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
26 May, 2024
A Critical Examination Of ‘Consensus’ In Climate Science
Written by Dr. Matthew Wielicki
I see that Wielicki refers to the famous "97%" study by John Cook (entitled “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature” and published in the journal Environmental Research Letters in 2013).
It was once widely quoted by the Green/Left but it no longer is and I had almost forgotten it. But it was such a methodological disaster area that even the Left eventually had to go quiet on it. See some of the critique of it below:
https://antigreen.blogspot.com/2015/05/a-debate-in-canada-canadas-national.html
The concept of a scientific consensus on ‘climate change’ has been a focal point in public and academic discourse, often cited to underscore the urgency and legitimacy of addressing global warming
This consensus refers to the agreement among scientists that climate change is real, predominantly caused by human activities, and poses significant risks to the planet.
While the consensus is frequently highlighted to support policy measures and societal action, its emergence, use, and implications warrant a critical examination.
This article explores the origins of the consensus concept, its application in promoting bad science, and the methodological critiques that challenge its validity.
Ultimately, science should be driven by continuous inquiry and debate rather than by consensus, which can stifle scientific progress.
The idea of a consensus on ‘climate change’ began to take shape in the late 20th century as the evidence for global warming accumulated. Key reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and prominent studies highlighted the human impact on climate, leading to a perceived agreement among climate scientists.
This consensus was increasingly used to galvanize public opinion and political action. The notion gained substantial traction with the publication of influential papers and statements by scientific bodies, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the NASA.
The consensus on ‘climate change’ has played a dual role. On one hand, it has been instrumental in driving policy initiatives aimed at mitigating ‘climate change’. By presenting an apparent unified front, scientists have effectively exaggerated the seriousness of climate issues to policymakers and the public, fostering initiatives like the Paris Agreement.
On the other hand, the reliance on consensus has sometimes led to the endorsement of flawed science. Historical examples, such as the consensus on the geocentric model of the universe or the now-discredited belief in eugenics, illustrate how consensus can perpetuate incorrect or harmful ideas.
In the context of climate science, the emphasis on consensus may have suppressed dissenting views and critical examination of methodologies.
Several seminal papers have bolstered the perception of a scientific consensus on ‘climate change’. In her widely cited essay published in Science, Naomi Oreskes reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed papers and concluded that 75 percent supported the consensus view, while none explicitly refuted it.
This study has been pivotal in reinforcing the consensus narrative. Similarly, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Anderegg et al. analyzed the publication and citation records of climate researchers, finding that 97-98 pertcent of the most active researchers supported the consensus view on ‘anthropogenic climate change’.
Another review by Cook et al. of over 11,000 scientific papers found that 97.1 percent of those expressing a position on anthropogenic global warming endorsed the consensus view. This paper has been extensively cited in both academic literature and public discourse.
However, the consensus narrative has raised several methodological concerns. Studies like Oreskes and Cook et al. suffer from selection bias, as they only include papers that explicitly state a position on ‘climate change’, potentially excluding neutral or dissenting papers.
Notice how the consensus arguments fall apart when including all papers.
The methodologies used to assess consensus, such as counting abstracts or analyzing citation records, have been critiqued for oversimplifying complex scientific opinions and reducing nuanced positions to binary categories.
In fact, a re-review of Cook et al. 2013 found…
A claim has been that 97 percent of the scientific literature endorses anthropogenic climate change (Cook et al., 2013. Environ. Res. Lett. 8, 024024).
This claim, frequently repeated in debates about climate policy, does not stand. A trend in composition is mistaken for a trend in endorsement.
Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cook?s validation test shows that the data are invalid.
Data disclosure is incomplete so that key results cannot be reproduced or tested.
Additionally, there are concerns that the drive to establish a consensus has led to confirmation bias, where studies and papers supporting the consensus are preferentially published, cited, and funded while dissenting views are marginalized.
Evidence suggests that many scientists, particularly young career, feel pressured to align with the consensus to secure funding, publish in prestigious journals, or avoid professional ostracism.
I definitely felt this pressure as a young academic working towards tenure. This entire system inhibits open scientific inquiry and debate.
While a useful tool for mobilizing action, the claimed consensus in climate science also presents significant challenges. The reliance on consensus can perpetuate flawed methodologies, suppress dissent, and hinder the fundamental scientific process of debate and critical inquiry.
Historical precedents demonstrate that scientific progress often arises from questioning and overturning established views, not from adhering to consensus.
Science thrives on skepticism and debate, and it is through this process that our understanding of complex issues like ‘climate change’ will continue to evolve and improve.
https://principia-scientific.com/a-critical-examination-of-consensus-in-climate-science/
**********************************************Scotland can meet Germany's demand for green hydrogen, new report finds
Green hydrogen is hydrogen cracked out of water using a lot of electricity from solar power or windfarms. It is unclear why Scotland would be good at that. Sunlight is rare there though it is rather windy. And let us not mention the large costs of transporting it in its customary liquefied form. Just another Leftist boondoggle
PLANS have been set out for green hydrogen produced in Scotland to be exported to Germany.
The Enabling Green Hydrogen Exports report commissioned by the Scottish Government analysed hydrogen production in Scotland and the demand for the green energy source in Germany.
The report is a collaborative effort between the UK-based Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC) and German-based Cruh21 and explores the technologies, infrastructure, and regulatory frameworks required to enable a safe and effective distribution of hydrogen.
According to the report, Scottish hydrogen exports could potentially meet between 22% to 100% of Germany’s hydrogen import demand by 2045.
One key point raised from the report is the need for further research and prioritising investment into the infrastructure to meet the potential demand for green hydrogen from Germany.
Mairi McAllan, Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Energy, recognised the “great” export opportunity with green hydrogen and confirmed the Scottish Government will shortly publish more plans on the project.
She said: “Scotland is strongly positioned to become a major exporter of hydrogen to Northern Europe and the UK – contributing to our climate objectives and to green economic property for our nation.
“Today’s report, which the Scottish Government commissioned and funded, explores how to match Scottish hydrogen production to German hydrogen demand.
“Green hydrogen that is created with renewable electricity will help to reduce our emissions for hard to decarbonise sectors in Scotland and could also be a great export opportunity to the rest of the UK and to our European neighbours.
“We are determined to realise this opportunity and will shortly be publishing an export plan for to this end.”
Mairi McAllan, Cabinet Secretary for Net Zero and Energy, and MSP for Clydesdale
NZTC is a not-for-profit organisation working with industry, government and academia to help drive technology innovation and to accelerate the energy transition to net zero.
Ana Almeida, senior project engineer for NZTC, also hailed the collaboration with German-based Cruh21 saying that working together helped to make sure both parties benefit equally from the proposed plans.
She said: “Whilst the potential for hydrogen production in Scotland is well understood alongside the scale of predicted demand in Germany, there is a lack of tangible strategies connecting supply and demand and its evolution from present day to 2045, when both countries aim to achieve Net Zero carbon emission targets.
“The scenarios outlined in this report illustrate pathways to maximise the opportunity of international hydrogen distribution.
“Developing the report in collaboration with Cruh21 also ensured the barriers and benefits for both countries were fully considered.”
There are two “critical stages” in the report, the first being the short term up to 2030 which focuses on early production and the transition out of energy generating systems which the green hydrogen plants will replace.
The second stage looks at a period between 2030-2045 and involves commissioning and ramping up of the pipeline infrastructure to help distribution at a lower cost.
Meryem Maghrebi, a consultant at Cruh21, said: “This report provides a holistic overview and stresses the necessity of developing a synchronised hydrogen and derivatives infrastructure, encompassing export terminals and pipeline networks, to bolster the hydrogen supply chain between Scotland and Germany.
“The critical factors to accelerate collaboration between Scotland and Germany lie in mapping supply and demand development and the establishment of Pan North Sea transport infrastructure.
“The cooperation with NZTC is a first step towards this goal.”
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La belle France: Over 170 Arrested As Climate Protests Target TotalEnergies And Fund Manager
The boss of TotalEnergies told shareholders Friday that new oil fields had to be developed to meet global demand, as the annual meetings of the French energy giant and one of its biggest shareholders were picketed by climate activists.
Police said they detained 173 people among hundreds who gathered outside the Paris headquarters of Amundi, one of the world's biggest investment managers and a major TotalEnergies shareholder.
Climate activists also gathered hours before the TotalEnergies annual general meeting opened. Greenpeace members unfurled a "Wanted" banner calling its chief Patrick Pouyanne "the leader of France's most polluting company".
The banner was quickly taken down by police.
Several hundred activists belonging to Extinction Rebellion gathered outside Amundi for its general meeting.
A few dozen protesters forced their way into Amundi's tower block, daubing graffiti on the walls and smashing some windows, police said. Amundi said eight of its security staff were injured.
The activists say TotalEnergies is contributing to global warming and the destruction of biodiversity through its gas and oil activities.
Pouyanne told shareholders that higher oil prices prompted by insufficient fossil fuel output "would quickly become unbearable for the populations in emerging countries, but also in our developed countries".
Demand for oil was growing in line with the global population, he said.
But Pouyanne said TotalEnergies would pursue its "balanced strategy" of developing both fossil fuel and low-carbon energy production.
TotalEnergies had proved it was possible "to be a profitable, or even the most profitable, company while pursuing a transformation" toward cleaner energy, he said.
At Friday's meeting, nearly 80 percent of shareholders approved the company's climate strategy, with more than 75 percent also voting to renew Pouyanne as CEO for three years.
Pouyanne, who last month floated the idea of a New York listing for the company, told shareholders there was "no question" of TotalEnergies leaving France.
French President Emmanuel Macron, asked by Bloomberg if he would be "happy" with such a move, responded: "Not at all and I would be very surprised" if it came to pass.
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Climate Ideology Ignores Science and History, Threatens Humanity
Climate scientists would be less likely to issue dire warnings of planetary doom if they gave more credence to the geological history of the past several million years. Instead, they rely on computer models that are biased by the preconceptions of their manipulators and incapable of accounting for the myriad factors influencing global temperatures.
Minuscule recent warming, whatever the cause, is inconsequential in light of the long record of data found in Antarctica ice cores that go back 800,000 years. The bottom line is that Earth is colder by nearly 3 degrees Celsius than it was 3,000 years ago and is just now climbing out of its longest cold spell of the last 10,000 years. Blaring headlines about record heat waves of the past 100 years are meaningless, hysterical blather.
A deeper dive into geologic history — based partly on the record stored over millions of years in deep-ocean sediments — shows that today’s carbon dioxide concentrations of 420 parts per million are a fraction of past levels that reached 5,000 ppm and more. Carbon dioxide is nearly at its lowest level ever since plant life began so many millions of years ago and well below the optimum amount for the health of most vegetation.
In fact, the 280-ppm concentration of the mid-19th century is uncomfortably close to the point at which plant life dies — below 150 ppm. Given that all life depends on adequate amounts of this gas, proposals to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide are nothing less than reckless.
Any global increase in carbon dioxide will be beneficial and have nearly no impact on future temperature. In contrast, demonstrated in the “bible” of human history and climate change compiled by the late professor Hubert Lamb at the University of East Anglia, cold kills.
During the Little Ice Age in parts of England, the “yearly number of burials exceeded the births from the 1660’s until about 1730,” he reported.
Why, then, are so many demonizing fossil fuels? The wealth enabled by coal, oil and natural gas has provided the leisure — and funding — for numerous researchers to focus on climate change instead of struggling to stay alive. Global society is absolutely dependent upon cheap and plentiful energy for its survival. Why would some demand that civilization retreat from useful energy sources to bring back mass starvation, poverty and horse-drawn buggies?
To dream of a utopian world is perhaps admirable, but to inflict suffering upon society through ignorance of science is deplorable.
Humanity is deprived of precious learning when so many favor the ideology and fearmongering of climate alarmists over the meticulous research of eminent physical scientists such as Richard Alley, professor of geoscience at Pennsylvania State University, who pioneered studies of ice cores, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who explored the incredible complexity of atmospheric physics.
We could easily name dozens of others similarly credentialed, who are largely unknown outside the scientific community.
The public is “protected” from empirical data by legacy and social media censors who eagerly broadcast the supposed need to restrict global warming to 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius — artificial constructs with no scientific basis.
We thus suffer the consequences of unwarranted regulatory intrusions into daily life, be they restrictions on heating, air conditioning, dishwashers and stoves or the increased price and reduced availability of electricity. The effects of these range from annoying to life-threatening.
There is no global climate emergency. There is, however, a widespread knowledge crisis.
https://co2coalition.org/2024/05/02/climate-ideology-ignores-science-threatens-humanity/
***************************************23 May, 2024
HHS Proposes Formal Debarment Of EcoHealth Alliance
Written by John Leake
To my pleasant surprise, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) actually accepted the House Select Subcommittee’s recommendation to formally debar EcoHealth Alliance, Inc
As stated in the official press release:
“HHS will immediately commence official debarment proceedings and implement a government-wide suspension of U.S. taxpayer funds to EcoHealth — including a hold on all active grants.”
It seems to me that this marks a major shift in U.S. federal agency policy with respect to EcoHealth Alliance.
The decision also opens up a fraught can of worms for the HHS and the NIH (a division of HHS).
Brad Wenstrup and his Congressional Committee have acknowledged and articulated the evidence that EcoHealth and its collaborators in the US and China are responsible for creating the Covid virus.
HHS’s acknowledgement that this evidence is sufficient to warrant debarring EcoHealth Alliance implies that the U.S. government is now formally recognizing the true, manmade cause of the COVID-19 Pandemic instead of trying to sweep it under the rug.
https://principia-scientific.com/hhs-proposes-formal-debarment-of-ecohealth-alliance/
**********************************************Australia: More Than 3,600 Children ‘Targeted’ With COVID-19 Fines in NSW
Legal advocacy groups are calling for reform of the New South Wales (NSW) fines system after 3,628 children received COVID-19 fines during the pandemic in the Australian state.
A 2024 report looking into children and COVID-19 fines in NSW found that the “penalty notice regime” implemented in NSW was “unsuitable” for achieving public health outcomes for children.
However, NSW Police have defended their response amid the rapidly evolving public health orders at the time, which required compliance and enforcement to limit movement regardless of people’s age.
The report, authored by academics at the University of NSW, University of Wollongong, and University of Technology Sydney, noted more than half of the fines issued to children were fixed at $1,000 (US$665).
The Redfern Legal Centre, Public Interest Advocacy Centre, and Aboriginal Legal Service commissioned the research, which considered statistical data and interview responses from lawyers and youth workers.
Meanwhile, some of the fines were as high as $5,000, despite the authors noting the maximum fine a child can get when found guilty of an offence in the NSW Children’s Court is $1,100.
“Children were liable to the same penalty notice fine as adults for almost all PHO offences, with the exception of two general age-based offences that concerned the failure to wear a face covering,” the report said.
The report noted the public health orders were changed and repealed frantically during the pandemic, with 266 public health orders put out between March 15, 2020, and Jan. 31, 2022.
In addition, a new public health order was brought in or modified every one and a half days during the Delta wave of COVID-19.
“The frequent changes made it especially hard for children to understand the rules, and contributed to errors in police decisions that a person had breached a PHO,” the report said.
One interviewee who spoke to the report authors said there were kids working off COVID fines who “probably shouldn’t have been issued with one in the first place.”
Analysis by the authors found that children in socioeconomically disadvantaged suburbs were “over policed” during the pandemic.
Authors said more than half of the top 30 suburbs where children received the largest number of penalty notices between March 2020 and June 2022 were in the bottom 25 percent of the social economic index.
Discussing the findings, Redfern Legal Centre chief executive officer Camilla Pandolfini said children cannot pay heavy fines and the deterrent effect is low.
“Fines are oppressive, discriminatory, and ineffective when used against children. We call for changes to policy, practice, and procedure to ensure that fines do not compound existing disadvantage and criminalise children,” she said.
Police Note Serious Nature of COVID-19 Led to Rapid Orders
A spokesperson for NSW Police explained public health order compliance was required for the safety of the community. Police could respond to breaches of the orders no matter what the age.
“The virulent nature and serious illness from the Delta variant of COVID-19 resulted in rapidly evolving Public Health Orders, including Local Government Areas of Concern being nominated by NSW Health,” the spokesperson told The Epoch Times.
“A compliance and enforcement response was required to limit movement and ensure compliance with Public Health Orders in these areas to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 and protect the community.
“Outside of these identified areas of concern, police still had the ability to respond to breaches of relevant Public Health Orders by issuing infringement notices—regardless of the age of the person involved.”
Meanwhile, report author Julia Quilter called for police to “stop issuing fines to kids” and engage in diversionary and creative problem-solving policing.
“Policing kids by issuing heavy fines during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted, in extreme form, the problems with our fines system more generally. Kids have no or little capacity to pay fines and saddling them with crippling debts only sets them up for future failure,” she said.
“This is especially troubling given that fines are disproportionately issued by police to vulnerable kids already experiencing socio-economic and other forms of disadvantage.”
The CEO of Aboriginal Legal Service Karly Warner called for a reform of the “archaic” and “unjust” fines system.
“Aboriginal communities set the gold standard for caring for one another during the COVID-19 pandemic, yet our children paid a higher price because of the government’s punitive approach to enforcing public health orders,” she stated.
Public Interest Advocacy Centre CEO Jonathon Hunyor added, “Creating massive debts for children and families simply amplifies disadvantage and builds distrust in the system.”
Police Faced Challenges During the COVID-19 Response: Inquiry
Meanwhile, the Police Federation of Australia (PFA), which represents 65,000 police officers, including more than 17,000 in NSW, have raised a number of issues in response to the federal government’s COVID-19 Response Inquiry.
In its submission (pdf), PFA noted access to appropriate personal protective equipment for a police “became an issue of concern” during COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns.
“Whilst it is accepted that in normal circumstances it would be the responsibility of the employer, in our case, the respective police forces, to provide such equipment, no provision appears to have been made for a national response to such a crisis,” the association noted.
In addition, the submission noted the pandemic impacted police resources and community attitudes towards police in a range of high profile incidents.
Meanwhile, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) noted extra law enforcement duties during COVID-19 took its toll on frontline police (pdf).
“The burden of the extra workload over the COVID-19 period was felt by the AFP, in particular the frontline officers, who were required to enforce mandated COVID-19 restrictions,” the AFP said.
“On an individual level, policing during the pandemic increased the risk of members contracting the COVID-19 virus through interactions with the public, as well as spreading the virus to family and friends.”
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22 May, 2024
EVERYTHING is caused by global warming
The article below says that increases in dangerous air turbulence encountered by aircraft are caused by global warming. It supports that claim by quoting a "study" on the subject. I have been unable to find the original study but below is a summary of it:
Research published last year by meteorologists from the University of Reading found that our skies are around 55 per cent more turbulent than they were 40 years ago. Scientists found that in a typical spot in the North Atlantic –one of the world's busiest routes – the total annual duration of clear-air turbulence rose from 17.7 hours in 1979 to 27.4 hours in 2020. Moderate turbulence in the same region is also up by a staggering 37 per cent.So how was turbulence measured? Since it is invisible, it was presumably measured simply by counting incidents reported by aircraft experiencing it. But there would be an increasing number of aircraft flights over the 40 year period between 1979 and 2020. So even if the frequency of turbulence was unchanged we would still see more reports of it. So the "expectation" of Prof Williams is unsupported. And even if his expectation were soundly based, he has no data to link it to global warming. Aren't "expectations" wonderful climate data?
Paul Williams, a co-author of the study, expects a 181 per cent increase in clear-air turbulence over the North Atlantic by 2050-2080, as rising global temperatures increase the velocity and unpredictability of windshears.https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-13443767/JULIAN-BRAY-turbulence-worse-increasing.html
A former pilot and aircraft accident investigator has suggested climate change may have been responsible for the horror plane plunge that left one passenger dead and injured dozens more.
Almost 60 Australians were on-board flight SQ321 from London to Singapore on Tuesday when the Boeing 777-300ER aircraft suddenly plunged more than 6,000 feet in just five minutes, hurling passengers and crew into the ceiling.
Geoffrey Kitchen, a 73-year-old musical theatre director from Gloucestershire, UK, died of a suspected heart attack, while eight Australians were later hospitalised from injuries sustained in the chaos.
The disaster, which was caused by a pocket of unexpected turbulence 11 hours into the journey, forced the plane to make an emergency landing at Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi Airport.
Shocking pictures taken inside the plane captured a scene of utter carnage including air stewards with blood smeared across their faces, oxygen masks dangling from the damaged ceiling and rubbish strewn in every aisle.
Tim Atkinson, an aviation consultant and a former aircraft accident investigator, said the plane was one of the 'largest and I daresay the most solid airframes flying around the world'.
'It's regarded as an exceptionally well-built machine in the piloting and aviation fraternity and for turbulence to have had this effect on a triple-seven it must have been really quite severe,' he told Sky News.
Mr Atkinson said that the area the plane was flying over, which is known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, is 'renowned among pilots, and I dare say passengers, for turbulence'.
'Despite abundant caution occasionally, there's turbulence ahead which can't be identified, and the unfortunate result of an encounter is injury and, very rarely, fatality,' he said.
Mr Atkinson urged all passengers to keep their seatbelt fastened whenever they are seated.
He also suggested a disturbing theory for the disaster.
'We are seeing as climate change is occurring that turbulence is becoming more common and more severe and that's something that the aviation industry is trying to address at the moment,' Mr Atkinson told the BBC.
A global study published last year by Reading University in the UK found that climate change is increasing turbulence during flights – and it predicted that the trend is set to worsen.
It found that in a typical spot in the North Atlantic - one of the world's busiest routes - the total annual duration of severe turbulence increased by 55 per cent from 17.7 hours in 1979 to 27.4 hours in 2020.
'My message from this is we need to do something otherwise flights will become more turbulent in future (as climate change drives more turbulence),' said Professor Paul Williams, an atmospheric scientist who co-authored the study.
********************************************
Wind Subsidies Are Rising… but wind power production isn’t rising with them
Administration (EIA) shows a decrease in wind power production in 2023. Despite record highs in installed wind capacity and continually rising subsidies production is falling.
Thanks to these subsidies, including the longstanding Production Tax Credit (PTC) and Investment Tax Credit (ITC), and the extensions that these credits received in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), subsidies for wind power have seen a dramatic increase over the last decade. The IRA extended these credits through 2025, and replaces them with the new, but similar, Clean Energy PTC and Clean Energy ITC through 2032. It also added provisions to provide even larger subsidies for projects that meet “Environmental Justice” requirements. All of this together will maintain, and increase, both the scope of subsidies for wind, and the impact that those subsidies have on the overall market for electricity.
Will this money do any good for the power grid? Will added investment in renewable sources, particularly wind, lead to any increase in the amount of wind power generated? And will that capacity increase or decrease the resiliency of the grid?
The answer to all of the preceding questions is an emphatic “no” and recent reality bears this out.
The highest installed wind capacity on record was last year, with nearly 150 gigawatts of installed wind capacity in the US.
Even with this record capacity last year, there was also a decline in power generated from wind for the first time. There was 2.1 percent less wind power generated in 2023 than in 2022. This was in part due to slower wind speeds that year, an inherent flaw of wind power. The intermittency of the source also means that sometimes wind power is unavailable when demand is high, but available when it is not, which can also result in less wind power being used.
These aren’t problems that subsidy dollars can solve, they’re inherent to the technology. Despite this, lawmakers have continually tried throwing money at the problem. From 2016 to 2022, the federal government spent approximately $18.7 billion on subsidies for wind power alone. This is a massive amount of money. It’s even more considerable given that wind’s intermittency heavily limits its benefit to reliability.
During that period, wind subsidies were much higher than the subsidies for any of the conventional power sources: natural gas, coal, and nuclear. Specifically, the wind subsidies were about 2.5 times greater than both coal subsidies and refined coal subsidies, and greater than both coal and refined coal subsidies combined. The wind subsidies were also about double the subsidies for natural gas and petroleum liquids and about 6.5 times greater than nuclear subsidies.
Renewables received 46 percent of overall power subsidies, despite constituting a very small portion of overall power generation.
This isn’t subsidies per kilowatt hour of generation. It’s total subsidies. If it were per kilowatt hour of generation, the disparity would be even more extreme given how much more output conventional sources have. To be clear, policymakers shouldn’t be increasing the subsidies for reliable sources to account for this disparity. The way to fix power markets is to subsidize everything less (ideally not at all). The solution to grid reliability problems is certainly not to subsidize the least reliable sources the most.
Decreasing wind generation makes wind’s power production limitations more obvious. It also emphasizes what many reliability advocates have been saying for years: government meddling in electricity markets in favor of unreliable sources will have consequences for reliability as money is funneled away from what works and toward what does not.
As a general matter, lawmakers should stop subsidizing energy sources. To protect reliability, lawmakers should look to repeal the IRA extensions of wind and solar tax credits as a first step toward repairing the damage that these subsidies have done to electricity markets.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/05/21/wind-subsidies-rising/?omhide=true
*********************************************Hydrogen madness in New Mexico
Over the past month, in public meetings stretching from the Navajo Nation to Albuquerque, public officials and company representatives unveiled a picture of a new hydrogen energy industry being built in the northwest corner of New Mexico. The presentations reveal hydrogen production, transportation, power generation and carbon sequestration projects arcing across the Navajo Nation to Farmington and down to the I-40 corridor between Gallup and Albuquerque. Most of the projects are underway, and it’s clear they’ll rely on fossil fuels.
Tallgrass Energy sits at the center of all this activity and has the backing of the state’s biggest political player, New Mexico’s governor. The Denver-based company operates more than 7,000 miles of natural gas pipelines stretching from Oregon to Ohio, and it’s going all-in on creating the necessary pieces of a new economic base in New Mexico’s second-largest fossil fuel producing region. The region’s natural gas holds the key to many of the projects
“Hydrogen is huge!” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham proclaimed while speaking at an event in Farmington in April. What came next is what many in the region fear.
“Hydrogen uses the natural gas resources here we don’t know what to do with,” she said.
Actually, plenty of people know what to do with natural gas. The issue is that fewer and fewer people want to use it, even as more and more of it is being produced. Historically, natural gas has been used most significantly for electrical grid power generation in the U.S., but its use in that arena is declining as renewable energy prices drop in the face of government climate policies and ever-cheaper solar technology.
It takes more energy to make hydrogen than it provides when converted to useful energy.
Meanwhile, natural gas prices have tanked due to a production glut caused by ever-increasing oil production using hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” in places like the Permian Basin, shared between New Mexico and Texas. Producers want the oil, which brings a market price well above the cost of its production. But, pulled from the well, that fracked oil comes commingled with the less desired natural gas. Over the past month, natural gas prices dipped below zero at a main pipeline transit hub in Texas due to the glut. Some companies are storing gas underground, awaiting better days and prices.
Enter hydrogen. The most plentiful element in the universe is a perfectly clean fuel when used to make electricity in a fuel cell. It’s generally cleaner than natural gas when burned to make heat, though the process produces nitrogen oxides that the EPA says damage the human respiratory system and contribute to acid rain.
The crux lies in how you make your hydrogen, which rarely exists on its own on earth. The cleanest, most energy-intensive way breaks water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen using renewable energy. The common way breaks off hydrogen atoms from the methane in natural gas. Either way, it takes more energy to make hydrogen than it provides when converted to useful energy. When made with natural gas, the process also produces a lot of climate-damaging carbon dioxide. That defeats hydrogen’s clean bonafides unless the carbon dioxide is captured and buried underground, a process that uses even more energy.
Furthermore, the natural gas production and transportation process often leaks, sometimes a lot. That gas is mostly methane, which is 80 times more capable of warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide in the first 20 years after it’s released.
The federal government incentivized so-called low-carbon hydrogen production from natural gas with carbon sequestration in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Many worry that this will lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions in light of New Mexico’s rocky track record of policing its oil and gas producers. All of this means a fuel promoted to fight climate change could actually exacerbate it, and cost a lot, too.
“How companies choose to produce that hydrogen will fundamentally be a business decision they must make,” said Michael Coleman, director of communications to Gov. Lujan Grisham. “Our greatest opportunity as a state is producing hydrogen from a range of feedstocks.”
Gov. Lujan Grisham has stumped for hydrogen for years, with little support from the state’s Legislature or environmental groups. She also sought a multibillion-dollar grant from the federal government to create a multi-state hydrogen ecosystem centered in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin, but the feds snubbed it last October. Hydrogen investments face a bumpy road in other states as well.
Nonetheless, Lujan Grisham forges on — she went to the Netherlands last week to drum up more hydrogen investments. Meanwhile, testing and planning chug along, with Tallgrass linking many of the far-flung pieces together. “The governor is looking to attract all kinds of hydrogen businesses to New Mexico,” Coleman said. “Tallgrass’ proposal draws all of the attention because of its scale but is hardly the only initiative under way.”
“One of the more notable misconceptions that we’ve struggled to overcome is the view that we are focused on a singular point-to-point hydrogen project,” said Steven Davidson, vice president of government and public affairs for Tallgrass Energy. He’s referring to a hydrogen pipeline being developed by GreenView, a Tallgrass subsidiary. “We are working to create a clean energy ecosystem in coordination with many other parties,” he said.
One of those parties is the Four Corners Clean Energy Alliance, an advocacy group promoting hydrogen development and associated technologies in the region on behalf of GreenView and Tallgrass. One of the group’s board members is an executive at Tallgrass. Both the group’s interim director and director of communications also work for the Consumer Energy Alliance, an industry trade group sponsored in part by a who’s-who of fossil fuel energy producers.
The Tallgrass ecosystem includes a carbon capture and sequestration project with New Mexico Tech. The university has been studying the geology of the San Juan Basin since 2020 with the goal of getting three sequestration wells operational in a few years. The project is in the middle of its federal permitting process and could be approved sometime next year.
It also includes the Escalante coal-fired power plant retrofitted to burn hydrogen, along I-40 between Albuquerque and Gallup and the hydrogen pipeline linking Farmington to central Arizona and crossing the Navajo Nation, a controversial project still in the planning stages.
It’s expected to include a hydrogen production facility or two in or near Farmington, with exact locations to be determined.
And there’s more. At a San Juan County Commission meeting in April, the lead researcher on the carbon sequestration project pointed out that if the Escalante power plant is to reach its carbon-free objective, Tallgrass has to build another pipeline, this one for carbon dioxide, running from the Escalante power plant to the future carbon sequestration wells, roughly 100 miles to the north and crossing the eastern reaches of the Navajo Nation.
Meanwhile, the hydrogen pipeline project has already drawn fire from Navajo opposed to further energy projects on the Nation. The tribe has a 100-year history of outside companies coming in, making fortunes from Native resources and leaving environmental messes behind.
“All the projects that have ever been on Navajo [Nation] made those companies a lot of money,” said Jessica Keetso, who is Diné and an organizer with Tó Nizhóní Ání or Sacred Water Speaks, a Navajo water rights and environmental protection group. Historically, she said, they don’t clean up after themselves. “They get away with not doing reclamation, for everything from oil and gas, uranium to coal,” she said.
“Will this really kickstart our economy, our Navajo Nation economy? I think that’s questionable. If 50 years of coal mining couldn’t do that, hydrogen is not going to do that.”
~ Jessica Keetso, organizer, Tó Nizhóní Ání
Many are also unhappy with how Tallgrass has gone about drumming up support from the tribe’s widely spaced, often-impoverished population.
At a meeting of the Navajo Nation Resources and Development Committee in Albuquerque in late April to discuss the hydrogen pipeline project, committee member Rickie Nez told Tallgrass representatives, “No more gift cards! No more gift cards! It makes you look like you’re bribing someone.”
GreenView representatives had been giving out gift cards to tribal members who attended chapter house meetings where the pipeline was discussed. (Chapter houses are the most local form of government on the Navajo Nation.) At some meetings, tribal members also voted on resolutions to allow the pipeline to cross their chapters. Davidson said the company came up with the idea “in consultation with respected cultural advisors from the Navajo Nation … to lessen the burden to the individual to encourage them to participate.” He said that the cards were for $25 to $50. He also heard that the cards “met with some concern about optics. We completely understand that point.”
In addition, at the Resources and Development Committee meeting, Adam Schiche, whose online profile says he is the vice president for international business development at Tallgrass, said that GreenView representatives met with and paid individual grazing permit holders $500 for the possibility of working on land where livestock grazes. Davidson later said, “We have no qualms” in offering upfront payments, treating Navajo permit holders “exactly like landowners off the Nation.” He said further money would be given if the project goes forward.
“Money talks. Money is persuading people, which is a very sad thing to see,” said Keetso. “The tactics are actually paying off for them because two months ago they didn’t have any resolutions.”
For roughly two years, representatives from both Tó Nizhóní Ání and GreenView have made their cases for or against the pipeline and asked chapters to consider resolutions supporting or opposing it all along the proposed pipeline route. At the April Resources and Development Committee hearing, Schiche said that Tallgrass representatives had gathered resolutions in favor of the pipeline from five chapters. Tó Nizhóní Ání has gathered 15 against.
Tallgrass’ main business is natural gas, and while the focus on hydrogen is touted as part of a climate change solution, it’s clearly connected to those fossil fuel operations. “We believe every practical option to decarbonize should be advanced — including the decarbonization of natural gas to make … hydrogen,” Davidson said. He sees hydrogen keeping the lights on, firing power plants when the sun goes down and the winds calm. “Hydrogen is a proven way to convert and store that clean electricity for when it’s needed,” he said. That’s the idea that ties natural gas to carbon sequestration, to the Escalante hydrogen-fired power plant 100 miles west of Albuquerque and to a 200-mile pipeline across the Navajo Nation to central Arizona.
Powering the electric grid with expensive hydrogen isn’t universally popular. The Rocky Mountain Institute, a Colorado-based nonprofit that helps businesses and governments transition away from fossil fuels, promotes a common view for hydrogen’s best uses. “Fertilizer, oil refining and petrochemicals, steel manufacturing, and long-distance heavy-duty transport are no-regrets applications of hydrogen today,” they write. Hydrogen power plants aren’t what’s needed now.
In the end, New Mexico’s discussion about hydrogen is about money. At the Resource and Development Committee meeting, Schiche told the group that $400,000 a year would be split among chapter houses along the pipeline route. In addition, the Nation could choose either a percentage stake in the pipeline company or annual payment for gas moving through the line.
“Will this really kickstart our economy, our Navajo Nation economy?” Keetso said later. “I think that’s questionable. If 50 years of coal mining couldn’t do that, hydrogen is not going to do that.”
Long-term jobs are a perennial hope for any projects on the Nation, where unemployment runs high. Schiche said that there would be a lot of construction work while building the project, but “the pipeline itself doesn’t generate a lot of jobs.” He said those would be at two hydrogen production sites somewhere around Farmington — which is not on the reservation.
Keetso calls on bigger groups to fight alongside Tó Nizhóní Ání against the hydrogen projects. She said, “I just wish big greens would get off the fence and say, ‘Hey, this hydrogen may be the solution for some things. But the way that this company is doing it is wrong.’”
https://capitalandmain.com/like-it-or-not-a-hydrogen-ecosystem-is-coming-to-new-mexico
************************************************Comedy environmentalist Jim Dale and Dale Vince have both suggested that climate ‘denial’ should be a criminal offence
It gets them clicks and attention on cable and mainstream news, and it plays into a wider push by green billionaire-funded lawfare outfits using the courts to enforce Net Zero industrial shutdown. But it begs the question: what are the climate ‘deniers’ actually denying?
Dale is a climate campaigner who points to bad weather as evidence that the climate is collapsing before our very eyes. But the evidence suggests no such thing. Data since 2000 show that there has been no increase in extreme weather, no increase in loss of life and no increase in economic costs.
The Emergency Events Database (EM-DAT) is a U.S. Government-supported tracker of mass disasters as well as health and economic impacts. It lists 26,000 disasters worldwide from 1900 to the present day. Dr. Matthew Wielicki, a former Geology Professor, has compiled data from this source and they provide no evidence to support the claim that ‘extreme’ weather is on the rise.
Dr. Wielicki suggests that the recent decrease in perceived climate urgency and importance among the American public, especially young adults, as shown by the recent Monmouth University poll “may be influenced by an observable lack of escalation in the direct impacts of climate change”. Such data can lead to scepticism or reduced concern, he adds.
It seems that the lack of evidence drives the alarmists further and further away from scientific reality in their desperation to promote Net Zero.
Last week’s absurd survey of 380 “top scientists” by the Guardian found climate modeller Ruth Cerezo-Mota wailing that it was almost impossible not to feel “hopeless and broken” after all the flooding, fires and droughts of the last three years. Biologist Camille Parmesan was so fearful she almost gave up what she called climate science 15 years ago to become a nightclub singer.
Now she says all the scientists she works with are at the end of their rope “asking what the fuck do we have to do to get through to people how bad this really is”. Engineering Professor Jonathan Cullen states the climate emergency is already here because just 1°C of heating has “supercharged the planet’s extreme weather”.
Millions of people have “very likely” died early as a result, he claimed. Lorraine Whitmarsh is an ‘environmental psychologist’ at the University of Bath, and worries about the future her children are inheriting since climate change is an “existential threat” to humanity.
The Guardian article was written by Damian Carrington, one of the green billionaire-funded lobby group Covering Climate Now’s three journalists of the year in 2023. This operation pumps out ready-to-publish climate catastrophe copy to media outlets worldwide.
Carrington polled over 800 lead authors or review editors of all reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2018. He received replies from 380 authors, but as with all IPCC (and Guardian) reports, the definition of ‘climate scientists’ is very broad. Carrington describes Professor Lisa Schipper as an “expert on climate vulnerability”.
Schipper notes that she is “particularly interested in socio-cultural dimensions of vulnerability including gender, culture and religion, as well as structural issues related to power, justice and equity”. Ralph Sims of Massey University says extreme weather events will escalate and there will be environmental refugees by the millions. Sims’s first job in academia was as a lecturer in agricultural machinery.
Meanwhile, back to the science, and the problem – the giant elephant in the room no less – is that the IPCC gives almost no credence to talk of a climate crisis based on observable bad weather patterns in the past and looking forward to the end of this century.
The above table published in the latest IPCC assessment report reveals this clearly. It shows there is little or no evidence that the following have been, or will be by 2100, affected by human-caused climate change: river floods, heavy rain and pluvial flooding, landslides, droughts (all types), fire ‘weather’, severe wind storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, heavy snowfall and ice storms, hail, snow avalanche, coastal flooding and erosion, and maritime heatwaves.
Far from living in a time of climate collapse, we appear to be enjoying a benign spell in an interglacial period. A little extra carbon dioxide, rescuing the Earth from possibly dangerous denudation, and a gentle rise of 1°C in temperature from the Little Ice Age, has boosted plant growth around the world. Evidence continues to be produced showing substantial CO2 greening of the planet including desert areas. A recent paper Chen et al. 2024 found that CO2 greening had actually accelerated over the last two decades.
The people spinning the tale of climate collapse – some of them advocating jail time for dissenters – are hysterical, but deadly serious. Ask Gianluca Alimonti, an Italian Physics Professor, whose paper stating a climate emergency was not supported by the available data, was recently retracted by Springer Nature after a year-long campaign by activist scientists and journalists, including Graham Readfearn of the Guardian.
The Alimonti paper, which also included the work of two other physics professors, found that rainfall intensity and frequency was stationary in many parts of the world, and the same was true of U.S. tornadoes. Other meteorological categories including natural disasters, floods, droughts and ecosystem productivity showed “no clear positive trend of extreme events”.
Only a fool would consider arguing that climate contrarian scientists should be sent to jail, as Dale did with Andrew Doyle last Sunday on GB News’s Free Speech Nation. Alas, the transcript of Dale’s comments does little to clarify his argument – it’s just word salad gibberish for the most part. But his intention is clear.
Time for ‘deniers’, whatever they are supposed to be denying, to be marched off to jail. The sad thing is that he is not alone – Dale says it is “common sense”, which, as Doyle observed, is the refrain of every tyrant in history who’s wanted to jail his opponents.
https://principia-scientific.com/fanatics-call-for-climate-deniers-to-be-jailed/
****************************************************Beware of Climate Activists Cosplaying as ‘Conservatives’
As a general rule of thumb, if the only reason you would identify somebody as a conservative is because they repeatedly insist they are a conservative, they likely are not a conservative. Readers should keep this general rule in mind if they read self-proclaimed conservative climate activist Benji Backer’s new book: The Conservative Environmentalist: Common Sense Solutions for a Sustainable Future.
Backer has created a niche for himself claiming conservative politicians can and must embrace climate activism as a way to hold true to conservative principles and win over young voters. His message runs along the line of, Hey, conservatives, I am one of you. You can trust me that climate activism is truly a conservative issue.
Most conservatives, however, would not recognize Backer’s words and actions as those of a conservative. Prior to writing his book, Backer:
proudly described himself as “Never Trump” and preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election;
slammed Trump’s restrictions on immigrants from terrorist-tied nations as anti-Muslim;
approvingly re-tweeted a statement that supported banning Trump from social media;
called for the reinstatement of FDR New Deal policies such as the Civilian Conservation Corps;
advocated government taking control of 30 percent of America’s land for environmental purposes;
claimed conservative Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) “encouraged” the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill, even as Johnson took to social media encouraging people to disperse;
made vitriolic attacks on conservative leaders Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO);
called Donald Trump “despicable and indefensible;”
asserted policymakers who do not support mass COVID-19 vaccinations “has to be one of the lowest possible lows;”
criticized people who did not want to wear face masks as “stupid” and not protecting others “because they want to make a political statement.”
literally said “thank you” to Greta Thunberg for playing “a critical role in generating worldwide awareness around this issue of climate change.”
Are these the words and actions of a conservative? Are these the words and actions of a person conservatives should trust to guide them on policy issues?
While Backer goes out of his way to venomously slam conservatives Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Ron Johnson, and Josh Hawley, he simultaneously elicits fawning praise from the political left. Van Jones, the far-left CNN pundit who served as Barack Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, praises Backer’s book as “a critical blueprint for the future of climate action.”
It’s not a coincidence that leftist political pundits praise Backer’s book. Backer wastes no time heaping praise on former President Richard Nixon for creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and creating the framework for the nation’s most far-reaching and much abused “environmental protection” laws. He celebrates the mandatory and controversial Green Building Standards Code in California. He admits his American Conservation Coalition is not a conservative organization at all, but is a mix of liberals, independents, and conservatives. One suspects its membership is far more liberal and far less conservative than Backer advertises.
Backer derisively refers to people who disagree with him as “deniers.” He says Alex Epstein supports an “extreme” position for saying we should maximize the benefits of fossil fuels.
Backer praises the Clean Water Act for its brevity, which allows the EPA to interpret the Act any way it wants and become a runaway authoritarian entity.
Backer bemoans the “overconsumption of coffee” because coffee cultivation sometimes occurs on previously undeveloped land. He bemoans “fashion overproduction” and “surplus luxury.” These are not conservative action items, either.
Backer praises Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act for giving “green hydrogen” subsidies that are not available to conventional energy. How are these special-interest subsidies either conservative or desirable?
Backer repeatedly advocates government-created “incentives” (i.e., taxing-and-spending to undermine and redirect market conditions). However, heavy taxation and heavy government financial intervention are not conservative policy principles. Backer can arguably claim his plan for government intervention through taxing and spending favoritism is not as terrible as some more draconian alternatives, but his government-intervention plan is still neither conservative nor desirable.
Backer provides a perfect illustration of his flawed logic and overarching worldview when he writes, “Without incentives, none of the energy sources we use today would have become as inexpensive, accessible, or clean as they are. Oil and gas became as ubiquitous as they did because federal, state, and local governments continually used incentives to generate competition among power companies to encourage better efficiency.”
No, oil and gas became ubiquitous because they are much more concentrated, abundant, dependable, and affordable energy sources than the whale oil and windmills they replaced. Backer’s logic is pretty much the same as President Barack Obama’s when he said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” Claiming that the benevolent influence of government is the source of any business’ success is not a conservative worldview or conservative principle.
In its barest form, Benji Backer believes climate change is the single most important issue facing humanity today. He advocates heavy government intervention through tax-and-spend subsidies to direct people’s behavior rather than outright restrictions or mandates. However, most conservatives realize that climate change is not a significant threat and heavy government intervention, in whatever form it takes, is not a conservative policy prescription. It is no wonder that Backer finds himself agreeing with leftist policies on a wide variety of topics and singling out conservatives for particularly venomous attacks. Backer may tell people he is a conservative in order to sell them his climate activism, but the vast majority of conservatives – fortunately – see through this.
https://heartland.org/opinion/beware-of-climate-activists-cosplaying-as-conservatives/
***************************************21 May, 2024
Cancer-causing microplastics are found in 100% of men's testicles in new study
The appropriate response to this finding is "so what"? The presence of the microparticles seems beyond argument. It is the added term "cancer causing" which is the problem. It is little more than journalistic licence. Evidence for the claim is very thin on the ground.
The main ill effect of the particles pointed to below is its alleged link to lowered sperm counts. Problem: It is doubtful that there has been any lowering of sperm counts
The sperm count furore was a beat-up. One of several problems with the claim is that sperm counts decline with aqe so you need to control for age in your samples and that was often not done. As a population ages, its average sperm counts will decline too. There is no known decline in young men.
I could go on in detail but a basic point is that plastics by the nature of their usage have to be very inert. They very rarely react with anything else. So if they are indeed found in human bodies they can be expected just to sit there, causing no effects of any kind. And that seems very clearly to be the case -- othwerwise we we would have many reports of them causing illess. But it is only when scientists go looking for illness that anything is found -- and even then any effects are very weak. And weak effects are notoriously not replicable so cannot be relied on for any policy response
Microplastics have been found at the top of Mount Everest, deep in the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench and now in men's testicles.
Researchers from the University of New Mexico found 12 types of microplastics in all 23 human testes studied.
Data has shown that sperm counts have decreased by 59 percent in the past few decades, with other culprits ranging from cell phones in pants pockets to vape pens.
'We don't want to scare people,' the study's lead author said. 'We want to scientifically provide the data and make people aware.'
The team found that the most prevalent of the 12 microplastics was a polymer material, polyethylene, used in plastic bags and bottles.
The average human concentration was 329.44 micrograms per gram of tissue — vastly more than recent studies of human blood, which came to only tens of micrograms per gram.
Microplastics, smaller than five millimeters in length, enter our bodies through plastic packaging, certain food, tap water and even the air we breathe - and have been linked to cancer and fertility issues.
'There are a lot of microplastics,' the study's lead author Dr. Xiaozhong John Yu, noted. 'We can make our own choices to better avoid exposures, change our lifestyle and change our behavior.'
Dr. Yu was inspired to spearhead the project after a colleague, a professor in the university's pharmacy college named Matthew Campen, found alarming concentrations of microplastics in human placentas.
The presence of this invisible pollution in placentas, so close to unborn children during pregnancy, Dr. Yu noted, led them both to wonder how else microplastics might be impacting reproduction.
Campen, according to Dr. Yu, asked him, 'Have you considered why there is this decline in reproductive potential more recently? There must be something new.'
Dr. Yu and his team found that the concentration of microplastics in the human male testicular tissue was significantly higher than the average Campen found in placental tissue.
For ethical reasons, anonymized human male testicular tissue had been obtained from the New Mexico Office of the Medical Investigator for the new study.
The state's coroners collect these tissue materials during autopsies and then store the material frozen for up to seven years for potential forensic purposes, before being permitted to legally dispose of it.
Preservation methods used to store the human tissue prevented the team from calculating the men's sperm counts.
To fill this gap, the study also looked at tissue from dogs, which showed that the volume of microplastics scaled directly to lower sperm counts in dogs.
'At the beginning, I doubted whether microplastics could penetrate the reproductive system,' Dr. Yu said of his research, published in the journal Toxicological Sciences,
'When I first received the results for dogs I was surprised. I was even more surprised when I received the results for humans.'
Health professionals have been worrying about declining sperm counts in men for years, although the causes appear to be related to multiple environmental factors.
One November 2022 study in the journal Human Reproduction Update, a review that tabulated data from men in 53 countries, found that mean sperm count had plummeted by 51.6 percent between 1973 and 2018 globally.
To analyze their samples, Dr. Yu and his team first chemically dissolved both the human and canine tissue of organic material, fats and proteins, leaving them only with contaminants, like the microplastics, to study.
Spinning the samples in an ultracentrifuge, yielded separated pellets of plastic that could then be identified using traditional lab methods, like mass spectrometry.
Dr. Yu explained that the presence of PVC plastic in particular was quite alarming: 'PVC can release a lot of chemicals that interfere with spermatogenesis [the creation of sperm in the testes] and it contains chemicals that cause endocrine disruption.'
Disruptions to the endocrine system have been known to cause issues with sex and reproductive hormones in humans, fish, and other species.
The health consequence of microplastics in people have gained more attention in recent years, as studies have shown the particles appearing to contribute to inflammatory bowel disease, pancreatic cancer, and Alzheimer's disease.
Amid the growing concerns about microplastics in our bodies and in the environment, 175 UN member countries have agreed to come up with a plan this year to end plastic pollution - a global plastics treaty.
Nevertheless, Dr. Yu expressed caution about jumping to worst case scenario conclusions and said he hopes more scientists will study the connections between microplastics and reproductive health.
'We have a lot of unknowns,' he said.
'We need to really look at what the potential long-term effect [could be]. Are microplastics one of the factors contributing to this decline?'
***************************************************
$7.5 Billion Buys Just Seven EV Charging Stations
You’re driving your electric car on a cross-country road trip but no matter where your battery begins to run low, there is a convenient charging station that would work with any make or model
How much would you pay for that kind of convenience? $19.99?
These miracle charging stations usually have a little store attached, so you’ll have something to do while you wait for your car to charge.
How much would you pay for such a deal? $29.99? $49.99? $100?
Someday — maybe not any time soon but in theory it just might happen! — these charging stations will dot our nation’s highways, providing recharges to fleets of electric vehicles people aren’t really buying any longer.
When the chargers are working, that is, which won’t be all the time.
Now how much would you pay?
One BILLION dollars.
Presidentish Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar “infrastructure” law (that spent just nine cents on the dollar for actual infrastructure — and even that is questionable, as you’re about to see) included $7.5 billion in subsidies for a network of 500,000 EV charging stations by 2030, less than six years from now.
Way back in December, I reported that exactly none had been built.
But these things move at the speed of government, so it was just eleven days later that I had to issue a semi-correction because one — count ’em, one — charging station was finally in operation. Located near a freeway in London, Ohio, it appears to be little used.
Well, here we are, just five months later, and I’m here to report that Biden’s EV charging station program has become a smashing success. According to an article in Monday’s Oil Price, we’re now up to seven spread across four states.
That comes out to an average of about one billion dollars per station. Not that they really cost that much, of course, but my ridiculous averaging is still a lot less ridiculous than Biden’s so-called Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
My back-of-the-envelope math also indicates that building seven stations every two years will get us to Biden’s goal of 500,000 no later than the year 144,881 AD.
Assuming we’re still using AD by then. 2030 doesn’t seem that far away now, does it?
“Missed it by THAT much,” as they say.
https://principia-scientific.com/7-5-billion-buys-just-seven-ev-charging-stations/
*******************************************‘Nowhere Near Ready For Prime Time’: Biden Wants Companies To Disclose Climate Risks — A Trial Run Did Not Go Well
Six major American financial institutions struggled to accurately assess the extent of their exposure to climate change and related risks, according to the Federal Reserve.
The Fed ran a pilot program for six leading American banks to assess how ready they are to keep track of the risks that climate change poses to their businesses, a practice that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is attempting to mandate for large corporations across the country. The banks — JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup — generally struggled to assess their exposure to climate change because they lacked key data and because climate risk modeling is so new that even the country’s biggest banks could not identify reliable techniques, according to the Fed’s May report on the pilot program.
“Participants reported significant data and modeling challenges in estimating climate-related financial risks,” the report states. “For example, participants noted a lack of comprehensive and consistent data related to building characteristics, insurance coverage, and counterparties’ plans to manage climate-related risks. In many cases, participants relied on external vendors to fill data and modeling gaps"
All of the banks that participated in the exercise said that some key details of insurance markets also posed problems for their efforts to determine their exposure to climate change-related risks, according to the Fed’s report. The banks’ uncertainty on insurance deductibles and the costs of replacing destroyed property forced them to lean on assumptions about how much of the costs would fall on insurers and how much would be the burden of the banks.
Additionally, the report states that the banks outsourced certain aspects of their climate risk modeling to third party organizations because the banks do not have the right personnel or systems of their own to build their own models.
“In the end you’re not sure what the reliability of that estimate really is,” Clifford Rossi, formerly a risk officer for Citigroup’s consumer lending business and now a professor at the University of Maryland’s business school, told E&E News. “The models are nowhere near ready for prime time in making hard money decisions.”
The difficulties that America’s largest banks encountered when trying to assess their own exposure to climate change could be a troubling development in light of the SEC’s major climate risk disclosure mandate, which the agency finalized in March before pausing the regulation in April as legal challenges go through the courts.
The SEC’s rule will require certain medium-sized and large corporations to disclose material climate risks and climate-related goals and targets, as well as some types of direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions, in their official filings, according to White and Case, a global law firm. While the rule’s proponents have hailed it as a major step toward providing investors and markets with much-needed data about climate change’s possible impacts on markets, critics have charged the SEC with overstepping its mandate and saddling companies with onerous new reporting requirements that are difficult to calculate.
Additionally, California has a corporate climate disclosure mandate for companies doing business in the state, which Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law in October 2023. California’s rules are more aggressive than the federal mandate, as they will require corporations with annual revenues in excess of $1 billion to report emissions, climate-related risks to their businesses and their progress on climate goals, among other things, according to the law firm McDermott Will and Emery.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/05/20/biden-climate-risk-disclosure-banks-federal-reserve/
***********************************************Net Zero Watch calls for UK to follow Dutch example
Net Zero Watch is calling on UK ministers to follow the example of the Dutch government, which has announced the scrapping of cornerstone climate policies such as mandatory heat pump targets and the compulsory purchase of farmland.
The reversal is part of a populist backlash against environmentalist policies that has so far been more pronounced in parts of continental Europe than in the UK.
The desire of Britain’s politicians to ‘lead the world’ in the fight against climate change has led it to be early adopters of ‘ambitious’ climate targets, without thinking through their implications. Theresa May’s decision to introduce a legally-binding Net Zero target was debated for just 90 minutes in the House of Commons, but it was a decision that was followed by many other countries.
The Dutch experience shows that voters do not appreciate being on the receiving end of inflexible, compulsive policies that hit the poorest hardest. The delaying of the 2030 ban on petrol and diesel cars to 2035 and the delay by a year of the Clean Heat Market Mechanism, show that the Government has at least woken up to the risk it faces. But it will need to go much further to protect consumers.
Harry Wilkinson, head of policy at Net Zero Watch, said:
What has happened in the Netherlands is likely to be replicated across Europe. We have heard some encouraging language from Claire Coutinho, but she needs to go further to avoid a backlash.’
’I’ve never been against heat pumps, but it is absurd to mandate their use when they will be inappropriate in many homes. Green technologies must stand on their own merits, or the public will be left poorer.’
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/follow-dutch-net-zero-example
***************************************20 May, 2024
Recycled beer yeast can remove lead from water: breakthrough discovery
This is very good news. Lead is a very harmful pollutant and there was a notorious episode of it contaminating the water supply at Flint, Michigan in 2014
Today, according to the National Resources Defense Council, high levels of lead have been found in Baltimore, Detroit, Milwaukee, Newark, New York, Pittsburgh and Washington D.C. The Journal of the American Medical Association recently reported that almost 70 percent of children under six in Chicago are exposed to lead in their home tap water
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech have found a way to use recycled beer yeast to make water cleaner by removing lead, the schools announced.
The breakthrough builds on their 2021 research that a year’s worth of discarded beer from a sole brewery could treat Boston’s entire water supply.
A process called biosorption, where yeast can quickly suck in traces of lead along with other heavy metals from the water, was key to the project. Researchers packaged yeast inside special hydrogel capsules that created a de facto lead filter for water.
They’re easy to remove from water once it is drink-ready, scientists said.
“We have the hydrogel surrounding the free yeast that exists in the center, and this is porous enough to let water come in, interact with yeast as if they were freely moving in water, and then come out clean,” researcher Patricia Stathatou said of the study, now published in the journal “RSC Sustainability.”
“The fact that the yeast themselves are bio-based, benign and biodegradable is a significant advantage over traditional technologies.”
Next, the team is brewing up a concept to modify the faucet water in homes or for mass quantities at treatment plants.
“We think that there’s an interesting environmental justice aspect to this, especially when you start with something as low-cost and sustainable as yeast, which is essentially available anywhere,” researcher Devashish Gokhale said.
https://nypost.com/2024/05/15/lifestyle/recycled-beer-yeast-can-remove-lead-from-water-study/
***********************************************Another Glorious Climate Triumph
For years Canada’s Liberal administration under Justin Trudeau have been touting their carbon tax as the best thing since sliced bread or possibly bread itself: efficient, effective, and popular.
The last has become clearly untenable and the former was never a sensible claim since those economists who favour carbon taxes want them to be a substitute for a hoorah’s nest of regulations not an addition to it.
But now comes the sad news that it and its red-tape buddies didn’t even work. Even with economically devastating and sanctimonious COVID lockdowns, Canadian GHG emissions rose from an estimated 686 million tonnes in 2020 to 698 million in 2021 and then 708 million in 2022, the latest year for which the feds have numbers.
Like many politicians, Canada’s prime minister has a sublime confidence in his own capacity to achieve wonderful things that is not, how shall we put it, evidence-based. Long in the fang after eight years in office, he resists all suggestions that he step down, instead crowning himself the only man who can save Canada from the forces of evil who want to oppress women and gays while burning up the planet:
“Are we a country that will choose to move backwards in the fight against climate change? To move backwards in the rights of women and LGBT communities? Are we going to be a country that invests less in green growth? […] Because that’s all that the conservatives are proposing.”
Sunny ways indeed. But what if you are going backward in the fight against climate change anyway because your carbon tax, for all the hardships it imposes on citizens when heating their homes and filling their vehicles, isn’t cutting emissions even in company with all the regulations, subsidies and other heavy-handed interventions? Then what?
As the Toronto Sun noted tartly in an editorial, the latest tally:
“means Canada is moving further away from Trudeau’s target of reducing emissions to at least 40% below 2005 levels by 2030.”
It also means he was completely wrong about what his policies would do, are doing and, presumably, will do.
He’s not alone. In her ongoing retreat from reality, Trudeau’s deputy and also his finance minister, once a public intellectual world-famous in Canada, now makes fantasy claims like:
“the investments that Canada is attracting today are coming to Canada in large part because foreign investors recognize that we have a price on pollution and we have a strong climate plan and that means they want to be here and make stuff here in Canada and create good jobs here in Canada”.
In large part? Where did that one come from? Who ever called her up and said wow, your energy is artificially expensive, where do we sign? Yet on she goes, also insisting that:
“The only way for us as an open trade-exposed economy, to have an economic plan actually work, to actually be able to attract foreign investment, to actually be able to sell what we produce, is to have a strong and credible climate plan.”
Um and do you? She thinks so, approvingly quoting her colleague Jonathan Wilkinson, the Minister of Energy and Natural Resources (formerly of Environment and Climate Change and evidently nostalgic for it), that:
“Climate change is altering our environment in a myriad of harmful ways that disrupts our daily lives and the Canadian economy. In this context, the federal government has developed an ambitious climate plan that is driving real results.”
Yes. Falling productivity, stagnant real wages outside the public sector and… what’s this? Rising emissions. Those results are real, all right. Just not the ones you were looking for.
As we’ve said before, the “backlash” against climate policy is driven partly by the real pain it is delivering. But also by the conspicuous lack of gain. It’s meant to improve the weather but none of them think the weather is improving or is about to.
https://principia-scientific.com/another-glorious-climate-triumph/
******************************************Biden’s Green-Energy Price Shock
Do White House officials pay electric bills? They strangely keep saying the President’s climate agenda is reducing electric-power rates even as the cost of running your dishwasher is sky-rocketing, as illuminated by the Labor Department’s consumer-price index.
The nearby chart shows the average change in electricity prices over the last decade. Electric rates remained relatively flat in the seven years before President Biden took office, rising 5%. Thank cheap natural gas. Yet since January 2021 electricity prices have soared 29.4%—about 50% more than overall inflation.
By our calculation, electricity prices have increased 13 times faster under Mr. Biden than across the previous seven years. His policies aren’t entirely to blame. But most of it is a result of the left’s climate agenda, and the price increases will get worse.
Federal regulations, renewable subsidies and state green-energy mandates are forcing fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to retire prematurely. Solar and wind need backup from so-called peaker gas plants, usually at a hefty premium. During power shortages, spot prices can hit $10,000 per megawatt hour compared to $30 to $60 on a normal basis.
State net-metering programs also subsidize people with solar panels for excess power they remit to the grid. People without solar then pay more for the grid’s fixed costs, which are also growing as more renewables are added. In California an average customer without solar pays 10% to 20% more to subsidize solar.
The costs of hardening the grid to support the government’s green energy transition are also increasing, including new high-voltage transmission lines, power transformers and battery storage. The Biden Administration’s electric-truck mandate alone will cost utilities $370 billion to upgrade their networks. Utilities will pass on their increasing costs to customers over time.
Higher interest rates are also increasing the cost of new green-energy projects. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) tax credits can offset up to 50% of a project’s cost, but offshore wind developers say this isn’t enough and are demanding to be paid higher rates—often four times more than natural gas plants.
By driving more baseload power plants out of business, IRA subsidies will increase electric bills even more. Businesses pass on their higher energy costs to customers. U.S. manufacturers will become less competitive, which is why some Members of Congress of both parties are pushing for a carbon tariff. Watch as the prices for cars and appliances rise.
The Inflation Reduction Act may be the biggest legislative misnomer of all time. Our friends on the left wonder why Americans are in a sour mood about the economy. Perhaps they all have solar panels.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/opinion-biden-s-green-energy-price-shock/ar-BB1ltv7N
********************************************Australian court upholds coal mine approvals. Defies Global warming argument
The Federal Court has upheld Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek's refusal to assess the climate impacts of coal mine expansions at Narrabri and Mount Pleasant near Muswellbrook.
The Environment Council of Central Queensland took Ms Plibersek and Narrabri Coal Operations (a subsidiary of Whitehaven Coal) and MACH Energy to court for failing to protect the environment from climate harm resulting from new coal and gas projects.
It had argued the minister's refusal to act on the climate risks of the mining expansions was irrational, illogical and unlawful.
The mining companies joined Ms Plibersek in court to defend the case.
The court found on Thursday that, under existing environment laws, the minister was not legally required to assess risk to the environment from the climate harm of the coal mine expansions.
"We are devastated and heartbroken by today's decision," Ashleigh Wyles from the Environment Council of Central Queensland said.
"We're afraid this decision will open the floodgates for the Minister to approve dozens of new goal and gas projects currently on her desk.
"Instead of standing up to fossil fuel companies, our Environment Minister is standing with them in court, defending her refusal to act on the climate harm of new coal and gas mines."
The minister employed the "market substitution" argument or "drug-dealers defence" to defend her decisions.
But the ECoCeQ argued this was dangerous logic because it was out of step with the law, with science and with public expectations.
"Our client is dismayed that under law as it currently stands, it is somehow not the role of the Environment Minister to protect our environment from the climate harm of new coal and gas mines," Environment Justice Australia co-chief executive Elizabeth McKinnon said.
"This judgement today does not change the science. What it does show is that Australia's environment laws are utterly broken.
"Our laws are failing to keep up with the climate crisis. They are failing to protect the iconic places, plants and animals of this country from the devastation of climate change."
***************************************
19 May, 2024
Researchers warn climate change is likely to aggravate brain conditions
The source article:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laneur/article/PIIS1474-4422(24)00087-5/fulltext
Cripes! I was born and bred in the tropics as were all 4 of my grandparents. I must have been walking around amid a herd of morons!More seriously, the writers had NO data on global warming and no global data of any kind. All they showed was that some illnesses are heat sensitive to an unspecified degree within an unspecified range on some occasions in some localities.
Their work was in fact a classic example of a Gish gallop. They also showed no awareness of the need for an experiment-wise error-rate approach to significance testing. Under something like a Bonferroni correction, ALL of their findings would be reduced to a nullity
Researchers warn climate change is likely to aggravate brain conditions
Climate change, and its effects on weather patterns and adverse weather events, is likely to negatively affect the health of people with brain conditions, researchers have warned.
The scientists argue that in order to preserve the health of people with neurological conditions, including Alzheimer’s and stroke, there is an urgent need to understand how climate change affects them.
As an example, they say that higher temperatures through the night can disrupt sleep, which could have a negative effect on some brain conditions.
There is clear evidence for an impact of the climate on some brain conditions, especially stroke and infections of the nervous system
Following a review of 332 papers published across the world between 1968 and 2023, the team, led by Professor Sanjay Sisodiya of UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology, said they expect the scale of the potential effects of climate change on neurological diseases to be substantial.
Professor Sisodiya, who is also director of genomics at the Epilepsy Society and a founding member of Epilepsy Climate Change, said: “There is clear evidence for an impact of the climate on some brain conditions, especially stroke and infections of the nervous system.
“The climatic variation that was shown to have an effect on brain diseases included extremes of temperature (both low and high), and greater temperature variation throughout the course of day – especially when these measures were seasonally unusual.
“Nighttime temperatures may be particularly important, as higher temperatures through the night can disrupt sleep.
“Poor sleep is known to aggravate a number of brain conditions.”
The researchers considered 19 different nervous system conditions, chosen on the basis of the Global Burden of Disease 2016 study, including stroke, migraine, Alzheimer’s, meningitis, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis.
They also analysed the impact of climate change on several serious but common psychiatric disorders including anxiety, depression and schizophrenia.
According to the findings, there was an increase in hospital admissions, disability or death as a result of a stroke in higher ambient temperatures or heatwaves.
The researchers also suggest that people with dementia are susceptible to harm from extremes of temperature and weather events such as flooding or wildfires, as their condition can impact their ability to adapt behaviour to environmental changes.
Writing in The Lancet Neurology, the researchers say: “Reduced awareness of risk is combined with a diminished capacity to seek help or to mitigate potential harm, such as by drinking more in hot weather or by adjusting clothing.
“This susceptibility is compounded by frailty, multimorbidity and psychotropic medications.
“Accordingly, greater temperature variation, hotter days and heatwaves lead to increased dementia-associated hospital admissions and mortality.”
The researchers say it is important to ensure that research is up to date and considers not only the present state of climate change but also the future.
Professor Sisodiya added: “The whole concept of climate anxiety is an added, potentially weighty, influence: many brain conditions are associated with higher risk of psychiatric disorders, including anxiety, and such multimorbidities can further complicate impacts of climate change and the adaptations necessary to preserve health.
“But there are actions we can and should take now.”
Funded by the Epilepsy Society and the National Brain Appeal Innovation Fund, the research is being published ahead of The Hot Brain 2: climate change and brain health event, which is led by Professor Sisodiya and jointly organised by UCL and The Lancet Neurology
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/ucl-b2545868.html
*******************************************Northern parts of Australia to suffer from ‘lethal heat’ in coming decades
This is just opinion. They have no data on temperatures in Northern Australia
Australia’s north will be “unliveable” in the coming decades because the heat and humidity will be so intense that it will be deadly for humans, experts have warned.
They say the lethal heat will start emerging at certain times of the year, making it impossible for humans to be outdoors for more than six hours.
Climate scientist Bill Hare said areas such as Broome and Katherine, as well as parts of Asia and Africa, would soon be unliveable if the temperature increased by just 1.5 degrees.
“We are already seeing small periods of lethal heat in South Asia, West Asia and South East Asia where there have already been reports of mortality occurring.
“It is already getting toward the limit of human liveability.”
Mr Hare is chief executive and senior scientist with Climate Analytics – a global climate science and policy institute supporting climate action aligned to the 1.5C warming limit.
In 2003, a study published in the scientific journal Comptes Rendus Biologies found more than 70,000 people died in Europe from lethal heat.
It was the hottest summer recorded in Europe since 1540, which lead to drought, food shortages and tens of thousands of people dying.
Mr Hare said for cities like Perth, which is currently experiencing its longest period of dry heat and no rain, scientists did not expect to see a lethal combination of humidity and heat in the next 25 years, but northern parts of Australia would.
He said some areas in the Kimberley region had already felt small bursts of lethal heat, killing cattle and native animals.
“It will happen slowly and gradually, the weather will become really extreme and it will get worse and worse,” Mr Hare said.
“There is only one way to limit this damage, but you won’t eliminate it, people will need to adapt to it.”
Mr Hare said carbon emissions needed to reduce by 50 per cent in the next decade and Australia needed to reach net zero by 2050.
“In the last 10 years, the largest increase in carbon dioxide and global warming came from fossil fuel emissions,” he said.
“Coal is being phased out, and the same thing needs to apply to gas, it should already be reducing.
“The federal government needs to step off supporting gas and go full throttle on supporting renewables.
****************************************
EPA's lead pipe fix sent about $3 billion to states based on unverified data
The Environmental Protection Agency distributed about $3 billion to states last year to replace harmful lead pipes based on unverified data, according to an agency inspector general's memo, likely meaning some states got too much money and others got too little.
Investigators found two states had submitted inaccurate data, the memo released Wednesday said. It didn't name the states. The EPA has since made changes, but the inspector general said the agency could do more.
“Insufficient internal controls for verifying data led to allotments that did not represent the needs of each state, and if left unaddressed, the Agency runs the risk of using unreliable data for future” infrastructure spending, said EPA Inspector General Sean W. O’Donnell.
The agency has said it will release new information on lead service lines projections later this summer. The EPA did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provided $15 billion to find and replace lead pipes over five years. These pipes are especially common in the Midwest and Northeast and are typically found in older homes. Lead can reduce IQ scores in children and stunt their development. It is also linked to higher blood pressure in adults.
To distribute funds based on how many lead pipes states had, the EPA asked for estimates from states and utilities. Then, in April 2023, the agency announced the results — there are about 9.2 million lead pipes nationwide — and adjusted its funding formula.
Tom Neltner, national director with Unleaded Kids, said two states — Texas and Florida — had much higher totals than expected in those estimates. Florida ultimately received the most funding of any state in 2023: $254.8 million after an initial estimate of nearly 1.2 million lead pipes.
“By submitting inflated information, it takes money away from states that really need it,” he said.
Texas and Florida didn't immediately respond to messages left with their governor's offices and Florida's Department of Environmental Quality.
The Biden administration has prioritized delivering safe drinking water to everyone. Earlier this year, the EPA proposed a rule that would require most cities and towns to replace all their lead pipes within a decade. It has also put limits on so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water.
Republicans have repeatedly attacked the Biden administration’s spending on climate and environmental priorities as a handout to left-wing causes without enough accountability.
The EPA’s office of inspector general is in the middle of evaluating federal funding for lead pipe replacement, and had been in contact with agency officials earlier about some of their concerns. The inspector general expects to release a final report in the fall when it will identify each states' inaccuracies.
The inspector general found a water provider in one state sent bad information to the agency and “adjustments made by another state” were also submitted.
Even before the inspector general’s memo was released, some states had already complained to the EPA that its funding decisions weren’t fair.
“We have serious concerns about the quality of the data upon which EPA relied,” a February letter to the EPA from Massachusetts officials said.
In early May, the EPA adjusted its allocation of funds for 2024, which is based on some new information it received from utilities. Funding for Texas dropped the most; its $146.2 million was cut by about $117.6 million. Florida had the second-biggest reduction, cut by $26.1 million. Eight other states or territories saw smaller reductions.
Nineteen states got more money, led by Minnesota with $48.7 million more and New Jersey's $40.1 million more.
Neltner said EPA deserves credit for collecting additional information to improve the accuracy of the funding granted.
The $15 billion is only a fraction of the total amount needed to replace all of the country’s lead pipes. Erik Olson, a health and food expert at the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, said inflated estimates by some states can direct a lot of money to the wrong place.
“I’ll just say it is suspicious,” he said.
Olson said it's the obligation of water utilities and states to submit accurate information. But EPA deserves some blame, too, “for not verifying some of these numbers," he said.
When the agency started distributing money, some states like Michigan had a long list of projects they wanted to fund. Others aren't so far along and must first spend the money on inventories to find their lead pipes. A small number of states even declined funding in the first year it was offered.
If states don’t spend all of their money, it gets reallocated to states that need it more.
Neltner worries that if states receive more money than they need, they'll spend it on expensive lead pipe inventories, not replacement efforts.
John Rumpler, clean water director with environmental group Environment America, said the important question is how well states are using the money they are given to replace lead pipes.
“Even if all of this money was perfectly allocated,” he said. “It would not remove all the lead pipes.”
https://apnews.com/article/water-lead-pipes-epa-florida-texas-2b725f2ef51bce25c144826c882af970
****************************************************Australia: Huge complexities and costs behind the CO2 allergy
The global warming hoax has much to answer for
This week’s news that energy networks plan to charge households to export excess solar energy to the grid in the middle of the day will affect the two men in very different ways.
In a dynamic mirrored by the nation at large, Horsley is likely to benefit from the new order, while Seton is likely to lose out. Meanwhile, the distributors and the likes of St Vincent de Paul Society say the move protects renters and low-income households without solar.
Sydneysider Nic Seton has solar panels on his roof and is worried about Ausgrid’s new network charge.
Sydneysider Nic Seton has solar panels on his roof and is worried about Ausgrid’s new network charge.CREDIT:LOUIE DOUVIS
It was enabled by a national rule change in August 2021. Australian Energy Market Commission chair Anna Collyer, whose organisation made the decision, says it allows distributors to recoup the cost of paying for upgrades to the grid to remove bottlenecks and allow more solar to be exported.
“A ‘do nothing’ approach would have led to a worse outcome for all,” Collyer says. “There would have been increasing instances where customers are limited in their level of exports or not allowed to export at all.”
Australia leads the world in rooftop solar: the Clean Energy Council estimates it represents 11.2 per cent of the national energy supply.
It’s a great success story that opens up myriad opportunities for the transition to a decarbonised economy, but experts say it also brings challenges with managing grid stability and who should pay for that.
At the heart of the problem is a demand curve that looks like a duck, even if it doesn’t walk and quack like one. Figures from the Australian Energy Market Operator show energy demand starts off neutral in the early morning, plummets during the middle of the day when consumers are either not at home or using their own solar, and then peaks in the evening when people get home and turn on their devices and lights.
Grattan’s director of the energy program, Tony Wood, says: “The dramatic growth in solar PV is breaking the electricity duck’s back. Flattening the load is likely to restore it to good health.”
This is at the heart of the changes announced this week by the three NSW energy distributors – Ausgrid, Essential Energy and Endeavour Energy. The NSW pricing structure was approved by the Australian Energy Regulator last month, and all three companies said it was done after extensive consultation with customers.
Rob Amphlett Lewis, group executive distributed services at Sydney’s main distributor Ausgrid, says: “We want to move as much of our energy [usage] into the middle of the day when we’ve got all of this generation happening, and that effectively squashes the duck.”
The solar duck is a national problem, and NSW is merely at the vanguard of a shift that is likely to come to other states as well. SA Power Networks was one of the proponents of the national rule change in 2021 necessary to bring in the charges and will be able to introduce them in the next AER pricing review in 2025, along with Queensland. Victoria’s next AER cycle is in 2026.
The effect is that the distribution networks, which own the poles and wires but are separate entities from the electricity retailers, will allow a threshold of free exports during the day and charge a penalty beyond that while also providing a reward for energy exports in the evening. The distributors, which have geographic monopolies, have different pricing structures, and the retailers can choose how to package it to customers.
Solar households will still enjoy reduced bills from using their own energy and will still be paid feed-in tariffs from retailers based on wholesale electricity prices. The overall cost is expected to be low for the average customer.
Seton has a modest 4.5-kilowatt battery on the roof of his townhouse in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Newtown, where he lives with his partner and two children. About six years ago, the family paid about $6000 after rebates and has enjoyed large savings on their electricity bills.
He has no control over the fact that the solar panels only work when the sun is shining, cannot justify the cost of a home battery at upwards of $9000, and has already tried to shift his energy usage to the middle of the day as much as possible.
Meanwhile, at the seven-person Horsley household in leafy Wahroonga on the north shore, there is a possibility the family can make money from the situation.
Peter Horsley has spent tens of thousands of dollars on 17 kilowatts of solar panels and three batteries, not including the cost of two electric cars.
He can charge his batteries during the day from the solar panels and then sell electricity back at higher prices in the evening. With his set-up (Tesla battery and an app from his retailer Amber Electric), Horsley has set this up as a default and can also manually override it when needed, for example, if there is a blackout.
He can even charge his batteries from the grid rather than his solar panels. “The prices can go negative during the day as well, so there have even been cases where we’ve been paid to fill up our batteries and take energy off the grid,” Horsley says.
He has already participated in an Ausgrid trial for two-way pricing, which offered generous evening feed-in tariffs but is not sure what the net effect will be in the future. Despite this, he is confident he won’t be worse off and adds that he does not support the changes, mainly because he believes in solar as a climate change solution and is worried it will slow uptake.
Energy distributors, backed by advocates such as the St Vincent de Paul Society, the Australian Council of Social Service and the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, say that it is about equity: the networks need to find the money to upgrade the grid to absorb the new solar energy being generated, and they don’t want the poorer non-solar households to bear the entire cost.
Seton, who runs Parents for Climate, says it’s pitting homes without solar and their interests against homes with solar. The better way to address equity is to help low-income households and renters get solar and to help solar households buy batteries.
He is frustrated there is a mandatory levy, however small, on solar households who have tried to contribute to the renewable energy transition.
“At the end of the day for some people, it’s still one more brick in the wall in that cost-of-living crisis,” Seton says.
Campaign groups such as Solar Citizens have described the new charge as a “sun tax” and warned it could put people off buying solar panels, while Rewiring Australia says it’s about the large-scale incumbents “defending their turf” against households getting in on the game.
There are also market analysts, such as Tristan Edis, a green energy and carbon markets economist with Green Energy Markets, who say it is the wrong approach.
Edis says bluntly that “the rule change was bullshit” and the regulators were “snowed” by the energy distributors. “They’ve just given them the keys to a new revenue stream through this rule change, even though there’s not proper evidence here.”
He points to UNSW research from 2020 that suggests so-called solar traffic jams are largely the result of distributors failing to manage voltage, a problem that occurs during the evening peak as well as by day.
Distributors do not effectively measure voltage spikes from solar households anywhere except Victoria, Edis says, so they had not proven the case that solar households were causing the problem.
In Victoria, the government had regulated the distributors to lower voltage, and this had occurred despite high solar penetration. As a result, he predicts that Victorian distributors will not need to introduce two-way pricing in their next AER round in 2026.
But Amphlett Lewis says the UNSW research shows the various ways to manage voltage, and the extensive consultation that Ausgrid and the other distributors carried out, determined that two-way pricing was the best model.
Rewiring Australia chief executive Saul Griffith says there is a bigger picture being lost. “A lot of people are not at home during the day when their house is generating the most electricity,” Griffith says. “In the best of all worlds, the excess electricity they’re making will charge the electric vehicles that are going to be prolific in this country … and the biggest battery in Australia will be our cars.”
The networks are keen on the vehicle-to-grid charging that Griffith is advocating. Essential Energy chief operating officer Luke Jenner says the network “is optimistic about the opportunities electric vehicle charging and vehicle-to-grid charging can offer consumers” and, while it already offers two-way charging for electric vehicles, it is currently testing and developing infrastructure to develop it further.
Home batteries cost from $9000 to $15,000 and the federal budget did not provide any funding to help households buy batteries. Some schemes exist in Victoria and Queensland, while the NSW government will have more to say on this in its consumer energy strategy due in the coming months.
Community batteries are another solution, often touted by the networks themselves, as they can build and own them, often with government subsidies. Ausgrid has five across Sydney and the Central Coast, Endeavour Energy has partnered with Origin Energy for community batteries in western Sydney and Shell Cove in the Illawarra, and Essential Energy says it owns and is developing several energy storage solutions.
Ausgrid’s Amphlett Lewis says both household and community batteries have their place, but “shared batteries will have a big role to play because they’re more cost-effective than behind-the-meter batteries”.
Tristan Edis disputes this, though, saying it’s better to support individual households in getting their own batteries because distributors have a profit motive and a monopoly business structure. That means they are wasteful and do not act in the best interests of consumers, while the locations of community batteries are often chosen “based on where politicians want to cut a ribbon.”
St Vincent de Paul Society’s executive manager of policy and research, Gavin Dufty, says batteries are expensive, but he advocates helping households to shift their usage of appliances, such as increased use of timers so loads of dishes and laundry can be done during the day even if no one is home.
He supports the policy: “It’s putting in the right foundations if we’re going to electrify everything and get to net zero, which we want.“
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16 May, 2024
Climate “Reparations” Numbers Are Rigged
What a lot of stupidity. Poor nations are poor because of their foolish economic policies, nothing else
Nobel Prize–winning economist Esther Duflo thinks rich countries should pay poor countries $500 billion in compensation each year for climate-change damages. It is our “moral debt.” She proposes an international 2-percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich and an increase in the global minimum corporate tax rate to fund this $500 billion transfer.
You and I may be shocked by such a suggestion but don’t worry: “It’s really necessary. And it’s reasonable. It’s not that hard.” Only someone in an elite, progressive bubble could say something like that. Let’s check her reasoning.
Duflo claims that climate change creates costs, specifically through “excess” deaths due to excessive heat. Poorer countries from the global south near the equator will see more days of extreme heat, and so will see a disproportionate increase in excess deaths.
Other economists translated those deaths into an externality cost of $37 per ton of CO2. Multiply that by the roughly fourteen billion tons of CO2 emitted by the US and Europe and voila, wealthy countries generate $500 billion in externality costs per year.
She proposes paying for this by increasing the global minimum corporate tax rate from 15 percent to 18 percent and introducing an international 2-percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich, which she defines as the 3000 richest billionaires. We can’t go into the many problems and obstacles to such funding mechanisms here — suffice it to say such ideas will be nearly impossible to implement.
But Duflo’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, besides missing the bigger picture, are so speculative as to require playing make-believe. Let’s play along for a moment to see why. We’ll start by reverse-engineering her $500 billion number into a measure of harm.
Regulatory agencies and insurance companies use the concepts of “statistical value of life” or the “statistical value of a life-year” to do cost-benefit analysis on risk and the monetary value of life. These concepts are slippery, however, and calculated in a variety of ways with a wide range of estimates.
To keep things simple, let’s assume that the value of one life-year is $200,000. The $500 billion number proposed by Duflo suggests that the cost imposed by wealthy countries burning fossil fuels is the loss of roughly 2.5 million life-year” in poor countries per year.
That sounds like a staggering number!
But what about the benefits that have accrued to developing countries from activities that generate CO2 emissions? Important advances in medicine, such as antibiotics and vaccines, were developed in modern industrialized countries. So, too, were refrigeration, cars, the internet, smart phones, radar; modern agricultural methods with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers; improvements in plumbing, building materials, manufacturing, and much more. “Polluting” activities in industrialized countries improved nutrition and safety around the world. These advances, and many others, significantly increased people’s life expectancies — especially in poor countries.
Surely the value of these improvements should weight the opposite side of the scale from the expected harm of climate change — especially since the crusade against fossil fuels and carbon emissions will assuredly slow economic growth and innovation. Let’s consider the case of India for a moment.
Life expectancy in India has basically doubled from about 35 years in 1950 to about 70 years in 2024. If you consider that India has just over a billion people living in it, modern technology developed by rich CO2-emitting countries has added 35 billion life-years in India alone.
Translating life-years back into dollars, 35 billion life-years times $200,000 per life-year means that the benefits from greater life expectancy in India over the past 75 years is the equivalent of $7 quadrillion dollars — or in annualized terms, an annual benefit of about $93 trillion dollars. In other words, the benefits to India alone are over a hundred times larger than Duflo’s estimate of costs!
Nor is India cherry-picked. China has a similar story with life expectancy rising from 43.45 years to 77.64 years. Similar improvements in life expectancy occur across the global south.
https://www.aier.org/article/climate-reparations-are-rigged/
*************************************************More US Youngsters Are Turning Away From Climate Alarmism
A recent Monmouth University poll highlights a decline in the American public’s sense of urgency about ‘climate change’, especially among younger adults
While 73 percent still believe ‘climate change’ is happening, only half now see it as a very serious problem.
This decline is most pronounced among the younger demographic, with only 50 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds viewing it as a very serious issue, down from 67 percent in 2021.
This shift could show a growing skepticism and a reprioritization of immediate concerns such as economic pressures.
The poll also notes a decrease in support for government action on ‘climate change’, with 59 percent in favor of more federal intervention, a drop from past years.
This waning support coincides with a diminished perception of ‘climate change’ as an urgent crisis.
Given the evolution of climate science, it’s critical to distinguish between substantive metrics and those used primarily to push a narrative of impending catastrophe.
For instance, while metrics like the Earth Energy Imbalance and various climate indices are valuable for understanding changes in the climate system, they come with significant uncertainties.
These uncertainties often overlap with the claimed magnitude of the changes, which could lead to overestimations of the impact.
Furthermore, the narrative that supports drastic climate action often overlooks the substantial improvements in human resilience to climate-related disasters over the past century.
Despite a significant increase in global population and industrial activity, the proportion of climate-related deaths has decreased dramatically, indicating enhanced adaptability and mitigation capabilities.
The data presented below provides a compelling backdrop to the recent Monmouth University poll findings regarding ‘climate change’ urgency.
The infographic highlights that there has been no significant increase in the number of hydrological, meteorological, and climatological disasters since 2000, no substantial rise in deaths from these disasters, and no significant uptick in their economic cost as a percentage of global GDP.
This stable trend suggests that the decrease in perceived urgency and importance among the American public, especially younger adults, may be influenced by an observable lack of escalation in the direct impacts of climate change.
Such data can lead to skepticism or reduced concern, aligning with the poll’s finding that fewer people now see ‘climate change’ as a very serious problem. This reinforces the view that while ‘climate change’ is acknowledged, the catastrophic consequences often highlighted in media and political rhetoric may not resonate with the empirical evidence observed over the past two decades.
When placed in the broader context, this polling data suggests a possible realignment of public opinion towards a more measured and data-driven approach to climate policy.
It highlights the importance of focusing on direct human and economic impacts rather than abstract indices that may not reliably indicate imminent disaster.
As public sentiment shifts, it might be time to reassess how we discuss and prioritize ‘climate change’ in policy debates, ensuring that actions are proportionate to the actual, measurable impacts rather than driven by alarmist narratives.
https://principia-scientific.com/more-us-youngsters-are-turning-away-from-climate-alarmism/
************************************************Those Endangered Polar Bears That Are Still Thriving
Polar bears have been very disappointing to Warmists. Odd that we now hear little about them. They are refusing to vanish
Remember the polar bears? Those cute, cuddly, incredibly dangerous apex predator icons of the climate emergency that once roamed the frozen wastes of the far north until climate change wiped them all out?
Well, in the late 1960s there were an estimated 12,000 polar bears spread out around the Arctic.
But with disappearing sea ice causing the bears not to be able to feed in the spring and summer, numbers have plunged to… 32,000. Whoa, wait a minute there….
In her report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, zoologist and polar bear expert Susan Crockford points out that the “official” estimate from the Polar Bear Study Group is 26,000, but it was last produced in 2015 and hasn’t been updated since then.
Perhaps they fear good news… and if so rightly because new regional surveys since 2015 have added thousands to the estimated sub-populations and by her reckoning the current population is likely around 32,000.
Note that among its other virtues, Crockford’s paper shows error bars rather than implying more certainty than is justified.
But even if the actual number is less than 32,000, and of course it could also be more, Crockford points out that back in 2007 the US Geological Survey forecast the polar bear population would fall by two-thirds to about 7,500 by now, due to disappearing sea ice, due to you wanting to fly to your holiday destination.
It was a spectacularly wrong forecast which at the time inspired a now-apparently defunct activist group called Plane Stupid to make a plain stupid video showing polar bears falling from the sky to their deaths on a city street below as a “J’accuse” against selfish polar bear killers who travel by ‘fossil fuel’-powered jets.
But if ‘climate change’ is what drives polar bear population change then hurray for ‘climate change’ because the polar bear numbers are not #Gettingworse, they’re getting better.
https://principia-scientific.com/those-endangered-polar-bears-that-are-still-thriving/
************************************************Australia: Victoria stil refusing to develop much needed gas
Energy minister Chris Bowen deserves high praise for telling Australia the politically incorrect truth – that we need gas to support our accelerated roll out of renewables.
It could not have been easy for Bowen to tell the truth because it contradicted his previous statements and the “we need gas” truth does not accord with the view of many in the cabinet and the ALP supporter base.
As my regular readers know, over the years Bowen and I have often had different views. In Australia, it is rare for a minister to reverse previous statements.
Accordingly, Bowen rises dramatically in my estimation, and the nation could do with more federal and state ministers with that sort of courage.
Australia’s new gas policy means both the government and opposition have similar gas policies, and that suddenly puts Victoria in a position where it is holding the east coast of Australia to ransom by stopping development of its immense low cost onshore no fracking gas reserves.
Fascinatingly, the last time Victoria held the nation to ransom over gas was in the 1960s, soon after gas was discovered in Bass Strait. The then Premier, the late Henry Bolte, wanted to keep the gas for Victorians and to use cheap, reliable energy to boost industry in the state.
It worked and Victoria got a great boost, but eventually the gas was shared with NSW and other states, and we have an east coast pipeline grid.
It is time for Canberra to get much tougher with the delinquent Victorian state, which keeps crying poor when it in fact is not using its enormous riches.
If Victorians wants higher unreliable energy prices, I guess that’s their business, but there is no reason why the existing pipelines should not be used to send Victorian gas to NSW and Queensland who understand the value of gas to lower emissions while keeping reliable energy prices low.
Victoria can encourage its industry and people to follow its energy and go north.
Meanwhile, Victoria can still benefit from is the remarkable attributes of its gas, which is dissolved in deep water. In Queensland, the water that is produced with gas is not suitable to grow crops but the water that contains Victoria’s gas needs very little if any treatment to be used to grow carbon absorbing plants and to revolutionise parts of Victoria’s agriculture, including making it drought proof.
Bowen’s current energy policy still insists that nuclear is too expensive. It is certainly a lot more expensive than a Latrobe Valley gas fired power from the incredibly low-cost Victorian gas. But BHP has shown that Canadian nuclear power is much cheaper than current Australian power costs. .
By using Victoria’s low carbon gas not only can we remove coal from the power equation but suddenly by not rushing nuclear we can watch a nuclear revolution taking place that is led by China.
The world’s second-largest economy now operates nuclear submarines using molten salt cooled thorium, and the same fuel is being used in container ships and also new power stations. It looks to be the future if nuclear, so it makes sense to wait.
My regular readers know the detail of Victorian gas and the fact that former Premier Daniel Andrews gave a carefully selected committee $42m with the instruction to look for gas on shore in Victoria, but that instruction carried a strict caveat – they were forbidden to look where one of the world’s leading gas reserve estimators, MHA Petroleum Consultants, (now part of the giant Sproule group) had calculated Victoria gas reserves totalled 4.996 trillion cubic feet of gas.
That’s some 60 per cent of the last 50 years of Bass Strait production. Better still there was a “high” estimate of reserves at 12.6234 TCF which would make the Victorian reserves second only to the North West Shelf. Lakes Oil also has onshore gas, and its reserves were also in forbidden territory.
The Andrews Committee pocketed the money and dutifully reported Victoria has no on shore gas. Publication of the MHA calculated reserves was removed from government web sites.
The gas was first discovered when Victorian brown coal fields were being mapped in the decades leading up to the 1950s. Decades later, with Bass Strait running down, Exxon in Houston began researching this very deep gas that is dissolved in water and sent the data to MHA.
The first proposal to develop the gas included Esso and BlueScope in the consortium and was put to the then Coalition Premier Denis Napthine in 2014. Napthine incorrectly thought it involved fracking and would hurt farmers, so rejected it prior to the election he lost.
That first proposal emphasised that further wells (about six) must be drilled to make sure that production and permeability will duplicate the first test wells. But Exxon were so confident that they planned to spend $200m (in 2014) on the project, arranged for BlueScope and other major gas users to pencil intent contracts and signed six agreements with local landholders who would benefit from the development.
In the decade that followed Andrews and his energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio, must have known that fracking was not required and because the gas was on the national pipeline and next to the Exxon treatment plant the costs were very low. As a result, they had to be able to deny its existence to keep green seats.
To get Victoria to comply with national policy may require punishment. And also required, is a local media that is not engulfed by Victorian government propaganda.
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15 May, 2024
Gas Stove Fearmongering Heats Up
The anti-fossil fuel lobby, in its zealousness, overlooks the undeniable benefits of gas stoves. These appliances, powered by one of the most cost-effective sources of energy in the world, have played a significant role in lifting much of the world out of abject poverty.
But it is fossil fuel, so it must be bad.
However, since Americans have been using gas stoves for generations, and because gas stoves are in many ways superior to electric stoves when it comes to cooking, merely proclaiming that gas is bad will not convince Americans to stop buying and using them.
With the Biden administration getting caught trying to underhandedly ban gas stoves, a move that a majority of Americans objected to, the anti-fossil fuel lobby began with demonizing gas stoves as a threat to people’s health. Doubling down on the “science” is the only way to make “progress.”
In that vein, The Washington Post recently ran a story titled “Gas stoves spread harmful pollution beyond the kitchen, study finds..” The subhead pushed the fearmongering even further, stating, “A study finds that the nitrogen dioxide emitted from stoves impacts the entire home, in some cases hours after the stove was turned off.”
The article notes that the study was conducted by researchers at Stanford University, which is an apparent attempt to suggest that this is actual scientific stuff here. The article then notes the study’s apparently startling claim “that long-term exposure to the staple kitchen appliance could be responsible for 50,000 current pediatric asthma cases from nitrogen dioxide.”
That’s right. Gas stoves are giving children asthma.
Furthermore, because of this woke world we are living in, those most negatively impacted by these dangerous gas stoves are poor minority kids. According to the study, “Indigenous, Alaska Native, Hispanic and Black households, as well as low-income households, experience the highest exposure to nitrogen dioxide from gas and propane from cooking.” Why do researchers think minorities are so inferior that they can’t stave off the danger as well?
The study’s principal researcher, Rob Jackson, claims, “It compounds the injustice of air pollution: Poorer people, and often minority communities, breathe dirtier air outdoors all the time. And it turns out they also breathe dirtier air indoors.” He adds, “And it’s not fair.”
We’re not sure how this is “not fair” because many white people and wealthy people also use gas stoves in their homes. It appears that Jackson is basing his comment on the average size of people’s homes, implying that those with smaller homes are poor minorities.
Tellingly, midway into the article, there is a qualifier that serves to undercut the fearmongering title of the story. The article quotes American Gas Association President and CEO Karen Harbert, who observes, “Despite the impressive names on this study, the data presented here clearly does not support any linkages between gas stoves and childhood asthma or adult mortality.” She adds, “The two major cited studies used to underpin the Stanford analysis directly contradict the conclusions they have presented. In short, the interpretation of results … are misleading and unsupported.”
Seeming to tacitly agree with Harbert that this study is basically bunk, the article notes the response of Michael Johnson, the technical director at Berkeley Air Monitoring Group: “It’s not that I don’t think there are health impacts from using gas stoves,” says Johnson. “There almost certainly are. But, trying to estimate what those health impacts are would need some type of randomized controlled trial.”
In other words, this study is effectively meaningless. It’s suitable only for propagating anti-gas stove propaganda. Besides, the government should focus on more pressing problems, such as securing the southern border. However, due to Washington’s bloated bureaucracy, Americans are subject to countless needless regulations that only infringe on our liberty.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/106816-gas-stove-fearmongering-heats-up-2024-05-15
**********************************************Biden’s EV Tariffs Are a Play for Michigan
Joe Biden wants all Americans to drive electric vehicles by 2050. This is part of his party’s extremist climate agenda, which is also apparently the motive behind Biden’s anti-fossil fuel agenda.
The trouble is that while EV technology has come a long way, thanks in large part to Elon Musk and Tesla, EVs aren’t cheap. Furthermore, their limited range, their relatively long recharging time, and the lack of a widespread charging network make them impractical for most Americans.
While EV sales have been rising over the last few years, they still only made up 9% of all vehicles sold in the U.S. last year. Even with Uncle Sam putting his thumb on the scales in the form of $7,500 in tax credits, the average price of a new EV in the U.S. is well over $50,000. Compare that to the median after-tax household income of $64,240, and you get a good idea why EVs remain little other than a luxury accessory for those with more disposable income.
Biden’s problem is that there are indeed more affordable EVs on the market, but they happen to be made in China. China has been looking to flood the U.S. market with lower-cost EVs that would undercut U.S. auto manufacturers — or at least undercut Biden’s agenda for developing all-American-made EVs. For Biden’s green agenda to work, he has heavily invested American tax dollars into developing green tech in the U.S.
In January, Tesla’s Musk warned, “If there are not trade barriers established, [China] will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.”
The most expensive component of EVs is the battery, and China dominates the industry. But with the promise of more government funding, companies in six states are investing in the EV battery industry with the hope of eventually competing with China. Incidentally, one of those states is Michigan, a swing state that Biden can ill afford to lose if he is to win reelection. The United Auto Workers, which has a heavy presence in Michigan, endorsed Biden earlier this year, and he has to deliver the goods.
In that light, the Biden administration announced it was looking to embrace one of Donald Trump’s more criticized policies — tariffs. Trump raised tariffs against China over our nations’ glaring trade imbalance. Now, with Biden desperately seeking to keep Chinese-made EVs out of the U.S., his administration is planning to soon slap a 100% tariff on Chinese-made cars. That’s up from the current 25% tariff.
While protecting American auto manufacturers from China is not a bad thing, the reason that car prices keep rising in the U.S. is in large part due to Biden’s effective EV mandate via emissions regulations. Instead of supporting the free market and allowing Americans to make the best decisions for their needs, Biden is trying to force them into buying something they don’t want — something that will cost them more of their hard-earned dollars, all in the furtherance of a radical climate agenda.
Whenever politicians manipulate the market by trying to pick winners and losers, it negatively affects the American consumer, often hurting the poorest Americans the most. Biden’s economic policies have only made everything more expensive. And far from making EVs more affordable for consumers, Biden’s proposed tariffs will have the opposite effect. Consumers will pay the price. Indeed, if Biden had not pushed his green dream agenda, cars would be cheaper today.
https://patriotpost.us/articles/106773-bidens-ev-tariffs-are-a-play-for-michigan-2024-05-14
**************************************************The H Stands For Hype
On June 10, 1975, during the 94th Congress, the House of Representatives held the first of two “investigative hearings on the subject of hydrogen — its production, utilization, and potential effects on our energy economy of the future.” The hearing was chaired by Mike McCormack, a Democrat from Washington state, who claimed hydrogen “has the potential of playing the same kind of role in our energy system as electricity does today.”
In 1996, the Chicago Sun-Times declared “The first steps toward what proponents call the hydrogen economy are being taken.” In 2003, Jeremy Rifkin, an “economic and social theorist,” published The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth. In that book, Rifkin claimed that “Globalization represents the end stage of the fossil-fuel era.” Turning “toward hydrogen is a promissory note for a safer world,” he averred.
President George W. Bush bought the hydrogen hype. In his 2003 State of the Union Address, he said, “With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles” to taking hydrogen-fueled automobiles “from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free.” A few months after that speech, his administration announced a collaborative effort with the European Union for the “development of a hydrogen economy,” including the technologies “needed for mass production of safe and affordable hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles.” The White House claimed in a 2003 press release that the effort would “improve America’s energy security by significantly reducing the need for imported oil.”
The history of the hype matters because we live in ahistorical times. Or, as author Jeff Minick explained in 2022, we are plagued by “presentism.” Presentism, Minick wrote, “is the reason so many young people can name the Kardashians but can’t tell you the importance of Abraham Lincoln or why we fought in World War II.”
Presentism helps explain why, on April 30, the New York Times published a piece headlined, “Hydrogen Offers Germany a Chance to Take a Lead in Green Energy,” which ignores the long history of hydrogen’s failure to live up to the forecasts. But blaming presentism can’t account for the vapidity of the article, which hinges on this nut graf:
The concept of hydrogen as a renewable energy source has been around for years, but only within the past decade has the idea of its potential to replace fossil fuels to power heavy industry taken off, leading to increased investment and advances in the technology. (Emphasis added.)
The idea of hydrogen may (or may not) be taking off, but hydrogen is not a “source” of energy, it’s an energy carrier. Calling hydrogen an energy “source” is like calling Stormy Daniels an “actress.”
Hydrogen is abundant in the universe. But it’s not a source of energy. Instead, like electricity and gasoline, it must be manufactured. The most common ways are by splitting water through electrolysis, or via steam-methane reforming, which uses high-pressure steam to produce hydrogen from methane.
There are other forehead-slapping statements in the Times article written by Stanley Reed and Melissa Eddy, who traveled to the German city of Duisburg to visit a factory that makes electrolyzers. “If adopted widely,” they wrote, “the devices could help clean up heavy industry such as steel-making, in Germany and elsewhere.” Well, yes, if “adopted widely.” But despite decades of frothy predictions from Rifkin and others, electrolyzers haven’t been adopted widely because making and using hydrogen on a large scale is — as my friend, Steve Brick, puts it — “a thermodynamic obscenity.”
Reed and Eddy ignore the energy intensity of making hydrogen, only offering that by using “electricity to split water” the electrolyzer “produces hydrogen, a carbon-free gas that could help power mills like the one in Duisburg.” That’s true. But how much electricity is needed? And where the heck is German industry, which is already being hammered by expensive gas and power, going to get the juice? At what cost? Those questions are not addressed.
To be clear, lots of other media outlets are hyping hydrogen. And the hype is surging because of fat government subsidies. Reed and Eddy explain that the German government has earmarked some $14.2 billion “for investment in about two dozen projects to develop hydrogen.” Here in the U.S., the 45V tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act provides lucrative subsidies for hydrogen production. Big business is lining up to get those subsidies. In February, energy giant Exxon Mobil warned that it might cancel a proposed hydrogen project at its Baytown, Texas refinery depending on how the Treasury Department interpreted the “clean” hydrogen rules in the IRA.
Regardless of tax credits and subsidies, making and using hydrogen is a high-entropy, high-cost process. As a friend in the oil refining business told me last year, “If you like $6-per-gallon gasoline, you’re gonna love $14-to-$20-per-gallon hydrogen.”
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-h-in-hydrogen-stands-for-hype
*********************************************Is the Goal Cleaner Air – Or Something Else?
In 1991, Oleta Adams sang “Get Here” on “Soul Train.” She spent 23 weeks on the Billboard top 100 with the love ballad, listing all the ways he could get to her: by railway, trailway, airplane, caravan, sailboat, swinging on a rope, by sled, horseback, or even by windsurfing, magic carpet, or hot air balloon. The conclusion is, “I don’t care how you get here, just get here…”
Government regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ought to take that approach, but rarely do. This was the primary controversy surrounding EPA’s regulation of methane emissions, which sought not only to set and enforce standards for the pollutant, but also to dictate a one-size-fits-all outdated technology to monitor emissions.
Governments are often behind the curve in recognizing the latest technology. Innovation invariably moves faster than the intentionally slow processes of government. We saw that with the Biden Administration’s methane regulations, and we are seeing it again with its recent move to halt upcoming liquefied natural gas (LNG) export permits. The LNG export moratorium has sparked intense debates around the country, on both sides of the aisle, and will have repercussions for years.
Frankly, the public was blindsided by the Administration’s suddenly announced LNG export permit moratorium. That’s because the U.S. established itself as the world’s largest exporter of LNG last year, surpassing gas-rich nations like Qatar and Australia. In fact, the U.S. positioned itself as a steadfast partner to European countries by assisting them in diversifying their energy sources and reducing dependence on Russian imports. That could have a more profound effect on world peace over the long term than military aid, so the sudden reversal sent a decidedly unfriendly message to Europe.
But threatening our overseas relationships isn’t the only thing at stake. Our national security will face significant threats, as our allies return to importing LNG from foreign adversaries to make up the difference.
The Administration’s haphazard decision-making on this issue has left members of its own political party dumbfounded. Numerous Democratic senators have expressed concern about the moratorium. Colorado Senator Michael Bennet called it “a short-sighted decision” and further noted “it’s been very important for liquefied natural gas to replace the natural gas Russia was sending to Europe.”
Pennsylvania Senators John Fetterman and Bob Casey, Jr. both publicly encouraged the President to reverse course. They wrote that halting LNG exports would harm Pennsylvania’s economy, “undermine [the President’s] climate agenda, empower Russia and Iran, and create a schism with allies who depend on this clean energy to fuel their countries.”
It was a shock because only two years ago, the administration intended to deliver essential aid to a Europe grappling with energy shortages, aiming to mitigate the impact resulting from Russia’s withholding of crucial energy supplies. Just last year, President Biden said he was eager to ramp up U.S. LNG production and exports to help our allies. Now, in a dramatic and abrupt turnabout, the White House has flipped sides, stunting further energy growth in the U.S. and hanging its allies out to dry.
The fact remains that natural gas is the cleanest available fuel. U.S. Energy Information Administration data shows it is considered the least carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Producing natural gas results in fewer emissions of nearly all types of air pollutants and carbon dioxide, compared with oil or coal. In addition, in 2019 and 2021, despite an increase in production, U.S. natural gas and oil producers reduced methane and CO2 emissions by 28 and 30 percent, respectively. And to bring it full circle, these reductions fit hand-in-hand with the EPA’s stated goal to slash methane emissions by as much as 80 percent in the next decade.
If the Biden Administration wants to see results that help the environment and keep overseas relations intact, the President must realize that rash decision-making may pander to supportive interest groups, but it will not achieve these goals. In the case of the earlier methane rule, EPA listened to many of the concerns about its initial proposal, and attempted to address them by allowing companies to apply a variety of methane emissions detection technologies. But the abrupt decision on LNG exports takes a completely different approach, not letting companies help determine the best way to achieve goals, but again trying to dictate the technology to be used. It risks economic stability, may force allies back under Russian influence, and will likely lead to higher domestic prices – not to lower emissions.
If President Biden truly wants to meet his aggressive climate goals, regressive policies like restricting emissions monitoring technologies or banning LNG exports is a poor start. Deploying promising new technologies, including LNG, would set a clearer direction toward achieving emissions reductions goals everyone supposedly shares.
Cooperation, not edict, is the likely key to success. Government should establish clear goals and be ready to accept various ways to achieve them based on the latest technology. Regulators should come to the table with a simpler message: “We don’t care how you get there, just get there.
https://heartland.org/opinion/is-the-goal-cleaner-air-or-something-else/
***************************************14 May, 2024
Children exposed to climate hazards are more likely to be stunted, underweight, and more vulnerable to early pregnancies
This is not as mad as it sounds. Some parts of India are so badly affected by floods, droughts and big wind events that their livelihood is endangered. They can suffer from semi-starvation. And that DOES have adverse health effects. It's nothing to do with global warming
Women and children in Bihar, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Telangana are particularly vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, reveals an internal study commissioned by Ministry of Women and Child Development. Children exposed to climate hazards are more likely to be stunted, underweight, and more vulnerable to early pregnancies, it further says.
The study exclusively accessed by The Hindu identifies climate and health hotspots in order to specifically understand the impact of floods, cyclones and droughts on health of women and children. Titled “How does climate change impact women and children across agro-ecological zones in India - A scoping study”, it was conducted by the non-profit M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF).
“The issue of climate-change impact on women and children is under-researched and often overlooked in policy formulation. In our scoping study we realised that up to 70% of Indian districts are at very high risk of floods, droughts, and cyclones. Women and children’s undernutrition, teenage pregnancy and domestic violence indicators in these hotspots are also very stark,” Soumya Swaminathan, chairperson, MSSRF and former chief scientist of World Health Organization told The Hindu on the sidelines of the WomenLift Health Global Conference 2024 at Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, in April earlier this year.
Overall, 183 districts were vulnerable to hydro-meteorological disasters such as cyclones and floods while 349 districts witnessed drought. The study was able to generate certain spatial hotspots where high exposure to hydro-met hazards such as floods, cyclones and droughts significantly co-exists with a higher prevalence of poor health variables such as underweight women and child marriage.
In northern areas of Bihar and Gujarat, the geospatial maps show hotspots where exposure to drought, flood, and cyclone co-exists with stunting and underweight children. In terms of women’s nutritional indicators too, these States need immediate attention, the study says. The northern parts of both States are flood-prone areas battered by heavy rainfall.
Also read: Fixing India’s malnutrition problem
The study also points out that the northern plains, including parts of Uttar Pradesh, have hotspots for stunting, while parts of north Maharashtra and south Madhya Pradesh are hotspots for underweight children. Children are 6% more likely to be stunted, 24% more likely to be underweight, experience 35% reduction in minimum diet diversity, and there is a 12% increase in likelihood of deaths if they are under five years of age and exposed to drought, the report said.
“Also, it should be noted that southern India and parts of coastal belts in Odisha have high exposure scores to hydro-met hazards but perform better in terms of child stunting and underweight, highlighting the role of stronger health systems,” the study points out.
The study further goes on to identify major hotspots in terms of impact on women and young girls in areas exposed to drought, floods and cyclones - northern Bihar and parts of Uttar Pradesh, southern West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and parts of Telangana, eastern Maharashtra, parts of northern Madhya Pradesh and southern Uttar Pradesh.
“Exposure to drought events increases the likelihood of prevalence of underweight women by 35%, child marriage by 37%, teenage pregnancy by 17% and intimate partner violence by up to 50%,” the study states.
The climate change hotspots have been identified by spatio-temporal analysis encompassing 50 years of data on frequency and intensity of floods, cyclones and droughts and by using district-level climate vulnerability exposure scores published in 2021 by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).
For health indicators of women and children, mapping and statistical analysis had been conducted by using the fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) which cites data of 2019-21.
The study recognises that each hazard has different implication and it is difficult to attribute effects of sudden and short-term hazards like flood and cyclone on various parameters. Contrarily, slow and long-term hazards like droughts are likely to have more chronic and long-lasting effects.
The document submitted to Ministry states that the study’s limitations include reliance on secondary data sources, with limited empirical insights into the health aspects of women affected by climate change.
The recommendation to Ministry also states that there is a key gap in evidence, in order to understand differential factors behind children’s vulnerability to heatwaves and develop a systematic method to measure children’s exposure to heatwaves, and relatively less research attention has been paid to this area of inquiry, particularly in India.
“Excess deaths due to heat are not recognised and every State and city should make a heat action plan to tackle the effects of heatwaves. There should be accountability for who is responsible for co-ordination, who will finance, how will messages be disseminated in case of heat stroke and so on. It is a multi-sectoral effort. For instance, the labour department should enforce laws to give a break to construction labour from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.,” Dr. Swaminathan said.
There is also an absence of national-level data on climate vulnerability considering all hazards. There is a need to study the extent of exposure of women and children at the individual, household, and community levels to seven types of hazards - floods, cyclones, droughts, rainfall variability, heatwaves, air pollution, and cold waves, the recommendation to Ministry points out.
“To identify statistically significant hotspots highlighting the prevalence of heatwaves or prolonged heat and poor health variables, there is a need to generate detailed district-wise monthly temperature data that is currently lacking,” the study document states.
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‘Gambling With The Grid’: New Data Highlights Achilles’ Heel Of One Of Biden’s Favorite Green Power Sources
New government data shows that wind power generation fell in 2023 despite the addition of new capacity, a fact that energy sector experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation demonstrates its inherent flaw.
Wind generation fell by about 2.1% in 2023 relative to 2022 generation, despite the 6 gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity that came online last year, according to data published Tuesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). That wind power output dropped despite new capacity coming online and the availability of government subsidies highlights its intermittency and the problems wind power could pose for grid reliability, energy sector experts told the DCNF.
The decrease in wind generation is the first drop on record with the EIA since the 1990s; the drop was not evenly distributed across all regions of the U.S., and slower wind speeds last year also contributed to the decline, according to EIA. The Biden administration wants to have the American power sector reach carbon neutrality by 2035, a goal that will require a significant shift away from natural gas- and coal-fired power toward wind, solar and other green sources
“Relying on wind power to meet your peak electricity demands is gambling with the grid,” Isaac Orr, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment who specializes in power grid-related analysis, told the DCNF. “Will the wind blow, or won’t it? This should be a moment where policymakers step back and consider the wisdom of heavily subsidizing intermittent generators and punishing reliable coal and gas plants with onerous regulations.”
Between 2016 and 2022, the wind industry received an estimated $18.6 billion worth of subsidies, about 10% of the total amount of subsidies extended to the energy sector by the U.S. government, according to an August 2023 EIA report. Wind power received more assistance from the government than nuclear power, coal or natural gas over the same period of time.
“This isn’t subsidies per kilowatt hour of generation. It’s raw subsidies. If it were per kilowatt hour of generation, the numbers would be even more extreme,” Paige Lambermont, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “This is a massive amount of money. It’s enough to dramatically alter energy investment decisions for the worse. We’re much more heavily subsidizing the sources that don’t provide a significant portion of our electricity than those that do.”
“Policy that just focuses on installed capacity, rather than the reliability of that capacity, fails to understand the real needs of the electrical grid,” Lambermont added. “This recent disparity illustrates that more installed wind capacity does not necessarily correlate with more wind power production. It doesn’t matter how much wind you add to the grid, if the wind isn’t blowing at peak demand time, that capacity will go to waste.”
Wind power’s performance was especially lackluster in the upper midwest, but Texas saw more wind generation in 2023 than it did in 2022, according to EIA. Wind generation in the first half of 2023 was about 14% lower than it was through the first six months of 2022, but generation was higher toward the end of 2023 than it was during the same period in 2022.
In 2023, about 60% of all electricity generated in the U.S. came from fossil fuels, while 10% came from wind power, according to EIA data. Beyond generous subsidies for preferred green energy sources, the Biden administration has also aggressively regulated fossil fuels and American power plants to advance its broad climate agenda.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) landmark power plant rules finalized this month will threaten grid reliability if enacted, partially because the regulations are likely to incentivize operators to close plants rather than adopt the costly measures required for compliance, grid experts previously told the DCNF. At the same time that the Biden administration is effectively trying to shift power generation away from fossil fuels, it is also pursuing goals — such as substantially boosting electric vehicle adoption over the next decade and incentivizing construction of energy-intensive computer chip factories — that are driving up projected electricity demand in the future.
“The EIA data proves what we’ve always known about wind power: It is intermittent, unpredictable and unreliable,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults on the energy sector, told the DCNF. “Any power generation source whose output is wholly dependent on equally unpredictable weather conditions should never be presented by power companies and grid managers as safe replacements for abundant, cheap, dispatchable generation fueled with natural gas, coal or nuclear. This is a simple reality that people in charge of our power grids too often forget. Saying that no doubt hurts some people’s feelings, but nature really does not care about our feelings.”
Blackmon also pointed out that, aside from its intermittency, sluggish build-out of the transmission lines and related infrastructure poses a major problem for wind power.
“Wind power is worthless without accompanying transmission, yet the Biden administration continues to pour billions into unreliable wind while ignoring the growing crisis in the transmission sector,” Blackmon told the DCNF.
Another long-term issue that wind power, as well as solar power, faces is the need for a massive expansion in the amount of battery storage available to store and dispatch energy from intermittent sources as market conditions dictate. By some estimates, the U.S. will need about 85 times as much battery storage by 2050 relative to November 2023 in order to fully decarbonize the power grid, according to Alsym Energy, a battery company.
The White House and the Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment.
https://dailycaller.com/2024/05/04/data-wind-generation-decrease-2023-grid-reliability/s
********************************************************Solar's Been Taking a Beating Lately
A massive blaze plunged a swimming carnival into chaos with hundreds of school children forced to evacuate a busy aquatic centre.
The solar panels on the roof of the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre in Homebush, western Sydney, went up in flames at about 12.30pm on Monday.
Children who were attending a swimming carnival inside the facility were forced to evacuate the building in their swimmers.
Thick plumes of smoke were seen coming out of the building as emergency services rushed to the scene.
Half a dozen NSW Fire and Rescue crews fought the blaze and three ambulance crews were also called to the venue.
Emergency crews got there and found the fire was literally in the solar array itself.
..."Six appliances and 24 Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) firefighters responded to the incident in Shane Gould Avenue at 12.15pm after reports of black smoke issuing from the building.
"Upon investigation, crews found a working fire in the solar panels on the roof of the sporting facility."
Fire crews used a ladder platform to attack the flames and were able to get the blaze under control within about 45 minutes.
FRNSW confirmed that more than 2,500 people had to be evacuated during the incident.
...Multiple witnesses phoned Sydney's 2GB to report the incident, with one caller named Peter claiming "all the solar panels are going up on the roof".
Thank goodness they got there that quickly and that the number of people at the venue could be evacuated efficiently and safely. I've only seen reports of one injury so far. Kudos to all involved.
**************************************************
Biden Signs Suicidal ‘No Coal’ Pact, While Rest of World Builds 1,000 New Plants
The Biden administration has just signed an economic suicide pact that would require the United States and six other Western democracies to shut down its coal power plants by 2035, while China, India and the rest of the world currently have more than 1,000 new coal power plants in the planning or construction phase. The no-coal pact allows all nations but the Suicidal Seven to continue using as much affordable coal power as they like.
Climate activists often point to China as a climate role model, noting that China manufactures more wind and solar power equipment than any other nation. China, however, isn’t stupid enough to use much of that equipment. Realizing that conventional energy – and especially coal power – is more affordable and reliable than wind and solar power, China manufactures wind and solar equipment, sells the equipment to America and Western Europe, and then powers its own economy primarily with coal power.
In America, government intervention has already caused the shutdown of many coal power plants and the construction of expensive wind and solar projects. In more than half the states, renewable power mandates require a certain percentage of electricity in the state to come from wind or solar. Federal laws and regulations punish coal power at nearly every step of coal mining and utilization. Massive subsidies for wind and solar allow wind and solar providers to charge substantially reduced prices for their product at taxpayers’ expense.
Even with government tipping the scale so heavily in favor of wind and solar power, the so-called green transition is coming with an enormous price tag. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there was a 21 percent increase in wind and solar power since Joe Biden took office in January 2021 through the end of 2023. At the same time, electricity prices also rose by 21 percent. Prior to Biden taking office, the long-term electricity price trend was an increase of approximately 1 percent per year. The green transition has increased the pace of electricity price inflation by 700 percent. And that doesn’t account for all the wind and solar subsidies that are hidden in our tax bills.
There is little reason to believe we are on the verge of a climate crisis. A good resource documenting this good news is ClimateRealism.com. Yet, even if a climate crisis were imminent, unilateral coal disarmament is a foolish way for America to approach carbon dioxide emissions.
Since 2000, the United States has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions more than any other country in the world. U.S. emissions are down 21 percent, while the rest of the world has increased its emissions by 47 percent. Clearly, America “showing leadership” reducing carbon dioxide emissions is leading to nothing other than the rest of the world free license to jack up their own emissions. Even if the United States and the rest of the Suicidal Seven could somehow eliminate all of their emissions, it would have little impact on the global trend.
Ultimately, Biden’s pact to eliminate American coal use will further ramp up inflation. After all, energy is an important cost component in almost every product bought and sold in the economy. In addition to the inflation impact, Biden’s pact will force American businesses into a major competitive disadvantage versus businesses in China, India, and the rest of the world, which will be paying substantially lower energy costs than American businesses.
Under Biden’s plan, we will end up sinking vast economic resources into eliminating coal power and as much carbon dioxide as possible from the American economy. Even then, we will still be looking at global emissions continuing to rise. At that point, Biden’s plan is for America to assume the lion’s share of global “climate reparations” and financial bribes to induce China, India, and the rest of the world to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. After sabotaging our own economy with higher energy prices, we will literally borrow money from China in order to then bribe China to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.
It would be hard to think of a crazier domestic energy policy.
***************************************
13 May, 2024
Many of the ‘Climate Experts’ Surveyed by the Guardian in Recent Propaganda Blitz Turn Out to be Emotionally-Unstable Hysterics
The Guardian last week published its survey of ‘climate experts’. The results are a predictable mush of fire-and-brimstone predictions and emotional incontinence. This stunt may have convinced those already aligned to the newspaper’s ideological agenda to redouble their characteristically shrill rhetoric, but encouraging scientists to speculate and emote about the future of the planet looks like an act of political desperation, not scientific communication.
For the purposes of creating this story, the Guardian’s Environment Editor Damian Carrington contacted 843 ‘lead authors’ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports (IPCC) and 383 responded to his questions. The actual substance of the survey does not seem to have been published by the paper, but the main response Carrington wanted to get from his respondents was an estimate of how much global warming there will be by the end of the century. “World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5ºC target,” claims one headline. A graphic in the article shows the responses:
The obvious problem this raises is that such a wide range of views on the next three quarters of a century discredits the notion that the IPCC represents a ‘scientific consensus’ on climate change. The ‘consensus’ – the putative expression of agreement by the worlds ‘top climate scientists’ – is the lynchpin of the narrative, epitomised by the Guardian, that the climate debate is between scientists and denialists. “Seventy seven per cent of climate scientists expect a rise of at least 2.5ºC,” explains the chart. Well, yeah, but 23% of climate scientists do not. And a good number of those connected to the IPCC believe that there will be just 1.5 degrees of warming – a third less warming than is anticipated by their colleagues at the other end of the spectrum. Clearly, there is, or needs to be, a debate.
This in turn raises the question of why this survey was necessary at all. The IPCC’s main output is an Assessment Report (AR), of which six have so far been produced since 1990. Each AR consists of three main volumes, each produced by a Working Group (WG), whose focus is on assessing the available research on “the physical science” (WG1), impacts and vulnerabilities (WG2), and mitigation options (WG3). A Guardian opinion survey is hardly going to shed any light on science that these scientists, who authored the reports, have not already published. It would seem rather silly to ignore the thousands of pages of summaries of the state of scientific understanding that hundreds of scientists and other experts have compiled and substitute it with a DIY opinion poll.
Opinion isn’t science. Even scientific opinion is not science. Yet Carrington seems to believe that tapping into the emotions of scientists is of greater value than reading their work. And all sorts of mush seems to have been unleashed by his project. “‘I am starting to panic about my child’s future’: climate scientists wary of starting families,” claims one headline based on the survey. According to the article, the victim of the panic is a Professor Lisa Schipper, whom Carrington describes as “an expert on climate vulnerability”. Schipper’s profile, however, reveals her actual occupation: “I am particularly interested in socio-cultural dimensions of vulnerability, including gender, culture and religion, as well as structural issues related to power, justice and equity.” I’m smelling a rat here, and more than a whiff of humbug. Schipper is not a climate scientist at all, as Carrington seems to imply in both his headline and his article.
Another article – an interactive page on the Guardian website – claims: “We asked 380 top climate scientists what they felt about the future.” The article quotes, among others, Lorraine Whitmarsh from the University of Bath, who tells Carrington:
[Climate change] is an existential threat to humanity and [lack of] political will and vested corporate interests are preventing us addressing it. I do worry about the future my children are inheriting.
But Whitmarsh is not a climate scientist either. According to her academic profile at Bath, She did a BA in Theology and Religious Studies with French at the University of Kent, graduating in 1997. She followed this with a Masters in ‘Science, Culture and Communication’, before completing a PhD in Psychology in 2005. Now Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST), Whitmarsh researches “perceptions and behaviour in relation to climate change, energy and transport” and “regularly advises governmental and other organisations on low-carbon behaviour change and climate change communication”.
I have discussed the nature of climate psychologists’ work before in the Daily Sceptic. And of course, CAST is of that lofty academic milieu which wraps naked Stalinism in motherhood-and-apple-pie. “We want to work closely with people and organisations to achieve positive low-carbon futures — transforming the way we live our lives, and reconfiguring organisations and cities,” says the group’s website. What it doesn’t have an answer to, however, is people who do not share CAST’s radical ideology and do not want their lives, cities or organisations transformed or reconfigured by self-regarding shrinks – who are manifestly the ones in need of help.
There are of course a number of respondents with scientific backgrounds who have replied to Carrington. But these scientific credentials do not seem to have made those who own them any more rational. “Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken,” says climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota, who at least appears to have a PhD in Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, “after all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change…”
But perhaps Cerezo-Mota forgot to read IPCC AR 6 in which her colleagues conclude that any detectable increase in floods and meteorological and hydrological droughts cannot be attributed with confidence to anthropogenic climate change. And perhaps she forgot that two decades of wildfire data in all regions of the world show significant declines.
I think it is probably for the best that such nervous wrecks do not reproduce. Their grasp on the data is particularly myopic. Despite their apparent belief that the climate crisis is upon us, life for children born in recent years is immeasurably better that of earlier generations. Rather than being dominated by the weather, today’s children are not only far more likely to survive their fifth birthday, they are going to live longer, healthier, wealthier and safer lives than any generation before them.
That is, unless these crazy climate scientists get their way. Because they would strip away every last benefit of industry, capitalism,and freedom to ‘save the planet’, and deny those children the abundant and affordable resources that has created their historically unprecedented position.
It goes further than humbug. I sense very little data and science underpins their anti-natalism, but a great deal of ideology and manipulation. So how can we explain these scientists’ views, if we don’t believe that they emerge from science?
One answer might be that, for nearly 40 years now, green ideology has been poured into classrooms throughout the world, without any care for the consequences. It has largely bounced off most people. But several generations of children have now come up through this system into the adult world, through higher education. The institutions of climate and environmental science have increasingly become the centres to which unhinged individuals are drawn. Emotionally unstable people naturally seek reasons to explain their dysphoria and believing there is a crisis unfolding in the skies above their heads (rather than in them) is a way to explain their anxieties. After all, if you were not a climate loon, why would you volunteer your time to the IPCC? Gradually, rational views have been weeded out of these institutions.
I believe that is the implication of Carrington’s series of Guardian articles and his survey. It shows that people with no scientific expertise to speak of are nonetheless routinely presented as ‘scientists’ and experts. It shows that even those with scientific expertise will happily and radically depart from both the consensus position and the objective data on both meteorological events and their societal impacts. And it shows they have no reluctance to use their own emotional distress as leverage to coerce others. Carrington thinks that showing us scientists’ emotional troubles will convince us to share their anxiety. But all it shows is that it would be deeply foolish to defer to the authority of climate science. It’s an unstable mess. Science must be cool, calm, rational, detached and disinterested, or it is just a silly soap opera.
***************************************************
Concerns Mount Over Exploding Electric Vehicles
Safety concerns around electric vehicles continue to mount with Australian fire and rescue services in New South Wales stating they might have to make a “tactical disengagement” of a trapped car accident victim if the battery is likely to explode.
Australian journalist Jo Nova covered the story, which was first mentioned in the EV blog The Driven, and commented: “They say the first responders need more training as if this can be solved with a certificate, but the dark truth is they’re talking about training the firemen and the truck drivers to recognise when they have to abandon the rescue.”
The Driven, a widely-read blog that seems highly sympathetic to a rollout of EVs, was reporting on recent testimony given to the NSW Government’s Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Batteries Inquiry. The writer suggested that first responders did not have adequate training to deal with electric vehicle collisions, and in the most serious cases, crews could be forced to abandon rescues.
One particular area of concern seemed to revolve around the need to extract a trapped casualty quickly after a crash by dragging the person out in a “very undesirable manner”. Fires are a grave risk in any vehicle accident, but they can be quickly brought under control in an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle.
Worries about the potential dangers inherent in EVs is likely to grow as numbers on the roads continue to rise. EV battery explosions can occur very quickly, triggering the release of highly toxic gases. When they roar into thermal overdrive, they create very high temperatures and are very difficult to extinguish.
The explosion can occur after almost any collision, or be due to a fault in the initial manufacture. The fire often takes hours to control and it can reignited days after it was thought to be out. With Net Zero fanatics desperate to drive ICE cars off the road in short order,
EVs are the only mass private transport solution offered. Many of the issues, including safety, that make them an inferior product compared to petrol-powered combustion cars are often ignored.
Just what can be involved in putting out a fire in an EV was dramatically detailed in a recent press release from the Wakefield Fire Dept in Massachusetts. It was called out to deal with a burning Tesla on a snowy Interstate 95, and reported:
Wakefield Engine 1 and Ladder 1 initiated suppression operations, applying copious amounts of water onto the vehicle. Multiple surrounding mutual aid communities responded as well to support firefighting operations and to create a water shuttle to bring water continually to the scene. Engines from Melrose, Stoneham, Reading,
Lynnfield as well as a Middleton water tanker assisted. Firefighters had three 1¾-inch hand lines as well as a ‘blitz gun’ in operation to cool the battery compartment… Lynnfield crews established a continuous 4-inch supply line from Vernon Street up to the highway. The fire was declared under control and fully extinguished after about two and a half hours…
The vehicle was removed from the scene after consulting with the Hazmat Unit… The crews did a great job, especially in the middle of storm conditions – on a busy highway.
There is little doubt that EV fires are on the rise. In the U.K., CE Safety runs Freedom of Information checks on local fire brigades and its latest survey shows an alarming rise in conflagrations. In Greater London in the 2017-2022 period, there were a reported 507 battery fires from a number of EV types, but CE Safety found a “gigantic” 219 conflagrations in 2022-23 alone.
Lancashire was said to rank second with 15 EV battery fires, but this was 10 more in a single year than recorded in the five years between 2017-2022. Overall “it was concerning” to discover that the number of electric battery fires during 2022-2023 was higher in most areas than the data showed over five years from 2017 to 2022. During that year, 14 buses suffered battery fires.
There was a substantial increase in the number of e-bikes catching fire, with CE Safety noting that lithium is highly flammable and reactive. “Over-charging presents a massive risk to households with lithium-powered vehicles,” the safety organisation observed.
Concern is also rising over the transportation of EVs on car ferries. Recently, Havila Kystruten, which operates a fleet of car ferries around the coast of Norway, has banned the transportation of electric, hybrid and hydrogen vehicles.
According to a report in the Maritime Executive, it is the latest step by the shipping industry, “which has become acutely aware of the increasing danger of transporting EV and other alternate fuel vessels”.
Havila’s Managing Director Bent Martini said a risk analysis had shown a fire at sea in a fossil fuel vehicle could be handled by on-board systems. “A possible fire in electric, hybrid or hydrogen cars will require external rescue efforts and could put people on board and the ships at risk,” he said. That of course is the nightmare scenario.
If fire breaks out on a ferry making a 20-mile crossing in good weather, the chances of all passengers and crew surviving are good. Less good, perhaps, if fire was to break out and fill the ship with toxic smoke in the middle of a stormy November night while crossing the Bay of Biscay. Chances of survival would be diminished if the high temperatures caused nearby EVs to explode.
Mercifully, we are less and less likely to see such accidents. The list of disadvantages of EVs is lengthening by the day. Environmental concerns about the manufacture and mining of raw materials have been raised, while ‘range anxiety’ is common among drivers. EVs are more expensive than ICE cars, while knackered batteries mean that second-hand values are very poor.
https://principia-scientific.com/concerns-mount-over-exploding-electric-vehicles/
***************************************************Recent past a poor guide to climate future
Don’t look to the recent past to understand near-term global warming, “the spatial pattern of global warming in the most recent 40 years doesn't look like the long-term pattern we expect in the future. The recent past is a bad analogue for future global warming,” according to Kyle Armour, of the University of Washington.
Instead it is the more distant past that might hold important clues about the warming we may expect by the end of this century. Short-term climate cycles like those we have recently experienced, coupled with the effects of atmospheric pollution, suggest that we can’t use recent data to reliably predict the rest of this century.
The caution is expressed in a new study published in Science Advances. It doesn’t alter the best-case warming scenario from doubling CO2 — about 2°C – but it does reduce the worst-case scenario from 5°C to 4°C.
This climate sensitivity estimate comes from looking at the recent paleoclimate record – a few tens of thousands of years ago – that includes long periods that were much warmer or colder than our current climate. This was caused by many factors, such as the influence of large ice sheets and greenhouse gases. Scientists take an interest in these past times because knowing, however roughly, what the past temperature changes were and what caused them, sheds light on what to expect in the future.
The researchers looked at the Last Glacial Maximum, a period 21,000 years ago when the Earth was on average 6°C cooler than today. Ice core records from the time show that atmospheric CO2 then was less than half of today’s levels, about 190 parts per million. Using new statistical techniques, the researchers have incorporated the paleoclimate data into climate models, producing temperature maps of the time.
The study shows that CO2 played a lesser role in influencing ice age temperatures than was thought. This suggests that the most extreme predictions for global warming from rising CO2 are less likely.
Cloudbase conundrum
In other recent research, scientists note that clouds are a major source of uncertainty in climate models. Some make the Earth warmer by trapping heat, others make it cooler by reflecting sunlight. Exactly which type of cloud influences climate is a major problem. In some cases it is unknown if they cause overall cooling or warming.
New remote-sensing measurements could provide a way to estimate droplet concentration in clouds, which will enable scientists to gain insights into how changes in atmospheric aerosol levels could affect clouds and climate.
They have made the first-ever remote observations of the fine-scale structure at the base of clouds. The results have just been published in Nature Climate and Atmospheric Science and reveal that the air-cloud interface is not a perfect boundary, but is a transition zone, where aerosol particles suspended in Earth’s atmosphere give rise to the droplets that form clouds. Most cloud droplets initially form at the cloud base, in the so-called ‘droplet activation zone’, and the number of them will affect the properties of the cloud later on, including how much sunlight it reflects.
To investigate this zone, scientists fired laser beams into the atmosphere and measured the backscattered reflection from molecules, aerosols, and cloud droplets. Recently, a new higher-resolution laser, firing at 20,000 pulses a second, has focused in on this important area. Cloud microphysical properties and processes are crucial to understanding weather and climate and this new technique may provide a valuable contribution.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/recent-past-a-poor-guide-to-climate-future
****************************************************UK: The Net Zero juggernaut grinds relentlessly onwards
Did you know that there is an Interministerial Group for Net Zero, Energy and Climate Change?
Hardly anyone does. But there is such a thing, comprising representatives of the UK Government, the Welsh Government the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive, which together form the UK Emission Trading Scheme Authority, and it issues, in the style of aristocratic, haut en bas, international diplomacy, occasional ‘Communiqués’ on its meetings.
The latest, reporting a discussion on the 21st of February, was released on the 2nd of May. In spite the long interval the substance of the public statement is brief and can be quoted in its entirety:
What was discussed
The Interministerial Group discussed the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, specifically the UK ETS Authority’s plans set out in July 2023 for expansion of the scope of the scheme to additional sectors of the economy.
Is that it? you ask. Yes indeed; that’s all you are allowed to know about a discussion and perhaps a decision that will add further industries to the UK ETS, and bring yet more of the economy under the low-carbon whip, loading consumers with still further costs. But it will not be the last of such opaque and ridiculously brief ‘communiqués’ from the four governments on this and many other matters related to Net Zero.
If the man and woman in the street said that this looks more like bureaucracy than democracy, it would be hard to disagree. The low-carbon policy agenda is now deeply embedded within the process of UK government, binding the four devolved authorities together in the collaborative development of policies to deliver one agenda – Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The policy and the process are now indistinguishable, and in spite of the turbulence affecting the Net Zero plans here and abroad, the green juggernaut grinds relentlessly onwards behind closed doors and away from prying eyes. The public may think that the Prime Minister is responding to concerns about the costs, and he may even think this himself, but the truth is that the ‘Interministerial’, and other similar Net Zero delivery agents such as Ofgem, carry on their work relatively undisturbed by such external criticism.
This matters a great deal. Direct income support subsidies to renewable generators are now well-known, and controversial. The OBR estimates that the Renewables Obligation will cost consumers some £8 billion in the current year, the Contracts for Difference scheme some £2.1 billion, the Capacity Market some £1.4 billion. The Feed-in Tariff for small scale generation adds a far from small scale £1.73 billion.[1]
But the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, which the ‘Interministerial’ communiqué is preparing to expand, already adds at least another £6 billion a year to consumer costs, equivalent to about half the other green levies in total. This cost is incurred by companies to purchase permits to emit carbon dioxide, the funds being received by the government. To avoid these costs, emitters must reduce their emissions by adopting low-carbon technologies. But this is not a cost-free option, since low-carbon energy supply is, and in spite of government propaganda, much more expensive than unpenalised fossil fuels.
Of course it is true that, in an otherwise undistorted market, companies would only choose to avoid emitting carbon dioxide if that were cheaper than buying emissions allowances. But the UK economy is not otherwise undistorted, and company directors are under considerable legal and media pressure to adopt Net Zero measures, regardless of cost and in anticipation of an emissions-free economy in 2050. My own paper, A Little Nudge with a Big Stick (2021),[2] discusses one of these, the embedding of the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting Framework within the Companies Act, thus making it a criminal offence for directors to fail to report or to misreport their emissions and energy consumption and best efforts to reduce them.
The costs of the UK ETS to the consumer, then, is in two parts. Firstly, the cost of permits purchased by companies that cannot avoid emitting carbon dioxide. Secondly, and obscurely, the cost of low-carbon technologies and fuels adopted to avoid the ETS penalties. Government revenues may fall as the ETS drives the economy towards Net Zero, but consumer costs will only fall if the low-carbon alternatives are cheaper, and there is no evidence that this is generally the case.
It is rational to infer that expansion of the ETS to the domestic maritime sector from 2026, to waste and incineration, including energy from waste, and the inclusion of emissions from carbon dioxide venting by the upstream oil and gas sector, will all eventually load additional cost on to the consumer, and it is this which the Interministerial was discussing in secret.
In addition, to make the UK ETS fully Net Zero consistent, the UK ETS Authority, which is comprised of the four governments making up the Interministerial, will reduce the number of emissions allowances by 30% by 2030. Even the authority itself admits that this is ‘ambitious’, [3] implying a steep rise in the cost of permits.
The governments are aware of the dangers of expansion of the scheme and a reduction of allowances, and in their jointly authored 2023 Review of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, they announced a smoothing measure, redistributing allowances from existing reserve ‘pots’ of allowances between 2024 and 2027. Just over 50 million additional allowances will be released, which will in part but only in part offset the effect of introducing the Net Zero consistent pathway and the expansion of the scheme, ‘reducing the risk of upward price shock’.
This smoothing effect probably explains the projected falls in revenues from the ETS over the next few years. The OBR estimates ETS revenue will drop from £6.1 billion in 2023/4 to £3.6 billion in 2024/5, with further falls bringing the annual cost to £1.6 billion a year in 2028/9.[4]
But as we have seen, a fall in government receipts from the ETS does not necessarily result in a fall of costs to consumers. The low-carbon alternatives required to prevent emissions may not be much cheaper than the ETS at its height, and may even be more expensive.
Thus, while the OBR’s figures suggest that the costs of Net Zero are falling, this is an almost certainly in part an illusion. While companies are buying emissions allowances, the policy costs are explicit; when companies avoid those costs by turning to low-carbon energy, perhaps through corporate power purchase agreements, the costs are internalised and buried in the overall cost of doing business. One could in principle laboriously extract them from company reports, but these Net Zero costs will no longer be on the government books.
The main take-home here is that the full, actual cost of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme as it is expanded and as allowances are cut to put it on the Net Zero consistent trajectory is very hard to determine. If you believe, as Lord Callanan, the well-meaning UK government representative on the Interministerial apparently does, that low-carbon fuel costs are low, then you will think the costs will fall. But if you judge, from a host of empirical indicators such as audited wind farm accounts, industry demands for subsidy, and underlying physics, say, that the costs are extremely unlikely to be low, then you will guess that the actual cost to consumers over the coming decades will be considerably upwards of the £6 billion a year that the ETS generated in revenue in 2023/4 and 2024/5.
This is a non-trivial cost, and it would be extremely interesting to know whether the members of the Interministerial, effectively the UK ETS Authority in full session, showed any awareness of this risk in their discussions on the 21st of February. Net Zero Watch will submit an FoI for the full minutes of this meeting in the public interest.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/ukets-interministerial-group
***************************************12 May, 2024
What The Media Won’t Tell You About The Green ‘Energy Transition’
Robert Bryce
Over the past few days, I’ve searched the NewsBank archive for uses of “energy transition.”
One of the earliest uses of that now-ubiquitous phrase occurred in the Christian Science Monitor in 1981.
In a dispatch from Nairobi, a reporter named Richard Critchfield explained that some “4,000 delegates from 154 countries” were gathering in the Kenyan capital for a two-week United Nations conference on new and renewable energy sources.
“The purpose of the conference,” Critchfield explained, was to “promote a better understanding of the global energy transition from oil to such new sources as geothermal, solar, wind, ocean, and hydropower or energy from biomass, fuelwood, charcoal, peat, draught animals, oil shale, and tar sands.”
The article doesn’t mention climate change. Instead, it focuses on Kenya’s reliance on imported energy, the country’s geothermal potential, and the “classic third-world poverty trap of soaring oil costs and stagnant export earnings.”
Today, 43 years later, we are inundated with news reports about climate change and claims that we are in the midst of an energy transition that will eliminate our need for hydrocarbons.
Myriad examples can prove that point, but consider the Earth Day press release from the White House. The April 22 release included the word “climate” 52 times and references the energy transition three times.
For instance, President Joe Biden has launched a new “Clean Energy Supply Chain Collaborative to work with international partners to diversify supply chains that are critical to a clean and secure energy transition.”
It continued, saying the president is “mobilizing other governments to follow the U.S. lead and commit to achieve net zero government emissions by 2040.”
Before going further, let me be clear about my politics. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican. I am Disgusted. I have no truck with either party.
As a journalist focused on energy and power systems, I am affiliated with math and physics. My job is to spotlight the trends and the numbers and to separate the hype from the reality.
Unfortunately, much of the media coverage about the energy transition is just that: hype. As I will show in these charts, the hype has soared during the Biden administration.
Last month, the EPA announced rules to “reduce pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants.” In the agency’s April 25 press release announcing the new regulations, the word “transition” appears three times.
The EPA said it was providing “regulatory certainty as the power sector makes long-term investments in the transition to a clean energy economy.”
It also quotes the BlueGreen Alliance’s Jason Walsh as saying the EPA mandate provides a “toolbox of critical investments targeted to the workers and communities experiencing the economic impacts of energy transition.”
In the 10 charts, I abide by W. Edwards Deming’s commandment: “In God we trust, all others must bring data.” The numbers I’m presenting aren’t my numbers, they are THE numbers.
I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it: the concept of the energy transition is essentially a Western conceit. The U.S. and Western European countries are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on programs like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Energiewende to fund buildouts of solar, wind, batteries, and tutti-fruity-colored hydrogen, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world will do the same. There is no evidence that China and India are going through an energy transition. Instead, the numbers show those two countries are building staggering amounts of new coal-fired capacity. That capacity is far greater than the amount of nuclear capacity they are building
According to Global Energy Monitor, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam are all building new coal plants. That new capacity, totaling nearly 188 gigawatts, is roughly equal to all existing U.S. coal-fired power plants (200 GW).
Furthermore, since 2019, according to Global Energy Monitor, China and India have added some 216 GW of coal capacity. One more number is relevant here: Those five countries have a combined population of 3.4 billion, or about 42% of all the people on the planet. Their electricity use is a fraction of the 12,000 kilowatt-hours per capita per year we use here in the U.S. For instance, in Bangladesh and Indonesia, electricity use is paltry: less than 500 and 1,200 kWh/capita/year, respectively.
Perhaps the most straightforward way to observe the surge in the marketing of the “energy transition” is to look at the number of times it has been used during the presidential terms of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Both, of course, are Democrats, and both, of course, have focused on climate. According the National Archives, Obama “believes that no challenge poses a greater threat to our children, our planet, and future generations than climate change — and that no other country on Earth is better equipped to lead the world towards a solution.” However, as seen in the graphic below, the Obama era had far fewer mentions of the energy transition than what has occurred under Biden. Indeed, that phrase has appeared more than 75,000 times during Biden’s presidency. Thus, the media has used the phrase “energy transition” 36 times more during Biden’s three-and-a-half years in the White House than during eight years of Obama’s presidency.
We can think this as the “Woozle Effect,” named after a Winnie The Pooh story by A.A. Milne. The Woozle Effect is also known as “evidence by citation,” which occurs when a source “is widely cited for a claim it does not adequately support, giving said claim undeserved credibility.”
The punchline here is obvious: We are not in the midst of a major energy transition. Instead, what we are seeing is the media echo chamber at work. Media outlets are giving undeserved credibility to the idea of the energy transition despite a metric ton of evidence that shows no such transition is happening, particularly in developing countries like Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Indeed, the surge in the use of the phrase by the Biden administration — and its many allies in big media outlets — shows that we’re being bombarded by a public relations campaign that’s designed to convince the public and policymakers that an energy transition is happening and that we should be spending staggering sums of money on it.
A decade ago, energy analyst and polymath Vaclav Smil wrote, “hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is fueled mostly by wishful thinking and a misunderstanding of recent history.” He explained that “for any new energy source to capture a large share of the market require[s] two to three generations: 50 to 75 years.” He concluded, “Energy transitions on a national or global scale are inherently protracted affairs.” That statement was true in 2014. And will be true for decades to come. Just don’t expect to read about it in major media outlets.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/what-media-wont-tell-you-about-energy-transition
***********************************************Environmental protesters attempt to storm German Tesla plant, clash with police
Tesla used to be seen as good guys by the Green/Left because of their pioneering of electric cars. It looks like the gloss has worn off
Protesters opposed to expansion of electric vehicle maker Tesla’s plant in Grueneheide near Berlin clashed with police as some of them attempted to storm the facility on Friday.
Some 800 people took part in the protest, according to the organizing group Disrupt Tesla, which claims the expansion would damage the environment.
A Reuters video showed dozens of people wearing blue caps and face-covering masks coming from a nearby wooded area and attempting to storm the company’s premises with policemen trying to prevent them, including by force.
“Why do the police let the left-wing protestors off so easily?” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on his social medial platform X, adding that the demonstrators didn’t manage to break through.
“We are here today to draw attention to the Tesla factory in Grunheide for the environmental destruction here,” Disrupt Tesla spokesperson Ole Becker told Reuters.
The group also wants to highlight environmental destruction in countries like Argentina or Bolivia, brought about by lithium mining, according to Becker. Lithium is a key resource for electric vehicle batteries.
“We protect the freedom of assembly,” Brandenburg police spokesperson Mario Heinemann said, “but we are also responsible for public order and safety. That means we will also intervene when necessary.”
Some of the demonstrators have damaged a few Tesla cars using pyrotechnics and paint at a nearby car storage site, the police spokesperson added.
Tesla earlier this week said it will shut the factory for one day on Friday, without specifying a reason.
https://nypost.com/2024/05/10/business/environmental-protesters-attempt-to-storm-tesla-german-plant/
**************************************‘Green’ Housing Mandates Push Americans Further Into the Red
Home prices across the nation are back up near a record high. That makes this a particularly bad time for the Biden administration to have rolled out its new “green” energy mandates, which will add $31,000 to the cost of a new home.
The mandates are being pushed through the Department of Housing and Urban Development and while they technically won’t apply to all homes, all homebuilders will effectively be forced to comply with them.
The Biden administration doesn’t deny this higher upfront cost. It simply claims it’ll pay for itself via lower energy bills. Unfortunately, the break-even point is 90 years.
So if a young couple buys one of these new green energy homes and has a child one year later, the regulatory costs still won’t have paid for themselves in that child’s lifetime, let alone the life of the couple who bought the home.
HUD argues that homebuilders will be able to get tax credits via the Inflation Reduction Act to offset some of these costs, with those savings hopefully passed along to homebuyers. However, this is not a real reduction in costs; it’s merely passing the buck to taxpayers. Instead of a homebuyer’s bearing the full freight of these green energy mandates, some of the cost will be passed on to taxpayers, including renters.
This is just the latest example of how failed public policies are creating a two-tiered society in America, where an entire generation of Americans will likely never be able to afford their own homes.
Amid a cost-of-living crisis, renters today are paying more than ever in housing costs, with half of them reporting difficulty paying their rent on time. Over 20% said they did at least one of the following to stay current on rent: skipped meals, worked extra hours, sold personal belongings.
With the average monthly rent for a home up 50% in just four years and the cost of other necessities like food, clothing, and energy also skyrocketing, many Americans have nothing left to save at the end of the month. Small wonder the average savings rate today is less than half what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
That means many renters can never afford to save for a down payment, so they’re stuck renting forever.
Even those who manage to scrimp and save for their jumbo-size down payment still may not be able to afford the monthly mortgage payment, which has doubled since January 2021. Despite record-high rental prices, owning a home has never been so expensive relative to rents.
The fallout from people being unable to afford a home goes far beyond dollars and cents. Young people delay marriage and having children. A two-tiered society springs up between the “haves,” who were lucky enough to buy a home at the right time, and the “have nots,” who were too late. Americans become increasingly divided along racial lines. People lose hope.
These new green energy mandates will worsen conditions in the frozen housing market for the same reason that other failed public policy caused the mess in the first place: These energy mandates increase prices.
Runaway government spending caused 40-year-high inflation that drove up prices everywhere, including for housing. Inflation also necessitated higher interest rates, which have made it impossible for many people to sell their homes since that would mean losing a 2%-3% mortgage in exchange for a 7%-8% one.
Inflation has also driven construction costs to record highs, and those costs are passed to homebuyers in the form of higher prices. Since most people cannot afford a home at these higher prices, homebuilders are producing fewer houses.
Thus, the supply of new and existing homes has been severely curtailed. The growth in apartment buildings will likely fall sharply and soon, too. Forward-looking indicators such as building permits are declining; the number of job openings in construction fell in March by the biggest drop on record. Less construction of apartments will mean even more upward pressure on rent prices.
Americans need relief, not regulation, in their struggle to find affordable housing.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/09/green-housing-mandates-push-americans-further-into-the-red/
**********************************************Tesla driver's warning after run-in with a kangaroo activated a safety feature and left him with a significant expense
More electric car woes
A run-in with a kangaroo on the road left a Tesla driver with a repair bill in the hundreds because of a little known safety feature.
Adam Goff reported his troubles to fellow Tesla drivers in a dedicated Facebook group after hitting a 'roo on a rural NSW road around 6am on Tuesday.
Mr Goff slammed the brakes and his dashcam caught the kangaroo colliding with his car so softly that the animal did not even fall over.
Despite both the 'roo and the car escaping without a scratch, Mr Goff soon found himself $500 out-of-pocket to get his Tesla Model 3 serviced after its 'active hood' feature was set off.
The active hood pops the rear part of the Tesla's bonnet after detecting a crash in order to reduce damage to the car itself as well as any persons or animals that are hit.
'Had a run in with a roo, only tapped him by the time I jumped on the brakes so no damage to the car,' he wrote.
'The active hood has deployed though, how much is it to get reset and is there anyway I can push it back so it's less embarrassing to drive around with.'
After parking the car, Mr Goff tried to jig the bonnet back into place but those in the comments said it needed a service.
'The process of the hood deploying is destructive. It needs the explosive struts replaced. Probably best go through insurance. It’s not as simple as it just simply being pushed down,' one man wrote.
When the explosive struts are activated an error message remains on the dashboard until the car is serviced and the bonnet restored.
Another commenter advised Mr Goff to immediately book a service for the car as the owner's manual stated that it was the correct course of action.
'It says immediately take the car to the service centre, so do that - you can point them to the website as justification,' they wrote.
When Mr Goff confirmed the quote from the service centre was $500 to put the bonnet back into place, some people observed he either 'got off lucky' or that there was more expense to come.
'Happened to me about a month ago... initial quote they gave was $500. After a technician had a look at the service centre, I received a call saying it was going to be $2,000,' one Tesla owner commented.
Many commenters observed that Teslas are not well equipped to deal with kangaroos because of their overly sensitive safety features.
Another complaint was that the car's motion sensor cannot detect them on the road.
The multi-camera 'Tesla Vision' system can detect pedestrians, cyclists and dogs, and then display them on the dashboard for the driver to see and avoid.
Kangaroos, however, appear to be phantoms to the system as one driver proved when they took a photo of one sitting right in front of their car undetected.
'Just a heads up to Tesla owners who are driving cross country... Tesla Vision does not recognise our national fauna such as our iconic kangaroo,' he said.
'Please take the usual precautions to slow down and keep an eye out, especially during sundown and sunrise.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13402387/Tesla-active-hood-safety-feature-kangaroos.html
***************************************9 May, 2024
It can be bad to REDUCE pollution!
There's no such thimg as a happy Greenie
It might sound like a conspiracy that China is controlling global warming, but a new study has revealed that this might inadvertently be the case.
Researchers at the Ocean University of China have found that the country has been creating 'heat blobs' over the northeast Pacific from 2010 through 2020.
The team noticed that temperatures had warmed up to 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit from the Bering Strait and traveling 1,000 miles to the Gulf of Alaska which has caused fish to die off, toxic algae to bloom and whales to go missing.
However, the warming events were found to be from China's agenda to reduce aerosol emissions, which are pollutions that can have a cooling effect on the Earth because it acts like a mirror, reflecting the heat from the sun back into space.
Researchers have now warned that Chinese government that it should reconsider its ban on aerosol, saying a lack of them will continue to increase temperatures in the region.
The nation has experienced record-breaking heatwaves in the last decade, such as in 2015 when temperatures hit 125 degrees.
And in 2010 China saw up over 104 degrees, which may support the researchers findings.
In the latest study, the researchers noted that the heat waves' patterns seemed to begin after the Chinese government successfully reduced aerosol emissions such as sulfate from factories and powerplants in 2010.
The team created 12 computer climate models that were run with two conditions in place: the first was where East Asian emissions remained stable while the other reflected the drop over the last decade.
They found that models where the emissions hadn't dropped, didn't change the temperatures in other regions while those that reduced aerosol levels saw heat waves in the northeast areas of the Pacific.
The models revealed why cleaner air meant warmer temperatures - as less heat was reflected into space, the rising temperatures caused high-pressure systems which is associated with hotter, dryer temperatures during the summer and more mild weather during the winter.
In turn, high-pressure systems forming above the Earth's atmosphere caused low-pressure systems in the Pacific to become more intense.
When this happened, the Aleutian Low - which transports warm air from the Aleutian Islands into the northeastern Pacific - developed a larger range and weakened the winds that would usually cool the sea's surface, resulting in hotter conditions.
This has had disastrous impacts, not only on the sea temperature and marine life, but also has had a socioeconomic impact such as the 2013 to 2016 California drought that cost multibillion dollars in US agricultural losses and killed more than 100 million trees.
'These severe ecological and social consequences indicate the urgency of revealing the causes of these emerging climatic extremes,' the study said.
Although limiting aerosol emissions does contribute to global warming, increased levels leads to the premature death of eight million people annually worldwide, according to NASA.
The tiny aerosol particles, like sulfate or nitrate, are emitted during fossil fuel combustion and when they're inhaled, can cause asthma, respiratory infections, lung cancer and heart disease.
In the Ocean University of China study, the researchers said their newest findings highlight the need to consider what risks come from reducing aerosol emissions. and called on government bodies to reassess its impact on climate change.
*****************************************************
How China’s Climate Agenda Threatens US
China is intentionally advancing a climate agenda for its own gain, and America is allowing it to happen, according to a senior research fellow for international affairs at The Heritage Foundation’s Asian Studies Center.
China has “taken advantage of the United States, because we’ve had this very driven climate agenda,” Heritage’s Erin Walsh says. (Heritage founded The Daily Signal in 2014.)
The development of solar energy, for example, began in America, and then the Chinese developed it further, and now China controls the “entire supply chain, so you can’t be involved unless you’re purchasing some goods from China to make your solar panels,” Walsh explained, adding that the same is true for wind turbines, and for batteries and electric vehicles. Right now, with respect to EV batteries, “they’ve got the dominant control of the supply chain.”
The more the U.S. and other nations move toward use of wind and solar energy, and electric vehicles, the further China’s economy benefits and the more America’s economy and national security are put at risk, according to Walsh.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/08/climate-agenda-puts-america-chinese-handcuffs-expert-says/
*************************************************
Right, "The Hill", Polls Do Show Declining Public Concern About Climate Change
The Hill posted an article discussing the fact that a recent survey indicates that the public’s concern about climate change is waning, especially among younger people, those we are constantly told are most concerned about and demanding governments take action to fight climate change. This poll’s results are confirmed by another recent independent survey which came to the same conclusion. Despite a daily barrage of mainstream media stories alternately proclaiming “we have just X number of years fight to radically reduce carbon dioxide emissions before it’s too late to save the planet,” or that we face a “climate crisis,” or that “climate change is an existential threat,” polls show the public is increasingly immune to the message.
Dozens of surveys conducted by a variety of noted polling organizations over the past two decades consistently demonstrate a few clear results: 1) a plurality or slight majority of the public (or registered voters, or people likely to vote—depending upon the polling organization’s criteria) are somewhat or very concerned about climate change; 2) when asked to rank climate change against other public policy issues of concern, climate change ranks last or near last among the issues of concern; 3) when asked how much those polled were willing to pay to fight climate change, or alternately the degree to which government should act to restrict or direct peoples’ choices to fight climate change, the answer is very little, to the former, or not much, to the latter.
Discussing the results of a recent survey conducted by the Monmouth University, The Hill writes:
Fewer Americans today see climate change as a “very serious” problem than they did three years ago, according to a new survey released Monday.
The Monmouth University poll, conducted on April 18-22 shows a 10-point decline in Americans who says climate change is a “very serious” problem, falling from 56 percent in September 2021 to 46 percent in April.
Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, attributed this trend to a decline in urgency among Americans.
“Most Americans continue to believe climate change is real. The difference in these latest poll results is a decline in a sense of urgency around this issue,” Murray said.
Perhaps surprising to many, the decline in concern among adults ages 18-34 was 17 points. In 2021 67 percent of that demographic said climate change was a “very serious” problem compared to just 50 percent in the most recent survey.
Interestingly, Monmouth’s survey found 27 percent of those surveyed did not believe climate change was happening or were unsure of it (an increase from 24 percent in 2021). And, almost as many survey participants believed human activities and natural changes in the environment were equally responsible for climate change (31 percent) as those who believed that human actions alone were responsible (34 percent).
The Monmouth poll is not really all that surprising to anyone who has closely followed surveys asking questions about climate change during the past two decades or longer.
On Earth Day, April 24, Breitbart reported on Gallup’s annual Earth Day poll, a survey it has undertaken since 2000. Its results were consistent with pervious Earth Day surveys. Finding the environment in general, and climate change, in particular, ranked very low on the list of the public’s issues of concern. Gallup’s 2024 poll found that despite decades of climate doomsaying fewer people worried a great deal about climate change in 2024 (42 percent) than were very worried about it in 2020, when the stated concern hit its high point (46 percent) in more than 20 years of surveys asking the question.
In Gallup’s survey a majority (55 percent), said they did not believe that climate change would pose a serious threat in their own lifetime.
Also, when ranked against other issues confronting the nation, as Gallup states: “Environmental Worries Lag Behind Economic and Social Issues,” which is also consistent with past surveys. And all of this is despite nearly two decades of climate alarm propagandizing in the mainstream media.
******************************************************
Australia: A "fossil fuel" comes in from the cold
New gas projects will gain stronger federal support in a Labor pledge to deliver affordable gas to customers for decades to come, as it warns of shortages within four years unless the nation boosts supply.
The federal government will back the case for new gas fields and import terminals to secure the supplies despite calls to phase out the use of fossil fuels, setting up a clash with the Greens and environmental groups over the new plan.
The future gas strategy, to be released by Resources Minister Madeleine King on Thursday, says the new supplies are fundamental to the economic transition to net zero emissions and the industries in the government’s “made in Australia” agenda for next week’s federal budget.
An official report to support the strategy says Australia could fill the future shortfalls by opening new gas fields such as Scarborough, being developed by Woodside off the Western Australian coast, and Narrabri, being developed by Santos in northern NSW.
“Ensuring Australia continues to have adequate access to reasonably priced gas will be key to delivering an 82 per cent renewable energy grid by 2030, and to achieve our commitment to net zero emissions by 2050,” King said.
While Labor often rubbished the Coalition’s support for fossil fuels with its talk of a “gas-fired recovery” three years ago, the new plan names gas supply as crucial to the nation’s economic fortunes.
“New sources of gas supply are needed to meet demand during the economy-wide transition,” the strategy says.
Former prime minister Scott Morrison outlined a “gas-fired recovery” policy during the pandemic with a vow to open up new gas fields, including the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory, but no new gas field has been developed in recent years.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese questioned the Coalition claims when he was opposition leader but broadly endorsed the use of gas, saying in November 2020: “The truth is that gas will play a role and should play a role in terms of firming up renewables and in other areas.”
Energy Minister Chris Bowen dismissed the Coalition gas plan as a “fraud” at the time.
Australia relies on gas for 27 per cent of its existing energy needs, as well as 14 per cent of its export income, but some Labor supporters as well as the Greens want the fossil fuel to be phased out by 2030.
The strategy mirrors the gas industry’s calls for new projects and endorses warnings from the energy market operator that new supplies are needed to avert supply shortfalls.
The government documents say NSW and Victoria will face shortages by 2028, along with other east coast states, while the shortage on the west coast will begin from 2030.
While the new plan does not force any change on state governments, it clashes with Victorian Energy Minister Lily D’Ambrosio because of her criticism of east coast gas producers, whom she has argued continue to export large volumes to international buyers.
“Gas companies in Queensland are putting their export profits ahead of domestic supplies. That has been the case now for a number of years,” D’Ambrosio said.
Victoria lifted its moratorium on conventional gas projects in 2021 but at the same time banned the practice of onshore fracking for gas.
The federal plan matches calls from NSW Premier Chris Minns and others in the Labor government for more domestic gas supplies, such as from the Narrabri field being developed by Santos.
The Future Gas Strategy will contain analysis of the future gas supply balance, which it is understood will reflect the Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) current forecasts.
ExxonMobil and Woodside’s 50-year-old Gippsland Basin gas fields in Bass Strait have historically provided up to two-thirds of southern states’ gas demand, but are rapidly drying up. AEMO forecasts gas production in NSW and Victoria will drop from 363 petajoules in 2023 to 236 petajoules in 2028.
AEMO said in March that the entire east coast gas market would be in annual deficit by 2028 unless new supplies are tapped, forecasting an annual shortfall of around 50 petajoules until 2032. The supply gap is expected to increase to between 100 petajoules and 200 petajoules from 2033.
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8 May, 2024
How your cooking could cause the same lung damage as pollution, study claims
This puts Greenie scares about pollution into perspective. If we want to eliminate air polluion we would have to eliminate cooking too. The fact of the matter is that cooking fires have long ago accustomed us to air pollution. We mostly just spit it up
Breakfasts featuring fried eggs, sausages and bacon aren't just bad for your heart. They could spell serious problems for your lungs too - especially if you're cooking them, a new study suggests.
Researchers have found that frying certain foods triggers the release of similar pollutants that flood the outdoor air in built-up cities, and are known to increase the risk of lung disease.
Previous studies involving chefs have shown exposure to cooking emissions is associated with chronic diseases in chefs.
But the new experiment, by experts at the University of British Columbia, is the first in which researchers revealed certain compounds can form in domestic kitchens.
The study analyzed the emissions and chemicals produced when cooking common meals using a frying pan - including pancakes, pan-fried brussel sprouts and vegetable stir fries.
To measure the amount of of pollutants produced by frying the meals, researchers set out to capture the smoke and emissions let off by cooking using a tool called an impinger, a small bottle mean to collect airborne chemicals.
After analyzing the emissions, scientists found the cooking produced carbon aerosols, small particles or liquid droplets in the air, called BrCOA.
The team then exposed these aerosols to overhead lighting in typical houses and natural sunlight.
They found all the meals released the same amount of carbon aerosols that then subsequently produced a harmful compound called singlet oxygen when exposed to light.
Singlet oxygen is a highly reactive compound that can cause lung damage and contribute to the development of cancer, diabetes and heart disease, previous studies have shown.
While all the meals produced singlet oxygen at around the same concentration, the highest amounts were detected when the fumes were exposed to sunlight - meaning kitchens with natural sunlight streaming in through windows could have the most compounds in the air.
Not only do these compounds form while cooking, but the scientists said they can linger in the air long after you've eaten, leading to the persistent degradation of your household air quality.
The study found the amount of singlet oxygen produced by cooking was present at similar levels to environmental pollution measured outdoors, but could be more dangerous indoors because it is a confined space with less ventilation.
While singlet oxygen compounds can be useful - sometimes used as a cancer therapy to cause cancer death - they have also been associated with damage to the body's cells.
Research has shown the chemical can also cause DNA and tissue damage, particularly of the skin and eyes and can cause swelling, blistering and scarring.
Because this is the first study of its kind, the scientists said more research is needed to fully understand cooking-related singlet oxygen and other cooking emissions.
Dr Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, UBC chemistry assistant professor and lead author of the study, said: 'Our next steps include determining just how this oxidant might affect humans and how much we’re breathing in when we cook. Could it play a role in some cooking-related diseases?'
In an effort to reduce the amount of this chemical, researchers recommend turning on kitchen venting fans, opening windows for fresh air and using an air filter in the kitchen.
Cooking with an oil with a high smoke point, such as avocado oil, can also help mitigate indoor pollution.
The study was published in the journal Environmental Science: Atmospheres.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13392333/cooking-lung-pollution-damage-study.html
**************************************************A whistleblower shares shocking details of corruption of peer review in climate science
I have been contacted by a whistleblower with a remarkable story of corruption of the academic peer-review process involving a paper published in 2022. The whistleblower has provided me with relevant emails, reviews and internal deliberations from which I recount this disturbing episode — which ends with an unwarranted and politically-motivated retraction of a paper that some climate scientists happened to disagree with.
The paper at the center of this story is not particularly significant, as it mainly reviews the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on trends in weather extremes. The paper does venture a bit too far (in my view) into commentary, but that is neither unique nor a basis for retracting a paper – if it were we’d have a lot of retractions!
To be clear, there is absolutely no allegation of research fraud or misconduct here, just simple disagreement. Instead of countering arguments and evidence via the peer reviewed literature, activist scientists teamed up with activist journalists to pressure a publisher – Springer Nature, perhaps the world’s most important scientific publisher – to retract a paper. Sadly, the pressure campaign worked.
The abuse of the peer review process documented here is remarkable and stands as a warning that climate science is as deeply politicized as ever with scientists willing to exert influence on the publication process both out in the open and behind the scenes.
I have contacted the publisher and the co-chief-editor of the journal with several questions (which you can find at the bottom), and a request for a reply by close-of-business today. It is now after 7PM in Europe, where both are based, and I have not received a response. My invitation for comment remains open and I will update this article should they respond.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/think-of-the-implications-of-publishing
***************************************************What the IPCC Actually Says About Extreme Weather. I promise, you'll be utterly shocked
ROGER PIELKE JR.
People are going absolutely nuts these days about extreme weather. Every event, any where is now readily associated with climate change and a portent of a climate out of control, apocalyptic even. I’ve long given up hope that the actual science of climate and extreme weather will be fairly reported or discussed in policy — nowadays, climate change is just too seductive and politically expedient.
But for those who want to know what research actually says on the relationship of extreme weather and climate change, that information is readily available. Today I’ll share the excellent work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarizing what its most recent assessment says about various types of extreme weather and climate change.
When you read the below you will realize that the difference between what you see in the news (including statements from leading scientists) and what the IPCC has concluded could not be more different. One day PhD dissertations will be written about our current moment of apocalyptic panic.
Identifying the signal of human caused climate change according to the IPCC, refers to detecting and attributing a change in the statistics of a particular climate or weather variable.
The IPCC further defines the emergence of a signal of climate change :
In this Report emergence of a climate change signal or trend refers to when a change in climate (the ‘signal’) becomes larger than the amplitude of natural or internal variations (defining the ‘noise’).
The IPCC further defines a concept called time of emergence:
Time when a specific anthropogenic signal related to climate change is statistically detected to emerge from the background noise of natural climate variability in a reference period, for a specific region
The “time of emergence” is a key concept of the AR6 report and a focus of its Chapter 12. It is important to note that just because a signal has not been detected, that does not mean that changes are not happening. However, as I have often said, the practical significance of a signal that can’t be detected cannot be large.
Before proceeding — A sidenote, perhaps telling about the state of climate research:
We (Ryan Crompton, John McAneney and I) were among the first to introduce the concept of time of emergence into the academic literature in 2011. The IPCC instead references the concept to a 2012 paper that applied the same concepts and methods, but failed to cite our work. I am used to such things! But it is satisfying to know that our work helped to kick start a major part of the IPCC AR6, which devoted an entire chapter to the topic. Now you know also.
Back to extreme weather — let’s take a look what IPCC AR6 says about the time of emergence for various extreme events. Here are some direct quotes related to specific phenomena:
An increase in heat extremes has emerged or will emerge in the coming three decades in most land regions (high confidence)
There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions
There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions.
Observed mean surface wind speed trends are present in many areas, but the emergence of these trends from the interannual natural variability and their attribution to human-induced climate change remains of low confidence due to various factors such as changes in the type and exposure of recording instruments, and their relation to climate change is not established. . . The same limitation also holds for wind extremes (severe storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms).
The IPCC helpfully provides a summary table for a range of extremes, indicating for various phenomena whether emergence has been achieved with medium or high confidence at three points in time:
A white entry in the table means that emergence has not yet been or is not in the future expected to be achieved. The blue and orange entries represent the emergence of respectively increasing and decreasing signals at various levels of confidence.
Take a moment and look at the table carefully. Look especially at all those white cells.
The IPCC has concluded that a signal of climate change has not yet emerged beyond natural variability for the following phenomena:
River floods
Heavy precipitation and pluvial floods
Landslides
Drought (all types)
Severe wind storms
Tropical cyclones
Sand and dust storms
Heavy snowfall and ice storms
Hail
Snow avalanche
Coastal flooding
Marine heat waves
Furthermore, the emergence of a climate change signal is not expected under the extreme RCP8.5 scenario by 2100 for any of these phenomena, except heavy precipitation and pluvial floods and that with only medium confidence. Since we know that RCP8.5 is extreme and implausible, that means that there would even less confidence in emergence under a more plausible upper bound, like RCP4.5
The IPCC concludes that, to date, the signal of climate change has emerged in extreme heat and cold spells. The IPCC states:
An increase in heat extremes has emerged or will emerge in the coming three decades in most land regions (high confidence) (Chapter 11; King et al., 2015; Seneviratne and Hauser, 2020), relative to the pre-industrial period, as found by testing significance of differences in distributions of yearly temperature maxima in simulated 20-year periods. In tropical regions, wherever observed changes can be established with statistical significance, and in most mid-latitude regions, there is high confidence that hot and cold extremes have emerged in the historical period, but only medium confidence elsewhere.
Clearly, with the exception perhaps of only extreme heat, the IPCC is badly out of step with today’s apocalyptic zeitgeist. Maybe that is why no one mentions what the IPCC actually says on extreme events. It may also help to explain why a recent paper that arrives at conclusions perfectly consistent with the IPCC is now being retracted with no claims of error or misconduct.
I’ve done research on climate change and extreme weather for almost 30 years (yowza!). I know the literature and have contributed quite a bit to it. My view is that the IPCC has accurately summarized that literature (if perhaps overlooking some key work, ahem).
I wonder if the IPCC is next in line to be attacked by champions of the apocalyptic zeitgeist. After all, how can science like this co-exist with an end-of-times panic? Something would seem to have to give, right?
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-ipcc-actually-says-about
*********************************************Australian Greens want a big new bureaucracy to supervise supermarkets
Guess who would wear the costs of it
Woolworths boss Brad Banducci won’t be pursued by the Greens-led Senate supermarket inquiry for contempt, and jail time of up to six months, after his fiery appearance last month but the inquiry has hit out at the powerful supermarket chains with recommendations to curtail their power, heighten regulatory oversight and possibly break them up.
In a lengthy 195-page report released on Tuesday, which carried 14 key recommendations aimed at lifting competition, limiting the power of Woolworths and Coles and beefing up regulation, the inquiry heavily criticised Mr Banducci for his performance, castigated Bunnings for not sending its CEO and ‘named and shamed’ multinational supermarket suppliers who declined to turn up at all.
The highly-anticipated report comes after the Albanese government earlier this year gave approval for the Greens-led inquiry to go ahead, handing Greens Senator Nick McKim a powerful pulpit as inquiry chairman to level accusations of price gouging and profiteering at Woolworths and Coles, and in one combative hearing threaten Mr Banducci with contempt charges and jail time.
The 14 key recommendations include recommending the federal government pursue a range of new rules and legislation to combat the power of the supermarket giants Woolworths and Coles, including divestiture powers, establishing a prices commission and making the food and grocery code of conduct compulsory.
Divestiture powers could allow a court to break up a large corporation, such as the biggest supermarket chains, if they were seen to be misusing their market power. The bosses of Woolworths and Coles warned in their public hearings that divestiture could cause unintended consequences such as job losses and a fall in business investment, while other witnesses before the inquiry argued in favour of these powers being introduced.
The committee also recommended that, as a matter of priority, the government establish a Commission on Prices and Competition to examine prices and price setting practices of industries across the economy, and review government and other restrictions on effective competition which are leading to high prices.
This commission would have the authority to, among other things, monitor and investigate supermarket prices and price setting practices, conduct market studies to review restrictions on competition in the supermarket sector, require supermarkets to publish historical pricing data that is transparent and accessible to both suppliers and consumers and access any data and information required to undertake its work, including supermarket pricing, mark-ups and profits data and price setting policies.
It has also called on the Competition and Consumer Act to be amended to prohibit the “charging of excess prices, otherwise known as price gouging”, merger laws to be strengthened, and the ACCC be given greater funding.
It has also recommended the current voluntary food and grocery code of conduct that covers the relationship between suppliers and Woolworths, Coles, Metcash and Aldi, be made mandatory.
***************************************
7 May, 2024
Forbes Calls BS on the latest Climate Economics Doomsday Prediction
A new study claims that loss of productivity because of climate change could result in a 19% reduction in the world economy by 2049. Despite the number being significantly higher than previous studies, the authors claim their numbers are conservative and could be as high 29% of the global GDP. Climate activists were quick to latch onto the study, calling for more aggressive measures to prevent climate change and fund mitigation efforts.
The study, The economic commitment of climate change, was published in Nature on April 17 by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, also known as PIK, a non-profit organization funded by the German government.
…
While I am not an economist, in my opinion the data seems flawed. According to a study published by NOAA in January 2024, the average temperature has risen 2° F since 1850. In that same period, the global GDP increased from $1.73 trillion to $134.08 trillion. If we accept the climate projection models used in the study, it dismisses the resiliency of human nature and our ability to overcome economic challenges.
The abstract of the study;
The economic commitment of climate change
Maximilian Kotz, Anders Levermann & Leonie Wenz
Abstract
Global projections of macroeconomic climate-change damages typically consider impacts from average annual and national temperatures over long time horizons1,2,3,4,5,6. Here we use recent empirical findings from more than 1,600 regions worldwide over the past 40 years to project sub-national damages from temperature and precipitation, including daily variability and extremes7,8. Using an empirical approach that provides a robust lower bound on the persistence of impacts on economic growth, we find that the world economy is committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years independent of future emission choices (relative to a baseline without climate impacts, likely range of 11–29% accounting for physical climate and empirical uncertainty). These damages already outweigh the mitigation costs required to limit global warming to 2 °C by sixfold over this near-term time frame and thereafter diverge strongly dependent on emission choices. Committed damages arise predominantly through changes in average temperature, but accounting for further climatic components raises estimates by approximately 50% and leads to stronger regional heterogeneity. Committed losses are projected for all regions except those at very high latitudes, at which reductions in temperature variability bring benefits. The largest losses are committed at lower latitudes in regions with lower cumulative historical emissions and lower present-day income.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07219-0
Spot on Jon McGowan – it’s near impossible to produce a scary projection without making some pretty questionable assumptions. From the study above;… Following a well-developed literature2,3,19, these projections do not aim to provide a prediction of future economic growth. Instead, they are a projection of the exogenous impact of future climate conditions on the economy relative to the baselines specified by socio-economic projections, based on the plausibly causal relationships inferred by the empirical models and assuming ceteris paribus. Other exogenous factors relevant for the prediction of economic output are purposefully assumed constant. …
Holding as many variables as possible static, while changing only those variables you want to study, is a time honoured method of analysing complex systems.
But as the authors admit, their study is not realistic. My understanding of the study is they are attempting to abstract the impact say more extreme weather would have on the economy, if nobody attempted to mitigate these problems, say by building better drainage and water management systems to manage floods, and bigger reservoirs to maintain agricultural output during severe droughts.
As Forbes author Jon McGowan rightly points out, there are good reasons to doubt the real world applicability of the predictions of the study, even if we pretend their admittedly unrealistic assumptions are realistic.
Why would the next 0.5C of warming be so much worse than the previous 0.5C of warming?
There is no historical evidence which suggests the next 0.5C of warming, if it occurs, would be any worse than what we have already experienced. There is no evidence extreme weather is getting worse, despite the predictions of climate models which were used as the basis of the study quoted above.
In fact there are good reasons to believe additional warming might produce a better climate for humans.
Global warming is not evenly distributed across the world. Polar amplification is the observed strong tendency for global warming to be pushed away from the equator to where it is actually needed.
If global warming continues, by 2049 there is a very good chance there will be more viable agricultural land available for our use, not less. Canadian Geographic admitted in 2020 that global warming is opening millions of square kilometres of new agricultural land, and will continue to do so if the world continues to warm.
I’m personally pleased Jon McGowan and Forbes published this rare criticism of alarmist global warming tropes. Let’s hope more news outlets and authors find the courage in future to question the steady stream of increasingly exaggerated and implausible claims of how doomed we all are.
**************************************************
Saving Climate From the Greens
“It’s like we were an idiot country,” the late Dwayne Andreas, longtime CEO of Archer-Daniels-Midland Co., once told me, referring to some systematically self-defeating policy out of Washington.
He raised a question of enduring interest. Why does government persist in demonstrably failed and foolish efforts? It took billions of dollars in subsidies from carmakers and federal taxpayers to get early adopters to buy electric vehicles, so it’s pretty clear car buyers aren’t that keen on EVs. They’ll put one in the garage if the price is right, but the right price is thousands less per vehicle than it costs to build them.
And remember why we sold ourselves this bill of goods: to reduce emissions. It was always nonsense. When Congress launched its first Obama-era climate subsidies, it funded a study by the Nobel-winning climate economist William Nordhaus, who concluded that alternative energy handouts are a “poor tool” for fighting emissions, with negligible effect even before accounting for the inevitable “international spillovers”—i.e., consumers globally using more fossil fuels because the U.S. spends insane billions to subsidize its consumers to use less.
A widely heralded paper by Princeton economists showed subsidizing green energy globally at best would have a “minuscule” effect on emissions.
Even Biden officials will say as much off the record. Yet look at the Washington Post’s recent contortions to let readers know the administration’s proclaimed U.S. “climate goals” are meaningless when the U.S. simultaneously exports large amounts of hydrocarbons and imports emissions-intensive manufactured goods. The Post could apparently publish these caveats only by attributing them to “big oil” lobbyists.
Or take the room where New York Times editors craft sentences to mislead readers. They say about Joe Biden’s EV policy: “Cars and other forms of transportation are, together, the largest single source of carbon emissions generated by the United States, pollution that is driving climate change and that helped to make 2023 the hottest year in recorded history.”
Notice how this conflates U.S. car emissions with total transportation emissions, then U.S. emissions with global emissions, to hide that the president’s policy would only reduce emissions by 0.2%, and then only if we ignore those pesky international spillovers.
Do no harm, the most cited advice of the Hippocratic Oath, is also a pungent observation on human nature. People want to be seen helping even when they aren’t. Much self-interested mischief is advanced under the guise of helping.
In search of relief, meet Chris Wright, CEO of the fracking services provider Liberty Energy, testifying Wednesday before the House Financial Services Committee.
He’s suing over an impertinent SEC rule on corporate climate disclosure, but his real goal, he tells me, is to seek progress against a “ridiculously naive” climate and energy debate, dominated by the cant phrases that prevail in the media.
“Clean energy,” as Americans increasingly understand, is a two-word phrase for the extremely dirty industrial business of delivering a consumer a car with no emissions at the tailpipe or electricity manufactured without the help of a fossil-fuel power plant.
“Energy transition” describes a nonexistent, mythic phenomenon found nowhere in the data. Wind, solar and biomass have always existed. All forms of energy consumption are going up, but oil, gas and coal still carry the load and no policy will alter this, especially as China embraces EVs to cut reliance on imported oil in favor of domestic coal.
“Decarbonization,” likewise, is a polysyllabic prettifier for sending gas-fired U.S. and German heavy industry to China to run on coal, with twice the emissions.
I’ve borrowed the term “sophisticated state failure” for the energy suicide of the West. Though not a fan, I told readers during the long election night of 2016: “Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his candidacy represents a chance to dismiss a very particular elite about whom it could be said, borrowing from Cromwell, ‘For any good you have been doing . . . in the name of God, go!’”
I was referring to the green-energy elite.
Mr. Wright’s company provides fracking to North American oil and gas producers in ways that reduce their total effect on the environment. His real passion, though, has been carbon-free nuclear ever since his undergraduate days at MIT. He endorses the estimates of the U.N. climate panel, which weighs dozens of computer models, none of which seem to get the climate exactly right. If so, the coming century will see 1 or 2 degrees Celsius more warming and 8 to 17 inches of sea-level rise.
If you believe no cost is too great to avoid this outcome, please stop exhaling. Otherwise, you’ve already accepted that some things are worse than CO2 emissions.
Welcome to humanity, points out Mr. Wright, which by its actions has shown that its adaptations won’t come at the expense of affordable energy that helps solve real problems for eight billion humans.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/opinion-saving-climate-from-the-greens/ar-BB1llIhA
**************************************************Former Auto Exec Exposes ‘Colossal Mistake’ In America’s EV Push
According to Experian data, as of the third quarter of 2023, only one percent of all registered vehicles in the U.S. are electric.
Former Big Three automotive executive Bob Lutz explained why the EV push isn’t resonating with buyers or suppliers to Fox News Digital.
“The idea of EVs, gradually, adoption over time, with ever longer battery range, ever quicker recharge time, so that over the next couple of decades, EVs take a bigger and bigger slice of the pie, that’s fine. But trying to get it done overnight was a colossal mistake, and it just plain is not going to work,” Lutz said.
Keeping in mind that the EV debate has become a “politically charged” subject, Lutz argued that legitimate pros exist in terms of driving an electric car, but there seems to be more cons in today’s market.
“We’ve had 125 years to perfect the internal combustion engine, and we’ve had roughly 15 years so far on doing modern electric vehicles with modern batteries,” Lutz said. “Electric vehicles are fun, they drive well, they’re silent, they’re fast.”
EVs also have fewer moving parts, their brake systems are more durable and, overall, it’s intelligent technology, according to Lutz, but they’re expensive and unreliable when it comes to charging.
An energy report released last October by the Texas Public Policy Foundation concluded that EVs would cost tens of thousands of dollars more if not for generous taxpayer-funded incentives: the average model year 2021 EV would cost approximately $48,698 more to own over a 10-year period without the staggering $22 billion in taxpayer-funded handouts that the government provides to electric car manufacturers and owners.
Additionally, as of December, only eight EV chargers were reportedly being built with funds from President Biden’s infrastructure law that earmarked $7.5 billion for 500,000 chargers nationwide.
“Tesla and many other electric vehicles nowadays, as far as design, road behavior and so forth, there is nothing wrong with it. It’s just that the American public is stubborn, and they happen to like gasoline engines,” Lutz said. “It’s just a question of convenience and infrastructure.”
Just over one year ago, Toyota’s president and chairman was forced to resign after telling the Wall Street Journal that he questioned whether the push for the auto industry to phase out gas-powered vehicles was the right decision.
“Turns out he was right,” the former Big Three exec reacted. “So all we’re seeing is that everybody is pulling back on their EV programs. And both Jim Farley of Ford and I believe Mary Barra of General Motors have said: we have to admit, we were all consumed in this wave of EV euphoria, and we all thought it was going to happen much faster than it actually did.”
“But they’re flexible. They’re still making predominantly internal combustion engines. So, as long as production facilities are still there for internal combustion vehicles, which they manifestly are, they’ll still keep producing gasoline-powered Explorers and Equinox,” Lutz expanded, “despite the government’s best efforts to make these things go away as fast as possible, which is not going to happen.”
The former exec also made the distinction that a liberal, environmentally focused crowd is “pushing the heck out of” EVs, while conservatives typically “reject” EVs as another example of government control.
“A lot of it’s become like Second Amendment gun rights, you know, ‘Nobody is going to take my gasoline powered pickup truck away from me, and they’ll have to come and get it at the same time that they pry my shotgun out of my cold, dead hands,’” Lutz said.
“One of the reasons why EV sales are down is because center-right conservative America is beginning to see them as a political statement, that if you buy an EV, it kind of means that you’re siding with the Biden administration on their environmental and social policies,” he emphasized. “And many Americans don’t want to do that.”
Pointing to a “long-term positive trend,” the self-deemed “father” of the first extended range EV believes the solution includes segmented improvements when it comes to mileage and charging supply over the next 10 years.
He also advised current and future executives and CEOs to use their resources and look ahead three to four years to consumer demands, but admitted “nobody is very good at that.”
https://principia-scientific.com/former-auto-exec-exposes-colossal-mistake-in-americas-ev-push/
************************************************What The Media Fails To Tell You About Coral Bleaching
Jennifer Marohasy
There was significant coral bleaching this last summer. It was remarkable at the Keppel Islands
But because scientists have been falsely calling it every year, this important fact is likely to be lost to our collective memory.
It is also a problem when my colleagues deny this bleaching.
If we deny when there is bleaching, and claim bleaching when there is none – it is impossible to know the cycles and their causes.
Last Sunday morning, at Secret Cove, I watched the turtle come out from under a stand of stark white coral – bleached coral – and swim towards me.
The turtle was not bothered by me and seemed oblivious to all the coral bleaching.
The creatures under-the-water last Sunday morning, they seem oblivious to the colour of the coral that was mostly stark white, some healthy chocolate brown (replete with symbiotic zooxanthellae/good microalgae), and some brown from infestations of macro algae smothering the corals.
To my eye, the fish and other creatures seemed randomly distributed, which is to say they could be found across the reef irrespective of the colour of the coral.
It was not at all how the BBC have described coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef – they have recently been using the terms ‘ghostly white’, ‘spooky white’, ‘like a graveyard’. These journalists are clueless (CLICK HERE).
Secret Cove a week ago was badly bleached – and it was teeming with life. But to know this, it is necessary to get under the water.
A big shout out to Jenn and the rest of the crew at Keppel Dive on Great Keppel Island (CLICK HERE). Thank you for the opportunity to dive so many coral reefs last weekend – thank you for your care and for finding the Epaulette shark at Secret Cove.
To know that many of the stark white corals are still alive it is necessary to observe them up close. For example, the brain coral (perhaps a Lobophyllia sp. or Caulastrea sp.) did look ‘ghostly white’ from a few metres away.
But up close – after I reset my camera to take a macro – you can see that the polyps are still very much intact, that the polyps have a carpet-like texture concealing separate corallites.
Secret Cove fringes Great Keppel Island, reportedly with some of the worst of the coral bleaching, considering the entire Great Barrier Reef this last summer.
The BBC also mentioned ocean acidification and high temperatures – unprecedented they claim. Again, they are just making stuff up.
I’ve noticed that the journalists and the scientists, from all sides of the political divides, increasingly just add to the established narratives rather than checking the data, or even visiting a coral reef.
This makes me an outlier – relevant only because you are reading me. (For sure the institutions and sometimes even my colleagues and even social media want me cancelled so be sure to subscribe at my website for weekly e-news: CLICK HERE)
It is the case that our oceans are not acidic, not at all. I wrote about this in a chapter for ‘Climate Change, The Facts’ back in 2017
As for the water temperatures, this last summer was hot, but not exceptionally so.
I write this, not with reference to the wholly contrived coloured maps they show you on the nightly news often for the whole Earth and always showing continuous increase (as though there is never winter), but rather with reference to more reliable location specific temperature data for the Keppel Islands.
For example, considering Australian Institute of Marine Science data for Square Rocks, and Bureau of Meteorology data for Rosslyn Bay, we can see that there is still a strong seasonal component to the temperature data and that this last summer temperatures were well within the expected seasonal cycle.
So, what caused the coral bleaching this last summer that has been so severe, particularly at the southern Great Barrier Reef, and particularly at the Keppel Islands?
The Moon has a particular influence on sea levels.
We see this not just in the daily and monthly cycles, but the Moon also causes the less well understood 18.6-year declination cycle.
The Moon takes a month to complete a revolution around the Earth. But it doesn’t follow the same path, moving above the Earth’s equator for two weeks and below the equator for two weeks of each month.
The distance above and below the equator changes with this 18.6 year cycle.
This is because as the Earth is tilted at 23.5 degrees relative to the Sun causing the seasons, the Moon is tilted at 5 degrees relative to the Earth, and every 18.6 years, the angle between the Moon’s orbit and Earth’s equator reaches a maximum that is the sum of Earth’s equatorial tilt (23°27?) and the Moon’s orbital inclination (5°09?) to the ecliptic.
This is called major lunar standstill, and I define it as occurring when the distance that the Moon travels south is more than 28 degrees south each month.
While we may intuitively expect larger sea tides as the Moon approaches its maximum declination considering this 18.6-year cycle, because the gravitational forcing of the Moon is less well aligned with the gravitational forcing of the Sun on the Earth at this time, we see on average lower sea tides at least in the data for the nearby Rosslyn Bay gauge for the last few months.
I suspect that the bleaching at the Keppel Islands this last summer can be blamed on the Moon; specifically that the lower tides caused by Maximum Lunar Declination combined with a short period of clear skies and no winds caused the water to stay continuously warm for a longer period than usual, in a way that was catastrophic.
That is my hypothesis.
The popular claim, the consensus claim consistent with anthropogenic global warming theory that the atmosphere replete with ‘greenhouse gases’ has been warming the ocean is not credible, at least not considering the location specific data for Square Rocks between North Keppel Island and Great Keppel Island.
The available Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) data shows that the water is consistently warmer than the air above it. As the water is consistently warmer than the air, it is not logical to suggest that the air is warming the water.
https://principia-scientific.com/what-the-media-fails-to-tell-you-about-coral-bleaching/
***************************************6 May, 2024
Offshore Wind Is Gearing up to Bulldoze the Ocean
The Biden Administration has recently produced a wave of plans and regulatory actions aimed at building a monstrous amount of destructive offshore wind. No environmental impact assessment is included.
Time scales range from tomorrow to 2050. Here is a quick look at some of it, starting with the Grand Plan.
“Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Offshore Wind” is the grandiose title of the Energy Department’s version of Biden’s vision. Their basic idea is that having successfully traversed the unexpected cost crisis, offshore wind is ready to take off.
They point out that even though costs quickly jumped an average of 65%, the boom market is unchanged. The coastal States are raring to go with huge offshore wind targets and laws. In short, it is a seller’s market. Cost is no object.
They note that State mandates and targets already exceed the Biden goal of 100,000 MW by 2050. But why stop there? They say that Net Zero requires an incredible 250,000 MW of offshore wind. At 15 MW a turbine, this is just under 17,000 monster towers.
The word “environmental” occurs frequently in this 62-page grand vision but it is always about environmental justice. The cumulatively destructive environmental impacts of lining our coast with towers and cables are ignored apparently not worth mentioning. Neither is cost.
Next comes transmission, where we have “AN ACTION PLAN FOR OFFSHORE WIND TRANSMISSION DEVELOPMENT IN THE U.S. ATLANTIC REGION“. While the Pathways plan covers the US, this one is just about the Atlantic because that is where the big action is now.
This 110-pager is from the Energy Department and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is actually building the offshore wind monster.
The basic idea is simple. Instead of bringing the juice ashore individually from each giant wind facility, we will build a massive high-voltage grid in the ocean. This way, we can move the energy up and down the coast from wherever it is generated to where it is needed.
In the Plan, there are actually three backbone grids: northern, central, and southern, but this detail need not concern us. There is, of course, a huge network of feeder lines connecting the backbones to the legion of individual giant generation facilities.
Given the incredibly huge generation numbers in the Liftoff Plan, this is a very big grid indeed. It is a DC grid, so I guess the juice gets turned into AC onshore, where it then ties to the suitably beefed-up land grid. Beefing that up is another huge unknown cost.
There are many issues with this grand design, including legal and policy ones, and many of these are mentioned. How this ocean-going grid ties into State utility law is an interesting example.
Environmental impacts are only addressed as a research topic, not as a potential problem, except for floating wind, where some big problems are mentioned in passing. The feel-good idea of minimizing impact occurs frequently, but what those impacts might be is not said.
As is typical for BOEM, they talk about monitoring a good bit. Their approach to environmental impact is let’s build it and see what happens as though extinction of the North Atlantic Right Whale was reversible. The concept of cumulative impacts is not addressed.
Cost allocation is a major economic topic, but there is nothing whatever on what this underwater monstrosity might cost.
Returning to today, several things have happened. First, BOEM has announced a lot of new lease sales over the next five years (the Biden II years?). These run from Maine to Oregon, fixed and floating, with five scheduled for this year alone.
Some are in new places, while others are in already crowded areas like the New York Bight. As always, there is no cumulative environmental impact analysis. It’s like BOEM never heard of that, even though the law clearly calls for it when piling on the projects.
More ominously, there are new regulations governing the permitting of offshore wind projects. The developers love these new rules, which tells us they are not designed for environmental protection. This is from the BOEM press release:
“”The final modernization rule will streamline the permitting process and reduce regulatory barriers for developers. It will also lead to greater collaboration between federal, state, and local stakeholders, ensuring that offshore wind projects are developed in a sustainable and responsible manner,” said Anne Reynolds, the American Clean Power Association Vice President for Offshore Wind.”
The primary “regulatory barrier” is environmental impact analysis. The new rules require agencies to rush these, which means glossing over them with no time for serious analysis.
Today’s actions may seem small, but given the long-term Plans, they are anything but. It is all part of a huge rush to do something enormously expensive and environmentally destructive for which there is no need whatsoever.
This offshore bulldozer must be stopped before it is too late.
https://heartland.org/opinion/offshore-wind-is-gearing-up-to-bulldoze-the-ocean/
*************************************************The High Price of Climate Alarm
It is with no small amount of pleasure that I found a media outlet acknowledging President Joe Biden’s energy and climate policies have increased American’s energy costs. The Dallas Express, a local online alternative news outlet, published a story titled “Energy Prices 30% Higher Under Biden Admin.” Unlike so much of the mainstream media, The Dallas Express didn’t expend ink trying to explain how consumers really don’t realize that the economy and their lives are better despite the higher prices, or that the costs Biden and company have added to peoples’ power bills are justified as a means of fighting climate change. Rather, the Express took a Joe Friday, “just the facts” approach, explaining:
Energy prices in the United States are wreaking havoc on budget-sensitive households, making it harder for families to save money or get ahead financially.
Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, Americans’ electricity bills have skyrocketed nearly 30%, or 13 times faster than in the previous seven years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest consumer price index data.
Despite the Federal Reserve holding interest rates steady since July 2023, inflation continues to pose a problem for policymakers and households.
“There is no improvement here, we’re moving in the wrong direction,” said Bankrate chief financial analyst Greg McBride in an interview with Fox Business. “The usual trouble spots persist—shelter, motor vehicle insurance, maintenance, repairs, and service costs. Add electricity to that list, up 0.9% in March and 5% over the past year.”
Part of the reason for the surge in energy prices is due to the push to replace fossil fuels and nuclear power plants with renewable subsidies and green-energy mandates.
Of course, The Heartland Institute has been on top of this story since Biden took office. We produced Energy at a Glance Documents in 2021 and 2022 detailing the Biden policies that have resulted in higher electricity, heating, and transportation fuel prices, and how much they went up. By our calculation, after less than 2 full years in office, Biden’s climate and energy policies hare increased average household energy costs by more than $2,300.
Interviewed for an Environment & Climate News story covering the lingering high prices energy prices in 2023, Gary Stone, executive vice president of engineering at Five States Energy, said:
The Biden administration has been a continually growing disaster for the domestic oil and gas industry. Using the ‘New Green Deal’ as a basis, they have halted or delayed drilling on federal lands, attempted to restrict drilling because of allegedly endangered species, cancelled pipelines, and restricted exports of crude and processed gas liquids.
While international oil politics, production, and pricing still control a significant portion of the market, there is no doubt the policies of the Biden regime have had a huge impact on prices.” Gas prices, for instance, were far lower under the Trump administration, crude oil prices were about $30 (per barrel) lower, and gasoline was around $2 per gallon less than now, all of which immediately rose under Biden.
Instead of encouraging domestic production as Trump did, the current regime is now implementing onerous methane-emission regulations and taxes that some sources estimate will result in the abandonment of as much as 30 percent of domestic wells and greatly increase the operating costs, and reduce the life, of the remaining producers. The Biden administration will serve the ‘green gods’ even if it bankrupts much of a major industry and greatly reduces the energy available to the country.
Of course those are just the direct energy costs to drivers, businesses, renters, and homeowners, not accounting for the ripple effect higher energy prices have on energy-intensive goods like food production and delivery, chemical production, and manufacturing.
Other rarely accounted for costs of Biden’s climate obsession—one not shared by the American public, according to recent polls—stem from government spending on Biden’s climate and energy policies. The costs of these programs are borne by taxpayers and future generations who will inherit the costs Biden’s energy policies are adding to the nation’s annual deficits and long-term debt.
How much are we talking about? Well, in early April 2024, the Biden administration granted outright more than $20 billion to unaccountable climate, finance, and community activist NGOs to promote green energy adoption across the country.
Author and energy analyst Robert Bryce has calculated that the subsidies and tax credits for wind and solar power alone have ballooned from an estimated $19.9 billion in 2015 to commitments of more than $425 billion by 2033, based on newly installed, approved, and anticipated wind and solar construction.
And, in December 2023, at a conference in Dubai, Vice President Kamala Harris bragged about the administration’s commitment to spend more than $1 trillion fighting climate change—less than the country spent on Social Security in 2023, but more than we spent on defense. This is likely an underestimate as past estimates of spending on these programs have repeatedly proven to be.
Government spending and regulations are a drag on the economy, basically a hidden tax, spending money on goods and services that consumers likely wouldn’t have freely chosen to spend their own money, or companies invested in, or banks financed, in a marketplace not directed by federal mandates or influenced by federal incentives: replacing market assessments of how to balance the concerns of climate change, energy security, and economic progress with spending decisions dictated by political overlords, their crony-capitalist allies, and climate scolds.
Any way you measure it, the price tag on Biden’s climate program on the American economy and its people is quite high and growing.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/05/climate-change-weekly-505-the-high-price-of-climate-alarm/
********************************************************BBC Uses Bad Science To Promote ‘Climate-Induced’ Extreme Weather
A recent BBC article, titled “How climate change worsens heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and floods,” claims that climate change is linked to four types of extreme weather, specifically that it causes extreme rainfall, worse heatwaves, longer droughts, and more wildfires. [emphasis, links added]
Widely available data proves these claims are false.
The “evidence” given by the BBC is not evidence at all, as it eschews real-world measurements, [preferring] model outputs and predictions from a single climate activist organization.
The first section of the BBC’s report is dedicated to the idea that climate change causes more extreme rainfall.
The BBC presents a very simplistic vision of how the precipitation is related to average temperature, claiming that warmer air can hold more moisture, and therefore heavier rainfall. While the basic physics here is accurate, the atmosphere is more complex than that in reality.
For this section, they [didn’t rely on] available data, even from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shows no evidence of the increasing intensity of rainfall, but rather the BBC solely referenced counterfactual modeling produced by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.
Climate Realism very recently explained why, contrary to the BBC’s insistence, attribution modeling is not evidence for climate change’s impact on flooding like that which was recently seen in Dubai.
In that same post, I pointed out that the IPCC does not admit to finding any evidence of climate change’s impact on heavy precipitation. (See figure below)
The next section in BBC’s report is no better. This time, the BBC writes “the distribution of daily temperatures shifts to warmer levels, making hotter days more likely and more intense.”
As evidence, they point to a recent heatwave in Mali and the Sahel region of Africa… and WWA’s analysis that concluded it could not have happened without “human-caused climate change.”
Again, WWA’s claims aren’t evidence. Many parts of the Sahel region frequently meet temperature maximums on average above 40°C – usually in April – which is what the recent heatwave brought.
There is no way to claim that such heat never happened before industrialization. This is pure speculation on the part of WWA and the BBC, lacking any facts or peer-reviewed research to back up their claim.
Once again, this exact claim was refuted in an earlier Climate Realism post, “Wrong, BBC and Reuters, No Evidence Proves West African Heatwave Is Unprecedented.”
Longer droughts, the BBC admits, are harder to link to climate change, but they attempt to do it anyway, asserting that recent short-term droughts in East Africa and the Amazon rainforests were caused by human-induced climate change.
The BBC once again relies only on the WWA’s say-so to support its claims, which, once again, are false.
Focusing on the Amazon rainforest, real-world data do not show that the Amazon is becoming more prone to drought because of climate change.
Myriad factors contribute to recent droughts, such as human causes like deforestation and increased agriculture putting strain on water supplies.
No research or data ties climate change to Amazonian droughts.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts points out that recent studies, including a paper from 2023, show that even worse droughts occurred in 1865 when the planet was cooler, and “several other years in the historical record were as bad or worse than the drought being experienced today.” (See figure below)
The final section again relies on WWA studies, this time promoting the idea that climate change is making the weather conditions needed for wildfires more likely, and claims that extreme wildfires are projected to become worse and more frequent in the future.
This is easy to refute, as data show that wildfire damage is becoming far less expansive.
NASA tracks the total acreage burned by wildfires since 2003. Their data show a steep downward trend in acreage burned—so, a decline in wildfires, not an increase. (See figure below)
Data from the European Space Agency display the same downward wildfire trend.
This is despite an increase in industry, deforestation, warming, and human encroachment on fire-prone areas, around the globe.
The BBC’s confidence in their assertions is utterly unfounded, and it is telling that they refuse to cite any historical data, instead relying exclusively on projections from WWA’s attribution models, which Climate Realism has refuted using historical data and present trends repeatedly here and here, for example, in addition to the articles cited above.
Reality paints a far friendlier picture of the climate and recent climate trends than does the BBC. Instead of attempting to frighten readers, the BBC ought to consider telling the truth.
https://principia-scientific.com/bbc-uses-bad-science-to-promote-climate-induced-extreme-weather/
*****************************************************Wrong, Mainstream Media, Climate Change Isn’t Spreading Malaria to New Places
Editor’s Note: The media seems to have gotten their marching orders. Multiple news outlets, including The Guardian, The Daily Express, and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, among others, published stories on the same day saying malaria and other mosquito borne diseases are on the rise in unusual locations due to climate change. We at Climate Realism have refuted similar claims multiple times in the past, here, here, and here, for instance. As detailed in Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the vast body of scientific literature refutes the recent mainstream media claims that climate change is likely to exacerbate the spread of mosquito borne diseases. Studies from Africa, to England and Wales, to North and South America, to Thailand and beyond refute any link between climate change and the spread of malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and other vector-borne diseases.
In this post guest analyst, Eric Worrall, uses classic literature, historical accounts, and scientific studies to show that malaria has historically been common in non-tropical areas, like Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, until modern societies learned to suppress them with medical and pesticide interventions. If such diseases become make a comeback in the future, it will not be because the climate has changed, making it new areas suddenly more conducive to malaria bearing mosquitos, but rather because we are no longer using the interventions which defeated such diseases in these regions and countries in the recent past.
Guest Essay by Eric Worrall
Famous British playwright William Shakespeare wrote about endemic Malaria in Britain in the 1500s. Malaria was the scourge of Scandinavia and Russia right up until the 20th century. But this has not stopped greens falsely claiming Malaria is a disease of warm climates.
Mosquito-borne diseases spreading in Europe due to climate crisis, says expert
Illnesses such as dengue and malaria to reach unaffected parts of northern Europe, America, Asia and Australia, conference to hear
Helena Horton Environment reporter Thu 25 Apr 2024 14.00 AEST
Mosquito-borne diseases are spreading across the globe, and particularly in Europe, due to climate breakdown, an expert has said.
The insects spread illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever, the prevalences of which have hugely increased over the past 80 years as global heating has given them the warmer, more humid conditions they thrive in.
Prof Rachel Lowe who leads the global health resilience group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, has warned that mosquito-borne disease outbreaks are set to spread across currently unaffected parts of northern Europe, Asia, North America and Australia over the next few decades.
…
“Global warming due to climate change means that the disease vectors that carry and spread malaria and dengue [fever] can find a home in more regions, with outbreaks occurring in areas where people are likely to be immunologically naive and public health systems unprepared,” Lowe said.
“The stark reality is that longer hot seasons will enlarge the seasonal window for the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and favour increasingly frequent outbreaks that are increasingly complex to deal with.”
Studying Shakespeare is, or was until recently, a staple of British education. So why do people swallow the mistruth that Malaria is a tropical disease? Why doesn’t everyone know about Shakespeare’s references to Malaria?
The reason is back in Shakespeare’s day, they called Malaria something else. Shakespeare’s 16th century word for fevers like Malaria and Dengue was “Ague“
Sixteen references in Shakespeare’s plays – Ague was an important factor in people’s lives in Britain in the 1500s.
Ague was a changer of battles, a metaphor for fear or a sign of divine punishment, a disease which caused a burning fever with shaking, pale skin (anaemia) and weight loss, a disease whose worst phases left people bedridden, a disease which was stronger during Spring, when mosquitoes become active: “the sun in March, This praise doth nourish agues“.
Ague was Malaria.
The point is Malaria infection was prevalent enough to be referenced sixteen times by Shakespeare, during the Little Ice Age, during the period frost fairs were held on the River Thames, which froze solid enough in winter for people to walk around on the ice. Malaria is not a tropical disease.
The American CDC also provides evidence that tropical weather is not the main driver of Malaria;
From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age
Paul Reiter
Author affiliation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Abstract
Present global temperatures are in a warming phase that began 200 to 300 years ago. Some climate models suggest that human activities may have exacerbated this phase by raising the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Discussions of the potential effects of the weather include predictions that malaria will emerge from the tropics and become established in Europe and North America. The complex ecology and transmission dynamics of the disease, as well as accounts of its early history, refute such predictions. Until the second half of the 20th century, malaria was endemic and widespread in many temperate regions, with major epidemics as far north as the Arctic Circle. From 1564 to the 1730s—the coldest period of the Little Ice Age—malaria was an important cause of illness and death in several parts of England. Transmission began to decline only in the 19th century, when the present warming trend was well under way. The history of the disease in England underscores the role of factors other than temperature in malaria transmission.
***************************************
5 May, 2024
Can we really avoid “forever chemicals”?
The prologed agonizing over PFAS chemicals is based on the claim that they are harmful to your health but the link that they give in "Salon" below in support of that claim says only that they "MAY BE" harmful to your health.
https://www.epa.gov/pfas/our-current-understanding-human-health-and-environmental-risks-pfas
And the reason for that caution is that many studies have shown that PFAS are NOT harmful to humans in the concentrations likely to be encountered. The evils of PFAS have become as much of a religion as the evils of climate change. Proof not needed. Not even probability is neededIt’s no secret that many of our favorite foods contain an array of chemicals that can lead to serious health risks.
This month, Consumer Reports — the watchdog group that’s currently urging the Department of Agriculture to remove Lunchables from the National School Lunch Program — found that pesticide contamination was rampant in several produce items, both conventional and organic. Pesticides, the group said, “posed significant risks” in 20% of the foods they examined, including bell peppers, blueberries, green beans, potatoes, and strawberries. Green beans, in particular, contained residues of a pesticide that is prohibited from being used on the vegetable for over a decade. And imported produce, namely some from Mexico, was likely to carry especially high levels of pesticide residues.
In addition to pesticides, there’s been growing concerns about PFAS, short for per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances. Dubbed “forever chemicals,” PFAS are a group of synthetic chemical compounds that have been used in industry and consumer products since the 1940s because of their ability to resist grease, oil, water, and heat. Although the chemicals are useful in food packaging and cookware, they are harmful to human health and our environment. PFAS take at least a century to break down in the human body, and even longer in the environment. Prolonged exposure and consumption of PFAS also contributes to a higher risk of cancer, autoimmune disease, thyroid problems and other health issues.
Unfortunately, PFAS are widespread in our foods — specifically some produce items, packaged foods and seafood — and even our drinking water. Today, more than 97% of the national population has PFAS in their bodies, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To make matters worse, human exposure to PFAS has become increasingly difficult to assess with the creation of new substances in recent years. PFAS are almost impossible to avoid, many experts have said. Further research into the chemicals — both new and existing — is also ongoing.
In 2020, CR tested 47 bottled waters, including 35 noncarbonated and 12 carbonated ones, for four heavy metals (arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury) along with 30 PFAS chemicals. Most of the noncarbonated beverages had detectable levels of PFAS, but only two brands — Tourmaline Spring and Deer Park — exceeded the 1 part per trillion health guideline set by the Environmental Working Group (EWG). Both brands later refuted the findings: Tourmaline Spring said PFAS levels in its bottle water are below the levels set by the International Bottled Water Association, while Nestlé, which owns Deer Park, claimed a recent test on its brand of water revealed “undetectable levels” of PFAS.
Many of the carbonated beverages CR tested contained measurable amounts of PFAS. Perrier Natural Sparkling Mineral Water, La Croix Natural Sparkling Water, Canada Dry Lemon Lime Sparkling Seltzer Water, Poland Spring Zesty Lime Sparkling Water, Bubly Blackberry Sparkling Water, Polar Natural Seltzer Water, and Topo Chico Natural Mineral Water all had PFAS levels higher than 1 part per trillion.
Outside of bottled waters, PFAS have also plagued sports drinks. Prime Hydration, the contentious energy drink brand founded by internet personalities Logan Paul and KSI, was named in a 2023 class action lawsuit claiming the brand’s drinks contain PFAS. The suit, filed in the Northern District of California, alleged that the amount of PFAS found within Prime Hydration during independent testing was “three times the (EPA's) recommended lifetime health advisory for drinking water.” It also accused the brand of fraudulently marketing its drinks as healthy.
A motion to dismiss hearing was heard on April 18. In it, Prime Hydration argued that the plaintiff failed to allege “cognizable injury” along with “facts showing a concrete (and) imminent threat of future harm.”
Paul responded to the lawsuit in a three-minute-long TikTok video posted Wednesday.
“First off, anyone can sue anyone at any time that does not make the lawsuit true,” he said. “And in this case, it is not... one person conducted a random study and has provided zero evidence to substantiate any of their claims.”
"This ain't a rinky-dink operation. We use the top bottle manufacturers in the United States. All your favorite beverage brands... use these companies. If the product is served in plastic, they make a bottle for them.”
Paul claimed that Prime “follows Title 21 for the code of regulations for (polyethylene terephthalate) and all other types of bottles.” According to the U.S. Code, Title 21 “made it unlawful to manufacture adulterated or misbranded foods or drugs in Territories or District of Columbia and provided [a] penalty for violations.” Many national beverage companies use polyethylene terephthalate (PET) because it is a recyclable, “clear, durable and versatile” plastic, according to the American Beverage Association.
Measures to limit PFAS pollution are slowly being issued as of recently. On April 10, the Biden-Harris Administration announced the first-ever national, legally enforceable drinking water standard that would protect communities from exposure to PFAS. That being said, the new regulations don’t apply to all public drinking water systems in the US and will take several years to go into full effect.
In the meantime, consumers can limit their intake of PFAS by testing their tap water with a home test kit obtained from a certified lab or through a local environmental agency, like EWG’s tap water database. It’s important to note that boiling or sanitizing water won’t rid it of “forever chemicals.” But using certain faucet filters and even a countertop filter and water pitcher filter certainly will.
As for how to reduce exposure of PFAS in food and home products, the PFAS-REACH (Research, Education, and Action for Community Health) project, funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, offered guidance on their official website. A few notable tips include looking for the ingredient polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) or other “fluoro” ingredients on product labels, avoiding nonstick cookware and boycotting takeout containers.
https://www.salon.com/2024/05/04/can-you-actually-avoid-forever-chemicals-in-your-diet/
**************************************************Britain’s climate action plan unlawful, high court rules
The UK government’s climate action plan is unlawful, the high court has ruled, as there is not enough evidence that there are sufficient policies in place to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, will now be expected to draw up a revised plan within 12 months. This must ensure that the UK achieves its legally binding carbon budgets and its pledge to cut emissions by more than two-thirds by 2030, both of which the government is off track to meet.
The environmental charities Friends of the Earth and ClientEarth took joint legal action with the Good Law Project against the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) over its decision to approve the carbon budget delivery plan (CBDP) in March 2023.
In a ruling on Friday, Mr Justice Sheldon upheld four of the five grounds of the groups’ legal challenge, stating that the decision by the former energy security and net zero secretary Grant Shapps was “simply not justified by the evidence”.
He said: “If, as I have found, the secretary of state did make his decision on the assumption that each of the proposals and policies would be delivered in full, then the secretary of state’s decision was taken on the basis of a mistaken understanding of the true factual position.”
The judge agreed with ClientEarth and Friends of the Earth that the secretary of state was given “incomplete” information about the likelihood that proposed policies would achieve their intended emissions cuts. This breached section 13 of the Climate Change Act, which requires the secretary of state to adopt plans and proposals that they consider will enable upcoming carbon budgets to be delivered.
Sheldon also agreed with the environment groups that the central assumption that all the department’s policies would achieve 100% of their intended emissions cuts was wrong. The judge said the secretary of state had acted irrationally, and on the basis of an incorrect understanding of the facts.
This comes after the Guardian revealed the government would be allowing oil and gas drilling under offshore wind turbines, a decision criticised by climate experts as “deeply irresponsible”.
The CBDP outlines how the UK will achieve targets set out in the sixth carbon budget, which runs until 2037, as part of wider efforts to reach net zero by 2050. Those emissions targets were set after a 2022 ruling that Britain had breached legislation designed to help reach the 2015 Paris agreement goal of containing temperatures within 1.5C (2.7F) of pre-industrial levels.
The Climate Change Committee’s assessment last year was that the government only had credible policies in place for less than 20% of the emissions cuts needed to meet the sixth carbon budget.
The lawyer for Friends of the Earth, Katie de Kauwe, said: “This is another embarrassing defeat for the government and its reckless and inadequate climate plans. We’ve all been badly let down by a government that’s failed, not once but twice, to deliver a climate plan that ensures both our legally binding national targets and our international commitment to cut emissions by more than two-thirds by 2030 are met.
“We urgently need a credible and lawful new action plan that puts our climate goals back on track and ensures we all benefit from a fair transition to a sustainable future. Meeting our domestic and international carbon reduction targets must be a top priority for whichever party wins the next general election.”
Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, said: “This is a new low even for this clown show of a government that has totally failed on energy and climate for 14 years. Their plan has now been found unlawful twice – once might have been dismissed as carelessness, twice shows they are incapable of delivering for this country.
“The British people are paying the price for their failure in higher bills, exposed to the dictators like [Vladimir] Putin who control fossil fuel markets. Only Labour can tackle the climate crisis in a way that cuts bills for families, makes Britain energy independent, and tackles the climate crisis.”
Caroline Lucas, the Green party MP, said: “Once again the government’s climate plan has been ruled unlawful. When dealing with the climate emergency, simply ‘hoping for the best’ and putting your faith in unproven technologies and vague policies is not good enough – we need concrete plans and investments and there is no time to lose. The government must now go back to the drawing board and urgently pull together a credible plan to put the UK back on track to delivering our climate commitments.”
John Barrett, professor in energy and climate policy at the University of Leeds, said: “The UK government has failed to describe a credible pathway for the UK to achieve its legally binding climate commitments. This is despite overwhelming evidence from the Climate Change Committee and university researchers on the various options available to the government. Many of these options also deliver numerous co-benefits such as warmer homes, cheaper bills, more energy security, better air quality, more jobs and a healthier society. It is time for the UK government to take climate change seriously and tell us how they are going to achieve their own targets.”
A DESNZ spokesperson said: “The UK can be hugely proud of its record on climate change. Not only are we the first major economy to reach halfway to net zero, we have also set out more detail than any other G20 country on how we will reach our ambitious carbon budgets. The claims in this case were largely about process and the judgment contains no criticism of the detailed plans we have in place. We do not believe a court case about process represents the best way of driving progress towards our shared goal of reaching net zero.”
*******************************************************
Replacing coal with wind and solar requires massive storage
In a summary of a recent peer-reviewed paper, the principal author stated that an electric grid predominantly powered by intermittent renewables such as wind and solar would require storage approximately equal to 25% of annual generation to be reliable. Other studies have reported similar results.
US coal powerplants produced approximately 700,000 GWH of electricity in 2023. The Administration has announced a goal of eliminating coal generation by 2030. Achieving this goal would require installation of approximately 270 GW of wind and solar rating plate capacity generation, depending on the percentages of wind and solar generation.
Based on the Fekete paper, the US would also require a total of approximately 175,000 GWH of additional electricity storage as the result of the elimination of coal power plants. The primary battery storage system currently being installed for grid level storage is the Tesla Megapack, which stores 19.3 MWH deliverable at a rate of 4.9 MW over a 4-hour period. Utilizing Tesla Megapacks to support the intermittent wind and solar generation installed to replace US coal powerplants would require 9,067.357 units at a current installed cost of $8,128,870 per unit, for a total installed cost of $74 trillion.
Research suggests that battery life can be extended by operating the batteries between 20% and 80% of full charge. Grid scale batteries would be expected to operate below 20% of full charge very rarely, so the lower limit can essentially be ignored. However, limiting the batteries to a maximum charge of 80%, while maintaining necessary electricity storage would require increasing the installed battery capacity by 25%, at an installed cost of approximately $18 trillion, increasing the total battery system installed cost to approximately $92 trillion. (Note: These costs do not include the land required for installation or the cost of grid connection.)
The US currently has an electricity storage deficit of approximately 140,000 GWH. Fossil fueled generation currently provides support for the existing wind and solar generation in the absence of this storage and there is growing concern regarding grid capacity margins during peak demand periods. Therefore, as coal powerplants are decommissioned, it would be essential that the current storage deficit be eliminated as well as installing the additional storage required to support the intermittent generating capacity which would provide the generation previously provided by the coal powerplants. This would require the installation of approximately 18 million Tesla Megapacks (or equivalent). Currently, production capacity does not exist to meet this demand over the next 6 years.
Also, as coal power plants are decommissioned, there will be a growing need for long-duration storage to support the grid through seasonal variation in both wind and solar generation. The only current long-duration systems are pumped hydro facilities. However, it is unlikely that significant additional pumped hydro capacity will be installed in the US because of geographic limitations and public resistance.
https://edreid.substack.com/p/no-coal-storage
****************************************************Game meat company to begin hunting deer in South Australian forests amid criticism of aerial culling
Sounds overdue to me
A game meat company will begin hunting deer in South Australian forests this month, which the owner says is more environmentally friendly and less cruel than the state government's preferred culling method.
Macro Meats Australia's contract with forestry companies to work towards eradicating deer in their plantations is also a rebuke to recreational hunters, who would prefer for some deer to remain so they can continue their enjoying sport.
The company is based in Adelaide and mostly focuses on exporting kangaroo meat.
Managing director Ray Borda has been critical of the state government's aerial deer culling program, which involves the use of shotguns to kill deer from helicopters and leaves the carcasses to rot on the ground.
Forestry companies want the deer eradicated because of the damage they to do trees.
Mr Borda said professionals shooting deer for meat was the best solution, because the meat could be sold for a profit rather than attracting scavengers or emitting methane when it rotted.
"Environmentally, and even animal welfare-wise, the professional industry is always looked upon as the best and cheapest way to handle these overabundant animals," Mr Borda said.
The hunters employed by Macro Meats will be in the South East next week to plan for the cull.
Professional deer hunters aim to shoot deer in the head to prevent damaging the meat in the animal's body.
Mr Borda, who is also the chair of the Australia Wild Game Industry Council, says this is better than aerial culling, when most deer die after being shot in the heart or lungs.
"The poor old deer — it's not their fault that there's too many of them," he said.
"So what we try to do is, we try to do it humanely, and then we're creating jobs."
Limestone Coast Landscape Board general manager Steve Bourne said aerial culling was an "effective and efficient means of removing large numbers of feral deer from the landscape in a humane way".
"Meat harvesting is a tool we have used — 2,100 feral deer have been processed for human consumption in the last three years," he said.
"In closed canopy pine forests, ground shooting can be a more effective means of removing feral deer."
The RSPCA has raised concerns that shooters targeting feral deer from helicopters using shotguns may not be able to tell whether the animals they shoot are dead or not.
But a Flinders University study found all the deer that researchers cut open after an aerial cull had been fatally shot in the lungs or heart.
A CSIRO study found aerial culling was extremely effective at controlling deer populations compared with ground shooting, with up to 94 animals killed per hour during aerial culling.
The SA government plans to eradicate all feral deer in the state by 2032, mostly through aerial culling, but also shooting on the ground.
It estimates there are about 40,000 feral deer in South Australia, mostly in the state's south-east, but also on the Fleurieu Peninsula and in the Adelaide Hills.
Deer compete with native wildlife and livestock for grass.
They damage trees and contribute to erosion and road crashes.
The government estimated farm productivity losses of $36 million last year, which would rise to $242m by 2031 if the deer population was not controlled.
Amateur hunters, many of whom travel to SA from Victoria, say they contribute to SA's economy.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-05-01/macro-meats-to-begin-hunting-deer-in-forests/103786220
***************************************2 May, 2024
Why climate change ISN'T going to end the world and why we need to stop obsessing about net-zero, according to Cambridge University professor
Young people are terrified that climate change will destroy Earth by the time they grow up, but the world is not actually ending, argues Cambridge professor Mike Hulme.
Humanity is not teetering on a cliff's edge, he says, at risk of imminent catastrophe if we don't reach net-zero carbon emissions by a certain date.
And he has made it his mission to call out the people who claim we are.
In his most recent book, Climate Change Isn't Everything, Hulme argued that belief in the urgent fight against climate change has shot far past the territory of science and become an ideology.
Hulme, a professor of human geography at the University of Cambridge, dubs this ideology 'climatism,' and he argues that it can distort the way society approaches the world's ills, placing too much focus on slowing Earth from warming.
The problem, he said, is this narrow focus takes attention away from other important moral, ethical, and political objectives - like helping people in the developing world rise out of poverty.
DailyMail.com spoke with Hulme about why he thinks climatism is a problem, how it should be balanced out, and what keeps him hopeful about the future of humanity.
As with other 'isms' - like cubism or romanticism - ideologies provide a way of thinking about things, explained Hulme.
'They're like spectacles that help us to make sense of the world, according to a predefined framework or structure,' he said
To be clear, Hulme does not claim that all ideologies are wrong.
'We all need ideologies, and we all have them - whether you're a Marxist or a nationalist, you're likely to hold an ideology of some form or other,' he added.
As Hulme sees it, many journalists, advocates, and casual observers of climate change have become devotees of climatism, inaccurately attributing many events that happen in the world as being caused by climate change.
He gives the examples of a fire, flood, or damaging hurricane.
'No matter how complex a particular causal chain might be, it's a very convenient shorthand to say, 'Oh, well, this was caused by climate change,'' Hulme said.
'It's a very shallow and simplistic way, I would argue, to try to describe events that are happening in the world.'
Researchers have shown that warming oceans do lead to more frequent and more severe storms: Twice as many cyclones now become category 4 or 5 as they did in the 1970s, scientists have found, and Atlantic storms are three times as likely to become hurricanes.
Hulme doesn't argue that the effects of climate change are not happening, though, just that stopping climate change won't stop disasters from happening altogether.
'Fundamentally, we're going to have to deal with hurricanes, and we're not going to deal with them just by cutting our carbon emissions,' he said.
The solutions, he argues, will include better forecasting, better early warning systems, better emergency plans, and better infrastructure.
'There are all sorts of things that we can do to minimize the risks and dangers of hurricanes, that are way more effective in the short term than trying to cut our carbon emissions,' said Hulme.
The danger of climatism, he pointed out, is that it leads people down a false chain of events: If all of these things happening in the world are caused by climate change, then all we have to do is stop climate change, and all the other things will stop themselves.
'So whether it's Putin's war, or whether it's the Hamas-Israel conflict in Gaza, whether it is a hurricane hitting Miami - if all of these things are caused by climate change, let's get rid of climate change,' said Hulme.
'And that clearly is a very inadequate way of thinking about the complexities of most of the problems we we face in the world today.'
This distorted thinking can make people forget about other important concerns, he argues.
As an example, Hulme points to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): 17 areas that the world's governments have identified as top priorities for humanity.
The SDGs include building peace and justice, eradicating poverty, reducing child mortality, and ensuring clean sanitation and water for billions of people on the planet.
'These are really important goals, and the danger is if we obsess about just climate change, if we think that climate change holds the key to wellbeing and a better future, we take attention away from interventions that will make progress on the sustainable development goals,' he said.
As an example, Hulme points to Western European governments that are not willing to put money into the transition away from open wood burning cookers in many rural villages in the global south, which cause very high mortality levels, particularly amongst women and children.
'Liquid petroleum gas (LPG) is much cleaner, much more efficient, much easier for women and girls to get access to,' he said. 'But in the name of climate change, well, we can't put money into LPG transition, because that's a fossil fuel.'
Others are coming around to see things his way, though.
'LPG for clean cooking can and should be permitted as a transitional fuel to save lives in the short-term until we can provide universal access to alternative low-emissions clean cooking systems,' experts from the World Bank and Columbia University wrote in March.
A number of benchmarks should have been met by 2020, according to climate scientists in 2016: Renewable energy - mainly wind and solar - should have made up at least 30 percent of the world's electricity supply, and no additional coal-fired power plants should have been approved after that date.
If society were to put climate change priorities into their proper proportions then, Hulme said it would still be on the list.
It just wouldn't be the only item on the list, and it wouldn't be at the top.
'There's 17 SDGs, and two of them are related to climate. So that begins to rebalance, or re-proportion, the amount of effort and attention we might wish to pay,' said Hulme.
Beyond these mixed up priorities, Hulme also takes issue with what he sees as an obsession with deadlines: 'There's this idea of the ticking clock counting down to Ground Zero - we've only got five years, 10 years, two years - however long different commentators put the deadline.'
He calls this line of thinking 'deadline-ism,' a sort of sub-ideology of climatism, and he says he finds it unhelpful.
'It's like holding a gun to your head and saying, 'You've only got three seconds to make a decision.'
And under those circumstances, most human beings would not make a very good decision,' he said.
Perhaps even worse, it has the potential to undermine the gravity of the true threat posed by climate change.
One danger of deadlines can be that they cultivate a sense of fatalism: 'Well, if we've only got three more years, clearly we're not going to solve it in three years time. So what the heck, let's give up,' Hulme said.
The other danger is cynicism: The average person sees deadlines come and go, but the world is still here, and as far as most people can tell, climate disaster has not befallen us.
'We've had many of these supposedly decisive years, said Hulme. 'And you know, it's not surprising that people may become somewhat cynical or fatigued by this type of rhetoric.'
Hulme's critics have argued that he is over-egging the pudding - that his picture of climatism as a rampant and harmful ideology is overstated or inaccurate.
'[Hulme's] claim that mainstream climate policy pays no attention to social and economic context and to non-climate priorities is simply not credible,' wrote development economist Simon Maxwell in his review of Climate Change Isn't Everything.
'It is certainly true that the climate and development worlds have in the past run on parallel and poorly connected tracks. That was probably true in the 2000s,' Maxwell wrote. 'But today? The literature is awash with references to climate compatible development, climate-smart development, climate-resilient development, just transition, and many other formulations of the same kind.'
Hulme disputed the idea that he is over-egging the pudding on climatism - after all, the whole basis of his argument is that climatists are the ones making a bigger deal out of it than they should be.
'I'm quite happy to have an argument or discussion about whether I'm over-egging the pudding, as opposed to the people who I think are over-egging the pudding,' he said, pointing to his deep experience in the field.
'I've been observing concerns about how climate change is talked about, framed, and reacted to in public for many, many years.'
And this public framing has led to a phenomenon called 'eco-anxiety,' which Hulme said he sees among his students at Cambridge University
'They have absorbed these claims of tipping points, and they take these things literally, and feel that there is no future for them because the climate is going to go out of control,' he said. 'They feel that it will be too late, and everything will collapse.'
As an educator of young adults, and as someone who has studied climate change over a 40-year career, Hulme sees a pastoral dimension to his role.
'I see people unnecessarily going down a spiral of despair and hopelessness that I find deeply concerning and worrying,' he said.
Part of what makes this so unfortunate is that he still sees many reasons to feel hopeful about the future.
Chief among them, the irrepressible ingenuity and spirit of humans and their social formations.
'Despite what I've just said about mental health and eco-anxieties, the vast majority of humans have this irrepressible spirit,' Hulme said.
He emphasized that the risks associated with climate change are important things to attend to.
'We do need smart climate policies, whether it's mitigation or adaptation,' he said.
'We need energy transitions away from carbon-emitting energy sources, and that energy transition is going to come through innovation. It's going to come through smart people doing smart things more efficiently, with the human ingenuity and creativity that we've been granted, making use of the material resources that the planet offers.'
In the end, it's faith in humanity that Hulme holds on to.
But he's a realist, too.
'For good or ill, through the last 200 years of human development, we've set in motion this resetting of the climate system, and we're not going to eliminate that any time soon,' he said. 'We've got to accept the fact that there is going to be residual climate change for a long, long time to come.'
Bad things are going to happen, Hulme acknowledged, and the climate will continue to change. But smart mitigations can shave off some of the worst excesses of that changing climate.
'That doesn't mean we give up,' he said. 'It's never too late to do the right thing. There is no cliff edge, after which we all fall down.'
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Researchers Find Arctic Region Was Warmer ~10,000 Years Ago Than Today
The European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE presents its latest climate video on its YouTube channel
Examined today is a paper appearing in the journal Nature Communications titled: “Seasonal sea-ice in the Arctic’s last ice area during the Early Holocene.”
The authors looked at sea ice in the region of the Lincoln Sea, bordering northern Greenland and Canada, which “will be the final stronghold of perennial Arctic sea ice in a warming climate.”
According to the paper, “Modelling studies suggest a transition from perennial to seasonal sea ice during the Early Holocene, a period of elevated global temperatures around 10,000 years ago.”
The researchers have found “marine proxy evidence for the disappearance of perennial sea ice in the southern Lincoln Sea during the Early Holocene, which suggests a widespread transition to seasonal sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.”
“Seasonal sea-ice conditions were tightly coupled to regional atmospheric temperatures,” the authors stated.
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Climate Change Is Normal and Natural, and Can't Be Controlled
NASA claimed that “Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate” and “human activity is the principal cause.” Others proposed spending trillions of dollars to control the climate. But are we humans responsible for climate change? And what can we do about it?
“The climate of planet Earth has never stopped changing since the Earth’s genesis, sometimes relatively rapidly, sometimes very slowly, but always surely,” says Patrick Moore in Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. “Hoping for a ‘perfect stable climate’ is as futile as hoping the weather will be the same and pleasant, every day of the year, forever.”
In other words, climate change is normal and natural, and you can forget about controlling it.
For instance, a major influence of weather and climate are solar cycles driven by the Sun’s magnetic field over periods of eight to 14 years. They release varying amounts of energy and produce dark sunspots on the Sun’s surface. The effects of solar cycles on Earth vary, with some regions warming more than 1°C and others cooling.
Climatic changes occur as a result of variations in the interaction of solar energy with Earth’s ozone layer, which influences ozone levels and stratospheric temperatures. These, in turn, affect the speed of west-to-east wind flows and the stability of the polar vortex. Whether the polar vortex remains stable and close to the Arctic or dips southward determines whether winters in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere are severe or mild.
In addition to solar cycles, there are three Milankovitch cycles that range in length from 26,000 to 100,000 years. They include the eccentricity, or shape, of Earth’s elliptical orbit around the Sun. Small fluctuations in the orbit’s shape influence the length of seasons. For example, when the orbit is more like an oval than a circle, Northern Hemisphere summers are longer than winters and springs are longer than autumns.
The Milankovitch cycles also involve obliquity, or the angle that Earth’s axis is tilted. The tilt is why there are seasons, and the greater the Earth’s tilt, the more extreme the seasons. Larger tilt angles can cause the melting and retreat of glaciers and ice sheets, as each hemisphere receives more solar radiation during summer and less during winter.
Finally, the rotating Earth, like a toy top, wobbles slightly on its axis. Known as precession, this third Milankovitch cycle causes seasonal contrasts to be more extreme in one hemisphere and less extreme in the other.
Moving from outer space to Earth, ocean and wind currents also affect the climate.
For instance, during normal conditions in the Pacific Ocean, trade winds blow from east to west along the Equator, pushing warm surface waters from South America towards Asia. During El Niño, the trade winds weaken and the warm water reverses direction, moving eastward to the American West Coast. Other times, during La Niña, the trade winds become stronger than usual, and more warm water is blown towards Asia. In the United States and Canada, these phenomena cause some regions to become warmer, colder, wetter, or drier than usual.
In addition to El Niño and La Niña, there is also the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is driven by low air pressure in the North Atlantic Ocean, near Greenland and Iceland (known as the sub-polar low or Icelandic low), and high air pressure in the central North Atlantic Ocean (known as the subtropical high or Azores High). The relative strength of these regions of low and high atmospheric pressures affects the climate in the Eastern United States and Canada and in Europe, affecting both temperatures and precipitation.
Similarly, Hadley cells are the reason Earth has equatorial rainforests that are bounded by deserts to the north and south. Because the Sun warms Earth the most at the Equator, air on either side of the Equator is cooler and denser. As a result, cool air blows towards the Equator as the warm, less dense equatorial air rises and cools, releasing moisture as rain and creating lush vegetation. The rising, drier air reaches the stratosphere blowing north and south to settle in regions made arid by lack of atmospheric moisture.
These and other phenomena influencing our climate are well beyond the control of humans.
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California’s Perpetual Drought Is Manmade and Intentional
The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) last week released its next five-year plan for the State Water Project—Update 2023. After years of meetings, California’s premier water agency has decided to focus on “three intersecting themes: addressing climate urgency, strengthening watershed resilience, and achieving equity in water management.”
Water supplies for California’s 40 million people and the planet’s most productive agriculture have third- to fifth-level priority.
There is nothing new here, except to publicly admit to betraying the public trust. Really?
Over several decades, the public has been deceived into voting for water bonds that have little new water in them—phony promises to build new water storage and aqueducts. About 12 percent of bond funds are spent on new water storage. The rest of the bond funds have been squandered on scores of local and special-interest environmental projects, e.g., tearing down four Klamath-area dams—killing fish to save them—and opposing substantial new water projects, e.g., raising Shasta Dam and building Auburn Dam.
Further, by California law, water must be equitably distributed, pumped “equally”—half to human beings (if you count agriculture) and half to fish (the water-short Pacific Ocean, 187 quadrillion gallons). During the big rains of 2024, about 90 percent of the water was flushed to the Pacific through the gills of perhaps a half dozen delta smelt.
Farmers call it a manmade drought.
The politicos halted humans “taking” water, “diverting” it, from fish. Under the U.S. Constitution, the taking of private property requires just compensation—not mass confiscation. Water rights are a complex species of property.
“Our findings show that atmospheric river activity exceeds what has occurred since instrumental record keeping began,” said Clarke Knight, a U.S. Geological Survey research geographer.
Still, DWR scheduled 2024 meetings of the Drought Resilience Interagency & Partners (DRIP) Collaborative for April, July, and October.
The DRIP fantasy continues despite a deluge of 2024 water from two winters of giant “rivers in the sky” dumping excesses of water and creating massive floods and landslides.
Recent massive atmospheric rivers, Ark events, are small compared to ancient monster storms that occurred long before human beings had any impact whatsoever on climate, let alone weather.
Despite plentiful rainfall, DWR continued to limit pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta to Central Valley agriculture to 30–40 percent to protect native fish. Nonnative bass are likely the greatest dangers to native fish. DWR insisted that its ability to move water south has been “impacted by the presence of threatened and endangered fish species.”
Those water districts’ contractors, paying the full cost of State Water Project (SWP) water, thought otherwise.
Jennifer Pierre, general manager of the State Water Contractors, stated: “While we are glad to see this modest allocation, it is still far below the amount of water we need. There is a lot of water in the system, California reservoirs are full, and runoff from snowpack melt is still to come. Even in a good water year, moving water effectively and efficiently under the current regime is difficult.”
California’s drought fixation is entirely manmade. In the past, in wet years, the waters of the Sacramento River, greater than the mighty Colorado, turned the Central Valley into an inland sea.
For over a century, California visionaries followed the lead of the Mesopotamians, Assyrians, Romans, and Nabataeans as well as the Aztecs before them. C.R. Rockwood, William Mulholland, Michael O’Shaughnessy, Gov. Pat Brown, and Gov. Ronald Reagan built dams and aqueducts to store and distribute water and to provide flood protection and hydroelectricity “too cheap to meter.”
As I have said before, California wastes tens of billions of dollars’ worth (at a conservative $100–$200 an acre-foot) of precious fresh water to save handfuls of delta smelt and “restore” salmon runs where salmon never ran before.
As I’ve also mentioned before, tyrannical water police order city folk, who use only 8 percent of California’s water, to drink recycled toilet water and to live on 55 gallons a day. The serfs may bathe every other Saturday whether they need it or not. California demands that its residents take a water conservation pledge: And to the utopia for which it stands. Neighbors turn neighbors in for “wasting” water, not to mention life, liberty, and property.
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1 May, 2024
Here’s How Green Groups Get Their Agendas Implemented in the Administrative State, Bypassing Congress
Most Americans may not have heard of the Department of the Interior, but this powerful administrative agency oversees more than one-fifth of America’s land area and much of its mineral and ocean resources. The Left’s dark money network has wielded influence at this massive agency to undermine oil and gas production and advance less reliable wind energy.
Radical environmental groups such as the Sierra Club have sought to force Interior to restrict the approval process for oil and gas projects and to mark certain areas of the Gulf of Mexico off-limits for oil and gas leases.
Interior under President Joe Biden has used a process called “sue-and-settle” to foist such regulations on the American people without the approval of Congress.
Blocking Oil, Boosting Wind
In 2020, the Sierra Club and other groups, represented by the environmentalist law firm Earthjustice, sued two agencies of the Department of Commerce (yes, not Interior) under the Endangered Species Act, seeking to force restrictions on oil and gas in the name of protecting wildlife. In 2023, the Sierra Club and its allies reached a settlement with the agencies. The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), an Interior Department agency that had not been a party to the lawsuit, released new rules restricting oil and gas leases in the Gulf, ostensibly to protect endangered Rice’s whales.
I say “ostensibly” because, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Benjamin Zycher explained in The Hill, those restrictions do not apply to the thousands of vessels engaged in fishing, construction of offshore wind energy facilities, or other activities in the area. As Zycher wrote, it seems BOEM considers it “unacceptable for an oil tanker to cause the death of a Rice’s whale, but if another vessel kills it, then it’s just the cost of doing business.”
Earthjustice celebrated the BOEM rules alongside the settlement.
In another case, the Sierra Club and other groups petitioned BOEM to “end a routine practice of fast-tracking approval for offshore oil and gas projects” in the Gulf of Mexico. Two months later, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced a new five-year plan for offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico. Haaland bragged that Interior had planned for “the smallest number of oil and gas lease sales in history”—a maximum of three.
America’s largest fossil fuel industry association, the American Petroleum Institute, sued Interior to block the plan, warning that it puts American consumers at risk and threatens U.S. energy security.
On April 24, the Sierra Club praised new rules from Interior laying out the five-year schedule for offshore wind leasing. While Interior restricts oil and gas to three lease sales in the Gulf, it plans for 12 offshore wind auctions in federal waters between 2024 and 2028. In praising the plan, Sierra Club Legislative Director Xavier Boatright pledged to continue “collaborating with the Biden administration” on these issues.
Oil is cheaper and more reliable than wind energy. In 2022, petroleum accounted for 31% of U.S. energy production, while wind energy accounted for only 3.8% of it. Wind energy also involves harvesting rare earth minerals through strip mining, an intensive process with toxic byproducts. Yet Interior is investing in wind and turning away from oil, largely for ideological reasons.
Of course, the Left’s dark money network may also have something to do with those priorities.
The Left’s Dark Money Network
While Democrats have been obsessed with the Republican-leaning Koch brothers, a New York Times analysis shows that the Left’s dark money network spent more than comparable conservative groups. The left-wing Arabella Advisors and the Tides Foundation set up nonprofits to allow donors to pour money into specific projects, without disclosing what the money does.
The Arabella network group Sixteen Thirty Fund poured $3.6 million into the Sierra Club from 2014 to 2022, according to IRS records. Tides Advocacy, the 501(c)4 lobbying arm of the left-wing dark money Tides Foundation, gave the group nearly $1 million between 2018 and 2021.
The National Wildlife Federation
Meanwhile, the National Wildlife Federation, an environmentalist group that promoted Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth,” received nearly $1 million via Arabella nonprofits. The federation’s former employees now hold positions of power at Interior.
Four-year federation staffer Tracy Stone-Manning is now the director at the Bureau of Land Management. She notoriously sent a threatening letter to the National Forest Service in 1989 on behalf of eco-terrorists who spiked trees to cause physical harm to loggers. She later said she does “not condone tree-spiking or terrorism of any kind.”
Laura Daniel-Davis, who worked at Interior under President Barack Obama before joining the federation for three years, is now the second in command at Interior. She’s only in an acting role, however, because the Senate would not confirm her. Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., opposed her for valuing the Left’s “radical climate agenda” ahead of Alaska’s energy production.
The National Wildlife Federation also takes credit for “climate-smart conservation,” a project it claims it developed with its “federal agency partners,” such as the National Park Service.
The federation’s close ties to Interior shouldn’t come as a surprise. A 2009 inspector general’s report found that staff at the Bureau of Land Management had worked so closely with the group that they may have violated the law. NWF staff wrote and edited official BLM materials. Much of this activity took place under President George W. Bush.
Pueblo Action Alliance
Haaland’s own daughter, 29-year-old Somah Haaland, has been heavily involved with the Pueblo Action Alliance, a radical left-wing group with ties to the Cuban government. In October 2021, the alliance helped lead a coalition of organizations known as “Build Back Fossil Free,” which rioted at the Interior Department, injuring Interior staffers.
As House Republicans wrote in a letter to Haaland, the alliance advocates “for the dismantling of America’s economic and political system and believe America is irredeemable because there is no ‘opportunity to reform a system that isn’t founded on good morals or values.’”
The alliance’s website states that it aims to “build international solidarity with the indigenous global struggle,” which “includes standing in solidarity with our Palestinian relatives by upholding their demands for ‘a permanent ceasefire, an end to the siege and illegal occupation in Gaza, and no more US/CANADIAN/UK military aid to Israel.”
Secretary Haaland appears in a video the alliance released. The video, narrated by her daughter, demands a moratorium on oil leases around New Mexico’s Chaco Cultural National Historical Park. In June 2023, Haaland shut down oil and gas opportunities in that area. The moratorium will cost the Navajo Nation, a rival tribe in the region that lobbied in favor of oil and gas development, $194 million over the next two decades, according to the Western Energy Alliance.
Ties between Haaland and the alliance, whose parent organization (the Southwest Organizing Project) received more than $1.3 million from Arabella network nonprofits, have raised ethics concerns. Haaland responded to those concerns by stating, “I believe that a reasonable person with knowledge of those facts would not question my impartiality.”
‘Derogatory Terms’
Finally, Interior recently convened a committee to reevaluate place names to remove “derogatory terms.” That seems noble, but Secretary Haaland named a divisive figure to the committee.
Kimberly A. Probolus had previously worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to help with its project shaming officials into removing all public symbols of the Confederacy. The Tides Foundation sent the SPLC more than $1 million between 2018 and 2022. In a meeting of the Interior committee, she noted this previous work, expressing her gratitude for the chance to “continue to work toward racial and social justice” with Interior.
The SPLC, which has lobbied Interior on “historic designations,” praised Haaland for including Probolus, suggesting the committee use SPLC resources on symbols of hate.
“No one should have to visit a national park whose name is rooted in legacies of hate and white supremacy,” the SPLC’s Lecia Brooks said.
Yet the SPLC is far from a reliable arbiter of hate. As I wrote in my book, “Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center,” the center is notorious for putting mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” alongside KKK chapters, scaring donors into ponying up cash.
If Interior wants to avoid being “derogatory,” it shouldn’t rely on the SPLC.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/04/30/how-lefts-dark-money-network-influences-department-interior/
*************************************************Despite Plenty of Pitfalls, Biden Doubles Down on Off Shore Wind Farms
In general, the Biden administration favors top-down, centralized economic planning rather than allowing the miracle that is the “invisible hand” of the free market system to drive the U.S. economy forward.
Consider the automobile industry for example. Do most Americans want to purchase electric vehicles as of now? Nope.
Yet that has not stopped Biden and company from doing virtually everything in their power, including heavy-handed mandates and billions of dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies, in order to force Americans into eventually having no choice other than an electric vehicle.
The same strategy has also been applied to several types of appliances, including gas stoves, furnaces, washing machines, etc.
Make no mistake, the Biden administration’s penchant for micromanaging consumer choices and exerting command-and-control economic edicts extends far beyond these realms.
A strikingly similar trend applies to the Biden administration’s energy policy posture, at large. The Biden administration, in its infinite wisdom, has determined that fossil fuel-based energy is bad. So, it has gone to extreme lengths to cripple domestic fossil fuel extraction and production because it has decided that so-called green energy is the wave of the future.
This is not breaking news. On repeated occasions, especially during his 2020 campaign, Biden promised to “end fossil fuels.” Moreover, on day one of his term, he nixed the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported 830,000 barrels of oil per day from Canada to the United States.
Instead of allowing American companies and consumers to decide what type of energy source they prefer to power their homes and businesses, the Biden administration has put its giant thumb on the scale in favor of supposedly environmentally friendly wind and solar.
Just to show how all-in the Biden team is on so-called renewable energy, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland recently announced a new “Five-Year Plan” regarding off shore wind farms.
Apparently, the irony of the “Five-Year Plan,” which has been an age-old instrument of socialist regimes over the past century, did not resonate with the geniuses behind this latest green energy proclamation.
According to Haaland, “The Biden-Harris administration, led by our Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, has built an offshore wind industry from the ground up after years of delay from the previous Administration. As we look toward the future, this new leasing schedule will support the types of renewable energy projects needed to lower consumer costs, combat climate change, create jobs to support families, and ensure economic opportunities are accessible to all communities.”
There are several problems with Haaland’s plan, which “includes 12 potential offshore wind energy lease sales … in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Pacific, and the waters offshore of the U.S. territories in the next five years.”
First and foremost, counter to Haaland’s claim, off shore wind farms do not lower consumer costs. As Bloomberg notes, “The levelized cost of electricity of a subsidized US offshore wind project has increased to $114.20 per megawatt-hour in 2023, up almost 50% from 2021 levels in nominal terms.”
Moreover, according to Barron’s, “At least eight multinational companies in three states have quietly started to back out of wind contracts, or ask to renegotiate deals in ways that will pass more costs to consumers.” “Returns on offshore wind are becoming more and more challenged,” Shell CEO Wael Sawan told Barron’s.
Second, there is absolutely zero evidence that massive off shore wind farms will combat “climate change.” And, as is becoming more apparent, huge off shore wind farms that have been built or are being built along the Atlantic Coast have caused widespread havoc on marine life, including a major spike in whale deaths. What’s more, the components necessary to build off shore wind turbines cause environmental degradation and the gargantuan turbine blades have a short shelf-life and are environmentally toxic.
Third, several states along the East Coast have made it crystal clear that they want nothing to do with off shore wind farms. From Maine to Florida, many states have banned these eye-sores due to myriad reasons, principally over the concern that they will blunt tourism and hinder recreational activities in the areas where they are built.
In spite of these head winds, the Biden administration is moving forward at breakneck speed to force its off-shore wind farm agenda upon the states and the American people. This is the very essence of “Bidenomics,” using the force of the federal government to micromanage economic decisions in a one-size-fits-all approach. However, history shows that this method of governance and economic planning is doomed to fail because it is literally impossible for a bunch of bureaucrats to decide what is best for more than 350 million Americans with very different life circumstances, preferences, and objectives.
https://heartland.org/opinion/despite-plenty-of-pitfalls-biden-doubles-down-on-off-shore-wind-farms/
*****************************************************Wrong Again, Biden, Climate Change Realists Are Working to Save the American People From a ‘Very Dangerous Future’
President Joe Biden was out on the stump making an Earth Day speech in Virginia on April 22, and as Fox News reports he was blaming humans for climate change, and the “devastating toll,” he claimed it was wreaking across the nation. He also said anyone who denies this is endangering peoples’ lives. Biden is wrong. Data refutes claims that the weather extremes are worsening amid the modest warming of the past half century. Also those who “believe the science,” as Democrats constantly admonish people to do, know this fact and are trying to prevent climate policies that pose a bigger threat to human welfare than climate change itself.
The Fox News article, “Biden warns climate change deniers are ‘condemning’ Americans to ‘dangerous future’ during Earth Day event,” quotes Biden saying:
But folks, despite the overwhelming devastation in red and blue states, there’s still those who deny climate is in crisis. My MAGA Republican friends don’t seem to think it’s a crisis ….I’m not going to go into it now, but I’m not making it up. It’s real. Just listen to what they say. Anyone in or out of government who willfully denies the impacts of climate change is condemning the American people to a very dangerous future, and the world, I might add.
Biden’s mistargeted harangue came shortly after he went through a litany of recent damaging extreme-weather events which he blamed on climate change, including recent wildfires, hurricanes, and floods.
However, a single year’s weather is not climate, which is defined by the World Meteorological Organization as a 30-year trend in weather for a location. And, as discussed in numerous Climate Realism posts, data shows no increasing trend of hurricanes, wildfires, or floods. Nor is there evidence that any of these three types of natural disasters have become more severe or stronger amid the recent slight warming. In fact, what the data for hurricanes shows that there has been a modest decline in tropical cyclone frequency during the recent period of warming and significant decline in global wildfires. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent assessment report confirms these facts. That’s the science. Biden should believe it.
The President evidently fails to grasp the fact that because climate change isn’t making severe weather more frequent or more powerful, it can’t be causing more harm to people.
Indeed, the data clearly show that fewer people are dying as a result of extreme weather events or extreme temperatures than at any time in history—deaths have declined dramatically even as the Earth has modestly warmed.
While the harm from climate change is declining, by comparison Biden’s climate policies are wreaking havoc with the U.S. economy and peoples lives, jacking up food and energy prices and making it hard for average American’s to get by.
Biden’s pointing his finger at climate realists, who try to publicize these facts, shows him to be nothing more than a befuddled shill for his misguided, tremendously expensive climate policies, pandering to the radical progressive wing of his party, who want to end capitalism and America’s constitutional republic in favor of an oligarchy or kleptocracy, run by political elites. If Biden can’t speak accurately concerning what the science actually shows about climate change, perhaps he should, in the words of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “remain silent.”
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Australian State government in talks to extend life of coal-fired power station for up to four years
Coal, wonderful coal
Australia’s biggest coal power station may stay open for four more years, with the NSW government working on the safety net solution to head off the threat of blackouts hitting the state’s electricity users.
The NSW state Labor government and Origin have been locked in talks over the future of the Eraring coal power station for months after an independent expert urged an extension. While The Australian understands an agreement remains unconfirmed – an extension guaranteeing an extension of two years, with an option for Origin to extend the lifespan by a further two years.
Minister for Climate Change and Energy Penny Sharpe did not comment on the timescale of the extension, but confirmed no deal had yet been reached.
“The NSW Government is engaging with Origin on its plans for Eraring Power Station and will not comment while the process is ongoing,” said Ms Sharpe.
An Origin spokeswoman declined to comment on details of the negotiations, but pointed to comments in the company’s quarterly report published on Tuesday.
“We remain in discussion with the NSW government on the closure date for the Eraring Power Station,” the company said.
While sources stressed a deal could yet collapse, there has been widespread acceptance that a deal would be done – though talks have dragged on for months – amid dire warnings should Eraring shutter as scheduled from 2025.
The Australian Energy Markets Operator last year warned NSW risked unreliable electricity supplies from 2025. Market executives have also warned allowing the state’s largest source of electricity – typically producing about a quarter of NSW’s electricity would stoke prices for households and businesses, already buckling under high interest rates and soaring inflation.
But opponents to extending Eraring said NSW could have adequately replaced the lost generation, and the closure would have been a signal for would-be renewable energy developers to rapidly accelerate work.
Environmental voters are unlikely to welcome taxpayers underwriting Eraring, though the full details of a risk sharing mechanism may not be revealed.
Such a deal has been used by Victoria in the past, as the state Labor government struck deals with AGL Energy and EnergyAustralia to keep the state’s two largest coal power stations open.
EnergyAustralia’s Yallourn will close in 2028, while AGL’s Loy Yang A will shutter in 2035 – giving the state enough time to bring online sufficient quantities of renewable energy. The terms of both deals remain a closely guarded secret, but they are a guiding principle for any extension of Eraring.
Eraring has in recent years been losing money. A rapid rise in rooftop solar has seen wholesale prices plunge to zero or below during sunny days, which explains why Origin in 2022 announced the retirement of the coal-fired power station in August 2025 – some seven years earlier than initially expected.
But Eraring’s fortunes changed in 2023 when the coal cap allowed Origin to recoup costs above $120 a tonne for coal, which returned the generator to profitability.
The scheme will end in June, and Origin is facing higher costs for coal that will dent the financial returns of Eraring without an unexpected move in Australia’s wholesale electricity market.
Should it return to a loss-making entity, a risk-sharing agreement with the NSW government would likely see the taxpayer compensate Origin beyond 2025.
Such a scheme would be politically sensitive to the Labor government, which has won favour with large swathes of the electorate with its commitment to renewable energy.
Moving to curtail political hostility, the Labor government is talking tough – insisting it will not be held hostage.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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