineering properties of the seabed across the vast site.
Copies of the report will be available to view at libraries in Stonehaven, Carnoustie and Dunbar from July 23 as part of a public consultation. It can also be viewed online at marine.gov.scot/node/23264.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24453880.consent-bid-huge-wind-farm-off-scottish-east-coast/
***************************************16 July, 2024
Wrong, Bloomberg, Texas “Deniers” Are Right, Climate Change Had Nothing to Do with Hurricane Beryl
Bloomberg recently published an article which said Hurricane Beryl in particular, and other natural disasters which commonly hit the state, are symptoms of climate change, and that Texas’ pro-fossil fuel policies are partly responsible. Bloomberg’s article is wrong, a classic case of blaming the victim, Texas residents, for something that is 100 percent beyond their control, the weather. Beryl was not the earliest hurricane or tropical storm to ever hit Texas, some media reports to the contrary, and despite modest warming, data show no trend in worsening hurricanes or other extreme weather events in Texas or nationally. In short, contrary to Bloomberg’s unsubstantiated assertions, there is no “signal,” that climate change is causing or contributing to weather disasters in Texas.
In the article, “Hurricane Beryl Makes a Mockery of Texas Climate Deniers,” by opinion editor, Mark Gongloff, Gongloff used Hurricane Beryl as the news hook writing:
On Monday [July 8], the state [Texas] was slammed by the third incarnation of Hurricane Beryl, which had been re-re-fueled by bathtub-warm waters in the Gulf of Mexico after wreaking havoc on several Caribbean islands, Jamaica, and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. It made landfall south of Houston as a Category 1 hurricane, bringing high winds, a storm surge and heavy rainfall, and leaving millions without power in sweltering heat.
That much of Gongloff’s story was accurate, but then he goes completely off the rails, writing:
Pop quiz time: Which US state is the most vulnerable to climate-fueled weather disasters and soaring home-insurance costs but is also growing rapidly and has a government hostile to the very concept of climate change? The most obvious answer is Florida, with its hurricanes and floods and anti-woke, stunt-loving governor. The correct answer, however, is Texas.
No other state has suffered more climate-related damage over the past several decades than the Lone Star State — not even Florida, California or Louisiana. Home-insurance costs rose more in Texas than in any other state last year and over the past five years, according to S&P Global. And though Governor Ron DeSantis has outlawed the mention of climate change in Florida, Texas’ aggressive pro-global-warming policies have real teeth and will continue to do real harm. Especially to Texas.
While it is true that Texas likely suffers more weather-related disasters than almost every other state when one counts hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, and flooding, that is because of its unique location (vis-à-vis natural weather patterns), size, and increasingly demographics with more rapid development in regions prone to extreme weather hazard; the number and severity of extreme weather event has not changed.
Long-term trends show no increase in extreme weather as fossil fuel development and use has proceeded apace, despite modest warming. By contrast the state has benefitted tremendously from the development and use of fossil fuels, a significant reason why job, economic, and population growth is strong. Indeed, the top four industries by revenue in Texas are, in order, gasoline and petroleum wholesaling, oil and gas extraction, petroleum refining, and gasoline and petroleum bulk stations which, by themselves, produced more than 1.13 trillion in revenue for the state in the most recent year. This doesn’t account for the billions more in revenue produced by the chemical refining industry, which produces plastics, fertilizers, pesticides, lubricants, and other fossil fuel-based products in broad and common use across Texas, the United States, and the world as a whole. As high as the cost of natural disasters are in Texas, which Gongloff pegged at $350 billion since 1980, those cost are dwarfed by the benefits delivered by fossil fuels over the same period. Indeed, the revenue generated by gasoline and petroleum wholesaling alone in the most recent year, 486.5 billion is greater than the cost of weather-related disasters over the entire 44-year period of Gongloff’s accounting.
And of course, it is unclear that long-term climate change contributed to any of the weather-related costs Texas has suffered since 1980, because there is no evidence it has made hurricanes, tornados, flooding, or wildfires worse or more frequent.
Let’s deal with Beryl and hurricanes more generally, first. Contrary to what has been implied in some reports, Beryl was not unprecedented. On June 26, 1986, Hurricane Bonnie made landfall in south Texas, dumping more than 13 inches of rain, spawning tornados, and killing four people. For those counting, June 26 is almost two weeks earlier than July 8. Also on June 30, 2010, Hurricane Alex made landfall just south of the Texas coast in Soto la Marina, Tamaulipas, Mexico, delivering heavy rains, winds, tornadoes, and flooding to the Texas coast and the Rio Grande valley. Six other named storms have made landfall in Texas in June since 1980 alone – and this doesn’t count any that did so before 1980. In case anyone is wondering, the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, 124 years of global warming ago, remains the deadliest natural disaster in Texas and U.S. history, claiming as many as 12,000 lives.
Concerning hurricanes more generally, real world data clearly show that there has been no increase in hurricanes or major hurricanes as the planet has modestly warmed
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Millions More Spent on Pritzker's Illinois Clean Energy Program
The state of Illinois is pumping millions of tax dollars more to develop a clean energy jobs program in underserved neighborhoods.
The Clean and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA), which was signed by Gov. J.B. Pritzker three years ago, funds programs that create clean energy jobs statewide.
Pritzker said the Climate Works Pre-Apprenticeship Program prioritizes underrepresented populations and Illinoisans living in communities that have historically faced economic and environmental barriers.
“Climate Works will provide participants the direct hands-on support and resources that they need to build a career in the clean energy trade while further bolstering our world class workforce development infrastructure,” said Pritzker.
The nonprofits HIRE360 and the 548 Foundation will receive nearly $14 million in taxpayer funding to expand its clean energy careers training program to reach 1,000 graduates in the next 36 months and to place grads into trade programs.
Jay Rowell, executive director of HIRE360, expects the funding will allow the organization to expand its workforce development program to cover all 102 of Illinois’ counties.
“It will allow us to provide the specialized training that individuals need to enter the green trades and build sustainable careers,” said Rowell. “Jobs in clean energy are the future for our state.”
As outlined in statute, the pre-apprenticeship program consists of three regional centers serving the North and Chicago metropolitan area, Central Illinois and Southern Illinois.
While state officials note that people of color, women and other populations have historically been significantly underrepresented in apprenticeship programs, a new study says some may be left behind.
The study, published in Political Geography by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, suggests the state, in attempting to redress historical wrongs, used blinders to define equity in CEJA, which led to perceived injustices for downstate rural, often white communities.
CEJA calls for 100% clean energy in Illinois by 2050.
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Critics Say Small Farmers Are Real Target Of Danish Livestock Emissions Tax
As Denmark prepares to become the first country in the world to tax farmers for livestock ’emissions’, critics say the real goal is to consolidate control over the food supply and shift to corporate-controlled ‘Pharma Food’
A ‘deal’ was reached on June 24th between the Danish government and representatives of the farming industry and unions.
The tax, which specifically targets methane emissions by cows, pigs and sheep, will take effect in 2030, pending final approval by the Danish Parliament, The Associated Press reported.
Beginning in 2030, farmers will be required to pay a tax of 300 kroner (approximately $43) per ton of carbon dioxide equivalent. This will increase to 750 kroner ($108) by 2035. After a 60 percent tax deduction, the respective amounts will be 120 kroner ($17.30) and 300 kroner.
CNN, quoting Denmark’s “green think tank” Concito, reported that Danish dairy cows emit, on average, 5.6 tonnes (6.2 U.S. tons) of CO2-equivalent emissions per year. This would result in a tax of 672 kroner per cow ($96) in 2030 and 1,680 kroner ($241) in 2035.
The respective emissions figure for all Danish cows is an average of 6.6 tons of CO2-equivalent annually, according to the AP, which reported that the Danish government aims to reduce the country’s ‘greenhouse’ emissions by 70 percent from 1990 levels by 2030, citing Taxation Minister Jeppe Bruus.
According to CNN, the proceeds from the tax will be used to support the agricultural industry’s ‘green’ transition in the first two years, including the investment of 40 billion kroner ($3.7 billion) for measures including reforestation and establishing wetlands.
After two years, the tax will be “reassessed.”
Denmark is a significant exporter of pork and dairy products, CNN reported. Agriculture is the country’s largest source of ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions. The AP reported that, as of June 2022, there were nearly 1.5 million cows in Denmark.
Proponents of the tax emphasized that Denmark is the first country to enact such a policy, characterizing it as a step toward greater environmental ‘sustainability’.
“We will take a big step closer in becoming climate neutral in 2045,” Bruus said.
“We are investing billions in the biggest transformation of the Danish landscape in recent times,” said Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen in a statement quoted by CNN. “At the same time, we will be the first country in the world with a (carbon) tax on agriculture.”
According to Torsten Hasforth, Concito’s chief economist, “The whole purpose of the tax is to get the sector to look for solutions to reduce emissions,” CNN reported. Hasforth noted that farmers could, for instance, change the feed they use, as part of their efforts to reduce emissions.
The Danish Society for Nature Conservation called the tax “a historic compromise,” in remarks quoted by the AP. The organization’s president, Maria Reumert Gjerding, said:
“We have succeeded in landing a compromise on a CO2 tax, which lays the groundwork for a restructured food industry — also on the other side of 2030.”
And Ben Lilliston, director of Rural Strategies and Climate Change at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, told PBS NewsHour that methane emissions are “a huge problem … a huge challenge.”
He argued that while methane remains in the atmosphere for fewer years than CO2, it has “about 80 times the potency.”
“If you reduce methane, you can get more near-term results and allow us to have a little longer of a window to reduce carbon dioxide emission,” Lilliston said.
Denmark’s ‘carbon’ tax was enacted despite recent farmers’ protests throughout Europe, including large protests in Brussels, the de facto capital of the European Union (EU) and center of EU policymaking.
The farmers voiced grievances over new environmental regulations and the corporate takeover of European farming.
In recent years, EU member states such as Ireland and the Netherlands have also pursued plans to limit farming and cull livestock, leading to protests in those countries.
New Zealand planned to enact a ‘carbon’ tax, set to take effect in 2025. The tax, passed by the country’s previous center-left government, was repealed last month by New Zealand’s new center-right governing coalition, according to the AP.
Criticisms are now being levied against Denmark’s new ‘carbon’ tax, with some experts arguing that it amounts to an added burden for the agricultural sector — particularly small farmers.
CNN quoted Danish farmers’ association Bæredygtigt Landbrug, which described the new policy as a “scary experiment.”
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Consent bid for huge wind farm off Scotland's east coast
A total absurdity
ONE of the largest floating offshore wind projects in the world has taken a step closer to becoming a reality with the submission of the consent application for its offshore array to the Scottish Government.
The Ossian project is being co-developed off the east coast of Scotland by a partnership comprising leading Scottish renewable energy developer, SSE Renewables, Japanese conglomerate Marubeni Corporation and Danish fund management company Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners.
At up to 3.6GW of installed capacity, Ossian would be among the largest floating offshore wind farms globally. Once operational, it would be capable of generating enough energy to power up to six million homes annually.
Development lead Rich Morris said: “We have submitted a comprehensive environmental impact assessment report to the Scottish Government’s Marine Directorate, and we’re committed to continuing engagement with the statutory consultees and wider stakeholder community.
“We are confident this submission will support the timely delivery of the UK’s largest floating offshore wind farm, ensuring Ossian is ready to take full advantage of ongoing grid reforms and National Grid ESO’s move to a ‘first ready, first connected’ model. We have worked hard to reach this significant milestone.”
Ossian has consulted with regulatory and industry bodies across nature conservation, fisheries, aviation and shipping and navigation to ensure the application is reflective of their views.
Extensive surveys have also gathered large amounts of data relating to the wind farm array. This includes Ossian’s collaboration with other ScotWind developers to document the habits of bird populations in the wider North Sea region. The survey involved aircraft collecting high-definition images across an 11,550sq km area in the North Sea.
A year-long data gathering campaign collecting information relating to wave height, currents, tides, and sediment movements was concluded earlier this year. The data and samples provided are crucial to understanding the engineering properties of the seabed across the vast site.
Copies of the report will be available to view at libraries in Stonehaven, Carnoustie and Dunbar from July 23 as part of a public consultation. It can also be viewed online at marine.gov.scot/node/23264.
https://www.thenational.scot/news/24453880.consent-bid-huge-wind-farm-off-scottish-east-coast/
***************************************16 July, 2024
Should electric vehicles be illegal?
From ESPN: “Randall Cobb, family ‘lucky to be alive’ after house fire.”
Wide receiver Randall Cobb and his family escaped a fire at their Nashville, Tennessee, home this week, with his wife, Aiyda, posting, “we are lucky to be alive.”
Aiyda Cobb posted to her Instagram story this week that a Tesla charger “caught fire in the garage late last night and quickly spread” through their home.
“We got out of the house with nothing but the clothes on our back and no shoes on our feet,” she wrote.
The Cobbs have three young sons.
Electric vehicle batteries, like the large batteries used to store electricity from inept sources like wind and solar, are prone to burst into flame. And those fires are hard to extinguish. Out of curiosity, I googled “battery fire.” Here is a sampling of news headlines from the last 36 hours:
Driver sustained major injuries after colliding with a tree in an EV vehicle that caught fire.
Fiery Tesla Crash Poses Unique Challenges for Firefighters Near Anderson Valley.
Crews respond to battery fire at East Penn facility.
Man critically hurt in Brooklyn fire, e-bike battery probed as cause.
U.S. safety board probes fatal Tesla accident in Florida.
Baseus power banks recalled after dozens of fires, 13 burn injuries.
E-bike catches fire after being left in the sun in West Valley.
Route 35 closed in Naples due to fatal electric vehicle crash, battery fire.
This former Detroit firefighter is tackling the EV battery fire problem.
Lithium Batteries Are Set to Power the World—and Pose New Fire Risks.
Lithium-ion batteries, suspected in Keene fires, fuel widespread concern.
Three rescued from apparent lithium-ion battery fire in Midwood.
Fire breaks out in Tesla Megapack unit in Australia during testing.
Lithium-ion battery found at Brooklyn apartment fire: FDNY.
And, if we go back just 72 hours: Lithium battery factory fire kills 22 in South Korea.
Where is the Consumer Products Safety Commission? Where is the Congressional investigation? In what other context are products that spontaneously burst into flames legally marketed? If electric vehicles, e-bikes and batteries for wind and solar installations were not darlings of the “green” scam that controls government at most levels, would they even be legal?
These are serious questions.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/06/should-electric-vehicles-be-illegal.php
********************************************NYT: Islands not drowning
Remember how we’ve been told for years now that climate change, and hence rising sea levels, were an imminent threat to islands and island nations around the world? Well, the New York Times reported a few days ago, oops:
The Vanishing Islands That Failed to Vanish
[W]hen the world began paying attention to global warming decades ago, these islands, which form atop coral reefs in clusters called atolls, were quickly identified as some of the first places climate change might ravage in their entirety. As the ice caps melted and the seas crept higher, these accidents of geologic history were bound to be corrected and the tiny islands returned to watery oblivion, probably in this century.
Then, not very long ago, researchers began sifting through aerial images and found something startling. They looked at a couple dozen islands first, then several hundred, and by now close to 1,000. They found that over the past few decades, the islands’ edges had wobbled this way and that, eroding here, building there. By and large, though, their area hadn’t shrunk. In some cases, it was the opposite: They grew. The seas rose, and the islands expanded with them.
Climate realists have been reporting the growth of island atolls for years, but were resolutely ignored. And now of course the Times behaves like they and their sources are noticing this inconvenient fact for the very first time.
The rest of this long—very very long—feature labors mightily to say there’s a still a problem, and scientists are working hard to understand the “complexities” of the situation.
One thing the story avoids saying, however, is that the science apparently isn’t “settled.”
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/07/a-fresh-embarrassment-for-the-climate-cult.php
****************************************************New British Energy Secretary Overrules Officials And Bans New North Sea Oil Exploration
Ed Miliband has ordered an immediate ban on drilling in new North Sea oil fields in a decision that overrules Energy Department officials and risks triggering a wave of legal action
In an unusual intervention into what is typically an apolitical process, the Energy Secretary has decided that regulators will not approve a round of drilling in new oil fields that was slated for confirmation in the coming weeks.
His decision to block the licences means that companies will have wasted millions of pounds on preparing their bids, with experts warning they are likely to take legal action as a result.
The decision comes after The Telegraph asked for updates on outstanding drilling licence applications.
The applications, from companies seeking to exploit up to 35 new North Sea areas, were submitted as part of the 33rd offshore oil and gas licensing round initiated by the last government in autumn 2023.
It saw 76 oil and gas companies submitting 115 bids to drill for oil and gas across 257 “blocks” of the North Sea, Irish Sea and East Atlantic. The NSTA said these would boost UK oil output by 600 million barrels.
Bids for up to 35 areas were still awaiting a decision from the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), the regulator, when the election was called. The NSTA is an arms-length agency overseen by the Energy Department.
On Wednesday afternoon the NSTA said that applications were still being considered, despite the change in Government. A spokesman reiterated the NSTA’s pre-election statement that:
“Further consideration is being given to a small number of remaining applications and a few more may be offered at a later date.”
However, a spokesman for Mr Miliband subsequently said that licences for new fields would not be approved.
In a terse statement issued late on Wednesday, his spokesman said:
“We will not issue new licences to explore new fields, and will not revoke existing oil and gas licences. We will manage existing fields for the entirety of their lifespan.”
Whitehall sources have also made clear that the NSTA’s role and structures are likely to be reviewed and overhauled.
Presiding over new licences would have been deeply embarrassing for Mr Miliband, a committed opponent of oil and gas.
In a debate earlier this year, he said:
“Oil and gas licensing will not reduce energy costs for households and businesses … will not enhance energy security, and offers no plan for the future of the UK’s offshore energy communities.
It will ensure the UK remains at the mercy of petrostates and dictators who control fossil fuel markets and is entirely incompatible with the UK’s international climate change commitments.”
Mr Miliband and Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, also pledged in opposition to raise taxes on UK oil and gas production profits from 75pc to 78pc and to slash the industry’s investment allowances.
The King’s Speech, at the state opening of Parliament on July 17, is expected to outline more of Labour’s plans for taxing UK oil and gas – including allowing existing fields to keep operating.
That has prompted eco-activists to step up their campaign against oil and gas developments.
On Wednesday activists from Just Stop Oil spread orange paint across three road junctions around Westminster. The group has also threatened to blockade airports through the summer.
Labour’s policies have also attracted widespread criticism from within the energy industry which points out that the UK spent almost £27bn on imports of crude oil and over £21bn on gas imports last year.
One leading analyst said:
“Right now the UK gets 75pc of its total energy from oil and gas and a lot of that already has to be imported.
The remaining North Sea oil and gas fields are absolute treasures and one day they will all be developed. These remaining fields could reduce reliance on imports.”
Oil industry insiders said any attempt to block legitimate licence applications “could result in a legal action for damages” by the affected companies.
Offshore Energies UK, which represents the industry, warned that UK production was already falling at eight percent a year but this would accelerate to 15 percent a year without new drilling – accelerating the surge in imports.
David Whitehouse, chief executive, said:
“We remain deeply concerned that some of the new proposals being put forward for our industry will undermine the energy transition we all want to deliver.
Labour’s leadership has recognised that North Sea oil and gas will be with us for decades to come and they have committed to managing this strategic national asset in a way that does not jeopardise jobs.
They now need to deliver on their commitment to support our industry.”
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Big batteries bring big problems
Viv Forbes
Solar generators won’t run on moon-beams – they fade out as the sun goes down and stop whenever clouds block the sun. This happens at least once every day. But then at mid-day on most days, millions of solar panels pour so much electricity into the grid that the price plummets and no one makes any money. And after a good hail storm they never work again.
Turbine generators are also intermittent – they stop whenever there is too little, or too much wind. In a wide flat land like Australia, wind droughts may affect huge areas for days at a time. This often happens when a mass of cold air moves over Australia, winds drop and power demand rises in the cold weather. All of this makes our power grid more variable, more fragile, and more volatile. What do we do if we have a cloudy windless week?
Our green energy bureaucrats have the solution to green power failures – ‘Big Batteries’.
But big batteries bring more big problems – they have to be recharged by the same intermittent green generators needed to keep the lights on, the trains running, and the batteries charged in all those electric cars, trucks, and dozers. And if anyone has been silly enough to build some power-hungry green hydrogen generators, they too will need more generation capacity and more battery backups. How long do we allow them to keep throwing our dollars into this green whirlpool?
Collecting dilute intermittent wind and solar energy from all over a big continent like Australia and moving it to coastal cities and factories brings another ‘green’ energy nightmare – an expensive and intrusive spider-web of powerlines that are detested by landowners, degrade the environment, cause bushfires, and are susceptible to damage from lightning, cyclones and sabotage.
They call them solar ‘farms’ and wind ‘parks’ – they are neither farms nor parks – they are monstrous and messy wind and solar power plants. And these very expensive ‘green’ assets are idle, generating nothing, for most of most days.
Big batteries sitting in cities have proved a big fire risk and no one wants them next door. So our green ‘engineers’ have another solution to these problems caused by their earlier ‘solutions’ – ‘Mobile Batteries’. (This is a worry – no one knows where they are – maybe they will be disguised as Mr Whippy ice cream vans?)
Train entrepreneurs want to build ‘batteries on tracks’ – a train loaded with batteries, which parks beside a wind/solar energy factory until the batteries are full. Then the battery train trundles off to the nearest city to unload its electricity, preferably at a profit. They can also play the arbitrage market – buy top-up power around midday and sell into peak prices at breakfast and dinner times when the unreliable twins usually produce nothing useful. This will have the added advantage of sending coal and gas generators broke sooner by depressing peak prices. Once coal and gas are decimated, then the battery trains can make a real killing.
But battery trains may be the perfect answer to supplying those energy-hungry AI data centres. Let’s start a pilot project and park a battery train beside the National AI Centre near the CSIRO in Canberra…
A more ambitious idea is the BBB Plan – ‘Big Batteries on Boats’.
It would work like this:
The Australian government places an order with China to build a fleet of electric boats (sail-assisted of course) that are filled with batteries (and lots of fire extinguishers). The batteries are charged with cheap coal-fired electricity at ports in China. They then sail to ports in Australia where the electricity is unloaded into the grid whenever prices are high or blackouts loom.
Australian mines can profit from the iron ore used to make the boats, the rare minerals used to build the batteries, and any Australian coal used by the Chinese power plants to charge the batteries.
This solution allows Australian politicians to go to world conferences boasting that Australia’s electricity is ‘Net Zero’, and more tourists can be enticed to visit our endangered industrial relics – coal mining and steam generator museums.
Of course, there is another danger in the BBB solution – some entrepreneurs may load their boats with nuclear generators plus enough fuel on board for several decades of operation. Or they may even site a small nuclear reactor beside a closed coal power station and make use of all the ready-to-go power lines already in place.
This sort of dangerous thinking could well demolish another Queensland green dream – ‘CopperString’ – a $5 billion speculation to build 840 km of new transmission line from Townsville to Mt Isa. We are not sure which way the power is expected to flow. They will probably not get there before the great copper mine at Mt Isa closes.
Why not just send a small nuke-on-a-train to Mt Isa?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/big-batteries-bring-big-problems/
***************************************15 July, 2024
Professor makes stunning discovery as to why dead whales keep washing up on East Coast beaches
For the best part of half a century, a 41-foot humpback whale named Luna swam up and down the East Coast. Then on Jan. 30, 2023, Luna washed up dead on Long Island, New York.
He was the tenth whale to strand on beaches in New York and New Jersey in nine weeks. Environmentalists, politicians and ordinary citizens loudly wondered if the construction of offshore wind turbines was killing them.
Apostolos Gerasoulis, a Rutgers professor emeritus of computer science who co-created the search engine that powers Ask.com, now says the answer is yes. ‘Absolutely, 100 percent, offshore wind kills whales,’ he says.
Early in 2023, Gerasoulis began researching whale deaths. That summer he started building a software system to identify any relationship between the dead whales and offshore wind survey vessels, which use loud blasts of sonar to map the seabed for the installation of offshore wind turbines and high-voltage cables.
He named the system Luna.
But the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is responsible for protecting marine animals and their habitats insists there is no connection.
‘To date, no whale mortality has been attributed to offshore wind activities,’ said Lauren Gaches, NOAA Fisheries public affairs director shortly after Luna’s body was found.
Whale deaths had started increasing several years earlier. NOAA declared ‘unusual mortality events’ for humpback whales in 2016, minke whales in 2017, and North Atlantic right whales also in 2017.
The death count is now up to 534 for these species.
Wind farm developers started sending out sonar vessels to blast the ocean floor with high-intensity sound waves to map it for offshore wind farms in 2016.
But NOAA still denies any connection.
‘At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys or pile driving could potentially cause whale deaths,’ Katie Wagner, NOAA public affairs specialist, told DailyMail.com.
‘There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.’
But according to Gerasoulis, NOAA data reveal that humpback whale deaths in New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island waters went from an average of two per year before 2016 to 10 in the years since.
Last year, 21 humpback whales died in the region. ‘You have 20 dead whales. You used to have two, and now it's 20,’ Gerasoulis said. ‘So I started looking at this from every perspective.’
He loaded NOAA data on whale deaths, the zigzag courses of survey ships and even wave action into his computer system. Luna revealed patterns that Gerasoulis believes point to offshore wind survey vessels as the cause of the whale deaths.
Gerasoulis is an expert in computational sciences, search engines, high-performance computing and data analytics. ‘There are five people in the world who build search engines,’ Gerasoulis says. ‘I’m one of them.’
Last year he founded Save the East Coast to investigate the impact of offshore wind on oceans, marine life, fishermen and shore communities.
The Luna software system that Gerasoulis built integrates NOAA data on whale, dolphin and porpoise deaths with vessel traffic data from MarineCadastre.gov. He believes it is the first system of its kind.
Luna generates maps of the U.S. East Coast and plots the locations of offshore wind farms; deaths of whales, dolphins and porpoises; and the routes taken by various survey ships. Luna can display any specific geographic area, time frame, marine mammal species or ship, depending on the query.
For example, from 2017 through 2023, a total of 286 whales, dolphins and porpoises died along the New Jersey and New York shores. Luna shows exactly where they were found.
Luna visually displays the zigzag routes taken by offshore wind survey vessels. During January and February 2022, there was little survey boat in the area. Six vessels traveled a total of 4,213 miles. One humpback whale died.
January and February 2023, however, showed a tremendous increase in survey vessel traffic in the waters off New Jersey and New York – 13 vessels traveled a total of 11,977 miles. Seven humpback whales died, including Luna.
In August 2022, survey boat traffic was minimal off the New Jersey coast. Two survey vessels worked near Asbury Park and two more worked off Atlantic City. They traveled a total of 5,469 miles. There was plenty of open water around the two survey areas and no humpback whales died.
August 2023, however, was a different story. Sixteen different offshore wind survey vessels moved slowly back and forth off the coast. They covered a total of 16,812 miles, triple the amount of the previous August. Six whales died that month.
In the summer of 2022, Trisha DeVoe, a conservation biologist on the Miss Belmar whale watching boat, first spotted a two- to three-year-old male humpback whale. He became No. 0260 in the New York-New Jersey humpback whale catalog run by Gotham Whales.
‘He was just a typical, healthy young humpback whale,’ DeVoe says. ‘We observed him several times during that whale watching season over the summer.’
But the last time Miss Belmar passengers saw No. 0260, in October 2022, half of his tail fluke was missing. It looked like it had been chopped off by a boat propeller.
‘We honestly didn't know if he would survive such an injury,’ DeVoe says. ‘We didn't know if he would be able to continue to swim and forage and behave like a whale with just half a tail fluke.’
Humpback whales stay in New Jersey waters for an average of 38 days, DeVoe says. In the fall they swim to the Caribbean to breed and give birth. She didn’t know if the young whale would make it.
The following July, DeVoe was thrilled to see 0260 back at the Jersey Shore.
‘Not only did he survive, he was thriving,’ DeVoe says. ‘He made that long migration down to the breeding grounds, and he came all the way back up, thousands of miles, so he was able to swim. He was so resilient.’
On July 24, 2023, DeVoe photographed the whale breaching off the Jersey shore.
‘They use their tail flukes to gain speed and propel them to lift their massive bodies out of the water, and he was able to do that with half a tail fluke,’ she says. ‘We were just overjoyed.’
Two and a half weeks later, on Aug. 12, 2023, DeVoe was out on the Miss Belmar when she and her passengers spotted the whale. He was floating dead in the water.
DeVoe was heartbroken.
‘He was able to survive everything he went through — the major injury and amputation and come all the way back up here. He was so strong, but unfortunately, he wasn't strong enough to survive the next onslaught that he was going to face in our ocean,’ DeVoe says.
‘We really believe that what is killing these whales is the surveying work that they're doing. It's the only thing different in our ocean. We never had whales dying like this.’
DeVoe and other local environmentalists were devastated by the loss of the whale and wanted to honor him with a name, rather than just a number. They started calling him ‘Saint.’
‘He was this whale, in human terms, who was a lot like a saint. He suffered a lot at the hand of humans. He suffered that massive injury and he survived, and he thrived, and he continued on with his life. But then he unfortunately went on to his ultimate death at the cause of human activity.
‘So, we feel like he was just a saint during his time here.’
**************************************************
Solar Farms are an environmental as well as economic mistake.
The actress Tracy Ward objects to her ex-husband the Duke of Beaufort building a 2,000-acre solar farm in Gloucestershire:
“Solar panels should be on roofs, along motorways, or industrial sites,” she says. “Be careful what the climate change fear-mongering will lull us into accepting.”
Spot on.
While solar panels on roofs can (almost) make sense, huge solar farms are an environmental as well as economic mistake.
The whole point of farmland is that it is already a solar farm, and a green one at that.
It turns sunlight into food energy for people, insects, voles and birds. “The fact that some green campaigners would rather have low grade electricity than high quality British farm produce shows how bizarrely irrational environmentalism has become,” says Dr John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation.
Ah, say solar-energy fans, but you can have both: you can graze sheep under the solar panels or allow weeds to flourish. This is nonsense: the whole point of solar panels is that they catch the sunlight — the clue is in the name – which plants would otherwise use to grow.
On a normal summer’s day, perhaps 10 percent of the sunlight might get missed by the solar panels and caught by the plants’ solar panels (leaves) instead. It’s a zero-sum game.
It is debatable whether we need home-grown electricity more desperately than home-grown food these days: reliance on imports of both are increasing sharply. But you cannot currently make bread or lambs any other way than by using land; the same is not true of electricity.
Solar power needs around 200 times as much land as gas per unit of energy and 500 times as much as nuclear.
Reducing the land we need for human civilisation is surely a vital ecological imperative.
The more concentrated the production, the more land you spare for nature. Going back to using the landscape to provide energy, as they did in the Middle Ages (through wind, water and hay for horses), would be a disaster for nature.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-power-of-power-density
Britain currently vies with New Zealand each year to break the record for wheat yield: our combination of soil moisture and summer day length is ideal. But it’s right at the bottom of the heap for solar-power potential.Around 1-2 kilowatt-hours a day of “direct normal irradiation” falls on the average square metre in Britain. Most of Australia experiences 5-8 times as much.
According to one study, it is not even clear that the energy generated by a typical solar farm in Europe north of the Alps is greater than what went into building it, let alone replacing it every 15 years.
https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517302914
To match UK electricity demand from solar on a June afternoon would mean covering 5-10% of the entire country with solar farms but they would be useless at night and in winter.British solar output peaks at precisely the times we least need it: in the middle of the day in the middle of summer.
It contributes the square root of sod all in December, and spring and autumn it stops generating just when demand starts to peak in the evening.
The more solar power we add to the grid, the bigger the evening ramp-up demand for gas. It is expensive to keep so much back-up ready. Batteries will not help much.
If we relied on solar power, it would take many billions of pounds to install enough batteries to tide us over a single night, let alone a winter.
Then there is the demand for materials. There is probably not enough silicon, silver or copper being mined and smelted in the world to build a solar farm big enough to supply Britain.
The material demands of solar power are about six times greater than for gas, per megawatt of capacity (though half those of offshore wind).
Much of this material comes from China, a significant vulnerability in terms of economic security and environmental damage.
Solar’s fans are fond of saying that the cost of solar panels is falling fast, but solar panels account for just a quarter of the costs of a solar farm: the cost of the rest of the infrastructure, and the land, is rising.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-power-of-power-density
Planning guidance on solar farms needs to change fast to stop these duke-lucrative, subsidised eyesores gobbling up more of our green and pleasant land.https://principia-scientific.com/solar-farms-are-taking-us-back-to-the-dark-ages/
**************************************************23 State Coalition Challenges New Federal Regulations on Washing Machines
I have always been glad we do not have these stupid regulations in Australia
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is leading a 23-state coalition of attorneys general opposing another Biden administration regulation on home appliances, this time on washing machines.
They did so as the U.S. House is poised to vote on two bills this week that would restrict Biden administration regulations on dishwashers and refrigerators, among other household appliances. Republicans say the regulations will only further drive up costs and make them less affordable than they already are, The Center Square reported. House Democrats have been encouraged to vote against the bills, arguing they are a political ploy.
A new U.S. Department of Energy regulation on washing machines is the “latest overreach into the livelihoods of middle-class Americans,” Moody said. The administration is now “weaseling its way into laundry rooms in an attempt to further its radical energy policies by implementing harmful and costly standards on washing machines.”
The AG coalition sent a letter to DOE Secretary Jennifer Granholm, asking her to abandon a new rule the DOE promulgated or “proceed with notice and comment rulemaking” before enacting it.
The DOE proposed new energy conservation standards for residential clothes washers in March 2023 through a new federal rule as part of an overall energy conservation program. The DOE received numerous comments supporting and opposing it and after months of impasse the rule went nowhere. Then, advocacy organizations and home appliance manufacturers agreed to a joint statement in September 2023 and the DOE finalized the rule in March 2024.
The Energy Policy and Conservation Act “grants DOE the power to regulate residential clothes washers for energy conservation,” the AGs explain. “That grant of authority is not limitless. DOA must also consider the economic burden such regulations will impose on consumers and manufacturers, and whether such burden is economically justified.”
By statute, DOE “may only issue direct final rule if a joint statement is submitted by interested parties who fairly represent the relative points of view and satisfy the standards,” they said. Because the joint statement “was the result of administrative arm-twisting, it did not address issues raised by important stakeholders during the period for comments on the proposed rule,” they wrote to Granholm.
The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers stressed the rule would “eliminate consumer features, reduces choice, significantly increases cost, and/or negatively impacts product performance.”
A study it conducted with Bellomy Research found that the rule would negatively impact low-income households. More than half of U.S. households wouldn’t be able to afford purchasing a more energy efficient washer, the research found, resulting in households purchasing used washers or not purchasing one at all.
Whirlpool argues the rule is not economically justified. Its research found a 25% increase in cost for consumers and a potential 31% loss in industry net present value, which could result in more than 8,000 American job losses. It also criticized DOE for failing to conduct a supply chain analysis in North America.
The joint statement includes advocacy groups like the Alliance for Water Efficiency, the Natural Resource Defense Council, Earthjustice and Others that “do not represent the interests of everyday consumers, and their input should not be given significant weight by DOE,” the AGs argue.
While states like California and Massachusetts support the rule, “many states do not,” the 23 AGs argue. “DOE cannot cherry pick the States with which it is politically aligned to circumvent the ordinary rulemaking process.”
Referring to the rule as “Biden’s war on washing machines,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill said the president “continues his attack on Louisiana citizens. This time, his bureaucratic tyrants want to dictate how you wash and dry your clothes. I’ll continue to push back on these ill-conceived policies that only hurt hardworking Louisianans and how they operate their households.”
U.S. Rep. Debbie Lasko, R-Arizona, who introduced the Hands Off Our Home Appliances Act, said she was “saddened that we would need such a bill.” After the U.S. House passed the bill in May, she said, “No government bureaucrat should ever scheme to take away Americans’ appliances in the name of a radical environmental agenda, yet that is exactly what we have seen under the Biden administration.”
The bill requires that any new energy efficiency standards be cost-effective and prevents household appliances from being banned by the federal government based on fuel usage. It is unlikely to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Depending on Granholm’s response, the coalition is expected to sue to ask a federal court to halt the rule from going into effect, arguing it is illegal.
https://climaterealism.com/2024/07/9369/
***************************************************GM receives $500 million federal grant to convert Michigan plant
The Lansing Grand River Assembly Plant of General Motors has been awarded a $500 million grant toward preparation to become a producer of electric vehicles.
It comes from the U.S. Department of Energy, led by Secretary Jennifer Granholm – former governor of the Great Lakes State.
The Lansing plant has been in operation more than 20 years, but with a Domestic Manufacturing Conversion Grant, it will begin to produce electric vehicles in addition to its current Cadillac CT4 and CT5 series. The decision is a part of a broader company plan to invest in onshore production of electric vehicle components.
“GM’s investment and this Department of Energy grant underscore our commitment to U.S. leadership in manufacturing and innovation, making sure we’re competitive at home and abroad,” said Camilo Ballesty, GM vice president of North America Manufacturing and Labor Relations. “Our Lansing Grand River team produces incredible vehicles for our customers, and we’re proud to bring our commitment to performance and quality into our EV future.”
https://www.thecentersquare.com/michigan/article_37f5f016-4081-11ef-851e-efc400379f50.html
***************************************14 July, 2024
Carbon dioxide and a warming climate are not problems
From "The American Journal of Economics and Sociology"
Abstract
Prior to the mid-19th century, Earth was in the grip of the Little Ice Age. Since then, temperatures have on average trended upward. At the same time, human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) have increased, and the interest of scientists has turned to consider the extent of the relative contributions of anthropogenic CO2 and natural forces to warming.
The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) Working Group II (WGII) claims that human-caused climate change or global warming is dangerous. According to the report, “Human-induced climate change … has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability. … The rise in weather and climate extremes has led to some irreversible impacts as natural and human systems are pushed beyond their ability to adapt (high confidence)” (IPCC, 2022a, p. 9).
The AR6 WGI and WGII reports measure climate change as the global warming since 1750 or 1850. The period before these dates is commonly referred to as the “pre-industrial period.” The Little Ice Age, a phrase rarely used in AR6, extends from about 1300 to 1850. It was a very cold and miserable time for humanity, with a lot of well documented extreme weather in the historical record from all over the Northern Hemisphere. It was also a time of frequent famines and pandemics. Arguably today's climate is better than then, not worse.
None-the-less, the IPCC claims that extreme weather events are worse now than in the past, however observations do not support this. Some extreme weather events, such as the land area under extreme drought (Lomborg, 2020), is decreasing, not increasing. Globally the incidence of hurricanes shows no significant trend (IPCC, 2013, p. 216; Lomborg, 2020).
Observations show no increase in damage or any danger to humanity today due to extreme weather or global warming (Crok & May, 2023, pp. 140–161; Scafetta, 2024). Climate change mitigation, according to AR6, means curtailing the use of fossil fuels, even though fossil fuels are still abundant and inexpensive. Since the current climate is arguably better than the pre-industrial climate and we have observed no increase in extreme weather or climate mortality, we conclude that we can plan to adapt to any future changes. Until a danger is identified, there is no need to eliminate fossil fuel use.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajes.12579
***********************************************Politico, NYT Exploit Senator’s Death to Attack His Climate Change Views
The eco-fanatics at Politico and The New York Times exploited a Republican Senator’s death to grave-stomp over his climate change skepticism.
How many Politico reporters does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Who knows, but we do know it took four to write an insane, grave-stomping July 9 headline: “Former Sen. Jim Inhofe, who called climate change a 'hoax,' dead at 89.” The first paragraph of the piece was no better. In fact, it was about as cringeworthy as it gets. “Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who once brought a snowball onto the Senate floor as a brazen symbol of his denial of climate change, died on Tuesday. He was 89 years old.”
Compare Politico's treatment of Inhofe to its flowery 2019 obituary for Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro and its priorities become clear: "Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who defied U.S. for 50 years, has died."
Politico's ghastly report on Inhofe begs the question why any editor(s) using their prefrontal cortexes would okay this for publication. Apparently, someone at Politico had some kind of epiphany because its asinine headline was changed soon after the piece was published.
But Politico wasn’t alone. The New York Times followed suit with its own outrageous attack against Inhofe’s climate views in a separate obituary. “James M. Inhofe, Senator Who Denied Climate Change, Dies at 89,” The Times’s boorish headline read. The Times smeared Inhofe in its first paragraph as “arguably Washington’s most prominent denier of the established science of human-generated climate change.”
Unlike Politico, The Times only needed one author to paint itself as a collective of thoughtless climate ignoramuses. The Times, however, didn’t recognize the insanity of its headline as Politico did, and it remains unchanged as of the publication of its article.
Inhofe’s former staff director Andrew Wheeler blasted Politico and The Times for their utterly disrespectful treatment of the former senator in comments to MRC Business.
“It’s a sad commentary of modern life when some people rush to speak ill of the dead. It’s even worse when it’s the so-called mainstream media like the New York Times, and it’s particularly vile when they only speak ill of Republicans,” Wheeler said.
Politico — despite changing the initial barking mad headline — cast Inhofe as a comic book pollution villain stemming the tide of progress for Gaia’s faithful acolytes:
One of the GOP’s most vocal critics of environmental regulation and the science of climate change, Inhofe held vast sway over environmental policy during his time as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — not only through his use of the gavel, but through his cultivation of staffers who went on to take key positions at EPA during the Trump administration and worked to roll back those rules Inhofe long maintained that climate change was a ‘hoax,’ going so far as to include it in the title of a 2012 book on the matter.
Politico is the same publication that hyped actually blocking the sun to save the planet from the climate boogeyman, so it’s no wonder it couldn’t resist dinging the legacy of a dead senator because he didn’t genuflect to the media’s pagan climate gods.
***********************************************
Pennsylvania General Assembly Sends Carbon Capture Bill to Governor's Desk
Absurd
A legal framework for carbon capture and sequestration, part of a plan to reduce emissions and advance hydrogen development, has made it through the General Assembly.
It now awaits the governor’s signature.
Senate Bill 831 has found support among some environmental groups like the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, Environmental Defense Fund, and the Nature Conservancy — but others like the Better Path Coalition, Clean Air Council, and the Center for Coalfield Justice have opposed it.
Sen. Gene Yaw, R-Williamsport, celebrated the bill’s passing as preparing Pennsylvania for a better future.
“This legislation is a proactive step to secure Pennsylvania’s future as a hub for carbon capture and sequestration,” Yaw said in a press release. “It’s a pragmatic solution to a problem that we all want to solve – reducing our carbon emissions without crippling the reliability of our existing power grid.”
One report estimates that Pennsylvania has space for 2.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide underground, the equivalent of yearly emissions from more than 500 million passenger cars. A federal tax credit created in 2018 has spurred dozens of new carbon capture projects, but even with almost $700 million of federal subsidies, attempts to implement the technology have so far failed.
SB831 has also received support from the Pennsylvania Chamber of Business and Industry, the Pennsylvania State Building and Construction Trades Council, the AFL-CIO, and others.
“Carbon capture technology has the potential to create a significant number of good paying jobs in the construction industry while simultaneously creating family-sustaining permanent jobs for the citizens of our commonwealth,” Robert Bair, Pennsylvania State Building and Construction Trades Council president, said in a press release.
In the Pennsylvania House, instead of running through the Environmental Resources and Energy Committee, it was handled by the Consumer Protection, Technology and Utilities Committee and advanced without discussion.
Both ranking members of the House Environmental Resources and Energy Committee Reps. Greg Vitali, D-Havertown, and Martin Causer, R-Bradford, voted against SB831.
Vitali was one of only 11 Democrats to go against the bill, while only 36 Republicans voted in favor of the bill, which passed the House 127-75.
*****************************************
World’s largest oil company bets on the enduring power of gasoline
Saudi Aramco is betting the internal combustion engine will be around for a “very, very long time” as the world’s largest oil company spots a business opportunity from the rise of the electric car.
The state-owned oil group, which made $500bn in revenues last year mainly from producing and selling crude, last month took a €740mn, 10 per cent stake in Horse Powertrain, a company dedicated to building fuel-based engines.
The calculation by Saudi Aramco and the other shareholders in Horse, Chinese carmaker Geely and its French peer Renault, is that as the industry stops designing and developing its own combustion engines, it will start buying them from third parties.
“It will be incredibly expensive for the world to completely stamp out, or do without internal combustion engines,” said Yasser Mufti, the executive vice-president at Saudi Aramco responsible for the deal. “If you look at affordability and a lot of other factors, I do think they will be around for a very, very long time.”
Asked if he thought there would be internal combustion engines forever, Mufti said yes. Saudi Aramco has previously said it believes that even in 2050, more than half of all cars will still run on some sort of fuel.
In 2021, the demise of the internal combustion engine (ICE) seemed assured after carmakers including Ford, General Motors and Mercedes-Benz, and governments including the UK, pledged to end sales of new petrol and diesel engines between 2035 and 2040.
But with growth in electric vehicle sales slowing and trade protectionism rising, the future of ICEs is looking less bleak.
“We believe that as far out as 2035, 2040 and even beyond 2040 we still see a significant number of ICE vehicles,” said Matias Giannini, chief executive of Horse. “More than half for sure, and up to 60 per cent of the population will still have some sort of an engine, whether it is pure ICE, a full hybrid or a plug-in hybrid.”
That outlook presents an opportunity to consolidate production.
Giannini said Horse had already secured “a couple of pieces of business”, and was in talks with several carmakers to supply them with engines.
“We have a variety of new engines coming out, for example, to address legislation,” he said, adding that while a lot of car companies had decided to stop investing in or developing engines in response to new EU standards, “we continued”.
The joint venture was created a year ago, after Geely and Renault carved out their engine and transmission divisions and joined them together into Horse. The new €7.4bn, 19,000-employee company, which has 17 factories worldwide, is capable of building 3.2mn units a year and wants to produce 5mn, putting it roughly in the same league as Stellantis, the owner of Chrysler, Fiat and Citroën.
“There’s nobody doing what we propose to do,” said Giannini. “If you are a car company today and you are focusing 100 per cent on EVs and all of a sudden you realise that in one region your customers want a hybrid vehicle, you could partner with Horse Powertrain.
“You will still have your branded vehicle,” he added. “Everybody wins. You don’t have to make a big investment, you don’t have to reshuffle your engineering, you can have something much faster, still producing out of your plants, employing people out of your region and offering more options to the final consumer.”
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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11 July, 2024
New U.S.-E.U. Methane Rules Won’t Affect Temperatures
In March, the US Environmental Protection Agency published new methane emissions regulations for the oil and gas industry. The European Union enacted new rules to reduce methane emissions from the energy sector in May. Agriculture is also being targeted regarding methane. But methane regulations, even if established worldwide, won’t have a measurable effect on global temperatures. However, they will raise costs for energy and food, impacting consumers and businesses.
On March 8, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized its rule on methane emissions for the oil and gas sector. The rule is intended to “reduce wasteful methane emissions that endanger communities and fuel the climate crisis.”
The new policy will require companies to pay a penalty of $900 for every ton of methane emitted above limits set by the EPA, starting this year. A legal challenge to the EPA’s new rule has been filed by 24 states.
On May 27, the European Union (EU) announced new regulations on methane emissions from coal, gas, and oil operations. These rules will require energy firms to monitor and report methane emissions and to reduce methane flaring from operations. The rules also apply to international firms that ship hydrocarbon fuels to Europe.
Methane (CH4) is also called natural gas. It is emitted from oil and gas operations from flaring or system leaks. CH4 is also produced through the decay of organic material, such as from municipal solid waste landfills. The EPA and the EU have proposed methane regulations to try to fight global warming.
But nature and human agriculture are larger sources of methane than the energy industry. Termites and other insects emit large amounts of methane. We have about 1.5 billion cows on Earth, and numerous other livestock and wildlife, emitting methane from both the nose end and the tail end.
Methane is a greenhouse gas and part of Earth’s greenhouse effect, which is blamed for global warming. Sunlight, which is high-energy radiation, enters the atmosphere and is absorbed by Earth’s surface. Like any warm body, Earth emits radiation. Since Earth’s temperature is lower than that of the sun, Earth emits lower-energy radiation called infrared radiation or longwave radiation, which is not visible to our eyes.
This longwave radiation seeks to leave Earth’s atmosphere, but almost all of it is absorbed by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. These gases then re-radiate the absorbed energy, which acts to warm Earth’s surface. The warming caused by the absorption of infrared radiation is called the greenhouse effect. Emissions from human industrial processes add to the effect and increase global temperatures.
But Earth’s greenhouse effect is overwhelmingly a natural effect. Water vapor, not carbon dioxide or methane, is Earth’s dominant greenhouse gas. Water vapor accounts for 70 to 90 percent of the greenhouse effect.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the next most important greenhouse gas, but most of the CO2 in the atmosphere comes from nature, such as CO2 emissions from the oceans and the biosphere. Every day, nature puts 20 times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as all human emissions and removes about the same amount. Methane ranks only as a distant third as a greenhouse gas.
The European Union states:
“ … methane’s ability to trap heat in the atmosphere is even stronger than that of carbon dioxide. On a 100-year timescale, methane has 28 times greater global warming potential than carbon dioxide and is 84 times more potent on a 20-year timescale.”
These assertions from the EU and other sources are widely reported, but they are incorrect. Claims about the global warming potential of methane are accurate in the laboratory, but not in the atmosphere.
No one paints a room in their house ten times, because after two coats of paint, no difference is observed. Similarly, greenhouse gases are already saturated in Earth’s atmosphere at the frequencies at which methane absorbs outgoing longwave radiation. Additional methane will have almost no effect.
A 2020 analysis by Wijngaarden and Happer looked at the absorption of outgoing longwave radiation by methane and other greenhouse gases across the radiation spectrum. The researchers found that doubling atmospheric methane, from either natural or human causes, would increase greenhouse gas absorption by only about 0.3 percent, a negligible amount.
Farming has become a target for efforts to reduce methane emissions. Earlier this year, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, the world’s largest beef producer, over the firm’s methane emissions and for allegedly making misleading sustainability statements to the public. The costs of this litigation will add to food price inflation for consumers.
Earlier this year, the EU sought to impose the Sustainable Use Regulation (SUR) on European farmers. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, stated that the agricultural sector needed to transition towards a “more sustainable model of production.” Farmers were asked to reduce the size of dairy herds and to limit the use of nitrogen fertilizer to reduce greenhouse gas emissions of methane and nitrous oxide. Germany’s Federal Agricultural Minister, Cem Özdemir, even proposed a consumption tax on meat.
But angry farmers launched intense protests in France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, and other nations. Hundreds of tractors blocked traffic in major cities and police were pelted with eggs and liquid manure. The SUR was defeated, and the EU backed away from additional agricultural regulations, including regulations on methane and the use of nitrogen fertilizer.
Possibly the most bizarre law to reduce emissions was the Australia Carbon Farming Initiative Act of 2011, which awarded carbon credits for killing feral (wild) animals, including:
“… the reduction of methane emissions through the management, in a humane manner, of feral goats, feral dear, feral pigs or feral camels.”
Killing of animals for carbon credits was halted in 2012.
In any case, because of greenhouse gas saturation in the atmosphere, methane regulations across the world will have no measurable effect on global temperatures. But to the extent that they are enacted, these rules will raise the costs of energy and food production and prices to consumers and businesses.
https://heartland.org/opinion/new-u-s-e-u-methane-rules-wont-affect-temperatures/
****************************************************Urban Heat Islands And Record Heat In Las Vegas: Unpacking The Causes Beyond Climate Change
Las Vegas has recently experienced a record-breaking heatwave, with temperatures reaching unprecedented highs spurring absolutely ridiculous headlines like this from The San Francisco Chronicle…
This event has reignited discussions about the causes of such extreme heat, with arguments focusing on urban expansion, population growth, and the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE), rather than solely attributing it to increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. By examining the ten hottest days in Las Vegas history and the context of urban development, we can better understand the primary factors contributing to these extreme temperatures.
On July 6, 2024, Las Vegas recorded its highest temperature ever, reaching 120°F (48.8°C). This surpasses previous records and prompts a closer examination of historical temperature trends and the contributing factors to such extreme heat.
To understand the trends, we can look at the ten hottest days in Las Vegas history:
120°F (48.8°C) on July 6, 2024
117°F (47.2°C) on June 30, 2013
117°F (47.2°C) on July 19, 2005
116°F (46.7°C) on July 24, 1942
116°F (46.7°C) on July 17, 2005
116°F (46.7°C) on July 15, 2023
115°F (46.1°C) on June 20, 2017
115°F (46.1°C) on July 15, 2020
114°F (45.6°C) on July 8, 2002
114°F (45.6°C) on July 19, 2006
Notably, several of these records were set decades ago, with some dating back over 80 years. This longevity of high-temperature records suggests that factors other than increases in GHGs are significantly influencing these temperatures.
The Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE) is a phenomenon where urban areas experience higher temperatures than their rural surroundings due to human activities and infrastructure.
Concrete and Asphalt: Urban surfaces like roads and buildings absorb and retain heat, increasing local temperatures.
Lack of Vegetation: Green spaces and trees cool the air through evapotranspiration, a process significantly reduced in densely built environments.
Human Activities: Energy consumption for air conditioning, vehicles, and industrial processes generates additional heat.
Las Vegas has undergone rapid urban expansion and population growth over the past few decades. The city’s population has increased from around 273,000 in 1980 to over 2.3 million in 2020. This urban sprawl has replaced natural desert landscapes with heat-absorbing infrastructure, significantly contributing to local temperature rises.
The temperature record in Las Vegas was set at McCarran International Airport (now Harry Reid International Airport), which has seen substantial growth over the decades. Initially a modest regional facility, the airport has expanded significantly alongside the city’s population boom and tourism industry.
The airport handled nearly 1 million passengers annually in the 1950s, a number that surged to over 50 million passengers by 2019, making it one of the busiest airports in the United States.
This expansion has included multiple runway extensions, terminal upgrades, and increased tarmac area, all contributing to the Urban Heat Island Effect by replacing the natural desert landscape with heat-absorbing infrastructure.
The proximity of temperature monitoring stations to these developments likely amplifies recorded temperatures, further underscoring the impact of urbanization on local climate conditions
While GHG emissions likely play a role in global climate change, the localized effect of UHIE in cities like Las Vegas is significantly more pronounced.
The slow pace at which new temperature records are set, despite accelerating global CO2 levels, suggests that urban factors are significant contributors to extreme heat events.
The assertion that GHGs, particularly CO2, are solely responsible for the record temperatures in Las Vegas is overly simplistic and ignores significant local factors.
Despite the continuous rise in global CO2 levels, which have accelerated over the past decades, temperature records in Las Vegas are not broken annually.
If CO2 were the primary driver of extreme heat, we would expect a more consistent upward trend in temperature records, correlating directly with rising CO2 levels. Instead, several of Las Vegas’s highest temperatures were recorded decades ago, such as 116°F in 1942.
This indicates that other factors, such as urbanization and the UHIE, play a more crucial role in these temperature extremes. Rapid urban expansion and increased heat-retaining infrastructure, like concrete and asphalt, have significantly contributed to localized heating.
Therefore, attributing these record temperatures primarily to GHG emissions overlooks the substantial impact of local environmental changes and urban development.
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Death of Biden’s gas export pause
When the Biden administration paused the approval of new liquefied natural gas exports in January, environmentalists and left-leaning politicians hailed the decision as a watershed moment for the climate movement. After months of pressure from climate activists, the Department of Energy, or DOE, announced that it would rethink how it evaluates the massive export projects that condense fracked gas into a supercooled liquid, known as LNG, and load it onto tankers that ship the fuel for sale in Europe and Asia. In the meantime, the administration committed to keeping the LNG projects awaiting approval in a holding pattern, preventing them from breaking ground.
The surprise move reportedly came about after senior White House officials met with young climate activists who were campaigning against LNG exports, and it seemed to mark a shift in the trajectory of the industry, which had received strong support from both the Obama and Trump administrations. The 350.org founder and writer Bill McKibben said the decision meant that President Biden had “done more to check dirty energy … than any of his predecessors.” (McKibben is also a former Grist board member.)
But just six months later, the pause looks like little more than a speed bump in the rapid growth of an industry that has transformed the global energy mix. Even though the pause incensed oil and gas executives and drew furious protests from Republicans, its application was limited to just a few projects that were in the planning stages; it didn’t affect several large terminals that have already received approval or are under construction, which together will double U.S. export capacity.
And earlier this week, a federal judge appointed by former president Donald Trump struck down the current administration’s policy. The Louisiana judge ruled that the Biden administration still has to consider individual projects for approval even while it ponders a broader shift in LNG export policy, negating the impact of the pause that Biden officials had said would last at least through the end of the year. With Biden facing diminished odds of defeating the former president in the November election, it’s become increasingly likely that his administration will not manage to change the country’s natural gas export policy at all.
“If this is really over — you have a DOE that’s going to go back to a presumption that LNG exports are in the public interest — this will have been a blip,” said Steven Miles, a research fellow and natural gas expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. “If this is going to be an opening salvo in an ongoing battle over every step in LNG exports, it’ll be trench warfare. It probably all depends on the election.”
When the DOE announced the pause in January, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm framed it as a necessary attempt to update the government’s criteria for evaluating the massive export terminals that have sprung up along the Gulf of Mexico. The United States had become the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, but officials still weren’t sure how the export surge was changing the world’s energy mix. Was sending so much gas overseas helping to displace coal, a far more climate-unfriendly fuel, or was it stalling the growth of renewable energy? Was it creating jobs in gas-rich U.S. states, or driving up costs for electricity ratepayers and American companies — or both?
These questions are very difficult to answer, in part because they rely on counterfactual assessments of what would happen if the U.S. didn’t export gas. Even since the pause took effect, a flurry of new research has complicated the picture. On the one hand, a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an energy think tank, found that gas exports to China aren’t helping to reduce coal usage in the energy-hungry country, undermining a key argument for the industry. On the other hand, an economics paper published in March argued that exports have driven up natural gas prices within the United States and thus encouraged substitutes for the fuel, acting in effect like a carbon tax and aiding the country’s net-zero target as a result.
While the administration tried to answer these questions, it paused its review of a handful of LNG projects that had been awaiting approval. Republicans and industry leaders excoriated that move, saying it jeopardized the nation’s ability to deliver fuel to foreign allies. In truth it only slowed down a few projects that had already received clearance from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, a separate independent regulator that has been far friendlier to LNG projects.
The pause also didn’t stop FERC from continuing to kick more projects over to the Department of Energy for approval: Just last week, the commission approved Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass 2 terminal, or CP2, a massive project that would be able to ship out 24 million metric tons of LNG per year, enough gas to power more than 15 million homes. It was the CP2 project that had galvanized many activists on TikTok and other social media platforms, reportedly drawing the attention of the Biden administration officials who pushed the pause in the first place.
In March, a group of 16 Republican-led states sued the administration over the DOE’s regulatory pause, and they found a sympathetic audience in a Louisiana court. The judge, Trump appointee James Cain, ruled that the Department didn’t have the authority to stop reviewing LNG export terminals, finding that the decision had led to “the loss of revenues, market share, and deprivation of a procedural right” for states such as Louisiana and West Virginia.
For Roishetta Ozane, an activist in Lake Charles, Louisiana, who has led the charge against the LNG industry for more than three years, the decision was demoralizing.
“It’s insane,” she told Grist. “I’m sad, I’m frustrated. I feel like I’m fighting against a state that I love and am trying to protect.”
The ruling doesn’t prevent the Biden administration from pursuing a larger review of how it regulates LNG projects, one that could lead to more comprehensive restrictions on the industry. However, given that this review would require the department to push through a new definition of whether exports are in the “public interest” under the decades-old Natural Gas Act, it would likely be subject to legal challenges now that the Supreme Court has scrapped the so-called Chevron deference precedent that gave federal agencies the flexibility to craft such policies under their interpretations of federal law.
Even so, in the aftermath of the ruling, environmental and climate advocates urged the administration to continue pushing forward with that bigger shift.
“It’s no surprise that a Trump judge would bend the law to hand the oil industry a win,” said Craig Segall, the vice president of the climate-oriented political group Evergreen Action, in a statement. “Luckily, today’s deeply misguided ruling from the Western District of Louisiana should have no impact on the Department of Energy’s statutory authority over what must be included in a public interest determination.”
But that long-term review of LNG exports will only continue if Biden wins reelection, and it’s unclear whether the attempted pause has helped or hurt his election chances. The January move represented an attempt to shore up support among young environmentalists, but some Democratic politicians in gas-rich states such as Pennsylvania — a must-win state for the president — have said that it hurt his standing locally.
It may also have damaged Biden’s fragile and largely unspoken truce with large oil and gas companies, which had been supportive of carbon capture and hydrogen provisions in the landmark Inflation Reduction Act that the president signed in 2022. During a March dinner at the Mar-a-Lago resort, former President Trump asked a group of oil and gas executives to donate around $1 billion to his campaign in exchange for favorable policies, including an end to the natural gas export pause.
“The damage has been done, in my view,” said Mary Landrieu, a former Democratic senator from Louisiana who now helps lead a coalition of gas industry stakeholders. “The decision was made so abruptly and so poorly that it doesn’t give people confidence that the president has a consistent and well-thought-through policy on the energy transition. I don’t think there was any upside to it, and I believe that the downside was really damaging the trust relationship that was building [with the oil industry] to some degree.”
https://grist.org/energy/biden-liquefied-natural-gas-export-pause-court-ruling/ .
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Used Engines Among Quebec’s Total Ban on Gas Vehicles by 2035
The government of Quebec is proposing regulations to ban the sale of all gasoline-powered vehicles, as well as the sale of used gas engines, by 2035.
The draft regulation for Bill 50, which was printed in the July 10 edition of La Gazette Officielle du Québec, says the ban would take effect on Jan. 1, 2035.
Specifically mentioned are the sale or lease of “motor vehicles that are not propelled solely by an electric motor,” including vehicles with “a hydrogen fuel cell or another means of propulsion that emits no pollutant.”
Bill 50, which is described as an act “respecting civil protection to promote disaster resilience and to amend various provisions relating in particular to emergency communication centres and to forest fire protection,” estimates that switching to electric vehicles will save consumers $2.1 million per year in energy costs. It will cost businesses in the petroleum sector approximately $434,000 per year in reduced fuel sales.
The regulation is aimed at increasing “the number of zero-emission motor vehicles in Québec in order to reduce greenhouse gas and other pollutant emissions,” it reads.
After 2035, only electric vehicles will be permitted to be sold in the province, according to the regulation, which will also ban the sale of used gasoline-powered engines. An exemption is provided for replacement engines for vehicles of model year 2034 or earlier.
Anyone wishing to comment on the draft regulation must submit written comments within 45 days of the July 10 publication.
The federal government announced its own regulations in December 2023 to be phased in over 12 years, although unlike Quebec’s plan they don’t include engines—new or old. At that time, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said the government would be pushing for 20 percent of all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2026, with that number increasing to three-fifths by 2030 and 100 percent by 2035.
Mr. Guilbeault said the move would tackle one of the reasons that Canadians haven’t been switching to EVs, which is a long wait time for a low supply.
Vehicle manufacturers will be entitled to credits issued by the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and which they can use, bank, or sell to companies that don’t earn enough credits.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced its regulations on gas vehicles, requiring one-third of new car sales to be electric by 2027, with that number jumping to over two-thirds by 2032.
Europe has also introduced legislation that would also see all petrol and diesel-powered vehicles banned by 2035.
The decision means that manufacturers need to cut 100 percent in carbon emissions by 2035 for new cars sold. It also set a 55 percent reduction in emissions for vehicles sold from 2030.
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10 July, 2024
Unseen Calm: The North Pacific’s Historic Storm-Free Period
For the first time in the satellite era, which began in 1966, the entire North Pacific has experienced an extraordinary meteorological anomaly.
From June 1 to July 3, 2024, there was no named storm activity in the western, central, or eastern North Pacific. This period of calm is highly unusual given the historical storm activity in the region during these months.
The absence of named storms during this time has significant implications for meteorology and climate science while the silence about this event in the MSM is clear evidence of the bias surrounding climate change.
Several factors contributed to this unprecedented period of calm. One critical factor is thought to be the temperature of the ocean’s surface. Warm sea surface temperatures (SSTs) are believed to provide the necessary energy for storm development however as reported previously new research has called that into question.
In 2024, SSTs in the North Pacific were lower than average, potentially due to cyclical oceanic patterns such as La Niña, which is characterized by cooler ocean temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific. This cooling effect may inhibit the formation of tropical storms and hurricanes.
Atmospheric conditions also played a crucial role. The North Pacific experienced higher-than-normal atmospheric stability during this period, suppressing the convection necessary for storm development.
Increased wind shear—a difference in wind speed and direction at different altitudes—further inhibited the organization of storm systems. These atmospheric conditions combined to create an environment unfavorable for storm formation.
The lack of named storms in the North Pacific from June 1 to July 3, 2024, provides a unique opportunity for meteorologists and climate scientists to study the underlying causes and potential shifts in weather patterns.
This anomaly challenges existing models and underscores the importance of refining predictive models to improve forecasting and preparation for future extreme weather events.
By analyzing this period of inactivity, scientists can enhance long-term climate predictions and better understand the impacts of natural variability and anthropogenic factors.
The media silence surrounding the North Pacific’s historic lack of named storms contrasts sharply with the overblown coverage of Hurricane Beryl. This disparity is a perfect example of media bias and the manipulation of information by the climate-industrial complex to drive fear and anxiety, pushing policy agendas.
While the media extensively covered Beryl’s every detail, often amplifying the storm’s potential impacts to sensational levels, the unprecedented calm in the North Pacific received little to no attention.
This selective reporting skews public perception, making it appear as though severe weather events are becoming more frequent and intense without providing a balanced view of the overall trends.
This bias fuels a narrative that supports the goals of those who benefit from climate change-driven policies, creating an environment of fear rather than informed understanding.
In conclusion, the unprecedented lack of named storm activity in the North Pacific from June 1 to July 3, 2024, marks a significant meteorological event.
By examining the contributing factors, implications for science, and potential long-term impacts, we gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of weather patterns and the importance of continued research and adaptation.
This interesting anomaly not only challenges our current understanding but also provides valuable insights into the media bias surrounding climate change.
https://principia-scientific.com/unseen-calm-the-north-pacifics-historic-storm-free-period/
*****************************************************Solar farms are taking us back to the dark ages
MATT RIDLEY
Even green campaigners fear they are damaging the planet, consuming land that could be left to nature
The actress Tracy Ward objects to her ex-husband the Duke of Beaufort building a 2,000-acre solar farm in Gloucestershire: “Solar panels should be on roofs, along motorways, or industrial sites,” she says. “Be careful what the climate change fear-mongering will lull us into accepting.”
Spot on. While solar panels on roofs can (almost) make sense, huge solar farms are an environmental as well as economic mistake. The whole point of farmland is that it is already a solar farm, and a green one at that. It turns sunlight into food energy for people, insects, voles and birds. “The fact that some green campaigners would rather have low grade electricity than high quality British farm produce shows how bizarrely irrational environmentalism has become,” says Dr John Constable of the Renewable Energy Foundation.
Ah, say solar-energy fans, but you can have both: you can graze sheep under the solar panels or allow weeds to flourish. This is nonsense: the whole point of solar panels is that they catch the sunlight — the clue is in the name – which plants would otherwise use to grow. On a normal summer’s day, perhaps 10% of the sunlight might get missed by the solar panels and caught by the plants’ solar panels (leaves) instead. It’s a zero-sum game.
It is debatable whether we need home-grown electricity more desperately than home-grown food these days: reliance on imports of both are increasing sharply. But you cannot currently make bread or lambs any other way than by using land; the same is not true of electricity.
Solar power needs around 200 times as much land as gas per unit of energy and 500 times as much as nuclear. Reducing the land we need for human civilisation is surely a vital ecological imperative. The more concentrated the production, the more land you spare for nature. Going back to using the landscape to provide energy, as they did in the Middle Ages (through wind, water and hay for horses), would be a disaster for nature.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-power-of-power-density
Britain currently vies with New Zealand each year to break the record for wheat yield: our combination of soil moisture and summer day length is ideal. But it’s right at the bottom of the heap for solar-power potential. Around 1-2 kilowatt-hours a day of “direct normal irradiation” falls on the average square metre in Britain. Most of Australia experiences 5-8 times as much. According to one study, it is not even clear that the energy generated by a typical solar farm in Europe north of the Alps is greater than what went into building it, let alone replacing it every 15 years.https://solargis.com/maps-and-gis-data/download/world
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421517302914
To match UK electricity demand from solar on a June afternoon would mean covering 5-10% of the entire country with solar farms but they would be useless at night and in winter. British solar output peaks at precisely the times we least need it: in the middle of the day in the middle of summer. It contributes the square root of sod all in December, and spring and autumn it stops generating just when demand starts to peak in the evening.The more solar power we add to the grid, the bigger the evening ramp-up demand for gas. It is expensive to keep so much back-up ready. Batteries will not help much. If we relied on solar power, it would take many billions of pounds to install enough batteries to tide us over a single night, let alone a winter.
Then there is the demand for materials. There is probably not enough silicon, silver or copper being mined and smelted in the world to build a solar farm big enough to supply Britain. The material demands of solar power are about six times greater than for gas, per megawatt of capacity (though half those of offshore wind). Much of this material comes from China, a significant vulnerability in terms of economic security and environmental damage. Solar’s fans are fond of saying that the cost of solar panels is falling fast, but solar panels account for just a quarter of the costs of a solar farm: the cost of the rest of the infrastructure, and the land, is rising.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-power-of-power-density
Planning guidance on solar farms needs to change fast to stop these duke-lucrative, subsidised eyesores gobbling up more of our green and pleasant land.https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/solar-farms-are-taking-us-back-to-the-dark-ages/
*********************************************22 Workers Killed After Single Malfunctioning Lithium Battery Sets Off Disastrous Chain Reaction
A fire at a lithium battery factory has claimed at least 22 lives.
The fire at the South Korean factory owned by battery maker Aricell took place in the city of Hwaseong, near Seoul, on Monday, according to The New York Times. In addition to the 22 people killed, one worker was missing while eight were injured.
Kim Jin-young, an official with the Hwaseong Fire Department, said 102 workers were in the factory when the fire broke out, according to the Times.
One battery cell caught fire, he said, leading to a series of explosions that rippled through the 35,000 battery cells stored on the factory’s second floor.
Lithium batteries are an essential component for electric vehicles, from bikes to trucks, but the fire risk from them has risen as their use proliferates.
Batteries from Aricell are often used to run utility networks, the Times reported.
More than 160 firefighters and 60 fire engines fought the fire.
Lithium battery fires can be stubborn to extinguish.
A fire at the Gateway Energy Storage facility near San Diego last month broke out on May 15 but was not extinguished until May 31, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Robert Rezende, Alternative Energy Emergency Response coordinator for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, said a lithium-ion battery fire is different from other blazes.
“Historically speaking, we usually tend to see a much longer period of time where this cascading damage just keeps going, almost like the domino effect,” Rezende said, according to the Union-Tribune.
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Backlash over proposed Tasmanian wind farm’s toll on eagles
Greenies are NOT onservationists. They are just a crazy Leftist religion bent on maximum disruption and destruction
Tasmania’s approval of a major wind farm, despite the proponent’s projections it could kill up to 81 endangered eagles, has prompted calls for federal intervention.
The proposed 300-megawatt St Patricks Plains wind farm – comprising 47 turbines 231m high in Tasmania’s Central Highlands – was on Monday approved by the state’s Environment Protection Authority.
However, opponents on Tuesday flagged a potential legal challenge and urged Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to block the project, given the likely impact on the endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle.
According to the EPA, proponent St Patricks Plains Wind Farm, owned by Korea Zinc, estimates the blades will kill on average two eagles a year, or 41 to 81 eagles across the farm’s 30-year lifespan, based on mitigation reducing 58.5 per cent of collisions.
The proponent argues its use of technology to halt turbines when eagles approach could further improve collision reduction to 85 per cent, and the total number of deaths to between 11 and 33.
However, eight eagles have been killed at the neighbouring Cattle Hill Wind Farm in the past four years, despite the use of the same IdentiFlight collision-avoidance technology.
“IdentiFlight represents an unreliable technology,” Victoria Onslow, of the local No Turbines Action Group, told The Australian.
St Patricks Plains project spokeswoman Donna Bolton said “learnings” from Cattle Hill had improved IdentiFlight’s effectiveness, and these would help keep eagle mortalities at her wind farm to “the lower end” of the modelling.
The EPA imposed a $100,000 “offset” to be paid for each eagle fatality, but opponents questioned how many eagles would be found by monitoring, as well as the morality of the arrangement.
“The sacrificial slaughter of birds … is an unethical bounty monetising the environment,” Ms Onslow said. “Developers should instead avoid high-density eagle sites.”
It is a view shared by eagle experts, who have repeatedly called for wind farms to be built in lower-density eagle areas.
The EPA said the St Patricks Plains wind farm site had a “very high” presence of wedge-tailed eagles: about 40 birds, and 17 nests across the site or within 1km of its boundary.
It is estimated only 220 Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle breeding pairs remain, and there are fewer than 1000 birds overall.
Experts warn there is insufficient consideration for the cumulative impact of multiple wind farms and fear Tasmania’s “wind rush” poses a “major threat” to the species’ survival.
Ms Onslow said a third wind farm for her area – the 58-turbine Bashan Wind Farm – was only 10km away from the St Patricks Plains site.
Ms Bolton said the St Patricks proponent, also known as Ark Energy, had “worked hard to avoid and minimise potential impacts to eagles”, reducing the number of turbines from an original 67 to 47.
“The latest technology and proactive avoidance have been combined to achieve the least impact possible to eagles and other threatened species while still delivering the new renewable energy generation that Tasmania needs,” Ms Bolton said.
The EPA acknowledged cumulative impacts “may be significant” and a lack of certainty over “the number of mortalities that can be considered acceptable”.
“However, the measures and conditions proposed are considered precautionary and sufficient to minimise eagle deaths to a level unlikely to have a significant impact,” it said.
Collision with electricity infrastructure, poisoning and shooting, as well as habitat loss due to logging and land clearing, are blamed for the decline of wedge-tailed eagles.
Ms Plibersek declined to comment but her department said it was reviewing the EPA assessment report. Ms Plibersek is not bound by the state decision and must make her own decision under federal environmental law.
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July 09, 2024
Multimillion Dollar Companies Backing Environmental Activists for Profit: Report
Many of the high-profile challenges by environmental activist groups against major projects are being backed by litigation funders—large, mostly foreign-owned companies that fund legal fees and other expenses in return for a significant share of any damages and costs awarded to the plaintiffs.
A report by the Menzies Research Centre, Open Lawfare, claims the cost of delays caused by actions filed against various developments was $1.2 billion (US$809 million) in 2016.
However, between August 2022 and June 2024, this had rocketed to $17.48 billion and placed almost 30,000 jobs at risk.
Projects affected by environmental activism, August 2022 to June 2024
Project State Industrial output value ($m) Employment
Angus Place Coal Mine NSW 354.9 613
Baralaba South Coal Mine QLD 600.0 613
China Stone Coal Mine QLD 11,323.0 19,564
Glendell Coal Mine NSW 354.9 613
Hunter Valley Operations North NSW 845.0 1,460
Hunter Valley Operations South NSW 845.0 1,460
Mount Pleasant Coal Mine NSW 1,605.5 2,744
Narrabri Underground Mine NSW 709.8 1,226
Winchester South Coal Mine QLD 845.0 1,460
Total 17,483.1 29,784
At the same time, the revenue of Australia’s 25 largest environmental groups increased from $112.8 million in 2015 to $274.5 million in 2023, and their full-time staff had gone from 374 to 880.
Australia is the second-largest jurisdiction in the world for what the Menzies Centre calls “environmental lawfare,” behind only the United States. On a per capita basis, it has the largest number of climate-related lawsuits—127 such actions were launched in Australia from the 1990s to 2022.
The report contains detailed case studies of the effects of lawsuits on five recent proposals, including Waratah Coal’s development of a thermal coal mine in the Galilee Basin, dropped by the company in February 2023 after more than three years of litigation.
Additionally, there was the Santos’s Barossa Gas Project, a $5.8 billion plan that was finally given approval in January 2024, after nearly three years of litigation.
Also at risk is the $16.5 billion Woodside Energy Scarborough Gas Project in Western Australia, which the Australian Conservation Foundation claims would endanger the Great Barrier Reef on Australia’s eastern coastline.
“Australian courts increasingly serve as forums for activist groups to pursue ideological agendas,” the Menzies Centre claims, adding that “courts are increasingly asked to decide essentially ideological claims pursued by activists.”
It cites a case in which eight 16-year-olds from Victoria asked the Federal Court to prevent the approval of the Vickery coal mine extension in northern New South Wales because the minister owed them a duty of care to avoid personal harm to children by climate change.
Australians Concerned By Judicial Decision-Making
A survey commissioned by the Centre found that 82 percent of Australians were “somewhat” or “very” concerned that judges may be making decisions based on motives other than a strict interpretation of the law, with 26 percent in the latter category.
The class actions, the Menzies Centre claims, are largely underwritten by multi-million dollar, mostly foreign-owned litigation funders.
These companies pay the ongoing legal costs of a class action in the expectation of receiving a large portion of any damages awarded by the court. There are an estimated 22 such companies in Australia, 14 of which are owned offshore.
They derive margins of well over 200 percent on their investments, and their fees—together with those of a relatively small number of “no-win-no-fee” law firms—sometimes leave the plaintiffs with less than half the amount to which they would otherwise be entitled.
Matt Corrigan, General Counsel of the Australian Law Reform Commission, testified in 2020 to a Joint Parliamentary Committee on Corporations and Financial Services that there was “a legitimate policy question as to the use of judicial resources to secure small sums for individual group members while creating enormous returns to lawyers and funders.”
The government committed $10 million in funding for environmental “lawfare” groups between 2022 and 2026, which was confirmed in the 2024 Budget.
Santos Pursues Environment Group After Failed Case
One example of a failed case concerns the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO), which represented some Tiwi Islanders, the plaintiffs, who opposed Santos’ Barossa Gas Project.
The EDO, which funded the case, was sharply criticised by a judge in the ruling for “coaching” witnesses, lying to plaintiffs, and giving evidence “so lacking in integrity that no weight can be placed [on it].”
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek sought independent legal advice on the conduct of the EDO following the judge’s adverse opinion, but found it had not breached the conditions of its $8.2 million in federal funding.
However, Santos is preparing to sue the group for damages.
The energy company recently had a major win when the same judge ruled that the EDO must hand over communications with one of its witnesses and with other environmental organisations.
The gas company claimed the EDO was “itself an activist organisation and not merely the lawyer for the applicants in the proceeding” and that “the outcome sought by the applicants in the proceeding aligned with its own political or ideological objectives.”
Liberal Senator Jonathon Duniam and Salmon Tasmania are also calling for the EDO to be defunded after it called on the federal government to “reconsider” whether the salmon farming industry has all the environmental approvals it requires to operate.
“Green lawfare is not limited to class-action cases; all over Australia, activist groups take advantage of laws that purport to protect the environment to block projects—including renewable energy projects—on ideological grounds,” the report said.
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UK: Analysts Welcome Labour’s Onshore Wind Planning Reform But Question Prices Claim
Energy analysts welcomed the Labour government’s lifting of the “de facto ban” on onshore wind but questioned claims of reducing prices.
Plans unveiled by new Chancellor Rachel Reeves on Monday said the government is “committed to doubling onshore wind energy by 2030.”
She said that an “absurd ban on new onshore wind farms” in England has been scrapped and energy projects will be given priority in the planning system.
‘De Facto Ban’
Previous rules under the former Conservative government in 2015 meant that any application to build wind turbines needed to have the clear backing of the community.
In September last year, former Levelling Up, Housing, and Communities Secretary Michael Gove loosened the restrictions in a bid to accelerate onshore wind projects where there is local support despite views of “a small number of objectors.”
The Labour government characterised this as a de facto ban on onshore wind in England and said that those rules are now removed.
Om Monday net zero minster Ed Miliband posted on the social media platform X that this “government was elected with a mandate to take immediate action to boost Britain’s energy independence.”
“The onshore wind ban is a symbol of how bad decisions in the last fourteen years have put up energy bills for families,” he said, adding, “Today, it ends.”
Welcome Reform to Planning Rules
Chief Operating Officer and energy analyst at the Institute of Economic Affairs Andy Meyer told The Epoch Times by email that he welcomed the ease of planning rules, which he hoped would be also used to “radically reform” nuclear permitting.
“The lifting of this ban is a welcome reform to planning rules that should reduce the time and cost of one source of future energy supply. This is a good thing,” he said.
“Whether it reduces future energy bills however depends more on the generosity of any support package, and associated costs of grid connection and back-up when the wind isn’t blowing,” he added.
He said that recently the cost of onshore wind subsidies rose 66 percent, that National Grid wants to spend £30 billion over the next five years, and capacity spending is expected to more than triple by the end of 2028.
“All this before the added cost of Labour’s 2030 net zero grid acceleration plan,” he added.
He said that consistent planning reform for affordable secure energy would also see “the moratorium on fracking lifted, ditching the proposed ban on new North Sea fields, and radical reform of nuclear permitting.”
Utility energy analyst Steve Loftus told The Epoch Times that he welcomed Labour’s “vigour” in removing regulations that stop building.
“I only hope that they are as keen to deregulate other sectors to increase productivity. Nuclear for example,” he said.
“However, onshore wind is a poor quality source of electricity, with low load factors and high external costs that requires 100 percent fossil fuel backup,” he added.
Done in the Right Way
The energy industry and Green MPs said that Labour had “taken a step in the right direction.”
Industry body RenewableUK’s Chief Executive Dan McGrail claimed that owing to advances in tech in modern turbines doubling onshore wind would not mean twice as many across the British countryside.
“This shows that the new government is determined to act fast to tackle some of the longstanding barriers which have held the UK back on developing vital new clean energy infrastructure,” he said.
Green Party co-leader and newly elected MP Adrian Ramsay said: “Absolutely we need to see more renewable energy in the UK of various sorts, done in the right way, and so Labour have taken a step in the right direction with that today.
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Why the World Needs Fossil Fuels
It’s summer, and the Sierra Club says: “This is climate change in action. We are living it.”
The United Nations’ secretary-general declares that “a fossil fuel phaseout is inevitable.” And The Lancet, a respected medical journal, insists that nations must swiftly transition away from hydrocarbons.
These groups call for reducing use of fossil fuels to tackle the climate crisis. But the downside of reducing fossil fuels is that poverty would rise, especially in emerging economies.
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In emerging economies, energy poverty deprives hundreds of millions of people of a decent quality of life.
Over 700 million globally lack access to electricity, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa. About 2 billion still rely on solid fuels such as wood and dung for cooking, leading to around 3.2 million premature deaths annually from harmful pollutants.
In many regions, women and children spend an average of 1.4 hours every day collecting these fuels, and even more time cooking on inefficient stoves.
Energy poverty deprives emerging economies of opportunities to grow. Modern economies rely on cement, steel, plastics, and fertilizers, often termed “four pillars of civilization.” These pillars are essential for infrastructure (such as highways and factories) and basic goods (such as refrigerators and food).
Fossil fuels provide the high temperature needed for cement production, turn iron to steel, convert to petrochemicals such as ethylene and propylene to make plastics, and produce ammonia for fertilizers.
Therefore, in an energy-impoverished world, people want more fossil fuel.
Maggy Shino, petroleum commissioner of Namibia, speaking at the U.N.’s 27th climate change conference, called COP 27, perfectly summed up what many Africans think: “Africa,” she said, “wants to send a message that we are going to develop all of our energy resources for the benefit of our people because our issue is energy poverty.”
India, the world’s most populous country, with 1.4 billion people, understands the need for greater use of fossil fuels. India’s per capita energy consumption is merely 20% of China’s and 8% of America’s.
India’s fossil fuel consumption increased by 8% in 2023. For the first time, India used more coal than North America and Europe combined.
U.S. electric utilities have doubled projections for additional electricity needed by 2028, primarily driven by an explosion in the number of data centers. America will require an additional 38 gigawatts of electricity, equivalent to about 38 typical nuclear power plants, within the next five years to meet this demand.
Similarly, other modernized economies are experiencing increased energy demands because of technological advancements and growing digitalization.
To meet the explosive increase in global energy demand, fossil fuels and nuclear power remain the most cost-effective sources. Renewable energy sources, especially solar and wind, are not reliable on their own because they are intermittent and require fossil fuel backups.
Additionally, while solar and wind power primarily generate electricity, fossil fuels offer versatility by being suitable not only for generating electricity but also for transportation, heating, industrial processes, and materials. The belief that renewable energy can replace fossil fuels and meet explosive energy demand is unrealistic.
The International Energy Agency projects that global demand for fossil fuels will peak before 2030. However, that’s simply driven by wishful thinking rather than reality.
Instead, fossil fuel demand will continue to grow in the decades ahead as developing countries increase their energy consumption to alleviate poverty and as developed nations expand their digital economies, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence.
Americans shouldn’t fall into the misguided view that the age of fossil fuels is ending. In reality, fossil fuels are essential for both the developing and developed worlds, fostering prosperity and economic growth.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/07/08/gae-fossil-fuels/
**********************************************The theology of gas: LNG bad, LPG good
Keeping up with the Greenie religion
It is a little-known fact that liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) is not included in Victoria’s natural gas (LNG) phaseouts, which means the clean, green gas will play a major role in Australia’s pathway towards net zero carbon emissions.
This is why Brett Heffernan, CEO of Gas Energy Australia, was optimistic about the potential of LPG in powering homes across the country.
“From our perspective, there’s nothing but upside,” he told The Epoch Times. “Not a lot of people know what’s happening in Victoria, and it’s fair to say the Victorian government isn’t singing it from the rooftops.
“But in terms of the ban on new gas connections that came into effect from Jan. 1, LPG is exempt.”
According to Gas Energy Australia’s website, “green gases will transform how we work, relax and play, ensuring families and businesses can continue to reliably and affordably use gas—renewable, zero-emitting gases—to 2050 and beyond.”
The industry already generates over $121 billion (US$81 billion) in economic activity, while fuelling 7 million homes.
LPG differs from liquefied natural gas (LNG) in its composition and contains double the energy content of natural gas, making it cheaper in many cases.
Government’s Bid To Phase Out Natural Gas
The CEO added that state governments—particularly the Victorian government—have “made it pretty clear that they see no future for natural gas in residential and commercial settings.”
“They see natural gas being used purely and simply for industrial uses, and as backup for electricity generation.”
Under the Victorian government’s Gas Substitution Plan, natural gas connections are banned in all new estates from Jan. 1 of this year.
However, the state Liberal opposition criticised this restriction as one that would only add to the national cost-of-living crisis.
“Premier Jacinta Allan and Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio are oblivious to the pain of Victorians during the cost-of-living crisis that Labor has made worse,” Shadow Minister for Energy David Davis, said as the new law came in.
“Their new gas plan will hit families and small businesses even harder, forcing up energy costs further, as Victorians pay the price for Labor’s mismanagement.”
What Does LPG Do?
LPG is a fuel gas that contains a flammable mixture of hydrocarbon gases, specifically propane, n-butane and isobutane. It is used in heating appliances, cooking equipment, and vehicles.
Clean, odourless, and colourless, LPG is typically 85-90 per cent methane, which contains less carbon than other forms of fossil fuels.
“And what that means is when you burn it, the only C02 that gets emitted is the C02 that you took out of the atmosphere to make it in the first place,” Mr. Heffernan said.
It Does Have Its Critics
Despite being a source of clean energy, not everyone is convinced that LPG is the way forward to power homes or cars.
Environment Victoria CEO Jono La Nauze stands against all forms of gas usage on Australia’s net-zero journey.
“Pretending gas is a climate solution is a throwback to the Scott Morrison era and is straight out of the gas lobby playbook,” he said in a statement.
“Gas is an expensive disaster for our climate and our health. We already know that burning gas at home has health impacts on the level of second-hand smoke and is responsible for 12 percent of all childhood asthma in Australia.”
While the Climate Council has echoed similar figures and has consistently opposed any future gas development in the country.
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8 July, 2024
The Net Zero Agenda Threatens Your Future Clothing Purchases
Whether living in the United States or in a European country, there is a greater chance of wearing a garment made in Bangladesh than in one’s homeland.
However, the south Asian country’s dominance in the manufacture of clothing is being threatened by a “green” agenda undermining the power supply.
With availability of cheap labor and plentiful raw materials, Bangladesh is the world’s second biggest garment exporter and trails only China, having surged ahead of other Asian competitors such as India, Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. A key to sustaining this manufacturing boom is maintaining supplies of electricity to run factories.
The “Made in Bangladesh” label has become synonymous with affordable, quality garments for much of the globe and with the economic growth of a country that achieved independence from Pakistan in 1971 and now shares borders with India and Myanmar. Bangladesh garment-making is more than just another economic sector; it is the lifeline of the national economy.
In a nation of 168 million, the industry employs more than 4 million workers, the majority of whom are women, and accounts for approximately 84% of the country’s total exports. Bringing in $47 billion to the economy, Bangladeshi clothing supplies global brands such as Walmart, H&M of Sweden and Zara of Spain.
In 2023, knitwear export earnings reached nearly $26 billion, while woven garments earned more than $21 billion. Both categories realized year-on-year growth of approximately 11% and 9% percent, respectively.
This success is built on factories that operate within tight schedules to meet international demands and deadlines. They require a steady flow of electricity to light facilities and operate machinery. Any disruption can result in significant financial losses for factory owners and hourly workers.
In a country where the minimum wage for garment workers is around $113 per month (about $4 a day), even a small reduction in working hours makes a huge difference in a person’s life.
Nonetheless, intentional disruptions in the power supply occur almost every day to manage Bangladesh’s chronic shortage of electricity. The exception to these interruptions has been winter when overall energy demand is lower.
The large gap in the supply and demand for electricity also sometimes leads to sudden, unplanned blackouts such as one in October 2022 when 80% of the country (including key industrial hubs of Dhaka, Chattogram, Sylhet, and Mymensingh) were left without electricity.
Lasting for up to eight hours, the “outage affected production in garment factories and small and medium industries” as millions suffered in sweltering heat, according to news reports.
Net Zero and Green Fantasies Present More Uncertainty
Now, the national government in Dhaka has announced plans to saddle the struggling power system with the reliability issues of the so-called green energy of wind and solar as part of a net zero scheme to be “carbon neutral” by 2050. This would be disastrous.
Relatively reliable fossil fuels provide more than 98% of Bangladesh’s electricity and still the grid has issues managing the supply-demand gap.
The well-known intermittency of solar panels and wind turbines makes them available only 10% to 30% of the time and sometimes overproducing when they are. Such erratic operational features add complexity, risk of damage to equipment and more uncertainty to an already shaky grid.
Instead of wasting time and money on renewables, the country should focus on increasing its power capacity from conventional energy sources like coal and natural gas. Even analysts supporting “green” energy say the country must allocate more funds towards oil and gas exploration in order to reduce dependency on imported liquified natural gas to fuel plants that now generate 70% of the electricity.
Bangladesh should stick to its current course of giving energy security top priority and reject pseudoscientific theories about climate change that promote unreliable energy sources. The beneficiaries would be millions of Bangladeshi workers, the country’s development goals and clothing shoppers worldwide.
https://principia-scientific.com/the-net-zero-agenda-threatens-your-future-clothing-purchases/
************************************************Virginia Breaks Free From California’s Electric Vehicle Mandate
Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced recently that Virginia would decouple from California’s onerous mandate requiring all new vehicles sold in the commonwealth to be electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles (EVs) by 2035.
This regulation—a ban on sales of new gas, diesel and traditional hybrid vehicles—promulgated by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), would have taken effect as soon as next year when 35% of all model year 2026 cars sold would be required to meet California’s definition of “zero emission.”
This all stems from a 2021 bill championed by then-Gov. Ralph Northam and his allies in the General Assembly. They enacted policy directing the Virginia Air Pollution Control Board (APCB) to adopt regulations tying Virginia law to California’s vehicle emission standards. And if you can believe it, the law was intentionally exempted from the Administrative Process Act, denying Virginians any opportunity to give input on the regulatory process and dodging larger economic review for the policy.
It sounds brazen, but that’s exactly what happened: the previous administration in Richmond put Virginia vehicle policy in the hands of Californians.
In November 2022, California finalized entirely new regulations at the direction of their Gov. Gavin Newsom. Under the new California policy, selling any new gas, diesel, flex-fuel or traditional hybrid cars and trucks would be unlawful and subject to severe penalties, whether in California or in states aligned with California.
California’s gas car ban would have been devastating for Virginia drivers and small businesses and damaging to U.S. national security. Consumers would have paid dearly under the ban, facing higher costs in both the new and used car markets and finding more and more vehicles simply priced out of reach for families. Any compliance penalties levied on automakers—roughly $20,000 per vehicle—would also likely be passed on to Virginia consumers.
The absurd and un-American mandate to “go electric” on California’s timeline would also have increased Virginia’s and the U.S. dependence on China, since China controls the global EV battery and mineral supply chain.
Make no mistake: criticism of California’s gas car ban and EV mandate policies—and fervent opposition to the spread of those policies in the commonwealth of Virginia and to any other state—should not be construed as an indictment of EVs themselves. EVs are a good choice for many Americans, and if those cars and trucks work for a family’s needs and fit within their budgets, that’s wonderful. Families have every right to make the choice to buy an EV, but no government mandate should compel them toward that purchase or restrict their access to other vehicle options.
When the stakes are absolutely clear and the choice is between government mandates and consumer freedom, the right move is to err on the side of consumers. And that’s exactly what Youngkin did when he chose to end California’s control over the vehicles that can and cannot be sold in Virginia. Virginia drivers, not California regulators 3,000 miles away, should be able to choose for themselves which vehicles to purchase. When people are free to choose, they make decisions that work best for them, their businesses and their families.
Other states tethered to California’s EV mandate should follow Youngkin’s bold and necessary leadership and free their residents, too, from the tyranny of California’s gas car ban.
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UK: Green MP Opposes 100-Mile Corridor of Wind Farm Pylons in His Suffolk Constituency
The co-leader of the Green Party is objecting to the Labour Government’s plans to build a 100-mile stretch of pylons through his constituency as part of their Net Zero plans. The Telegraph has the story.
Adrian Ramsay, one of the party’s four newly elected MPs, has said that he will seek a pause to the plans to build a 100-mile corridor of pylons stretching through his constituency of Waveney Valley.
The plans, which are currently under consultation by National Grid, will bring power from wind farms off the coast of East Anglia, and stretch from Norwich to Tilbury.
A spokesman for the Green Party said that the Government had “tried to force through one option” and Mr. Ramsay was “focused on securing a proper options assessment to ensure that the alternatives are properly considered, including an offshore grid”.
The new Labour Government has a target for the electricity grid to be run from 100% green sources by 2030, and will set out plans in its first days to lift the ban on onshore wind farms, and encourage community backing for local renewable projects.
But the opposition from within the Green Party, which has urged the country to move even faster to Net Zero, shows the challenge of getting the public onside, even when they support action on climate change. …
The Norwich to Tilbury pylon plan has been the subject of controversy in the local area, with campaigners saying the proposals for 110 miles of cabling using 50m high pylons will “destroy our historic landscapes and will require huge loss of trees”. …
Speaking after his win in Waveney Valley, Mr. Ramsay said he would “stand up for the issues that really matter to people here”.
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Wind droughts
Rafe Champion
Severe wind droughts are prolonged spells with next to no wind across continental areas. They also exist offshore as any sailor who has been becalmed knows full well. Wind droughts will kill the green-power fantasy, and they have the potential to deal a massive blow to our lifestyle, depending as we do on abundant, reliable and affordable power. While meteorologists don’t mention them, independent Australian observers discovered wind droughts over a decade ago but nobody took any notice. We may pay a bitter price for this neglect.
Serious questions have to be asked about the silence of meteorologists on wind droughts. At the same time the responsible authorities should be called to account for their failure to check the wind supply before connecting intermittent energy to the grid.
Why wind won’t work
Wind and solar cannot provide reliable power at grid-scale and the reason is as simple as ABC: Input to the grid must continuously match the demand, and the continuity of wind and solar input fails on nights with little or no wind.
The amount of storage required to bridge the gaps is not feasible or affordable.
Supporters of the transition to intermittent energy invoke a “holy trinity” of strategies to ride through wind drought. These are (1) long-distance transmission lines to shift power from areas of plenty to drought zones, (2) pumped hydro storage, and (3) battery storage.
Long distance transmission lines will not help because wind droughts can extend across the whole of SE Australia. On the other side of the world they have been known to extend across all of western Europe.
Pumped hydro at the scale required appears to be out of the question. There is no substantial pumped hydro scheme in the world that runs on wind and solar power alone.
As for batteries, we read practically every day that more “big batteries” are coming but “big” is an abuse of language in this context because the capacity of even the biggest batteries, like the 1.4GWh Waratah Super Battery in NSW, is negligible compared with the power required in a single night in the grid. That is in the order of 300GWh, while the total capacity of all the battery projects in the pipeline amount to some 60GWh and the batteries at work in the system at present can deliver only 3GWh.
The plan devised by the market operator (AEMO) calls for a ninefold increase in the amount of installed wind and solar capacity, but all that capacity will deliver a pitifully small amount of power on nights with little or no wind. Such nights are the limiting factor for the whole system like the slowest ship in a convoy or weakest link in a chain.
The threat of wind droughts
Subsidised and mandated intermittent energy providers drive out conventional power plants because they can make money when the market price is too low for conventional providers to run profitably. The unreliables can displace conventional power but they can’t replace it! Eventually there will not be enough reliable (dispatchable) power to meet 100 per cent of the demand. At that point, the power supply will be compromised whenever the wind is low overnight.
The day of reckoning has been delayed by the modest increase in demand in recent years due to creeping deindustrialization — directly caused by the increasing cost of power. As the coal generating capacity runs down, the pinch will first occur for a few hours at the dinnertime peak of demand. That can be met using the deceptively named Reliability and Emergency Reserve Trader Scheme (RETS). This sounds like a reserve supply, but it functions by diverting power from major users (with compensation) to protect the integrity of the grid and avoid inconvenience for the community at large. In other words, industrial production stops so he the community’s lights stay on!
If the RETS diversions of supply is not enough, rolling blackouts can be organized to handle the shortfall. As the process goes on, there will eventually not be enough conventional power to service the base load, the minimum that is required day and night. At that point, whenever the wind is low overnight there will be blackouts, and we will officially achieve the status of a Third World country.
Since 2012, 12 coal power stations have closed in South-Eastern Australia, taking out some 8GW of capacity, which in total is down to 22GW. We are now only one coal station closure away from a power crisis whenever the wind is low overnight. The problem surfaced in June 2022 when outages in some coal stations created a crisis that was met by using gas, which spiked the price of gas, and hence the wholesale price of power.
This was seen as a problem with the price of gas, to be solved by government intervention and a price cap. It should have been seen as an early warning of what was coming if the capacity of coal power continued to run down. Gas is too expensive to be used outside peak periods. In addition, there are serious concerns about the availability of gas going forward.
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2024/06/things-that-go-slump-in-the-night/
***************************************7 July, 2024
What Happened To The Predicted Summer Of Hell?
In March this year, the German website Climate News carried a piece by former criminal biologist & politician Marc Benecke (and now apparently also a climate expert), who declared to all and sundry this year would see a ‘summer of hell with almost complete certainty’ because of ‘climate change’
We all know what happened next in Britain. April was so cold most people had their heating on for much of the month.
This must have been another case of mass delusion though, because the Met Office confidently stated in June we had only imagined the cold, and April was in fact warmer than usual.
May turned out to be about average in terms of temperature, and the first 18 days of June were up to five degrees cooler than usual (and only half the temperature we saw in the two-week heatwave last June), before we had five days of hot temperatures.
That qualified as a heatwave because about ten years ago the Met Office reduced the number of days from seven consecutive above the average temperature for the time of year, to just three, thus allowing them to claim heatwaves are becoming more common.
After the hot week, temperatures dropped again at the end of June and into July which, along with August, are traditionally the hottest months in the UK.
The Telegraph reported June saw more sunshine than usual, but acknowledged cold air from the Arctic made it significantly cooler than usual.
The Telegraph article said 30.3C was recorded at Heathrow Airport on June 26th which, as everyone should know by now, usually gives the highest readings, not least because of the urban heat island effect, and the fact that the Heathrow weather station is right in the middle of acres of highly reflective tarmac and concrete, and probably has aircraft exhaust washing over it.
The Met Office and the mainstream media decline to mention that inconvenient fact.
Today the temperature is predicted to reach just 16C, and the forecast for the next seven days is temps in the high teens, where the average July temperature for the UK is around 22C.
So much for the summer of hell then.
Those who remember the summer of 1976 with its eight-week heatwave will probably recall it was described by many as a glorious summer, and it was.
If that happened now you would undoubtedly hear shrill cries from the gullible and the indoctrinated that ‘the end is nigh’.
We shall see what temperatures the rest of summer brings, but whatever happens, you can guarrantee with almost complete certainty to paraphrase Marc Benecke, that the BBC and the Met Office will confidently state this year was ‘the hottest on record’.
This continues to ignore the fact that the 1930s was the hottest decade, a fact climate alarmists fervently wish didn’t exist.
https://principia-scientific.com/what-happened-to-the-predicted-summer-of-hell/
*************************************************Illegal ESG Collusion Behind Decarbonization Efforts
In mid-June, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee released an interim report describing collusion between radical environmental groups, progressive activists, and corporate interests, especially in the financial sector, to impose Environment, Social, and Governance goals on the American people. The Judiciary committee is, in part, charged with the “[p]rotection of trade and commerce against unlawful restraints and monopolies.” This includes protecting against collusion which reduces competition, limits consumer choice, and increases prices, in the case at hand, through efforts to decarbonize the economy, in pursuit of environmental and environmental justice demands.
Doctrinaire, elitist adherents of ESG goals view capitalism is a sin against the environment that must be restrained through social engineering to ensure that the social, environmental, and ethical ends they believe are required by a social justice, are adopted and enforced across society. Evidence shows that there is no climate crisis, but ESG pushers use the alleged threat of catastrophic climate change to push progressive ends.
The Heartland Institute was well ahead of the curve in exposing the dangers ESG poses to freedom and economic progress, with our April 2023 study exploring the ways different special interests are colluding to universalize ESG standards – Congress is finally catching up.
Congress used the power of the subpoena to force recalcitrant ESG proponents (which it labels the “climate cartel”) to give up documents detailing their collaborations to promote ESG, and concluded based on the documentation that the various groups are illegally colluding against the interest of the American people by, for example, “forcing companies to slash output of products and services that are critical to Americans’ daily lives.”
The groups colluding, include (not an exhaustive list), per the report:
Climate Action 100+, the Net Zero Asset Managers initiative, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ);
blue state pension funds like the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS);
radical environmental non-profit organizations like Ceres;
stockholder engagement service providers like As You Sow;
activist investors like Arjuna Capital, LLC (Arjuna), Trillium Asset Management,
LLC, Engine No. 1 LP, and Aviva Investors Americas, LLC, which “acquire a minimal ownership stake . . . to stop climate change, not to make a financial profit;”
the “Big Three” asset managers BlackRock, Inc. (BlackRock), State Street Global Advisors (State Street), and The Vanguard Group, Inc. (Vanguard), who together own 21.9% and vote 24.9% of the shares of the Standard and Poor’s (S&P) 500;
and the foreign-owned proxy advisory duopoly of Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. (ISS) and Glass, Lewis & Co. (Glass Lewis), which have a combined 90% market share and advise mutual funds controlling more than $27 trillion in assets.
The report says the climate cartel has, among other things:
[D]eclared war on the American way of life [by] … waging “a Global World War” for net zero against disfavored American companies, including those in the fossil fuel, aviation, and farming industries that allow Americans to drive, fly, and eat.
It has described Climate Action 100+ as “the global Navy,” and compared Ceres’s efforts to “the Army ground troops” and “an ‘air cover’ strategic and silent bombing campaign by a newly funded division of the Air Force.”
The climate cartel has agreed to force corporations to “decarbonize.” Members of groups like Climate Action 100+ expressly commit to engage “with the companies in which [they] invest” to make them reach “net zero [greenhouse gas (GHG)] emissions by 2050” by disclosing their carbon emissions, reducing their carbon emissions, and adopting enforcement mechanisms to strengthen these commitments.
The climate cartel “[r]amp[s] up” and “[e]scalate[s]” pressure against corporations on the “wrong side of climate history.” The climate cartel is “willing to go to the top rung” by filing shareholder resolutions, voting against management, and “replac[ing] board members” with those of its own choosing.
The climate cartel seeks to “keep fossil fuels in the ground,” raising prices and reducing output for American consumers.
In short, this exhaustively referenced report uses the climate cartel’s own documents and independent research to expose how these groups are colluding through pressure tactics and political influence (politicians and bureaucrats), to force companies to adopt ESG goals that further their social and political aims, to the detriment of many of the companies themselves, consumers, and the general public.
The report concludes:
The Committee’s ongoing investigation into collusion between left-wing activists and major financial institutions has revealed that a climate cartel is working to decarbonize the U.S. economy—with disastrous implications for American consumers. The climate cartel has declared war on our way of life, escalating its attacks on free markets and demanding that companies slash output of the critical products and services that allow Americans to drive, fly, and eat.
The Biden Administration has failed to act upon the climate cartel’s apparent violations of longstanding U.S. antitrust law.
For a government report, it is relatively short, and like The Heartland Institute’s report before it, well worth reading in full. As grim a picture as the Judiciary Committee paints of the collusion to decarbonize the world in pursuit of ESG, I think it actually understates the danger to humanity’s short-term and long-term well-being. ESG is a recipe for equality in squalor—with the exception of the elites in charge of the climate cartel—with poverty and premature death being the end result.
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Energy Innovation Is Key to Prosperity
In a recent report, “Powering Human Advancement,” The Heritage Foundation laid bare the truth that the driving force behind wealth creation and raising human development standards is the innovative harnessing of energy.
As historian Vaclav Smil sees it, “Energy is the only universal currency.”
Therefore, policymakers should endeavor to allow their citizens abundant access to energy and to the wealth and prosperity it affords.
Unfortunately, government bureaucrats have taken for granted the practical realities that energy abundance has on reducing poverty for its citizens. Subsequently, these policymakers are taking a dangerous path of forced energy scarcity that is deindustrializing countries like Germany.
America cannot turn its back on the energy abundance that made it the most advanced and greatest nation on Earth.
The universal currency of energy provides us with reliable rules-of-thumb for gauging human advancement. In nations with an energy use of only 500 kWh of energy per capita, there is often only subsistence-level agricultural production, and incomes hover around $1,000 per year.
When energy consumption per capita eclipses 10,000 kWh per capita, there is a drastic decline in poverty. At this point, societies tend to have one doctor per 1,000 residents and see a drastic reduction in child mortality. At 20,000 kWh per capita, the people have enough accumulated wealth to begin serious investments towards mitigating air and water pollution.
America exceeded 10,000 kWh per capita around the 1920s. This ushered in a period well remembered for material prosperity that saw the beginnings of mass-electrification and majority access to improved water sources.
By the 1960s, America had eclipsed 20,000 kWh per capita, and the march of progress continued. This period saw near universal access to electricity and sanitized water systems causing infant mortality rates to decline and life expectancy to increase rapidly.
This increase in energy consumption is also directly correlated with improvements in GDP, agricultural productivity, health indicators, and overall human development. In fact, the U.S. saw GDP per capita rise from $4,000 in 1900 to over $60,000 in 2018, a clear demonstration of how increasing energy access drives economic growth and improves living standards.
The American Experiment has thrived as innovators created new businesses and jobs that increasingly harnessed energy with greater efficiency to build our modern wealth of material goods. This new wealth has one source – the intangible value created by the energized innovators and entrepreneurs that push our technological frontiers and expand the dream of tomorrow. It is not the individual innovator that benefits most from their creation, it is the rest of society.
As long as the government does not become captured by special interests, the voluntary exchange of wealth, the exchange of time and skills, allocates toward whoever can solve the scarcity of time the best. This free market, under properly ordered liberty, is the only system that allows individuals and their families to maximize their utility, their pursuit of happiness, and their indirect service to the rest of society through innovative pursuits.
With an energy abundance, the physical toil that defined much of human existence has been alleviated–for which we should be thankful.
As “gratitude is the heart of conservatism,” policymakers should be humble in this time of energy abundance and avoid punishing the creation of wealth, the fruits of easing scarcity for others.
Policymakers must prioritize facilitating the work of innovators and entrepreneurs to discover new methods of harnessing energy and increasing energy access. This is the only true path to accumulating the wealth necessary for human advancement worldwide.
When policymakers create radical energy policy, onerous regulations, and slush funds for favored groups, the resulting progressive corporatism strains our collective confidence in our time-tested marketplaces. The poverty these policies induce doesn’t largely fall on those government bureaucrats or wealthy business owners–it falls on families in the form of high prices, lower wages, and loss of access to products.
If we are to reverse our recent economic malaise and secure our nation for generations to come, policymakers must acknowledge that the innovative harnessing of energy is the driver of prosperity.
Thoughtful and grateful policymakers would be wise to respect the free innovative and entrepreneurial process by heeding the wisdom of the old Greek proverb that “Society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
https://www.heritage.org/energy/commentary/energy-innovation-key-prosperity
***************************************************Greenwashing Kamala Harris: How the Veep Casts Herself as an Environmental Justice Crusader
Vice President Kamala Harris has long cast herself as a fearless pioneer of efforts to fight for social and environmental justice.
“When I was elected DA of San Francisco,” Harris told a gathering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta last year, “I started the first environmental justice unit of any DA’s office in the country.”
In her telling, the San Francisco District Attorney formed the special environmental justice unit in the early 2000s especially to protect the long-neglected community of Bayview Hunters Point, a predominantly African American and impoverished part of the city, which had become “a dumping ground for people from other places.”
In dozens of speeches and interviews in recent years, Harris has bragged that she went “after polluters” and protected minority communities in San Francisco in novel ways as a local prosecutor.
The narrative has become a bedrock of Harris’ political identity. She featured her DA environmental justice crimes unit in her first statewide television advertisement and she rarely missed an opportunity to tout the history during her presidential bid, during which she promised similar initiatives if elected.
But records from the San Francisco District Attorney’s office and interviews with local environmental advocates point to a different, far less ambitious record.
“We’re unaware of any major or semi-major environmental justice work done by Harris in Bayview Hunters Point, including on the Hunters Point Shipyard Superfund site,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, a progressive watchdog group that seeks to “to promote environmental, social, economic and climate justice.”
Steve Castleman, an attorney with UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic, who has worked on urban pollution issues in the Bay Area, also noted that he did not know of any significant Harris environmental justice action as DA.
Far from targeting powerful corporate interests, Harris’ environmental justice unit appears to have filed only a few lawsuits, all against small-time defendants. The targets included a young man who conducted illegal smog checks at a small auto body shop in the city and a left-leaning community newspaper accused of illegally dumping leftover ink in an abandoned lot.
Another defendant charged by the unit was a small construction company accused of using adulterated concrete. The major industrial polluters of San Francisco were left untouched under Harris’ watch during her two terms that ended in 2010.
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4 July, 2024
Guterres Mangles Metaphors To Pitch Extreme Climate Alarmism
History will record that the United Nations has established itself as the greatest organizational perpetrator of junk science in modern times, if not of all time, with current Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (pictured) destined to be singled out for his contribution to the grossly-distorted UN climate alarmism
Since his appointment in 2019, Guterres and the UN have lived up to our standard formal definition of junk science.
It occurs when scientific facts are distorted, risk is exaggerated (or underplayed), and “the science” is adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.
That definition encompasses a wide range of activities among scientists, NGOs, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks, and quacks who manipulate science for political, environmental, economic, and social purposes.
It also nicely captures the entire United Nations climate crusade and the work of its institutional creation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But no single official can top Guterres as a purveyor of IPCC hype and doom, a living embodiment of Hans Christian Andersen’s fabled emperor who believes he is fully, stylishly dressed but in fact, has no clothes.
Guterres, a former Socialist Party prime minister of Portugal (1995-2002) and president of the Socialist International (1999-2005) was in typically ridiculous form on June 5th when he delivered a speech at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, at an event billed as “A Moment of Truth” and a “special address on climate action.”
Guterres talked about a planet on a “highway to climate hell,” rehashing a line he used in 2022 in Egypt at the COP27 climate conference:
“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”
Guterres also has no qualms about mixing and mangling metaphors.
He simultaneously told the Manhattan audience that humans are:
“like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we’re having an outsized impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.”
The longer Guterres rambles on, the more confusing, contradictory, and senseless the metaphors become:
“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet. We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.
And the truth is … we have control of the wheel.”
Other Guterres’ climate spins include:
“Humanity has opened the gates of hell” and “become a weapon of mass extinction.”
And:
“We must go into emergency mode and put out this five-alarm fire.”
Is Guterres describing reality — or the content of a new AI computer game in which some crazed, teenaged human monster drives a flaming meteor through the ozone layer, knocking off dinosaurs before crashing onto a highway and plowing into a Russian Museum of Political Roulette just outside the Gates of Hell?
As UN secretary-general, Guterres sits atop a hierarchy of agencies such as the IPCC climate science megaplex, which was created in 1988 by two other UN agencies, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
UNEP was cobbled together in 1972 as the brainchild of Maurice Strong, the late Canadian global environmental schemer, who famously mused about a fictional environmental crisis that led a group of global insiders to decide the only hope for the planet is “that the industrialized civilizations collapse”.
The current “degrowth” movement is a version of deindustrialization that reflects Guterres’ off-ramp from the highway to hell. In fact, the word “degrowth” appears 28 times in the IPCC’s sixth and latest Assessment Report.
https://principia-scientific.com/guterres-mangles-metaphors-to-pitch-extreme-climate-alarmism/
*****************************************************California Advances Bills to Ban Thicker, Reusable Plastic Bags That It Previously Required
It seems that California’s plastic bag ban has been a failure, but that is not stopping lawmakers from trying to impose a second bag ban.
California first adopted a statewide ban on “single-use” plastic bags with the passage of Senate Bill 270 in 2014.
After being held up by a referendum in November 2016, voters narrowly approved Proposition 67, thereby implementing SB 270. As a recent Mercury News report revealed, however, Democratic lawmakers who had plastic bag factories in their districts successfully lobbied for the inclusion of a provision in the bill that would allow the use of thicker plastic bags marked as recyclable.
However, people treated the thicker, “reusable” plastic bags the same as the previous “single-use” bags, which was entirely predictable. Plastic bag use is now greater than it was before the ban. Moreover, as an August 2023 Los Angeles Times article noted, not a single recycling center in California accepts the thicker, high-density polyethylene (HDPE) plastic bags anyway.
Now, a pair of identical bills, SB 1053 and Assembly Bill 2236, would ban those thicker plastic bags and force grocery stores and retailers to sell paper bags made from at least 50 percent recycled paper for a minimum of 10 cents apiece, or reusable bags made of cloth or other washable textiles. The bills have each passed their respective chambers and are now under consideration in the opposite chamber.
So we are apparently going back to using paper bags, which, if you are old enough to recall, we were once told were not environmentally friendly, and we were scolded for using them because their manufacture required killing too many trees. In fact, those “single-use” plastic bags did have a significantly smaller carbon footprint than paper bags—and they had the added benefit of not ripping and dropping heavy loads of groceries as easily as the paper ones. (It should also be noted that the “single-use” moniker was always a misnomer, as people tended to use them to line trash bins, pick up pet waste, and store and carry a number of items after their initial use.)
In a 2013 San Diego Union-Tribune column, I asserted:
The claims that plastic bags are worse for the environment than paper bags or cotton reusable bags are dubious at best. In fact, compared to paper bags, plastic grocery bags produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions, require 70 percent less energy to make, generate 80 percent less waste, and utilize less than 4 percent of the amount of water needed to manufacture them. This makes sense because plastic bags are lighter and take up less space than paper bags.
Reusable bags come with their own set of problems. They, too, have a larger carbon footprint than plastic bags. Even more disconcerting are the findings of several studies that plastic bag bans lead to increased health problems due to food contamination from bacteria that remain in the reusable bags.
In fact, according to a 2018 Danish government study, one would have to reuse a paper bag 43 times to equal the environmental performance of a “single-use” plastic bag (like the ones California already banned), a thicker polyethylene plastic bag (like the ones legislators are now trying to ban) 35 to 84 times, and an organic cotton bag 20,000 times. So, banning plastic bags will likely have a worse net effect on the environment. The substantial increase in the water needed to produce the paper bags that would largely replace them under the proposed laws seems doubly foolish for a state prone to periodic (and often severe) droughts.
Moreover, banning the existing thicker plastic bags will only prompt consumers to buy more plastic bags to replace the ones they used to use for their trash can, pet waste, and other needs. This is precisely what happened not only here in California after the previous ban but also in places like New Jersey, Ireland, and the Australian Capital Territory (where the capital of Canberra is located) after they instituted similar plastic bag bans.
California state Senator Catherine Blakespear (D-Encinitas) and Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan (D-Orinda) recently wrote a Sacramento Bee column arguing for their bills, SB 1053 and AB 2236, respectively. In their piece, the politicians decried “our culture of plastic consumption.” They noted that a wide variety of plastics have been found “in our oceans and waterways.” The language they used suggests that not only is plastic pollution a substantial problem, but also that “we” in California and the United States more broadly are major contributors to that problem. But a little perspective is in order here.
Despite having the largest economy in the world and the third-largest population, the United States emits less than 1 percent of its plastic waste into the ocean. Moreover, the U.S. is responsible for just 0.25 percent of all plastic waste emitted to the ocean (and, of course, California accounts for only a small fraction of this total). That is less than half of the plastic waste emitted by tiny Panama (which accounts for 0.53 percent of ocean waste) and only about one-third of Guatemala’s total (0.73 percent). In fact, approximately half of all plastic waste emitted to the ocean comes from the Philippines (36.4 percent) and India (12.9 percent). Other top polluters include Malaysia (7.5 percent), China (7.2 percent), and Indonesia (5.8 percent).
So it is not the large, industrialized nations like the United States that are primarily responsible for plastic waste ending up in the oceans; rather, it is the poorer, industrializing nations—particularly in Asia—that do not have adequate waste management infrastructures. Thus, punishing Californians by (once again) dictating how they should carry their groceries to their cars and into their homes will have no significant effect on plastic pollution in the oceans and, as noted above, is likely to actually be counterproductive for the environment.
If California’s previous plastic bag ban, and others around the country and the globe, have taught us anything, it is that these prohibitions are less about the environment and more about control and virtue signaling: control over how we live our daily lives (in this case, through the decision of what kinds of bags in which we may carry our food and other goods) and control over our minds, through the propaganda that falsely claims that this sacrifice will save the lives of untold numbers of cute sea turtles and other marine life.
Until Californians stop electing preening busybodies intent on meddling with and micromanaging people’s lives with harmful and suffocating mandates, however, we can expect still more pointless nanny-state laws to come out of the formerly Golden State.
https://blog.independent.org/2024/06/26/california-reusable-plastic-bags-ban/
************************************************How the Climate Hysteria Is Lowering Your Standard of Living
Interview with Doug Casey.
Excerpts:
But perhaps the average person doesn’t think about these things or care. The standard of living has gone up for so long that we tend to think it’s automatic and divinely ordained. I’m not so sure about that. Everything tends to wind down unless there is enough outside force to counteract it.
The planet will be just fine. It’s been here for 4.5 billion years and will be here for billions more, long after humanity has disappeared or gone elsewhere. Anyway, the climate hysterics don’t really care about “saving the planet”; even they aren’t quite that stupid. What’s going on is that they actually hate humanity. And themselves. The world is suffering from an episode of mass psychosis.
One currently fashionable indication of this is the 15-minute city, which governments are trying to impose all over the world. These would penalize you if you exit your designated 15-minute zone more than X number of times per month. The idea is green. And, like most green notions, it is very retrogressive. They want to return people to the status of medieval serfs, when few ventured more than 15 minutes from their hovels.
https://progresswithgod.com/2024/01/19/how-the-climate-hysteria-is-lowering-your-standard-of-living/
*********************************************‘Screwed’: People trying to sell their used Teslas face massive challenges
A second hand Tesla that’s been listed for sale for the past four years without finding a buyer offers a stark insight into the challenges faced by Australians trying to offload older used electric vehicles.
The 2015 Model S in question is almost a decade old and has 115,000 kilometres on the clock, with some visible wear and tear across its interior.
Despite its age and the fact it’s sat unsold since July 2020, the current owner is seeking $86,800, although the price has been discounted by almost $16,000 over the years. Used car valuations site RedBook puts the guide for such a car in a considerably lower range of $51,400 to $57,300.
It’s one of almost 1000 used Teslas currently listed on carsales.com.au, ranging from a sleek 2011 Roadster for $349,000 to a stock standard 2019 Model 3 for just $32,000.
Analysis by news.com.au shows a large number of those vehicles for sale have been languishing for several months and up to two years.
“Second hand EVs do pose some challenges for retailers and private sellers at the moment,” Michael Costello from Cox Automotive Australia, which owns the Manheim wholesale auction house, told news.com.au.
Tesla resale values slide
A “perfect storm” of factors have combined recently to deliver generally lower residual values compared to traditional fuel cars, Mr Costello said.
“New EV prices continue to get cheaper, due largely to new Chinese players and Tesla’s ongoing price cuts. When new models get cheaper, you can’t sell an older model at inflated prices,” he explained.
Carsales.com.au motoring reviewer Toby Hagon said a surge in the supply of new Teslas globally, combined with weaker demand for the brand, has seen the US carmaker aggressively discount some of its models in recent times.
“Over the past 18 months or so, there have been multiple price reductions to Teslas, the most recent of which shaved $3000 off the Model 3,” Hagon said. “It’s all aimed at luring more buyers by lowering the price.”
In addition, rapid advancements in battery technology in the past few years mean older Teslas are beginning to look “a little obsolete”, Mr Costello added.
And then there’s customer anxiety over ageing batteries, which can cost anywhere between $10,000 and $20,000 to replace.
“A lack of clarity for consumers around battery longevity beyond the eight-year warranty, and a lack of battery health tests to reassure used buyers, [is another reason].”
***************************************
3 July, 2024
After A Trillion Tons Of CO2, The Great Barrier Reef Hits Record Coral Cover Third Year In A Row
Sixty Percent Of All Human CO2 Emissions Have Been Emitted Since 1985 But Today The Corals Are Healthier Than Ever.
In 1985 humans were emitting only 19.6 billion tons of CO2 each year, and now we emit 37 billion tons. In the meantime AIMS have been dragging divers thousands of kilometers over the reefs to inspect the coral cover.
These are the most detailed underwater surveys on the largest reef system in the world, and they show that far from being bleached to hell, the corals are more abundant than we have ever seen them.
As Peter Ridd points out, when the reef was doing badly, AIMS was happy to combine the data on the whole reef, so we could lament its demise.
But lately AIMS splits it into separate sections and if Peter Ridd didn’t check the numbers, who would know it was a record across the full 2,300 kilometer length of the reef?
And that may be exactly the point. As Ridd reminds us, in 2012 the AIMS team predicted the coral cover in the central and southern regions would decline to 5 – 10 percent cover by 2022. Instead the whole reef is thriving at 30 percent.
UNESCO has been threatening to slap an endangered label on the reef for years. They would have looked ridiculous if they had done this whilst corals were at a record high.
But that didn’t stop them demanding tribute and conditions anyway, as if Australia can’t manage the reef by itself. Our Prime Minister should have laughed at them and cut UN funding until they start making sense.
The UNESCO recommendation that the World Heritage Committee not proscribe the reef as “in danger” at its meeting next month no doubt has come as a big relief for government but it still has plenty of strings attached.
To keep favour with UNESCO, governments must ban all gillnet fishing by mid-2027 and more closely supervise land activities stretching hundreds of kilometres inland from the coastline, and further still from the reef itself. It must also keep the billions of dollars flowing for research and reef management.
Who runs the country, is it our elected government or a foreign committee at the service of third world dictators?
The Greens, unfortunately, still struggle with big-numbers, or any numbers at all:
The Greens say the UNESCO decision is a “triumph of lobbying and spin over science”. “The burning of fossil fuels is literally cooking our oceans and degrading marine ecosystems across the globe, and nowhere else has this been more politicised than on the Great Barrier Reef,” says Greens spokesman Senator Peter Whish-Wilson.
And who is politicizing The Great Barrier Reef more than The hyperbolic Greens themselves? No wonder Greens voters were the most confused in the AEF survey.
Ten years after our corals hit a record low, our survey showed that half the country didn’t realize the reef has recovered. Only 3% knew the corals were at a record high, and nearly half the Green voters were as wrong as they possibly could be — they thought coral cover was at a record low.
The full AIMS report will be released in August. There have been some bleaching events both before and after the survey, and as is normal, we won’t know for months whether any corals actually died or whether it was just the normal home renovation that corals go through when they get stressed.
It’s common for corals to throw out the zooanthellae as temperatures change and let in newer house-guests that are better acclimatized. Since sea levels near Queensland were 1 -2 meters higher 6,000 years ago, and the world was a lot warmer, corals can clearly look after themselves.
As Peter Ridd says the biggest threats to the reef are cyclones and crown-of-thorns starfish plagues, neither of which appear to be any worse now than they were years ago.
*************************************************
Central England Temperature Record Shows No Unprecedented Warming
The Central England Temperature (CET) record, maintained by the Met Office, is the longest-running continuous temperature record in the world, starting in 1659. It provides an invaluable historical dataset that allows us to analyze long-term temperature trends and variations over centuries
This dataset serves as a critical reference point in the ongoing discourse on ‘climate change’ and the factors influencing global temperatures.
Initially, measurements were taken from various locations, including Birmingham, Oxford, and London.
Over time, the locations have changed slightly, with modern observations coming primarily from rural locations to mitigate urban influences.
The current primary stations include Pershore College in Worcestershire and Rothamsted in Hertfordshire. This careful selection helps ensure that the data remains consistent and representative of the broader region.
Early thermometers were less precise, and methods for recording temperatures have evolved. Errors can arise from several sources, including instrument calibration, changes in measurement locations, and observer differences.
However, modern techniques have significantly improved the accuracy and reliability of temperature measurements. Regular calibration of instruments and the use of standardized methods help reduce errors.
Statistical methods are also applied to adjust for known biases and to homogenize the data across different periods and locations.
The CET record is crucial for understanding natural and anthropogenic climate influences. It provides context for recent temperature changes by showing that significant warming and cooling periods have occurred over the past several centuries.
These historical variations highlight the importance of considering natural climate variability when interpreting modern climate trends.
When examining the CET record, one can observe significant warming periods, notably from 1695 to 1735 and from 1990 onwards.
The warming from 1695 to 1735 is particularly striking; it displays a rapid increase in mean temperature anomalies, much like the warming observed in recent decades. This historical warming occurred during a period when atmospheric CO2 levels were relatively stable and pre-industrial, suggesting that natural variability played a significant role.
The modern warming period, which began around 1990, is frequently attributed to anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, the magnitude of the warming observed from 1695 to 1735 challenges the narrative that current warming is unprecedented.
If the warming in the early 18th century could occur without significant changes in CO2 levels, it challenges the assumption that current warming is driven exclusively by CO2.
Natural climate variability, driven by factors such as solar radiation, volcanic activity, and oceanic cycles, has historically influenced global temperatures. The significant warming period from 1695 to 1735, evident in the CET record, underscores the role of these natural factors.
Given that similar temperature increases occurred in the past without industrial CO2 emissions, it is plausible that natural variability could be responsible for recent warming trends as well.
Attributing the current warming trend solely to CO2 emissions may be an oversimplification driven by factors other than scientific inquiry.
The CET record demonstrates that significant temperature fluctuations can and have occurred due to natural causes. The mainstream media often portrays modern warming as unprecedented, yet historical data from the CET record suggests otherwise.
This raises critical questions about the models and assumptions used in contemporary climate science.
In conclusion, the CET record offers a valuable long-term perspective on temperature trends, illustrating that substantial warming can occur independently of CO2 levels.
Historical warming periods such as that from 1695 to 1735 suggest that natural variability remains a significant factor.
A more nuanced understanding of both natural and anthropogenic influences is essential for accurately interpreting climate trends and formulating effective policies.
https://principia-scientific.com/central-england-temperature-record-shows-no-unprecedented-warming/
*******************************************Increased CO2 Caused Big Gains In US Crop Yields
From the US National Bureau of Economic Research: a new study by economists Charles Taylor and Wolfram Schlenker of Columbia University shows that rising atmospheric CO2 levels were better for crops than scientists had suspected up to now.
So more unsettled science… but for once it’s better than scientists thought, not worse. Experts have long known that something good was going on out in the fields. Starting around 1950 US agricultural output started soaring even while the number of workers was shrinking.
Introduction of improved seed and plant varieties helped, as did new equipment and techniques. But by the 1990s it was clear that agricultural productivity was growing much faster than the rest of the economy, and faster than could be accounted for by standard measures of technological improvement.
Using satellite-measurements of changing CO2 levels from 2015 to 2021 matched to county-level crop yields these economists found not only that extra CO2 makes crops grow better, which experts already knew, but the effect is much much better than previously believed.
The usual way of measuring how CO2 affects plants is to grow them in a greenhouse where the CO2 level can be artificially increased.
Taylor and Schlenker note that the effect is so good, so consistently, that commercial greenhouses typically raise the CO2 level to 900 ppm or more, at least double the average outdoor level.
But it’s hard to identify how plants would respond out in the field where other weather conditions can play a role.
One way to try to figure it out is to use little chimneys and pump CO2 into the air along a row of field crops, called the Free Air Carbon Enrichment or “FACE” method.
Those experiments have tended to show only small improvements in yield, but critics have argued the results aren’t very accurate since the CO2 gets blown away so the plants may not benefit from it.
There is another approach: look at the big picture. So Taylor and Schlenker made use of a satellite observatory that was put in space to measure the distribution of CO2 in the atmosphere.
While CO2 eventually mixes to a uniform average in the troposphere, closer to the ground it varies considerably over space because of the variation in sources (such as cars and factories) and sinks (like plants and forests).
It also varies seasonally, dropping in the spring and summer as plants grow then rising again as they die and decompose, and it trends up over time as CO2 emissions happen.
The satellite record yielded point-by-point estimates of the local CO2 level during the 2015-2021 period that the authors could then line up with local temperature, precipitation and air pollution records, then use to explain local variations in the output of corn, soybeans and wheat.
They found that every one-part-per-million increase in local CO2 yielded a gain of between 0.5% and 0.8% in output depending on the crop type. These benefits were far higher than estimates from FACE and other previous methods.
Looking back in time Taylor and Schlenker attribute 10% of the total increase in output of corn since 1940 to CO2, plus 30% of soybeans and 40% of wheat. Which is a remarkably good thing if you dislike hunger and hate deadly famines.
Indeed, if someone invented a machine that boosted crop productivity by that much it would be hailed as a miracle of modern technology. Instead we keep hearing how extra CO2 is going to kill us all. Well at least we’ll be well fed when the apocalypse arrives.
https://principia-scientific.com/increased-co2-caused-big-gains-in-us-crop-yields/
**********************************************Battery baloney, hydrogen hype, and green fairy tales in Australia
Viv Forbes is his usual incisive self below
How low Australia has fallen… Our once-great BHP now has a ‘Vice President for Sustainability and Climate Change’, the number of Australian students choosing physics at high school is collapsing, and our government opposes nuclear energy while pretending we can build and operate nuclear submarines.
Our Green politicians want: ‘No Coal, No Gas, No Nuclear!’ while Our ABC, Our CSIRO, and Our Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) are telling us that wind and solar energy (plus a bit of standby gas, heaps of batteries, and new power lines) can power our homes, industries and the mass electrification of our vehicle fleet. This sounds like Australia’s very own great leap backwards.
There are two troublesome Green Energy Unions: the Solar Workers down tools every night and cloudy day, and the Turbine Crews stop work if winds are too weak or too strong. And wind droughts can last for days. The reliable Coal and Gas Crews spend sunny days playing cards, but are expected to keep their turbines revving up and down to keep stable power in the lines.
Magical things are also expected from more rooftop solar. But panel-power has four huge problems:
Zero solar energy is generated to meet peak demand at breakfast and dinner times.
Piddling solar power is produced from many poorly oriented roof panels or from the weak sunshine anywhere south of Sydney.
If too much solar energy pours into the network (say at noon on a quiet sunny Sunday), the grid becomes unstable. Our green engineers have the solution – be ready to charge people for unwanted power they export to the grid, or just use ‘smart meters’ to turn them off.
More rooftop solar means less income and more instability for power utilities so they have to raise electricity charges. This cost falls heaviest on those with no solar panels, or no homes.
Magical things are also expected from batteries.
When I was a kid on a dairy farm in Queensland, I saw our kerosene lamps and beeswax candles replaced by electric lights. We had 16 X 2 volt batteries on the verandah and a big thumping diesel generator in the dairy.
It was a huge relief, years later, when power poles bringing reliable electricity marched up the lane to our house. All those batteries disappeared with the introduction of 24/7 coal power.
Batteries are never a net generator of power – they store energy generated elsewhere, incurring losses on charging and discharging.
There has to be sufficient generating capacity to meet current demand while also recharging those batteries. What provides electricity to power homes, lifts, hospitals, and trains and to recharge all those vehicle batteries after sundown on a still winter night? (Hint: Call the reliable coal/gas/nuclear crews.)
The same remorseless equations apply to all the pumped hydro schemes being dreamed up – everyone is a net consumer of power once losses are covered and the water is pumped back up the hill.
Yet AEMO hopes we will install 16 times our current capacity of batteries and pumped hydro by 2050 – sounds like the backyard steel plans of Chairman Mao or the Soviet Gosplan that constipated initiative in USSR for 70 years. Who needs several Snowy 2 fiascos running simultaneously?
Mother Nature has created the perfect solar battery which holds the energy of sunlight for millions of years. When it releases that energy for enterprising humans, it returns CO2 for plants to the atmosphere from whence it came. It is called ‘Coal’.
‘Hydrogen’ gets a lot of hype, but it is an elusive and dangerous gas that is rarely found naturally. To use solar energy to generate hydrogen and to then use that hydrogen as a power source is just another silly scheme to waste water and solar energy. It always takes more energy to produce hydrogen than it gives back. Let green billionaires, not taxpayers, spend their money on this merry-go-round.
Who is counting the energy and capital consumed, and the emissions generated, to manufacture, transport, and install a continent being covered by ugly solar panels, bird slicers, high voltage power lines, access roads, and hydro schemes? Now they want to invade our shallow seas. Who is going to clean up this mess in a few years’ time?
As Jo Nova says:
‘No one wants industrial plants in their backyard, but when we have to build 10,000 km of high voltage towers, 40 million solar panels, and 2,500 bird-killing turbines – it’s in everyone’s backyard.’
With all of this planned and managed by the same people who gave us Pink Batts, Snowy 2 hydro, and the NBN/NDIS fiascoes, what could possibly go wrong?
Another big problem is emerging – country people don’t want power lines across their paddocks, whining wind turbines on their hills, and glittering solar panels smothering their flats. And seaside dwellers don’t want to hear or see wind turbines off their beaches. Even whales are confused.
The solution is obvious – build all wind and solar facilities in electorates that vote Green, Teal, and Labor. Those good citizens can then listen to the turbines turning in the night breezes and look out their windows to see shiny solar panels on every roof. This will make them feel good that they are preventing man-made global warming. Those electorates who oppose this silly green agenda should get their electricity from local coal, gas or nuclear plants.
What about the Net Zero targets?
At the same time as Australia struggles to generate enough reliable power for today, governments keep welcoming more migrants, more tourists, more foreign students and planning yet more stadiums, games, and circuses. None of this is compatible with their demand for Net Zero emissions.
Unlike Europe, the Americas, and Asia, Australia has no extension cords to neighbours with reliable power from nuclear, hydro, coal, or gas – we are on our own.
Australia has abundant resources of coal and uranium – we mine and export these energy minerals but Mr Bowen, our Minister for Blackouts, says we may not use our own coal and uranium to generate future electricity here. Someone needs to tell him that no country in the world relies solely on wind, solar, and pumped hydro. Germany tried but soon found they needed French nuclear, Scandinavian hydro, imported gas, and at least 20 coal-fired German power plants are being resurrected or extended past their closing dates to ensure Germans have enough energy to get through the winter.
Australia is the only G20 country in which nuclear power is illegal (maybe no one has told green regulators that we have had a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney since 1958). Australia is prepared to lock navy personnel beside nuclear power plants in our new nuclear-powered submarines but our politicians forbid nuclear power stations in our wide open countryside.
More CO2 in the atmosphere brings great benefits to life on Earth. If man adds to it, the oceans dissolve a swag of it, and what stays in the atmosphere is gratefully welcomed by all plant life.
In 2023, Australia added just 0.025 ppm to the 420 ppm in today’s atmosphere. Most of this probably dissolved in the oceans. If we in Australia turned everything off tomorrow, the climate wouldn’t notice, but our plant life would, especially those growing near power stations burning coal or gas and spreading plant food.
Climate has always changed and a warm climate has never been a problem on Earth.
It is cold that kills. Especially during blackouts.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/battery-baloney-hydrogen-hype-and-green-fairy-tales/
***************************************2 July, 2024
The New York Times Is Right, Finally; Climate Change Is Not Threatening Island Nations
The New York Times (NYT) recently posted an article, titled “A Surprising Climate Find,” which explains how island nations like the Maldives and Tuvalu are not, in fact, in danger of sinking under the seas due to climate change. This is true; a fact Climate Realism has repeatedly discussed. Atolls in particular are known to grow with rising water levels, this has been known for years if not decades.
The NYT climate reporter, Raymond Zhong, explains that as “the planet warms and the oceans rise, atoll nations like the Maldives, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu have seemed doomed to vanish, like the mythical Atlantis, into watery oblivion.”
This is an exceptionally common claim from the climate alarmist media, and some of the nations themselves that are benefitting from massive aid packages and “reparations” from wealthier countries; money not be used to help their people relocate from the “sinking” islands, but rather to build infrastructure and boost tourism. In fact, the NYT promoted this falsehood as late as April 2024, with a story, titled, “Why Time Is Running Out Across the Maldives’ Lovely Little Islands.“
In his most recent piece Zhong writes:
“Of late, though, scientists have begun telling a surprising new story about these islands. By comparing mid-20th century aerial photos with recent satellite images, they’ve been able to see how the islands have evolved over time. What they found is startling: Even though sea levels have risen, many islands haven’t shrunk. Most, in fact, have been stable. Some have even grown.”
It is true that the islands are not sinking, but Zhong is wrong when he says this fact has only been discovered “of late.” His own article references a study published in 2018, which found 89 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans increased in area or were stable, and only 11 percent showed any sign of contracting. So just three months after the NYT published an article claiming the Maldives were disappearing beneath the waves, the paper is now reversing itself based on research that existed six years before the April article was published. Since, Climate Realism has covered the claim many times, including with regard to Tuvaluan “refugees,” looking at tropical storms, and examining other island refugee claims, one wonders whether the NYT’s fact checkers were asleep on the job when the paper published its false story in April.
The facts about atolls growth and demise are not newly discovered. Scientists have known for decades, if not more than a hundred years, that atoll islands uniquely change with changing sea levels. Charles Darwin was the first to propose that reefs were many thousands of feet thick, and grow upwards towards the light. He was partially correct, though reality is more complicated than his theory.
In 2010, as discussed in the Climate Realism post “No, Rising Seas Are Not Swallowing Island Nations,” studies found that Tuvalu and Kiribati were growing, as well as Micronesia, and some had grown dramatically. Likewise in 2015, the same group of researchers reported that 40 percent of islands in the Pacific and Indian Oceans were stable, and another 40 percent had grown.
Zhong correctly says that ocean currents and waves can cause erosion, but also “bring fresh sand ashore from the surrounding coral reefs, where the remains of corals, algae, crustaceans and other organisms are constantly being crushed into new sediment.”
Climate at a Glance: Islands and Sea Level Rise, also confirms the fact that in Tuvalu in particular –often a poster child for islands supposedly threatened by sea level rise—“eight of Tuvalu’s nine large coral atolls have grown in size during recent decades, and 75 percent of Tuvalu’s 101 smaller reef islands have increased as well.”
The only “surprising” discovery in this story is that the climate desk for the New York Times was allegedly not aware of these facts before now. This information is not new. It could be, of course, that the NYT neglected to report the truth about island nations’ status previously simply because it did not conform to the alarming climate narrative they have been trying to push, but as the data has gotten too strong to ignore, they were forced to admit the truth with regard to growing islands in the face of rising seas.
****************************************************
Mining the Planet for Renewable Energy
By Paul Driessen
This election year, several critical issues dominate voter concerns. Illegal immigration across unsecured borders by migrants, criminals, sex traffickers and terrorists. Anti-police policies, reduced prosecution of criminals and rising crime. Unprecedented prices for food, clothing, housing and other necessities.
Parental roles in education and sex changes for children. Threats to our republic and democracy from unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats who use their powers to persecute, prosecute, silence and even imprison opponents, and control our lives.
Also crucial: control over energy – the lifeblood of our civilization, jobs, health and prosperity.
Will America shut down coal, gas and nuclear electricity generation before it has sufficient reliable replacements? Will we have electricity when we need it, or only when it’s available, especially after we’re forced to convert gasoline cars and gas stoves, furnaces and water heaters to electric models?
What will families pay for that electricity and everything we eat, drink, build and use? Where will we get plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, and thousands of other products made from oil and gas they want to lock in the ground? What will happen to our jobs, health, living standards – and personal choices about where we live, what we eat, what car we can drive and how far, whether we can fly places for vacation?
We’re told a great energy and economic transformation is underway – and is essential to prevent a “climate crisis.” In reality, the crisis exists in computer models, headlines and politicized science, but not in actual temperature and weather records.
In reality, there is no energy transformation. In 2023, wind and solar power generated 2.7% of the world’s primary energy; 81.5% came from fossil fuels. Between 1965 and 2023, North America and Europe cut their fossil fuel consumption almost in half; but over the same period, the rest of the world consumed seven times more than those two regions reduced their use. Emissions went up even more, because China, India and other developing countries require minimal pollution controls on power plants and vehicles.
In reality, a transition to an all-electric economy with no fossil fuels means millions of acres of America’s wild, scenic and agricultural lands would be covered with wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines, and warehouses filled with batteries that can spontaneously erupt in flames.
In reality, we don’t know whether there are enough accessible metal and mineral deposits on Planet Earth to extract all the raw materials required to manufacture the turbines, panels, batteries, transmission lines, electric vehicles, transformers and other equipment the energy transformation would require – just for the United States, much less for the entire world.
We don’t know how many billions of tons of rock would have to be mined, processed and disposed of; how many millions of acres would be impacted; how many millions of tons of toxic air and water pollution would be emitted; what human rights would be violated to get those metals and minerals.
One of the most basic and vital metals for the energy transformation is copper. Average worldwide ore concentrations (0.04%) mean miners would have to remove some 40,000,000 tons of overlying rock and extract, crush and process nearly 25,000,000 tons of ore to get 110,000 tons of copper – enough for just the first 30,000 megawatts of President Biden’s offshore wind plan.
Worse, mining is essentially banned in the United States – and the Biden Administration has vetoed world-class mines that could have met US needs for copper (and other metals) for decades to come. And the problem isn’t just President Biden or the Biden Administration. It’s governors like Gavin Newsom and Gretchen Whitmer, and countless activists and mostly Democrat politicians who support these policies.
Recent studies question whether mining companies can even produce enough copper just for the electric vehicles people are told they must buy – much less for wind and solar power; to say nothing of a full US (or global) energy transformation. Again, that’s just the copper.
A 2022 International Energy Agency report examines the need for essential metals and minerals in energy transitions. Onshore wind installations, the report says, require nine times more materials than combined-cycle gas generating plants, to produce the same amount of electricity. Offshore wind installations require fourteen times more. (These IEA numbers do not include materials for transmission lines or backup power for windless-sunless periods.)
The IEA says its projections are “highly dependent” on how quickly and stringently the world actually tries to reach zero greenhouse gas emissions in power generation and all energy uses; on which wind, solar, battery and other technologies dominate; and on whether countries also try to utilize low-carbon (natural gas) or no-carbon (batteries) equipment in mining, materials processing, manufacturing and transporting wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, vehicles and other technologies.
However, the IEA calculates, demand for aluminum, copper, cobalt, graphite, iron, nickel, lithium, rare earths, concrete and other “green” energy materials is expected to skyrocket by 5, 20, 40, 50 or more times current global requirements by 2040.
The Agency says numerous “challenges” to actually acquiring those materials include actually finding producible deposits, plus land use, water scarcity and pollution, air pollution, toxic mining waste management, corruption and bribery, worker and nearby resident health and safety, and child labor.
Meeting these challenges, the IEA says, will require “systematic approaches,” the “development of institutions and the rule of law,” “inclusive legal frameworks,” “responsible” and “robust” pollution and waste management frameworks, “sustainable practices,” “international coordination,” “capacity building and knowledge sharing,” greater “transparency” and, ultimately, “international minerals governance.”
These actions will all help foster “sustainable and responsible supply chains that contribute to a low-carbon economy” worldwide, the IEA assures us.
But will these wishful terms survive collisions with the real world? Developing nations view coal, oil and gas as their key to jobs, modernity and prosperity. China, Russia and their allies perceive the West’s fixation on climate change and green energy as opportunities to control US and EU supply chains, geo-political options and military-economic capabilities.
The biggest wind energy project in the USA will soon blanket 1,600 square miles (1.25 times Delaware) of New Mexico, to generate 3,500 MW about 30% of the year. The Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona generates 4,200 MW from 6 square miles almost 24/7/365.
A Bloomberg research team says the world will need at least $200 trillion to stop global warming by 2050. Others estimate $275 trillion!
How can we head this economy-and-environment-killing craziness off at the pass?
Wise decisions at the ballot box are essential, of course. But state and local governments should enact laws requiring that utilities explain how they will generate wind and solar replacement power on windless winter nights, before they shut down a single coal, gas or nuclear power plant – or get approval for a single wind or solar project. (Those are just a few of the actions they can take.)
They should also demand full details on where raw materials will come from, and at what dollar, human rights and environmental costs – to state and local communities … and our planet.
America’s jobs, health, living standards, and right to choose our homes, cars and food depend on it.
https://heartland.org/opinion/mining-the-planet-for-renewable-energy/
*************************************************Yet Another Waste Of Time Climate Conference
The implausible president of COP29, Mukhtar Babayev of Azerbaijan, was at the recently-concluded UN’s Bonn Climate Change Conference in June to try to galvanize the COP29 corpse, and claimed to have “a two-pillared plan to ‘enhance ambition and enable action’.”
To which again we say been there, done that.
Twenty-eight times and counting, in fact… if you’re only counting the main gatherings not the endless intermediate ones.
Given the grandiose rhetoric ambition hardly needs enhancing since everybody has it, in amounts that make it a drug on the market.
The real question is why action needs “enabling” since nothing’s obstructing it, other than nobody wanting to impose disastrous costs on their own people to no purpose.
Nations are able to act. They just aren’t motivated to, and an agenda full of high-falutin’ ambition won’t change that situation.
The Edge (Singapore) explains in vain that lead Azerbaijani climate negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev:
“says the COP29 Presidency also aims to broker a ‘fair and ambitious new climate finance goal, finalise Article 6, strengthen global financial institutions and ensure the private sector commits to climate action’.”
Ensure? That we’d like to see. Well no, we wouldn’t. And we aren’t going to, no matter what was said at the Bonn Show.
Which in fact was yes we failed again let’s um uh well see that is, as Climate Home News lamented in a closeout piece that makes you wonder whether covering the story was worth it:
“Apart from smiles and flowers in an emotional farewell for a longtime UNFCCC staffer, the mood at the closing session of the Bonn climate talks on Thursday night was sombre.
Frustration and finger-pointing dominated interventions by delegates representing both developed and developing nations, as they lamented the collapse of key talks on the Mitigation Work Programme – the main channel for curbing planet-heating emissions.
‘We have failed to show the world that we are responding with the purpose and urgency required to limit warming to 1.5 degrees,’ said Samoan negotiator Anne Rasmussen, speaking for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).
Disappointment also ran high over minimal progress towards a new post-2025 finance goal due at November’s COP29 summit in Baku, with rich countries refusing to put numbers on the table.
And there were grumblings about the narrow scope and opaque process of work on integrating climate science into the UN talks in Bonn. All of that left UN climate chief Simon Stiell with little option but to give countries a stiff talking-to as he beseeched them not to ‘leave the hardest work to the eleventh hour’ before COP29.
‘Business-as-usual is a recipe for failure, on climate finance, and on many other fronts, in humanity’s climate fight,’ he warned them.”
Um that was business as usual. And the 11th hour. But they can fix the weather, honest. And will in Baku. This time for sure.
https://principia-scientific.com/yet-another-waste-of-time-climate-conference/
******************************************‘Green lawfare’ is now the weapon of choice for Australia's activist class
The anti-industry industry has come a long way from its humble origins in the late 1970s, when Bob Brown went to his local St Vincent de Paul and bought himself a suit. The transition from a gaggle of amateur nature lovers to a professional organisation with salaried staff was a giant evolutionary leap for the environmental movement.
It was the precursor to blocking the Franklin Dam and the first tentative steps into politics and the law. Today, green activism in Australia is a quarter-billion-dollar business that employs hundreds of people. Research published this week by the Menzies Research Centre shows the combined revenue of the top 25 green advocacy groups was $275m last year. The revenue has more than doubled from $113m in 2015. The number of staff on their books has increased from 374 to 880.
Ironically, the report finds that the green activist industry is growing faster than the primary industries and resource sectors it targets. Its goal is not to create wealth but to destroy it. It forms part of the NGO-corporate-industrial complex that has discovered how to profit from the war on carbon, aided and abetted by the government through subsidies and regulation.
The environmental juggernaut of today bears little comparison with the green movement that began in Tasmania almost half a century ago. Its focus has changed from conservation to the ideology of climate change. The movement has become remote and insensitive to the natural environment and developed a narrow-minded obsession with carbon emissions from coal and gas combustion.
The big environmental groups are wholly committed to renewable energy and dogmatically opposed to nuclear power. To the extent that we’re able to trace the source of their funding, much of it flows from investors in the renewables sector whose portfolios would be instantly devalued by the entry of nuclear power.
Activist organisations have become so dependent on green corporatism that they are willing to ignore the destruction of broad acres of natural vegetation for the construction of wind turbines, industrial solar plants, energy storage infrastructure and associated transmission lines.
Climate warriors are more likely to be found in the courts these days rather than tied to the front of a bulldozer in the tropical forests of the Upper Burdekin in far north Queensland. Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s approval of the Upper Burdekin/Gawara Baya wind development last month came despite a damning report that warned of “unavoidable significant impacts” on the endangered Sharman’s rock wallaby, the koala, the greater glider, the red goshawk and the masked owl.
Nowadays, lawyers perform much of the heavy lifting for climate activism. The MRC’s research found that Australia is the second-largest forum for environmental lawfare after the US. There are more climate lawsuits per capita in Australia than anywhere else in the world, thanks to a rich array of resource sector targets and an obliging legal system.
The bar for launching court actions in Australia is low for those with funds. Every dollar spent by legal activists is a drain on the profits of businesses forced to defend themselves against adventurous and vexatious claims. The biggest cost to the resource sector is not legal fees, punishing as they are. It is the mounting cost of interest on borrowed money that sits idle while the legal process drags on.
The MRC calculates that in past two years $17.48bn in industrial output has been frozen by legal action. Whether investors will see a return on their capital is at the mercy of the courts. The damage is compounded by the damage to the broader economy.
The MRC calculates 29,784 Australian jobs are at risk in cases before the courts. The loss of taxes and mining royalties will make it harder to fund roads, schools and hospitals and support our health and education systems.
The fiscal impact alone would prompt a clear-thinking government to step in and clean up this mess. The Albanese government, however, is anything but hard-headed about anything related to the environment. It refuses to countenance any reform that might give the Greens party an edge in quinoa-chomping enclaves such as the seat of Grayndler, the fate of which is of more than passing interest to our PM.
It gets worse. In an act of fiscal self-harm, the government is subsidising legal activism that eats into the profits it likes to milk. The 2022 budget included $10m in funding for the Environmental Defenders Office and Environmental Justice Australia, the two bodies responsible for most environmental lawfare in Australia.
In 2015, the EDO had 14 staff and a $3m budget. By 2023, it had grown to a team of 105 staff and a budget of $13.3m. It measures success with a perverse set of metrics. Its 2022 annual report boasts of providing 11,587 legal hours and spending 134 days in court.
In January, the EDO’s tactics were heavily criticised by Federal Court Justice Natalie Charlesworth, who reversed an order preventing Santos from building a pipeline allowing the $5.8bn development of the offshore Barossa gas field. She rejected assertions by three Tiwi Islanders that the pipeline posed a risk to intangible underwater heritage, including Crocodile Man song lines and an area of significance for the rainbow serpent Ampiji, and was not “broadly representative” of the beliefs of Tiwi people who would be affected by the pipeline.
Charlesworth found the EDO had engaged in dishonest “coaching” tactics and the misrepresentation of local Indigenous knowledge. Charlesworth dismissed evidence from the EDO’s expert witness about potential impacts on underwater archaeological sites, finding there was a “negligible chance” of a significant impact on tangible cultural heritage. Charlesworth found a cultural mapping exercise undertaken by an expert witness for the applicants and “the related opinions expressed about it are so lacking in integrity that no weight can be placed on them”.
“I am satisfied that this aspect of the case does indeed involve ‘confection’ or ‘construction’, at least in part, and that it cannot be an adapted account of the kind discussed by the anthropologists,” the judgment states.
Yet despite the loss of the case, the activists are winning. The global demand for liquid natural gas has never been higher, and is forecast to continue to rise until the 2040s. Yet oil and gas exploration activities in Australia have been falling significantly over the past two decades. The number of new offshore wells has fallen from over 50 in 2010 wells to just three in 2023. When your aim is to frustrate and delay, there is no such thing as a wasted day in court.
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1 July, 2024
A bombshell report titled “Climate Control: Exposing the Decarbonization Collusion in ESG Investing” has exposed massive financial and shareholder coercion in climate finance
The climate cartel has declared war on the American way of life. The climate cartel is waging “a Global World War” for net zero against disfavored American companies, including those in the fossil fuel, aviation, and farming industries that allow Americans to drive, fly, and eat.
Issued by The US House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust the “Climate Control” report targets groups like Mark Carney’s GFANZ (Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero) and ClimateAction 100+ among others.
The report states: “The climate cartel has declared war on the American way of life. The climate cartel is waging “a Global World War” for net zero against disfavored American companies, including those in the fossil fuel, aviation, and farming industries that allow Americans to drive, fly, and eat.
It has described Climate Action 100+ as “the global Navy,” and compared Ceres’s efforts to “the Army ground troops” and “an ‘air cover’ strategic and silent bombing campaign by a newly funded division of the Air Force.”
Some 272,294 documents and 2,565,258 pages of non-public information were received and reviewed. Also noted in the report: “Due to their failure to produce responsive material timely and fulsomely, the Committee was forced to issue document subpoenas to GFANZ, Ceres, As You Sow, Arjuna, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, ISS, and Glass Lewis.”
The report claims that the “climate cartel imposes these radical policies by weaponizing ever-escalating pressure tactics…” on corporations. One of the tactics is forcing companies to make “immaterial disclosure of carbon emissions,” a tactic being pushed in the US and Canada.
In Canada, Friends of Science Society has issued a number of Open Letters to the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, Bank of Canada, and the Canadian Securities Administrator pointing out the folly of forcing corporations to waste time and money on climate risk reporting that is invalidated by the implausible climate scenarios recommended.
Furthermore, they argue, such reporting exposes companies to shareholder liabilities and lawfare by climate activists.
As reported by CBC’s “What on Earth?,” Environment Canada now claims to be able to attribute an extreme weather event to human-caused climate change within 7 days of the event, which CBC says “will help victims sue” as reported in this Western Standard article.
Canada has recently radically altered the framing of the Competition Bureau’s “greenwashing” legislation, within a few sections of legislation slipped into an economic Bill C-59.
In plain language, the actual standards are vague, but the financial penalties for violation are huge. Friends of Science Society says this presents an open invitation for radical climate lawfare.
Further, advertising claims, for instance, about a firm’s product, service, or actions to seek “Net Zero” must be provable according to an undefined international standard. More details are in this summary brief by Norton, Rose, Fulbright.
Much of this relates to the Catherine McKenna-led Nov. 2022 report “Integrity Matters” which demanded mandatory reporting and cracking down on greenwashing, shifting focus from national Paris Agreement reporting to reporting by corporations, cities and financial institutions.
Friends of Science Society issued a rebuttal statement at the time, pointing out that imposing regulations for a goal that cannot be met shows a lack of integrity. According to an in-depth, meticulous mining and minerals study by Prof. Simon Michaux for the Geological Society of Finland, there is no material supply chain for Net Zero 2030 or even 2050.
A recent Friends of Science review of three Canadian Net Zero plans shows the Canadian targets cannot be met without extreme degrowth and poverty, an abomination for a country with one of the richest resource and energy sectors in the world. Video explainer here.
In 2019, The Guardian reported that Mark Carney stated “Firms ignoring the climate crisis will go bankrupt.”
As the CLINTEL international network of 1,931 scientists and scholars have shown, there is no climate crisis or emergency. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR6 Working Group I Physical Sciences report of August 2019 only mentions ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate crisis’ once in reference to media coverage.
Thus, one can conclude the people doing the real greenwashing, misleading, and deception – perhaps ideological self-deception – are the climate cartel participants and advisors like Mark Carney and Catherine McKenna.
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International Climate Conference Debunks Science and Policy Consensus Claims
The Heartland Institute partnered with the Germany-based European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) and the U.S.-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) to hold a two-day climate conference on June 14-15 in Vienna, Austria. This was the 16th International Conference on Climate Change; Heartland has either hosted or participated in all of them.
As I write, videos of the conference sessions have not been posted; but below, I categorize and note some of the speakers and topics, and Taylor has provided brief descriptions of a few of the talks. On the science front, an international group of scientists, including Nicola Scafetta, Ph.D., Willie Soon, Ph.D., Nir Shaviv, Ph.D., and Henrik Svensmark, Ph.D., discussed the role the sun and cosmic rays play in warming and climate change. William Happer, Ph.D., described the role that clouds play in radiation transfer. Roy Spencer, Ph.D., discussed the idea that temperature extremes are becoming more common. Taylor, Craig Rucker, and Nobel Prize laureate John Clauser, Ph.D., each discussed how climate alarmists and the media are lying, either directly or through omission of key facts, to promote the idea of climate emergency in need of a big government fix—and discussed ways to successfully debate and debunk their claims.
Other researchers discussed the science and politics of energy and climate change, including the potential of different energy sources and how and why climate alarm is being fought in legislatures and the courts. They included such analysts as Marc Morano, Marcel Crok, László Csaba Szarka, Ph.D., Bernhard Strehl, Ph.D., Manfred Haferburg, Douglas Pollack, and Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D.
Below, Taylor briefly describes the content and impact of a few of the presentations, including his own.
To a packed house at the conference hall in Vienna, I (Taylor) set the stage for presentations by some of the world’s most accomplished climate scientists and climate policy experts. I explained how climate alarmism is a Trojan horse for the global left to consolidate money and power in global government institutions while depriving us of our most basic freedoms. After congratulating the audience on sending even more freedom-focused policymakers to the upcoming EU Parliament session, I noted how Heartland is working closely with EIKE and other public policy organizations and policymakers throughout Austria and throughout Europe. I gave a presentation on specific examples of climate change misinformation making the rounds in the establishment media. I then turned the floor over to presentations by participating scientists and policy experts.
“No chance” was the key takeaway from a presentation by Dr. Will Happer. Happer and a colleague, W. A. van Wijngaarden, Ph.D., published a paper in 2020 showing the atmosphere has nearly reached its carbon dioxide saturation point. Carbon dioxide impedes the flow of longwave radiation to space within a specific spectrum range. At current atmospheric CO2 levels of approximately 420 parts per million, atmospheric CO2 is nearly saturated, meaning nearly all potential warmth retention from atmospheric CO2 has already occurred, such that additional CO2 emissions will have almost no impact on global temperatures. During his presentation, Dr. Happer said there is no chance that the saturation effect he documented could be wrong. From the humble and affable Dr. Happer, that is as forceful a statement as you will ever hear. That is good news for people worried about future climate change, and should end the debate about any future climate change crisis.
In a subsequent one-on-one conversation that I had with Danish scientist Dr. Henrik Svensmark, he confirmed Happer’s assessment of the CO2 saturation effect, saying, “Dr. Happer is correct, CO2 saturation as described by Dr. Happer is a well-known and well-understood matter of science.
“Nobody with any basic understanding of atmospheric physics can claim it is wrong,” Svensmark concluded.
Dr. John Clauser, the 2022 Nobel Prize winner for physics, gave a compelling blow-by-blow takedown of climate alarmism. Among other things, Clauser emphasized that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its computer models are spectacularly wrong in their assumptions about clouds.
Clauser pointed out that average cloud cover throughout the planet is approximately 67 percent. IPCC claims clouds have an albedo of 0.34, meaning they reflect approximately 34 percent of sunlight back into space, with 66 percent of the sunlight that strikes cloud tops reaching Earth’s surface. In reality, Clauser emphasized, cloud albedo is approximately 0.80. The sun is a variable star, meaning the output of solar energy varies a significant amount. Compelling scientific evidence shows solar output has increased significantly during the 120-plus years since the beginning of the 20th century. Drastically underestimating cloud albedo allows IPCC to underreport the impact of the recent increase in solar output on global climate and allows IPCC to claim a much greater impact from carbon dioxide emissions than is justified by sound science.
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Could Courts Be Persuaded To Ban The Use Of ‘Fossil Fuels’?
Despite hundreds of billions of tax dollars spent on ‘green’ energy over the past decade, the world and America used more ‘fossil fuels’ than ever before in history last year.
The electric vehicle movement is stalled out, solar and wind power are both still fringe forms of energy, and the green candidates got crushed in recent elections in Europe because voters are sick of the higher prices associated with ‘green’ policies.
So having struck out with consumers, businesses, and at the ballot box, now the greens are moving on to the courts. The climate industrial complex has now joined forces with trial lawyers to advance their war on ‘fossil fuels’.
One of the more absurd lawsuits happened in Hawaii.
There, a group of 13 teenagers — honest, I’m not making this up — sued Hawaii’s government over its use of ‘fossil fuels’. Environmental law firms Our Children’s Trust and Earthjustice claim that Hawaii’s natural resources are imperiled by CO2 emissions.
Even if that were true, shouldn’t they be suing China?
The settlement will require the state to eliminate ‘fossil fuels’ from its transportation system by 2045, and also formally recognizes the right to file future lawsuits against other parties.
Gov. Josh Green even stood next to the young plaintiffs as he read a statement claiming:
“This settlement informs how we as a state can best move forward to achieve life-sustaining goals.”
There’s so much that’s wrong about this decision. How did a bunch of teenagers possibly have standing to sue? What possible harm have they suffered from ‘fossil fuels’?
The irony is that this island paradise in the Pacific — whose primary industry is tourism — is going to collapse without ‘fossil fuels’. With no jets and cruise ships allowed, will tourists and business travelers have to arrive by sailboat?
This new technique of using lawsuits to advance the anti-‘fossil fuels’ movement has spread to other states. Last August, a judge ruled that GOP-dominated Montana violated its constitution when it approved ‘fossil fuel’ projects without taking ‘climate change’ into account.
After the recent flooding in Vermont, ‘green’ activists sued the state for not abolishing ‘fossil fuels’.
Massachusetts is suing Exxon Mobil for adverse weather conditions.
There are now 32 cases filed by state attorneys general, cities, counties, and tribal nations against companies including Exxon Mobil, BP, and Shell. The lawsuits claim that the industry tried to undermine ‘scientific consensus’ about the ‘crisis’.
Here’s what’s so frightening about these sham lawsuits from trial lawyers who hope to turn oil companies into cash cows similar to the tobacco lawsuits 20 years ago: The end game of lawsuits against states and oil and gas companies for using or producing energy because of alleged damage to the environment could bring about the abolition of ‘fossil fuels’ through the back door of the nation’s courthouses.
But what none of these judges or litigators take into account is the catastrophic economic effects of NOT using ‘fossil fuels’?
As an example, the Left wants to abolish air conditioning, which requires electricity, which mostly comes from ‘fossil fuels’. But air conditioning saves tens of thousands of lives a year.
What about the millions of jobs that would be wiped out with no ‘fossil fuels’? How many thousands of Americans would die in hospitals, assisted living centers, daycare centers, or schools if the lights went out with no ‘fossil fuel’ power plants?
‘Fossil fuels’ have saved millions of lives over the last century. They make Americans much richer, safer, happier, healthier, and more mobile.
Meanwhile, there is no evidence backing up the absurd claim by teenagers that if Hawaii stopped using ‘fossil fuels’, the state’s weather conditions would improve.
Will judges take that into consideration when they try to rob Exxon and coal companies of their profits for the sin of making life on Earth much better?
https://principia-scientific.com/could-courts-be-persuaded-to-ban-the-use-of-fossil-fuels/
**********************************************Science pushed aside as media backs renewables
How can journalists claim Coalition support for nuclear power is “Trumpian”, or part of a conservative “culture war”, when 32 countries use nuclear energy?
How do media critics of nuclear power explain commitments by more than 20 countries from four continents to treble their nuclear power generation capacity in the wake of warnings at the COP28 climate meeting in Dubai last year that the world is falling behind in its emissions-reduction targets?
It is, of course, incumbent on political reporters to demand details from Opposition Leader Peter Dutton about his nuclear power announcement of June 18. Yet many journalists have for years been incurious about details of the renewables rollout preferred by the government of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the previous Coalition government of Scott Morrison.
Aren’t the actual culture warriors the journalists who refuse to ask questions about problems in the renewables rollout, flagged publicly last August and again in May by the Grattan Institute, a strong renewables backer? Problems with the speed of the rollout were again admitted last week in the Australian Energy Market Operator’s 2024 Integrated System Plan. Yet to read or listen to reporters from the ABC, the Guardian and The New Daily, you would think the entire world was following Australia down the road to 100 per cent renewables, problem free.
The truth is the renewables rollout is in trouble across the northern hemisphere and particularly in Europe. And emissions are rising in China, India, Russia, most of Asia and much of South America.
Countries with higher percentages of renewables than the 82 per cent by 2030 policy target of Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen depend on hydro-electric power generation because of their abundant water resources.
This column has quoted the International Energy Agency saying the technology to reach 100 per cent renewables is not yet available. On November 14, 2022, this column quoted former Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott telling ABC Radio National’s breakfast program host Patricia Karvelas about the scale of the energy transition and switching off coal. “Well, I think it may not be possible but I think we’ve got to try,” she said.
An ordinary listener might have expected RN to follow up that line. But no.
Critics on the right have often argued environmentalism, and particularly belief in renewables, has become a matter of quasi-religious fervour. Yet there are facts about power generation and grid stability that stubbornly refuse to evaporate in the face of the climate beliefs of left-wing journalists and Greens voters.
Chris Uhlmann, now with The Australian, felt the full fury of the pro-renewables camp when he wrote about the potential for high levels of renewables to destabilise the South Australian electricity grid after a statewide blackout on September 28, 2016. Critics accused Uhlmann of being a closet climate denier and insisting the blackout was entirely down to a storm.
They were – and largely remain – oblivious to Uhlmann’s central point about the engineering parameters needed to provide stability in all electricity grids. This is not just about the intermittent nature of wind and solar power, but about the effects of asynchronous renewables in synchronous power distribution systems.
This column, a fan of contributions by power generation specialists to Professor Judith Curry’s Climate Etc blog, recommends a three-part series by US “planning engineer” Russ Schussler, retired vice-president of system planning for the Georgia Transmission Corporation.
Schussler rates hydro as the best renewable resource for grid stability but also criticises the focus by critics of renewables on the intermittency of wind and solar.
“The major challenges associated with increased penetration of wind and solar … are not caused by intermittency, but rather from how the energy is injected into the grid,” he said. “The electric energy produced by wind and solar is transformed by a power converter using inverters in order to synchronise with the oscillating grid. In terms of reliability, resources that spin in synchronism with the grid as electricity is produced are much better for the grid than those resources which use inverter-based technology to convert for grid injection.”
This is the science: using asynchronous power from wind and solar in a synchronous system is a much bigger problem than environmentalists understand.
Power engineers say that as renewables penetration increases, so does the grid stability problem. This is the big “82 per cent renewables” question.
Add to that the ecological damage done to large areas of mainland Australia by building out 10,000km of new power lines, millions of solar panels and tens of thousands of wind turbines. All this as the rest of the world continues to increase CO2 emissions. Yet Bowen and others believe our comparative advantage in wind and sun will make Australia a green energy superpower.
Much of their optimism flows from predictions about the potential for exports of green hydrogen, a technology yet to be developed economically.
Even Grattan has sounded a warning about hydrogen, suggesting the extent of our comparative advantage might be limited to green steel and green fertiliser. There is another hint in the latest AEMO ISP as to why Labor’s green industry ambitions may falter. Page seven of the AEMO plan says “renewables accounted for almost 40 per cent of the electricity market” in 2023.
“Rooftop solar alone contributed more electricity to the grid in the first quarter of 2024 (13 per cent) than did grid-scale solar, wind, hydro or gas.” That’s right – suburban homes are generating much of our new renewable power. What does this mean for the government’s “future made in Australia” plans?
This column on May 5 analysed the draft ISP, the latest Grattan warnings on the slow pace of the renewables rollout, and a critique by the Centre for Independent Studies. The CIS goes to the heart of the point about rooftop solar.
Why does AEMO acknowledge the importance of rooftop solar as well as the future role for home batteries but not cost their installation? That is, this major cost is not included in the $122bn figure Bowen used to fob off ABC 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson last Monday.
The CIS study said rooftop solar and home batteries would have cost $360bn at today’s prices by 2050. And the latest ISP press material on the AEMO website specifically acknowledges Bowen’s $122bn figure “does NOT include the cost of commissioned, committed or anticipated projects, consumer energy resources, distribution network upgrades”.
This column on March 17 was sceptical the Coalition would actually take a nuclear policy to the next election. Maybe that was wrong. Such a policy would be subject to the mother of all scare campaigns by the Greens and Labor.
All that political risk would be for a generation system that could have no influence on power prices or system reliability until the late 2030s when the first reactor came on stream.
Yet even if Dutton is writing the longest political suicide note since John Hewson’s Fightback, surely journalists owe the public genuine scrutiny of the costs, risks and benefits of both nuclear and renewables.
Especially since AEMO itself acknowledges Bowen’s $122bn figure is not the total cost of the renewables path.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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