This document is part of an archive of postings on Greenie Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written
This is a backup copy of the original blog
30 March, 2023
Deadbeat Spain breaking Greenie contracts
Renewable energy investors who lost subsidies promised by Spain are heading to a London court to try to claw back $125 million from the government — a decadelong dispute with ramifications for clean energy financing across the European Union.
The outcome will be closely watched by investors after the U.S. passed a new law offering incentives for homegrown green technology. Experts say the Inflation Reduction Act is already drawing clean energy investment away from EU countries like Spain, leaving the 27-nation bloc much less competitive globally.
The European Commission, the EU's executive arm, has proposed its own rules on allowing state aid and incentives for green investment. But those changes would not affect court cases already underway.
The lawsuit in London’s Commercial Court this week involves investors from the Netherlands and Luxembourg who poured millions into a solar plant in southern Spain in 2011. The Spanish government offered subsidies to encourage growth in renewable energy production, then controversially slashed the payments without notice as it cut costs after the 2008 financial crisis.
Spain has been sued internationally more than 50 times over the retroactive changes. It has not paid out despite losing more than 20 cases so far, according to U.N. data on international investment disputes. The EU backs Spain's position.
“Those renewable investors — multibillion-dollar companies — are very concerned about the attitude of Spain and Europe looking forward,” said Nick Cherryman, one of the lawyers leading the case against Spain. “Why should they take risks investing in Europe given the track record?”
Spain now ranks alongside Venezuela and Russia as countries with the most unpaid debts over commercial treaty violations, according to a recent ranking compiled by Nikos Lavranos, a Netherlands-based expert in investment arbitration and EU law.
Most of the cases allege that Spain broke agreements it agreed to honor under the international Energy Charter Treaty, a legally binding agreement between 50 countries to protect companies from unfair government interference in the energy sector.
Environmental campaigners have criticised the treaty for protecting fossil fuel investment because financiers can also sue over policy changes aimed at scaling back polluting projects. However, for Spain, almost all cases relate to renewable energy.
“If you take the bigger picture, the EU is shooting itself in the foot by supporting Spain in this,” Lavranos said. “You cannot trust that they can follow through with their agreements, so I think you do shake investors’ confidence."
He also questioned how leaving investors in the lurch over initiatives to ramp up renewable energy production aligned with recent EU initiatives like the Green New Deal, a goal for carbon neutrality by 2050 and relaxation of subsidy rules.
“It’s very contradictory,” Lavranos said.
In 2013, the investors in Spain brought a case before the World Bank-backed International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, an arbitration body between governments and investors.
Spain in 2018 was ordered to compensate investors over its subsidy changes. Despite being told to pay out more than $1 billion by the international body, Spain has refused, citing EU rules.
Spain’s Ecological Transition Ministry said the payments “may be contrary to EU law and constitute illegal state aid.” When the government is told to make a payout, it says it notifies Brussels but that “Spain cannot pay before the commission’s decision, so it is faithfully complying with its legal obligations.”
The European Commission said the Energy Charter Treaty does not apply in disputes between member states like the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Spain, arguing EU law takes precedence. The commission says the decision to compensate investors over lost Spanish subsidies is still being studied and “the preliminary view is that the arbitration award would constitute state aid.”
Cherryman, the investors' lawyer, said the EU thinks it "should be superior to international treaty law." After waiting for payment for a decade and given the EU position, his team is trying to seize part of a $1 billion settlement awarded to Spain over a 2002 oil spill.
Starting Wednesday, the London court will hear Spain’s arguments that the investors should not be allowed to seize those assets in lieu of compensation they have yet to be paid.
José Ángel Rueda, a Spanish international arbitration lawyer who has represented several renewable energy investors against Spain, said the country's reputation is at stake. Other EU members like Germany and Hungary have paid out after international disputes, opting to maintain a positive image, he said.
“Spain is not like Russia or Venezuela. It was expected to be a serious country. But the awards remain unpaid,” Rueda said. “Investors can see that Spain might not be a reliable state in terms of the rule of law.”
Following years of legal wrangling, the EU is now considering a coordinated withdrawal from the energy treaty, though that would not affect pending disputes.
“It is not possible to modernize the treaty to make it compatible with the objectives of the Paris agreement and the European Green Deal,” Spain's Ecological Transition Ministry said.
The European Commission agreed, saying a withdrawal was “the most pragmatic way forward.”
That might simply nudge investors to look across the Atlantic, Cherryman said.
“America has been nimble, and it introduced very favorable legislation to encourage renewable investment,” he said. “They will respect my investment. Or I can take risk and go into Europe, go into Spain.”
The risk was the loss of more money for renewables, which are “a win for everybody,” Cherryman said. “We all want to see renewables being invested in and we all want a greener environment that is a safer future for our children."
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Irish government not very green
In its second report on the issue, the environment watchdog found green criteria is missing from 76 per cent of Government contracts worth over €25,000.
And that just 10 per cent of government spending included GPP criterion in 2021.
Read more: Government 'failing miserably' to hit deep retrofit targets, opposition claims
Ireland’s EPA was given the responsibility of measuring and reporting on GPP in the 2019 Climate Action Plan.
The aim was to encourage public authorities to source goods, services or works that have a reduced environmental impact throughout their life cycle compared to goods, services and works with the same primary function that would otherwise be procured.
But the 2021 report suggests that rather than improving, the government has gone backwards as 26 per cent of 2020 contracts reportedly incorporated GPP.
EPA director general, Laura Burke, said: "It is disappointing there has been a low level of implementation of Green Public Procurement in Government Departments in 2021, even lower than that reported in 2020.
"This is a missed opportunity for Government Departments to purchase more resource efficient and less polluting goods, services and works. "The public sector must play a leadership role.
"Green Public Procurement sends a powerful signal to the marketplace that Ireland’s Government sector is committed to reducing emissions and protecting our environment while saving money over the full lifecycle of goods and services."
According to figures provided by the state’s 18 departments, GPP was in just 8 per cent of the 100 contracts handed out by the Department for Agriculture, 2 per cent for foreign affairs and 4 per cent for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth.
Green Party-led departments performed markedly better, with 79 per cent of Environment, Climate and Communications deals including GPP and 1,005 for Transport.
The Department for Rural & Community Development also performed well (97 per cent) under Fine Gael Minister Heather Humphreys.
The EPA also found there was no GPP implementation in the priority sectors of food/catering, heating equipment, textile products/ services and lighting.
https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/government-back-pedalling-green-procurement-29572567
***********************************************Berliners vote down referendum on tighter climate goals
Berlin. The referendum for more ambitious climate goals in Berlin has failed. The state election authority announced on Sunday evening that the required minimum number of yes votes had not been reached.
An alliance "Klimaneustart" wanted to achieve a change in the state energy transition law with this referendum. Specifically, Berlin should commit itself to becoming climate neutral by 2030 and not by 2045 as planned.
After counting the votes, the supporters were slightly ahead of the opponents of such a change in the law. However, this was only one requirement for a successful referendum. The second requirement, an approval rate (quorum) of at least 25 percent of all eligible voters, was not met.
According to the preliminary final result, 442,210 yes votes faced 423,418 no votes. The turnout was 35.8 percent. 50.9 percent of voters voted yes, 48.7 percent no. The quorum for a successful referendum was around 608,000 yes votes.
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EU's energy summit ends in division over Net Zero
The EU may aspire to become a geopolitical superpower, but arguments over energy at a leaders’ summit this weekend suggested it has enough difficulties keeping its internal affairs in order.
The summit was overshadowed by a dispute over the EU’s law to ban sales of new CO2-emitting cars by 2035. The bloc agreed its combustion engine ban last year as the flagship policy of its Green Deal for cutting carbon emissions. Now, countries with significant car manufacturing industries seem to have woken up to the fact that, in the context of such a huge industrial realignment, 12 years isn’t a very long time.
Germany led the dissent, insisting that combustion engine vehicles should still be allowed if they run on synthetic e-fuels, which are deemed to be carbon-neutral because they are made using captured CO2. After weeks of heated debate, Berlin won out, with EU officials promising on Saturday to adjust the combustion engine ban to exempt cars running on e-fuels.
Critics call the debate irrelevant, saying there is no chance of production capacity for e-fuels coming anywhere near making them a viable alternative for the automotive sector. Similar arguments could be made about electric cars, too —
Manufacturers admit that the technology and infrastructure needed to make electric vehicles as cost-effective, reliable and versatile as traditional cars are still lacking, and that they are often only attractive for customers if supported by subsidies and tax breaks.
Such problems might be overcome with sufficient investment. But the dispute over the combustion engine ban has highlighted friction between national economic interests and international moral pressure over climate change.
Another major issue hanging over the EU summit was a new “Net-Zero Industry Act” proposed by the European Commission, which does not include nuclear energy as a “strategic” technology worthy of investment and incentivisation. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen admitted that “nuclear can play a role in our decarbonization effort,” but said “only the Net Zero technologies we deem strategic for the future – like solar panels, batteries and electrolysers – will have access to the full advantages and benefits.”
The EU’s refusal to come to terms with nuclear power is a continued source of frustration for nuclear-dependent France and other countries betting on new developments, such as the Czech Republic and Hungary.
Germany, together with Austria, is again at the centre of this bizarre policymaking, due to long-standing and virulent opposition to nuclear power. This opposition previously contributed to the EU becoming hooked on Russian gas; now, it threatens to scupper development of the most viable clean energy source available.
Such a lack of pragmatism may lead to more unintended consequences. The EU’s Commissioner for the Internal Market claims the energy transformation will make the bloc “an industrial leader that exports its products and technologies – not its jobs”. But ballooning imports from China and an unprecedented trade deficit are ominous signs for the EU’s continued industrial competitiveness.
Growing trepidation among car-manufacturing countries about the ban on combustion engines is just one example of concerns about the future viability of European industry. While the EU paints an idealistic picture of a future in which new high-tech industries export from Europe to the world, a lack of pragmatism in its energy transformation could lead to a much harsher reality.
https://unherd.com/thepost/eus-energy-summit-ends-in-division-over-net-zero/
***************************************29 March, 2023
Honey, Joe Biden Just Shrunk Our Pension
President Biden recently issued his first veto since taking office on January 20, 2021.
Mr. Biden rejected a bipartisan bill that would have required investment fund managers to take politics out of their investment decisions and to stay focused on providing the best return to their clients as much as possible.
Why should you care? Because Mr. Biden was, in effect, saying it was permissible for fund managers, who have control of trillions of dollars in pension accounts, to take into consideration a company’s ESG score (related to how it stands on racial justice, climate change and LGBT issues) when they decide where to invest the money.
Workers and retirees are angry about this decision — as they should be. ESG is effectively a tax on your retirement funds, and it means you will have a smaller nest egg when you retire than if the money managers simply bought the top-performing stocks. Workers don’t want politics diluting the returns on their 401(k) plans and other pension accounts.
Let’s step back a minute. Social investment funds have been around for decades. I’m fine with it. As a matter of conscience, if people want to avoid investing in pro- or anti-abortion causes, divest from products made with child labor or avoid owning any fossil fuel companies, gun manufacturers, plastic companies or firms that don’t have enough transgender bathrooms — it’s a free country. These funds normally underperform the market, but that’s a decision of personal conscience.
I try to be a socially conscientious investor myself. I don’t like the politics of Ben and Jerry’s, for example, so I try not to buy their ice cream. But to be honest, I love their ice cream, so sometimes I give in to temptation. The Left tried to stage boycotts against Chick-fil-A because of some of the owner’s social policy views, but the chicken sandwiches are so popular that the crusade failed miserably.
This new fad of ESG investing is entirely different and more nefarious. ESG stands for environmental and social justice governance. The idea is to promote racial equality, save the planet from climate change, and advance gay rights and a whole host of other related trendy and mostly left-wing causes.
ESG investing is perfectly appropriate when the investors are making their own decisions with their own money on where and what to invest in. But the scandal arises when fund managers that make investment decisions with other people’s savings, or pension plans start injecting their own political biases into the investment portfolios and choose company stocks they should or shouldn’t buy.
Fund managers, such as Fidelity and Blackrock, that pool their clients’ investment dollars and pick (hopefully) high-performing stocks have what is called a fiduciary duty. They are legally required to get the best return they can. Their duty is not to save the planet.
Biden said in his veto message that ESG is good for investors and offers high returns to workers and pensioners. Wrong.
A recent analysis by Bloomberg found that last year, ESG funds severely underperformed the market — in some cases by well more than 10 percent. Many ESG funds were divested from oil and gas companies, even though Exxon, Conoco Phillips and others were among the highest-return stocks.
In other words, if you bought the stocks that ESG funds sold, and sold the stocks that ESG funds bought, you’d have made a lot of money in recent years. And by the way, given that more than 70 percent of our energy now comes from fossil fuels, how does it advance our well-being as a nation by closing these energy sources down?
Another study by Boston College professors in retirement policy examined the performance of ESG funds and found “the average annualized return for those with a state ESG mandate would be 20 basis points lower than for those without a mandate.”
My estimate is that ESG has cost the public billions of dollars of reduced returns on their retirement nest eggs. This comes atop the $30,000 or so that people have lost on average in their 401(k) plans after Biden came into office, and the combination of high inflation and lousy stock market returns overall.
The good news is that more than a dozen Republican governors are fighting back to protect pensions from “political influences.” They are telling fund managers in their states that ESG is a violation of their duty to workers whose money has been placed in their trust. ESG should only be allowed with the explicit approval of the investor.
In other words, politicians and community activists aren’t very good stock pickers. So keep your grubby hands off our pensions.
https://www.nysun.com/article/honey-joe-biden-just-shrunk-our-pension
******************************************************John Kerry's Defense of Climate Change Activists' Private Jet Use Is Beyond Comical
John Kerry is mailing it in right now. This green warrior envoy gig is the last post he’ll hold in public life, and it shows. The man is saying the quiet part out loud about new environmental policies and an absolute lack of caring regarding perception when he drops remarks that make these folks like total hypocrites. They don’t care because they’re the political class—wealthy, entitled, and damn near untouchable. It’s been a years-long swipe at this activist class who whine, moan, and scream about carbon emissions but then utilize a fleet of private jets for traveling to elite gatherings, like Davos, to ironically discuss the end of the world via global warming.
When asked about this, Kerry took a zero-care approach, saying these folks’ private jet use “offsets” because they’re on the right side of the issue and doing good work or something. In other words, we can take private jets because we’re not in the oil and gas industry and believe in green energy. It’s a laughable pivot that again exposes this administration's lack of serious people.
‘We can do it, but you can’t’ is a grade school talking point. Never mind how the Democrats’ environmental agenda is tantamount to regional genocide, where numerous coal-mining communities have been irreparably crippled under the Obama administration. Gas stoves are next to be outlawed, and that is a policy initiative that will come in waves at the state and local levels. Democrats know they don’t have the votes for a federal ban, so the orders were given to like-minded governors, city councils, and state legislatures to carry out Order 66.
And please, stop talking about job retraining. A working man in his 50s or 60s cannot learn a new task that coastal elitists think is easily transferable; these people cannot become code writers or aces in tech. Even the late Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO knew this was a Trojan Horse position, seeing it was a miserable failure when NAFTA was being debated.
Of course, liberal America has a graduated scale on what is permissible regarding shamelessness and hypocrisy based on the issue and whether they’re on the right side. The more left-wing you are, the more you can be an insufferable sanctimonious clown. Ketchup man is just a byproduct of his politics and his party. It’s not a shocking revelation, but this defense of private jets is as weak as his 2004 presidential run. It’s almost as bad as the ‘they’re not supposed to do that’ when pressed about Iran using funds that were once frozen to subsidize their terrorist operations post-Iran nuclear deal.
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Italy looks to slow green transition drive to shield local firms
In power for just five months, Italy's right-wing government is pushing back on an array of initiatives aimed at greening the economy, arguing that local business can ill-afford previously agreed transition goals.
Since the start of the year, Italy has demanded that the European Union water down a directive aimed at improving the energy efficiency of buildings, re-write plans to phase out combustion engine cars and questioned a drive to slash industrial emissions.
Last week it unexpectedly reneged on a 2021 pledge to stop financing international fossil fuel projects, arguing that the energy crisis sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine meant the government had to be more cautious with its objectives.
"The problem is that we cannot help the environment by destroying our industries," Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni told reporters on Friday at the end of an European Union summit in Brussels.
"The road to a green economy must be socially and economically sustainable," she said.
Climate activists have denounced the erosion of green ambitions and warned that the backtracking in Italy could persuade other nations to follow suit.
"It is shocking," said Simone Ogno, a campaigner with the Italian environmental group ReCommon. "The government is using the recent energy crisis to justify everything, but we are talking here about the future of the planet."
Italy's reticence to sign up to green directives has also annoyed the European Commission, which has warned that Italian industry will end up losing out if it does not lead the drive in developing new, climate-friendly technologies.
"The transition is (aleady) here. You have to work on how to make it feasible and gain leadership in this process," said Paolo Gentiloni, the European Economic Commissioner and a former centre-left Italian prime minister.
"You don't have to be the last wagon in the train trying to hold the others back," he told an audience in Milan last week.
While Italy is still in discussion with the European Union about the fate of a number of green directives, it unilaterally walked away from a pledge made at the 2021 Cop26 summit in Glasgow to turn off the funding taps for foreign fossil fuel projects by the end of last year.
The country's export credit agency SACE said in a statement that it would continue to support oil distribution projects until January 2028, and oil storage and refining programmes until January 2024.
It declined to set any timetable to withhold funding for gas projects in these three areas.
"The Italian Climate Policy takes into account both climate objectives ... as well as the current energy crisis," SACE said, adding that further investments maybe needed "to diversify sources of supply, in particular in relation to gas".
The U-turn was announced just two days after the United Nations urged wealthy nations to slash emissions sooner than planned after a new assessment from scientists said there was no time to lose in tackling climate change.
Prior to the 2022 war in Ukraine, Italy imported 40% of its gas from Russia. Over the past year it has sourced alternative supplies from other nations, including Algeria, and is looking to become a major energy hub in its own right, carrying gas from North Africa and Mediterranean to the rest of Europe.
Critics say this will take a massive investment in new infrastructure and warn that by the time the pipelines are operational, the gas would no longer be wanted because of European caps on fossil fuels.
The European Union has among the most ambitious climate change policies of major emitters, having committed to cut its net greenhouse gas emissions 55% by 2030, from 1990 levels, and eliminate them altogether by 2050.
Luca Bergamaschi, co-founder and executive director of the Italian climate change thinktank ECCO, said the risk was that Rome would invest heavily in old technologies and fail to build the sort of industrial network needed to take advantage of the ecological transition in areas such as batteries.
"The government is trying to protect things for a short while, but this is ultimately destructive because it is not creating anything new," he said.
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Wind farms can simply ignore agreed contracts and cash in big time, FOI reveals
Net Zero Watch has accused the wind industry and the government of colluding to mislead the public about the true cost of wind energy.
The Government has repeatedly assured us that energy bills would soon fall as a result of much lower prices for offshore wind power, set at recent Contracts for Difference (CfD) auctions.
However, a new Freedom of Information (FOI) request to the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (now Department for Energy Security and Net Zero) and the Low Carbon Contracts Company (LCCC) has revealed that offshore wind farms and other generators are under no obligation whatsoever to take up their CfD options.
What is more, the Government has no power to either enforce them or impose penalties on those who don’t.
It is therefore almost certain that wind farm operators will simply not trigger their contracts. Instead, they are sell electricity on the open market at much higher prices, as two offshore wind farms are already doing. They are selling electricity at prices nearly double than they agreed in their contracts.
A series of research papers published by Net Zero Watch and others has shown that the true costs of offshore wind power are much higher than claimed, and that the low prices contracted at recent CfD auctions are simply nonviable.
Net Zero Watch is calling on the Government to impose a 100% windfall tax on all generators who refuse to honour their contracts.
Climate and energy analyst, Paul Homewood, said: "The Contracts for Difference scheme has been badly designed since the outset, and has already cost energy users £5.7 billion. For offshore wind farms, it is Heads I win, Tails you lose."
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28 March, 2023
Famine Risk as Supplies of Vital Fertilizer Dwindle, Scientists Warn
This is sad old rubbish. There are phosphate mines worldwide including huge deposits in North Africa and China. And even Saudi Arabia is sitting on 1.4 billion MT of it. It is not going to run out
Scientists are warning that we’re running out of phosphate, a key fertilizer for the crops that feed earth’s eight billion people. This raises the danger of famine unless agriculture innovates new ways of prompting exhausted soil to bring forth its bounty.
“We have reached a critical turning point,” a professor of Soil and Water Science at the U.K.’s Lancaster University, Philip Haygarth, tells the Guardian. “We might be able to turn back but we have really got to pull ourselves together and be an awful lot smarter in the way we use phosphorus.”
Fail, Mr. Haygarth warns, and “we face a calamity that we have termed ‘phosphogeddon.’” The warning echoes those of the visionary writer, Isaac Asimov. “Life can multiply until all the phosphorus is gone,” he said, “and then there is an inexorable halt which nothing can prevent.”
“No farmers, no food,” reads a popular bumper sticker in America’s breadbasket, pushing back against the perception that produce and meat spring by spontaneous generation on supermarket shelves. Lost in the messaging is the role of phosphorus, sometimes called “the oil of our time.”
“In a few years,” a senior research scientist at Rothamsted Research, Dr. Martin Blackwell, said back in 2019, “it could be a political issue with some countries effectively controlling the production of food by having control of rock phosphate supplies.”
Low prices have led to using it as if there’s no end in sight, causing problems such as runoff leading to algae blooms and poisoning reservoirs, a subject at the UN’s first water conference in 42 years held last week.
Hennig Brand is credited with identifying phosphorus in 1669, and humanity has spent the ensuing centuries studying how to harness its many properties, with 13 scientists earning Nobel Prizes for their work in the field.
Industrial mining of phosphorus-rich guano, or bird excrement, began in the mid-1800s, and the resource became so precious that in his 1850 State of the Union message, President Fillmore pledged “Nothing will be omitted on my part” to secure America’s supply.
“Peruvian guano has become so desirable an article to the agricultural interest of the United States,” Fillmore said, “that it is the duty of the government to employ all the means properly in its power for the purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price.”
Today, America “mines and consumes about 23 million tons of phosphate rock per year,” according to the EPA, whittling known domestic reserves down by 99 percent. “At current rates of use,” Dr. Blackwell said, “a lot of countries are set to run out of their domestic supply in the next generation.”
Those countries at risk include America, Communist China, and India. Together, Morocco, Communist China, Algeria, and Syria, sit on over 80 percent of rock phosphate. The national security threat of this may not be as obvious as others, but it’s just as real.
In his new book, “The Devil’s Element: Phosphorus and a World Out of Balance,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist, Daniel Egan, “explores the alarming reality that diminishing access to phosphorus poses a threat to the food system worldwide — which risks rising conflict and even war.”
Two centuries ago, the Guano Wars raged in South America. Spain and Peru fought over deposits in 1864, while Bolivia, Chile, and Peru spilled blood over bird droppings in 1879. So insatiable is humanity’s appetite that even the taboo of grave robbing proved no obstacle.
The director of the Center for Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, Tony Pollard, cites reports of bones from the Battle of Waterloo being ground into fertilizer.
“The benefits of implementing measures to improve phosphorus sustainability will be observed mostly at local to national scales,” says a report by the Our Phosphorus Future project. Citing input by over 100 scientists, they warn “any delay will only accrue further impacts and societal costs.”
America may soon face a day when an updated agriculture slogan emerges, one reading, “No phosphate, no farmers, no food,” but with dead soil and Dust Bowl-style famine facing millions, we won’t need a bumper sticker to tell us that phosphogeddon has arrived.
https://www.nysun.com/article/famine-risk-as-supplies-of-vital-fertilizer-dwindle-scientists-warn
******************************************************Electric Vehicles Are Scrapped Over Only Minor Damage
Insurers are being forced to write off many electric vehicles with only minor damage to battery packs, sending the batteries to scrap yards and hindering the climate benefits of going electric, Reuters reported.
Battery packs typically represent roughly half the cost of an electric vehicle, sometimes costing tens of thousands of dollars, often making it more economical for insurers to consider a car as totaled than replace a battery pack, according to Reuters. While many carmakers, including Ford and GM, told Reuters that their battery packs were repairable, many are unwilling to share key data with third-party insurers to help assess damage.
“The number of cases is going to increase, so the handling of batteries is a crucial point,” Christoph Lauterwasser, managing director of the research institute Allianz Center for Technology, told Reuters. “If you throw away the vehicle at an early stage, you’ve lost pretty much all advantage in terms of [carbon dioxide] emissions.”
Allianz, an insurance firm and parent company of Allianz Center for Technology, has seen cases where battery packs were scratched, and likely had undamaged internals, but a lack of access to diagnostic data forced the company to write off the vehicles, Reuters reported. Producing electric vehicle batteries emits much more in terms of carbon dioxide emissions than producing a gas-powered car, in some cases requiring an electric car to rack up more than 10,000 miles before it makes up for the additional emissions in production, according to a Reuters estimate.
It cost roughly $206 per month on average to insure an electric vehicle in 2023, 27% more than gas-powered cars, Reuters reported, citing online brokerage Policygenius. Without access to diagnostic data, it is likely that insurance costs will climb as more electric vehicles are sold and low-mileage cars are scrapped.
Electric vehicle and battery production are both expected to climb dramatically by 2026, off the back of more than $120 billion in investments, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. Annual production of electric vehicles is projected to climb from roughly 1 million per year in 2023 to 4.3 million in 2026, while annual battery production is expected to climb from 2.4 million per year in 2023 to 11.5 million per year in 2026.
President Joe Biden has made electric vehicle tax credits, from his signature Inflation Reduction Act, a cornerstone of his domestic policy. While Biden’s plan was initially forecast to cost roughly $30 billion in tax breaks over the next 10 years, the surge of domestic investments has caused private analysts to reevaluate the cost of the tax breaks to more than $136 billion.
https://climaterealism.com/2023/03/electric-vehicles-are-scrapped-over-only-minor-damage/
*******************************************Biden’s Latest Fuel Proposal Promises To Drive Gasoline Prices Higher
Instead of encouraging more supply, the administration keeps poisoning the atmosphere for investment in traditional fuels.
The SEC’s and the EPA’s moves will depress investment, continuing a pattern of lowering America’s refining capacity.
The path forward is clear: The EPA should scrap this eRIN proposal for the good of America’s producers and consumers, as well as our national security.
Gasoline prices remain stubbornly high—above $3.35 a gallon nationwide on average—and will likely go higher when the summer driving season arrives. Yet rather than take steps to help, the Biden administration has blamed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the oil companies, badgering them to produce more.
As any Econ 101 student knows, gas prices are determined by supply and demand. Instead of encouraging more supply, though, the administration keeps poisoning the atmosphere for investment in traditional fuels.
In the latest example, the Environmental Protection Agency has just proposed a change to the Renewable Fuel Standard that will once again push supplies of fuel lower and make it more expensive. The EPA is creating a new way to comply with RFS by allowing auto companies to generate “eRINs” they will sell to oil refiners. This should be raising alarm bells in every agricultural and oil-producing state and at every gas pump in the country.
Right now, oil refiners have to obtain and submit renewable identification numbers, or RINs, at the end of every year to prove that they’ve blended sufficient biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel into petroleum fuels. The birth of the modern RFS in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 used this tool to diversify America’s fuel—blending American-produced ethanol from American-grown corn.
The EPA’s proposal, however, opens the door for the RFS to be dominated by EVs—taking money from gasoline and diesel customers and sending it to auto companies that make EVs. Such a transformation will further hamstring producers of our transportation fuels (farmers, blenders and refiners), hit consumers with higher costs, and endanger our national security by making us more dependent on China, which dominates the EV supply chain.
One can immediately see the problem. Farmers and biofuel makers have invested billions of dollars to build plants, terminals and trucks to blend ethanol, biodiesel and renewable diesel. These U.S.-produced fuels will be drastically reduced—if not altogether eliminated—in an all-electric future.
A study by the Agricultural Retailers of America showed EVs could cost farmers $27 billion in income in just 2050 alone and reduce biofuels by 60% (biodiesel) to 90% (ethanol). In the interim, investments will flow from traditional fuels and biofuels to EVs. That would be fine if it were driven by consumer demand. But this is happening only because of government policy.
Refiners, too, are facing higher costs and lower demand thanks to eRINs. EV mandates of 50% to 100% electric cars and enormous subsidies like those in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act cast a huge shadow on the investment climate for refining. Those effects are exacerbated by a new climate disclosure rule from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the progressive push for environmental, social and governance considerations.
President Biden scolded refining companies to “work with my administration to bring forward concrete, near-term solutions that address the crisis.” He’s essentially looking for companies to row upstream against a current he’s accelerating. The SEC’s and the EPA’s moves will depress investment, continuing a pattern of lowering America’s refining capacity, which has lost about a million barrels a day in the last two years after having risen nearly every year since 1994. Less refining capacity means lower supply, which means higher prices.
That leads to the second major group that will suffer because of eRINs: consumers. Undoubtedly, consumers will pay more for gasoline as the newly limited supply struggles to keep up with demand. They’ll also pay more to help cover the refiners’ eRIN costs. Worse, customers will be paying more for their gas-powered cars in addition to their fuel.
Automakers have to cross-subsidize EVs by charging more for traditional cars to cover the cost of EVs. This and previous administrations have acknowledged that aggressive fuel economy standards and zero-emission-vehicle mandate cost consumers thousands at the showroom. eRIN revenue could help automakers a little, but it’s not nearly enough to close the gap, which some companies have said approaches $14,000 per vehicle. Unfortunately, the ultimate beneficiary of the forced switch to EVs is going to be China, which dominates the EV supply chain.
That brings up the third harm from this eRIN proposal: Instead of increasing American energy security—the stated purpose of the RFS—this proposal encourages automakers to make cars with Chinese batteries (about 75% of worldwide battery production) or with Chinese-mined or Chinese-processed minerals (more than half the world’s processing of lithium, cobalt and graphite). It is unclear whether the United States can open mining and processing inside its borders: Right now, there is only one lithium mine in the United States, and it accounts for less than 2% of the global supply.
At a time when the United States has become a major exporter of liquid fuels—an unthinkable dream for every president from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama — we are about to throw it all away and put all our transportation eggs in a basket made in China.
The path forward is clear: The EPA should scrap this eRIN proposal for the good of America’s producers and consumers, as well as our national security. If the agency doesn’t, Congress must stop it.
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Big Australian coal-fired generator saved from closure
There's a lot of persiflage below but there is a committment not to close Eraring until replacement generation is available. That may never happen. The idea that batteries could help is a laugh. A battery will only last hours and then be useless
The soon-to-be owner of Origin Energy will hold talks with incoming NSW premier Chris Minns on the future of Australia’s biggest coal plant, Eraring, as pressure grows to keep the station running longer than 2025 amid fears of blackouts.
“What’s most important to us is that it is closed down as soon as it possibly can be. So within that context we’re obviously happy to have a conversation with the government and hear what they have to say,” Brookfield Australian boss Stewart Upson said.
“But it will be important to us that whatever happens the result of our investment here is that Eraring can be closed down as soon as it can be done so in a responsible manner.”
The takeover deal includes a plan for Brookfield to invest an extra $20bn in Origin through to 2030 to build up to 14 gigawatts of new renewable generation and storage facilities in Australia.
Before the Brookfield approach Origin had given notice that it intended to close the 2880-megawatt Eraring power plant in the Hunter Valley in August 2025.
Mr Minns has said his view is to seek talks to keep the nation’s biggest coal-fired generator open past the scheduled closure date.
Mr Upson told The Australian the August 2025 date “is not a required closure date”. Any closure would also ensure there is alternative supply in place, he added.
“It’s not a commitment by Origin to close on that date, it’s the earliest possible date, it can close.
“Both Origin (now) and under our new ownership – are focused on closing Eraring as soon as we possibly can, only if we can only in a way that’s responsible and doesn’t have an impact on consumers or supply in the market.”
“That’s about ensuring that we have the replacement capacity in place before we close it down, which is something Origin has already been working on with its battery project and something we will be working on as fast as we can,” Mr Upson said.
He said he welcomes talks with the incoming NSW Premier.
“They are a very important stakeholder and I think it’s going to be important that we work closely together to ensure that the transition happens in a way that doesn’t have a negative impact on consumers, business or the economy in general,” he said.
The comments by Mr Upson shows the infrastructure giant is prepared to play the long game on politics as it prepares to take control of one Australia’s most important power generators.
Mr Upson still has some way to go to win Origin, but he has got past the biggest hurdle – securing binding scheme agreement on the $18.7bn mega power deal.
The proposal still needs to get approvals from competition and foreign investment regulators and Orgin’s shareholders are yet to vote on the deal, although it has been endorsed by the board.
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27 March, 2023
AGAIN! At least once a year we get a claim that global warming is endangering coffee production. Same old, same old. And it never happens. Coffee beans are very widely grown throughout the world so a crop failure in one place is only one part of the world's productive output. Prices rise and fall but that is it
Roast Magazine’s Daily Coffee News rans a story claiming climate change was causing “ongoing systemic shocks,” harming coffee production by creating more simultaneous extreme weather events across different growing regions. This is false. Data refutes claims that extreme weather events are increasing in number, intensity, or frequency. Also, coffee production is increasing amid modest warming.
According to the Roast Magazine story, titled “Study: Climate Change Increasing ‘Systemic Shocks’ to Coffee Production:”
The global coffee industry can expect increasing and “ongoing systemic shocks” to coffee production due to climate change, according to new research published this month in the journal PLOS Climate.
The research, which was funded by the Australia’s national Climate Service agency, says that there has been a been a notable increase in “synchronous climate hazards” among the world’s 12 largest coffee-growing countries over the 40 years ending in 2020. In other words, more coffee-producing areas are being negatively affected by climate change at the same time.
The study takes particular note of the El Niño, the La Niña and the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) climate phenomena effecting global tropical regions throughout the coffee-growing world.
There are so many false or mistaken claims packed into these three introductory paragraphs its hard to know where to begin to refute them. Starting with the last paragraph first. El Niño, the La Niña and the Madden–Julian oscillation are large scale natural oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns and they do effect climate on regional and trans- and multicontinental scales. However, contrary to the implication of the paragraph and evidently the study it references, those patterns drive weather events. Climate models are unable to account for the impacts of these patterns on climate change.
Data neither show, nor does the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, any significant changes in these large-scale natural circulation patterns that can be linked to climate change. There is no evidence whatsoever that climate change is altering these natural patterns; either making their impacts more severe or the circulation patterns themselves more persistent or erratic. Whatever effect El Niño, the La Niña and the Madden–Julian oscillation, or other large scale short- and long-term natural oceanic and atmospheric patterns, might be having on coffee production, they have always had such effects—there is no evidence this has changed.
Just as there has been no detectable change in various periodic oceanic and atmospheric patterns that are drivers of weather, there has also been no increase in the number or severity of various extreme weather events which effect coffee growing regions, as well as the rest of the world. As discussed at Climate at a Glance, data does not show droughts, floods, hurricanes, or other classifications of extreme weather events that might negatively effect coffee production are increasing in number or severity globally. And higher carbon dioxide concentrations and the decline in unseasonable cold spells have benefited coffee production, as they have almost every other crop.
Which leads us to the most important claim made in the paper. Because oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns aren’t changing, and weather isn’t becoming more extreme in any way that has been measured, is it impossible for these factors to be causing a decline in coffee production. Indeed, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that it is not.
“The occurrence of these spatially compounding events has become particularly acute over the past decade, with five of the six most hazardous years occurring since 2010,” say the authors of the study cited as evidence of a pending coffee apocalypse in Roast Magazine. Such struggles are not evident in the production data recorded by the FAO.
FAO data show that coffee yields set new production records seven times since 2010, most recently in 2020. And at no time after 2010 did coffee yields fall below yields recorded before 2010. Indeed, from 1990 to 2021, the last year for which data is currently available, during the recent period of climate change, coffee yields increased by nearly 56 percent.
What’s true of coffee yields is also true of coffee production. Even as a growing number of coffee producers have begun growing boutique coffee varieties using only organic methods, which have reduced yields on those plantations, coffee production overall has grown substantially. Once again, the data show that rather than the period since 2010 being one of hard times for coffee producers, production has set records regularly. Between 2010 and 2021, coffee set records for production five times, and coffee production has grown by nearly 17 percent during that period. Over the term which climate change is measured, 30 years, coffee production has increased approximately 64 percent.
To sum up: Roast Magazine claimed climate change was altering large scale oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns, which was causing an increase in the number and severity of simultaneous extreme weather events, allegedly threatening coffee production worldwide. Each of these claims is refuted by hard evidence. Perhaps going forward, rather than uncritically parroting the alarming findings from the most recent, but untested, study asserting climate change threatens a serious coffee decline, the reporters at Roast Magazine will look into the data and ask some hard questions to determine whether setting off the climate alarm is justified. If they do so, they will likely find they can sit back, relax, and enjoy their next cup of Joe, unburdened by fears that this enjoyable daily ritual will soon pass.
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Greta Thunberg Sees a Great Capitalist Conspiracy Against the Climate
She and her supportres have always said that capitalism is their real enemy. They understand nothing. All they have is hatreds and self-righteousness. Self-confident ignorance is a very dangerous thing
Greta Thunberg became famous for calling on us to “panic” in the face of climate change. Unfortunately, she did not offer much specific advice on how to solve the problem.
According to Thunberg, the underlying problems are industrialization and capitalism. "The Industrial Revolution, fueled by slavery and colonization, brought unimaginable wealth to the Global North, and in particular to a small group of people there," she writes in "The Climate Book."
"That extreme injustice is the foundation our modern societies are built on," she adds.
But the number of people has increased eightfold from one to eight billion since the beginning of industrialization. Without industrialization, billions of people would have had no chance of survival. It is also not true that capitalism only improved life for a small minority. In 1820, the proportion of people living in extreme poverty around the world was 90 percent; today it is 9 percent.
The book is laced with harsh criticism of capitalism. Running to almost 500 pages, there are only two sentences in which Thunberg admits that other systems also destroy the environment: “Leaving capitalist consumerism and market economics as the dominant stewards of the only known civilization in the universe will most likely seem, in retrospect, to have been a terrible idea. But let us keep in mind that when it comes to sustainability, all previous systems have failed too. Just like all current political ideologies – socialism, liberalism, communism, conservatism, centrism, you name it. They have all failed. But, in fairness, some have certainly failed more than others.”
She does not reveal which systems have failed more than others – she limits her denunciations to capitalism. And yet, environmental destruction in socialist countries was incomparably worse than in capitalist countries.
Thunberg sees a great capitalist conspiracy against the climate. She blames policymakers who are “still in thrall to Big Oil and Big Finance.” The media have failed, even though she admits that “journalism is starting to take its first baby steps towards covering this crisis.” She would only be satisfied if the media were full of nothing but stories about climate change: “This should of course be dominating every hour of our everyday newsfeed, every political discussion, every business meeting and every inch of our daily lives. But that is not what is happening.”
Wearily, she notes that many journalists unfortunately did not go into journalism to “uproot a system they believe in.” The fact that the population of a country is constantly bombarded with certain news is something more frequently associated with totalitarian states.
Thunberg regrets that there are “no laws or restrictions in place that will force anyone to take the necessary steps towards safeguarding our future living conditions on planet Earth.” The world, she writes, is run by “white, privileged, middle-aged, straight cis-men,” and these are “terribly ill suited” for dealing with the crisis. Instead, co-author Sonja Guajajara suggests, we need “indigenous women at the heart of the struggle to guarantee a future for humankind. For in many original communities, it falls to us, indigenous women, to manage and preserve our ecosystems and to preserve our knowledge through memory and custom.”
Thunberg devotes a quarter of a single page to nuclear power – summarily rejecting it as a solution. Technologies to extract CO2 from the air are dismissed as “a joke,” while solar geoengineering is dismissed because it meets with “fierce resistance from indigenous peoples.” Electric vehicles, the book states, are not a viable solution because they “may well be an option only for the powerful and wealthy.”
The state, according to Kevin Andersen, should determine for everyone “the size (and number) of our houses; how often we fly and in which class; how big and how many cars we have and how far we drive them. Even at work, how large is our offices, how many foreign meetings and international conferences do we attend and how frequent are our field trips.”
Thunberg herself complains that there are “still no laws to keep the oil in the ground.” Kate Raworth thinks the state should phase out “private jets, mega-yachts, fossil-fueled cars, short flights and frequent flyer rewards.” Seth Klein calls for “a new generation of public corporations” to produce the right things at the requisite scale. Moreover, he laments, “Where is the government advertising to boost the level of public ‘climate literacy’?” The Canadian anti-capitalist Naomi Klein wants to increase taxes on the rich and reduce spending on policing and prisons in order to fund the fight against climate change. The French critic of capitalism Thomas Piketty calls for the introduction of “individual carbon rights.” For the sake of social justice, he argues, it should be considered to set “equal individual carbon quotas” by the authorities.
Ultimately, it all boils down to abolishing capitalism and replacing it with an eco-planned economy.
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Challenging the NSTA’s Position Statement on Climate Change
The CO2 Coalition has reviewed the National Science Teaching Association’s Position Statement on Climate Change and has found that it has serious problems, which we address in this assessment. Our detailed rebuttal, Challenging the NSTA’s Position Statement on Climate Change, was published March 23, 2023.
Our objections to this document are many but can be separated into two major categories:
* Reliance on “consensus” science and a rejection of critical thinking skills and the scientific method.
* NSTA’s embrace of the hypothesis of “harmful man-made warming” despite its basis in flawed science and government opinions and its rejection of all contradictory science.
A primary role for the NSTA should be to develop critical thinking skills for students and to instill in them knowledge and use of the scientific method. Students should be encouraged to review all facts on a subject (in this case climate change) and make up their own minds rather than be indoctrinated into an established political agenda.
Unfortunately, the NSTA has taken a strong position that is antithetical to the scientific method, critical thinking and open scientific debate. Its position is one of censorship of any scientist or science that does not support the NSTA-approved “science.” The NSTA Position Statement on Climate Change fails to delineate between real science and political science.
Background
In early 2021, a group of CO2 Coalition members decided to act on their concerns about the state of science education in America. They recognized that the teaching of science had strayed from the 400-plus-year-old scientific method and was less inclined to encourage inquisitiveness in students and more prone to require conformity to the opinions of teachers. At present, much of the instruction on climate
change resembles an indoctrination into a political agenda rather than the provision of necessary tools for critical thinking.
It is our knowledge of science and commitment to the scientific method – not political narratives – that make the CO2 Coalition uniquely qualified to lead in the development of a fact-based program of climate-science education.
https://co2coalition.org/publications/challenging-the-nsta-position-on-climate-change/
************************************************Energy prices have continued to rise under President Joe Biden’s radical energy and climate agenda
In 2021, household electricity prices rose 8 percent. Electricity price increases accelerated even more in 2022, and have now risen 17 percent since December 2020, the last month before Biden took office. Even with substantial 2021 price increases for all major energy sources, the price for each major energy source ended 2022 even higher than its 2021 closing price.
During the past two years, overall electricity prices rose 17 percent, industrial energy prices increased by 34 percent, home heating oil prices rose an incredible 88 percent,3 conventional oil prices rose by 61 percent, natural gas prices for residential consumers increased by 51 percent, and gasoline prices had risen $1.15 per gallon by the end of 2022.6
Average Household Paid $2,300 More in Additional Direct Energy Costs After two years of Biden’s energy policies, the average U.S. driver spent at least an extra $650 per year in higher gasoline costs, and $231 in higher electricity costs over the past two years.
Households that use natural gas spent an extra $780 over the past two years, on average, and those using home heating oil paid a whopping $1,725 extra. Since Biden entered the Oval Office, the average American household has suffered under the burden of approximately $2,300 in higher direct energy costs.
Additionally, these higher energy prices have been baked into the costs for all goods and services, especially food prices, and substantially contributes to inflation. With those costs in mind, it’s clear the Biden administration’s energy and climate policies have cost the average U.S. household—directly or indirectly—much more than $2,300.
Rapidly rising energy prices are no accident. They are the predictable result of Joe Biden’s war on affordable and reliable energy. The Biden administration has implemented dozens of policies since he took office that have increased energy costs. In 2022 alone, Biden pushed the following policies:
Slow walking oil and gas leasing plans, missing legal deadlines by months Threatening new windfall taxes on oil companies Issuing the lowest number of energy production leases since the 1940s Repeatedly canceling legally required oil and gas lease sales Passing the first direct federal tax on methane emissions Doubling rental fees on onshore leases Increasing and introducing new fees associated with leasing Increasing onshore royalty rates by about 36 percent Reinstating the Hazardous Substance Superfund Financing Rate on crude oil and imported petroleum
The onslaught of policies that undermine U.S. energy independence shows no sign of abating anytime soon. For example, in March 2023, President Biden banned oil and gas production on millions of acres of federal land and on the U.S. outer-continental shelf.
https://heartland.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Biden-Energy-Policies.pdf
***************************************26 March, 2023
Climate Homicide: Prosecuting Big Oil For Climate Deaths Harvard Environmental Law Review, Vol. 48, No. 1, 2024
This could be brilliant. A complete defence would be to show there is NO dangerous climate change. And a court of law would have to consider the evidence on that. And the evidence tracing deaths to climate change is non-existent. It's all just theory. So a ruling on this could put the whole climate change myth to bed. Bring it on!
Abstract
Prosecutors regularly bring homicide charges against individuals and corporations whose reckless or negligent acts or omissions cause unintentional deaths, as well as those whose misdemeanors or felonies cause unintentional deaths. Fossil fuel companies learned decades ago that what they produced, marketed, and sold would generate “globally catastrophic” climate change. Rather than alert the public and curtail their operations, they worked to deceive the public about these harms and to prevent regulation of their lethal conduct. They funded efforts to call sound science into doubt and to confuse their shareholders, consumers, and regulators. And they poured money into political campaigns to elect or install judges, legislators, and executive officials hostile to any litigation, regulation, or competition that might limit their profits.
Today, the climate change that they forecast has already killed thousands of people in the United States, and it is expected to become increasingly lethal for the foreseeable future. Given the extreme lethality of the conduct and the awareness of the catastrophic risk on the part of fossil fuel companies, should they be charged with homicide? Could they be convicted? In answering these questions, this Article makes several contributions to our understanding of criminal law and the role it could play in combating crimes committed at a massive scale. It describes the doctrinal and social predicates of homicide prosecutions where corporate conduct endangers much or all of the public. It also identifies important advantages of homicide prosecutions relative to civil and regulatory remedies, and it details how and why prosecution for homicide may be the most effective legal remedy available in cases like this. Finally, it argues that, if our criminal legal system cannot focus more intently on climate crimes—and soon—we may leave future generations with significantly less for the law to protect.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4335779#
******************************************‘Climate Change’ Now Top Priority for US Navy
With both China and Russia restive, this is a huge failure. Both Russia and China have substantial navies and they now seem to be in alliance
In a stunning, but not altogether surprising statement, America’s top Navy official declared that “fighting climate change” is a “top priority” for the U.S. Navy. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro announced this last week not at the Pentagon or the U.S. Naval Academy, but at a conference in the Bahamas.
It is likely that Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting this week in Moscow to discuss closer military cooperation, shared a high five on hearing the Navy Secretary’s declaration.
Del Toro’s admission that strengthening America’s dwindling fleet of naval ships is no higher a priority than is “embracing climate-focused technologies” was not totally unexpected.
Since taking office two years ago, President Biden repeatedly has stated that “fighting climate change” is and will remain his top national security priority. This was made crystal clear in an October 2021 presidential “Fact Sheet” directed to our nation’s military, foreign policy, and national intelligence leaders.
Rather than resist such a priority directive, the Navy Secretary joined other top Defense officials and saluted their Commander-in-Chief’s warped policy decision; one that will further weaken our country’s defenses. Making matters worse, Biden’s latest defense budget submission to the Congress proposes a 40 percent increase in “climate spending” and a net decrease in the number of operational ships in our Navy’s fleet, continuing a troubling trend highlighted in the Administration’s FY 2023 budget proposal.
Such cuts reflect what one military expert refers to as “seablindness” — a short-sighted policy accounting for America’s shrinking dominance of the world’s oceans, a strength on which we and the entire Free World have relied since World War II.
In an insightful analysis just published in The Atlantic (“The Age of American Naval Dominance Is Over”), former Navy officer Jerry Hendrix chronicles the many shortcomings in our country’s civilian and naval shipbuilding capabilities, even as Russia and China aggressively continue to expand theirs.
In one striking example, Hendrix notes that Russia maintains a robust fleet of Arctic ships and has been moving in the direction of unilaterally declaring parts of the Arctic Ocean within its territorial waters, while the U.S. “has not built an Arctic-rated surface warship since the 1950s.”
Also questionable is our capability to quickly or timely build needed ships, considering the small number of U.S. shipyards capable of constructing such massive and complex vessels (as Hendrix notes, there remain only one dozen such “graving docks” certified to build or work on Navy ships).
Elsewhere, China has embarked on a massive, multi-year expansion of its Navy and is asserting claims to large swaths of the East and South China Seas.
Currently, neither of our two adversaries’ navies come near to matching our overall naval capabilities, especially when it comes to our premier warship the aircraft carrier. But our failure to expand, much less retain, a commitment to domestic maritime and naval shipbuilding, has created a long-term weakness in being able to protect oceanic trade routes on which we and almost all other nations increasingly rely.
Budget cuts by the current and prior administrations of both political parties, especially the Clinton administration, purposefully reduced the number of defense contractors able to build modern naval vessels, and policies have favored development and modernization of air power over naval power. The resulting slippage in the number of operational naval vessels in our fleet, now down to 293, imperils our ability to project power in the decades ahead and also to maintain the freedom of the oceans for commercial purposes.
One facet of naval power in which the United States maintains a clear advantage over every other maritime power is in the number of foreign bases and port facilities available to our ships; but even here, China is moving to close that gap. While China has a long way to go in this regard, it is aggressively expanding its reach on the west coast of Africa, and continues to use its “civilian” shipping company, Cosco, to build and operate container port facilities in areas long allied with the United States, including Israel, western Europe, and South and Central America.
If the United States continues the folly of focusing on “climate change” rather than taking concrete short and long-term steps to counter Chinese and Russian moves to assert sea power interests adverse to ours, we and the entire Free World will pay a heavy price in the decades ahead.
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The Dutch attacks on nitrogen emissions
Visitors to dairy farms are always well advised to watch their step. Those inspecting the three dozen milking cows kept by Minke van Wingerden and her team have more to fear than landing in manure: the entire farm is set up on a floating platform, docked a 20minute cycle ride away from Rotterdam’s central railway station. One wrong step and you will wind up spluttering in the Nieuwe Maas river—as a couple of the cows have discovered (firemen fished them out of the harbour). Forget vistas of the placid Frisian countryside: these animals spend their days overlooking tankers and trucks unloading wares at Europe’s biggest port. Throughout the day schijtscooping robots scour the milking area, keeping it clean. On two lower floors of the barge, the cows’ output is variously turned either into cheese or fertiliser.
Ms Van Wingerden’s Floating Farm is the apotheosis of centuries of Dutch thinking about how to grow lots of food in a crowded corner of northern Europe. Since the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, land has been reclaimed from the sea and windmills erected to drain the plains. Townsize greenhouses are built to grow tulips or vegetables. A food shortage during the second world war convinced the Dutch they needed to grow as much as their fields could manage. Calvinist industriousness turned the Netherlands into an unlikely agrarian powerhouse: with more than €100bn ($108bn) of annual farming sales overseas, it is the world’s biggest exporter of agricultural products after America, a country more than 250 times its size. Some of that is reexported imported food.
But the Dutch make twice as much cheese per head as France.
Two questions have long dogged Dutch farming. The first is whether quantity made up for quality: having tasted the tomatoes, cucumbers and chilies grown in its hyperefficient greenhouses, one may be forgiven for not being able to tell them apart. The second is whether its approach made any sense. The Netherlands is the most densely inhabited country in the EU bar tiny Malta; officials joke it is a citystate in the making. Efficient as its farmers may be, the sector is a footnote to the modern Dutch economy, employing just 2.5% of workers. Countries usually pick between having lots of farms or lots of people. The Dutch approach was to have their Gouda and eat it. That has landed both farmers and politicians in a heap of natural fertiliser.
Limits to the Dutch model of turbofarming have been suspected for decades. Already in the 1980s, authorities realised that importing lots more animal feed would result in lots more animal excrement. Yet the limits of the land kept being tested: each acre of Dutch farm supports four times as many animals, by weight, as others in Europe. The result of all those digestive tracts has been a surfeit of excreted nitrogen, a key nutrient for plants but one that in excessive quantities can destabilise ecosystems. Cars and industry emit nitrogen compounds too. All this has contributed to damaging the soil and polluting waterways. Flora that thrive on excess nitrogen have been killing off plants that would otherwise manage to compete for resources. That in turn has knockon effects, not all of which scientists understand.
Ernst van den Ende of Wageningen University, a foodresearch hub, says there is not much wrong with individual Dutch farms, which are often models of sustainability. The problem is that there are too many of them, pumping out too much nitrogen. For more than a decade there have been efforts (mostly ineffectual) to cut back such emissions to meet EU rules that protect nature reserves. But in 2019 things came to a head. A decree from the highest Dutch court gave wishywashy laws unexpected bite. Every activity that led to nitrogen being produced—including the construction of buildings, roads and other infrastructure—would henceforth require cuts in nitrogen elsewhere. The country has a housing shortage, but new building has been throttled by the rule. Daytime speed limits on motorways were cut from 130kph to 100kph in the hope that lower emissions might let other bits of the economy keep going. Schiphol airport, one of the world’s busiest, resorted to buying farms to shut them down so planes could take off.
The crisis has been allencompassing. A bastion of freemarket liberalism in Europe has morphed into something akin to a planned economy, with a “Minister for Nature and Nitrogen Policy” as lead commissar. In the end, it became clear a piecemeal approach would not cut it. Last year a sweeping plan to halve nitrogen emissions by 2030 was unveiled. The government said it would pay €24bn to buy out as many as 3,000 big emitters, meaning mostly farms. Livestock numbers would be cut by nearly a third. The era of everincreasing agricultural exports was over.
Strangely, even in a country bursting at the seams, picking people over cows turns out to be politically fraught. The prospect of buyouts or expropriations fuelled farmer protests across the country. (Think burning haybales and nitrogenrich animal matter dumped on motorways.) Last week the revolt hit the ballot box. A newish party representing farmers triumphed in local elections on March 15th, topping the polls that elect the nationwide senate as well as regional governments. The farmers’ party got 1.5m votes, 19% of the total, in a country that employs just 244,000 people in agriculture. Citydwellers backed it out of a nostalgic attachment to farmers and resentment against nagging authorities. Whether the government can force through its nitrogen cuts is up in the air.
Other countries are heading for nitrogen crises too; neighbouring Belgium, also pretty crowded, already has one. But the wider parallel is with carbon emissions, which Europe plans to cut to “net zero” by 2050. That will demand adaptations well beyond what the Dutch have experienced with nitrogen. The Netherlands, a generally wellrun place, has made a hash of adapting its economy to ecological constraints it knew about for decades. That does not bode well for everyone else.
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Woke Dem-Led Colorado City Bans New Gas Stations to Fight 'Climate Change'
A Democrat-run city in Colorado is taking it into its own hands to try and fight so-called "climate change" by banning all new gas stations in the area.
City councilors in Louisville passed an ordinance limiting the number of gas stations allowed to operate within the city to just six.
Legislators claimed they felt the decision was necessary to combat "global warming."
"We have an obligation to take every step possible to address the changes to our climate that are ravaging our planet and directly impacting the health, well-being, and livelihoods of the constituents we represent in Louisville,' council member Maxine Most told Fox News.
In the unanimous vote, the ordinance also mandates gas stations to be at least 1,000 feet apart from one another while requiring each one to install "electric vehicle (EV) fast charging stations for any expanded, modified or new gasoline or automobile service station equaling 20% of the number of gasoline pumps at the stations, with no fewer than two such charging stations."
Although Most admitted the proposal wouldn't end "climate change," she still advocates for the small town to continue with the plan anyways, saying she does not want to create additional fossil fuel infrastructure.
According to the ordinance, "gasoline station bans may also be seen as promoting the use of Electric Vehicles (EVs), thus, reducing vehicle emissions and encouraging low-carbon and cleaner energy options for transportation."
The town, which has about 20,000 residents, laid out goals such as meeting the city's municipal electricity needs with carbon-free sources, generating 75 percent of the town's residential, commercial, and industrial electric needs with carbon-free sources by 2030, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Earlier this month, the Louisville Sustainability Advisory Board recommended the city limit the number of gas stations to five, pushing people to switch from fuel-powered cars to electric vehicles.
Colorado is not the only blue state to push such measures. California Democrats banned the sale of new gas-powered cars beginning in 2035 also to get people to hop on the electric vehicle train.
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24 March, 2023
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports reveals Great Barrier Reef could be destroyed
This is a thoroughly dishonest piece of reporting. It takes scenarios that the IPCC deems highly unlikely (3C+ warming) and treats it as if it were probable. It's just blatant propaganda from a fanatic below
The Great Barrier Reef could be destroyed and Queensland could endure extreme weather conditions if the planet warms more than 3C, a new report has revealed.
A United Nations report by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change warned that time may be running out for the world to only warm by 1.5C, saying it was already at 1.1C.
The report details what changes a rising temperatures would bring to Australia.
If they increaee by 4C globally, Australi’s temperaturs could possibly surge by 6C, meaning the potential for 50C days.
Director of Griffith University Climate Action Beacon Professor Brendan Mackey said to make sure the dire effects of global warming won’t happen we need to transition away from fossil fuels and accelerate to clean energy.
“Each government has made a pledge of policies and programs to achieve mitigation which is what the current government propose,” Prof Mackey said.
“If you add all the commitments it would limit global warming.
“A global warming of three would mean the end of the Great Barrier Reef as we know it,” he said.
“Every increment of warming, that makes it hard for everyone. For Queensland it would mean much heavier impacts for agriculture, huge impacts for Great Barrier Reef.
“If you have a temperature of 40C, it’s life threatening and the doctor would send you to hospital, when we talk about levels of warming a healthy temperature would be 0 above pre-industrial levels.”
Prof Mackey said the Reef couldn’t handle the amount of choral bleaching that would occur.
Prof Mackey said things were heating up fast. “That means we are going to see a big increase in climate impact, an increase of severity of extreme weather events,” he said.
“For Queensland this is interesting, as it is highly exposed to extreme weather events.”
“It would mean more heavy flooding, we will have more of everything that’s bad when it comes to weather.
“Every increment of warming, that makes it hard for everyone.”
But Prof Mackey said the report also revealed there was still opportunity to cap the amount of climate change and limit it at 1.5C.
“It’s really Queensland’s interest to prevent further climate change, while Queensland has a lot of fossil fuels, it also has the minerals that it needed for clean energy, there’s a huge opportunity to become a clean energy powerhouse,” he said.
“What the report is saying for Queensland is that climate change is going to get worse than its better. That’s going to be more climate risk for Queensland.”
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Biden's EPA Is Lowering the 'Environmental Justice' Boom on Louisiana's Disputed 'Cancer Alley'
LAPLACE, La.?Along Interstate 10 where the Mississippi River threads from Baton Rouge to New Orleans, ever-expanding petrochemical and other industrial projects have long been fought by environmental activists, who have saddled the stretch with the disputed moniker “Cancer Alley.”???
Now the Biden administration is opening a new front in the war -- against a proposed expansion of the sector in St. John the Baptist and St. James parishes known to Louisianians as the River Parishes. Under its stated aims of “equity” and “environmental justice,” the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to block state-issued permits for two new complexes – while renewing objections to an existing plant – all on grounds of a negative “disparate impact” on minority populations in the area.
In a novel application of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – which allows the federal government to defund entities found to discriminate based on race, creed or national origin – the EPA is threatening to withhold millions of dollars in general federal grants to Louisiana unless it enters into an “informal resolution agreement.” This would give federal regulators wide latitude to control a process currently run by Louisiana agencies.
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry calls the move a breathtaking regulatory overreach, noting that the state has complied with existing environmental regulations.
But the EPA has notified Louisiana that it has subjected the state’s permitting process to a “civil rights analytical framework.” Just what that framework is, who wrote it and when are unclear, according to Landry’s office, and the EPA declined to discuss the matter or answer questions, citing the pending agreement and legal challenges.
Some light emerged last December, however. In a phone call between Landry’s office and EPA officials, Mary O’Lone, an agency attorney, said the problem in Louisiana isn’t any traditional environmental hazard. In state documents reviewed by RealClearInvestigations, she said “compliance with environmental law does not guarantee compliance with Title VI.” The EPA team conducting the civil rights analysis said there was “no specific action at issue” but rather “the cumulative impact from [the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s] overall action.”
The new approach is being met with skepticism from critical attorneys familiar with environmental laws.
“This is not the way the EPA typically operates, and it looks like they are trying to expand their authority by using their muscle without clear authorization from Congress to infringe on a state permitting agency,” said Jeff Clark, who served in the Trump administration in the Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division and is now with the conservative Center for Renewing America. “There is no authorization to apply cumulative impact analysis to Title VI regulations.”
“I've never seen this," said Steve Milloy, an attorney who has written extensively about what he and others characterize as EPA overreach. "Environmental justice is a hoax and the EPA has no statutory authority to pursue it with permits. The EPA is pushing the envelope here to see what it can get away with. They are trying to strongarm the state.”
At issue is the permitting process covering a cluster of seven existing plants in the River Parishes. The two pending projects would mark a huge expansion. The first is a $9.4 billion Formosa Plastics complex in St. James Parish, the second a $400 million grain terminal in St. John the Baptist Parish. In addition, an existing plant is being targeted by the EPA in its Title VI allegations: the Denka Performance Elastomers factory, which has been in St. John Parish for decades and has been partly owned by a Japanese company since 2015.??
Responding to the agency in January, Louisiana Assistant Attorney General Joseph Scott St. John wrote that “the EPA seems to be using complaints about two specific facilities as a springboard to a larger area.”
Issuance of the Formosa permit is already under legal challenge in Louisiana, where in an unprecedented ruling a district judge tossed it on “environmental racism” grounds last September. That ruling is under appeal.
The Denka plant is the nation’s only domestic producer of neoprene, a synthetic rubber used in surfers’ wetsuits, cell phone cases, and medical and military equipment. And environmentalists and the EPA are zeroing in on a chemical essential to neoprene production: chloroprene, which, they insist, is a dangerous carcinogen.
While studies have shown it can be a carcinogen in animals, scientists only suspect that it is cancerous in humans as well. An agreement reached in 2015 reduced by 85% the amount of chloroprene in the air, which, all sides agree, is released only intermittently. A state permit at the Denka plant that incorporates the regulations is currently pending.
For decades activists have alleged that the petrochemical industry is responsible for cancer in the local population, especially minorities. In 1997, however, the Journal of the Louisiana Medical Society found almost no evidence that the incidence of cancer was higher in the River Parishes than in the rest of the United States.
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Canada: scientists discover new method to break down toxic ‘forever chemicals’
Researchers at a Canadian university have made a breakthrough they hope will dramatically shorten the lifespan of the thousands of toxic “forever chemicals” that persist in clothing, household items and the environment.
Scientists at the University of British Columbia announced on Wednesday they had developed a new silica-based material with ability to absorb a wider range of the harmful chemicals, and new tools to break them apart them.
“This is very exciting because we can target these difficult-to-break chemical bonds – and break them for good,” said researcher Madjid Mohseni, who focuses on water quality and water treatment.
The chemicals, also known as PFAS (per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are used for non-stick or stain-resistant surfaces, including clothing, cookware, stain repellents and firefighting foam. But they are also notoriously difficult to break down naturally, giving them the name “forever chemicals”.
In recent years, scientists have found the chemicals, which were once assumed to be harmless, are also linked to elevated cholesterol, hormonal disruption, infertility, cardiovascular disease and cancers.
“They attach to the proteins in our blood and can accumulate in our bodies, particularly in the liver and the kidneys. And the older you are, the more PFAS you have in your body,” said Amira Aker, a postdoctoral researcher at the Université Laval who was not involved in the UBC research. “And we can also pass the chemicals to a growing fetus, so even newborn babies have PFAS in their bodies from the moment they are born.”
While Canada has joined other nations in banning the manufacture of the chemicals, they are still found in household appliances and cosmetics and when discarded, can leach into the environment.
“We still don’t actually know how long some of these PFAS compounds will take to break down, because they were created back in the 1940s and they still exist within the environment,” said Aker.
Current technologies often use activated carbon to filter out the chemicals, but are largely only able to target what researchers call the “long-chain” versions of PFAS – those with more than six carbon bonds. Following recent bans, however, industry has shifted to creating “short-chain” iterations of the chemical.
“[Those versions] are equally toxic and they stay in the water better. And as a result, current technologies like activated carbon really aren’t as effective,” said Mohseni.
Most household water filters use activated carbon – and as a result, miss a wide range of possibly harmful chemicals.
His team also found that the current filters concentrate the absorbed chemicals, creating a “highly toxic” form of waste that consumers throw into the garbage.
Such filters “are not addressing the problem. We’re just temporarily fixing it and letting those chemicals stay in the environment,” he said.
To combat the deficiencies in combatting PFAS, the team has developed a new silicate absorbing material that captures a far wider range of chemicals. The thin material can also be reused repeatedly.
To destroy the chemicals, Mohseni says researchers use either electrochemical or photochemical processes to break the carbon-fluorine bond. The team first published their findings in the journal Chemosphere.
Mohseni says the technology could be used to combat the chemicals, both in drinking water, as government agencies bring higher standards in, and at industrial sites where high concentrations of the chemicals are released into water supplies.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/22/canada-toxic-forever-chemicals-pfas-researchers
*************************************************Why Britain has big plans to join the rush for small modular reactors
Sixty years ago, small nuclear power plants were the next big thing. A United States army promotional film from 1963 features square-jawed scientists and earnest GIs cooing over the ML-1, a reactor that could go anywhere on the back of a truck and provide power without need for resupply. “Epitaph for an unsuccessful operation,” says the narrator, in a Walter Cronkite baritone, “out of gas!”
The army’s portable atomic stations were meant to ensure no operation ever ran out of gas. Unfortunately they did not fulfil their promise, and the programme was shut down in the 1970s. A similar fate befell America’s flirtation with small civilian power plants.
Now small reactors are all the rage again. This time they are being touted as powerful potential weapons in the fight against climate change. Governments around the world are investing billions of pounds to push ahead with new designs; private investors, including Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft, are piling into what they believe will be a lucrative market.
Britain is trying to secure its place in the rush. Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, used last week’s budget to announce a competition to select a design for a small modular reactor — an SMR — for use in the UK. The successful applicant or applicants will be chosen by the end of the year and will receive co-funding from the Treasury.
The contest is part of what would be a substantial expansion of the UK’s nuclear fleet. Hunt said he wanted nuclear to provide one quarter of electricity by 2050, up from the 15 per cent provided by the current ageing plants, many of which will be decommissioned in the intervening years.
There is no standard definition of an SMR, but typical designs produce up to 400 megawatts, enough to power 400,000 homes. Traditional large nuclear plants have much higher outputs. The station being built by EDF at Hinkley Point in Somerset, for example, will generate 3.2 gigawatts of electricity, eight times as much.
More details of the competition are expected at the end of the month, but industry executives expect the government will commit to taking on close to half of the development costs of a prototype. There is also speculation that the government will underwrite construction of the first commercial plants with a contract to buy power at a guaranteed price — or that the funding of a station could be paid for from a levy on consumer bills.
It is thought that about six companies or consortiums will submit bids. The race is likely to pit the domestic champion Rolls-Royce, the aero-engine maker, against European and American contenders.
Regardless of how many companies enter, there is no shortage of interest in the UK among international constructors. “We are very happy with the idea of a competition, and we look forward to seeing what is proposed. We would like, though, to go ahead even without government funding,” said Stefano Buono, chief executive of Newcleo, a start-up in London that will announce plans today to raise €1 billion in equity.
“In general promoters like the UK because there is public support for nuclear power, and support across political parties too,” said Jeff Navin, director of external affairs at TerraPower, which is backed by Bill Gates.
“We look forward to working with the government,” said a spokesman for NuScale, an American company that has a design approved by the US nuclear regulator. Nuscale is listed on the New York Stock Exchange with the ticker “SMR”.
Small reactors have floated back to the top of the energy charts on the tide of renewed interest in nuclear power. After the initial enthusiasm of the 1960s and 1970s, governments and utility companies lost interest because of high costs and the risk of serious accidents — a fear stoked by the partial meltdown of a reactor in 1979 at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and a more serious disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986.
These worries have been set against the need to tackle climate change. Nuclear power generation does not produce carbon dioxide, and, unlike wind and solar, is not intermittent.
Advocates of SMRs say their smaller size means they can be installed in a greater range of sites, in clusters where more power is needed, and can largely be built on factory production lines, eliminating many of the cost overruns that have dogged the building of large plants. Detractors point to the eventual failures of previous efforts to develop SMRs, and the potential higher cost than rival forms of generation.
Those issues have not deterred a rush of interest in the past five years. It is estimated that about 60 different SMR designs are at various stages around the world, split between established nuclear power companies, governments, universities and start-ups. China and the US both have large government-backed programmes. Britain has put money into the Rolls-Royce effort, and promised a wider programme, but progress has been held up by delays in setting up Great British Nuclear, an agency that will co-ordinate the government’s efforts.
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23 March, 2023
The UN’s Newest Climate Report Is A Woke Dumpster Fire Masquerading As Science
Like clockwork, the United Nations is out with yet another climate report, and the usual suspects are already blaring the global warming alarm sirens.
The New York Times warned the planet is on track “to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade” and the only way to “hold global warming to relatively safe levels” would “require global cooperation, billions of dollars and big changes.”
The Associated Press declared the world is on “thin ice” due to warming. The BBC characterized the UN report as a “survival guide” — if we don’t follow it, we’ll see “the worst effects of climate change.”
The alarmist frenzy was joined by prominent scientists, eco-activists, Democratic politicians and even the UN chief himself, who called the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb.
In other words, the media, elites and the scientific establishment want you to take this report very, very seriously. The problem is no one who actually cares about sound science should give it the time of day.
Any scientific credibility the new UN report might have otherwise had is immediately called into question by its extensive use of “woke” buzzwords.
Variations of the words “equity” and “inequity” appear 31 times in the 36-page document. Variations of “inclusive” and “inclusion” appear 17 times. The document even mentions “colonialism” and repeatedly refers to climate and social “justice” for “marginalized” groups.
“Equity,” if you remember, is that word then-candidate Kamala Harris famously described as a system where “we all end up in the same place.” Sounds a lot like socialism, doesn’t it?
The UN report also contains an entire section titled “Equity and Inclusion,” which states “[e]quity remains a central element in the UN climate regime.” The report goes on to state that “[r]edistributive policies … that shield the poor and vulnerable, social safety nets, equity, inclusion and just transitions, at all scales can enable deeper societal ambitions and resolve trade-offs with sustainable development goals.”
In other words, the “woker” the policies, the better. How’s that for science?
Now, if you think “equity” is a fundamental pillar of scientific knowledge, then this is the report for you. But if you’re like most people and don’t think far left political priorities have a place in scientific documents meant to advise policymakers, this should alarm you.
No reading between the lines is necessary to decipher the real goal of this new UN report. In fact, the report’s accompanying press release is quite explicit about its goal: “Taking the right action now could result in the transformational change essential for a sustainable, equitable world.”
The release goes on to quote one of the report’s authors, who says: “Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected.”
Sounds like political science, not climate science.
Another author calls for “prioritizing climate risk reduction for low-income and marginalized communities, including people living in informal settlements,” adding that “[i]nsufficient and misaligned finance is holding back progress.” (RELATED: CARLA SANDS: Biden Admin Is Dazed And Confused When It Comes To American Energy)
The report’s scientific rigor is further called into question by its insistence that warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times represents a catastrophe. There is precisely zero verifiable, peer-reviewed science supporting a 1.5-degree climate threshold, but there’s tons of research on the staggering costs of complying with UN models.
One 2020 study in Nature found the cost of meeting the 1.5 degree goal would be “5 trillion dollars per year in 2020.” Given it’s 2023, the price tag is likely even higher.
An analysis by McKinsey & Company illustrates just how meeting the UN’s goal means more than shelling out trillions to overhaul global energy supplies. They note “a 1.5-degree pathway would imply a large dietary shift: reducing the share of ruminant animal protein in the global protein-consumption mix by half.”
Sounds like a dream for wannabe dictators. And they seem more than willing to peddle junk science in order to get it.
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UN climate study proves the fight to lower global temps won’t work
Here we go again — another climate-change doomsday warning about the world’s failure to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. In reality, though, Monday’s report from the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change just highlights the absurdity of the climate war.
“By 2030,” it asserts (with just “medium confidence”), global temps “could exceed 1.5°C relative to 1850-1900 with a probability between 40% and 60%.”
And?
Well, limiting warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) is a key goal of climate warriors, though it’s a fundamentally arbitrary figure and past plans to achieve it were always a joke.
Naturally, the New York Times headline left no doubt: “Earth to Hit Critical Warming Threshold by Early 2030s, Climate Panel Says” — though the story did concede that a 1.5°C rise hardly spells Armageddon.
The UN folks say the world (er, wealthier nations) need to shell out three to six times as much as they are now on “climate action” to keep global warming between 1.5°C and 2°C.
Yet it’s only the West that’s chasing this goal. China, for one, last year issued 168 permits for coal-fueled power plants with a capacity equivalent to two large facilities a week, per the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. New construction on such plants soared 50% from the year before.
Beijing is adding new emissions faster than Western nations can reduce their own, at great cost to their economies.
India, too, has continued spewing emissions apace.
Temps are already up by 1.1°C compared to the late 19th century, the UN report notes. And for all the progress reducing CO2 output, “the challenge has become even greater” than flagged in the last report in 2018.
Anyone want to bet the IPCC’s next “assessment” likewise sees the “challenge” greater still?
Truth is, when push comes to shove, the costs of global warming don’t come anywhere close to the mind-numbing price of trying to halt it (if that’s even possible).
Climate warriors want to upend the entire global economy, reduce living standards in the developed world (though they pretend the “transition” will be a winner) and stop the developing world from developing.
China and India refuse to go along except in lip service; Western elites caught in a quasi-religious fervor are simply refusing to face facts, at huge cost to the non-elite majority. Yet if the world does nothing, climate change will slow economic growth only slightly.
That doesn’t mean we should ignore climate change, but the answer is in encouraging innovation, not sending us back to the Dark Ages. All the screaming is as useless as any other fit of hysteria.
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Eco-dread is a luxury belief we can no longer afford -- Climate-change hysteria is a menace to the lives and interests of working people.
Here we go again. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a new document – the final part of its mammoth sixth report – and we all know what that means. More doomsday porn in the papers. More shroud-waving from eco-agitators. More warnings of imminent apocalypse. The climate cult has not disappointed. Our world is on the ‘brink of catastrophic warming’, cries the Washington Post. We’re headed for ‘climate disaster’, warns the BBC. The ‘climate time bomb’ is ticking, says UN secretary general António Guterres. In short, the countdown to doom continues. Unless we repent of our eco-sins, we’ll cause the heat death of our celestial home.
It’s always like this. Every IPCC report gives rise to Revelations-style hysteria in elite circles. Its 2021 report – which gave a ‘code red’ warning to humankind – was heralded as a vision of the horrors that await humanity if we do not drastically cut our carbon emissions. The future will be ‘some kind of hell on Earth’, said an Oxford professor. Behold the ‘climate crimes’ of our species, wailed the Guardian, like a modern-day version of those potty millenarian preachers of old. The Biblical vibe was palpable. ‘With raging wildfires, floods and pandemics, it seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, said a writer for the Hill. This view of humankind as being one new coal power station away from doom has found expression in response to the latest IPCC report, too. Humanity is on ‘thin ice, and that ice is melting fast’, quipped Guterres.
It all just washes over you after a while, doesn’t it? They’re the boy who cried apocalypse. Though at least the wolf in that fable did turn up eventually. I confidently predict that the eco End Times feverishly envisioned by the likes of Extinction Rebellion – who insist ‘billions will die ’ – will never materialise. Indeed, the IPCC says nothing even remotely as apocalyptic as that. As Michael Shellenberger has pointed out, pore over the thousands of pages of IPCC analysis and nowhere will you find the claim that ‘life on Earth is dying’. ‘No credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilisation, much less the extinction of the human species’, says Shellenberger.
As to the now mainstream belief that climate change will intensify ‘weather of mass destruction’, causing more deaths in natural disasters, ‘the science’ on that is also far from clear-cut. The IPCC only says it’s ‘likely’ that human influence is driving some instances of heavy rainfall, for example. It expresses only ‘medium confidence’ that climate change has impacted on water availability in parts of the world. Confidence is ‘low’, it says, that flooding on a global scale has been shaped by man’s impact on the climate. What we can be confident of, though, is that fewer people are perishing in natural calamities. As Shellenberger says, ‘In 1931, 3.7million people died from natural disasters. In 2018, just 11,000 did.’ And that brilliant decline in death happened at a time when the human population quadrupled. Maybe that ice we’re skating on isn’t so thin after all.
Speaking of ice, recent studies suggest there has been a stabilisation and even growth in the Antarctic ice shelf, that thing we’re constantly told is disappearing thanks to dastardly mankind. The Great Barrier Reef is doing pretty well too, in defiance of the numerous obituaries eco-doomsters wrote for that natural wonder (a 2014 piece in the Guardian was literally titled ‘The Great Barrier Reef: an obituary’). The ozone layer is recovering nicely. Green hysterics are wrong about everything. The End of Days that keeps them up at night never materialises. No wonder Greta Thunberg deleted that tweet in which she shared the harebrained claim that ‘climate change will wipe out all of humanity’ if we don’t ‘stop using fossil fuels over the next five years’. A tweet she posted… five years ago.
Let’s be clear about this: nothing that resembles science says that all of humanity will be wiped out unless we stop using fossil fuels. That is delirium, a frenzy of existential fear, a medieval-style dread of terrible heavenly punishment for our hubris, which is about as far from science as you can get.
There was a line in the Guardian this week about the IPCC’s latest report that made it pretty clear that there’s a difference between what the IPCC says about climate change and what the doom-addicted media say about climate change. This vast tract ‘took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages’, said the Guardian, but it can be ‘boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late’. Call me a cynic, but I reckon a lot of things are lost in translation when thousands of pages of complex scientific discussion are ‘boiled down’ to a juvenile one-line slogan designed to panic the masses into behaviour change.
This is not to let the IPCC off the hook. Its dense tomes might be free of XR-style fever dreams about billions of deaths and Greta-style warnings of all of humanity being wiped out. But the IPCC’s treatment of climate change as the gravest challenge facing mankind is a problem. It has a warping effect on our political priorities, implicitly downgrading issues like global poverty or deaths from disease by dragging our gaze, always, to climate. And it lends legitimacy to the crankier bell-tolling of the green movement. Indeed, those one-liners spun by António Guterres – ‘code red for humanity’, ‘the alarm bells are deafening’, ‘humanity is on thin ice’ – do nothing to challenge the terror-mongering of green talking heads, and a lot to inflame it.
Indeed, the latest IPCC document makes a preposterous demand of developed countries – that they should aim for Net Zero by 2040 rather than 2050. Apparently we should devote ourselves to achieving that expensive, anti-industry, anti-jobs goal of Net Zero 10 years earlier than planned. Here is the entire problem with the climate-change obsession – it’s the luxury belief we can no longer afford. This new IPCC report, like its 2021 predecessor, has landed in a time of crisis. In our post-lockdown era of soaring inflation and energy shortages, we can ill-afford to carry on indulging the late-bourgeois fantasy that modernity is a planet-killing force. We can no longer nod along to this petrified ideology that bears a great deal of responsibility for today’s energy problems and for the stalling of development in poorer parts of the world. Luxuriant apocalypticism, with its provision of a sense of mission to our lost elites, might have been just about tolerable in good times – it’s a non-starter in bad times.
The true conflict today is not between humankind and Mother Earth. It’s between the needs of ordinary people and the fantasies of a global elite that dolls up its loss of faith in industry and progress as ‘climate-change activism’. That tension will explode soon. We should hope it does, anyway.
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Hypocrite Biden blocks mineral mining his clean-energy goals require
President Joe Biden claims he wants America to lead in “clean energy” production, but he’s again blocking American producers from developing the critical, rare-earth minerals to make it happen.
The federal government owns huge chunks of America’s West, home to critical minerals like lithium essential to technologies like electric-vehicle batteries — yet Biden blocks their development beneath federal lands.
Biden banned access Tuesday to nearly 514,000 acres of public lands, including a new national park in Nevada, Avi Kwa Ame.
Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo says Biden failed to consult him before this designation, though the Silver State contains massive lithium deposits.
This is particularly frustrating because Nevada is a whopping 80% federally owned — compare that to New York, less than 1%, Pennsylvania (home to robust shale drilling) 2.2%, South Dakota 5.4% and Texas only 2%.
Blocking the critical mineral mining required to meet Biden’s “clean energy” goals denies reality — the mining infrastructure isn’t there.
China dominates, with around 80% of the market for mining these minerals, and undermines human rights to do so, through child and slave labor.
By the way, “clean energy” requires minerals mined using acid drainage, wastewater runoff and other environmentally sensitive factors, a big reason US resources have gone untapped.
“We believe it’s hypocrisy across the board. It’s illogical across the board, and it’s harming Alaska and the United States. Not everybody is buying their story that they’re really wanting to produce critical minerals,” Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy told me by phone.
“I’d be the first one to praise the Biden administration if I did see it, but all we see are a continual series of actions against Alaska’s ability to develop its resources, including minerals.”
Alaska is 61% federally owned, and Dunleavy pointed to Biden’s preemptive veto, through the Environmental Protection Agency, of the Alaskan Pebble project, which the governor said contains an estimated $1 trillion worth of copper — potentially the largest copper mine in the world. (It was blocked for supposedly endangering salmon streams.)
The governor said federal agencies stymied Alaskans trying to build a road to the Ambler mining district.
“It’s a continual fight with these guys,” Dunleavy said.
Dunleavy noted America’s energy-production regulations are more stringent than those of market leaders China and Russia.
He expressed disappointment about a Biden White House June 2021 report referencing critical minerals, a 250-page missive that mentions Australia 60 times and Canada 32 times but Alaska only once, as a footnote.
Last week, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise introduced HR 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act, which aims to revive America’s energy producers, in part through permitting reform for critical minerals.
Scalise told me he wasn’t surprised by the Biden energy report highlighting foreign countries ahead of Alaska and other US states.
“President Biden has made it clear from Day One, when he declared war on American energy, that he would rather make our country dependent on other countries for energy and critical minerals than making it here in America,” Scalise said.
“The energy costs are through the roof in part because President Biden’s made us dependent on foreign countries by shutting America down when it comes to energy production and critical minerals. It’s lunacy.
“But that’s the Biden agenda
https://nypost.com/2023/03/22/biden-blocks-mineral-mining-his-clean-energy-goals-require/
***************************************22 March, 2023
"Christian" Warmist says all their disaster prophecies were not wrong
She appears to be claiming that the carbon-control policies that were adopted have prevented the prophesied disasters. Just one problem with that. The policies have NOT reduced or even slowed the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere. See the graph below
Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe discussed a recent United Nations report that warned about the impact of global warming on Monday's "PBS Newshour."
"PBS Newshour" invited climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe to discuss climate change predictions following the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on Monday.
The IPCC, an organization of experts convened by the United Nations, published an extensive report warning about the disastrous effects that global warming predictions are expected to have on humanity by the early 2030s. Many social media users have called out these claims, pointing out that past climate doom predictions have been wrong for decades.
However, Hayhoe insisted the predictions were not wrong and instead the "uncertainty" comes from humanity.
"The previous predictions were not wrong. The uncertainty is us. The predictions were for what will happen depending on the choices we make. Prior to the Paris Agreement in 2015, the world was heading towards a future that was between four to five degrees Celsius warmer than today," Hayhoe said. "You might say, well, that does not sound that bad, it‘s four or five degrees warmer. But think of it in terms of the human body. The temperature of the planet has been as stable as that of the human body over the course of human civilization. If our body is running a fever of one or two degrees Celsius, or four to six degrees Celsius, that is life-threatening."
She insisted, "We have already, thanks to the Paris Agreement, reduced the amount of change we can expect by policies enacted by at least one degree. But we still need more, because every bit of warming carries a cost with it."
Nawaz commented on United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres’ statement also made that day when he warned that the "climate time bomb is ticking."
"Humanity is on thin ice, and the ice is melting fast," Guterres said. "Humans are responsible for virtually all global heating over the last 200 years. The rate of temperature rising in the last half century is the highest in 2,000 years."
Hayhoe commented that the "dire" warning from Guterres is "completely justified."
"It is completely justified. We scientists have been warning about the impacts of climate change on humans, and all other life on this planet, for decades. Yet our carbon emissions continue to rise. As the IPCC report says, the window of opportunity we have to make decisions that will lead us to a better future is closing rapidly," Hayhoe said.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/climate-scientist-says-previous-predictions-climate-change-not-wrong
****************************************************European farmers fed up with climate policies shock political establishment
A young Dutch political party seeking to push back on the government's climate agenda achieved a stunning victory Wednesday as it won the most seats for a single party in the Dutch Senate.
"This isn't normal, but actually it is! It's all normal citizens who voted," party leader Caroline van der Plas said. "But today people have shown they can't stay at home any longer. We won't be ignored anymore."
The Farmer-Citizen Movement Party, known as BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB) in Dutch, built its victory on the back of protests against the government’s environmental policies, which aim to slash nitrogen emissions by dramatically cutting back on livestock numbers and buying out thousands of farms. Nitrate and ammonia pollution significantly impacts biodiversity, particularly air and water quality.
The party appears on course to take 15 of the 75 Senate seats — more seats than Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s conservative VVD party — with almost 20% of the vote, according to the BBC. Rutte built his victory on the back of a four-party coalition, which will now control 24 seats overall.
"Now is the time to take citizens seriously. I am open to talks with everybody. We are ready," van der Plas added.
Around 57.5% of voters turned out for the election, marking the greatest turnout in years.
Voters argue that the government’s approach does not support the farmers, and the government’s plan is "not good" for them as it stands.
However, the other big winner on the night was the Greens and center-left Labor Party coalition, an environmentally focused group that argued that climate problems will not just go away. The left-leaning coalition also won 15 seats, tying BBB.
The results mainly indicate that Rutte’s remaining time in office may prove difficult as he faces a challenge to push through any legislation that needs Senate support.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/european-farmers-fed-climate-policies-shock-political-establishment
**************************************************Britain's heat-pump fiasco
No one denies that changing the way we heat our homes will play a major role in eventually achieving a carbon neutral economy. Heating our houses accounts for 14pc of the UK’s carbon emissions, so unless we can find a clever offsetting scheme or make drastic changes to other parts of our economy, we will eventually have to find an alternative to the gas boilers that three-quarters of British households use right now
Right now, the Government's big idea is that we should all switch to heat pumps. These are electric devices that work like a fridge in reverse, taking warmth out of the air and then blasting it around our homes. Huge subsidies of up to £5,000 per home have been thrown at persuading us all to make the switch, and a target, because inevitably there is a target, of 600,000 installations a year has been set.
Indeed, for new houses, gas boilers will be banned from 2025, and existing homes may not be far behind. By the end of the decade, we may well be forcing people to rip out old heating systems. And yet amid some very stiff competition, the drive to install heat pumps as the country’s main source of domestic heating is turning into the greatest eco fiasco of the decade.
The latest blow to the Government’s agenda was delivered by Bosch. The German industrial giant has global sales of almost €90bn (£79bn), engineering expertise that stretches back to the 19th century, and is one of the world’s major suppliers of domestic heating systems.
By any reasonable standards, it can be said to know a thing or two about how to keep homes warm. And yet Vonjy Rajakoba, the managing director of Bosch UK, has pointed out an obvious problem: for heat pumps to work well in the cold, “you need well-insulated homes, [and] you also need space for heat pumps for the external unit”. Very true. Now, which homes lack these features?
Well, older ones. And as it happens, Britain, a country blessedly free of the ravages of war, has an exceptionally old housing stock compared to most major economies, with almost two fifths of our private homes built before 1945. Rajakoba, in turn, has noted that for Britain’s “fleet of Victorian houses or period houses and so on”, Bosch UK thinks “hydrogen, or in the interim hydrogen-ready boilers, are the solution”.
But the problems don’t stop there. Heat pumps don’t generate nearly as much heat as the equipment they are replacing, meaning that homes need to be insulated as well – and as we’ve just noted, it’s often virtually impossible to upgrade homes dating back to the 19th or even 18th century to the required standard. And insulation is not the only added expense involved.
The Government might be subsidising these things like there’s no tomorrow, but the current offers don’t cover the extra expense of installations or the additional running costs of a heat pump compared to a traditional gas boiler. Even with the grant, a pump based system could set you back more than £9,000 compared with less than £3,000 for a traditional alternative.
On top of that, we don’t have enough plumbers trained to install them all, and skills training is so poor in this country, and labour shortages already so severe, there is little prospect of that being fixed any time soon (indeed, the latest data showed the number of trained plumbing and heating engineers in the UK is currently falling by 4.1 per cent a year).
And even if by some miracle we did manage to get them all installed and they all worked, it’s not even clear we’d be able to generate enough electricity to power them all. We can’t seem to get a nuclear power station built or find a sensible way to manage the intermittent production of wind turbines.
It’s all too reminiscent of the HS2 debacle: an unnecessary product, consuming vast quantities of money, which is unsuitable for the UK, and which won’t be delivered on time or anything close to it. In short, a colossal white elephant.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/03/16/heat-pumps-have-become-eco-fiasco-decade
**************************************************Let’s stop pretending we are going to recycle all this plastic
The report in this newspaper that Australia stands no chance of reaching its goal of recycling 70 per cent of its plastic waste by 2025 is at once depressing and predictable.
Most of our single-use plastics cannot be recycled into a useful product at a reasonable cost. As voters and consumers we keep pretending it can, because we like plastic. It is cheap and useful.
So governments and industry go along with the charade, providing us with pantomime recycling efforts.
In turn, petrochemical companies, facing the end of the fossil fuel era, happily increase production.
You need only compare the economics of recycling streams to get a sense of how useless most of our waste plastic is.
Most metals and glass can be recycled endlessly, exhibiting the same quality in each of its new lives. That’s why people pay for scrap metal, while we had to pay China to take our waste plastic.
In 2017, China finally tired of taking the world’s plastic waste and banned new imports, leaving the rest of us to scramble to find something to do with our growing stockpiles.
In Australia, we have seen the collapse of REDcycle, the nation’s largest waste recycling scheme, with admissions that thousands of tonnes of warehoused plastic is bound for landfill.
In Europe, much of it is burned for energy in machines that might not release particulate pollution but do release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – burning plastic is after all burning oil.
In other parts of the world, plastic simply chokes rivers and seas and the creatures that live in them.
The New South Wales environment watchdog has issued ‘clean-up’ orders to the supermarket giants for 15 warehouses and storage depots around the state where soft plastics have been stockpiled.
Whether plastic is dumped under the ground or into the ocean, or burnt for energy, all plastic will eventually end up as a greenhouse gas.
In fact, according to analysis published in February by the Minderoo Foundation in conjunction with the global energy analysis firm Wood McKenzie, the climate consultancy Carbon Trust and KPMG, single-use plastics now generate as much greenhouse gas emissions as the United Kingdom.
Minderoo’s second Plastic Waste Makers Index found growth in single-use plastics made from fossil fuels was 15 times that of recycled plastics, and that between 2019 and 2021 global use of them surged from 133 million tonnes per year to 139 million tonnes, or about 1 kilogram per person on earth.
ExxonMobil remains the largest producer of polymers bound for single-use plastics – responsible for six million tonnes in 2021 – followed by China’s Sinopec, which produced 5.8 million tonnes, and US-based Dow third.
Growth in single-use plastics production was driven by demand for flexible packaging such as films and sachets, which grew from a 55 per share of all single-use plastics in 2019, to 57 per cent in 2021.
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21 March, 2023
‘On thin ice’: United Nation’s grim warning over climate change
Same old, same old. Just a routine false prophecy. Sad if anyone believes it
UN Secretary-general Antonio Guterres called on wealthy G20 countries to urgently bring forward carbon neutral goals by a decade to 2040 to “defuse the climate time bomb.”
Mr Guterres warned: “Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast,” during the release of a bleak and final Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report which he called “a survival guide for humanity.”
In a fresh plea Mr Guterres called for OECD governments to phase out coal by 2030 and for poorer countries by 2040.
And in a new target, he urged countries to have carbon-free electricity generation in the developed world by 2035, meaning no gas or coal-fired power plants and a halting of all new fossil fuel exploration.
Mr Guterres said all countries had to make a quantum leap in climate action to limit average temperature increases to 1.5C, acknowledging: “It starts with parties immediately hitting the fast-forward button on their net zero deadlines”.
He said rich G20 countries, of which Australia is a member, should aim for carbon neutrality as close to 2040 as possible. He added that emerging economies, which includes China, must aim for net zero by 2050.
New synthesis report will play a pivotal role when governments gather in Dubai in December for the UN climate…
China has a net zero goal for 2060, while India’s goal is even further away, at 2070.
“This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every time frame,’’ he said.
“Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”
The landmark IPCC “Synthesis” report brings together the latest scientific advice and was agreed after governments reviewed the documents in Interlaken, Switzerland over the past week. The report says a cut in carbon emissions has to be more extreme than the current plans because of continuing rising emissions, to ensure a “liveable and sustainable future”.
“The pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change,’’ the report says, adding that keeping warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels requires deep, rapid and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors. “Emissions should be decreasing by now and will need to be cut by almost half by 2030, if warming is to be limited to 1.5°C.”
As well the report notes that cash for developing countries to help them reduce emissions must be increased six times above current levels to keep climate change to the 1.5C target.
IPCC chairman Hoesung Lee said multiple, feasible and effective options are available now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change. The report notes changes in the food sector, electricity, transport, industry, buildings and land-use can reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as encouraging low carbon lifestyles and people having a better understanding of the consequences of overconsumption.
IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said “This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.
“Transformational changes are more likely to succeed where there is trust, where everyone works together to prioritise risk reduction, and where benefits and burdens are shared equitably.
“We live in a diverse world in which everyone has different responsibilities and different opportunities to bring about change. Some can do a lot while others will need support to help them manage the change.”
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Legalized Climate Grifting
Paul Driessen
Grifters have long fascinated us. These usually small-time lawbreakers excel at persuading their “marks” to hand valuables over willingly. If they ever represented a “distinctly American ethos,” they’ve been supplanted by con artists seeking bank accounts for funds abandoned by Nigerian princes.
Their artful dodging is epitomized by Frank Abagnale daring the FBI to “catch me if you can,” Anna Delvey inventing Anna Sorokin, Redford and Newman masterminding their famous Sting, and dirty, rotten scoundrels like Steve Martin, Michael Caine and Glenn Headly.
However, they were all pikers compared to the billion-dollar stratagems being carried off by Climate Armageddon grifters like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Elon Musk and Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry.
Their schemes are not only unprecedented in size and complexity. They represent the greatest wealth transfer in history, from poor and middle class families to the wealthiest on Earth. Most important, the plundering has been legalized by laws, regulations, treaties and executive orders, often implemented at the behest of the schemers and their lobbyists.
They and their politician, activist, scientist, corporate and media allies profit mightily, but legally, from foundation grants, government payouts and subsidies, and taxpayer and consumer payments based on claims that Earth faces manmade climate cataclysms. That we’re giving our money willingly to these wind, solar, battery and other programs is questionable.
Microsoft co-founder Gates’ estimated 2022 post-divorce net worth of some $130 billion enables him to donate hundreds of millions to social, health, environmental and corporate media causes. That usually shields him from tough questions.
But BBC media editor Amol Rajan recently asked Mr. Gates to answer charges that he’s “a hypocrite,” for claiming to be “a climate change campaigner” while traveling the world on his luxurious private jets – often to confabs where global elites discuss how we commoners can enjoy simpler, fossil-fuel-free lives: what size our homes can be, how and how much we can heat them, what foods we can eat and how we can cook them, what cars we can drive, whether we can fly anywhere on vacation, what our kids will learn in school, and more.
Caught flatfooted, Gates defended his use of fuel-guzzling, carbon-spewing jetliners by claiming he purchases “carbon credits” to offset his profligate energy consumption. He also said he visits Africa and Asia to learn about farming and malaria, and spends billions on “climate innovations.”
Indeed, Gates’ book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need” calls for replacing beef with synthetic meat. Cattle emit methane, a greenhouse gas (00.00019% of Earth’s atmosphere) – so people should eat fake meat processed from vegetable oil, veggies and insects.
You may say, that’s disgusting. But Mr. Gates will profit mightily if his “recommendation” is adopted. He’s a major investor in farmland and the imitation meat company Impossible Foods, as is Mr. Gore.
How cool! Wealthy elites can save the world and get richer at the same time!
Beyond Meat’s stock may be down more than 75% from its one-time high, but investors will likely bring in lots more cash via new “climate-saving” mandates, while consumers are left holding bags of rotting bug and lab-grown burgers.
Carbon offsets? In the real world they’re part of the problem, not the solution. They don’t help Main Street; they too help rich Climate Armageddon Club members become wealthier.
Gates Foundation grants could prevent extensive African misery, brain damage and death from malaria, by spotting disease outbreaks and eradicating Anopheles mosquito infestations – today. But it’s spending millions trying to engineer plasmodium-resistant mosquitoes, which may pay off a decade from now.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. continues pocketing billions selling and trading carbon credits. In fact, between 2015 and 2020, the company received $1.3 billionfrom selling credits to other companies – more than twice what it earned from automotive sales. Times sure have changed since manufacturing tycoons got rich selling products, instead of hawking climate indulgences.
Musk also loves flying in private jets. Last summer, he even took a 9-minute, 55-mile flight from San Francisco to San Jose, instead of driving a Tesla. Wags might say that goes well with the way he’s made a science of lobbying government agencies to subsidize fire-prone cars and SpaceX rockets.
It’s all to protect the environment, of course – which is why Gore, Gates, Musk and Kerry think they’re entitled to travel by private jet and limousine. We’re also supposed to ignore how their cars and lifestyles are based on metals extracted and processed with African child labor and lakes of toxic chemicals.
Since Al Gore left the vice president’s office, he’s hauled in some $330 million railing about “rain bombs” and “boiling oceans,” and shilling for government and corporate “investments” in “green energy” that’s also reliant on supply chains running through Africa and China.
Never forget this fundamental rule: Wind and sunshine are clean, renewable and sustainable. However, harnessing these unreliable, weather-dependent energy sources to power modern economies requires millions of tons of metals and minerals extracted from billions of tons of ores, mostly using dirty, polluting processes in lands out of sight and mind.
In short, nothing about “renewable energy” is clean, renewable, sustainable, fair or equitable.
Moreover, the “climate crisis” is based on computer models that predict hurricane, tornado, flood, drought, sea level rise and other disasters vastly greater than the world is actually experiencing. The models also ignore five great ice ages and interglacial periods, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, the Anasazi and Mayan droughts, and other inconvenient climate truths.
Topping it off, China, Russia and India are burning cheap coal to industrialize, lift their people out of poverty, and leave climate-obsessed Western nations in the economic and military dust. Even if the West went totally Net Zero, it wouldn’t reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases even one part per million.
The climate change movement’s deceptions and contradictions seem to have no bounds – and know no apparent limits to how much loot they can rake in by lobbying federal, state and local governments, and playing political science with similarly minded legislators and regulators who control climate and energy laws, mandates, grants and subsidies.
How can the general public be so oblivious to all of this?
FTX founder and alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried revealed the secret. He avoided media and regulator scrutiny by donating to influential media outlets, the way Bill Gates does. That garners favorable press and social media – which also ignore, cancel and deplatform critics and skeptics.
Fortunately, gutsy interrogators like Rajan are discovering and publicizing what most of the bought-and-paid-for “journalist classes” still won’t. This helps more people see behind the curtain and find the self-interest, double-dealing and pseudo-science that create the scary climate crisis monsters.
Climate Armageddon Club games are costing us trillions of dollars, in the name of saving people and planet. Hopefully, more real journalists, troves of Twitter emails (this time kudos to Mr. Musk!), and congressional investigations will save taxpayers and families from additional costly, destructive policies.
https://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2023/03/20/legalized-climate-grifting-n2620875
**************************************************Greens refuse to discuss recycling of renewables and restoration of mining locations to pristine conditions
Decommissioning, recycling, and restoration of the landscaping back to its original pristine condition is not in the cards for wind, solar, and EV battery materials.
The reality is that all the mineral products and metals needed to make wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries are mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control. Decommissioning and restoration of those mining landscapes back to their original pristine condition is not in the cards in developing countries. Recycling of worn-out turbine blades, solar panels, and EV batteries, in wealthy countries is also not in the cards.
The sites for the mining of materials required to build wind, solar, and EV batteries are under minimal to nonexistent labor, wage, environmental, reclamation, and worker health and safety regulations. The mere extraction of those exotic minerals presents social challenges, human rights abuses, and environmental degradations worldwide, but are of no significance to the wealthy countries benefitting from those “green” materials.
The climate cult COULD seek decommissioning and restoration standards in those developing countries down to the last dandelion, just like we have for decommissioned mines, oil, and nuclear sites in America, but the climate cult avoids the same in developing countries.
The life cycle for renewable electricity like wind and solar runs from design, procurement, and construction, through operations and maintenance, and repair, as well as the life ending decommissioning and disposal, but again, recycling and restoration of the landscaping back to its original pristine condition, is also not in the cards in the wealthy countries that are going green.
Since the blades and panels and EV batteries are very difficult to recycle, the waste stream created by them is a mounting problem. According to a 2017 study published in the scientific journal Waste Management, the world’s wind industry alone will be producing 43 million tons of blade waste annually by 2050.
Those worn out wind turbines will be the equivalent weight of 215,000 locomotives. The demand of the wealthy economies for more wind turbines are projected to cause 43 million tons of blade waste worldwide by 2050 with China possessing 40 percent of the waste, Europe 25 percent, the United States 16 percent, and the rest of the world 19 percent.
The size and weight of the blades vary, but the average length is around 120 feet, and they weigh around five tons. Some of the largest can be as long as a football field and weigh 20 tons. Currently, there are no scalable, cost-effective technologies to recycle the blades, and most of them are going to landfills.
Those 1,000-pound EV batteries present similar challenges. With more than 40 percent of all EV’s in America being located in California, there are no EV-battery recycling plants in California, and only five up and running nationwide, according to CalEPA. That’s even though used lithium-ion batteries contain valuable minerals that otherwise must be mined from the earth, mostly from overseas operations in developing countries. The” throw away” society is alive and well in America.
With wealthy countries obsessed with a “green” society, it looks like decommissioning, recycling, and restoration of the mining landscapes in developing countries and renewable generating sites in developed countries back to their original pristine conditions is not in the cards for the foreseeable future.
The vast majority of these critical minerals and elements are mined abroad, and almost all the refining of them is done by China alone.
What’s more, China is the largest single provider of most of the critical minerals and rare earths used around the globe, and is almost the only refiner of such products. This means minerals and rare earth elements mined elsewhere, often with Chinese funding, are shipped to China for processing into usable materials. Much of the mining and refining of materials in China is produced by forced or slave labor, often of persecuted religious minorities, like Falun Gong followers and Uighurs.
The Biden administration declared October 4, 2022 that batteries from China may be tainted by child labor, yet the American government continues to enforce mandates, subsidies, and tax breaks to go green, that provides financial incentives for developing countries to continue their current practices of inflicting environmental degradation to their local landscapes, force labor atrocities upon their workforce.
Concerning China, the Biden administration acknowledged the problem of slave labor, having signed the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021.
Now, the Biden administration is leaning more on Africa to counter China’s control over U.S. energy.
Still, the reality of today’s globalized supply chain and America’s financial incentives that continuously encourage further exploitations of humanity and the environment makes it almost a certainty the massive green energy transition being pushed by the Biden administration will be built with minerals and parts produced using Chinese and/or African slave labor.
With insufficient intelligence on the ground in China or Africa to track forced-labor manufacturing, and less still the raw materials, wealthy countries will continue to exploit the folks with yellow, brown, and black skin in developing countries.
In economic terms, the wealthier countries climate hysteria is imposing severe negative externalities on developing countries. Ethically, the West’s climate obsession is immorally condemning present generations of impoverished peoples and nations to continued perjury and early deaths in the years ahead. Make no mistake, this ruse exists to further enrich people in developed countries while they simultaneously exploit those in developing countries.
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The bank crises could take down the ESG push
Only three months ago the Credit Suisse bank issued its annual Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures report, promising to set the bank at the centre of the global Net Zero carbon trajectory.
As shares of the legendary Credit Suisse bank tax haven plunged 24 per cent on Wednesday and fuelled another day of alarm over the risks imbedded in the financial system, green activists at Bill McKibben’s 350.org climate operation distributed invitations to an online Earth Day event titled “Divest/Invest: How we stop banks from fuelling the climate crisis.”
The message might have rung bells of support a week ago. The plan was to stop America’s big banks from investing in fossil fuel development and “shut down” the oil and gas industry.
Such action calls are likely to fall on deaf ears this week as the global policy and investment focus is on keeping the banking industry alive and well. Instead of forcing banks to divest fossil fuels assets, the challenge now is to stop institutions from divesting bank shares.
Today it’s the banking climate that needs to be protected in an environment filled with predictions that the world financial system is in some peril. Anybody scanning commentary surrounding the banking share price crash has heard the news. “We don’t have a credit risk yet,” said a not-very-reassuring Nouriel Roubini, the “Dr. Doom” forecaster of the 2008 financial crisis who posted a tweet: “An economic & financial hard landing has been my baseline for over a year. Now it is clearly unavoidable. Economic stability & fighting inflation require raising policy rates much higher.”
The head of the world’s largest investment firm, Larry Fink at BlackRock, issued his annual letter on Wednesday with a warning that the fall of Silicon Valley Bank could signal more failures to come. “We don’t know yet whether the consequences of easy money and regulatory changes will cascade throughout the U.S. regional banking sector (akin to the S&L Crisis) with more seizures and shutdowns coming,” said Fink. His letter to shareholders is usually issued in February, but the delay this year suggests Fink was grappling with the emerging risks.
Fink is the world’s leading green corporate activist. In 2022, he warned that “Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net-zero world. The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?” But this week he raised themes and issues he has seldom mentioned in past annual missives. The 2023 letter refers to “easy money” policies deployed by central banks and contains 18 references to “inflation,” a word not used in his 2022 statement.
Another caution came from Bob Michelle, the chief investment officer at JPMorgan Asset Management, who warned that Credit Suisse is “absolutely” a sign that there is more trouble on the horizon. It is, said Michelle, the “tip of the iceberg” of banking turmoil to come.
It’s a cold metaphor that neatly brings us back to the climate activist campaign. In their easy-money world, banking icebergs have long ago melted away and there is nothing to worry about except how to get the banks to divest their fossil fuel holdings to make the world safe and green. But this idea that the only problem facing the planet is climate change is going to be more and more difficult to maintain.
There are indications that banks, central bankers and regulators have been dedicating too much effort and resources to the management of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Tracking ESG risks, in other words, may well have been a distraction from managing the real risks foisted on the world economy by high government debt and inflationary monetary policies.
The Bank of England seems to be pulling back on climate change. In a report on climate-related risks issued Monday the Bank implies that climate risks in financial markets seem to be under control and “are appropriate.” It warned, however, that “Any use of macroprudential tools would need to be assessed carefully against how well they mitigate climate risks, their behavioural impacts, and the potential for unintended consequences.” In other words, now is no time to be flirting with unintended consequences of radical climate policy when real financial risks are being overlooked.
Notes of caution over climate management risk were issued in Canada last week by the federal government’s Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. While climate change is an issue, the biggest risk seemed to be coming from “transition risks” created by government policy. “These risks can emerge from current or future government policies, legislation, and regulation to limit GHG emissions, as well as technological advancements, and changes in market and customer sentiment towards a low-GHG economy.”
Within Credit Suisse, a heavy public focus on ESG and climate issues was accompanied by less obvious failures to manage financial risk.
Only three months ago the bank issued its annual Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures report, a 106-page document signed by its top executives. The report, they said, “provides important information on how we apply our expertise as a bank.” Filled with graphs, metrics and explanations, the report promises to set the bank at the centre of the global Net Zero carbon trajectory.
Credit Suisse’s financial management regime is another story. This week — as its shares fell to near US$2 from highs of US$50 a decade ago — the bank’s annual report said there were “material weaknesses” in its internal controls over financial reporting.
When it comes to bank management of risk in the future, the new focus is likely to be on the books rather than the climate.
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20 March, 2023
EPA cracks down on coal power pollution
No word on HOW ozone levels can be reduced
On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, finalized a regulation that will cut smog-causing air pollution from coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities. The new "Good Neighbor" rule requires 23 states to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions blowing across state boundaries. The air pollutants — which form ozone, the main ingredient in smog — can travel downwind into neighboring states, harming the health of communities miles away.
The EPA estimates the rule will halve nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants by 2027, compared to peak 2021 levels. And that cleaner air will lead to major public health improvements. According to the EPA, the new rule will prevent approximately 1,300 premature deaths, 2,300 hospital and emergency room visits, and 1.3 million cases of asthma in 2026 alone.
Ozone is one of the most widespread air pollutants in the U.S. Research has found that ozone raises the risk of premature death and can be particularly dangerous to children, older adults, and people with asthma and other chronic conditions. Asthma attacks and other health effects from ozone can drive people to the emergency room and take them away from schools and jobs.
Paul Billings, national senior vice president of public policy for the American Lung Association, describes ozone's health effects as "a sunburn of the lungs." Ozone can cause even healthy adults working or moving outdoors to wheeze, cough, and experience shortness of breath. During peak ozone season, from March to November, people across the country experience its harms. Ozone pollution particularly impacts those who live close to a major polluting source, disproportionately low-income communities and communities of color.
"We know this harmful pollution doesn't stop at the state line," EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement Wednesday. "Today's action will help our state partners meet stronger air quality health standards beyond borders, saving lives and improving public health in impacted communities across the United States."
Initially proposed in February last year, the plan implements a part of the federal Clean Air Act known as the "Good Neighbor" provision. Under the law, states are required to submit a plan for ensuring that their air pollution does not spread significantly to other states. If they fail to submit or if the EPA disapproves of their plan, the agency must issue its own rule to protect downwind states.
The new "Good Neighbor" plan also aims to achieve coast-to-coast adherence to national ambient air quality standards set by the EPA for ozone back in 2015. Billings says given the eight-year gap, the new plan is "long overdue" — and that the EPA has more work ahead if it wants to take ozone seriously.
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is required to review — and update if needed — air quality standards every five years. In 2020, the Trump administration decided to not update the 2015 ozone limits. The agency announced late last year that it would reconsider that policy, aiming to reach a final decision by the end of this year.
The current ozone standards set a ceiling of 70 parts per billion; the American Lung Association and other public health and environmental justice advocates call for "standards no higher than 60 parts per billion."
"The president has made addressing environmental injustice a priority," Billings told Grist. "And rules like the revision of the ozone health standard will be an important test to see if the policies are going to match the rhetoric."
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New EPA regulation on water quality is poorly advised
John Doolittle
A recent proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to enact the first-ever federally enforceable water quality standards for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has prompted discussions about the potential impacts of these regulations on public health, the environment, and the economy.
As a former Member of Congress who served on several committees of jurisdiction that handled water issues, I have always been an advocate for safe and clean drinking water. But any such standards must be viewed within the broader portfolio of drinking water priorities and developed based upon the best available science. Unfortunately, this proposal misses that mark.
By way of background, PFAS is a broad term for a family of chemicals that have been used for decades across industries and that are essential to modern life. Consisting of more than 5,000 different chemistries, each PFAS compound has its own unique chemical makeup and uses as well as environmental and health profiles. However, despite this fact, the EPA is pressing forward with a regulation that would lump many of these chemicals together in one basket.
While some advocates for this aggressive regulation have cherry-picked data to claim that the science is settled on this issue, the fact remains that there is no clear evidence that exposure to the PFAS chemicals used today causes cancer or any other serious health effects. The EPA's own website says that it doesn’t fully understand "how harmful PFAS are to people and the environment", and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has similarly found that “human health effects from exposure to low environmental levels of PFAS is uncertain.”
In fact, many PFAS chemicals have never even been evaluated by the EPA for health risks, including two that would be swept up in these new water quality standards. In other instances, the EPA has violated the scientific integrity of its process by using studies that had not yet been peer reviewed to set previous “Advisory Guidelines” that subsequently helped to inform this newly proposed rule.
This background now leads to a new regulatory regime proposed by the Biden-Harris Administration that will vastly expand the difficulties facing water utilities, which have expressed concerns about the impacts the rule may have on state staffing levels, lab capacity for monitoring needs, and water treatment capabilities. As the State Water Drinking Association has pointed out, this new rule will also result in “significant rate increases” for customers of water systems that will suddenly find themselves required to test for and remove PFAS to exceedingly stringent standards.
This newly proposed rule sets Maximum Contaminant Levels (MCLs) for PFAS chemicals well outside international norms, as much as 25 times stricter than World Health Organization guidelines in some cases. Given that this rule will also impose a whole new set of monitoring requirements and that these MCLs were in some cases set at the lowest level that can be detected in lab settings, such testing may likely be expensive and time-consuming. Some experts fear that a bottleneck in such testing capabilities may be on the horizon, resulting in possibly lengthy delays as a result.
Water utilities that are already struggling to staff up to implement the new bipartisan infrastructure law as well as the lead and copper rule, could find that this new PFAS rule would create an additional competing priority. In some cases, this result may come at the expense of dealing with more pressing and better-known threats to public health and water quality such as removing and replacing the lead pipes that are poisoning communities across the United States and are responsible for the well-publicized water safety issues in Flint, MI and Jackson, MS
I am concerned that the Biden-Harris Administration would be willing to move forward with proposed regulations that could result in unnecessary costs and disruptions for water utilities and their customers, given the shortcomings of the underlying science, which are quite substantial. The fact remains that the EPA has failed to determine safe exposure levels and has not even proven whether PFAS chemicals pose a health hazard to humans – two major milestones that should be achieved before instituting such an onerous regulatory regime.
The public will have a chance to comment, and the EPA would be wise to make changes before issuing a final rule, which is expected by the end of the year, or scrap it all together and start anew. Given the paucity of substantial evidence as to the risks posed to humans by PFAS chemicals, it is simply premature for the EPA to impose these new ill-advised regulations.
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Lights Out: Midwest Grid Groans, Plants Close as Green Regulations Hit Home
Detroit – From idled Illinois manufacturing plants to rising electricity costs to Michigan residents shuttered in their cars without power, the Green Revolution is wreaking havoc on the Midwest.
Governments are regulating America’s industrial heartland into an era of carbon prohibition. Scientists say the transformation will have little environmental benefit, but their effects are being felt by workers and consumers as jobs and power reliability suffer.
“I’m as cold as hell,” Ron George, 63, told The Detroit News from his van, where he’d lived for five days in front of his powerless Redford Township home after a February 22 winter storm left over 700,000 residents without power.
Electric grid strain
The Midwest is in the midst of another cold winter, and electric grid operators have warned they don’t have the energy resources to provide power. The reason? Governments are forcing utilities to abandon fossil fuels in favor of less reliable renewables.
“Everybody in the Midwest should be aware that there are issues with our grid,” Tom Sobeck, president of northern Michigan-based utility Presque Isle Electric & Gas, told The Detroit News. “You get a perfect storm of weather and a maintenance outage on one of our generation plants and. . . . It could be bad.”
The Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), grid operator for most of the Midwest and the Canadian province of Manitoba, says that in five years, 30% of its energy will come from wind and solar power. Yet, with renewables currently at 15%, states like Michigan are already at a breaking point. This winter the state was found to be short of planning standards developed by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.
“(MISO says) that we were on the wrong side of that planning standard," said state utility regulator Dan Scripps, chair of the Michigan Public Service Commission, with "an increased likelihood of outages because we didn't have enough resources available."
MISO suggests there needs to be a more stable energy source to keep the lights on, but there is a rush to renewables instead. Michigan, led by Detroit’s DTE Energy and Consumers Energy, have spent $3 billion on windmills, solar panels, and biomass in the last 15 years.
That has come at the expense of infrastructure reliability, and the state’s grid is increasingly vulnerable. A decade ago that wasn’t an issue, Melissa Seymour, MISO’s vice president of government affairs told The News. “We had plentiful generation. It was 30% above our reserve margin. Nobody was worried about resources. Now, we are at our reserve margin.”
Commented Redford Townships’ George, who says power outages appear more frequent: “I don’t know what, but something needs to be done. This happens too much."
His hunch is borne out by data as Michigan has recorded more power outages than any state this side of Texas, which has also aggressively pursued wind power.
Credit Jennifer Granholm, governor from 2003-2010, who began Michigan’s renewable push with a 2008 renewable energy mandate with an eye on eliminating fossil fuels. She warned that, among other environmental calamities, the Great Lakes would dry up. That hasn’t happened. Indeed, scientists like John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama-Huntsville who monitors global satellite temperature data, says that “if you apply the different (national) regulations, they will have no climate impact. If you eliminate the US from the face of the earth, it will have no impact on global temperature. Climate is not as sensitive to CO2 as the models say it is.”
Granholm’s zealotry has been rewarded with a promotion to Secretary of Energy where she is implementing her Michigan energy policies on a national scale.
Her Democratic successor, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, has kept the pedal to the metal. Whitmer’s Michigan Healthy Climate Plan proposes to “generate 60% of the state’s electricity from renewable resources and phase out remaining coal-fired power plants by 2030 (and) build the infrastructure necessary to support 2 million electric vehicles on Michigan roads by 2030.”
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Net Zero could cost Americans more than $50 trillion, new paper warns
An eminent researcher has warned that any attempt to decarbonise the US economy by 2050 is doomed to failure.
Professor Michael Kelly, from the University of Cambridge in the UK, has previously studied the impact of Net Zero projects in the UK and his native New Zealand, and has now turned his expertise to the United States.
His headline findings are a stark warning for politicians across the country.
“The cost to 2050 will comfortably exceed $12 trillion for electrification projects, and $35 trillion for improving the energy efficiency of buildings. A work-force comparable in size to the health sector will be required for 30 years, including a doubling of the present number of electrical engineers. The bill of specialist materials is of a size that, for the USA alone, is several times the global annual production.”
Professor Kelly warns that politicians are not thinking through the scale of the project they are pursuing.
“It’s clear that no country has the manpower, the materials, or the money to deliver Net Zero. It cannot be attempted without establishing a command economy, and even then it would fail. This is a fool’s errand.”
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19 March, 2023
Liberal Area to Phase Out Natural Gas Furnaces and Water Heaters -- but not stoves
Aiming for cleaner air is reasonable but electric heating does not do as good a job and looks set to be costly. If this goes ahead, the smarties will invest in an AGA -- a mainly British stove that has long been used to double as a heater. It was originally designed to burn hard coal!
The San Francisco Bay Area will begin a “gradual phaseout” of gas-powered water heaters and furnaces, which will be banned after 2026, The Hill reported Thursday.
Reportedly, the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD) voted this week to approve new rules to eliminate nitrogen oxide emissions from water heaters and furnaces. Going forward, the sale of NOx-emitting natural gas water heaters will be prohibited beginning in 2027. In 2029, the sale of NOx-emitting furnaces will be banned. “Large, commercial” water heaters that emit NOx will be banned in 2031.
“The 1.8 million water heaters and furnaces in the Bay Area significantly impact our air quality, resulting in dozens of early deaths and a wide range of health impacts, particularly in communities of color,” Philip Fine, executive officer of the Air District, said in a statement to the outlet. “This groundbreaking regulation will phase out the most polluting appliances in homes and businesses to protect Bay Area residents from the harmful air pollution they cause.”
The Hill noted that a separate fact sheet from the agency said that the only zero-NOx appliances available in the are electric appliances. A press release from the BAAQMD said that the regulations do not affect appliances used for cooking, such as gas stoves, which was previously a target for Democrats.
“The new amendments will safeguard public health against the hazards of these pollutants and prevent an estimated 85 premature deaths, as well as dozens of new asthma cases, in the Bay Area each year,” a statement from the agency added.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2023/03/16/san-francisco-n2620704
**********************************************Climate change experts' bullying is not about helping the Earth, it is about controlling us
It's been a tough couple of years for the experts. When it comes to big public policy questions, complicated adult stuff like war and disease and the economy – really the only things that matter – the assumption in Washington has for many years been that you should not worry about it. Don't sweat the details. That's not your role as a citizen and as a voter. We don't have that kind of democracy, the kind where you might actually participate. No, your job is to trust the experts and their conclusions and then obey them.
But COVID kind of blew that up. If there's one thing we learned from that disaster, it's that public policy experts very often had no clue what they were talking about. Your hippie aunt in Mendocino County knew a lot more about how to beat a flu virus than your average virologist on CNN. They're not going to tell you to go outside, get some exercise, some sunlight, some fresh air, stop eating junk food, turn off your computer once in a while, spend time with other people. Be healthy. That advice worked. The experts, by contrast, made you get the vaccine and that did not work.
By March of 2021, people are starting to figure this out. Anyone who was paying attention in America understood that the experts, many of them, were full of it. And it was exactly at that moment that The Atlantic Magazine in Washington published a piece pushing back against a growing consensus. That story was entitled "Following Your Gut Isn't the Right Way to Go."
It's hard to think of a funnier headline, really mostly because it's so spectacularly absurd. You should always trust your gut, obviously. It is the one thing that will never betray you. But The Atlantic Magazine wanted you to know that your natural instincts are, in fact, worthless. "The experts had a rough year," the magazine concedes, "but we still have to trust them." Right.
Actually, we don't have to trust them and on big questions of public policy, we absolutely should not trust them. It's a democracy. But Washington is continuing to demand that we do trust them. Why? There may be a reason. Maybe COVID isn't the only big project they have in mind for us, a project the experts will justify and MSNBC.
And indeed it's not. There is the climate change agenda and the climate change agenda is the single most ambitious effort to remake human civilization in all recorded history, and it's coming. In fact, it's already in progress. The only reason that millions and millions of Americans aren't protesting in the streets tonight over this effort to completely overturn their lives is that on some level, many people still do trust the experts, at least on climate change, but should they?
We were pondering that this morning when we saw that the world's most famous climate change expert, Greta Thunberg of Sweden, just deleted a tweet she wrote in June of 2018.
Fridays For Future climate activist Greta Thunberg attends a news conference with climate activists and experts from Africa, in Stockholm, Sweden January 31, 2020. TT News Agency/Pontus Lundahl via REUTERS
Fridays For Future climate activist Greta Thunberg attends a news conference with climate activists and experts from Africa, in Stockholm, Sweden January 31, 2020. TT News Agency/Pontus Lundahl via REUTERS (TT News Agency/Pontus Lundahl via REUTERS)
Here it is: "A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years." That scientist, of course, was a Harvard professor so obviously that prediction was going to be correct, but here we are still driving our Silverados and still alive and some of us are still happy.
So, it does make you wonder if Greta Thunberg, the greatly revered Greta Thunberg, a perennial finalist for the Nobel Peace Prize, could have gotten that so wrong, what else have the climate experts gotten wrong and how long have they been getting it wrong? Well, fortunately, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has done the research on this, and it turns out these people have been very wrong for a very long time. In 1969, The New York Times was printing climate hysteria from an expert called Paul Ehrlich "We must realize that unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years."
That was Paul Ehrlich in 1969. Well, here it is, 2023, and that same Paul Ehrlich, who's now 90 and still publishing books and still being cited on "60 Minutes," is still telling us that we're all going to die. Now, clearly, Paul Ehrlich had some sort of traumatic childhood. He's been inflicting it on the rest of us for over 50 years, and for 50 years, his fellow experts have taken him seriously.
Jordan Peterson tells Tucker the religious structure behind the climate cult of the leftVideo
Now, back then, of course, climate change didn't mean global warming. It meant a new ice age. In 1970, The Boston Globe reported, "Scientists predict a new ice Age by 21st century." According to the Globe, "air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century." An ice age!
In 1972, Brown University's science department sent a letter to the White House explaining that they had "deep concern with the future of the world because this ice age falls within the rank of processes which produced the last Ice Age." Two years later, in 1974, the Guardian reported, "Spy satellites show new ice age is coming fast" and the report cited for moral weight analysis carried out at Columbia University. Then, a few years later, 1977, the actor Leonard Nimoy – who was not a science expert technically, but played one at one point on television – shot this video.
LEONARD NIMOY: If we are unprepared for the next advance, the result could be hunger and death on a scale unprecedented in all of history. What scientists are telling us now is that the threat of an ice age is not as remote as they once thought. During the lifetime of our grandchildren, arctic cold and perpetual snow could turn most of the inhabitable portions of our planet into a polar desert.
Hunger and death are an unprecedented scale! Someone else with a tragic childhood he inflicted on the rest of us.
But by the early 1980s, when the ice didn't arrive well, the expert decided the problem wasn't too much cold. It was too much heat. It was global warming. In 1989, the Associated Press ran this story "A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000." In other words, 23 years ago.
That same year, 1989, a climate expert called Jim Hansen met with a reporter from Salon. According to Salon, Hansen explained that within 20 or 30 years, "The West Side Highway, which runs along the Hudson River in Manhattan, will be underwater," Underwater! We checked tonight, and actually it's congested, but still a road.
Then in March of 2000, the Independent newspaper had a piece explaining that snowfalls are now just a thing of the past: "Snow is starting to disappear from our lives." The piece quoted a climate expert claiming that "children just aren't going to know what snow is." No idea what snow is! It'll be a relic of the Ice Age, but of the great inferno of global warming.
Then in 2004, amazingly, civilization still existed. The Guardian predicted that, "Major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a Siberian climate by 2020" – which is a little confusing because global warming doesn't typically produce a Siberian climate. And it was around this time that they decided, "Hey, we don't want to get pinned down on the details. Will it be too hot? Will it be too cold? We don't want to say. Something bad is going to happen, so we're going to call it climate change."
And that paved the way for Al Gore, who in 2006 released his famous documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth." The beauty of An Inconvenient Truth is now that it's been well, inconveniently more than 15 years since it came out, we can fact-check its claims. Here's the trailer.
AL GORE: If you look at the ten hottest years ever measured, they've all occurred in the last 14 years and the hottest of all was 2005. This is Patagonia 75 years ago and the same glacier today. This is Mount Kilimanjaro 30 years ago and last year. Within the decade, there will be no more "Snows of Kilimanjaro."
Al Gore also said there would be no ice in the Arctic. He quoted researchers, climate researchers, experts, and he explained that, "The North Pole will be ice-free in the Summer by 2013 because of manmade global warming." Now, it does take a certain level of hutzpah to make a prediction that precise and Al Gore made many of them and all of them turned out to be wrong and for a normal person, that would be a cue maybe it's time to retire. I'm rich on Google stock. Maybe I could just stop talking because, of course, I've been disgraced by my own foolish predictions,
But no, he kept going, and he was helped in that by the entire news media. It makes you wonder why? News organizations exist to bring you the news, to assess whether things are true or not, but if all of them collude to hide lying, you have to ask, is there something else going on here? We will let you decide. We do know that by 2006, NBC News informed the world that, "a leading U.S. climate researcher says the world has a ten-year window" (till 2016) "a window of opportunity to take decisive action on global warming and avert catastrophe." Of course, by their predicted date, Donald Trump became president, but that's not what they were predicting.
In 2008, the Associated Press reported that according to a top NASA scientist, "in 5 to 10 years, the Arctic will be free of sea ice in the summer." That didn't happen, but of course, no one was ever held to account for bad predictions. So, this kept going. John Kerry, now our climate czar, cited that very same science in 2009. Watch.
JOHN KERRY: You have sea ice, which is melting at a rate that the Arctic Ocean now increasingly is exposed. In five years, scientists predict we will have the first ice-free Arctic summer.
What's hilarious is this is a guy who's never had a job. He's only been in politics. He never did one useful thing. He's not a scientist. He has never done research. He's actually not an expert. But because he's way more aggressive than you are and because he has access to the media, which amplify his claims, he poses as one.
Now, what's strange about the prediction you just heard is that John Kerry's prediction contradicts Barack Obama's famous climate prediction from a year earlier. You probably remember this.
BARACK OBAMA: Because if we are willing to work for it and fight for it and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless. This was the moment when the rise in the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.
Sad to watch that. All the cheering people, they seem so sincere. He's going to save the world and control the weather. He's Jesus. But in fact, the global healing Obama promised at the beginning of his first term never came and neither the global destruction. Here, by the way, is Neil deGrasse Tyson, another great predictor of things, saying that by 2014, the Statue of Liberty will soon be underwater.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You know what I tell people? This really wakes them. Here in the New York metropolitan area, I say, you know, if we lose the ice caps, you know how high the water will be? "Oh maybe a couple of feet." No, it would come up to the Statue of Liberty’s elbow, the one that's holding the Declaration of Independence. That's where the waterline will be.
That man is a scientist and of course, climate does change it, as always, change. In fact, the landscape we live in now is formed by climate change. The glaciers are a product of climate change. The climate is changing now. It never stops changing. That is a process that we didn't cause and that we can't control to any great degree, we will never be able to control and there are upsides to it and downsides to it.
Biden warns climate change 'damning' entire generation: 'Mother Nature let her wrath be seen'Video
By the way, if the Earth is indeed getting warmer and it seems to be, well, then that will make more arable land in places like Canada and Northern Europe. So, like everything in this life in the temporal world, it's a mixed blessing, but you only hear the downsides, which tells you a lot. It tells you this is not science. It's manipulation. These aren't reports from the experts. These are threats.
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No—ESG Doesn’t Offer Investors More Choices, Nor Is It Part of the Free Market
On Feb. 28, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote an impassioned appeal in The Wall Street Journal for Republicans to support environmental, social, and governance (ESG) scores because ESG ostensibly represents the free market at work, by offering investors more “choices.”
Schumer appears to be deeply confused about how ESG operates. Or, more likely, he’s pandering to his powerful donors; pro-ESG asset management titan BlackRock reportedly donated more than $100,000 to Schumer’s reelection campaign in 2022.
Whatever the case may be, in reality, ESG results in the complete opposite of what Schumer claims. Putting aside the highly problematic “woke” metrics ensconced in all ESG frameworks, ESG at its core is designed to centralize decision-making power among an enormously powerful public-private cartel of elites and international organizations. It blatantly attempts to fundamentally transform the economy by severely altering traditional methods of assessing risk and allocating capital and credit. Rather than being judged solely based upon material factors such as revenue and the quality of goods and services, entities under ESG are judged based upon their commitments to arbitrary, subjective, political goals such as mitigating climate change and advancing social justice causes.
Businesses deemed by this elite cabal to be sufficiently committed to said goals are given a “high” ESG social credit score, and are rewarded with substantial capital in-flows, tax breaks, grants, access to special financial vehicles, preferential contracting, and other advantages. Businesses assigned “low” ESG scores suffer from reduced or eliminated access to capital, credit, and even insurance.
Just listen to Bank of America CEO and Chairman Brian Moynihan, who also runs the World Economic Forum’s International Business Council. At the WEF’s 2022 Annual Meeting in Davos, Moynihan committed to using the financial clout of his entire institution, including the funds of individual investment account holders. As Moynihan put it, “200,000 people, a three trillion-dollar balance sheet, 60 billion in expenses; you start aiming that gun, and you take that across all these companies, it is huge. … [The companies] delivering on the metrics will get more capital, the ones that won’t will get less.”
With so much wealth in the hands of a relatively small group of players who are committed to using their capital for ESG objectives, companies have little choice but to comply and pursue those objectives, lest they risk dying on the vine. There’s little to no actual choice involved, for the business or the investor.
For instance, entire industries such as oil and natural gas extraction, tobacco sales, and firearm manufacturing are often designed to be screened out from investment funds, loan offerings, and insurance underwriting, with many large asset management firms like BlackRock divesting heavily from critical economic sectors. These fund managers even target much of the agriculture sector due to its supposedly high carbon dioxide emissions, further exacerbating negative food supply shocks. This occurs, regardless of whether investing in such industries would result in financial gains for the investors who have entrusted asset managers with their hard-earned money.
Asset managers—including the fund fiduciaries charged with safeguarding and growing retirement accounts and pension funds—have a legal responsibility to their investors. And, investors often don’t even know that these fiduciaries are using their funds to pursue political objectives at the expense of financial returns.
The result is that investor choices are limited by the fund managers to those companies that produce less greenhouse gas emissions, have the “right” ratio of white, black, Asian, and Latino employees, and donate to the “proper” political causes such as Black Lives Matter and Planned Parenthood.
I would bet that if these investors’ wealth had been allocated based purely upon financial metrics, and diversified to include companies involved with fossil fuels, firearms, or agriculture, they would have seen substantially higher returns on their investment in recent years. In fact, many studies have shown ESG-centric funds significantly underperform compared to traditional funds.
Using a natural experiment, University of Chicago researchers found that none of the highest-rated sustainability funds they studied outperformed any of the lowest-rated sustainability funds—though the former received more capital than the latter.
In December 2022, Bloomberg analyzed the 10 largest ESG funds by assets as compared to the S&P 500 index. Eight of the 10 funds performed worse, many substantially so. For instance, Vanguard’s FTSE Social and its ESG U.S. Stock both suffered year-to-date losses of minus-20.6 percent, compared to S&P’s minus-14.8 percent. The Brown Advisory Sustainable Growth Fund suffered a staggering minus-28.1 percent loss, nearly double that of the S&P index fund.
Regardless of the financial performance aspect of ESG investing, intentionally screening out companies involved with certain industries distorts the marketplace and the macroeconomy, and limits choice. Moreover, decreasing investment flows to vital industries such as energy—which is the lifeblood of any economy—results in reduced research and development that drives economic growth, and less prosperity for everyone.
Ultimately, rather than letting the invisible hand of the free market decide where investment should flow, the intervention of ESG factors into investment decisions fundamentally changes our entire financial and economic systems. Controlled investment is the antithesis of a free market, and is very similar to a socialist or fascistic command-and-control economic model. And, unsurprisingly, those advocating for this new economic model stand to gain the most.
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‘Climate Alarmism’ Is New Form of ‘Colonialism’ That Infringes on Sovereignty, Researcher Says
OXON HILL, Md.—The Earth is warming, and while many worry about the potential consequences of the change, it is not unprecedented or dangerous, and will be a net benefit for humanity, Vijay Jayaraj said.
Numerous figures in the mainstream media have pushed “climate alarmism,” but Jayaraj, a research associate at the nonpartisan, nonprofit CO2 Coalition, debunks the claim, calling it a new form of colonialism.
“There is a growing sentiment among the leaders in the developing world about imperialism and reemergence of colonialism, in which they see an enforcement of restrictive energy policies from the Western leaders,” Jayaraj told The Daily Signal during an interview at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this month. “So, it’s in a form of an imperialism and climate alarmism, which is now infringing upon the rights of the poor people and dashing their hopes about having a future where they can have reliable energy access.”
The consensus of the climate change narrative is not being determined by scientists, but by “unelected political leaders” who use climate policies as “the Bible for policymaking,” he said.
“And we have a fair number of people in the conservative movement who do embrace, or are sympathetic towards, these reports,” said Jayaraj, who holds a master’s degree in environmental science. “And that is a problem, because this is a war against human well-being, not only in the developing world, but also in the developed West.”
He discussed the benefits of using nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuels, and how even evidence from the meltdowns at Fukushima and Chernobyl have not been as “detrimental to human health,” but “the left runs with the idea.”
Fighting back against the set climate narrative is difficult due to the potential for professors and scientists to lose their funding “or position,” Jayaraj warned. “So, it’s unfortunate, but we do have a lot of peer-reviewed scientific journals that are not talked about in the mainstream media,” Jayaraj emphasized. “And all people have to do is access Google Scholar and search for the terms that they’re interested in, their wide range of articles and scientific publications that do not agree with the current dominant climate narrative.”
Jayaraj thinks the American people are unfortunately in the grip of the mainstream media, which push the exaggerated climate crisis to those who do not have the time to look more closely at those issues.
“So, if you don’t have time to look into facts and read for yourself, you are just going to look at the headlines, and you are just going to assume that that is true because it’s on every leftist media,” he laments. “And you go, ‘Well, I think that’s the consensus, and I’ll go with that.’ But we do know that science is not based on consensus.”
“Science is based on scientific methodology, where you refute and challenge whichever theory is being put forward,” Jayaraj said. “And I think that’s all the more reason for media groups like yours to educate people on this.”
Jayaraj thinks the best way forward is to be more “people-centric,” in a way that “enables people to flourish.”
“So, that’s a way forward. I believe there are a lot of lawmakers in the conservative party who are very good at this, and I hope the tide turns in the coming years, and they are elected, and they can come forward with sensible energy policies,” Jayaraj concluded.
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17 March, 2023
Unpublished!
Google have stepped up their "unpublishing" activities lately. They delete posts that they dislike on blogspot, which they own. The odd thing is that they mostly delete posts from years ago. And just why is not immediately apparent. The latest post on this blog that they have deleted was from November 2009. It does appear in my backups here so you can still read it. Just scroll down to 23rd. I think it was the second last post of that day that was the problem -- in which I quote some pretty fiery words of John Hinderaker. His original post is still up. Marc Morano quoted that post too so Google's efforts are not going to make it go away
The second one that they have deleted is more mysterious. I suspect that it was a quote from Peter Berger that offended. Scroll down to the third post on January 12 here
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Is Greta Thunberg a stooge?
The more I dug into @GretaThunberg's story, the more I realized that something stinks here. It's no COINCIDENCE that her first appearance was on August 20, 2018, with a sit-in protest in front of the Swedish Parliament, followed COINCIDENTALLY four days later by the release of a book she co-authored with her mother.
But that's not all - the PR machine for her was already in full swing on August 20, thanks to a man named Ingmar Rentzhog, who financed and drove the campaign through his company, @WeDontHaveTime
And guess what? Rentzhog is also COINCIDENTALLY the chairman of the think tank "Global Challenge" (@ChallengesFnd), which is now COINCIDENTALLY fully financed by a billionaire named Kristine Person, a member of the Swedish Social Democratic Workers' Party and former minister in the government under Stefan Löfven.
And if that's not enough, Rentzhog purely COINCIDENTALLY happened to walk by the Swedish Parliament on August 20 and encounter Greta during her sit-in protest, taking a photograph of her. But wait, there's more - Rentzhog and Gretas mother had already met before at a climate conference on May 4, 2018, which is COINCIDENTALLY the exact date when Rentzhog became CEO of the aforementioned think tank.
And here's something interesting - both Kristine Person and Stefan Löfven happen to be members of Klaus Schwab's
@WEF. It's amazing how all these connections seem to come full circle, isn't it?
It's clear to me that something fishy is going on behind the scenes here. These people are manipulating the public and abusing their power for their own political gain. We need to be aware of their tactics and warn everybody we know about the Great Reset and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
https://twitter.com/goddeketal/status/1636465572153008134
******************************************The War on Affordable Energy Continues
The Biden Administration’s war on American energy commenced on his first day in office when the president issued seven Executive Orders limiting oil exploration, imposing massive new costly regulations on the energy industry, and rescinding support for the Keystone Pipeline. Americans are feeling the impact of these policies through astronomical prices for electricity and natural gas.
Even states like Kentucky, which boasts one of the most robust energy industries in the country, are feeling the pain. Out of nowhere, the Blue Grass State suddenly found itself stuck in rolling blackouts this winter as scores of residents couldn’t even so much as turn on their lights, heat their homes, or power on their electric cars or stoves. The fact that something like this happened in Kentucky, a state that uses more energy per dollar of Gross Domestic Product than nearly any other, shows that it can happen anywhere.
This should not come as a shock when considering how coal country has been under assault for more than a decade. Liberal billionaires have spent hundreds of millions of dollars convincing policymakers to shut down American energy sources and the jobs connected to them. President Biden has bought what they’re selling, and despite the pain Americans are feeling, he is showing no signs of backing down.
President Biden’s position is nonsensical. There’s a reason that coal still generates a large portion of the United States’ electricity: it’s one of the most reliable and effective energy sources on the market today. Biden says that it’s not clean, but that’s not true either. States like West Virginia and Kentucky have proven that coal can be mined with little to no environmental impact.
In addition to being wrong on the facts, the war on affordable energy generally and coal specifically, is dangerous because it involves government bureaucrats rather than the marketplace picking winners and losers. Under White House policy, the government is putting its fingers on the scales to boost solar and wind power while building every impediment possible to other energy sources.
This temptation works both ways, with some state legislatures considering bills, such as Kentucky’s SB 4, that would use the power of big government to strong-arm coal use at all costs. Supporters of bills like these ignore the fact that coal plants, like everything else, have limited lifespans, and sometimes need to be shut down for taxpayers’ and energy consumers’ own good.
Government shouldn’t put its thumb on the scale in either direction. Weakening the competitive marketplace, increasing costs, and reducing the availability of reliable electricity is not in anyone’s interest.
The data proves it. In 2022, consumers paid nearly 15% more for their electricity than they did the year prior. President Biden and other advocates of the war on affordable energy may argue energy cost increases came about due to general price inflation, but this figure is two times higher than the country’s annual inflation rate of 6.5%.
The more President Biden and others push the country to move away from the cheapest and most effective sources of energy at their disposal (whether those may be coal, renewables, or something else), the more jobs and economic activity the American people will lose, and the more horror stories we’ll hear from people paying hundreds of dollars more every month for gas and electricity.
Let’s not reflexively black out any particular source of power in the energy industry. Let’s allow them all to continue to grow, innovate, thrive, and shine bright. It’s the only way to ensure our power remains on and our utility bills don’t become as big as our mortgage payments.
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Australia has already achieved net zero. What climate crisis?
Australia has more than reached net zero emissions, and we are in surplus, argues the nation’s leading climate scientist.
So why is the Albanese government pouring billions into going even further with this agenda, and in the process wrecking lives by replacing one of the cheapest and most reliable electricity systems in the world with one of the most expensive and least reliable?
And with a leading Scandinavian car ferry line banning electric cars for safety reasons, why is the NSW Liberal National party government pushing apartment buildings into making it easier to charge EV’s when it should be banning such dangerous death traps from all car parks?
Fortunately, there are those who stand out against this. Prominent among these is the nation’s best-known geologist, the highly credentialled Professor Emeritus Ian Plimer.
Notwithstanding the frequent calls by politicians to ‘follow the science’, few consult or even read Plimer just as few media outlets publish or broadcast him.
However, he recently gave an extended interview, ‘What climate crisis?’, available free on demand on ADH TV
Plimer challenges the elites’ determination to move to net-zero emissions. Even if the discredited global warming theory were true, he says net zero is unnecessary for Australia.
He has come to the startling conclusion that Australia has already achieved net zero. He explains that when we burn coal and petroleum products and release CO2 into the atmosphere, this is sequestered into grasslands, crops and forests and dissolved in the coastal sea.
Incidentally, never fall for yet another linguistic trick from the Orwellian Minitruth, the Ministry of Truth, and call CO2 ‘carbon’. That’s done to suggest something unclean. Similarly, for reasons explained previously, never ever use ‘gender’ when you mean ‘sex’.
Returning to the sequestration of CO2, this occurs during photosynthesis, the process by which a plant uses CO2 from the air and water with energy from the light of the sun to produce its own food and what we need, oxygen.
Now, unlike politicians, plants do not distinguish between the 3 per cent of CO2 which is man-made and the rest. To a plant, it’s all food and not a pollutant, the silliest claim the elites could make .
Since Australia is lucky enough to be a continent with very few people, says Plimer, we absorb far more CO2 than we need.
Far from net zero, we are in a massive surplus, absorbing ten times our CO2 emissions. To achieve what we already have, our politicians are wasting billions and billions.
Plimer argues we should become the centre of every CO2 emitting industry in the world. After all, if a politician is under the delusion that CO2 is a pollutant and that it’s going to change the climate, he or she should campaign to locate heavy industry, smelting, metal manufacturing, in Australia.
Plimer’s thinking is impeccable. Why is he being silenced? Why don’t the global warmists try to prove this eminent scientist wrong? Is it because they cannot?
Asked what he would do if he were in power, he says he would stop subsidies and get rid of ‘foolish policies’ that as soon as you have electricity from wind or the sun, coal-fired power stations are to be blown up.
Rejecting claims about fossil fuel, he’d repeal legislation banning nuclear energy. Wholesale electricity contracts would be for the life of a nuclear power station, 80 or 100 years, to protect investors from politicians trying to stop them from providing cheap and reliable electricity ‘24/7, 365 days a year’.
Professor Plimer is right. What climate crisis indeed?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/australia-has-already-achieved-net-zero/
***************************************16 March, 2023
Greta Thunberg is yet another false prophet
Environmental activist Greta Thunberg has deleted a 2018 tweet saying that climate change would 'wipe out humanity' unless the world ceased using fossil fuels by 2023.
The Swedish campaigner had tweeted an article by gritpost.com detailing Harvard University professor James Anderson's warning that humanity would cease to exist if use of fossil fuels was not stopped within five years.
Thunberg's now erased post stated: 'A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.'
The article on gritpost.com - whose website no longer exists - quoted Anderson, an atmospheric chemistry expert, where he argued there would be 'essentially zero' ice left in the Arctic by 2022.
It is unknown when exactly the tweet was deleted, but it was captured by internet archive Wayback Machine last week on March 7, just before 10pm.
The WayBack Machine also captured some of the replies to Thunberg five years on from the tweet. One user asked: 'It's been five years GT, what's up?'
Another wrote: 'Is this the afterlife? I thought it'd be... better.' A third wrote: 'Why are we still here?'
Many high-profile conservatives have been quick to taunt the environmentalist over the apparent gaff - something Thunberg is not averse to after past run-ins with Andrew Tate and Donald Trump.
Charlie Kirk, the founder of right-wing group Turning Point USA tweeted: 'One of the best headlines of the year so far... 'Greta Thunberg deletes 2018 tweet saying world will end in 2023 after world does not end.''
Conservative film maker Dinesh D'Souza also tweeted: 'Climate Radical Greta Thunberg Caught Red Handed: Deletes 2018 Tweet That Says World Will End Without Action by 2023.'
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Antarctic Sea Ice: ‘The beginning of the end!’ – again
There is a small recent dip but nothing dramatic
The great sleeping giant that is Antarctica that — apart from the Antarctic Peninsula — refuses to respond to global warming may just have begun to stir, and the implications are, well, apocalyptic.
According to CNN “Antarctic sea ice hits record lows again. Scientists wonder if it’s “the beginning of the end.” CNN also reports that, “90% of ice around Antarctica has disappeared in less than a decade.”
CNN are not the only media outlets to report on this years’ record low sea ice around Antarctica in apocalyptic terms, other media extremists are available. For Sky News it’s the accelerating melt of polar regions. For the BBC “There is now less sea-ice surrounding the Antarctic continent than at any time since we began using satellites to measure it in the late 1970s.” All this is technically true, but misleading. When it’s put into context one sees a different picture.
So let’s have a look at the actual satellite data of Antarctic sea ice collected monthly since 1979. The NSIDC gives two data sets for what it calls i) sea ice extent, and ii) sea ice area. So let’s examine both of them.
The first graphs is sea ice area, the second sea ice extent.
From the empirical data it is evident that there is hardly any change of sea ice over the 44-year time span. Since 2016 there is a dip with possibly more variability (of which more later), and the lowest month (February) does show a record low, but by hardly anything (and also look at the data for 1992). Does this actual data look like the beginning of the end to you? Where is CNN’s 90% loss or Sky News acceleration?
Antarctic sea ice evolution has no significant trends along the whole period, but a volume drop is observed since 2016. Some scientists say there was a rapid decline in 2015/16, and record minima because believing that this ice loss marks an abrupt transition from a high to a low ice state that cannot be explained by year-to-year variability. Such a change is possibly associated with a long-term variability arising from ice–ocean feedbacks. Some evidence for this is that the transition was preceded by an increasing upper Southern Ocean density stratification, and an accumulation of heat at the subsurface; suggesting a decoupling of the surface from the subsurface ocean. In 2015/16, the upper ocean density stratification in the ice-covered region suddenly weakened, leading to a release of heat from the subsurface, contributing to the sea ice decline during winter. Perhaps this is a significant change in the coupled circumpolar ice–ocean system. Time will tell.
One could say that this prime example of science miscommunication is the fault of the NSIDC scientists and their comments posted on their website which were taken by journalists, and repeated without analysis or true context. So much of science journalism these days consists of “turning around” a press release.
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Woke, go broke: Vanguard ditches ESG investing
The world’s second largest asset management firm, Vanguard, with $8 trillion AUM, has pulled out of the ESG madness.
This is massive.
I recently pondered the question, ‘Is it possible that we are winning?’ and hailed Novak Djokovic’s Australian Open win as an omen of a turning of the tide in the war against globalism and Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset.
But I also remarked on other more tangible signs of the faltering program of global homogenisation that would see national sovereignty surrendered to world government, and individual freedom sacrificed to the greater good of ‘climate justice’ and ‘DEI’ (diversity, equity, and inclusion) – signs such as Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover (ostensibly to restore free speech to the platform), the fall of Jacinda Ardern (significant, but not to be overstated), the rise of the Freedom Caucus in the US House of Representatives, and the rather lacklustre showing by global elites at this year’s annual World Economic Forum junket in Davos.
These signs and many more suggest that people are waking up to the social engineering, and they don’t like it.
Paul Joseph Watson this week discussed a recent UK poll that showed nearly half of the British public believe LGBTQ+ people and ethnic minorities are over-represented on television (which they are, both in the UK and throughout the West). What’s striking about this is that a previous poll showed British people believed 20 per cent of the UK population was black (it’s actually only 3 per cent) and that 30 per cent was LGBTQ+ (it’s only 3 per cent). This new YouGov poll suggests a recalibration in public perception has occurred.
It now seems people are catching on to the ESG scam too.
ESG (environment, social and corporate governance) is a credit score system for corporations dreamed up at the UN and WEF and enforced by the world’s asset management behemoths such as BlackRock, Vanguard, and Fidelity, just to name the top three. The ESG matrix attempts, by withholding investment capital, to force companies into adopting ‘sustainable’ business practices which benefit not only shareholders, but ‘stakeholders’ also (for stakeholder read: any class of professional victim the establishment wishes to use as a political pawn). These ‘sustainable’ practices include things like carbon offsetting, hiring of ‘minorities’, and enforcing an equal gender split in senior management and on boards of directors.
This is all part of Klaus Schwab’s concept of ‘Stakeholder Capitalism’, which is really just communism rebranded and refitted to benefit those who are already super rich, and it has gained pre-eminence in the past decade. All those TV ads you see that bang-on about ‘sustainability’; those puff pieces in the corporate media about LGBTQ+ Pride; the weird focus on gender, race, and sexual identity in your workplace; the sudden politicisation of your favourite sport … it all comes from ESG.
ESG is what underpins the new religion of Wokeness – it is a centralised, top-down program designed to reorganise the global economy and permanently transform society. Even the credulous sceptics in the culture war, who laugh at me and the rest of the ‘tinfoil hat brigade’, ought to be wary of ESG and the impact it is having on their retirement funds.
ESG has completely dominated almost every aspect of our lives for at least five years. Most people have been largely unaware of its very existence, instead putting the recent tidal wave of identity politics and climate hysteria down to natural grassroots political upheaval; for more on this check out my article The Mistake Everyone Makes About Wokeness.
People are waking up though.
As Terrence Keeley recently reported in the Wall Street Journal, Vanguard CEO Tim Buckley ‘knows that Vanguard can’t promise to be a fiduciary to its clients while also committing to align its assets with the 2050 Net Zero target. Signatories to such initiatives effectively commit to reducing their volume of investments in companies not aligned to the Paris Agreement without ever knowing how much of the global economy will be compliant or investable’.
Finally, some common sense from the financial sector! Buckley’s withdrawal from the $59 trillion Net Zero Asset Managers initiative suggests he’s done with the ESG program as a whole and is an overdue breath of fresh air not only for regular working folk whose life savings and retirements are under threat from this absurd fusion of Marxism and capitalism, but for the world at large for, as noted above, ESG is in everything now.
Delightful though it is to witness the humiliation of the sanctimonious commissars of globalism, we can take small comfort from such news for, as Investment renegade Tom Luongo concedes, it represents nothing more than gang warfare of the most rarefied kind. But as he also points out, the lesser of two evils is always preferable, and I for one would be much more comfortable continuing to live under the yoke of the devil we know, than overhauling the entire system in the image of Klaus Schwab’s glorious Reset.
With Vanguard now joining this interesting alliance, the cracks in the edifice are really beginning to show. Like Jamie Dimon, we must not conflate Buckley’s reticence with some latent form of heroic populism or love for the little man. Vanguard is apparently jumping ship for selfish reasons, but I believe it is not without regard for popular sentiment.
Consider Buckley’s stated reasons for getting out of ESG: ‘Our research indicates that ESG investing does not have any advantage over broad-based investing.’ He’s saying that he can’t fulfil his fiduciary responsibilities within this framework. Well, Tim, that should have been perfectly obvious to you from the start.
When I first heard about ESG, I knew immediately that the ludicrous ideological tenets it espoused would have virtually zero correlation with profitability. If I, a lowly copywriter and aspiring novelist knew this, then surely the CEO of the world’s second largest asset manager knew it.
By all means, Tim Buckley is getting his company out of ESG for practical, fiduciary reasons – get Woke, go broke – but why has it taken this long? I suspect there’s another reason he’s pulling out. I suspect he’s seen the writing on the wall. I suspect that the rising tide of public consciousness around ESG and all its offshoots is making him nervous.
Much like we’re now seeing major institutions distance themselves from the lockdowns and the masks and the vaccine mandates as the truth begins to seep out, the big financial fish are starting to question the wisdom of going all in on this radical new agenda.
I suspect Tim Buckley wants to take a step back and see which way the wind blows for the next couple of years. Because the fact is, people are waking up. The word is out, thanks in no small part to people like US Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy (he breaks the issue down succinctly in these two short clips from Timcast IRL: here and here) and, as always, the oddball Boomers who run the world have underestimated the power of the internet – it’s small wonder, most of them probably still think we get our news from CNBC like they do.
Just this last week I received my annual client satisfaction survey from my asset management company (the New Zealand government forces us to save for retirement but does not allow us to manage our own funds, as is possible here in Australia, so I still have a portion of my retirement savings under institutional management back home).
One of the questions was: ‘Did you know that we consider ESG when investing your money?’
I had been anticipating this question, as they asked it last year as well, only back then I was less impassioned about the whole thing and merely told them I thought ESG was corporate communism. This time I let them have it with both barrels.
‘You are mismanaging my money,’ I told them. ‘You are in dereliction of your fiduciary responsibility and when this whole sorry scam is finally exposed, you will be held accountable.’
I wonder, has Tim Buckley been receiving similar feedback from Vanguard’s customer satisfaction surveys?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/get-woke-go-broke-vanguard-ditches-esg-investing/
**************************************************"Red Alert" for 900,000 car workers in Germany as EU plans to ban combustion engine
The Bosch works council and the IG Metall union are reacting to the EU decision to phase out combustion engines from 2035 and are announcing a works meeting at ten locations in Germany. There is fear of massive job cuts, Bamberg's works council chairman, Mario Gutmann, told the "Bayerischer Rundfunk".
Many employees are also worried about the possible relocation of production facilities abroad. Gutmann warned that parts for combustion engines are manufactured in Germany which are unusable after the EU ban from 2035 at the latest.
Two thirds of the approximately 6,300 employees in Bamberg are currently concentrating solely on the production of parts for combustion engines.
Martin Feder from the IG Metall union issued a "red alert" and warned: "The future of industrial production is in danger." This is not only felt at Bosch, but applies to many companies. 900,000 employees are currently involved “directly and indirectly” in the production of combustion engines in Germany.
Feder cites the actions of the car manufacturer Ford as a cautionary tale. Almost 2,300 jobs are to be cut in Cologne and Aachen. Meanwhile, Ford is already building a new factory in the US that will cost several billion dollars. Ford soon wants to produce batteries for electric cars there.
Thanks to subsidies and tax breaks, the USA and China are particularly strong promoters of production in their own countries. The head of the Bamberg works council, Gutmann, warned about the resulting de-industrialization in Germany.
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15 March, 2023
There Is No Energy Transition, Just Energy Addition
As Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright explained in his viral video a few weeks ago, dishonest terminology surrounds the climate debate. One of these terms is “Energy Transition”. The term’s use gives the impression that there exists a quick, easy and scalable alternative to eliminate fossil fuel use without serious impact on people.
Current primary energy distribution by source, and forecasts by organizations like the EIA in their International Energy Outlook 2021, show that this “energy transition” is non-existent. As you can see in the title graph above, and also in Liberty’s ESG report on Bettering Human Lives, on a net basis no present quantity of primary energy generated by fossil fuels is currently replaced by renewables. A couple of headlines from the report that you don’t hear a lot:
Global primary energy use is about to grow by almost 50% between 2020 – 2050 as impoverished people rise from poverty;
Oil consumption rises in all EIA scenarios. In their “Reference Scenario”, oil consumption rises at about 1 million bopd/year for the next 30 years, almost the same steady yearly increase of the last 5 decades;
Natural gas consumption will continue to growth through 2050.
The reason for this growth is simple: fossil fuels are abundant, cheap and efficient to provide reliable and dense energy at scale. They have helped to generate a quality-of-life revolution for a portion of humanity, and people in poverty who have missed out on this blessing rightfully want what you and I already have.
Sadly, few report on this blessing we take for granted. Good news about renewables breaking records, however, is widespread and often inflated. There are a few marketing strategies renewable advocates have used that make it appear as if renewables have a larger market share than they really do:
First, using the word “energy” or “power” when they mean “electricity”. Take this Reuters report as an example: “Renewable energy is expected to account for around 46% of German power consumption this year….” This sounds like Germans are running on renewables for almost half of their energy needs. But this is JUST for electricity. According to the BP Statistical Review and graphed below by OurWorldInData.org for world electricity vs primary power, worldwide electricity represents only 17% of all primary power. That’s also where is currently stands in Germany. In 2021, Germany’s top three primary energy sources were oil, natural gas and coal.
Second, reporting renewable records without mentioning they only last a short time. As an example, this article boasts renewables powering 85% of Germany’s electricity needs. But like electricity's primary power sources reported in the plot below by Timera Energy, records in wind and solar don’t last very long, and there are times when they don’t provide anything at all. Fossil fuels are there to back them up. Energy reliability is a marathon, not a sprint.
Third, reporting power capacity, not energy output. Renewables really shine using this metric because they don’t work most of the time. If you have ever spent time in western Europe, you will know that the sun there, like most Europeans, only has a 32-hour work week, while it gives little heads up when it will show up. What to do during the remaining 136 hours that week? You need to build a lot of power capacity to harvest a little energy. As per BP Statistical Review, the world capacity factor is only 14% for solar and 26% for wind. Therefore, if you see a historical power capacity growth curve, divide the solar curve’s slope by 7 and the wind curve’s slope by 4 to get energy output. Consumers pay for MWh, not MW.
Lastly, lumping in “traditional biofuels” to boost the share of renewables as part of total energy needs. These traditional biofuels kill millions of people yearly through PM2.5 particle release during indoor cooking. If there is an “energy transition” humanity needs ASAP, it is the transition from the traditional renewable cooking fuels to clean-burning fossil cooking fuels.
These unfair reporting methodologies have led to confusion and a belief that an “Energy Transition” is currently in the making. It is not.
The EIA primary energy forecast for the next 30 years shows that ALL sources of energy are growing. While renewables are expected to comprise a larger fraction of a growing pie, fossil fuels are expected to grow more in absolute terms.
Recently, a spark of sanity has returned to the debate about nuclear power. For a reliable, cost-effective, low-carbon and scalable energy transition, we need to take the path proposed by Robert Bryce in his book Power Hungry. In the near-term, we need more natural gas, which reduces our CO2 footprint and is cheap, reliable and abundant. For the long-term, we need to build nuclear energy, hopefully eventually nuclear fusion. Before that, let’s hope a spark of sanity returns to the discussion about the “Energy Transition”.
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Now Biden's Coming For Your Washing Machine, New Regulations Could Ruin Laundry Day Forever
Biden’s Energy Department last month proposed new efficiency standards for washing machines that would require new appliances to use considerably less water, all in an effort to “confront the global climate crisis.” Those mandates would force manufacturers to reduce cleaning performance to ensure their machines comply, leading industry giants such as Whirlpool said in public comments on the rule. They’ll also make the appliances more expensive and laundry day a headache—each cycle will take longer, the detergent will cost more, and in the end, the clothes will be less clean, the manufacturers say.
The proposed washing machine rule marks the latest example of the administration turning to consumer regulations to advance its climate change goals. Last month, the Energy Department published an analysis of its proposed cooking appliance efficiency regulations, which it found would effectively ban half of all gas stoves on the U.S. market from being sold. The department has also proposed new efficiency standards for refrigerators, which could come into effect in 2027. “Collectively these energy efficiency actions … support President Biden’s ambitious clean energy agenda to combat the climate crisis,” the Energy Department said in February.
While the Energy Department—which did not return a request for comment—acknowledged in its proposal that “maintaining acceptable cleaning performance can be more difficult as energy and water levels are reduced,” it expressed confidence that Whirlpool and other appliance manufacturers can comply with its regulations without sacrificing stain removal and other performance standards. For the Heritage Foundation’s Travis Fisher, however, manufacturer concerns over the proposal are justified.
“When you’re squeezing all you can out of the efficiency in terms of electricity use and water … you by definition either make the appliance worse or slower,” said Fisher, who serves as a senior research fellow at the foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment. “Why are we so focused on the energy output, as opposed to if it’s helping me wash my clothes? That standard has kind of gone off the rails.”
Beyond the performance standard debate, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers argued that the Energy Department’s washing machine regulations “would have a disproportionate, negative impact on low-income households” by eliminating cheaper appliances from the market. The Energy Department estimates that manufacturers will incur nearly $700 million in conversion costs to transition to the new machines.
Biden and his Democrat buddies won’t rest until your life is totally miserable.
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Germany leads renewed calls to oppose Europe’s 2035 new petrol and diesel car ban
The German government has formed an alliance with six countries to push back on the European Union’s proposed effective ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2035, centring its case around synthetic fuels, according to overseas reports.
Last month, European Parliament members approved a proposal which would effectively bring an end to the sale of new petrol and diesel cars – also referred to as internal-combustion engine (or ICE) vehicles – from 2035.
While a vote by the European Union to enact the laws is considered a formality in proceedings, the process was delayed last week after the German government entered talks with the EU over the allowance of synthetic fuels, which would mean new cars powered by petrol or diesel could continue to be manufactured and sold after 2035.
According to news agency Reuters, the Czech Republic, Italy, Poland, Romania, Hungary and Slovakia support Germany’s proposed concession to allow synthetic fuels to keep combustion engines alive.
"The (EU) proposal needs changes urgently," German transport minister Volker Wissing told news agency Reuters. "A ban on the combustion engine, when it can run in a climate-neutral way, seems a wrong approach for us."
As previously reported, German car-maker Porsche has been at the forefront of synthetic petrol development – where carbon is captured from the atmosphere and recycled into fuel – having spent more than $US100 million ($AU144 million) on biofuels since 2020.
German car giant BMW (and its sister brand Mini) and Italian marque Lamborghini have also been investing in separate synthetic fuel projects, while Ferrari has reportedly also been pushing for the adoption of synthetic fuels as a carbon-neutral alternative.
When the proposal was passed by the European Parliament in February, low-volume car-makers were granted an extra year to meet the new emissions rules – allowing manufacturers which produce fewer than 10,000 vehicles per year until 2036 to comply with the regulations.
As reported last week, the German Government has also expressed concerns over the proposed 'Euro 7' laws, which would require a significant reduction in tailpipe emissions by 2025.
These regulations have been signalled by many manufacturers as making it no longer feasible to produce small and affordable petrol-powered city cars from the middle of the decade.
https://www.drive.com.au/news/germany-opposes-europe-2035-petrol-diesel-car-ban/ ?
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Net Zero Watch has welcomed the decision by the Bank of England to demote its Net Zero agenda and cut its spending on climate change
According to reports, the bank’s climate programmes will be downgraded so that officials can return to work on its main remit, namely the nation’s financial stability.
The bank has been widely blamed for allowing inflation to rocket to more than five times the bank’s 2% target.
Its obsession with climate change, promoted and pushed through by its former governor, Mark Carney, in tandem with government ministers, has for years distracted it from its main responsibilities. Instead, it has been enforcing ESG disclosure guidelines, carbon-testing balance sheets and promoting Net Zero policies.
During his time as Governor, Net Zero Watch criticised Mr Carney repeatedly, warning that his climate activism and his intimidation of financial institutions and pension funds into costly Net Zero targets would eventually lead to policy failure and a distressed correction. This correction appears to have now begun.
Last year, Net Zero Watch criticised the Bank’s so-called ‘climate stress test’, which used discredited projections of a global temperature change of 3.3°C by 2050, far exceeding even the IPCC’s much-criticised SSP5-8.5 scenario.
Dr Benny Peiser, Net Zero Watch’s director, called on the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority to accept that the risk of costly climate and Net Zero policies have become a bigger threat to the UK’s economy and financial stability than climate change.
"Unless the Bank of England abandons its fixation with green virtue-signalling, it is only storing up more problems for the economy and the UK’s financial system."
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14 March, 2023
Air Pollution, Mass Killer or Mass Fraud?
Over the years I have examined here many research reports which claimed to show harm from air pollution. Not one was methodogically sound. The article below adds to the evidence that air pollution as we normally encounter it does no harm
Fine particulate matter in outdoor air, also called PM2.5, is the most toxic substance known to man. PM2.5 is responsible for 8 million, or one-in-seven deaths per year on a global basis. A single molecule can kill within just a few hours of inhalation. Or at least that what environmental and health regulatory agencies around the world claim.
PM2.5 is so dangerous that no one noticed it until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) started trying to regulate it in the early 1990s. PM2.5 kills, in fact, no one. A point that is easily demonstrated and will be done so here. That we still must talk about PM2.5 is a testimony to the stubborn commitment of regulatory agencies to science fraud.
What is PM2.5?
PM2.5 is fine airborne soot and dust. A PM2.5 particle is about one-twentieth the width of a human hair. The soot form of PM2.5 is emitted by all forms of manmade and natural combustion: from fossil fuel plant smokestacks; truck and automobile exhaust pipes; and furnaces, fireplaces and barbeques to wildfires and volcanoes The dust form of PM2.5 exists as pollen, pet dander, dust and mold. Smokers of all sorts inhale PM2.5 in massive amounts, especially compared to PM2.5 levels in outdoor air. You may think that last point condemns PM2.5 as a killer. But it actually is the among the best evidence that PM2.5 doesn’t kill anyone.
What is the history of PM2.5 regulation?
Having eliminated virtually all large and visible particulate matter from US skies by the late 1980s and having established a massive regulatory program in the proicess, the EPA hit on the idea of regulating smaller PM2.5 to keep its regulatory bureaucracy going.
In the late-1980s, the EPA began funding PM2.5 research at the Harvard University School of Public Health. In 1993, the Harvard group issued an epidemiologic study of six cities in the US claiming to associate higher PM2.5 levels with higher death rates. Another larger EPA-funded study reaching the same conclusion was published in 1995.
These studies caught the eye of EPA’s legally mandated panel of independent scientists and experts (the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council or “CASAC”) who asked EPA for the raw data so that it could review the studies. The agency refused to provide the data. A subsequent request from Congress for the data was also rebuffed.
Based on these two studies, EPA proposed for the first time in 1996 to regulate PM2.5 in outdoor air. The agency claimed that its new regulations would prevent 15,000 deaths in the U.S. per year. As EPA valued human lives at the time at 5 million dollars each, the agency claimed that saving these lives would provide $75 billion worth of economic benefits to the economy per year.
When called upon to review the scientific basis of the proposed rule in 1995, CASAC balked and stated there was insufficient evidence showing that PM2.5 killed anyone. Although the EPA was legally required to obtain the advice of CASAC, the law does not require that the agency accept CASAC’s conclusions. And the EPA did not.
The agency proceeded to regulate PM2.5 for the first time anywhere on the basis that PM2.5 kills. Its success in issuing these regulations emboldened and empowered the agency over the next 15 years to convert and an unknown killer into the most potent killer known to man. The EPA used these claims in a series of regulations during the Obama administration that destroyed 50 percent of the U.S. coal industry.
Does PM2.5 kill anyone?
The EPA, of course, knows that PM2.5 doesn’t kill anyone. Here’s how we know that, too.
Recall that the EPA’s crusade against PM2.5 was launched by the previously-mentioned 1993 and 1995 epidemiologic studies. Epidemiology is the statistical study of disease in human populations, the key part of that description being “statistical.” I could spend pages and pages describing the flaws in EPA’s data and statistical analysis, but your eyes would gloss over and it’s unnecessary thanks to EPA.
In 2012, a group with which I am affiliated, sued EPA for conducting illegal human clinical research experiments involving PM2.5. By the early 2000s, EPA had concluded that any exposure to PM2.5 could kill in a matter of hours and that elderly and sick people were most at risk. To prove its point, conducted numerous experiments on elderly and sick people in which diesel exhaust from a truck was pipelined into an actual gas chamber where the human guinea pigs inhaled very high levels of PM2.5 for hours at a time. This was illegal because researchers are not allowed to conduct Nazi-like experiments where the purpose is to cause harm, especially without the informed consent of the human guinea pigs.
In its defense to our lawsuit, the EPA stated that it conducted the PM2.5 experiments because the PM2.5 epidemiology was only statistics, and as all researchers know, statistics only demonstrate correlation and correlation is not the same as causation. The EPA told the court that the human experiments were needed to establish needed biological plausibility for the claims of the epidemiology studies.
The EPA’s unequivocal admission that epidemiology alone was an insufficient basis to conclude that PM2.5 kills obviates any further need to consider the many significant flaws of the PM2.5 epidemiology.
And what were the results of those clinical experiments?
Despite exposing hundreds of elderly (as old as 80) and sick people (with asthma and heart disease) to extraordinary levels of PM2.5 (as high as 75 times the level in average US outdoor air), not so much as a gasp, wheeze or cough, much less any death, was reported. The clinical research, in fact, provided not an ounce of biological plausibility to the (dubious) epidemiology.
There is one last important point to make about EPA’s PM2.5 epidemiology. Recall that EPA refused to produce to the CASAC and Congress the raw data used in the epidemiology studies it funded. Frustrated by this most unscientific refusal to share data, I sought a way around the EPA refusal and discovered one.
The state of California provides vital statistics, such as death certificates, to researchers. The state also has the best and most localized air quality readings that can be readily matched to the death certificates. After obtaining some of these death certificates and related air quality data, I did a rough epidemiologic study of my own to see if deaths were in fact correlated with PM2.5 levels. They were not.
I subsequently convinced prominent and expert researchers to obtain 12 years-worth of California death certificate and air quality data and do their own rigorous study. Their study of all deaths in California between the years 2000 to 2012 (more than 2 million) reported no correlation between PM2.5 and death.
Although PM2.5 levels in Chinese and Indian cities can reach quite high levels ? e.g., 100 times average outdoor levels in the US ? no actual deaths are ever reported. The reason for this is that the level of acidic gases always remains in a safe range. Simply inhaling PM2.5 alone kills no one.
https://junkscience.com/2023/03/pm2-5-mass-killer-or-mass-fraud/
******************************************************US to drill for oil in Alaska as Biden OKs $8B Willow Project, 180K barrels a day
The Biden administration on Monday approved a massive oil drilling project in Alaska that is sure to put the president on a collision course with far-left factions of his Democratic Party.
The Willow Project has come under fire from environmental groups, who are already accusing President Biden of reneging on campaign promises to battle climate change and end drilling on public lands.
Some Republicans, meanwhile, lauded the move by Team Biden to finally do something to offset the rising cost of gasoline and start to make the US energy-independent.
Under the plan announced by the Department of the Interior, Houston-based ConocoPhillips can drill at three sites on Alaska’s North Slope — about 219 wells in all — but the federal agency denied the company’s proposal for another two sites.
ConocoPhillips, which is seeking to develop oil and gas leases it purchased in the 1990s, will also have to give up rights to about 68,000 acres in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
The $8 billion Willow Project, according to the company, could produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil a day and create as many as 1,800 jobs during construction and 300 long-term jobs, as well as generating billions of dollars in royalties and tax revenues for the state and federal government.
While the project enjoyed widespread support in Alaska, it has been the subject of an aggressive social media campaign by environmental groups.
The Biden administration has also been under increasing political pressure to ramp up domestic energy production after historic highs in gasoline prices.
The Natural Resources Defense Counsel said in a Twitter posting that it would continue to fight against the project.
?”?It’ll escalate the climate crisis and lock us into decades of dependence on Big Oil executives hell-bent on destroying the planet. The fight isn’t over and we will consider every tool available to stop this climate bomb?,” the organization said.
Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous said in a statement that by giving the Willow Project the green light, the Biden administration has “made it almost impossible to achieve the climate goals they set for public lands.”
The environmental group also addressed the administration’s attempt on Sunday to offset the blowback it would receive for approving the ConocoPhillips plan by preventing or limiting oil drilling in 16 million acres in Alaska and the Arctic Ocean.
“While we celebrate the administration’s unparalleled protections for Alaskan landscapes and waters, the decision to approve the Willow Project may very well wipe out many of these climate and ecological benefits,” Jealous said.
“And by approving one of the largest oil and gas extraction projects on federal public lands, one must ask the question what the Biden administration has in store for the Arctic Refuge,” he said.
Sen. Dan Sullivan? (R-Alaska) called the Willow Project “critically important” to the state’s economy and national security.?
“Producing much-needed American energy in Alaska with the world’s highest environmental standards and lowest emissions enhances the global environment,” Sullivan said in a statement. ?
Alaska’s other GOP senator, Lisa Murkowski, said approval of the project is a “huge and needed victory for all Alaska.”
??”This project will produce lasting economic and security benefits for our state and the nation?,” she said on Twitter. ?
https://nypost.com/2023/03/13/biden-greenlights-8-billion-oil-drilling-project-in-alaska/
**********************************************************Greenies no longer want to save the whales
For about twenty years the Natural Resources Defense Council [NRDC] engaged the US Navy in a legal battle over the effects of the Navy’s use of Mid Frequency Sonar in training exercises and its impact on marine mammals and other creatures, with one case even reaching the US Supreme court. While there are many different aspects of NRDC’s legal actions, the results of the litigation have produced an enormous amount of scientific data and research regarding the effects of underwater sound on marine creatures, with an emphasis on Sonar and marine mammals.
They forced the Navy to admit that their use of sonar had resulted in the unintentional mass strandings of many different marine Mammals in a dozen different instances around the world, primarily involving Beaked whales, that are classified as being low to mid frequency cetaceans. These mammals communicate, navigate and feed using low to mid frequency sounds.
While this series of lawsuits resulted in the recognition of the harm that high powered Sonar can cause to marine creatures, it did not address the issue of the damage that lower sound levels can cause. This also coincided with a growing recognition that the amount of human caused noise in the natural marine environment was reaching a dangerous level, and was having impacts on the creatures that reside there, which may be worse that many of the more visible signs of pollution.
The efforts of NRDC regarding the damaging effects of Naval sonar has saved the lives of many marine creatures by forcing the Navy to comply with the many US laws that protect the environment. They have become one of the worlds leading experts on the effect of noise on marine mammals, yet
curiously they remain silent on the issue of the recent strandings of Whales along the US east coast, as coincidently research vessels using low frequency sonar have inundated the area for geological mapping of the seafloor and substrates for industrial wind power turbines. A group that was so concerned about saving the Whales from underwater noise, has conveniently forgotten their concern because that noise is created by vessels employed by wind companies. Those companies and the US government have worked in unison to deny any link at all between the recent strandings and the work being done for offshore wind development. High level US officials have categorically denied that there is any evidence of the noise being produced having a detrimental effect on marine mammals despite decades of work in regard to the harm being caused by human produced noise in the marine environment. Existing science suggests the link is there.
In a paper by NRDC’s Joel Reynolds, titled “Submarine’s, Sonar, and the death of Whales”, published by William and Mary Environmental Law and Policy Revue [vol. 32:759] in 2008, Reynolds writes; “There is no longer a serious scientific debate about the connection between sound and marine
mammal mortality. A range of experts, from the international Whaling Commission’s {IWC} Scientific committee [2004 report] to the U.S. Navy’s own commissioned scientists, have agreed that the evidence linking mass strandings to mid-frequency sonar is “convincing” and “overwhelming”. Consultants retained by the Navy concluded that the evidence of sonar causation is in our opinion, completely convincing and that therefore there is a serious issue of how best to avoid/minimize future beaching events.
Potentially related strandings have occurred repeatedly around the world, with stranded animals found with bleeding around the brain, emboli in the lungs, and lesions in the liver and kidneys, symptoms resembling a severe case of decompression sickness, or the “bends”. Because these injuries occurred in the water, before the animals stranded, scientists are concerned that Whales turning up on shore may represent only the tip of the iceberg, with substantially larger numbers dying off-shore. Other sources of noise, such as the airguns used in seismic surveys, may have similar effects.”
The paper also has this statement; “Though a prominent focus of public concern and reporting in the media, these stranding events represent only one manifestation of injury related to exposure to intense noise. Indeed, it is the cumulative impact that these stressors have on the behavior of marine mammals, particularly in already depleted populations, that may pose the greatest threat; what has been called a “death of a thousand cuts”. Because marine mammals depend on sound to navigate, find food, locate mates, avoid predators, and communicate with each other, flooding their habitat with high intensity, anthropogenic noise poses a substantial risk of interference with these and other activities”.
Footnoting this point; NRDC’s Michael Jasny, quoted Dr. Sylvia Earle’s “death of a thousand cuts “, and stated that “preliminary attempts at modeling the energetics of marine mammals [the amount of energy an animal has to spend to compensate for an intrusion] suggest that even small alterations in behavior could have significant consequences for reproduction or survival if repeated over time”.
Further in the document are these statements; “Also in November 2005, the parties to the Convention on Migratory Species [CMS] passed a resolution naming marine noise among six human threats to cetacean populations. The resolution calls on the CMS’s Scientific Council to assess whether marine noise is adequately addressed in the convention’s threat abatement activities.”
“The UN General Assembly established an “Ad Hoc Open-Ended Informal Working Group to study issues relating to the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity beyond areas of national jurisdiction” [i.e. on the high seas] In February 2006 that working group convened its first meeting, where it recognized ocean noise as a “growing human pressure” that requires urgent action through international cooperation and coordination.”
Lastly, starting off the recommendations section of the paper is this; “The accumulating scientific evidence of noise-induced harm, including mass strandings of marine mammals around the world, is a wake up call to a significant environmental problem. While its complexity precludes a simple
or an immediate solution, some progress has already been made, both domestically and globally. But much more is clearly needed now, at a point where meaningful and effective solutions can have an impact BEFORE the problem proliferates out of control, it’s causes intractable and it’s impacts
irreversible”.
This last sentence is critical, because we are already near the point where long term damage from the multiple noise sources involved in the production of offshore wind energy is intractable, and its impacts to marine mammal populations irreversible. Extinction is forever.
Many marine mammal species migrate annually along the North American coast and they have had to adapt during their lifetimes to a growing amount of human created noise, some of it deadly. It has created a high stress life for them with a confusing array of sounds including low frequency noise from distant sonar and seismic testing, which can trigger fight or flight responses. Repeated stress responses can be detrimental physiologically to animals and could lead to premature death. The average life span of every species of Whales along the US coast has dropped dramatically in the last few decades, coinciding with the rise in human produced noise in the marine environment. Have Whale species in the North Atlantic reached the tipping point in how much human produced noise they can withstand and still survive, or have they passed the point of no return with the recent introduction of almost relentless noise from low frequency sonar research vessels along the coast?
NOAA and BOEM are closing their eyes to science and scientific protocol in regard to the recent Whale strandings. They ignore a growing mountain of evidence indicating that many species of whales are more sensitive to sound then previously thought, with research showing tagged Cuvier’s beaked
Whales responding to only 89 dB re 1 u Pa. A paper published by Frontiers in Marine Science, entitled; “Impacts of Navy Sonar on Whales and Dolphins: Now beyond a Smoking Gun? By E.C.M. Parsons in 2017 cites numerous recent studies showing Whales sensitivity to sound is greater than believed, and he reasons then that the US harassment levels of sound are far higher than they should be, with TTS and PTS being reached at lower levels then acknowledged. Almost all of the research that’s been done has admitted to not having enough science to be certain of any effects of under water noise but they all urge the use of the Precautionary Principle in regard to its possible effects. This important paragraph highlights that:
“The importance of not delaying conservation action when a concern exists, but scientific data and analysis have not incontrovertibly established the threat exists, i.e. “the precautionary principle”, has been enshrined in a number of international laws [Hey,1991] including the 1992 Convention on
biological Diversity [Principle 15 of the so-called “Rio Summit”]. Because of this level of uncertainty and difficulty in establishing beyond a reasonable doubt trends and threats in cetacean populations, it has been argued that in order to effectively conserve and manage populations one must be precautionary, as otherwise catastrophic declines in cetacean populations could occur before science catches up with the problem”.
We only have one last chance to save the North Atlantic Right Whale from extinction, scientific protocol calls for us to make the most of it. Endangered marine mammals are facing a survival crisis that is complicated by the increase in human made noise, which may even have more population level effects then ship strikes and fishing gear encounters. The sheer enormity of Biden’s offshore wind projects dwarfs in size and scope any previous usages of the marine environment throughout history, its effects are bound to be enormously destructive to the entire marine ecosystem of the east coast. No one should be able to ignore science just because it doesn’t suit their purposes.
https://fisherynation.com/noaa-and-boem-ignorance-is-bliss-by-jim-lovgren
**************************************************Renewables: the more you have, the more you pay for backups
Cold, still weather in the UK this week triggered high demand for electricity at a time when wind turbines were idling. That forced National Grid to use a back-up coal(opens a new window)-generation plant for the first time this winter.
Depending on Mother Nature for electricity means accepting her inconsistencies. Back-up is required, and keeping it available has a cost.
In the US, electricity demand is on average 15 per cent higher during July than January according to the US Energy Information Agency. In the much cooler UK, a government study during 2012-2013 revealed that demand rose 36 per cent in the winter.
Lex charts showing the mix of UK’s electricity generation and the penetration of intermittent renewables
Intermittent supply adds to the challenge of balancing the grid. Wind and solar power made up 31 per cent of the Texas grid’s capacity last year, up from 9 per cent ten years prior. That intermittency is a vulnerability.
Indeed, an unusually cold snap in early 2021 forced a system increasingly dependent on intermittent power into blackouts. That prompted calls for more nuclear and gas-fired power plants. Consumers would pay, though it could add just $2 on a typical $100 power bill, say power researchers E3.
Lex charts showing how gas-?red power generation will still be needed to cover demand peaks in 2030
In contrast, UK power needs are reasonably well anticipated via capacity auctions. Run by government, these aim to provide generation for expected demand. A recent auction for capacity in 2026/27 cost £5.7bn over the 15-year period of the longest contracts, according to analysis by Aurora Energy Research. Consumers also pay for this, partly through the environmental levies which can make up a quarter of bills.
Power capacity differs from “firm” power capacity, Lambert Energy Advisory points out, depending on reliability and intermittency. In winter months, the UK government gives the accolade of “firm” to gas-fired turbine power plants at 90 per cent of capacity, wind at 9 per cent and solar at under 3 per cent.
Consumers end up paying to build little-used firm power capacity. The conundrum is that the greater the overall share of renewables in the energy mix, the more customers will have to spend on these largely redundant backups.
https://www.ft.com/content/91d341f8-b945-4f3a-85b2-ba738a5b4f2f
***************************************13 March, 2023
Another reason the wind industry is demanding more handouts: Wind turbine failure rates are rising
Unexpected and increasing wind turbine failure rates, largely in newer and bigger models, are savaging the profits of some of the world’s biggest manufacturers, as Siemens Gamesa, GE and Vestas report heavy repair and maintenance losses.
Faulty components created a €472 million ($A28 million) hole in Siemens Gamesa’s December quarter result, making up more than half of the nearly billion-euro loss for the period. Of that total, €187 million was due to a reduction in revenue with the remainder due to warranty provisioning.
The wind turbine maker said a “negative trend” of failure rates from turbines are causing higher than expected maintenance costs and warranty call-outs. It did not specify which components are affected.
Siemens Gamesa ended the year with a quarterly loss of €884 million ($A1.4 billion), more than double that of the same period the prior year, and net debt of €1.9 billion.
Write-downs in goodwill and the inclusion of integration and restructuring costs come as the company prepares to delist and integrate with Siemens Energy.
“The group’s financial performance in Q1 23 was materially impacted by the outcome of the company’s periodic monitoring and technical failure assessment of its installed fleet,” the company said in its quarterly results.
“The expected cash impact during FY23 amounts to a mid-double-digit euro million figure.”
Vestas has added €210 million in warranty provisions for repairs in the December quarter, as rising call outs and higher upgrade costs bite at the Danish company, too.
Vestas also said its lost production factor is rising towards 4 per cent due to the number of “extraordinary” repairs and upgrades.
GE blamed its $US2.2 billion annual loss on rising warranty provisions from its wind division in the September quarter, which contributed to a 17 per cent drop in revenue.
Too big too fast?
Advancements in materials, manufacturing and design techniques, and operations and maintenance tools led to a technical revolution in wind energy, allowing bigger and bigger machines to be installed.
Wind turbines and their blades have rapidly been upsizing, with the average rotor diameter in the US reaching 127.5 metres in 2021, while the largest in the world is a 13.6 megawatt (MW) offshore wind turbine with a rotor diameter of 252 metres.
***************************************
Home Depot founder Bernie Marcus warns Americans to 'wake up' after 'woke' Silicon Valley Bank goes bust - because it was 'more concerned about global warming than shareholder returns'
The co-founder of Home Depot, Bernie Marcus, says Americans need to 'wake up' to the reality that the US economy is facing tough times following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank.
Marcus also laid some of the blame for the bank's failure with the Biden administration over prioritizing 'global warming' instead of shareholder returns.
He argued that the collapse of the bank shows the US economy is not as strong as President Biden has suggested.
Marcus criticized the bank's officials for selling off their stock before the collapse, and lamented the fact that many Americans lost their money in what he called a 'woke bank.'
'I can't wait for Biden to get on the speech again and talk about how great the economy is and how it's moving forward and getting stronger by the day. And this is an indication that whatever he says is not true.
'And maybe the American people will finally wake up and understand that we're living in very tough times, that, in fact, that a recession may have already started. Who knows? But it doesn't look good,' Marcus said on Fox News, on Saturday.
Marcus blamed the Biden administration for pushing banks to prioritize 'diversity and all of the woke issues' over shareholder returns and suggested that a focus on social policies is now causing banks to be badly run, and failing to protect their shareholders and their own employees.
'I feel bad for all of these people that lost all their money in this woke bank. You know, it was more distressing to hear that the bank officials sold off their stock before this happened. It's depressing to me. Who knows whether the Justice Department would go after them? They're a woke company, so I guess not. And they'll probably get away with it,' he continued.
Marcus then went on to warn how the US economy is in trouble, with the Federal Reserve raising rates and inflation going in the wrong direction.
***********************************************
KY Wants to Prevent Coal Plant Closures Invited By Net-Zero Policies
As net-zero policies wreak havoc federally, individual states desire to stymie its ruinous consequence.
The Commonwealth of Kentucky wants to implement measures to shield their electric grid from instability wrought by unreliable, costly renewable energy adoption.
The General Assembly is deliberating legislation, Senate Bill 4, to remedy this issue. If passed, the bill would require the Public Service Commission to prove coal plant retirement won’t negatively impact grid reliability and resilience. All the while having no adverse impact on electric utility rate affordability.
As of this writing, the bill passed the state senate by a 25-8 vote. It now awaits a vote in the Kentucky House of Representatives. It currently enjoys popular support from lawmakers and could advance before Wednesday—the final day of the 2023 General Assembly session.
Historically, coal production has kept Kentucky’s energy costs down. Nevertheless, forced transition to unreliable sources like solar and wind has resulted in higher energy bills–as seen elsewhere in the U.S.
Even natural gas, a reliable source unleashed during the Trump administration, can’t fully meet the Commonwealth’s immediate demands.
Kelly Craft, former U.S. Ambassador to Canada and a 2023 Kentucky gubernatorial candidate, discussed this in a major state publication, writing, “As coal power shut down, it has been replaced by natural gas and, while I support an “all of the above” energy policy, natural gas has limitations. Natural gas price volatility drove Kentuckians’ cost of electricity to all-time highs last year.”
Despite coal’s staying power, powerful utility companies operating in the Bluegrass State are actively working to defeat this reasonable measure. This isn’t surprising because investor-owned utilities seek to benefit from adopting a net-zero carbon grid by 2050.
“If this bill passes, we would not be able to close a fossil fuel plant. That isn’t hyperbole,” Rocco D'Ascenzo, deputy general counsel Duke Energy Kentucky, said of SB4.
Louisville Gas and Electric Vice President Kent Blake remarked his company has “every incentive in the world to keep coal-fired generation as long as it’s reasonably possible,” but argued retiring coal-fire plants would ultimately be good for consumers.
“When we bring a case forward that says now is the time to retire a given coal-fired unit, you can believe that now is the time,” he said.
These comments contrast other industry-wide statements opposing the move away from fossil fuels.
In June 2022, the Utilities District of Western Indiana published a Capacity Alert warning about potential rolling blackouts and blamed shortages, in part, “due in part to the closing of coal-fired generation plants across the country.”
Even the Washington Post mused, “The sudden warnings [of rolling outages] have surprised even those who were sounding an alarm. That’s because… the early retirement of fossil fuel plants has accelerated the destabilization of the grid.”
State Senator Robby Mills, a Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee member and sponsor of SB4, says his bill will offer oversight on this issue and give Kentuckians a seat at the table.
“Grid operators like PJM and MISO have been warning that this hasty transition to renewables is putting our electric grid at risk,” Mills said in a statement to Townhall.com. “Kentuckians need a reliable source of energy that will keep the power grid stable and electricity rates affordable. We, as policymakers, owe that to our constituents."
Tucker Davis, a former Interior Department official and current Kentucky Coal Association president, warned Biden’s energy policies will have negative downstream effects on regular Kentuckians already paying exorbitant costs to heat and power their homes.
“The reason electricity rates have been on the rise in Kentucky is because of the Obama/Biden Administration’s “War on Coal.” These reckless federal policies have forced utilities to replace coal with more costly, unreliable alternatives and pass those costs on to ratepayers,” Davis remarked in an email to Townhall.com. “When it comes to the energy security of our Commonwealth, these decisions should be made here in Kentucky, not in a corporate board room.”-
Coal plant retirements undergird the wasteful climate bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act. S&P Global elaborated, “Of the 58.7 GW of coal plant capacity projected for retirement by 2030, about 24.3 GW, or 41.4%, are due to the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, making coal less competitive than other resources…”
As a result, it would be unwise for individual states— including Kentucky–to pursue untenable, net-zero policies.
The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a regulatory authority tasked with reducing risk to and securing electric grid reliability, warned several years ago that “an accelerated retirement of coal-fired and nuclear plants could lead to power outages, temporary shortfalls in surplus generation, and transmission problems.”
Per the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), coal remains king in the Bluegrass State.
The agency reports, “In 2021, coal-fired power plants supplied 71% of Kentucky's electricity generation, the fourth-largest share among the states after West Virginia, Missouri, and Wyoming. Historically, coal-fired power plants produced more than 90% of Kentucky's net generation.”
“Kentucky still remains among the top five states in the nation in coal-fired generating capacity with about 9,400 megawatts at the beginning of 2022,” it adds.
Energy security need not be jeopardized by entertaining flawed clean energy credits and so-called incentives promising unicorn dreams.
The Commonwealth of Kentucky shouldn’t be ostracized for maintaining its coal plants. Therefore, legislators should be entrusted to protect their constituents’ interests here.
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Loony ‘environmental’ mandates will kill NYC’s middle-class housing
Among the disastrous effects of the folly called Local Law 97, which requires most apartment buildings to change their heating systems to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, is that electric heat – the city’s preference – doesn’t work as well as boilers that burn fossil fuels.
Bob Friedrich, board president of Glen Oaks Village in northeastern Queens, the city’s largest garden-apartment complex, warns that heat pumps for electrical systems “are only efficient for temperatures in the 30s and 40s. Below that they become less efficient to heat a home.”
In other words, he said, “Get out the heavy coat and gloves.”
The law to take effect at the end of the year can only drive more middle- and working-class homeowners owners out of town. Friedrich calls it “insane.”
Residents of Glen Oaks Village and the Bay Terrace Cooperative, both in Queens, face staggering future costs for “environmental” overhauls.
The loony law spells financial ruin for many of the city’s 3,700 co-op and condo buildings, which are home to 800,000 apartments. It requires buildings with more than 25,000 square feet to either switch to electric heat or replace their boilers so as to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.
Warren Schreiber, board president of Bay Terrace for twenty-five years, said, “I’ve never had an issue that actually kept me awake at night.”
Unlike at rental apartment towers owned by real estate companies with substantial revenue bases, the costs of heating conversions in co-ops and condos will be borne by individual shareholders and owners either as assessments or whopping hikes in monthly maintenance costs.
But do it, the city demands — or face gargantuan fines. The Real Estate Board of New York estimates that affected buildings would face more than $200 million in penalties if they can’t comply with the changes, rising to $900 million by 2030 when emission rules would be even tougher.
Climate change might well be occurring albeit much more slowly than New York Times panic-pushers want us to believe. But that we must freeze our patooties off to stave off a strictly theoretical climatic holocaust belongs to the Sci-Fi Channel.
Building managements, including at the Upper East Side high-rise where I live, are all grappling with the law’s ramifications.
But the most pain will be felt by residents of modestly-priced buildings that do not have large reserve funds or other resources to pay for the “woke” diktats.
At the 200-unit Bay Terrace complex in Bayside, Queens, Schreiber said, “We don’t know how we’re going to pay for this.” He can’t even figure out what steps would put the complex in compliance because the rules are too dense to follow.
To go all-electric would cost Bay Terrace $3 million for heat pumps alone, he said, in addition to myriad other expenses needed for conversion.
Shareholders would pay huge assessments or a 30 percent hike in monthly maintenance. Schreiber noted, “We don’t have million-dollar luxury units like in Manhattan. We are a middle-income and working-class co-op. We have lots of teachers, civil servants, single-parent households and senior citizens.
“Many seniors would have to downsize” to smaller units to afford to stay.
At sprawling Glen Oaks, home to over 10,000 residents in 134 buildings. “We have 96 boilers” that would all have to be replaced, Friedrich said. “We’d have to spend $24.5 million for new boilers we don’t need.
“Even if we put in the most efficient boilers,” he said, the fines would be a little less but “would not go away” entirely because emission-reduction thresholds are impossible to meet without switching to an electric system.
But “switching to electric would cost $35 million and saddle our working-class homeowners with the highest electrical rates in the country,” Friedrich said. He called it “the largest unfunded mandate the city ever imposed on their constituents.”
If Glen Oaks made no changes at all, “We’re facing $1.1 million in fines every year,” Friedrich said.
The law was passed by the City Council and signed by former mayor Bill de Blasio with hoopla on April 22, 2019 — Earth Day. Happily for de Blasio, the two buildings he owns in Brooklyn are too small to require the changes.
While the middle class gets screwed, lower-income housing such as the city’s own slum empire of NYCHA unsurprisingly get big breaks on deadlines and implementation.
A coalition of co-op and condo leaders is suing to block the new law and some Council members introduced a bill to delay it. But get ready to bundle up.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/12/nycs-local-law-97-is-a-threat-to-affordable-housing/
***************************************12 March, 2023
French Nuclear Revival Hits Trouble as New Reactor Defects Found
France’s troubled nuclear industry is supposed to be in revival, but the discovery of further defects at some reactors this week is stoking fears that the year ahead could be just as difficult as the last.
Electricite de France SA’s fleet of 56 atomic power plants has long been the backbone of Europe’s energy system, but in 2022 it was more of a millstone. As reactors were shut down to fix cracked pipes, the company’s nuclear power generation slumped to the lowest since 1988, making the region more dependent on fossil fuels just as Russia squeezed natural gas exports.
The continent is still grappling with the long-term consequences for energy security of the invasion of Ukraine. Everyone from power traders to political leaders had been hoping that France would finally be able to switch from hindrance to help this year, but that’s looking less likely as the country’s nuclear watchdog asks EDF to revise its maintenance program in light of the new flaws.
“If EDF is not able to have a strong comeback in 2023 with a large uptick in generation compared to the very low levels in 2022, the fear is that 2022 can end up being the new normal for the French nuclear generation,” said Fabian Ronningen, a senior analyst for power and renewables research at Norwegian consultant Rystad Energy AS.
As traders digested the week’s news, French power for delivery in 2024 jumped almost a third to about €220 ($235) per megawatt hour, the highest since January.
Following the discovery of so-called stress corrosion cracking at a reactor in late 2021, EDF opened a wide-ranging investigation. The probe found that the company’s 16 newest units were prone to the phenomenon mostly because of the design of the pipes aimed at cooling the reactor in case of an accident. Cracks may also have been caused by welding and other defects.
The utility’s nuclear output sank by 23% in 2022 as it halted about a dozen of its 56 reactors to replace cracked pipes. France went from being a major electricity exporter to its neighbors into a net importer for the first time since 1980.
EDF’s nuclear output hit a low point in August and gradually began to recover. Crucially, a surge of plant restarts in December helped France avoid the blackouts it had been fearing and preparing for during a severe cold snap.
Power generation peaked briefly near 46 gigawatts in early February, but has declined by almost 30% since as more plants were taken offline for safety checks and maintenance, plus the impact of workers’ strikes, according to data from grid operator RTE. Repairs continue at several units and more pipe replacements are planned later this year at a handful of plants. The rest of the fleet is due to be progressively checked up until 2025.
More Problems
These maintenance shutdowns have been uncovering more problems. On Tuesday, France’s nuclear safety authority asked EDF to revise its program of reactor checks following the utility’s discovery of a “significant” corrosion crack at its Penly-1 plant. The defect is located near a weld that had been mended twice during construction of the facility, which was commissioned in the early 1990s.
The watchdog also said EDF would have to extend areas where it looks for signs of so-called thermal fatigue — a different type of defect — after such flaws were found on pipes at the Penly-2 and Cattenom-3 reactors.
So far, the company and nuclear watchdog haven’t been able to give a clear answer on how the discovery of these flaws will affect the recovery in nuclear output.
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British Met Office accused of implausible worst-case climate prediction
A new study by the UK Met Office claims that accelerating global warming will make extreme rainfall events in the UK four times more frequent by 2080 compared to the 1980s.
This story has been widely covered in the news media.
The Met Office claims are derived from computer modelling based on the so-called RCP8.5 emissions scenario, the most extreme pathway for global greenhouse gas emissions, which the Met Office misleadingly describes as “plausible”.
In reality, most credible scientists regard RCP8.5 as implausible given that global emissions data and technological advances essentially rule it out. As a result, the Biden Administration has abandoned using this discredited worst-case scenario.
Moreover, the Met Office offers no empirical data in evidence that an increased trend in extreme rainfall events has actually been observed in line with their modelling. In fact some studies suggest the opposite may have occurred in recent decades.
Dr Benny Peiser, the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, called on the Met Office to withdraw its fatally flawed study:
“The Met Office should withdraw this grossly misleading and baseless study which is undermining its scientific credibility and integrity and makes it look incompetent.”
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Kamala Harris Brings Environmentalist Hysteria to New Low, Claims Climate is Causing This Illness Among Young People
I can almost picture the drug commercials now.
Envision it with me: A worried millennial walks through a smog-filled park, his/her/their/xir face fixed in a rictus of existential dread. Then comes the voice-over: “Do you have climate mental health issues?”
“Symptoms could include watching MSNBC for hours on end, worrying if your corgi is contributing to rising sea levels, and physically attacking your grandmother during Thanksgiving dinner for neither serving Tofurky nor giving a land acknowledgement to the Native Americans she stole her suburban flag lot from.
“Perhaps it’s time you ask your doctor if Kamala is right for you.”
It sounds like a good drug name, doesn’t it? It also sounds like an inherently ludicrous woman one heartbeat away from the presidency who claims our children are facing “climate mental health” issues and don’t even know whether they can start a family or not.
According to Fox News, Vice President Harris was speaking at the “Aspen Ideas: Climate Conference” in Miami Beach, Florida on Wednesday, where she told the audience that young climate activists are at risk of mental illness thanks to climate change. That’s a new low from an elected official if I’ve ever heard one.
“One of the young leaders was talking to me about climate mental health. I said, ‘Tell me what’s going on with your peers,’” Harris said.
She then repeated what the activist told her: “Climate mental health.”
“I said, ‘I think I can understand that, but unpack it for me.’ And she talked about how her peers are thinking about it,” Harris continued.
“One example is, you know, whether, when they’re ready, could they start a family — worried about what that would mean and the stress of it.”
“They were talking about in terms of their peers trying to figure out, you know, they’re going to have to get a job and they’re gonna have to make a living — but what they can do and how can they adapt the education that they are having now to their activism?” she continued.
Wait — you mean you can’t just stay a college activist for the rest of your life? Yes, Virginia, that’s usually the case. Sometimes you luck out (See: Sanders, Bernie), but most of us have to find something that creates value, and shouting down Exxon-Mobil representatives at a campus job fair or protesting a Ben Shapiro speech hosted by the College Republicans doesn’t quite fit the bill.
Or maybe I have it all wrong. After all, some Twitter users didn’t even get what the heck this was all about:
Others cast doubt upon the story, no doubt aware that Vice President Harris has frequently been more liberal with interpreting reality than even her boss, on occasion:
However, there are two reactions I think best encapsulate just how dumb this was. The first came from Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki, an earth science professor and climate-alarmism skeptic:
“Climate mental health” issues, such as they may exist, aren’t caused by the climate. They’re caused by politicians and unelected bureaucrats who feed on fear like ticks feed on blood — and the more fear they gorge their rhetoric with, the bigger they get. Now, the perpetuation of the species — the most basic biological drive of every living being, no matter how simple — is being met with what our vice president describes as a form of clinical anxiety.
And then there’s the second important takeaway here: This is, yes, our vice president. The heir apparent to Democratic leadership. A woman who very well may become the most powerful leader in the world should President Joe Biden finally give out.
“Fundamentally unserious” is right. But this is the content that sells for Democrats — at least when they’re among other Democrats. You’re not going to see her give this speech among coal miners in West Virginia, I don’t think.
But, whatever. If you’re young, gullible, tightly wound and easily triggered by climate alarmism, ask your doctor if Kamala is right for you. Side effects may include higher taxes, fewer jobs, rampant inflation, out-of-control crime, violations of constitutional rights and laughter from other world leaders.
If you fail to see positive results after four years, talk to your health care provider about voting to double your dosage. While you may not see any change in the earth or your mental health, studies show you may feel more self-righteous for having “done something.”
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Dirty Mining, Slavery, and Child Labor Are at the Core of Elites’ Green Energy Obsession
The much-touted green energy economy and the net zero goals it aims to obtain are built upon a dirty little secret: slavery and child labor.
A large percentage of the rare earth elements and critical minerals required for modern electronics, in general, and green energy technologies in particular, are produced and/or refined in countries where, if labor and environmental standards exist at all--and are enforced if they do—the standards are far short of what is required in developed countries.
The mining, refining, manufacturing, and transportation of the huge amounts of rare earth elements and critical minerals is a dirty business. Yet, they are vital to the magnets used in wind turbines, the cables, and stations used to transform the electricity produced by turbines and solar panels, and transmit it to its final destination, and the battery back-up needed to maintain electric power supply and reliability from those intermittent sources.
The International Energy Agency reports that offshore wind requires more scarce minerals, rare earth elements, and other critical metals per kilowatt hour of energy produced than any other source of electric power generation, renewable and non-renewable alike. Onshore wind and solar are the next most critical-mineral-intensive sources.
The vast majority of these critical minerals and elements are mined abroad, and almost all the refining of them is done by China alone.
A single on-shore wind turbine requires up to three metric tons of copper and magnets. Much larger offshore wind turbines require even more copper and magnets composed of rare earth elements. Thousands of pounds of ore must be mined to produce a single pound of rare earths, much less the combination of rare earths required for the magnets used in wind turbines. In addition, between 200,000 and 1.5 million pounds of earth must be mined and moved to produce the lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, and other metals and trace elements necessary to produce a battery pack for a single electric vehicle. Thus, billions of tons will have to be mined and refined to produce the thousands of batteries that will compose the large-scale battery facilities providing backup power when wind and solar facilities are offline.
The conditions under which many of these minerals are produced are appalling. For example, cobalt is a necessary component of the green energy technologies President Biden is pushing on an expedited timeframe. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is the largest producer of the cobalt in the world, by far. A large percentage of the cobalt is produced from small mines, where child labor is the norm, not the exception.
What’s more, China is the largest single provider of most of the critical minerals and rare earths used around the globe, and is almost the only refiner of such products. This means minerals and rare earth elements mined elsewhere, often with Chinese funding, are shipped to China for processing into usable materials. Much of the mining and refining of materials in China is produced by forced or slave labor, often of persecuted religious minorities, like Falun Gong followers and Uighurs.
To be clear, those pushing Net Zero goals, like Democrats in Congress, green energy elites profiting from government support in the form of mandates and subsidies, and the Biden administration, know child- and slave-labor are used to produce the minerals their green technologies depend upon. They claim to care about human rights, but their actions belie their words.
The U.S. State Department has a memorandum of understanding with the DRC to reduce the practice of child labor, however, that agreement doesn’t carry the force of law. The United States wants the cobalt and other minerals produced in the DRC, and nearby regions where child labor is also a problem, in large quantities. Indeed, the Biden administration is leaning more on Africa to counter China’s control over U.S. energy. As such, there is little doubt that growing government demand for wind turbines, solar panels, and battery packs in America and elsewhere in the West will increase pressure on cobalt mines to produce more. This will result in either more children being put to work, or existing child laborers being forced to work longer and harder under extremely dangerous conditions.
Concerning China, the Biden administration acknowledged the problem of slave labor, having signed the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021. Still, the reality of today’s globalized supply chain, combined with insufficient intelligence on the ground to track forced-labor manufacturing, and less still the raw materials, makes it almost a certainty the massive green energy transition being pushed by the Biden administration will be built with minerals and parts produced using Chinese slave labor.
In economic terms, Western climate hysteria is imposing severe negative externalities on developing countries. Ethically, the West’s climate obsession is immorally condemning present generations of impoverished peoples and nations to continued penury and early death. Make no mistake, this ruse exists to further enrich people in developed countries while they simultaneously avoid the cost and inconvenience of adapting to future climate conditions.
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10 March, 2023
"Fossil" fuels do a lot more than generate electricity. They are part of most modern products
They CANNOT be phased out
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More Brands Are ‘Greenwashing’ to Make Consumers Think They’re Being Eco-Friendly
Data suggests that environmental consciousness in the United States is at an all-time high. In other words, more people care about protecting the planet than ever before, with more than half of the US population now thinking it's more important to safeguard the natural world than to grow the economy.
This growing environmental awareness has a significant effect on the decisions people make in their everyday lives, such as grocery shopping. As a result, consumers in the United States are increasingly pressuring retailers and manufacturers to find greener methods of production.
Sadly, there will always be some companies who choose expediency over ethics, even if it means misleading their consumers. Some businesses prefer to greenwash. They virtue-signal about their eco-friendliness, but when you look more closely, you find their statements don't hold up.
In the American marketplace, greenwashing has become a serious problem. Consumers are left under false pretenses and their faith in companies' green credentials plummets as a result. Regrettably, it's on the rise, as more shoppers than ever before pay attention to the long-term viability of the goods and services they buy in an effort to reduce their impact on the planet. More and more businesses are making dubious claims about how environmentally friendly their products are in their marketing.
Questionable statements about green issues abound on the packaging and promotion of consumer goods like food. Accusations of greenwashing can do serious damage to a brand’s reputation. The FTC concluded in 2022 that a number of goods sold by Kohl's and Walmart, which had been marketed as ‘made from bamboo’, did not actually contain any bamboo. A classic case of greenwashing, caught out in this case by a regulator. The retailers were fined a total of $5.5 million. In another case, Hefty's Recycling Bags suffered an embarrassing episode when allegations emerged that their bags are not, in fact, recyclable.
The marketing of products containing different vegetable oils is a hotspot for greenwashing. Manufacturers of all manner of products increasingly use the phrase ‘palm oil free’ to advertise their products as ‘environmentally friendly’. Research shows that a disproportionately large number of people (41%) view palm oil as 'environmentally unfriendly,' compared to those who feel the same way about other vegetable oils (such as soybean, rapeseed, sunflower, and olive). Unfortunately, that negative sentiment (stoked by brands) is not reflected in the reality.
Palm oil is much more land-efficient than those other oils. That means if a brand switches away from it to another oil – say, sunflower oil – they suddenly have to chop down a lot more trees to get the same amount of product. So, when a company boasts of having gone ‘palm oil free’, they are almost certainly causing more deforestation than they were before. Yet, they still use the ‘palm oil free’ label as a tool for greenwashing, suggesting to consumers that by sacrificing palm oil, they are somehow helping safeguard the natural world.
Some firms take this kind of greenwashing to extremes. Iceland, a UK grocery chain, collaborated with Greenpeace to create a TV ad depicting a cartoon orangutan whose jungle habitat is devastated thanks to deforestation in order to promote their palm oil boycott. Since then, Iceland has reversed its 'palm oil free' stance, and the commercial has been removed from screens for being too political.
Instead of virtue-signaling with orangutan images and hoping consumers don't question their claims, businesses should be transparent about the environmental credentials (or otherwise) of their products. They get nowhere by pandering to eco-sensitivities and jumping on the latest bandwagon without thinking too hard about the real-world consequences, because it is only a matter of time before their claims are called out. Consumers are more perceptive than some brands assume, and they reward manufacturers who go out of their way to make a real difference in their supply chains and genuinely help roll back deforestation (which doesn't always align with what we might first think are the most environmentally friendly methods).
The increased interest in and concern for environmental concerns is being closely monitored by most large companies. As more customers insist that businesses make changes to better safeguard the environment, many have begun to do so. This means that businesses who engage in "greenwashing" in an effort to avoid the responsibility of providing sustainable products and services to their customers are doing themselves harm.
To make a genuine impact and safeguard the longevity of their business models, corporations must be considerably more forthright about the choices they make throughout production and across their supply chains, as well as the effects those choices have. If the present surge in environmental consciousness continues, it will soon be next to impossible for corporations like Walmart to engage in green virtue signaling without being called out.
Rather than waiting until the situation becomes urgent, because customers discover they are being misled and start abandoning the offending brands en masse, they would be better off setting aside the environmental virtue-signaling and investing now in serious reforms to their supply chains if they want to make bold environmental claims. Greenwashing might seem like a great short-term fix to some companies, but is not profitable in the long term.
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Canada’s CBC Falsely Claims ‘Climate Change’ Threatening Vineyards
CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster, published a confusing article that claims Canadian vineyards are suffering due to ‘climate change’, and that genetic engineering is going to be needed in order to help certain grape varietals survive in Canada
While it may be true that certain popular types of grapes struggle in the cold and damp of Ontario, where many Canadian vineyards are, the past hundred years have had no measurable effect on Canadian grape production.
The article, “With climate change threatening Canadian vineyards, is genetically engineered wine on the horizon?” admits right away that many people believe that global warming will aid the Canadian wine industry by making winters milder in the southern parts of the country.
The CBC’s “science communicator,” Darius Mahdavi, who wrote the piece, asserts that Canadian winters “are milder on average, but still experience drops to extreme cold” that “could actually be worse for vineyards.”
Researchers interviewed by Mahdavi say that sudden cold snaps during a winter that started off mild can catch grape vines off guard, and damage them more readily than normal hard winters.
At the same time, Mahdavi admits that Canada’s southernmost wine-producing regions have already benefited from the naturally milder zones around the Great Lakes.
Luckily for grape growers in Canada, there is no data that shows arctic outbreaks are more frequent or common, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that instances of extreme cold should continue to decline as the Earth modestly warms.
This means there will be fewer crop-endangering cold snaps in general, not more, alongside the milder start to winter.
The article also discusses how Canadian growers like to stick with European varieties that are not normally very cold tolerant and suffer from diseases in Ontario’s environment, despite the fact that other grapes, like those grown in Germany, or regionally developed hybrids, can be hardier and produce more regularly.
Wine made from a hybrid grape cannot be honestly labeled as a Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, or other specific grape varietals.
In this case, it seems Canadian wine producers’ main problem is not ‘climate change’, but rather some vintners’ insistence on attempting to produce wine from varietals of grapes not well suited to cold regions, where sudden freezes and heavy snow are common.
The article goes on to describe how gene editing could allow scientists to remove genes from European grape varieties that make them prone to disease, without needing to hybridize.
If Canadian vintners stubbornly cling to the desire to produce certain types of wine not normally grown in colder climes, rather than growing grape varietals and producing wines more suited to the climate, it might make sense to use gene editing to make something like a Chardonnay grape more capable of surviving normally unfriendly regions of the world.
But this has nothing to do with ‘climate change’. As Climate Realism has discussed previously here, here, and here, for example, grape production varies regionally from year to year.
Some years will have unfavorable weather conditions for grapes in one part of the world, whereas others will see bumper crops.
Canada is neither a major producer of grapes nor wine, especially compared to the large wine-producing countries and regions around the world.
Despite this, data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) show that amid the normal year-to-year ups and downs of crop production during the recent period of modest warming, since the 1990s both grape and wine production have increased in Canada: grape production has grown by more than 86 percent, and wine production increased by more than 97 percent.
There is no evidence ‘climate change’ has or will hamper Canadian wine production. Indeed, slightly warmer weather should make the region more suitable for growing the types of warm weather varietals some Canadian vintners seem insistent on producing.
The CBC could have produced an interesting story about the difficulties of producing homegrown wine in Canada and how genetic engineering may be used to make grapes heartier and more resistant to cold and diseases.
Instead, the public broadcaster attempted to link one more non-existent threat to ‘climate change’.
As is true with so many stories hyping the “climate crisis,” there is no actual evidence to back up the CBC’s claims that weather is making Canadian wine production harder.
As such, CBC did a disservice to Canadian growers and the wine-consuming public. The good news is the future of wine production in Canada appears to be safe and even growing.
https://principia-scientific.com/canadas-cbc-falsely-claims-climate-change-threatening-vineyards/
***************************************Greens off on another planet: Today’s Australian Greens make their predecessors look sensible
Judith Sloan
It was the formidable Labor finance minister, Peter Walsh, who first described the Greens as akin to fairies at the bottom on the garden. He held their idealistic and unrealistic ideas in complete contempt. In his view, the Greens’ way was a highway to penury, particularly for those on the lowest incomes.
He was also suspicious of their environmental methods, claiming, for instance, that the failure to maintain national parks by clearing, weeding and regular burn-offs would simply lead to devastating bushfires and an extraordinary loss of environmental benefits.
Fast-forward through the intervening decades and it would seem that the Greens have moved on from the bottom of the garden and are now flying in an entirely parallel universe where the practicalities of running a government completely elude them. Indeed, from today’s perspective, former Greens leader, Bob Brown, appears almost sensible; OK, at least he was living on Planet Earth when he was in parliament – at least most of the time.
Today’s cohort of Greens parliamentarians has less connection with the environmental movement – saving forests and endangered species, etc, (although they are obsessed with climate change) – and more connection with hard-left political stances. They support big government, high taxation, anti-capitalism and favourable treatment for all minority groups. Sadly, most of them can’t even spell freedom.
The Greens are now led by the unappealing Adam Bandt who comfortably holds the seat of Melbourne, home to woke types, students and some doctors’ wives. There is no prospect of Labor wresting this seat from the Greens and the adjoining ones are always at risk of being lost to some former teacher turned climate activist.
Of course, it’s been great sport watching the antics of Lidia Thorpe, former Greens senator for Victoria. For those in the Greens party room, it must have been like having a rabid dog running around, incapable of being controlled. Even though Bandt assures us he did everything he could to keep her in the party, one suspects that there were a few sighs of relief when she decided to quit and become an independent senator.
Even so, she probably continues to inflict damage on her former party through her opposition to the Voice on the basis it doesn’t go far enough – truth-telling and treaties are the only road for her – and her antics at the recent Pride March in Sydney.
What is the point of lying on the road and stopping the procession of a float? It escapes me, although she was evidently making a point about the brutal and discriminatory behaviour of the police force. Luckily, the attending police officers had no hesitation moving her on.
Thorpe has zero chance of being re-elected to the Senate as an independent, but she will be in office for some time still, creating mayhem and damaging the Greens – maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
But let me get back to the chasm that the Greens deliberately create by advocating much higher government spending while calling for all sorts of perverse measures, up to and including the banning of coal and gas projects. Without these projects, there is no prospect there will be sufficient revenue to fund their over-the-top spending aspirations.
The Greens’ wish list is close to endless: free childcare, free TAFE and university, free dental care, higher dole, higher rental assistance, more public housing, more public transport, more spending on government schools, more foreign aid and on and on it goes.
Unless you believe that government spending is costless and never-ending – OK, for a while the crazy advocates of Modern Monetary Theory held sway until the ugly face of inflation reared its head and the interest payable on government debt began to rise – the Greens cannot escape that perennial political question: how are you going to pay for it?
But here’s the thing: the main reason Australia is not completely in the fiscal dog-house is the surging company tax revenues from mining companies and high commodity prices. Now I know some Speccie readers are a little bit allergic to numbers, but bear with me if I point out a few simple facts.
Take iron ore, which is a mainstay of our budget. For every $US10 increase in the price of iron ore per tonne, there is a lift of $600 million in company tax receipts. The high prices of coal, both thermal and coking, as well as liquefied natural gas, have similarly led to rapid growth in company tax receipts.
At the time of the election last year, the Treasury expected company tax revenue for 2022-23 to come in at a tad over $90 billion. It now expects it to be $127 billion – a jump of nearly one third. Company tax revenue is now at an historic high which, in turn, is mainly because of the surging tax being paid by the mining companies so reviled by the Greens.
Talk about contradictory: it’s not just having your cake and eating it too; it’s about having the whole bakery. This underscores my conclusion that the Greens are now living on a different planet rather than partying at the bottom of the garden. They want to shut down most of the resource sector but think that government spending can be jacked up big-time.
And let’s not forget here that federal Labor already has substantial spending plans. Next financial year, it expects to spend $666 billion and in 2025-26, the figure is $729 billion, an increase of over 9 per cent in real terms. The Greens’ ambitions are in addition to this increase.
Don’t get me onto some of the other proposals from the Greens. The geniuses in the party think that imposing national rental controls is the answer to our housing rental crisis. The fact that the attractiveness of residential real estate for investors has declined is regarded as neither here nor there by them. And this is before the full impact of the higher cost of investment loans.
They also want to achieve net zero by 2035, think that the ambition of B1(Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen) to reduce emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 is woefully inadequate and want 100-per-cent renewable energy by the end of the decade. In Bernie Sanders’ style, they think that ‘taxing the billionaires and big corporations’ will release oceans of revenue and a 6 per cent annual wealth tax is the way to go.
Walshy must be spinning in his grave; he would surely conclude that the dotty Greens of his era were sensible pragmatists compared to today’s loopy lot.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/greens-off-on-another-planet/
**********************************************9 March, 2023
Net Zero Watch urges UK government to stand up to the wind lobby’s blackmail
New briefing exposes the lobby’s deceptive tactics and the true cost of wind farms
Net Zero Watch has urged the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to resist the renewables industry’s demands for additional subsidies and has denounced its blackmailing tactics.
Its new briefing for MPs and ministers exposes a systematic campaign to deceive the public over the real cost of wind farms.
Author Andrew Montford explains that wind lobby claims of a dramatic fall in costs, repeated incessantly since 2017, were deliberate falsehoods.
"If it were true, costs could double and they’d still make extraordinary profits at current market prices. The truth is that they deceived the public when they said there had been a cost revolution."
And claims that wind farms have suffered input price inflation since bids were submitted a year ago are also untrue. Most key commodities used in the production and deployment of wind turbines have reduced in prices, and the bids are inflation-indexed in any case.
Net Zero Watch director, Dr Benny Peiser said:
"Wind farms are awash with billions of subsidies every year, making energy bills more expensive year on year. To blackmail the government and demand even more handouts, at a time when households are struggling to make ends meet, is reprehensible and should be categorically opposed by ministers."
Contact Andrew Montford, Deputy Director, Net Zero Watch
e: awmontford@gmail.com
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Changing climate change: debunking the global colossus
Mark Imisides
In a previous article, I discussed how climate science has grown from an obscure theory in the late 80s to a worldwide colossus that will soon overtake the oil and gas industry in terms of its size.
How is it that despite the scientific case for a climate apocalypse comprehensively collapsing some 20 years ago, we have seen a 16-year-old girl (at the time) being invited to address the United Nations, weeping children marching in our streets, and a federal election outcome in which this issue dominated the political landscape?
Where did we go wrong? And by ‘we’ I’m referring to those of us termed sceptics – people who understand the science, and the house of cards that comprises the notion of Anthropogenic Climate Change.
Mainly, we have fallen into the trap of thinking that just because the evidence is on our side, people will come around to our way of thinking. Or to put it another way, we naively assume that everyone is as interested in evidence as we are.
They are not. The Climate Change industry is a massive global entity with unimaginably large financial and political interests. There is too much at stake for those involved to sully themselves with things like evidence…
The time is ripe for a major political party to take up the cudgels and go to the next election on the ‘cost of living’ platform by tossing every initiative or program with ‘eco’, ‘green’, and particularly ‘renewable’ in the bin. Peter Dutton, I’m looking at you.
How do we do it?
Put simply, we must learn the art of the polemic. The art of rhetoric. We must recognise that there’s no point in having evidence on our side if we don’t know how to use it.
We begin with this proposition. There is no case for reducing our carbon footprint unless all four of these statements are true:
The world is warming.
We are causing it.
It’s a bad thing.
We can do something about it.
No rational person can have any problem with this, and if they do, we need to find out why.
Here’s where we have to decide which of these points we want to contest. Remember, you only have to falsify one of them for the whole thing to collapse like a house of cards.
Most sceptics, in my view, pick the wrong fight. They do this by attempting to prosecute the case based on one of the first two points. This is a mistake.
Here’s why.
Arguments about whether the world is warming revolve around competing graphs: ‘My graph shows it’s warming. If your graph shows it isn’t, then it’s wrong – no it isn’t – yes it is – no it isn’t…’
This argument also looks at Urban Heat Island Effects, and examines manipulation of data by government agencies.
This is a poor approach to take because:
You’re never going to prove your graph is right.
You can be very easily and quickly discredited as a conspiracy theorist (Brian Cox did this to Malcolm Roberts on Q&A a few years ago).
People just do not believe that government agencies would manipulate data.
We should not fear a warming world. Records began at the end of the last ice age, so it’s only natural that the world is warming. And the current temperatures are well within historical averages.
As for arguments about whether we are causing the warming, this is even more problematic. The various contributions to global temperatures are extremely complex, involving a deep understanding of atmospheric physics and thermodynamics. With a PhD in Chemistry, this is much closer to my area of expertise than Joe Public, but I am very quickly out of my depth. I recognise most of the terms and concepts involved, but know just enough to know how little I know.
Sadly, many people on both sides of the debate don’t understand how little they know, nor how complex the subject of atmospheric physics is, and it is nothing short of comical seeing two people debating about a subject of which both of them are blissfully ignorant.
This approach is taken simply because it is so tempting. We can point to the Vladivostok ice cores that prove that CO2 follows temperature changes. We can ask why the cooling period from 1940-75 coincided with the greatest increase in CO2 production the world has ever seen. It’s very tempting. But, I’m sorry to say, it is simply a futile approach.
The bottom line is this – they simply don’t change anyone’s minds – ever. Having seen these arguments used for years, and having used them myself, I cannot point to a single person that has said, ‘Oh yes! I see it now…’ The whole point of arguing, or debating, is to change someone’s mind (including, at times, your own). If that isn’t happening, then it’s futile to continue with the same approach.
I think the reason both these approaches fail that most people do not believe that all these experts, and the government, can be wrong. You say the world isn’t warming? Oh, I’m sure you have the wrong graph. You say that CO2 is not responsible? Oh, I’m sure the government scientists know more than you do.
This then brings us to the third point. Why is a warmer world a bad thing?
This is even more tempting than the first two points, as it’s so easy to prove that a warming world, so far from being a crisis, is actually a good thing. The reason for this is that, unlike with the first two points, they don’t have to look at a complex scientific argument. They just have to look at the weather. Are cyclones and hurricanes increasing? Are droughts increasing? Are flooding events increasing?
Regretfully, it is impossible to get people to even look at this. Even worse, they seem oblivious to the simple concept of cause and effect. We see this in that they simply can’t see that droughts and floods are opposites, and the same cause cannot produce exactly opposite effects. Astonishingly, they somehow think that charts that plot these extreme events are somehow manipulated, even when they come from a primary source such as the BOM, and that there really is a ‘climate crisis’.
Where does that leave us? Well, before we adopt Catweazle’s mantra of ‘nothing works’, there is one more point – point 4 (can we do anything about it?).
Most people will have seen the address of Konstantin Kisin at an Oxford Union debate, where he prosecuted this case to great effect. He pointed out, in simple terms, that as the UK only contributes 2 per cent to the global CO2 budget, anything they did will have negligible effect, and that global CO2 levels will be determined by people in Africa and Asia. He then pointed out that people in these countries ‘didn’t give a sh*t’ about climate change, as all they want to do is feed and clothe their children, and they don’t care how much CO2 that produces.
Finally, he pointed out that Xi Jinping knows that the way to ensure that he isn’t rolled in a revolution, as happened to so many other leaders in former communist regimes, is to ensure prosperity for the Chinese people. And indispensable to that goal is cheap, reliable, power, which is the reason that China is now building lots more coal-fired power plants – in 2021 alone they built 25 GW of capacity – equivalent to 25 x 1000MW plants.
By all accounts, his speech was well-received, with many people turning to his side. The beauty of prosecuting this case, as opposed to the other three, is that people don’t have to look at any evidence. They don’t even have to look at the weather.
The argument is at the same time simple, compelling, and irresistible. The question is this: will we see a major political party with the courage to take it on?
That part remains to be seen. But what is certain is this – the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes. If, for twenty years we’ve been telling people either that the world isn’t warming, or if it is we aren’t causing it, or if it is warmer but there’s no climate crisis, and not a single person has been persuaded by our arguments, then we have the brains of a tomato if we think anything is going to change.
Konstantin Kisin’s talk, and in particular the way it was received, fill me with hope that I haven’t had in years. It fills me with hope that if the case is prosecuted wisely, the climate change colossus can be brought to a grinding halt, politicians will unashamedly take on energy security as a political mantra, and the notion of climate change will at last be exposed as the unscientific, anti-human, regressive, apocalyptic cult that it is.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/changing-climate-change-debunking-the-global-colossus
****************************************************Biden’s Energy Lunacy Is An Attack On The American People
Under President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” policies and after 62 years of hard work, the United States achieved energy independence and produced more energy than it consumed.
Under the Trump administration, the United States produced more oil and natural gas than any other country, including Russia and Saudi Arabia – the U.S. even exported oil to Saudi Arabia under the previous administration. President Trump is absolutely right when he says that the oil price would have been less than $40 per barrel under his leadership, and Russia would not have invaded Ukraine, displacing millions of people.
President Biden has methodically reversed the Trump administration’s policies in less than three years. He killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, suspended new drilling leases on federal land/water, rejoined the Paris Climate Accord, depleted our strategic reserves, doubled energy prices, and emboldened Russia to attack Ukraine. But most alarming, the Biden administration’s feckless and “Chamberlainesque” foreign policy has forged new economic and trade alliances detrimental to American national interests - specifically China, Russia, and Iran.
During the previous administration, President Trump saw energy as an avenue to build closer political, security, and trade ties with India, the world’s third-largest oil importer. The United States saw a trade deficit fall by 9% with its premier Indo-Pacific ally. Due to India’s Natural Gas demand, the United States became a primary source for liquified natural gas (LNG) exports – including a $2.5 billion deal with U.S. company Petronet, among other agreements where Trump expanded trade and general relations with India.
Fast forward to a Biden administration that has made BLUNDER AFTER BLUNDER. Biden’s debacle in Afghanistan emboldened Russia to invade Ukraine, leaving India alone after making a significant investment in Afghanistan. The unnecessary war between Russia and Ukraine created a difficult situation for India, whose military depended on continued supply of spare parts from Russia. India’s friendly economic relations with the U.S. have now taken a backseat.
Under Biden, India’s imports from Russia have risen nearly 500% since the war in Ukraine began. Additionally, India has refused to condemn the Russian invasion and/or ally with the United States, but most importantly, it has increased its purchases, becoming a key strategic buyer of Russian oil.
Knowing President Trump, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and chief architect of India’s foreign policy Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar the way I do, I can confidently tell you this would have never happened with President Trump at the helm of affairs.
However, this is but one example of how Biden’s policies have elevated American adversaries and threatened American prosperity for years to come, creating global energy shortages that his policies created. This is a self-inflicted wound that a clueless administration is now trying to remedy – manipulating the system by using our national Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to combat rising gas prices.
Our SPR was established in 1975 with national security in mind. According to the Department of Energy, our reserves constitute the nation's "first line of defense." The Russian invasion of Ukraine and China’s continued aggression highlight the importance of American energy independence. With depleted reserves, the United States is left exposed.
If there is a national emergency such as war (which every day seems even more likely), we have SPR, and we can continue its flow from the refineries to our frontlines – rather than allowing it to serve as a mask for Biden’s foolish policies. Rising gas prices are a direct result of this administration’s irresponsible agenda. The Biden administration’s decisions will have long-lasting effects on our energy producers, the jobs the industry supports, and all American families that depend on traditional power sources.
Unfortunately, President Biden has shredded our Constitution – taking countless actions hostile to the United States and our energy interests. Americans are paying the price of the current administration’s incompetent leadership. We are quickly approaching a cataclysmic point of no return as a nation. If we are to truly “Make America Great Again,” immediate change is needed. President Trump rolled out his initiative to save America this week on the campaign. He described this plan as an action to cleanse out the globalists in the Deep State, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the national security industrial complex. This plan is the key to America’s survival moving forward.
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UK: Madness on stilts: Hydrogen boilers might need ‘four-inch holes in walls to prevent explosions’
Households that have hydrogen boilers installed could be forced to drill a 4x4-inch hole in their wall to mitigate risks of explosion, according to recommendations in a government-backed safety report.
Residents in a neighbourhood being considered for a trial of hydrogen for home heating have been alarmed by a report’s recommendation that rooms with boilers hobs or substantial pipework “should have non-closable vents with [an] equivalent area of 10,000 mm2”.
The report, by Arup, the design consultants, said these should be located as close to the ceiling level as possible and no more than 50cm below ceiling level.
The same report, which came out in 2019, said that hydrogen for home heating could cause four times as many explosions and injuries than gas boilers without sufficient mitigations, including ventilation.
The report, which is based on a two-storey, masonry-built, terraced house with a basement and a loft conversion, will be used to inform the trials of hydrogen for home heating expected to go ahead from 2025.
Whitby, in the Cheshire town of Ellesmere Port, is one of two neighbourhoods being considered for conversion to hydrogen, with the final decision expected to be made by the Government this year.
In discussions with residents, representatives from Arup and gas network Cadent, which is bidding to run the trial, have said most homes will not require the maximum ventilation given the draughtiness of much of the UK’s housing stock.
Kate Grannell, a resident of Whitby who has led opposition to the plans for the hydrogen trial, said the assurances had not allayed concerns.
She said: “All we’ve done for decades is insulate and draught-proof our houses. So to say homes are leaky enough to void the requirements for ventilation, I think is a really big question.”
Richard Lowes, an energy expert at the Regulatory Assistance Project, said that it ran counter to efforts to reduce draughts and insulate homes to reduce emissions.
He said: “We’re trying to make building more energy efficient and putting in a 10-centimetre hole is doing the opposite of that. So it’s totally backwards.
“To counteract the heat loss, you’d have to have more heat so it is making hydrogen more inefficient. We already know that hydrogen will be more expensive, so it’s making that even more expensive.”
The proposed trials, which will inform the Government’s final decision on whether hydrogen is a viable fuel to help decarbonise home heating, have already been thrown into doubt by the strength of local opposition.
This week, the Government conceded that the trials would not go ahead without the support of residents, although it has not said exactly how this will be measured.
A Cadent spokesperson said: “Every decision we make as an organisation is to ensure the welfare and safety of the 11m customers we serve every single day.
"We have been working closely with Arup as they have developed their research on the safety of hydrogen in homes.
"Their Hy4Heat study undertaken for the UK Government concluded that where the safety measures described in the report are implemented, ensuring ventilation in a home meets the minimum requirements of current building regulations, hydrogen is as safe as natural gas.”
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8 March, 2023
Climate change will quadruple extreme rainfall events, study suggests
"Suggests" is the right word. This is just modelling and a model simply gives you back the assumptions you have put into it. It proves nothing. This is just a publicity grab
Extreme downpours could become four times more frequent by 2080 if greenhouse gas emissions remain high, a new study suggests.
Climate scientists at the Met Office have found that for every degree of regional warming, the intensity of extreme downpours could also increase by 5-15%.
By the 2070s, deluges of more than 20mm of rain per hour could occur four times as frequently as they did in the 1980s. London typically receives about 40-50mm of rain in a month.
In July 2021, 40mm fell on the capital in just three hours, flooding 31 Tube stations and 2,000 properties.
The Met Office researchers said forecasting long-term trends for extreme rain will help planners and policymakers adapt to the changing risk.
Three million properties across England are currently at risk from surface water flooding, with urban areas in steep catchments, such as Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire, particularly vulnerable.
Using a high resolution model normally used for weather forecasting, Met Office climate scientist Professor Lizzie Kendon and colleagues examined how local weather patterns could change over a 100-year timespan – between 1980 and 2080.
They ran the model 12 times at a resolution of 2.2km which gave them a more accurate picture of how the frequency of heavy downpours is likely to change over the coming decades.
Previously, less accurate, lower resolution models had found a smaller increase of two to three times as many extreme rain events by the 2070s.
Prof Kendon said: “Being able to look at our projected future climate in such detail has unlocked an incredible amount of information and has shown how expected increases in intense rainfall events will actually manifest at local scale and for the coming years.
“Having this level of detail is crucial to ensure that we’re prepared for the possible extremes of the future.”
Our study highlights the complexity of how natural climate variability and human-induced climate change will come together in the extreme rainfall events we experience over the UK
Higher temperatures create more extreme rainfall because warmer air holds more moisture – 7% for each degree – leading to a greater amount of water falling when clouds finally burst.
Much of the UK’s wet weather comes from clouds which form over the Atlantic and are carried east on the jet stream, which is why the west and north of the UK are generally wetter than the south and east.
The researchers found such regional differences in their climate modelling. North-west Scotland for example could see almost 10 times as many extreme downpours in 2080 as in 1980, whereas the south of the UK could see around three times as many.
The modelling also showed that extreme downpours are likely to fall in clusters because of natural climate variability adjusting conditions favourable for their occurrence.
Prof Kendon warned against trying to predict long-term trends through observation, adding: “The observed rainfall record in the UK is fairly erratic with a large amount of variability, these latest projections show that this is likely to continue through the century.
“What we can see from the higher resolution output is an even more erratic frequency of extreme events each year, so this could mean we see clusters of record-breaking intense rainfall events, followed by a period when no records are broken.
“Despite the underlying trend, these pauses in the intensification of local rainfall extremes can last a surprisingly long time – even multiple decades.”
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Climate Scientists Told To ‘Cover Up’ No Temperature Rise Since 1998
Scientists working on the most authoritative study on ‘climate change’ were urged to cover up the fact that the world’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years, it is claimed
A leaked copy of a United Nations report, compiled by hundreds of scientists, shows politicians in Belgium, Germany, Hungary and the United States raised concerns about the final draft.
Published next week, it is expected to address the fact that 1998 was the hottest year on record and world temperatures have not yet exceeded it, which scientists have so far struggled to explain.
The report is the result of six years’ work by UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is seen (by some-Ed) as the world authority on the extent of ‘climate change’ and what is causing it – on which governments including Britain’s base their green policies.
But leaked documents seen by the Associated Press, yesterday revealed deep concerns among politicians about a lack of global warming over the past few years.
Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries.
Hungary worried the report would ‘provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change’.
Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for statistics, as it was exceptionally warm and makes the graph look flat – and suggested using 1999 or 2000 instead to give a more upward-pointing curve.
The United States delegation even weighed in, urging the authors of the report to explain away the lack of warming using the ‘leading hypothesis’ among scientists that the lower warming is down to more heat being absorbed by the ocean – which has got hotter.
The last IPCC ‘assessment report’ was published in 2007 and has been the subject of huge controversy after it had to correct the embarrassing claim that the Himalayas would melt by 2035.
It was then engulfed in the ‘Climategate’ scandal surrounding leaked emails showing scientists involved in it trying to manipulate their data to make it look more convincing.
The latest report, which runs to 2,000 pages, will be shown to representatives from all 195 governments next week at a meeting in Stockholm, who can discuss alterations they want to make.
But since it was issued to governments in June, they have raised hundreds of objections about the 20-page summary for policymakers, which sums up the findings of the scientists.
What it says will inform renewable energy policies and how much consumers and businesses will pay for them.
The report is expected to say the rate of warming between 1998 and 2012 was about half of the average rate since 1951 – and put this down to natural variations such as the El Nino and La Nina ocean cycles and the cooling effects of volcanoes.
A German climate scientist – Stefan Rahmstorf, who reviewed the chapter on sea levels – yesterday admitted it was possible the report’s authors were feeling under pressure to address the slowdown in warming due to the ‘public debate’ around the issue.
The draft report, which is not new research but a synthesis of all the work being done by scientists around the world, is likely to be highly disputed at the three-day meeting.
It will make the case that humans are causing global warming with carbon emissions even more strongly upgrading it from ‘very likely’ in 2007 to ‘extremely likely’ it is manmade.
But scientists are under pressure to explain why the warming has not exceeded 1998 levels although the decade 2000-2010 was the hottest on record.
Alden Meyer, of the Union of Concerned Scientists based in Washington, said yesterday:
‘I think to not address it would be a problem because then you basically have the denialists saying: ‘Look the IPCC is silent on this issue.’
Jonathan Lynn, a spokesman for the IPCC said yesterday:
‘This is the culmination of four years’ work by hundreds of scientists, where governments get a chance to ensure the summary for policymakers is clear and concise in a dialogue with the scientists who wrote it, and have the opportunity to raise any topics they think should be highlighted.’
https://principia-scientific.com/climate-scientists-told-to-cover-up-no-temperature-rise-since-1998/
**********************************************America’s $100 Billion Bust on Climate Change
For at least the last 20 years, politicians in Washington, at the behest of green energy groups, have spent some $100 billion of taxpayer money to fight climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. How is that going for us so far?
A recent Associated Press story, based on the latest data on global carbon emissions, provides a pretty accurate report card: “Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reached a Record High in 2022.”
The article tells us: “Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power.”
The article adds that “Emissions of the climate-warming gas that were caused by energy production grew 0.9 percent to reach 36.8 gigatons in 2022, the International Energy Agency reported Thursday. (The mass of one gigaton is equivalent to about 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, according to NASA.)”
You’ve got to almost shriek out loud when you read that the “report was described as disconcerting by climate scientists.”
“Disconcerting”? That’s putting it lightly. We are the furthest thing from being climate change alarmists, but when you spend $100 billion of taxpayer money and achieve absolutely nothing, President Biden and his green allies should be arrested for criminal fraud.
Where did all the money go? Tens of billions of dollars have lined the pockets of left-wing environmental and social justice groups that have been emitting a lot of hot air but no results. Green energy companies have milked taxpayers of tens of billions more, even as wind and solar only produce about 12 percent of our energy.
Is this the greatest ripoff of U.S. taxpayers in history?
I’ve often said that I doubt all the doomsday predictions of global warming are accurate, but if they are, we are goners. Because nothing the Left is doing on climate change is making even the tiniest bit of difference, as the new report shows. What it is doing is giving politicians and activists a chance to virtue-signal. Does it even matter to them that none of their schemes are working?
The most obvious flaw in the green strategy is that few, if any, of the big polluters are cooperating despite the assurances from Mr. Biden’s climate change ambassador, State Secretary Kerry. For the umpteenth time: The United States is not the problem — China is. Its pollution levels are three times higher than ours. Soon India will surpass America in carbon emissions.
Even the top scientists who study climate change admit that without progress from China, nothing America does to reduce emissions will reverse the global trends. America has reduced our emissions more than any other nation, and the problem continues to get worse. And yet, the rest of the world blames America.
All we are accomplishing in the Biden war on fossil fuels is kneecapping our own domestic energy industry while the rest of the world consumes more fossil fuels than ever before. Instead of the oil and gas produced in Texas or North Dakota, it’s coming from Russia, Iran and OPEC. The energy source that is growing the fastest now is coal.
The only way to combat climate change is not through more command-and-control government action. That never works. The Covid crisis and the incompetent government response should have taught us that lesson. We need more growth and better technology to deal with a changing climate. The leftists want less growth and have even been backing “degrowth.” Since when is making America poorer the solution to any problem?
In the wake of this epic policy failure, the Democrats aren’t backing off. Mr. Biden’s latest budget calls for $500 billion more for climate change over the next decade. Talk about throwing good money after bad. We shouldn’t be too surprised because, as Milton Friedman used to remind us, anytime a government program isn’t working, the politicians’ response is: “We aren’t spending enough money.”
If congressional Republicans are smart (a big if), they will not appropriate one penny more for this epic public policy flop. If we want to save our country’s future for our children, the first step is to stop adding to our $32 trillion national debt.
https://www.nysun.com/article/americas-100-billion-climate-change-flop
************************************************Time for leftist media to terrify people with articles about snow!
The articles below are in the tradition of articles that we have seen for decades saying we could look forward to snowless winters because of humans and our use of natural resources.
What is missing from every one of these articles is a direct link connecting oil consumption, CO2 content, or any other such thing with temperatures and snow. But the truth has never mattered to the media and other leftists when they have set out to destroy the oil industry.
They cannot explain why we had a cooling period from 1940 to 1975, where essentially the same people who are warning of an existential threat of warming were warning of an existential threat that billions would die from an existential threat of a coming ice age. Here is a hint for sycophant journalists who just repeat what they are told.
Snow has been a no-show for some traditionally wintry cities
A big reason for the lack of snow has been the warmer conditions, Robinson says — conditions driven in part by human-induced climate change. The northeast is among the fastest warming regions in the country.
Another story in Yahoo on Monday, which published the indoctrination piece above, talks about record snowfall in California this year. Can't the journalists read or think? If we have record cold and snow in some parts of the country and record warmth in another part of the country, humans and natural resources aren't causing the warm temperatures and snowless winters. The climate is and has always been cyclical and natural.
Dramatic photos show aftermath of historic snowfall, winter storms blanketing California
This is the snowiest first five months of the snow season in the Sierra Nevada since 1970, almost fifty feet so far.
Graphics show snowfall totals in California: Over 50 feet with more expected this weekend
Five months into this water year, counted Oct. 1 through Sept. 30, more than 44 feet has fallen there at the Central Snow Laboratory, a University of California, Berkeley field research station. That's more than double the median of 21.7 feet by this time of year.
"We have had the snowiest October through February going back to 1970," said Andrew Schwartz, lead scientist and manager at the snow lab.
“We're within 3½ feet from the 2017 water year total of 47.77 feet, which is our third largest snowfall year on record in the last three decades," Schwartz said. The lab record for a water year is 53.58 feet set in 2011.
It is a simple concept: humans and natural resources cannot cause both record snow and no snow. Sadly, journalists don't care. They and other Democrats are the party of fear. They want to scare children and others into capitulation, whether it is about the climate or COVID.
Everything to leftists is about power. They do not care how much damage they do to the poor, the middle class, or the overall economy. They don't care how much inflation they unnecessarily cause. They don't care that their destructive policies help Russia finance their war.
They are pathetic and dangerous!
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7 March, 2023
No Link Found Between Gas Stoves And Respiratory Illness
A new independent analysis published Thursday morning concluded that natural gas-powered stoves are “not a significant determinant of residential indoor air quality.”
The analysis — conducted by the California-based Catalyst Environmental Solutions and commissioned by the California Restaurant Association and the California Building Industry Association (CBIA) — examined dozens of existing studies and government reports.
It concluded that existing research doesn’t establish a significant connection between respiratory illness and gas stove usage despite recent media reports.
“When it comes to the indoor air quality of cooking, the main driver of health risk is what you are cooking, not the fuel that you use to cook it,” Dan Tormey, president of Catalyst Environmental Solutions and chief author of the report, told Fox News Digital in an interview.
“A secondary finding is that the most effective way to protect your health during indoor cooking is to have proper ventilation.”
Tormey noted that emissions produced by heating fish in oil, for example, may produce a large number of emissions, sometimes enough to trigger a home’s fire alarm.
He said those emissions are more detrimental to respiratory health than whether the food was cooked on a gas stove or electric stove.
“It is the entire act of cooking, not just the natural gas, but other elements,” he continued. “What you’re cooking, the method you use to cook. And, in addition, [existing] studies don’t separate out other factors.”
“For example, if there’s smoking in the home cigarette smoking, that has a far greater effect than cooking on asthma,” Tormey said. “Interestingly, some studies find that if a child is allergic to a pet in the house — a dog, cat, bird — that has a far greater effect on the occurrence of asthma than the act of cooking.”
The analysis also concluded that proper ventilation, such as a fan above a stove, which is required around the country, is more important than the type of stove used.
Cooking food at a higher temperature may also produce more emissions and have a greater impact on health.
And media coverage and reports often highlight conclusions in research regarding the links between gas stoves and respiratory health that aren’t made by the research itself, according to Tormey.
In fact, large amounts of existing research have found that there is no evidence of an association between gas stove usage and asthma.
“This study is really just to address the misnomer that ‘people may want it, maybe it costs less and it’s easier to get, but you’re killing people.’ That’s just not true,” Dan Dunmoyer, CBIA’s president and CEO, told Fox News Digital. “This study really just points to the fact that there really is not a health impact based on the fuel source.”
“We believe we’re a market-driven industry,” he said. “So, 87 percent of our customers when surveyed want to have the option of what type of fuel they have in their home, whether it’s gas or electric or hydrogen or solar or whatever they prefer. For us, it’s a market-driven world we live in and if the consumer wants an option, we think we should give it to them.”
He noted that homes in California, where state leaders have pushed particularly aggressive electrification of the economy as part of their climate agenda, are already the most energy-efficient.
In early January, a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) told Bloomberg that “any option is on the table“ regarding a potential gas stove ban and that unsafe products can be banned, noting gas stoves were a “hidden hazard.”
He added that the idea that cooking had to be done on gas stoves was a “carefully manicured myth.”
In the report, Bloomberg highlighted research published in December showing gas stoves were tied to childhood asthma cases.
However, the Rocky Mountain Institute, a pro-electrification group that funded the study, later walked back the findings and the White House denied that it was interested in banning gas stoves.
The Department of Energy, though, has moved ahead with strict restrictions on future stove purchases and the CPSC has asked for public comments on the safety of gas stoves.
https://principia-scientific.com/no-link-found-between-gas-stoves-and-respiratory-illness/
***********************************************With the ‘expert’ COVID view blown up, green terror must be next
Carbon fuels and the technologies that depend up them are essential to modern society: Pretending that governments can simply mandate them away, ordering replacements into existence, is out-and-out magical thinking — and policy based on unicorns and magic crystals can only bring disaster and suffering.
Yes, the hysterics also point to disasters and suffering. But that involves even more disconnects from reality (long documented by brave skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and others). Here just a few:
At the 2021 Glasgow UN climate summit, John Kerry said we had only nine years left to stop global warming. That followed Prince (now King) Charles’ 2019 claim that we had only 18 months. Which conflicted with AOC’s claim that same year that we had only 12 years left. Which cut against the 2004 claim from British greens that climate change would destroy all human civilization by 2020. That timeline undermined the 1989 UN prediction that we had only three years left to win the climate fight — a major fail, after the same body said in 1972 that only a decade remained before time ran out.
Consider, too, the climate refugees, i.e., people supposedly sure to be driven from their homes by climate change. The Institute for Economics and Peace predicts as many as 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050; but the big brains have as bad a record here as they do on the date of doomsday. The United Nations not so long ago foresaw 50 million such refugees by 2010, a massive migration flow that utterly failed to materialize.
On individual extreme weather events, the record of “experts” is just as miserable. Despite endless predictions of raging wildfires and city-drowning floods, the overall death toll from such events is down drastically, from about 500,000 worldwide in the 1920s to about 18,000 from 2012 to 2022.
Don’t forget the helpless critters greens love to hype up. Remember the vanishing polar bear, a keystone of Al Gore’s moral-panic masterpiece “An Inconvenient Truth”? Turns out their numbers are up from 2.5 to five times since the ’60s. The allegedly dying coral of the Great Barrier Reef now holds more coral than at any time since record-keeping began.
Green fanatics, the numbers show, are just as much in the dark about the climate situation as Anthony Fauci et al were about COVID. Their “solutions” — ban gas stoves! mandate Teslas! eat mealworms! — are equally nonsensical, catering to the imaginations and emotions of rich progressives rather than aiming rationally to mitigate the (very real) risks climate change actually presents.
It’s time we stopped listening to them, for good.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/04/with-the-expert-covid-view-blown-up-green-terror-must-be-next/
************************************************Honda repeats pledge: Petrol engines to continue beyond 2040
The boss of Honda believes traditional petrol and diesel engines will continue to 2040 and beyond.
Honda had previously said it would switch to electric and hydrogen power across its range by 2040, but in an interview with news outlet Reuters, CEO Toshihiro Mibe suggested that timeframe could be extended.
Mr Mibe said Honda was conducting feasibility studies to determine the future of petrol and diesel engines – also referred to as internal-combustion engines – as well as into the increasing dominance of battery technology.
"I’ve been in the engine development business for more than 30 years, so personally [the transition to electric is] a little threatening," he told Reuters.
"But I have to separate my own feelings from what is best for the business."
While many car companies have outlined a move to electric vehicles by 2030 or 2035, Honda is one of the few to express a more conservative viewpoint, suggesting there will still be a place for typical engines by 2040.
Some industry experts are worried developing nations may not have the electrical infrastructure in place to switch away from petrol and diesel, particularly in rural areas.
Despite having a longer time horizon for a complete switch to electric cars than its competitors, in April 2022 Honda revealed plans to launch 30 new battery-powered vehicles by 2030 – including two sports cars and what is believed to be an electric ute.
Honda expects hybrid and electric vehicles will account for 40 per cent of its sales by the end of this decade.
Multiple reports in the second half of 2022 all but confirmed one of those sports cars would be a successor to the NSX.
As part of its transition to electric vehicles, Honda announced it is partnering with General Motors to use its Ultium electric-car battery architecture for future models – as well as announcing a separate partnership with technology company Sony to launch a new electric-car brand called Afeela.
Mr Mibe reiterated that Honda is also working on its own electric-car architecture,
https://www.drive.com.au/news/honda-sees-petrol-engines-beyond-2040
**********************************************Australian Labor Party makes dramatic coal policy backflip that's sure to infuriate the party's green left
NSW Labor leader Chris Minns has risked a serious rift within his party by flagging the possibility of buying back Australia's largest coal-fired power station in a bid to shore up the state's energy supply and bring down electricity bills.
The Australian Energy Market Operator last week warned the east coast could face rolling blackouts with renewable energy generation and gas unlikely to keep up with demand in the next few years.
Despite the impending threat of the lights going out, coupled with spiralling retail energy costs, there has been great reluctance from governments to pour money into the fossil fuel industry - fearing backlash from environmentally-conscious voters.
But Mr Minns appears to be positioning Labor for a major backflip in energy policy ahead of the March 25 election.
The Opposition leader said a government he leads may look to take control of the Eraring power station in Lake Macquarie, which is scheduled to close in 2025, seven years earlier than previously planned.
'I'm not going to let the power run out in NSW, and I'm not going to rule out (buying Eraring),' he told told 2GB's Ben Fordham. 'It might be a negotiation between the government and a private company and I acknowledge that before the election, I'm putting that out there.'
Mr Minns said Eraring provides 25 per cent of NSW's electricity needs. 'If it's taken offline, and there's not the firming power in place, we could have major shortages,' he said.
When its owner Origin Energy made the announcement last year that it would close in 2025, NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean said he was disappointed by the decision.
He promised the state would build what he described as the 'biggest battery in the southern hemisphere' to make up for the power production that would be lost. But, having sold the plant in 2013, the Coalition then tried to buy it back in 2021 for almost five times the selling price.
'This power station was sold for $50million, Matt Kean tried to buy it back for $240million,' Mr Minns said. 'When you sell off critical infrastructure that the state needs, it undermines industry, the economy and the budget position in the long run.'
The Labor leader's comments came after Mr Kean said the Coalition, if reelected, could intervene to keep Eraring open past 2025 to ease shortfalls and rising prices.
But as Labor flipped to a more pro-coal view of power supply, the Liberals flipped the other way and Mr Kean walked away from what he had said hours earlier.
Premier Dominic Perrottet, whose Liberal Party is facing strong challenges from pro-environment Teal candidates in several seats, said intervening to extend Eraring's lifespan was 'not part of our plans'.
'We have an energy roadmap that's delivering $32billion of private sector investment to ensure we have a long term reliable and clean energy future. That's our plan,' he said.
The Premier added that he and Mr Kean were 'on completely the same page' about the power station's future.
Mr Minns told Fordham that the Australian Energy Market Operator - the national regulator - 'released a report last week indicating that we do need to worry about shortfalls in supply in the energy markets over the next 24 months'.
He said one of the reasons Labor plans to set up a NSW Energy Security Corporation is because 'we're worried about exactly these things'.
'When the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing we need to make sure we’ve got dispatchable power for the people of NSW,' Mr Minns said.
'At the moment that's not going to happen because Matt Kean has not done the work to make sure there's energy security within the network. 'I can't rule out further action in relation to Eraring.
The Coalition sold off all five NSW coal-fired power plants since it won power in 2011, while the previous Labor NSW government sold off energy suppliers, but Mr Minns has ruled out any further privatisation if Labor wins power.
In February, he said 'Privatisation does not work. It has been a disaster for NSW and under Labor it stops.'
If Labor bought Eraring back, it would be the opposite of privatisation, it would mean the state taking back control of a previously privatised asset.
If the buyback was about almost anything other than a coal-fired power station it would get the backing of Labor's left and the Greens.
But it does concern fossil fuels - and Mr Minns will have calculated that however many votes the switch loses to the Greens and minor parties the decision will come back in spades in the seats Labor needs to win in Western Sydney.
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6 March, 2023
The Economic Case for Better Recycling Policy
The writer below draws optimistic conclusions from the undoubted success of aluminium recycling. But aluminium is an outlier. It takes huge amounts of energy to refine it in the first place but melting it back down for recycling purposes takes relativly little energy. Such an extreme gap does encourage recycling but it is not typical of recycling efforts. Recycled products can easily be more costly and less useful than making the product from scratch
Recycling is one of those things that everyone supports in theory, but too few people carry out in practice. While 95 percent of Americans believe that recycling helps the environment, fewer than half believe the current system actually works well. This is reflected by the data. According to a finding by the Container Recycling Institute, up to two-thirds of all beverage containers in the country never get recycled. This is both environmentally destructive and economically wasteful.
So, where’s the disconnect? Everyone understands the benefits of recycling, but apparently that’s not translating into tangible outcomes.
There are two primary reasons for why recycling has never really taken off at scale in America. The first is a basic lack of incentives. The cost and logistical complexity of sorting recyclable goods from regular trash have proved an economic burden on municipalities and local governments. Absent a strong consumer incentive to properly recycle materials, recycling programs have often ended up costing more money than they saved.
The second is that, because of this market failure, the U.S. has spent the last few decades simply shipping a lot of our recyclable materials overseas. In 2016 alone, we sent China 16 million tons of metals, paper, and plastic. But then the Chinese government decided it had enough, promptly embargoing the import of foreign waste goods in 2018, and causing a domino effect among other Asian nations. However, the damage had already been done: America’s long-term dependence on foreign countries to take our waste has precluded the development of a sturdy, domestic recycling infrastructure.
However, it needn’t be this way. The idea that recycling costs more money than it saves is an idea born out of bad – or absent – policy, not reality. Recycling doesn’t, inherently, have to be a trade-off between economics and sustainability.
Consider, for example, the admirable track record of aluminum recycling. Nearly 75 percent of all the aluminum ever produced is still being used today, thanks to 90 percent or more recycling rates in industrial markets like construction and automotives. Recycling aluminum for industrial purposes uses 95 percent less energy than producing new aluminum, resulting in significant cost savings. It also cuts out the additional costs associated with importing high value materials from other countries with less secure supply chains.
A similar dynamic can exist for those two thirds of beverage containers that get wasted each year – a full 140 billion individual containers. Even aluminum containers aren’t safe, with fewer than 50 percent being recycled each year, a lost retail value of $800 million annually. Not only are we polluting the environment, but we’re also losing money while doing so.
In order to overcome the current challenges of recycling, though, creative solutions are required. One such solution is quickly gaining traction across the country again – 10 states already have it, but the most recent implementation was in Hawaii, 20 years ago. Recycling incentive programs, dubbed “bottle bills,” establish a refundable cash deposit on all beverage containers, whether they be glass, plastic, or aluminum. Consumers pay the deposit, typically only 5 or 10 cents, at the time of purchase and then collect their refund when they return the empty container. This is a powerful incentive to prevent recyclable bottles and cans just ending up in the trash, overcoming the aforementioned market failure.
Not only is this kind of program highly successful – containers that get sold with a refundable deposit on them ultimately get recycled at a rate of up to three times higher than those without such a deposit – but it also makes economic sense. It doesn’t cost the government any money, can reduce roadside litter by up to 70 percent, and creates a sustainable domestic supply chain of raw materials.
Simply put, deposit programs are a convenient and highly effective incentive for Americans to do their part for the environment without spending taxpayer dollars.
They also directly benefit municipalities, giving local communities an incentive to engage in better recycling practices. A comprehensive review of 33 studies on the matter, in regions across the world, found that in nearly every case, deposit return systems financially benefit municipalities, to the tune of millions of dollars per year. Moreover, they create thousands of local jobs.
In a world dominated by all-or-nothing political proposals, seemingly small solutions like establishing a refundable deposit on containers are not just elegant, but highly effective. They also clearly show that environmental responsibility doesn’t require economic sacrifice.
At the end of the day, this is a pro-economy, pro-environment, and pro-America solution. We shouldn’t have to rely on shipping our waste to other countries and letting them deal with it, nor should we abdicate our responsibility to be good stewards of our resources here at home. The American way is finding the most innovative solution possible. Reforming our recycling policy by establishing an incentive program like refundable deposits is rooted in common sense, serving both our economy and our environment.
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Governor Mike Dunleavy: Invest in Alaska to Save the Environment
After winning a second term in office, Governor Mike Dunleavy (R-AK) wants to make his case for Alaska in the Lower-48.
A natural salesman, he wants Americans to visit The Last Frontier and bask in her natural beauty. His most effective pitch came in a 2021 Travel Alaska ad campaign.
"To me, it's an amazing place," Dunleavy said during our recent interview. "I grew up in Pennsylvania—in Scranton, Pennsylvania—and left in 1983 to go to Alaska right out of college, and I thought I died and went to heaven."
He continued, "It's a place where even today I still say to myself, 'I need eight lifetimes to see the entire state and understand it.'"
The Alaska model of balancing natural resource development with conservation stewardship has worked for decades. But the model is now threatened by radical preservationist policies emanating from the White House.
"We have tremendous resources," stated the 12th Alaska governor. "Alaska was probably the only state in the country in which its admittance into the Union as the 49th state was predicated upon its ability — and a compelling argument — that they must develop their resources. The irony today is that the federal government is doing everything possible, from our perspective, to stop that view [and] that approach to resource development from occurring."
During our conversation, Dunleavy showed me a binder containing all federal government directives to devastate vital Alaska industries. Since January 2021, the Biden administration issued over 40 executive actions undermining energy and natural resources development opportunities under the guise of "fighting the climate crisis" and "protecting the environment."
These directives have incurred severe economic consequences, from placing a drilling moratorium in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to reinstating the 2001 Roadless Rule on the Tongass National Forest in southeast Alaska. These actions, in Dunleavy's view, are harmful to Alaskans. "It's really an anti-individual, anti-person agenda," the governor said of President Joe Biden's environmental policies.
Dunleavy wasn't shy about criticizing the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement— the pernicious ideology discouraging investment in oil and gas exploration.
"I think what really goads a lot of folks in Alaska is when we're talking about this ESG approach to the world," he continued. "And some of your larger banks would like you to believe that they are noble and they are saving the world."
He added, "Many of them are investing in places in which the environment is being destroyed. The political situation is horrible. Child labor issues and minority issues are being exploited. So you really want to save the environment? Invest in developing America and Alaska because we do it better than anybody."
I then asked him about Alaska Natives—a key constituency of his comprising over 20 percent of the population–and how President Biden's policies are impacting them.
The Biden administration has touted consulting Tribal interests in all policy areas but is quick to dismiss their input supporting resource development.
"I can put you in contact with hundreds— if not thousands— of Alaska Natives that believe in resource development [and] that believe in responsible resource development," Dunleavy continued. "The Biden administration is talking to a select few that don't necessarily want resource development in their area. But I can tell you, overall, the vast majority of Alaska and Alaska Native people want resource development— responsible resource development—because of what it provides. It provides a future for their kids."
Even a pastime like hunting isn't safe from the Biden administration. For example, Alaska's Federal Subsistence Board, a subsidiary of the Department of Interior, recently closed off 60 million public land acres to hunting access. Unsurprisingly, the anti-hunting Interior Secretary Deb Haaland fails to commit to a "no net loss" policy to maintain existing hunting and fishing access on federal public lands.
The avid sportsman expressed his dismay with the decision and assured me he vows to fight it.
For his tireless defense of wildlife conservation, Safari Club International recently bestowed him with their prestigious "Governor of the Year Award" at their annual convention in Nashville, Tennessee.
"If you're a hunter, we're one of the Meccas to go to," he explained. "We're the only state with the three bear species: polar bears, brown bears (grizzly bears), and black bears. We have enormous herds of caribou, musk oxen, plains bison, and we're the only state with wood bison, which are the largest bison on the planet."
"One of the reasons I went to Alaska right out of college was I wanted to be part of the outdoors," the governor stressed. "I want to be part of the wilderness, and it hasn't disappointed me. And, you know, I've gone on a hunt on a regular basis—whether it's caribou or moose."
Despite all that's transpiring, Governor Dunleavy insists his state can sustain itself and be a model for actual conservation practices elsewhere in the U.S.
"Alaska is ground zero because there's a lot of folks that can be duped into thinking that if they support no activities in Alaska, then they're saving Alaska," the former school teacher continued.
"You're not saving Alaska. To be honest with you, Alaska is doing well saving itself right now by itself."
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Greenies and Cuban Communists Partner For Propaganda
“The Government of Cuba and The Ocean Foundation signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) today,” announced The Ocean Foundation last week, “one that marks the first time the Government of Cuba has signed a MoU with a non-governmental organization in the United States. ..The MoU draws on over thirty years of collaborative ocean science and policy work between the organization and Cuban marine research institutions and conservation agencies.”
A prime example of that “cooperation” was a CBS "60 Minutes" program back in December of 2011 featuring another in its long line of joint CBS-Castro productions. On that program, Anderson Cooper and his production crew partnered with the Stalinist regime’s Centro de Investigaciones Marinas for a propaganda piece on the marvels of Cuban coral reef conservation. The co-host of the CBS show and conduit for this fruitful Communist infomercial was Dr. David Guggenheim, senior fellow at the Ocean Foundation in Washington, D.C. who chairs its “Cuba Marine Research and Conservation Program.” Dr Guggenheim bills himself as a “Cubaphile” and toasted Castro’s fiefdom (which he proudly claimed to have visited over 40 times) as a “magical place!”
Needless to remind, such a gold-plated visa is not handed-out haphazardly by the totalitarian Castro regime. And such a welcome mat and red carpet are not rolled out randomly.
After surfacing from their scuba dive at Jardines de la Reina reef off southern Cuba, Cooper and Guggenheim of The Ocean Foundation rhapsodized for the CBS cameras thusly:
Guggenheim: “The corals are healthy. The fish are healthy and abundant. There are predators here, large sharks. It's the way these ecosystems really should look.” “It's a living time machine. And it's a really incredible opportunity to learn from.”
Cooper: “So something here holds the key to figuring out how to save other reefs and bring them back.”
Guggenheim: “it's because this ecosystem is being protected, it's got a leg up on other ecosystems around the world that are being heavily fished.”
Yes, amazing how that Communist conservation works! You simply convert free citizens of a nation which formerly enjoyed a higher per-capita income and car-ownership than half of Europeans, and with the third highest protein consumption in Latin American, into penurious half-starved serfs! Nothing to it!
In pre-Castro Cuba, the abundant lobster, grouper and snapper that so enchanted Cooper and Guggenheim on their scuba dive served as dietary mainstays of the humblest Cuban, who owned boats, fishing gear and were perfectly free to use them at every whim and then consume their catch. For Cuban landlubbers, pre-Castro groceries stocked seafood in abundance. Now these delicacies are reserved mostly for tourists, regime apparatchiks and valued foreign propagandists. Catching and eating a lobster can land a Castro subject in jail. And owning even a dinghy is the stuff of dreams, of escape.
“In 1996, the government of Fidel Castro, a diver himself, made this area one of the largest marine preserves in the Caribbean. Almost all commercial fishing was banned,” explained a smug Cooper to his "60 Minutes" audience.
Yes, amazing how that works in Stalinist Cuba! “Ah! Think I’ll decree my favorite diving and fishing site a preserve that prohibits my subjects from doing there what I do,” brainstorms the Lider Maximo (translates into German almost precisely as Fuhrer) one fine afternoon, then presents it to his “parliament”… “Now, do I hear any objections?...No?.. No?! OK, going once, going twice…The motion passes!”
There’s just something about running a KGB-tutored Stalinist regime that encourages this type of instant and gung-ho team-playing by regime “legislators.” Many among the tens of thousands of Castro’s prison, torture and firing squad victims were his former comrades, onetime regime officials. Unlike food, clothing, shelter, feminine napkins and toilet paper, one thing there’s never any shortage of in Stalinist Cuba is rubber stamps. Not that CBS or The Ocean Foundation even hinted at such unpleasantness.
Apartheid South Africa, by the way, did a bang-up job of wildlife conservation. The segregationist governments set up many national parks and nature preserves where vigilant police kept poaching to a minimum. Came the end of apartheid and the enfranchisement of South Africa’s black population and poaching became rampant for a while, with the populations of many endangered species (rhinos in particular) plummeting.
But extolling Apartheid South Africa’s “conservation consciousness,” by the mainstream media wasn’t much in evidence during the 1980s. Apparently, in the view of enlightened opinion worldwide, the vileness of that government’s segregationist policies negated the virtue of its conservation policies.
If only Stalinist policies were regarded similarly by enlightened opinion worldwide. If only a totalitarian Cuban regime that jailed and murdered political prisoners at 10 times the rate of an authoritarian South African regime provoked a tiny fraction of the revulsion as the latter among the “enlightened” worldwide.
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To defeat climate change, Australia must do the impossible
The argument between Labor and the Greens about new gas projects is strange and pointless. New projects must be included in the government’s emissions reduction target, which doesn’t change.
But it’s true that new mining and industrial projects of almost any sort will make it harder, and new fossil fuels will mean achieving that target goes from being almost impossible to impossible.
None of what the government has said about Australia’s latest plan to reduce emissions, or the media coverage of it, has properly conveyed its difficulty.
The politics has been all about the wonderful opportunity of the green energy economy, and how Australia is going to be a big winner.
This is mostly flim-flam, and sets the country up for a nasty shock.
Sure there will be opportunities – mainly digging up and shipping the lithium, copper and nickel needed for batteries, but we can’t make batteries here because of the carbon emissions that would cause, taking us over our limit.
But as hard as the emissions reduction task is going to be, it will have to be done. There is no choice, and it would be helpful if the government told the truth about it.
The plan is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent from Australia’s 2005 level by 2030, and to net zero by 2050.
That was an exercise in split-the-difference back-engineering: 43 per cent was roughly halfway between the Coalition’s 28 per cent target and the Green’s 75 per cent, so they started with that number and worked backwards. Spreadsheet jockeys were paid to assure them, and us, that it could be done, no problem, which they duly did.
There’s no mention of “apart from new gas projects” in the fine print. It’s unconditional, and it looks like an election promise that can’t be broken … unlike those about taxes.
Much of the work of emissions reduction has to be done by the 215 firms that each belch more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere and are responsible for 28 per cent of Australia’s emissions. They have to cut their total emissions by about a third over seven years, from this year’s estimated 143 million tonnes to 100 million.
Sitting comfortably atop that list of very anxious big emitters is Woodside’s North West Shelf gas project, at 6.78 million tonnes last year. The company’s huge, lucrative Scarborough project is due to come onstream in 2026. and Woodside has said its emissions will be 880 million tonnes over 30 years, or about 30 million a year, on average.
All going well, and assuming no other new projects, that 4.9 per cent a year legislated requirement will have reduced the emissions of the 215 to 117 million tonnes by 2026. But suddenly, thanks to Woodside and Scarborough, emissions are back to something like 147 million tonnes – and now with only four years to go!
That presumably means the task – for everyone – in the last four years between 2026 and 2030 is a 9 per cent reduction per year, not 4.9 per cent, which is hard enough.
Pressure to reduce production
It’s actually amazing that the other 214 big emitters haven’t already marched on Canberra to support the Greens’ demand for no new projects, although they’re probably more worried about their own gas supplies.
Commonwealth Bank commodities analyst Vivek Dhar has figured out that the businesses covered by the safeguard mechanism will need to reduce their production by an average of 0.3 per cent a year to meet the 4.9 per cent a year reduction.
Considering that executives are paid bonuses to increase production and launch new projects to satisfy shareholders, that is going to require a very big and unlikely change in corporate culture and remuneration.
It results from the collective need, if they don’t reduce production, also calculated by Vivek Dhar, to reduce emissions intensity – that is, carbon dioxide per unit of production – by 35 per cent by 2030.
The National Electricity Market (NEM) is an example of what can be done on this score. Thanks to a huge increase in renewable power generation, the NEM has cut its emissions intensity in the seven years from 2014 to 2021 – by 24 per cent.
So the 215 largest Australian emitters are being asked to do almost 50 per cent better than the NEM has done with all the renewable electricity that’s been added to its grid.
They won’t cut production and can’t cut emissions intensity that much, so they’ll buy lots of offsets to obey the law, or Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs) that are generated by planting trees or not cutting them down.
Anticipating massive demand for ACCUs leading to a brutal carbon tax, the government has said that the price will be capped at $75 a tonne and then increased by CPI plus 2 per cent per year after that.
But that’s not quite true. That’s just the price at which government itself will trade them, as buyer and seller of last resort. Others can buy and sell them for whatever price they want.
Trees, millions of trees
And if the non-government market price goes above $75, no one will want to sell to the government at $75. So how will Energy Minister Chris Bowen get hold of enough to satisfy what is likely to be enormous demand for cheap government ACCUs?
That’s not explained, but it looks like Mr Bowen will have to create them, like the Reserve Bank prints money, by planting trees! Presumably we’ll see harried public servants driving around in utes packed with seedlings and spades, planting trees on every spare bit of dirt they can find.
Without government forests springing up everywhere, it’s likely that two things will happen:
Companies in the safeguard mechanism will be forced to choose between cutting their production and losing market share to imports from countries with less rigorous climate change policies, or increasing their costs and prices by buying ACCUs
The non-government price of ACCUs will go very high indeed, which will be a new cost to businesses in the safeguard mechanism, or those that have voluntary committed to net zero by 2050 themselves, and have said they won’t engage in “greenwashing” by buying cheap, dodgy offsets from overseas.
Normally I’d say that when this rubber hits the road in five years’ time, and everyone realises how hard and expensive the carbon abatement task actually is, politicians will run a mile and the country will go off the whole idea and exhume Tony Abbott to repeal Labor’s legislation again.
Australia, and specifically the 215 hapless big emitters, will have to do the impossible, and the Prime Minister needs to start telling them and us that yesterday.
https://thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2023/03/06/climate-carbon-target-kohler/
***************************************5 March, 2023
Climate child labor- Who cares?
The ruling class, powerful elite, and the media lack some energy literacy which may be the reasons they avoid conversations about the ugly side of “green” mandates and subsidies. Before anyone in Washington decides to procure wind turbines, solar panels, or an EV, they should read the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations”, and decide for themselves if they wish to financially support the humanity atrocities and environmental degradation among folks in developing countries with yellow, brown, and black skin, so that the wealthy countries can go green.
The few wealthy countries pursuing the generation of electricity from wind turbines and solar panels while simultaneously moving to rid the world of fossil fuels have short memories of petrochemical products and human ingenuity being the reasons for the world populating from 1 to 8 billion in less than two hundred years.
Wealth, with no ethical or moral standards for those of lesser means, can be dangerous and fatal to the cheap labor of disposable workforces. We have seen the effects on the disposable workforce when Qatar “needed” to build seven new stadiums in a decade to be ready for the 2022 World Cup. The World Cup in Qatar kicked off on Sunday November 20 at the Al Bayt Stadium, but the “acceptable” toll of more than 6,500 migrant laborers who died between 2011 and 2020, helping to build World Cup infrastructure with cheap disposable workforce will provide viewers and participants with many lingering questions about our ethical and moral beliefs resulting from the grim toll.
The transition to electricity generation from breezes and sunshine has proven to be ultra-expensive for the wealthy countries of Germany, Australia, Great Britain, and the USA representing 6 percent of the world’s population (508 million vs 8 billion). Those wealthy countries now have among the highest cost for their electricity, while the poorer developing countries, currently without the usage of the 20th century products manufactured from crude oil, are experiencing about 11,000,000 child deaths every year due to the unavailability of the fossil fuel products used in wealthy countries.
When we look outside the few wealthy countries, we see that at least 80 percent of humanity, or more than six billion in this world are living on less than $10 a day, and billions living with little to no access to electricity, politicians are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity. Energy poverty is among the most crippling but least talked-about crises of the 21st century. We should not take energy for granted. Wealthy countries may be able to bear expensive electricity and fuels, but not by those that can least afford living in “energy poverty.”
Decades ago, it was sweat shops in the textile industry that grabbed everyone’s humanity interests, but today it is the “green” movement that is dominated by poorer developing countries mining for the exotic minerals and metals that support the wealthy countries that are going green at any cost to humanity, remains out of the spotlight.
Today, the wealthy countries understand developing countries have virtually no environmental laws nor labor laws, which allows those locations unlimited opportunities to exploit folks with yellow, brown, and black skin, and inflict environmental degradation to their local landscapes.
A recent report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) notes: “A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired plant”.
Lithium: Over half of the world’s Lithium reserves are found in three South American countries that border the Andes Mountains: Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. These countries are collectively known as the “Lithium Triangle”.
Cobalt: The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) produces 70 percent of the world’s Cobalt. While there is no shortage of environmental issues with its Cobalt mining, the overriding problem here is human rights: dangerous working conditions and the use of child labor. Cobalt is a toxic metal. Prolonged exposure and inhalation of Cobalt dust can lead to health issues of the eyes, skin, and lungs.
Nickel: A major component of the EV batteries, is found just below the topsoil in the Rainforests of Indonesia and the Philippines. As a result, the nickel is extracted using horizontal surface mining that results in extensive environmental degradation: deforestation and removal of the top layer of soil.
Copper: Chile is the leading producer of the world’s Copper. Most of the Chile’s Copper comes from open pit/strip mines. This type of mining negatively affects vegetation, topsoil, wildlife habitats, and groundwater. The next three largest producers of copper are Peru, China, and the infamous Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Showing no moral or ethical concerns for the disposable workforce, wealthy countries continue to encourage subsidies to procure EV’s and build more wind and solar. Those subsidies are providing financial incentives to the developing countries mining for those “green” materials to continue their exploitations of poor people, and environmental degradation to their local landscapes. Are those subsidies ethical, moral, and socially responsible to those being exploited?
Many of us had a chance to view the 2006 movie “Blood Diamonds” starring Leonardo DiCaprio that portrays many of the similar atrocities now occurring in pursuit of the “Blood Minerals” i.e., those exotic minerals and metals to support the “green” movement within wealthy countries that continue promoting environmental degradation to landscapes in developing countries, and imposes humanity atrocities to citizens with yellow, brown, and black skinned workers being exploited for the green movement of the few wealthy nations.
A few years ago in 2021, Ronald Stein co-authored the Pulitzer Prize nominated book “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy. The book does an excellent job of discussing the lack of transparency to the world of the green movement’s impact upon humanity exploitations in the developing countries that are mining for the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green energy”. In these developing countries, these mining operations exploit child labor, and are responsible for the most egregious human rights’ violations of vulnerable minority populations. These operations are also directly destroying the planet through environmental degradation.
Every individual should enhance their energy literacy and know where and how the lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, etc. are being mined and the worldwide humanity atrocities and environmental degradation that is occurring in the developing countries with yellow, brown, and black skinned people. Then, with that knowledge in hand about the supply chain of those “blood minerals” required to support the wealthy countries mandates and subsidies toward green electricity, they can make their own decision to financially support, or not support, those exploitation atrocities.
https://www.cfact.org/2023/03/03/climate-child-labor-who-cares/
************************************************Don't buy the hype: Malaria is actually declining, not expanding
The New York Times and the Washington Post each published Feb. 14 articles claiming climate change is accelerating the spread of malaria. The title of the New York Times article claimed, “Climate change is spreading malaria in Africa.” The Washington Post title claimed, “Climate change may make it easier for mosquitoes to spread malaria.”
Given such claims, we should see rising numbers of malaria cases and malaria deaths. Yet neither has happened.
The alarming claims made by the New York Times and the Washington Post are in response to a newly published paper written by biologists at Georgetown University, home to the Georgetown Climate Center, a well-funded organization that has predetermined climate change to be a “crisis” and raises money by claiming an urgent need to address it. That doesn’t mean readers should dismiss at face value all claims by Georgetown’s paid staff, but it should raise a warning signal to reputable media not to accept such claims at face value, either. As is the case with any stories and claims, the media should probe whether such claims are true.
The central claim of the newly published paper is that the range of malarial insects is spreading poleward by approximately three miles per year. If true, that is not much range expansion. Nevertheless, it is apparently enough to draw feature stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. The New York Times summarized the paper by claiming that climate change “may explain why malaria’s range has expanded over the past few decades.”
But is it true that malaria’s range is expanding? The answer is clearly no. In fact, just the opposite is happening.
The World Health Organization’s “World Malaria Report 2022” documents that the world malaria map is, in fact, shrinking. Since 2000, 23 nations, home to more than a billion people, have become malaria-free. China, Taiwan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, El Salvador, Belize, Argentina, and Paraguay have all eradicated malaria since 2000. Many of those nations accomplished the feat just in the last three years.
Importantly, many of the nations that have recently eradicated malaria were previously at the poleward limit of malaria’s range. While climate activist "researchers" and their media allies claim that climate change is causing malaria to expand poleward, the objective data show that malaria range is contracting back toward the equator.
It is not just malaria range that is shrinking, either. The number of malaria cases and deaths is also shrinking.
The "World Malaria Report 2022" documents a steady decline in global malaria cases from 245,000 in 2000 to 232,000 cases in 2019. During the COVID years of 2020 and 2021, cases rose back to year 2000 numbers, but the report emphasizes that COVID disruptions and restrictions had much to do with that.
More strikingly, global malaria deaths steadily declined from 897,000 in 2000 to just 568,000 in 2019. Even the COVID bump in 2020 and 2021 saw malaria “peak” at just 625,000 deaths.
Historically, malaria has not been constrained to tropical nations. More than 500 cases of malaria were reported in Finland during the mid-1800s. During the early 20th century, an outbreak of malaria occurred in England. Another outbreak occurred in Archangel, Russia, inside the Arctic Circle. Two thousand years of global warming ago, Alexander the Great died of malaria on the banks of the Euphrates River, where malaria does not exist today.
Whatever the conjecture is by "researchers" funded by global warming activists, the undeniable fact is malaria’s range has been shrinking for decades, and the number of malaria cases and malaria deaths is shrinking along with it. Don’t trust the headlines of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Trust the objective facts instead.
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World News: Coffee Yields Are Growing Amid Climate Change
An article in Nature World News alternately claims climate change has caused or is likely to cause a decline in coffee yields. This is false. Higher carbon dioxide levels do and will continue to act as plant fertilizer and there is no evidence, outside of flawed computer model simulations, that current growing regions will be unable to continue producing coffee.
In the article, “Coffee Farming Yields Down By 50% Due to Rising Temperatures,” author Rich Co can’t get his facts or timeline straight, writing “[a]ccording to experts, rising temperatures are causing a 50% decrease in coffee farming yields.”
Nowhere in the entire story does Co cite or quote a single expert who says climate change has caused a 50 percent decrease in either coffee production or yields. Indeed, since data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organizations (FAO) shows a substantial increase in coffee yields and production during the recent period of climate change, it would be surprising if he could find an “expert” who would make such a claim. The FAO’s data shows that between 1991 and 2021:
World coffee production increased by nearly 64 percent, setting new records for production 13 times during that time period, with the most recent record being set in 2020.
World coffee yields display a similar trajectory, having grown by more than 55 percent, setting new records 13 times, once again most recently in 2020. (See the figure, below)
Data prove coffee production has not decreased by 50 percent, or even at all, contrary to Co’s claim. Perhaps what he meant to say is that one set of supposed experts, the increasingly climate obsessed Inter-American Development Bank, claimed: “[b]y 2050, the area suitable for growing coffee will have decreased by up to 50%.”
The projection of a 50 percent decline is based on computer model simulations of future climate trends. Yet, as noted repeatedly at Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, climate models are seriously flawed. The basic projection they make is the global average temperature in response to additional carbon dioxide concentrations, and after more than thirty years and 6 generations of models, the model projections still run too hot.
Modelers then pile their disparate assumptions about how various features of the earth will respond to the flawed temperature projections and assumed CO2 concentrations, referred to as “feedback mechanisms” or “feedback loops,” to produce simulations of what the world will look like 20, 30, 50, and 100 years from now. Model simulations are tested for accuracy against simulations from other models, rather than available data, in the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project.
Beginning with bad data, adding untested (in some cases refuted) assumptions about interactions, and testing the output against other models which also use bad data and faulty assumptions is no way to produce trustworthy projections about future climate conditions. It amounts to 30 years of Garbage-In-Garbage-Out or GIGO.
Not only are the Inter-American Development Bank’s claims based on weak computer models, they are refuted by what botany, agronomy, and horticulture tell us about the relationship between carbon dioxide levels and net-plant primary productivity.
Agronomy and Botany explain why crop production and yields have increased amidst global warming, and the same sciences explain why the world should likely expect crop production gains to continue. What’s true for plants in general is equally true for coffee. Modest warming has brought slightly higher rainfall totals, and a modestly longer growing season with fewer crop-killing late-season frosts. In addition, crops are benefitting from higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, which any greenhouse operator will tell you is plant fertilizer, contributing to plants growing larger, faster, and using water more efficiently.
Real world data should have informed the claims Co and Nature World News made about links between global warming and current and projected coffee yields, instead of assertions by a few so-called experts at a development bank. Facts refute any claim that climate change is resulting in reduced coffee production or declining yields. Some basic fact checking and copy editing could have resulted in a story that told the good news about coffee production amid modest warming. Nature World News’ readers might have enjoyed that bit of good news as they sipped their first cup of morning joe.
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How Biden's 'Green Energy Economy' is Benefiting Left-Wing Billionaires
President Joe Biden's taxpayer-funded push to build a "clean energy economy" is benefiting the left's most prominent billionaire megadonors, including Bill Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs, a Washington Free Beacon analysis found.
Biden's Energy Department has in the last two months announced nearly $3 billion in loans to two electric battery companies, Redwood Materials and Ioneer, which are backed by seed funding from Gates, Jobs, and other left-wing billionaires. Now those billionaires, who have poured millions into the effort to win Democrats power in Washington, are likely set to see a handsome profit from their initial investment. Ioneer, for example, won a $700 million loan from Biden and saw its stock price increase by 33 percent after the announcement.
Biden's Energy Department is funding Redwood and Ioneer through its Loan Programs Office, which is no stranger to controversy. Under former president Barack Obama, the office approved a $529 million loan to electric car manufacturer Fisker, which declared bankruptcy in 2013 and was subsequently sold to China. The office was largely dormant following Fisker's taxpayer-funded failure—until Biden's so-called Inflation Reduction Act funded it to the tune of more than $300 billion. Congressional Republicans such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) warned that the money would create a "green energy slush fund"—predictions that are now proving true.
Biden's green energy grants are going to groups funded by the same people who poured money into dark money groups that helped get Biden elected. In July 2021, Redwood raised $700 million from a "carefully selected group of strategic investors," including Gates and Powell Jobs, who participated in the fundraising round through their investment firms. Ioneer, meanwhile, boasts Texas billionaire John Arnold as a major shareholder, according to an October SEC filing. In 2020, Gates sent $127 million to a liberal dark money network working to elect Democrats, while Powell Jobs gave left-wing candidates and political groups more than $2 million. Arnold is also active in liberal dark money circles—he gave one such group $13.5 million from 2016-2020.
The Energy Department did not return a request for comment. An Ioneer spokesman told the Free Beacon the company is "grateful for the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office's conditional commitment" but did not return questions on whether its influential investors helped it obtain that loan commitment. A Redwood spokeswoman said the company managed the loan application process "internally" but did not elaborate further.
Gates launched his green energy investment fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, in 2016. A who's who of deep-pocketed Democrats are tied to the fund: Arnold and fellow liberal billionaire John Doerr serve alongside Gates on its board, while failed presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is an investor. Doerr is a top Obama foundation donor, and Bloomberg contributed more than $152 million to Democratic causes in 2020.
Powell Jobs's investment group, Emerson Collective, is much more secretive. Bloomberg in 2019 described it as a "quiet force in Silicon Valley" that operates "in near-total secrecy" thanks to Powell Jobs's "penchant for anonymous giving." Still, some of the multibillionaire Apple widow's investments make public waves—Powell Jobs used Emerson Collective to become the majority owner of the Atlantic in 2017.
For Daniel Turner, founder and executive director of energy advocacy group Power the Future, Redwood and Ioneer's billionaire backers are proof that the companies shouldn't need taxpayer funds to advance their operations.
"It's just remarkable that people who have such enormous wealth, cumulatively in the hundreds of billions of dollars, need the taxpayers to take the financial risk of their ventures," Turner told the Free Beacon. "If these are such good and sound investments, why don't they use their own cash?"
This is far from the first time Biden's efforts to advance green energy have benefited his donors. The Democrat last year awarded thousands of acres of public land to a solar energy company whose top executive helped him raise millions of dollars. The Biden administration has also publicly promoted green energy companies whose investors and board members led Clean Energy for Biden, a political group made up of "clean energy business and policy leaders" that raised Biden millions of dollars. The group went on to push the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act under the name "Clean Energy for America."
https://freebeacon.com/energy/the-winners-of-bidens-clean-energy-economy-emerge-liberal-billionaires
***************************************March 03, 2023
UK renewables produced enough electricity to ‘power every UK home’ through the winter, analysts say
This is just looking at aggregates, ignoring WHEN the energy was produced -- much of it outside peak demand times. but it obviously would have done some good for part of the day
British-based renewables generated more electricity than gas this winter and produced enough to power every UK home through the winter, analysis has shown.
Between 1 October and 28 February, power generated by wind, hydro and solar reached 47TWh (terawatt hours), according to the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU).
Generating the same amount of electricity using gas power stations would have required around 95TWh of gas – equal to 110 tankers of liquified natural gas (LNG) or the amount more than 10 million UK homes would burn over the winter.
Renewably-produced electricity this winter has displaced more than a third of the UK’s entire annual gas demand for power generation, the analysts said.
Without it, the UK would have had to burn more gas which would have potentially increased net gas imports by more than 22 per cent, including gas imported via pipeline.
Jess Ralston, head of energy at ECIU, said: “We’re seeing the old electricity system give way to the new, with renewables becoming the backbone and displacing more and more gas.
“Battery storage is ramping up faster than expected, boosting the UK’s energy security and leaving us less exposed to international gas markets.
“Lifting the ban on the onshore wind will help. But with the US and the EU going gangbusters for renewables, eyes are on the Government, the Chancellor and the Budget to decide on how the UK stays an attractive market for the investments that will ultimately bring down bills.”
On Monday, Energy Security Secretary Grant Shapps met his US counterpart Jennifer Granholm in London and said he wants to commit the UK to greater energy independence through nuclear and renewables.
Mr Shapps and Ms Granholm want to wean Western countries off Russian oil and gas to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
They said the huge rise in gas prices after the Russian invasion has shown the need to speed up the move away from fossil fuels.
Emma Pinchbeck, Energy UK’s chief executive, said “we must do everything possible” to encourage and speed up investment in low-carbon power.
She added: “This analysis confirms the ever-growing contribution that homegrown renewable generation is making to power our homes and our businesses.
“We’ve seen the effect that record wholesale gas prices have had on customers’ bills over the last 18 months and it’s underlined the urgency of expanding our supply of cheap, domestic, clean power in order to remove our dependency on expensive fossil fuels – which will strengthen the country’s energy security, cut bills and emissions and boost economic growth.”
In 2022, UK renewables provided 38 per cent of the country’s electricity generation, nearly as much as gas at 40 per cent, and became a net electricity exporter for the first time since 2010.
Most clean energy in the UK comes from wind power which is most productive during the winter when winds are stronger.
Other sources of generation, including nuclear and biomass, generated 28TWh over the winter period, the ECIU analysts said.
Using gas power plants instead would have required 56TWh more gas, equivalent to almost five million homes’ annual gas demand or more than 60 LNG tankers.
Battery storage is also set to grow 14-fold with the storage pipeline having increased by five times in the last year.
Europe’s largest grid-scale battery storage facility came online in 2022 and the UK’s pumped hydro storage capacity is set to rise by 130 per cent to 6.5GW.
The UK is still heavily dependent on gas. It supplies 40 per cent of our power and 85 per cent of our heating and UK households have been badly hit by rising gas prices because they are the least energy efficient in western Europe, according to the International Monetary Fund.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-renewable-energy-electricity-winter-b2292542.html
*****************************************************My ‘low confidence’ in media’s climate change propagandists
The press’ reaction to The Wall Street Journal’s blockbuster weekend report that the US Department of Energy has concluded the COVID pandemic originated from a lab leak in Wuhan, China, is another highly revealing instance of deep media bias.
Mainstream media outlets were quick to highlight that the department itself rated its conclusion “low confidence,” which was clearly meant to cast doubt on the credibility and significance of the report.
Question: How often do the major media ever mention the “low confidence” ratings attached to many findings in climate science? Almost never.
Yet anyone who takes the time to read through the climate-science reports the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues every few years will find that many of the most crucial factors behind the catastrophic climate-change claims and forecasts are rated “low confidence” by the scientists who produce them.
In the most recent IPCC science report, for example, issued in 2021, the term “low confidence” appears 48 times in the key 131-page chapter on climate sensitivity; “uncertain” or “uncertainty” appears 248 times.
While the media breathlessly report that every tropical storm, tornado, hurricane and forest fire are caused by climate change, the UN scientists are much more restrained, saying they have “low confidence” the computer models or climate-history studies justify such statements. Ditto for predictions of large sea-level rise, Antarctic sea-ice melting, ocean-surface temperatures, regional climate impacts and North Atlantic storm tracks.
The IPCC’s estimates for the largest single cause of future temperature change — the various forms of water vapor in the atmosphere (in other words, clouds) — remain highly uncertain.
But anyone who brings up these “low confidence” findings or mentions “uncertainty” in any aspect of climate science is branded a “climate denier,” a term deliberately promoted to equate any climate-science skepticism with Holocaust denial — just as anyone who suggested the lab-leak theory for COVID the last three years was branded a racist, a bigot and a tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist, including by Scientific American’s editor and The New York Times’ science reporter.
The “settled science” of climate is enforced by the most appalling groupthink. Most major media willingly go along with the demonization of dissenting analysis of climate questions just as they did with COVID.
The Los Angeles Times announced several years back it would no longer publish any letters to the editor that dissent from the party line on climate change. Major media outlets like The Washington Post that have otherwise been laying off journalists have been adding numerous reporters dedicated to covering climate change, and nearly all of them come with environmental-advocacy backgrounds.
The Society of Environmental Journalists is better known as the Society of Environmental Stenographers, so faithfully do most environmental “reporters” uncritically pass along the claims of green-activist groups.
Not content to let the SEJ do the heavy lifting for the climate campaigners, a new pressure organization, Covering Climate Now, boasts of signing up 500 media outlets and reporters who are on board to “inform the public and hold power to account.”
Covering Climate Now is a joint project of several leftist publications including The Nation and The Guardian, and the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review has taken sides as well, declaring that climate change should “touch every beat in the newsroom.”
CCN is just one of countless climate initiatives funded by a consortium of foundations that bankroll the massive climate campaign, including the Packard Foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund and even Bill Moyers. The climate lobby is likely a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide at this point, and while CCN is a relatively recent and small node, it has enjoyed considerable success feeding storylines to the media. One of its gimmicks is to give out annual journalism awards in more than 20 categories, with the winners featured in ABC News TV — good for a budding career as a climate propagandist.
In addition to parroting climate activists’ talking points, the media also ignore or distort coverage of green energy, the holy grail of the climate movement. While there have been hundreds of local protests against proposed wind and solar-power installations around the United States, the media seldom cover these unless Greta Thunberg shows up.
Last week Reuters reported that Thunberg protested a wind-power installation in Norway because it is located near reindeer pastures an obscure indigenous tribe favors. A serious news media would be embarrassed at this kind of celebrity-driven coverage.
But we no longer have a serious and unbiased media. The press is one institution the American public now rates with “low confidence.”
The latest Gallup survey on American attitudes toward the press finds the proportion of people who have no trust in the media “at all” has risen from about 5% in 1972 to 38% today, with another 28% expressing “little trust.” The segment with a “great deal or fair amount” of trust in the media has fallen from 68% in 1972 to just 34% today.
That’s a climate change you can believe in. No wonder the forecast for the future of media is so grim.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/01/my-low-confidence-in-medias-climate-change-propagandists/
************************************************'Ecogrief' Seminar Is the Latest Leftist Attack on American Energy
Harriet Hageman
The insanity of woke-ism is permeating our society, ruining our culture, and preventing law-abiding citizens from working for a living and taking care of their families. This scourge has already infiltrated academia, the media, and our corporate boardrooms, and it is now taking over functions of our own government, with the bill being handed to the taxpayers.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service has now begun offering “Ecogrief” training to its employees. Yes, you read that correctly: Ecogrief. Although it sounds like a parody of leftism, sadly, it is not.
Ecogrief is nothing more than a made-up condition that provides a pat on the head for delicate federal employees who are allegedly struggling with a sense of trauma as they believe they are witnessing a cataclysmic collapse of the Earth’s environment.
It might be comical if it were a private company wasting its own money, but it’s not. It is our federal government, and that makes it your money that is being misappropriated and used to further a political agenda. The explicit purpose of this agenda is to increase the cost of putting food on your table, a roof over your head, and gas in your car.
It is your money that is being used for environmental activism instead of to pay down some of our nearly $32 trillion in national debt.
It’s your money being used to convince people that the United States is evil, despite the fact that we have lifted more people out of poverty, provided a better standard of living, and provided more opportunities for more people than any other country in the history of mankind. And at the same time, we’ve managed our natural resources in a way that supports our economy, protects our environment, and safeguards our country’s sovereignty.
This latest phony malady is just another part of a larger-scale assault on both common sense and American energy. And it disturbed me enough that I took to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives to draw attention to it.
The Biden administration has gone to war on our energy industries by blocking the extraction, development, transport, and use of our abundant and clean fossil fuels. In other words, they’re opposed to any energy resource that actually works, such as coal, oil and gas, and uranium.
They seek to make us energy paupers, thereby forcing the United States to beg other countries for the resources we need to power this country and our economy. And this is a war is being fought on multiple fronts.
Permitting is now longer, more complicated, more expensive, and designed to limit new sources of energy production throughout every step of the process.
Oil and gas leases have declined by 97% compared to this point in Donald Trump’s presidency.
And despite President Biden’s irresponsibly tapping into our Strategic Petroleum Reserves, gas prices remain stubbornly high, and natural gas – a major source of home heating for half of America – is expected to increase by 25%.
Coal, which provides a quarter of America’s energy, is critical to manufacturing, and is vital to not only my state of Wyoming, but to anyone who wants to ensure access to clean and affordable energy. Nonetheless, coal is under constant attack by the ever-increasing and more restrictive rules issued by unelected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.
And who suffers? The citizens of this country, with the poorest among us suffering the most.
I believe that there is truly a special place in hell for people who adopt policies that are designed to create energy poverty – a situation where families must choose among buying food, heating their homes, or putting gas in their cars. This will be one of Biden’s lasting legacies: Shared misery for everyone except the elite.
We cannot afford the woke energy agenda, and we certainly shouldn’t provide cry rooms for the victims of the fictitious affliction of ecogrief.
But, while it may seem that there is a non-stop cycle of bad policies coming out of D.C., we must never give up. With the Republicans back in control of the House, we must pass legislation to claw back power from the administrative state – and I am filing multiple bills to do just that. We can unleash our affordable and plentiful American Energy and we can call out the nonsense.
And I have a message to our friends at the Fish & Wildlife Service: You may want to get in a good cry and take that Ecogrief seminar now – before we legislate it out of existence.
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Polar wildlife was thriving in 2022
A prominent Canadian zoologist says that Arctic and Antarctic wildlife continued to thrive in 2022 despite predictions of impending catastrophe.
In the Polar Wildlife Report 2022, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) on International Polar Bear Day, zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford explains that ice-dependent species in the Arctic and Antarctic show no sign of impending population crashes due to lack of sea ice.
Crockford’s report reveals that there were no reports in 2022 that would suggest that polar wildlife is suffering as a result of reduced sea-ice extent: no starving polar bears or walrus, no beach-cast dead seals, no marked declines in great whale numbers, no drowned penguin chicks.
While a few Antarctic penguin species and the Antarctic minke whale appear to have suffered a recent decline in abundance, these were unrelated to sea-ice cover in the Southern Ocean. Similarly, in the Arctic, a recent 27% decline in polar bear numbers in Western Hudson Bay was found to be unrelated to sea-ice conditions over the last five years.
Indeed, contrary to all expectations, critical Antarctic winter sea ice has been increasing since 1979. While sea-ice experts have long voiced concerns that computer models of future Antarctic sea ice coverage are seriously flawed, biologists concerned about the future of ice-dependent emperor penguins and Antarctic krill have continued to use them to justify alarmist predictions.
Crockford concludes: “In both the Arctic and Antarctic, less summer sea ice has meant increased primary productivity, which in turn has meant more food for all animals. This explains in part why polar wildlife continues to thrive, even in areas with much reduced summer sea-ice coverage.”
Key Findings
* There were no reports in 2022 that would suggest polar wildlife is suffering as a result of reduced sea-ice extent; in both the Arctic and Antarctic, less summer sea ice and increased primary productivity over the last two decades has meant more food for all animals, which explains in part why polar wildlife has been thriving.
* Arctic sea ice in summer has declined since 1979, but has had an overall flat trend since 2007; coverage was again well below average in the Barents and Chukchi Seas in 2022, where continued high primary productivity has provided abundant food resources for wildlife; winter ice coverage in 2022 was slightly lower than 2020 but overall has shown a relatively flat trend since 2011.
* Ice-dependent polar bears worldwide probably now number about 32,000, with a wide range of potential error; a survey of Western Hudson Bay polar bears in 2021 generated a population decline of 27% since 2016, but this did not correlate with lack of sea ice. A genetically-distinct subpopulation of polar bears was discovered thriving in SE Greenland, and western Barents Sea bears (Norway) are still doing well despite the most profound summer sea-ice loss of all Arctic regions.
* Atlantic walrus numbers are still low, but recovering in the Barents Sea and eastern North America. A new population estimate of Pacific walrus in 2019 reveals more than 200,000 exist in the Chukchi/Bering Sea area. More killer whales were reported visiting the Eastern Canadian Arctic, and in Alaska and the Western Canadian Arctic, bowhead whales are thriving.
* Antarctic sea ice extent has barely changed since 1979: vital winter ice has slightly increased overall while summer ice has slightly declined (with its lowest extent in December 2022), all while overall primary productivity has increased. A new sea ice predictive model acknowledges previous flaws and does not predict a future decline until 2050 at the earliest.
* Krill are crucial prey for many species of wildlife (especially huge numbers of great whales and penguins) that live or feed in the Southern Ocean. Future intensification of commercial fishing of krill (largely to feed farmed fish) is likely the largest conservation threat to local wildlife, given recent geopolitical tensions over effective fisheries management.
* Numbers of fin, blue, humpback, and southern right whales feeding in Antarctic waters in summer have increased in recent years, and while minke whale numbers appear to have declined, an estimated 500,000 individuals still frequent the region.
* Killer whales (orcas) are the top predator in the Southern Ocean and most populations appear to be thriving. The IUCN lists all ice-dependent seals in Antarctica as ‘least concern’.
* Several albatross and large petrel species are considered ‘vulnerable’ by the IUCN due to deadly interactions with long-line trawlers fishing for Antarctic toothfish (Patagonian sea bass), while over-fishing of this cod-like species and the herring-like Antarctic silverfish is also a concern.
* Emperor penguins, the largest and most ice-dependent penguin species, were classified as ‘Threatened’ on the US Endangered Species List in 2022 but remain ‘Near Threatened’ according to the IUCN Red List because of the large size of their breeding population and the acknowledged uncertainty of future sea-ice predictions.
Contact Dr Susan Crockford e: sjcrockford@gmail.com
https://mailchi.mp/2f3898a89fed/press-releasepolar-wildlife-was-thriving-in-194215?e=cc88839e92
***************************************March 02, 2023
House votes to block 'woke' Biden plan pushing retirement planners to invest in ESG in 401ks
The House voted Tuesday to quash a Biden administration rule that allows private retirement funds to consider environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors in investment decisions.
A resolution of disapproval passed 216 to 204, with one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, voting with Republicans to block the rule.
The resolution was put forth by Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., and a similar Senate bill is being brought forth by Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., and has the approval of at least one Senate Democrat - Joe Manchin.
Under the Congressional Review Act Braun and Barr could force a vote on their resolution to nullify the DOL rule. The resolution only requires a simple majority to pass and be sent to the president, but he can then veto it.
If the resolution makes it to President Biden's desk, he would be expected to use his first veto of the presidency on it.
The Department of Labor unveiled the rule in November that allowed retirement managers to consider ESG factors, replacing a rule that stipulated these managers focus on getting the best returns for the 152 million Americans who invest with the ERISA retirement plan.
The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 defines a strict fiduciary responsibility almost all pension plan professionals have long adhered to.
ERISA covers most employer-sponsored retirement plans, managing $11.7 trillion in assets.
The White House has said that the rule, which would put back in place a provision that Trump rolled back in favor of order money managers to focus strictly on returns, is 'not a mandate.'
'It does not require any fiduciary to make investment decisions based solely on ESG factors,' the White House Office of Management and Budget said. 'The rule simply makes sure that retirement plan fiduciaries must engage in a risk and return analysis of their investment decisions and recognizes that these factors can be relevant to that analysis.'
Democrats argue that the rule frees up retirement managers to make investment decisions that might be less profitable in the short term but more profitable in the long term as clean energy and sustainability projects become more lucrative.
As of this writing, the S&P 500 ESG index is down 9.5 percent over the past year but up 10.5 percent over 10 years. The S&P 500 Energy index is up 24.1 percent over one year but only up 1.2 percent over 10 years.
A number of ESG ratings firms are in charge of deeming the good and the bad, and some critics say that without proper measurement the practice can amount to a 'marketing scheme.'
For example, Sustainalytics' ESG risk rating gives Vital Farms, a pasture-raised egg and butter company that preaches its commitment to 'conscious capitalism' and 'ethically produced food from family farms', a worse score (42.8)than four defense contractors - Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing (28.4 to 35).
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Exploding the Cheap Offshore Wind Fantasy
The energy industry lobbyists are out with their begging bowls demanding more subsidies to deliver more “investment” in renewables in general and offshore wind in particular. It looks like the developers cannot deliver the wind farms they promised at “record low” strike prices of £37.35/MWh and claims of wind being nine times cheaper than gas were just so much hot air.
The Government’s predictions of decreasing costs of offshore wind were based on continued low commodity prices, the availability of cheap money and unrealistic assumptions about improved operational performance. It’s not looking likely that any of their operational improvement targets will be met.
In addition, the costs of raw materials and energy have gone up dramatically and interest rates have risen sharply pushing up the costs of capital. These factors have had a dramatic effect on the price of offshore wind.
Who would have guessed that a highly mineral intensive and capital intensive source of energy would be very susceptible to commodity and energy price inflation and rising interest rates?
The work of Professor Simon Michaux has shown that the prices of critical minerals are going to continue to rise as demand increases and ore grades for new discoveries fall leading to higher processing costs.
It is beginning to look like the offshore wind power bubble has burst and the fantasy of ever cheaper renewables has come to an end.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/exploding-the-cheap-offshore-wind-power-fantasy
*****************************************************The iron triangle of energy realism
Possibly the most powerful argument against the quest for Net Zero can be briefly stated using the Iron Triangle of Power Supply, bearing in mind the logic of testing (or falsification, as Karl Popper called it).
The three aspects of the triangle are:
Continuous input of power to the grid. Adequate input is required all the time, not just most of the time or almost all the time.
Wind droughts and especially windless nights break the continuity of input from wind power when there is no solar.
There is effectively no storage to bridge the gaps (despite all the talk about batteries and pumped hydro).
Consequently, the proposition that the grid can run on wind and solar power is falsified (ruled out) and there is no justification for the decision to contaminate the grid with subsidised and mandated intermittent input from environmentally ruinous wind and solar facilities.
In defiance of the Iron Triangle, the official position is that we just need more installed wind and solar facilities, and more storage. That is stated by the Prime Minister, the Climate and Energy Minister, and the CEO of the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). It is dutifully repeated by all the usual suspects in the ABC and the mainstream media, although over a hundred leading journalists have received the briefing notes from the Energy Realists of Australia over the last three years.
The briefing notes were compiled by an elite squad of almost-dead white males and Ben Beattie, recruited to work with The Energy Realists of Australia – joking, of course.
What is the point of more wind and solar capacity?
Wind and solar can displace coal (to a point that we have almost reached), but they can’t replace it.
The rate of exit from coal is not accelerated by increasing penetration on good wind and solar days, it is limited by the lowest level of output on nights with little or no wind, as a convoy travels at the speed of the slowest vessel, the water penetrates the levee at the lowest point, a chain is only as strong as the weakest link and stock get out of the yard through gaps in the fence even if the rest of the fence is built to the sky.
What storage?
Batteries can be dismissed very quickly by comparing the capacity of the biggest batteries in the world with the amount of power required to get through a windless night. Journalists don’t help by reporting the capacity of batteries in MW instead of MWh (megawatt hours). Scribes who report MW instead of MWh should be promptly escorted from the building with their personal effects thrown into the street after them.
More words are required to describe the inadequacy of pumped hydro because there are many large schemes around the world, and there are some small ones in Australia already. However, I am not aware of any large scheme that runs on wind and solar alone. The largest facility at Bath, Philadelphia (US), runs entirely on coal and nuclear power to enable those plants to run continuously at their optimum output.
Conclusion
We need to keep enough conventional power, mostly coal power, to meet the highest levels of demand at dinner times in high summer and deep winter, until we have nuclear power on deck.
A note on the logic of testing that was mentioned at the start of this piece. It has gone missing in science (on walkabout?) since it became generally accepted in the 1960s that Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory (science by consensus) had superseded Karl Popper’s critical approach (forming a preference after rigorous testing and comparison of rival theories.) That is an important topic for another day.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/the-iron-triangle-of-energy-realism/
*******************************************************One in two Australian companies found to overstate green credentials in regulator review
More than one in two companies surveyed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission were found to have overstated their clean or green credentials in a move which may expose them to legal action.
The ACCC said it was concerned at the level of greenwashing identified in a blitz of the advertising and packaging of 247 businesses.
The regulator found 57 per cent of the companies reviewed made inflated or wrong claims about their environmental impact, with the cosmetics, clothing, footwear, and food and drink industries the worst offenders.
ACCC deputy chair Catriona Lowe said these companies may find themselves the target of legal action or infringement notices to correct their statements or face fines.
Ms Lowe said the regulator would not tolerate greenwashing that wrongly gave the impression a product was more environmentally sensitive than it was.
“We’re seeing businesses not providing evidence of the claims they’re making,” she said.
“We are increasingly seeing consumers making their purchasing decision on the basis of the green credentials for their goods and services.”
Ms Lowe said the ACCC would not just stop at claims made on products, but would seek to scrutinise claims made by businesses around offsetting emissions or announcing environmental targets “without clear plans of how they’re going to achieve those goals”.
“It is possible of course that some of the claims that are being made are able to be verified but of course we’re standing in the shoes of the consumer,” she said.
The ACCC’s planned crackdown comes days after the Australian Securities and Investments Commission handed out court action against superannuation giant Mercer, over its green claims.
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Ms Lowe said the ACCC would take a firm line on companies that misled or deceived consumers around their green credentials, warning fines could be levied into the millions.
“We will certainly be undertaking our assessment and thinking carefully about the impact on consumers and the gain that may have been obtained by making the false claims relative to the investment required to make the claim true,” she said.
A report by the ACCC notes the regulator will conduct further analysis of these issues and is planning to produce and release “economy-wide guidance material, as well as targeted guidance for specific sectors” outlining expectations around green claims.
Ms Lowe said the regulator was concerned about companies making claims packaging could be recycled when those products could not be accepted by most recyclers.
An ACCC spokeswoman said the regulator was engaging with “relevant industry participants” in a bid to ensure clarity and transparency about handling soft plastics recycling after the REDcycle scheme collapsed.
The NSW Supreme Court ordered on Monday to wind up the REDcycle company after finding it was hopelessly insolvent and failed to pay fees for storing thousands of tonnes of soft plastics around the country.
“The ACCC is conscious of the significant financial and environmental impacts if food and grocery suppliers were to dispose of existing packaging containing the REDcycle logo and Australasian Recycling Label (ARL) ‘return to store’ labelling in landfill,” the spokeswoman said.
“We have engaged with industry participants about taking all reasonable alternative steps to ensure that representations to consumers are accurate. For example, this could be achieved through information provided in their other advertising and marketing.”
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1 March, 2023
Green Energy: Greatest Wealth Transfer To The Rich In History
We are in the midst of history’s greatest wealth transfer. Government subsidized wind systems, solar arrays, and electric vehicles overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy members of society and rich nations.
The poor and middle class pay for green energy programs with higher taxes and higher electricity and energy costs.
Developing nations suffer environmental damage to deliver mined materials needed for renewables in rich nations.
Since 2000, the world has spent more than $5 trillion on green energy.
More than 300,000 wind turbines have been erected, millions of solar arrays were installed, more than 25 million electric vehicles (EVs) have been sold, hundreds of thousands of acres of forest were cut down to produce biomass fuel, and about three percent of agricultural land is now used to produce biofuel for vehicles.
The world spends about $1 trillion per year on green energy. Government subsidies run about $200 billion annually, with more than $1 trillion in subsidies spent over the last 20 years.
World leaders obsess over the need for a renewable energy transition to ‘save the planet’ from ‘human-caused global warming’. Governments deliver an endless river of cash to promote adoption of green energy.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 provided $370 billion in subsidies and loans for renewables and EVs. But renewable subsidies and mandates overwhelmingly favor the rich members of society at the expense of the poor.
Wind systems receive production tax credits, property tax exemptions, and sometimes receive payments even when not generating electricity. Landowners receive as much as $8,000 per turbine each year from leases for wind systems on their land.
Lease income can be quite high for a landowner with many turbines. In England, ordinary taxpayers pay hundreds of millions of pounds per year in taxes that are funneled as subsidies to wind companies and wealthy land owners.
In the US, 39 states currently have net metering laws. Net metering provides a credit for electricity generated by rooftop solar systems that is fed back into the grid. Solar generators typically get credits at the retail electricity rate, about 14 cents per kilowatt-hour.
This is a subsidized rate, which is more than double the roughly five cents per kilowatt-hour earned by power plants.
Apartment residents and homeowners that cannot afford to install rooftop solar pay higher electricity bills to subsidize homes that receive net metering credits. Rooftop solar owners also receive federal and state tax incentives, another wealth transfer from ordinary citizens.
US federal subsidies of up to $7,500 for each electric car purchased, along with additional state subsidies, directly benefit EV buyers.
The average price of an EV in the US last year was $66,000, which is out of reach for most drivers.
A 2021 University of Chicago study found that California EV owners only drive 5,300 miles per year, less than half the mileage for a typical car. Most electric cars in the US are second cars for the rich.
A mid-size electric car needs a battery that weighs about a 1,000 pounds to provide acceptable driving range. Because of battery weight, EVs tend to be about 50 percent heavier than gasoline cars, which causes increased road damage.
But EVs don’t pay the road tax included in the price of every gallon of gasoline. EVs should pay higher road taxes than traditional cars, but today this cost is borne by everyday gasoline car drivers.
Renewable systems require huge amounts of special metals. Electric car batteries need cobalt, nickel, and lithium to achieve high energy density and performance. Magnets in wind turbines require rare earth metals, such as neodymium and dysprosium.
Large quantities of copper are essential for EV engines, batteries, wind and solar arrays, and electricity transmission systems to connect to remote wind and solar sites.
According to the International Energy Agency, an EV requires about six times the special metals of a gasoline or diesel car.
A wind array requires more than ten times the metals of a natural gas power plant on a delivered-electricity basis. The majority of these metals are mined in developing countries.
Almost 70 percent of cobalt is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Indonesia produces more than 30 percent of the world’s nickel.
Chile produces 28 percent of the copper.
China produces 60 percent of the rare earth metals.
These nations struggle with serious air and water pollution from mining operations. Workers in mines also suffer from poor working conditions and the use of forced labor and child labor practices.
But apparently no cost is too great so that rich people in developed nations can drive a Tesla.
To top it off, the European Union recently approved a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). The CBAM will tax goods coming from poor nations which aren’t manufactured using low-carbon processes.
CBAM revenues will be a great source of funds for Europe’s green energy programs that benefit the wealthy.
In January, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, New York, and Washington proposed a wealth tax on billionaires.
It’s interesting to note that all seven of these states mandate and heavily subsidize wind and solar arrays and electric vehicles, which transfer wealth from poor and middle-class residents to those same billionaires.
https://principia-scientific.com/green-energy-greatest-wealth-transfer-to-the-rich-in-history/
****************************************************Ignoring International Pressure, China Ramps Up Coal Power Production
President Biden’s plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to try to curb climate change are running up against the ugly geopolitical reality that China has no plans to join the growing international effort. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Beijing’s embrace of a fossil fuel that has become anathema in the rest of the world — coal.
A report out this week from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air says China accelerated its investment in coal power plants dramatically in 2022, with new permits reaching the highest level since 2015. More new coal-fired plants were started in China in 2022 than in the rest of the world combined, the report said.
“China continues to be the glaring exception to the ongoing global decline in coal plant development,” a research analyst with the center, Flora Champenois, said. “The speed at which projects progressed through permitting to construction in 2022 was extraordinary, with many projects sprouting up, gaining permits, obtaining financing, and breaking ground apparently in a matter of months.
“This kind of a process leaves little room for proper planning or consideration of alternatives,” she added.
The report states that construction of more than 50 gigawatts worth of coal power capacity began in China in 2022, an increase of 50 percent over 2021. The center expects more of the same in 2023.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, has promised that his country would begin scaling back its coal consumption, but not until 2026. That so many new coal plants — financed and managed by companies with powerful political connections — are coming online, though, has analysts skeptical of his claims. The owners of these plants now have a vested interest in slowing the country’s transition to cleaner energy and a phase-out of coal, according to the report’s authors.
Of all the fossil fuels that activists blame for climate change, coal is by far the worst offender, accounting for as much as 30 percent of all energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. It is also the planet’s top source of electricity, according to the International Energy Agency, especially in developing economies like China, India, and Indonesia.
Until the war in Ukraine threw the continent’s energy industry into turmoil, Europe had been aggressively moving away from coal in recent years in order to meet goals laid out in international agreements. Since 2012, total coal-powered energy generation has dropped by a third in the European Union. Ten nations in the bloc were described as “coal-free” in 2021, and the remaining members have pledged to phase out its use at various points between now and 2038.
Mr. Biden and his allies in the climate change lobby have turned coal into public enemy no. 1 in America. During a campaign stop in California before last year’s midterm elections, the president lamented the country’s continued use of coal — about 20 percent of its electricity still comes from coal — and pledged that “we’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar.” The White House later attempted to walk back the comments after coal-country legislators such as Senator Manchin of West Virginia erupted in anger.
Despite the dust-up, killing coal remains a key item in the Biden climate change agenda. His climate envoy, John Kerry, pledged at last year’s international climate change summit in Egypt that the country would be coal-free by 2030. Without legislative backing for its climate agenda, the administration is turning to regulators to hasten coal’s demise.
This spring, the Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue a number of new rules that are seen triggering a number of coal plant retirements around the country and making many of those remaining prohibitively expensive to operate. To offset the loss of generating capacity, the administration committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money to prop up wind and solar projects in last year’s so-called Inflation Reduction Act.
Without buy-in from developing economies in the rush to eliminate coal, though, all the spending by Europe and America in their efforts to curb climate change will be for naught. If anything, the reports about China’s continued enthusiasm for coal suggests the country is moving in the opposite direction of everyone else.
The worst-case scenario, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, is a major increase in China’s CO2 emissions over the coming decade that would “undermine the global climate effort, and could even put China’s own climate commitments in danger.”
https://www.nysun.com/article/ignoring-international-pressure-china-ramps-up-coal-power-production
******************************************************Biden Admin Proposes to Block Half of Current Gas Range Models
A new regulation proposed by the Department of Energy (DOE) would block half of current gas stove models from the market, an analysis by the federal agency shows.
In a proposed regulation published at the beginning of February, DOE set a maximum annual gas consumption of 1,204 thousand British thermal units (kBtu), also known as the EL 2 standard, for all gas cooking tops.
If the new regulation is finalized, only half of gas cooking tops will be able to meet the new standard, i.e., half of the products currently on the market will be blocked.
“DOE estimates that nearly half of the total gas cooking top market currently achieves EL 2 and therefore would not be impacted by the proposed standard, if finalized,” DOE said in an updated analysis (pdf).
DOE issued the updated analysis mainly because it excluded certain types of gas cooking tops in the previous analysis that was published on Feb. 1 (pdf).
Only 4 percent of the gas cooking tops in 2027 could meet the EL 2 standard if the new standard was not implemented, according to DOE’s projection in the previous analysis.
The governmental agency includes gas cooking tops with high input rate (HIR) burners in the new analysis.
The market share of qualified products expands substantially because all products with HIR can pass the new regulation, DOE said.
The new rule would be effective three years after it’s adopted.
The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM) said they’re “very concerned” about the direction of the DOE.
“They have released the most stringent proposal for gas ranges, which only a sliver of the market can meet,” Jill Notini, industry spokesperson for AHAM, told The Epoch Times. “It’s very concerning what they’re doing with gas products. We believe that there should be consumer choice and that consumers should be able to make a decision on whether they would like to purchase a gas or electric product.”
“Clearly, the Department of Energy’s intentions are to eliminate gas products from the market. And they should just say that instead of releasing a deceptive and flawed analysis to justify their proposal,” Notini added.
AHAM is a trade association representing the manufacturers of household appliances sold in the United States.
They don’t trust DOE’s analysis and are carrying out their own analysis.
The results of the proposed regulation could be much worse than the DOE stated, AHAM said.
“What we believe is that products right now in the market would need significant redesign in order to meet the proposed levels,” Notini said.
The trade association said “everything is on the table” when asked if they plan to take legal action against the proposed regulation.
Rulemaking and Lawsuit
The DOE initiated the rulemaking process of potential regulation on gas cooking tops in 2014 and proposed standards in September 2016. The 2016 standard sets the maximum annual gas consumption at 924.4 kBtu.
However, President Donald Trump’s energy department halted the rulemaking process in December 2020, months before the president was going to leave the White House.
But the rulemaking process has also been disputed in the courts as six organizations, including some environmental groups, and some blue states filed two separate lawsuits in an attempt to force the Trump administration to regulate the gas cooking tops.
AHAM was one of the plaintiff intervenors in both cases.
In September 2022, a U.S. district judge ordered DOE to issue regulations on conventional cooking products or determine that no regulation is needed by Jan. 31, 2024.
The Biden administration resumed the rulemaking process by issuing the Feb. 1, 2023, proposed rule.
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Live not by lies – climate edition
David Archibald
I used to correspond with Cardinal Pell. He was the only cleric in Australia who took a stand against the climate hoax. I would send him my books on climate and he would send a letter thanking me, first on Sydney diocese letterhead and then Vatican letterhead. As for all the other clerics in Australia, there is an unpleasant colloquialism from half a century ago that might describe my thoughts toward them…
Our physical selves can only take us so far. Culture is the software of our civilisation and religion is a big part of that software. Culture enables adult males to work together productively and not waste their time fighting over females. We all know that some cultures are better than others and some religions are better than other religions.
We had the best culture and that is why people want to come here, and no Australians want to emigrate to Iran, Libya, or any of the other 180 ‘less desirable’ countries on the planet. It is culture and culture alone. Argentina, for example, is very scenic and agriculturally productive. But its population are largely the descendants of Europeans living in poverty because of their culture.
Global warming, the belief system, is a reversion to animism, a notion that some living and inanimate things have spirits. Animist cultures don’t achieve much. They go to bed when it gets dark because there is no lighting and that will be our fate too if we allow them to continue to run the Australian economy into the dirt.
Our clerics fail to decry global warming as a reversion to animism and by their silence are complicit in the duplicity of this state-sanctioned religion. Curse them in living and curse them in dying. They will end up with a peasant’s death.
Who else was complicit in not calling out global warming? Most of the hard science professionals – people like chemical engineers who could debunk global warming science in five minutes if they bothered to do so.
All have been as silent as the grave, and thus complicit. In the meantime, the hating on the carbon atom has become unhinged. The Australian economy is on the edge of power prices going through the roof which of course will crush our competitiveness in export markets, apart from simply making us poorer for no good reason.
Clerics have a useful role in society if they actually serve in the role required – affirming moral verities derived from the golden rule. Hard science/engineering graduates similarly have a moral duty to call out shoddy science. If they are not affronted by fake science, they have failed their moral duty to society.
Many basically good people likely think that global warming believers are harmless, like being a Moonie or the like.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In my opinion, global warmers are some of the most evil people that God has breathed life into. Some have taken it to its next iteration – is a belief system that takes Man’s fall from grace and his expulsion from the Garden of Eden for despoiling it to a further conclusion – Man is inherently evil and should be killed off as much as possible.
When I say some, I mean the main architects of the Covid plague. They started plotting 30 years ago to unleash a plague on humanity with global warming as the excuse. Their death toll so far is half of what Mao achieved with his Great Leap Forward but they are catching up on the Great Helmsman fast.
They need the excuse of global warming to salve their consciences.
Which gets back to the argument this essay started with. Those in society with the roles of either calling out shoddy religions or shoddy science failed in their duty to society. And the result hasn’t just been some higher power bills. The bitter harvest of their failure is a lot of deaths and maiming, with plenty more to come. The religious zealots are running amok and stuffing the crematoria with their human sacrifice.
The time to act on global warming is long past but it is not too late to save civilisation. It is well known that the global warmers are impervious to facts but do make their lives insufferable. Their religion is being used as the excuse to kill us so that is not a disproportionate response.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/live-not-by-lies-climate-edition/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
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