This document is part of an archive of postings on Greenie Watch, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written
This is a backup copy of the original blog
30 November, 2022
Leading maker of electric cars still not green enough
Elon Musk evidently has a diabolical view of environmental, social and corporate governance – more commonly referred to as “ESG.”
His comments came in response to a Sunday Twitter post from small business expert and advisor Carol Roth.
“Remember when @ElonMusk wanted to bring free speech to Twitter and then S&P removed Tesla from their ESG 500 index, but kept in Exxon?” Roth wrote. “ESG is business social credit. It’s a means to control capital, keep business people in line with the narrative, and, ultimately, control you.”
In characteristically brief fashion, Musk responded: “ESG is the devil.”
ESG refers to non-financial standards used by asset managers and investors in financial decision-making. ESG investing is sometimes referred to as sustainable investing or impact investing, and investors can use ESG standards and criteria to screen potential investments and monitor non-financial risks.
Earlier this year, Tesla was removed from the S&P 500’s ESG index. S&P Dow Jones Indices’ senior director and head of ESG indices Margaret Dorn said in a May blog post that Tesla was no longer eligible for inclusion in the index because its S&P DPJ ESG score had fallen into the bottom 25% of its global industry group peers despite remaining “fairly stable” year over year.
Factors that contributed to Tesla’s lower score include its lack of “low carbon energy and codes of business conduct.”
“While Tesla may be playing its part in taking fuel-powered cars off the road, it has fallen behind its peers when examined through a wider ESG lens,” Dorn said.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/28/elon-musks-view-of-this-investing-strategy-esg-is-the-devil/
**********************************************************Biden’s Dirty Deal for Venezuelan Oil
We don’t have a lot of friends in South America these days. And with Joe Biden’s sneaky scheme to buy oil from Venezuela’s scummy socialists while stifling the production of light sweet crude from little Guyana, an erstwhile ally in the region, we now have one fewer.
“Washington policy makers occasionally make miscalculations that help American enemies, undermine development in a poor country, or harm U.S. economic interests,” writes The Wall Street Journal’s Latin American expert Mary Anastasia O'Grady. “But to nail the trifecta requires a special blend of ideological blindness and incompetence that is mercifully rare. Still, as the administration’s treatment of Guyana demonstrates, it does happen.”
It’s not just that the Venezuelan regime has a history of anti-Americanism, which former dictator Hugo Chavez bequeathed to the nation’s current strongman, Nicolás Maduro. And it’s not just that the Biden administration, by allowing Chevron to resume drilling in Venezuela, has reversed restrictions that the Trump administration had put in place in an effort to oust the illegitimately elected Maduro. No, Venezuela is also cozy with the “Death to America” mullahs of Iran.
We’ll say this about Joe Biden: He sure knows how to pick ‘em. And he sure knows how to put one over on the American people. As O'Grady explains:
The U.S. government thinks you’re a fool, dear reader. And not only because it waited until Americans were en route to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving to let news slip of a deal to increase heavy-crude output from joint ventures controlled by a dictatorship allied with Iran. Or that it expects you to believe that Venezuela is considering a return to free elections in exchange.
What does the U.S. get out of all this? Precious little, according to former Trump economist Stephen Moore: “This is the same administration … that won’t allow us to do drilling here in the United States, not in Texas, not in Oklahoma, not in Alaska, not in West Virginia. But we can pump oil from Venezuela. It makes absolutely no sense. It’s put America last energy policy they got. And by the way … when Trump left office and I helped Trump on energy policy, our whole policy was to make America totally energy independent, so we wouldn’t have to rely on countries like Venezuela and Iran and Russia.”
And yet here we are. Helping to prop up a dictatorship whose citizens were recently reduced to scavenging for morsels in the back of a garbage truck, and chasing and stoning to death a cow in a field.
Fox New’s Peter Doocy put the question to Biden talkinghead John Kirby yesterday: “Does the President think there’s some benefit to the climate to drill oil in Venezuela and not here?”
As for little Guyana, what a missed opportunity. Exxon Mobil discovered an abundance of oil in its offshore waters in 2015, and Guyana’s estimated reserves are now more than 11 billion oil-equivalent barrels. To put this in perspective, only Kuwait has more oil per capita.
“The story gets even better,” as O'Grady writes, “because the crude under Guyanese waters has low sulfur content, the opposite of the tar that comes out of Venezuela. It would be hard to dream up a more exciting narrative for a country mired in poverty.”
But, no, let’s instead do business with a guy we’ve been trying to oust for years.
None of this would’ve happened, of course, had the U.S. simply tapped into its own abundant energy reserves rather than getting ourselves over a barrel with South American socialists. Instead, Joe Biden has stiffed a friend and thereby invited the Communist Chinese into the picture. As O'Grady reports, China “is aggressively signing contracts to build infrastructure in Guyana and getting in on the oil boom.”
All while the U.S. is buying dirty crude from people who hate us.
Good to go, Joe.
***************************************************
Britain doubles coal imports to head off winter energy crisis
Rising gas prices resulting from the war in Ukraine have forced the UK to nearly double its coal imports in the fight to keep the lights on through the Winter.
The increasing use of coal-generated power in the UK comes after years of the country shifting to cleaner electricity from gas-fired power plants and renewables, but is deemed vital as Russian president Vladimir Putin crimps gas supplies to Europe.
Figures from Kpler, a commodity analytics firm, show that last month more than 560,000 tonnes of coal came into British ports, compared to the 291,089 tonnes that arrived in October 2021, a 93 per cent increase.
In the first 10 months of this year, the UK imported more than 5.5 million tonnes of coal, already exceeding the 4.2 million tonnes throughout the whole of 2021.
Victor Katona, senior analyst at Kpler said increased demand for coal is because of the rising price of wholesale gas. “Absent the option of burning fuel oil - the most cost-efficient power generation option right now - coal- is very much the best option out there, albeit the most polluting one, too.
“With gas prices like these, relying on natural gas for power generation is a no-go zone for anyone who can switch between fuels.”
****************************************************
Barrier Reef in danger? The fight’s on again as Australian government prepares to lobby UN
Australia faces its second fight in less than two years to prevent the Great Barrier Reef from being declared “in danger” by the UN, as Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek prepares to lobby her global counterparts against the move and scientists say the reef is improving.
The expert panel of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee has released a report recommending the reef be placed on a list of World Heritage sites in danger as it faces risk from climate change and degrading water quality from agricultural run-off.
Farmers within the Great Barrier Reef catchment area have warned they will lobby hard against any extra regulations after the report recommended a reduction in run-off from banana and sugarcane farming.
Ms Plibersek faces a battle to stave off a formal ruling when the report is considered at the meeting of the World Heritage Committee in mid-2023. Having recently met with UNESCO director-general Audrey Azoulay in Lisbon, she will speak with her international counterparts at global environmental talks in Montreal next month.
The Australian understands Ms Plibersek is prepared to lobby hard if a formal proposal to place the reef “in danger” is made.
Ms Plibersek and her Queensland counterpart, Meaghan Scanlon, sought to distance themselves from the report’s findings, arguing they were the result of the former Coalition government’s failure to act on climate change.
“The reason that UNESCO in the past has singled out a place as ‘at risk’ is because they wanted to see greater government investment or greater government action – and since the change of government, both of those things have happened,” she said.
“We’ll clearly make the point to UNESCO that there is no need to single the Great Barrier Reef out in this way.”
Former Coalition environment minister Sussan Ley only last year successfully fended off an attempt downgrade the health status of the reef. She flew to Europe last July to directly lobby World Heritage Council members.
Steve Edmondson, a reef tour operator in Port Douglas, said the UN-backed report relied on old information gathered during a monitoring mission in March while the reef was going through a mass coral bleaching event.
“I don’t think it considers that there are a lot of positive things that have happened in the past year,” he said. “The reef is in excellent condition at the moment and that’s what our guests are experiencing every day.
“It’s actually doing better than it has done for a very, very long time. It is fragile, but I do feel encouraged by the resilience of the Great Barrier Reef.”
An August report from the commonwealth’s chief independent marine science agency found the northern and central parts of the reef have the highest amounts of coral for 36 years, despite another bleaching episode earlier this year.
***************************************
29 November, 2022
Britain’s energy cost crisis and the Mad Hatter’s Tea-Party of Westminster
Responding to the front-page news that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss are both supporting the lifting of the so-called “ban” on onshore wind in the UK, Net Zero Watch today described the Westminster energy debate as a “rationality-free zone”.
Since becoming Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has, against logic and all evidence, re-imposed the ban on exploring the vast potential of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas and oil in the UK, a thermodynamically competent fuel that could reinforce UK security of supply and, by giving UK markets a domestic option, reduce the price of imported gas. His chancellor, Mr Hunt, has imposed a windfall tax on energy companies, including those that Britain needs most such as oil, gas and nuclear, that will discourage investment for decades unless it is swiftly reversed.
The Prime Minister’s critics within his own party are no better. Led by Simon Clarke MP, but now joined by the ex-Prime Ministers, Johnson and Truss, some Conservatives are supporting a renewed drive for onshore wind, apparently believing the absurd industry propaganda claims that wind power is cheap. As is well known in the markets, but not apparently understood at all in Westminster, wind both on and offshore is extremely expensive, with stubbornly high capital costs and rising operational costs, to say nothing of system management costs to address its uncontrollable variability.
Meanwhile, the Opposition front bench, notionally led by Sir Keir Starmer, but in fact driven by the radical views of Ed Miliband, are promising to nationalise the energy sector and call it GB Energy, freeze energy bills and pay for the cost by taxes on oil and gas companies, while quadrupling offshore wind (to about 40 GW, up from 11 operational today) and doubling onshore wind (up to 28 GW from 14 operational today).
Dr John Constable, NZW’s Director of Energy, said:
"The intellectual quality of the UK energy policy debate is a disgrace to parliament, revealing both the ignorance and folly of elected representatives. Like Alice in Wonderland it is utterly surreal nonsense; but, unlike Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece, it isn’t funny. The British people deserve better."
Contact
Dr John Constable
e: john.constable.1837@gmail.com
************************************************
Green Europe: VW warns soaring energy costs render battery plants unviable
Investment in German and EU industrial projects such as battery-cell factories will be unfeasible if the region’s policy makers fail to control ballooning energy prices in the long-term, the head of Volkswagen AG’s namesake brand said.
“Unless we manage to reduce energy prices in Germany and Europe quickly and reliably, investments in energy-intensive production or new battery cell factories in Germany and the EU will be practically unviable,” VW Brand Chief Executive Officer Thomas Schaefer wrote Monday on LinkedIn. “The value creation in this area will take place elsewhere.”
An outline for industrial-policy cooperation hatched by the French and German economy ministers last week “falls short in crucial areas and does not address the envisaged priorities,” Schaefer said.
Europe’s energy crisis is compounding pressure on how to respond to the US’s Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s climate and tax law that aims to boost domestic production of electric cars and reduce reliance on China for battery components and materials. European Union officials have said the subsidy program violates World Trade Organization rules and discriminates against non-US companies.
The EU’s programs don’t focus enough on “the short-term ramp-up, scaling and industrialisation of production,” Schaefer said, critizising what he called “outdated and bureaucratic state-aid rules.”
Volkswagen plans to have six battery factories in full operation across Europe by 2030 under its battery company PowerCo, which broke ground on its lead plant in Germany in July of this year and signed a €3 billion ($3.1 billion) joint venture with Umicore in September for cathode material production.
************************************************
Man Stunned When He Sees Bill for Charging Hummer EV: 'You Won't Believe How Much It Costs'
There is the idea going around that electric vehicles are an efficient and inexpensive alternative to gas-powered vehicles. With the price of gas soaring in the past year and pressure to find an “eco-friendly” alternative to gas cars, electric vehicles are promoted as the future of driving.
But one man illustrated that the reality is much more complicated when he posted a video on YouTube showing how much it costs to charge a Hummer EV.
On Nov. 10, Kyle Conner, who runs the YouTube channel Out of Spec Reviews, posted a video in which he revealed the cost of charging the Hummer EV Edition 1 from zero to 100 percent.
The video was titled “You Won’t Believe How Much It Costs To Charge The Hummer EV” — and that is accurate.
No, your eyes did not deceive you. Charging the vehicle’s 200-kWh battery using the basic rack rate from Electrify America cost $96.32 — and that is without the taxes, which can bring the total price to over $100, Conner said.
“It’s the first production EV, passenger EV, that cost more than $100 to charge zero to full,” he said.
Yes, you can get a lower rate by buying an Electrify America Pass, but it still costs about $70 to charge the car, and you need to pay $4 per month for a pass.
It does get significantly less expensive when you get to per-minute charging, but the total cost still hovers around $40 without taxes and fees.
This is not the first test to show the high cost of charging the Hummer EV. In August, Car and Driver’s Testing Hub reported that an 80 percent charge of the vehicle cost $81, including tax, so a zero to 100 percent would run more than $100.
This is on top of the purchase price for the vehicle itself.
The Hummer EV usually costs around $100,000, and with the high demand and low supply, some people have paid more than $200,000 to get their hands on one.
Then you have to start considering the maintenance costs. It can cost over $8,000 to replace the taillights, and if you have to replace the battery, that can run $30,000.
Clearly, the Hummer EV is mostly a toy for the rich. The average person could never afford those expenses.
But electric vehicles overall are out of the reach of many Americans. According to Kelley Blue Book, the average price of a new EV in August was a whopping $66,524.
Combine that with the maintenance expenses and the surprisingly high price of a recharge, and it’s clear that electric vehicles aren’t the money-savers that President Joe Biden and other Democrats claim they are.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/man-stunned-sees-bill-charging-hummer-ev-wont-believe-much-costs
*******************************************************Australia: Climate reparations are sycophantic, virtue-signalling lunacy
Mike O'Connor
Summer, praise the Lord, is all but upon us so what will it be this year – fire, flood, cyclone or perhaps a plague of locusts?
Whichever is visited upon us, it will be hailed in apocalyptic terms as presaging the end of civilisation and a vindication of the beliefs of the wild-of-eye zealots who shriek “climate change” at the approach of every passing shower.
Reporters will stare sternly down the barrels of TV cameras with well-practised frowns and declare that we are experiencing the hottest/wettest/coolest/driest summer in history.
History shows that it’s all happened before and is guaranteed to happen again, but climate change and its attendant mantra of net zero emissions are the new religion, the opium of the people, with the federal Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Chris Bowen its anointed high priest.
To suggest that the end is not nigh is to court mindless wrath and tiresome self-righteousness so better, perhaps, to sit quietly and wait for the lights to go out as our little nation of 26 million souls seeks to save the planet and destroy our children’s future.
Our latest commitment is to pay climate reparations to developing nations for the damage as a developed nation that we have allegedly caused them to suffer.
Lots and lots of free money, it seems, will go some way to assuaging this hurt.
China is classed as one of these so we will be in the happy position of paying one of the world’s biggest emitters for our alleged sins.
If anyone can find a better example of sycophantic, virtue-signalling lunacy, I’d like to hear it.
As well as the imminence of extreme climatic events, these being those previously known as tropical and sub-tropical weather, the onset of summer signals the end of the parliamentary year, reason enough to crack a coldie and utter a silent prayer of thanks that we will be spared the self-congratulatory, chest-thumping crowing of our leaders for a precious few months.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese continues to enjoy the support of the electorate, but the storm clouds are beginning to gather as the unions call in their markers and Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke dances puppet-like to their tune.
How lovely it would be if all you had to do to create a workers’ paradise was to give everyone a pay rise and entitle them to work fewer hours.
It’s amazing that no one has thought of it before.
More paid leave is also a sure way to lift productivity – paternity leave, maternity leave, domestic-violence leave and now a campaign for menopausal and menstrual leave.
The cost-of-living “crisis” will continue to make headlines through summer, a ”crisis” apparently lost on the millions of Australians who rushed out to buy things they didn’t need on Black Friday because a lot of retailers told them that they would save money if they did so. The more you spend, the more you save. Brilliant!
In sunny Queensland, Opposition Leader David Crisafulli must be looking at the Daniel Andrews victory in the Victorian state election as confirming what he suspected, which is that it is possible to fool most of the people most of the time as the Palaszczuk government staggers from one disaster to another, arrogance building on arrogance.
Crisafulli keeps jabbing away, but the only person on the Opposition benches whose punches appear to do any damage is his deputy Jarrod Bleijie.
The fact that Health Minister Yvette D’Ath and Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll have not resigned in disgrace says everything you need to know about this government.
Police Minister Mark Ryan should have joined them but could be spared, perhaps, in the light of his emerging talent as a stand-up comic.
As evidence mounted that your average goldfish would have a greater grasp of the police portfolio than his good self, the minister fired back by saying that Crisafulli should change his name to “Crisa-full-of-it.”
The cut and thrust of such a rapier-like wit is truly a joy to behold. I don’t know who is writing his lines, but I would suggest that they seek another line of work. Please!
***************************************
28 November, 2022
Scientists trawl through 12,000 wheat specimens in 300-year-old collection in hopes of finding a strain that can cope with climate change
This is a total crock. Warmth is good for crops. And wheat already grows in a variety of climates. Global warming would expand cool climate crops (e.g. in Northern Canada) into new lands and lead to an INCREASE in wheat availability. Global warming is most likely to cause a GLUT of grain crops. It wouldn't take much warming for Canada's arable area to expand 100 miles further North
Scientists are hunting through 300-year-old wheat samples kept by the Natural History Museum to find a variety resilient enough to face the challenges of our changing climate.
The archives of the museum in London could hold the key to finding the hardier wheat type that could help feed the world as conditions become more unfavourable to modern-day wheat.
Out of the 12,000 samples held by the museum, scientists will sequence the genomes of the most promising specimens to find the genetic secrets of the toughest types of wheat.
The old varieties of wheat are stored in hundreds of old cardboard files in the museum vaults, containing dried leaves, stems or ears of grain, and sometimes all three, from centuries ago.
They're carefully labelled with information on where and when they were found.
Larissa Welton, who is part of the team digitising the archive so it can be accessed online, told the BBC: 'The collection spans back to the 1700s, including a specimen that was collected on Captain Cook's first voyage to Australia.'
The war in Ukraine, disease and pests are jeopardising the supply of modern-day wheat which is used globally for staples in our diets such as, bread, pasta, cereals and cakes.
Scientists predict that a one degree rise in climate temperature could decrease the production of wheat by an alarming 6.4 per cent.
Pests and diseases are also causing major challenges, reducing the projected annual yield by about a fifth each year.
The Green Revolution of the 1950s meant that wheat strains that could provide the greatest yield were favoured, which has shrunk the diversity in wheat varieties.
With a smaller pool of wheat varieties, farmers have now lost access to types of wheat that could survive the more extreme weather conditions we are seeing as a result of climate change today.
Last week, the global population hit eight billion and is projected to continue growing by an estimated 60% more by 2050.
Scientists are hoping to find strains that will grow in places that wheat does not currently grow in order to keep up with the demands of a booming world population.
Dr Matthew Clark, a geneticist at the Natural History Museum told the BBC: 'We want to be able to see whether there are some of the things that we have lost, that we could basically capture and bring back to the modern varieties,'
'For example, by looking at crops that were able to survive in more marginal areas - places with hot and dry climates - that could help more developing countries increase their food supply,' added Dr Clark.
He explained that this could be done through traditional plant breeding, genetic modification or gene editing - a technique where genes can be very precisely added, removed or replaced.
Scientists at the John Innes Centre in Norwich are searching for solutions through old wheat samples.
Their archive, called the Watkins landrace collection, contains samples for a hundred years ago and contains varieties from all over the world.
The samples are stored at a chilly 4C to preserve the seeds, which means they can be planted and grown.
The team at John Innes have had some success in taking some of the older varieties of wheat and cross-breeding them with modern ones.
Dr Simon Griffiths said: 'Within this collection of old wheats, there are new resistances to that disease, which stand up against this disease, and that's being deployed by breeders right now to defend this really important threat to wheat production.'
The team is also interested in finding more nutritious wheat varieties. 'What about what's in the wheat? We know that we can increase the fibre content, the mineral content of wheat,' he said.
'There's so much diversity that hasn't been fully exploited yet by modern wheat breeders, and we think we can bring that to them.'
***************************************************
Europe Pays for Green-Energy Illusions
Europe is struggling to keep its lights and the heat on this winter, and fuel supply is only half of the energy crisis. The other half, now coming into view, is the ruinous fiscal cost associated with the failure of green-energy flights of fancy. European taxpayers will pay this bill for years to come.
Governments across Europe have announced €674 billion ($696 billion) in handouts and subsidies to alleviate the burden of skyrocketing energy prices between September 2021 and October 2022, according to Bruegel, the Brussels-based think tank. The money includes €264 billion in Germany alone and the equivalent of €97 billion in the United Kingdom. This is on top of what households and businesses are paying in higher energy bills even after the subsidies.
Some policies will help. Almost every European country has reduced excise taxes on fuel. This is a rare instance of the energy crisis forcing a beneficial rethink of green fixations—in this case, Europe’s tendency to treat energy levies as a green “sin tax.” But for the most part the money is subsidizing households and businesses directly or indirectly. One common tactic is to impose a retail price cap, with taxpayers plugging the gap between the costs that utilities must pay for energy and what they’re allowed to charge consumers.
A special dishonorable mention goes to countries such as France and Germany whose energy policies have dragged the government directly into the utility business. Paris has turned majority-state-owned utility EDF into a subsidy slush fund, using state control to limit retail prices today while apparently hoping taxpayers won’t notice plunging dividends or a big equity injection tomorrow. Berlin may nationalize Uniper and is offering tens of billions of euros in subsidized credit to other utilities.
This tabulation assumes “temporary” subsidies will expire on schedule, such as Britain’s energy price cap that’s due to end in April. If you think politicians will do that willingly, we have a hydropower dam in the Sahara to sell you.
This tally doesn’t include costs associated with the race to build new energy infrastructure, especially to import natural gas from sources other than Russia. Governments seem to be in denial about how to encourage private investment to shoulder more of this load.
Politicians still claim their medium-term plan is to ramp up renewables such as wind and solar. But those subsidies will skew incentives against investing in gas terminals or pipelines and the like. Taxpayers may end up footing bills that private investors would have been willing to pay if politicians hadn’t promised to put fossil fuels out of business within 10-15 years. Governments also are rushing to impose windfall taxes on the profits from the fossil-fuel investments they say they want to encourage.
Add it all to the tab. It’s impossible to say how much money Europe has wasted on its failed green-energy transition over the past few decades. Estimates for Germany alone start in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Taxpayers shouldn’t be surprised if their total bill to bail out that failed energy transition tops $1 trillion in coming years. When it comes to green energy, the motto is “pay, and pay again.”
********************************************
Europe needs to start fracking now! Hungary could have shale gas lasting a century
The Corvinus project, designed to kick-start shale gas extraction in Hungary, aims to ensure that the natural gas field in Békés county, at a depth of 3,700-4,500 metres, can be exploited as soon as possible, reported the economy portal Világgazdaság.
Former Minister of Innovation and Technology László Palkovics said encouragingly in early October that a priority was to review the Energy Strategy, including a significant reduction in the share of natural gas in the energy mix. The current national gas demand of 11.1 billion cubic meters per year would be reduced to 9.2 billion in the medium term, by 2030, and to 3.9 billion in the long term, by 2050. 40 percent of this would be imports. But the Hungarian government declared an energy emergency in the summer of 2022, and its action plan to address it includes an increase in domestic gas production from 1.5 billion cubic meters per year to at least 2 billion.
The ex-minister said in a statement in October that this could be done by 2023 without opening new fields. The project has been declared a priority investment by the government and is therefore exempted from the normal rules on historical monuments, environmental protection and local building regulations.
As part of the project, shale gas extraction in the Great Plain could start as early as January 2023.
Shale gas is largely methane, which is nearly 80 times more greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period, and therefore, when released into the atmosphere, will accelerate global warming.
The new well was put into production on November 11 and will start with a production of 600 barrels per day.Continue reading
The Association of Hungarian Nature Protectors (MTVSZ) has warned though that shale gas is produced by a process known as hydraulic fracturing, whereby shale gas is drilled vertically and horizontally several kilometers into the rock and then fractured at high pressure with a mixture of water, granular material such as sand, and chemical additives such as highly carcinogenic benzene and formaldehyde, forcing the gas into the extraction well. One fracking operation requires roughly 15 million liters of water, and a shale gas well can be fracked up to ten times.
https://hungarytoday.hu/hungary-could-have-shale-gas-lasting-a-century/
***************************************************Australia: Chicken Little propaganda dressed up as science
The Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO have delivered their biennial dose of depression about the climate in their latest State of the Climate report. The climate has warmed by 1.5C and there is barely a single benefit – it is all disaster.
It is often said, “if it is too good to be true, it probably is” and you are being conned. What about too bad to be true? Can a gently warming climate have no significant benefits at all? The only marginally encouraging part of the report is about northern Australia. There might have been a slight reduction in cyclone numbers, and there has been a bit more rain in the recent decades.
Apart from that, the report reads like the Book of Exodus – one disaster after another. Only the frogs and boils are missing.
But it is significant that the period when Egyptians were building pyramids, which was hotter than today’s climate, is often called the Holocene Climatic Optimum. The word “optimum” was an indication that scientists working in the era before climate alarmism could see some advantage of a warmer climate.
A sure sign that the report tries too hard to find disaster is when it discusses coral bleaching and the Great Barrier Reef. It stresses that there have been four bleaching events in the past six years, which it implies were devastating. But for some reason the report fails to mention that this year the reef recorded its highest amount of coral since records began in 1985.
This proves that all the hype about the coral loss from bleaching was greatly exaggerated. But the report writers were obviously untroubled by the contradictory evidence. They ignored it.
And they also ignore the fact that corals grow about 15 per cent faster for every degree temperature rise, and that almost all the corals on the reef also live in much warmer water near the equator. We should expect better coral, and it should extend further south. That is not too bad, is it?
Why doesn’t the report mention that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere improves the water utilisation efficiency of dryland plants, which occupy most of Australia, and that this has caused plants to thrive? According to NASA satellites, there is a “greening” of Australia of at least 10 per cent. Overall, the world has seen the area of green leaves expand by the equivalent of twice the area of the United States in just 35 years.
In a changing climate, there will be winners and losers, and it might be that the net effect is a major problem. But if the report writers will not even mention the good bits, how can we have any confidence in its findings?
The latest report should ring alarm bells – but not just about climate. Is this an excellent tool of propaganda, or is it a scientific statement?
We should all worry about whether groupthink has taken hold of the BOM and CSIRO.
We should worry when the BOM says it has recently adjusted all the temperature records reducing the temperatures a century ago by up to a degree. Can we have any confidence they did this with a good scientific reason?
And we should worry about the BOM’s claims that the fire seasons are now much worse than in 1950. Why is all the information on huge bushfires before 1950 ignored – like the devastating 1851 Victorian bushfire and the 1939 fires? It is not like there is no data before 1950.
Did they ignore that data for a good reason? Is this similar to the US fire statistics, which are often reported by authorities as having a major increase in fire acreage burnt since the early 60s, but fail to mention that there was almost 10 times more acreage burnt in the “dust-bowl” period in the 1930s?
In the next decades, Australian governments plan to spend hundreds of billions attempting to prevent climate change. Before we do that, maybe we could spend a few million doing an audit of BOM and CSIRO reports.
Maybe we would find that adapting to a changing climate is by far the best way to proceed. We might even find that some of what we have been told is wrong.
Why will the conservative parties not commit to an audit? Who would argue against a bit of checking of the science, when the Great Barrier Reef statistics prove scientists got something badly wrong?
And the latest report is a sure sign that the BOM and CSIRO are drifting into political advocacy rather than science, observation, and objective prediction.
***************************************
27 November, 2022
Biden Administration Pledges to Pay ‘Climate Reparations’-- for what?
On Nov. 20, officials at the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) agreed to form an international fund to promote “climate justice” by implementing “climate reparations.”
According to Simon Stiell, the UN climate change executive secretary, “We have determined a way forward on a decades-long conversation on funding for loss and damage—deliberating over how we address the impacts on communities whose lives and livelihoods have been ruined by the very worst impacts of climate change.”
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the climate reparations deal as “a small step towards climate justice.”
In reality, the deal struck at COP27, in which wealthy nations will pay billions of dollars to poor nations, has nothing to do with climate justice and everything to do with global wealth redistribution.
As of now, there’s no evidence that poor, undeveloped countries have suffered from increased climate change disasters due to the carbon dioxide emissions from wealthy, developed countries such as the United States.
Likewise, there’s no guarantee that the billions of dollars that would be funneled from rich countries to poor countries would be invested in “green” infrastructure. In fact, the poorer nations that are in line to receive the climate reparation payments scoffed when U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry attempted to insert a provision into the agreement that would phase down their use of “unabated” fossil fuels.
In other words, rich Western nations have agreed to send boatloads of money to low-income countries with no assurance that these funds will not end up in the pockets of corrupt officials, as has happened so many times in the past.
Moreover, the climate reparations agreement ignores the fact that poor nations are poor not because of the carbon dioxide emissions from rich countries, but mostly because they lack access to affordable and abundant energy.
As we have seen with the European energy crisis in recent months, ample access to reliable and cheap energy, namely via fossil fuels, is the bedrock for a thriving economy.
If the UN actually sought to improve the living standards of the billions of people residing in abject poverty in developing countries, it would do everything in its power to ensure that they have total access to low-cost, dependable energy.
According to the International Energy Agency: “Today 770 million people live without access to electricity, mostly in Africa and Asia. … Africa’s increase in the number of people without access contrasts with Asia, where the rollout of grid connections and distributed electricity access solutions was supported by more concerted policies and easier access to financing. … Almost 1.2 billion people have gained access to electricity in developing Asia since 2000, with 97% of the region having access in 2020 compared with 67% in 2000.”
The principal reason that Asia has made great strides over the past 20 years in ensuring that almost all of its population has access to electricity is because it has embraced fossil fuels.
In turn, several Asian nations, notably China and India, have drastically reduced the percentage of their people toiling in poverty.
China, in particular, has fully embraced fossil fuels as a means of spurring its dramatic economic transformation. As of today, China is responsible for emitting more than double the amount of carbon dioxide emissions than the United States and European Union, combined.
Yet, according to the COP27 climate reparations agreement, China is considered a “developing” country and is therefore exempt from paying into the newly created fund.
What’s more, the climate reparations agreement is just a down payment on what the UN has in mind for the years to come.
According to the UN: “A global transformation to a low-carbon economy is expected to require investments of at least USD 4-6 trillion a year. Delivering such funding will require a swift and comprehensive transformation of the financial system and its structures and processes, engaging governments, central banks, commercial banks, institutional investors and other financial actors.”
Make no mistake, the UN’s calls for “climate justice” via a “climate reparations” fund isn’t the end of the quest for rich nations to transfer wealth to poor nations; it’s just the beginning.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-administration-pledges-to-pay-climate-reparations_4879659.html
*********************************************************World cup stadiums and “green” exploitation of cheap, disposable workforces
Wealthy countries seem to be oblivious to the humanity atrocities and environmental degradation occurring in other countries to support bizarre environmental policies and the need for athletic entertainment.
The 2022 World Cup in Qatar kicked off on Sunday November 20 at the Al Bayt Stadium, but the “acceptable” toll on the cheap disposable workforce will provide viewers and participants with many lingering questions about our ethical and moral beliefs resulting from the grim toll of more than 6,500 migrant laborers who died between 2011 and 2020, many while helping build World Cup infrastructure including seven new stadiums. The low cost of stadium construction reflects the even lower cost of labor in Qatar.
Many of us had a chance to view the 2006 movie “Blood Diamonds” starring Leonardo DiCaprio that portrays many of the similar atrocities that took place in Qatar to build seven new stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, and continues occurring today in the developing countries that are mining for the “Blood Minerals” i.e., those exotic minerals and metals to support the “green” movement within wealthy countries.
Wealthy countries continue to silently support similar the exploitation of folks with yellow, brown, and black skin by supporting subsidies to procure EV’s and build more wind and solar when those subsidies are providing financial incentives to the developing countries mining for those “green” materials that promotes further exploitations of poor people in developing countries and environmental degradation to landscapes in “other” countries
Even President Biden’s expressed his recent shift on child labor when the Biden administration declared October 4, 2022, that batteries from China may be tainted by child labor, a move that could upend the electric vehicle industry while giving fresh ammunition to critics of White House climate policies.
The Department of Labor said it would add lithium-ion batteries to a list of goods made with materials known to be produced with child or forced labor under a 2006 human trafficking law. The decision was based on many batteries using cobalt, a mineral largely mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where children have been found to work at some mining sites.
The department released the list in the form of a report that excoriated “clean energy” supply chains for using forced labor. It grouped Chinese batteries together with polysilicon — a key material used in solar panel cells — made in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Biden’s 2022 declaration occurred one year after the book “Clean Energy Exploitations – Helping Citizens Understand the Environmental and Humanity Abuses That Support Clean Energy was nominated for a 2021 Pulitzer Prize. The book does an excellent job of discussing the lack of transparency to the world of the green movement’s impact upon humanity exploitations in the developing countries that are mining for the exotic minerals and metals required to create the batteries needed to store “green energy”. In these developing countries, these mining operations exploit child labor, and are responsible for the most egregious human rights’ violations of vulnerable minority populations. These operations are also directly destroying the planet through environmental degradation.
Whatever the plan to satisfy our sports entertainment values, and our attempts to address climate challenges, we best not forget that have ethical and moral responsibilities to continue to address the materialistic needs of those eight billion now on this planet.
*********************************************
Cooling Aerosols must be included in climate risk assessments
When Pakistan faced appalling floods in June this year, global attention focused on climate change as the culprit. The country had three times the usual rainfall in its summer monsoon, exacerbated by short spikes of extremely heavy rain. Riverbanks burst and more than 1,600 people died. Formal attribution studies and politicians alike blamed global warming for making such an event much more likely. Something else should have been mentioned, too: aerosols.
Aerosols are the miasma of soot (black carbon), sulfur dioxide, organic carbon and other compounds that drives poor air quality over many of the world’s most-populated regions. Studies show that aerosols strongly affect the likelihood of extreme precipitation events1, such as those that contributed to Pakistan’s floods, and many other climate hazards.
Worse, it is not clear whether aerosols are set to rise, fall or stabilize. The amount of uncertainty about aerosol levels by 2050 is as large as the total increase since pre-industrial times (see ‘Drastic uncertainty’). Over the next 20–30 years, we might — or might not — see aerosol-driven climate changes as large as those that have played out over the past 170 years, adding as much as 0.5 °C to global warming. That could rapidly change the likelihood of extreme events occurring in many regions.
Yet the impacts of aerosols on climate risk are often ignored. The issue was not on the official agenda of the 27th United Nations climate conference (COP27) in Sharm-El-Shaikh, Egypt. This neglect must end.
Critical gap
Aerosols are hugely important to the climate, globally and regionally. The details are complicated. Some aerosols warm the atmosphere, others cool it, depending on their type, height above ground and impact on clouds. But, overall, vast emissions of aerosols since the start of the industrial age have had a profound cooling effect by reflecting sunlight. Without them, the global warming we see today would be 30–50% greater.
Historically, aerosols have had dramatic regional impacts. They were the main reason temperatures in Europe didn’t warm between the 1950s and 1980s2. They drove a decline in the South Asian monsoon during the second half of the last century3. And they were a major driver of the late-twentieth-century Sahel drought4, which triggered a famine that killed 100,000 people.
How climate change and unplanned urban sprawl bring more landslides
Globally, aerosols are a more powerful player in climate extremes than are greenhouse gases. Warm the world by removing aerosol emissions and this will create more extremely hot days, more extreme precipitation events, and more consecutive dry days over highly populated regions, than if the world was warmed by the same amount by adding greenhouse gases5.
Despite all this, regional estimates of risk from climate change often omit aerosol impacts. Most evaluations of near-term climate risk used by policymakers either ignore aerosols or reduce their effects to a globally averaged offset to warming by greenhouse gases. This probably strongly underestimates risks to communities both near and far from sources of aerosols.
As experts in aerosol–climate interaction, climate impacts and scenario development from many nations, we call for estimates of climate risk to include regional aerosol projections. Policymakers and stakeholders must recognize that their assessments of near-term risk are probably missing a critical component. In the longer term, we need to ensure that any forecasting tools used are ‘aerosol aware’.
Stakeholders potentially face a range of nasty surprises if they continue to be solely focused on risks driven by greenhouse gases.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03763-9
************************************************A picture of a tree in regional South Australia has sparked a wild climate change debate
The photo posted on social media shows the tree littered with markings from recent floods.
Well above the current flood level is a marking from 1956.
For some, it was a smoking gun that climate change isn’t real.
“And the climate change back in 1956 was caused by what?” one person joked. “I wonder if they were talking climate change in 73, 74 and 75,” another added.
Others pointed out an obvious issue. “How tall was that tree in 1956?” one person questioned.
“Trees grow upward from the top, not from the bottom. Their trunks spread outward, not upward,” one person correctly stated.
Others said the one tree was just a bad data set.
“Using one tree as evidence to suit your agenda shows what level of intelligence we are dealing with,” one said.
“There are many factors why areas have worse flooding. There is no denying though, with mass land clearing as one factor, flooding will only get worse under extreme climate events such as La Nina,” he continued.
Hundreds have flocked to the seemingly innocuous post to duke it out in a debate about climate. In fact, 1956 was the worst flood on record for the area, with the ‘Great Flood’ described as “the greatest catastrophe in the state’s history”.
According to the Adelaide Advertiser, the flood was a culmination of two years of a La Nina, which had brought three months of heavy rain to Queensland, Victoria and NSW.
***************************************
25 November, 2022
Global rainbow distribution under current and future climates
Is this a spoof?
Abstract
Rainbows contribute to human wellbeing by providing an inspiring connection to nature. Because the rainbow is an atmospheric optical phenomenon that results from the refraction of sunlight by rainwater droplets, changes in precipitation and cloud cover due to anthropogenic climate forcing will alter rainbow distribution. Yet, we lack a basic understanding of the current spatial distribution of rainbows and how climate change might alter this pattern.
To assess how climate change might affect rainbow viewing opportunities, we developed a global database of crowd-sourced photographed rainbows, trained an empirical model of rainbow occurrence, and applied this model to present-day climate and three future climate scenarios.
Results suggest that the average terrestrial location on Earth currently has 117 ± 71 days per year with conditions suitable for rainbows. By 2100, climate change is likely to generate a 4.0–4.9 % net increase in mean global annual rainbow-days (i.e., days with at least one rainbow), with the greatest change under the highest emission scenario. Around 21–34 % of land areas will lose rainbow-days and 66–79 % will gain rainbow-days, with rainbow gain hotspots mainly in high-latitude and high-elevation regions with smaller human populations.
Our research demonstrates that alterations to non-tangible environmental attributes due to climate change could be significant and are worthy of consideration and mitigation.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937802200142X
****************************************************Biden Administration Holds Up Major Oil Refinery Despite Looming Fuel Crisis
President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on November 17 that it would not reopen a key U.S. oil refinery in the Virgin Islands, despite a coming national shortage in diesel fuel that could prove catastrophic to the country.
According to the Daily Caller, the St. Croix refinery was first shut down in June of 2021 after the administration demanded a “Prevention of Significant Deterioration” permit, required by the Clean Air Act, that would prove the refinery’s capabilities of reducing air pollution if reopened. The refinery is owned by West Indies Petroleum Limited and Port Hamilton Refining and Transportation, LLLC.
The St. Croix refinery, one of the largest oil refineries in the world, was capable of producing over 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day, processing that oil into gasoline and heating oil, which is a form of diesel. Heating oil is now 65 percent more expensive in October of 2022 than it was in October of 2021, according to Bloomberg.
The U.S. currently has only about 26 days left of diesel fuel in commercial inventories, with the Energy Information Administration (EIA) admitting that one gallon of diesel now costs $1.58 more than it did in November of last year. In addition, Biden’s EPA is considering another anti-diesel plan that would make prices even worse, by forcing oil companies to store a mandatory minimum amount of diesel in their fuel tanks.
“I am committed to prioritizing the health and safety of underserved and overburdened communities across this country and holding polluters accountable,” said EPA Administrator Michael Regan. “This will ensure protections for St. Croix by requiring the refinery to operate in compliance with environmental laws designed to protect people’s health and the environment.”
The counterproductive move by the Biden Administration reflects its far-left “green energy” approach to energy policy, which has included shutting down the sale of all oil leases on federal land, as well as stifling domestic oil production in favor of so-called “renewable” forms of energy such as wind, solar, and electric. These policies led to the spike in gas prices earlier in 2022, a crisis that was subsequently exacerbated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Although Biden has turned to raiding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as a means of temporarily reducing gas prices in order to improve his public image, gas prices have continued to rise after a brief drop, and the coming diesel shortage could spell disaster for the United States if truck drivers are no longer able to transport food and other goods across the country.
*********************************************
Protests Erupt After Irish Govt Bans Peat, A Natural, Abundant Fuel
Protesters gathered in front of a shuttered power station on Sunday to demonstrate against the Irish government’s banning of a natural and abundant fossil fuel just in time for the winter energy crisis.
A large group of mostly rural individuals gathered at the closed West Offaly Power Station [pictured] in Shannonbridge on Sunday afternoon to protest against the Irish government’s continued green agenda drive in the face of the ongoing energy crisis.
The station was closed back in 2020 as part of an EU-supported government drive to drastically reduce the use of turf [peat] in Ireland, a natural fossil fuel that can be easily obtained using a shovel from bogs throughout the country.
As part of this green drive, the government has now outright banned the commercial sale of peat on the island entirely, drastically curtailing the ability of ordinary citizens to obtain locally sourced traditional fuel at a time when fuel bills are rising dramatically.
“We are demonstrating to maintain our right to continue to cut turf so we can heat our homes and cook our meals,” Mick Cantwell, a member of the organization that hosted the protest, told local paper the Athlone Advertiser.
“We are also of the view that Shannonbridge Power Station should be reopened, preventing extreme poverty for all living through this present energy crisis.”
Also present at the demonstration was Carol Nolan, an independent elected representative within Ireland’s national parliament, as well as Shane Lynam of the Irish Freedom Party, who addressed the crowd.
“The current regime we are up against wants nothing more than to destroy Irish culture and the Irish way of life,” Lynam said in a speech at the event, during which he frequently criticized the EU’s involvement in the restrictions on the harvesting of turf, as well as its “hollow promises of globalism”.
Coming into force on Halloween this year, the ban on the commercial sale of turf in Ireland comes amid fears that the island nation — like many other EU members — will see rolling blackouts this winter.
Despite the island sporting a wide variety of both onshore and offshore deposits of fossil fuels, top-down climate change laws imposed at the national and European Union level have largely prevented the country from utilizing them, resulting in Ireland obtaining a large amount of its natural gas from abroad.
The country also lacks any in-use gas storage facilities, a fact that leaves it far more vulnerable to disruptions in supply compared to the likes of Germany.
As a result of these factors, the country’s national grid operators may be forced to cut off certain parts of the country from their electricity supply in order to keep the grid stable, while one senator has now described rolling blackouts as being a “very real prospect” facing Ireland over the coming months.
Ireland is not the only country where the national governments have banned a cheap and easy-to-use home heating fuel just in time for the national gas and electricity grid to come under pressure, with energy prices for those commodities soaring.
The UK has banned the sale of house coal, citing environmental concerns, a legacy of the Boris Johnson era of radical green politics.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/protests-erupt-after-irish-govt-bans-peat-a-natural-abundant-fuel/
************************************************Australia: Greenie hatred of sheep and cattle
Having flown to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (Cop 27) in Egypt, Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen has been at pains to point out the Albanese government’s commitment to US President Joe Biden’s international pledge to reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030.
The pledge will impel greenhouse gas-intensive industries like agriculture which, owing to the digestive systems of sheep and cattle is responsible for about half of Australia’s methane emissions, to curb their methane output.
If the target is legislated, the door would open for punitive regulatory measures to be placed on graziers running cattle and sheep.
Across the ditch, New Zealand is planning to impose a ‘burp tax’ on farmers by 2025 which, according to its own modelling, would force an estimated 20 per cent of cattle and sheep farmers and 5 per cent of dairy farmers out of business.
Such a policy in Australia would have the same result, with farmers compelled to de-stock, leading to a decline in food production and a skyrocketing of meat and dairy prices. The inevitable farm closures would devastate regional communities.
Why the Albanese government would commit to any measure that risks destabilising Australia’s agricultural industry beggars belief.
In the current geopolitical climate, the lesson could not be clearer: food security is inextricably linked to national security – a point emphasised in a recent report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute which outlines that ‘robust and resilient food and fibre production systems are critical to political and social stability’.
One need only look as far as Ukraine to see the horrific results when food supplies become weapons of war. By mercilessly blockading Ukrainian cereal exports, Vladimir Putin has plunged millions in chronically malnourished regions in Africa and the Middle East into food scarcity and starvation.
Fortunately, Australia is one of the most food-secure nations on earth. Our $83 billion agricultural industry produces enough food every year to feed Australia threefold. Surplus supplies go to our neighbours in the Indo-Pacific region – home to half of the world’s undernourished people.
The war in Ukraine, therefore, is a salutary reminder that, in any crisis to come closer to home, Australian farmers will play a crucial strategic role in bolstering not only our national resilience but peace and stability in our region.
The ASPI report argues that government and policymakers should take heed of ‘Putin’s war on global food security’ and examine how ‘national security can be threatened as well as enhanced by how we approach agriculture policy, investment and production’ in Australia.
Despite its strategic importance, few industries are as demonised by the urban green lobby or as burdened by environmental regulation as Australian agriculture, particularly the livestock sector.
Even before the methane pledge, Australian farmers were up to their neck in cumbersome environmental regulation.
Recent research from the Institute of Public Affairs has shown that the weight of Commonwealth environmental red tape, known as ‘green tape’, that farmers are forced to wade through, has grown 80-fold since 1971.
The effect has been to stifle the efficiency and productivity of Australian farmers.
IPA research shows that the Commonwealth’s environmental bureaucracy has grown at nearly three times the rate of the agricultural sector since 2000. In the same period, for every one job created in the environmental bureaucracy, 14 jobs have been lost in agriculture.
The excessive regulatory burdens placed on our farmers border on the ridiculous. To build a single irrigation pivot on private land requires no less than eight different permits.
Excessive green tape risks hampering our food security which, in times of crisis, is one of the most critical requirements to national resilience.
All of this reflects the growing tendency among policymakers to place lofty climate ambitions above the practical needs of our nation.
Despite paying for our social services, healthcare, and infrastructure, farmers – like miners – are increasingly enemy-number-one for the green climate lobby who paint them as environmental vandals. This despite the seemingly obvious fact that sustainable land management is unquestionably in the interest of every single farmer.
The reality in modern Australia is that fewer and fewer Australians have any connection to farming, agriculture or our rural regions. Worse still, few recognise that Australia is a secure, stable and safe nation largely thanks to the efforts of our farmers, both past and present. Not to mention peace in our region.
Our agricultural industry sits at the heart of our nation.
Recognising this, the Albanese government should act to cut unnecessary green tape, commit to no new taxes on farmers and, most importantly, celebrate the noble work our farmers do, not only feeding and clothing their fellow citizens but millions around the world as well.
This is now a national security priority. Just as Australia was built on the sheep’s back, so too will we rely on our farmers in any dark times to come
https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/australian-notes-324/
***************************************24 November, 2022
Climate reparations exposed
At the recently concluded UN COP27 climate conference in Egypt, Tuvalu Prime Minister Natano called for reparations to "at-risk" nations. At the conclusion of the conference, negotiators from nearly 200 countries agreed to fund poor nations for the "loss and damage" they are supposedly experiencing.
We decided to take a deeper dive into the claims of "sinking islands," and the truth may surprise you.
Tuvalu is a low-lying island nation in the South Pacific with an average elevation of two meters (3.3 feet) and consists of four reef islands and five true atolls. Its highest elevation is 4.5 meters (15 ft) above sea level, which gives Tuvalu the second-lowest maximum elevation of any country (after the Maldives)
The claim is made that continued sea-level rise will soon put Tuvalu and other low-lying nations under water. That certainly sounds like a reasonable assumption, but putting this into a longer geologic context is important.
About 20,000 years ago, the islands of what is now Tuvalu were just above sea level, just as they are today. Since that time, sea level has risen more than 400 feet (130 meters) and yet, the islands remained above sea level.
The reason that these islands grew is a geologic process known as "accretion." This process transfers sediment from the beachface to the island surface and allows the islands to keep up with rising seas. In fact, over the last four decades, there has been a net increase in land area of the islands of nearly 3 percent (33 acres).
Maldives - And what of the most at-risk island nation? According to Forbes, there is a construction boom going on there with the building of new villas, resorts and airports. All of this is funded by equity companies and protected by multinational insurance companies. Bear in mind that these institutions avoid risk like the plague. Would they put their capital at risk if they thought that the islands were going to be under water soon?
newsletter@co2coalition.org
**********************************************
Biden Agrees To Pay Climate Reparations—And China, the World’s Top Carbon Emitter, Could Profit
The Biden administration on Saturday agreed to pay climate reparations to developing nations, a move that China—the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases and one of its largest economies—could profit from.
Administration officials emerged from the United Nations Climate Change Conference over the weekend with a global agreement to establish a "climate justice" fund that would see the United States and other wealthy nations pay developing countries for "loss and damage" caused by climate change. But the U.N. still classifies China—which boasts the second-highest gross domestic product in the world—as a developing country, meaning it could benefit from the fund.
That classification has left the United States scrambling to assure "that China will eventually contribute to any fund created—and that China would not be eligible to receive money from it," the New York Times reported Saturday. Beyond its economic status, China is by far the world's number one carbon emitter: The communist nation's greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 "exceeded those of the U.S. and other developed nations combined," according to CNBC.
It's unclear exactly how much the fund would cost, but a 2021 U.N. estimate placed the annual price tag in the hundreds of billions of dollars. That sky-high figure—and China's potential to receive a portion of it—will likely draw Congress's ire, particularly after Republicans take control of the House in early 2023. Biden's climate diplomats agreed to the fund at the conference, but Congress still must appropriate any taxpayer money that goes into it. Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.) has already called the fund "completely misguided," and even a razor-thin House GOP majority could decline to bankroll it should its members remain united in opposition.
Biden's decision to back the climate fund comes just days after his climate czar, John Kerry, assured reporters that such a fund was "just not happening." "It's a well-known fact that the United States and many other countries will not establish … some sort of legal structure that is tied to compensation or liability," Kerry said on November 12. Roughly one week later, after the conference's conclusion, Kerry released a statement saying he "welcomes" the fund's creation.
The White House did not return a request for comment.
Beyond the Biden administration's support for climate reparations, conference attendees faced criticism for using gas-guzzling private jets to travel to the two-week summit, which was held in Sharm El Sheikh, a swanky resort town in Egypt. Brazil's president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, flew to the climate conference on a millionaire businessman's private jet, and more than 400 private aircraft flooded Egypt's airports during the conference, according to Business Insider. Last year's conference, which occurred in Glasgow, contributed to the emission of roughly 103,000 metric tons of greenhouse gases—roughly 7,000 times the average American's annual carbon footprint.
Power the Future founder and executive director Daniel Turner admonished the U.N. and other world climate leaders for their exorbitance, arguing that U.S. taxpayers should not fork over more money for climate reparations when they've already paid for government officials to "live glamorously and travel the world in the name of climate change."
**********************************************************
Green Britain: UK economy to suffer biggest hit from energy crisis among G7 nations
Britain is predicted to continue to suffer from painful inflation exacerbated by worker shortages and ‘untargeted’ energy support.
Gloomy forecasts from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reveal a sharp downgrade for the country’s economy. It is expected to shrink by 0.4% in 2023 and grow by just 0.2% in 2024.
In the new report, the OECD took aim at the UK Government’s support efforts to cap energy bills at around £2,500 until April. Experts say doing so will push up inflation and mean households and businesses will be hit by higher interest rates as a result as policymakers look to rein in price and wage rises.
The OECD said: ‘The untargeted Energy Price Guarantee announced in September 2022 by the Government will increase pressure on already high inflation in the short term, requiring monetary policy to tighten more and raising debt service costs.
‘Better targeting of measures to cushion the impact of high energy prices would lower the budgetary cost, better-preserve incentives to save energy, and reduce the pressure on demand at a time of high inflation.’
Germany is the only other G7 country set to see a contraction in gross domestic product (GDP) next year, with a 0.3% drop, according to the report.
Italy will see only paltry growth of 0.2%, while the United States will eke out 0.5% expansion, with GDP set to rise by 0.6% in France and 1% in Canada and 1.8% in Japan.
On Britain’s outlook, the OECD cautioned: ‘Risks to the outlook are considerable and tilted towards the downside.
‘Higher-than-expected goods and energy prices could weigh on consumption and further depress growth.
‘A prolonged period of acute labour shortages could force firms into a more permanent reduction in their operating capacity or push up wage inflation further.’
But it said households may choose to return to the jobs market to help boost stretched finances.
The OECD said UK inflation – which hit a 41-year high of 11.1% in October – will likely peak at the end of this year and remain above 9% into early 2023, before slowing to 4.5% by next year-end and to 2.7% by the end of 2024.
Its report sees UK interest rates rising further from 3% currently to 4.5% by April next year, while unemployment will lift from 3.6% to 5% by the end of 2024.
*************************************************
Tropical cyclones reached Sydney in the 1950s and they could return
It's terrible weather but is NOT due to global warming
NSW could be impacted by destructive tropical cyclones this decade, and it's not because of climate change.
While only two cyclones have directly struck NSW since 1974, the state was pounded by a cyclone every two years from the 1940s to the 1970s, many leading to record flood levels and deaths.
What's concerning is the Pacific pattern behind the abundance of cyclones last century has now returned.
Tropical cyclones can reach Sydney
Studying 27 NSW cyclone tracks between 1887 and 2013 shows most storms impacted the state's north-east but some survived down to Sydney and the South Coast.
What's irregular is the majority of cyclones arrived in just a 30-year window from 1945 to 1974, including eight in the 1950s.
While cyclones continue to annually make landfall over northern Australia, during the past 48 years only Cyclone Nancy (1990) and Ex-Cyclone Oswald (2013) reached NSW, both bringing significant flooding and a damage bill in the hundreds of millions.
Where have the cyclones gone?
The inordinate frequency of cyclones from the 40s to the 70s and the disappearance in recent decades is not random variability.
A 2020 report in the Journal of Southern Hemisphere Earth Systems links NSW cyclone activity with changes in the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO).
The current state of the IPO and other cyclone influences has rapidly shifted in the past three years to resemble the 1950s. Meaning, the current phase of the Pacific is conducive to tropical cyclones impacting NSW.
How the IPO can impact weather for decades
The IPO is a shift in Pacific Ocean temperatures but unlike the annual La Nina and El Nino oscillations, the changes extend outside of the tropics and last from years to even decades.
A negative phase of the IPO occurs when waters along the equator are cooler than normal (region 2) while waters are warm off Australia's east coast (region 3) and in the northern Pacific (region 1).
A negative IPO phase was behind the flood dominant 1950s to 1970s and a period when tropical cyclones regularly visited NSW.
A positive phase led to drought dominant weather in Australia from the 1980s to 2000s.
The lowest IPO values during the past 100 years were in the early 50s, and 1950 was not only the wettest year on record for NSW but also a year when a tropical cyclone made it to Sydney.
The one year average IPO in 2022 is running at the lowest value since 1917 and the 11 year average is plummeting as a result.
Deadliest cyclones to reach NSW and Sydney
Before tropical cyclones were regularly named a system in January 1950 — labelled TC119 — made landfall on the Gulf of Carpentaria coast then tracked south and reached Sydney as a category 1 system about three days later.
Sydney recorded its second lowest pressure on record at 988 HPa and 114mm of rain in 24 hours. Ten people died and seven yachts were wrecked in Sydney Harbour.
This kicked off what became the wettest year on record, before 2022.
In February 1954, TC137 also dropped more than 100mm on Sydney after crossing the coast near Tweed Heads as a category 3 cyclone with wind gusts in excess of 165 km/h.
TC137 caused disastrous floods in Lismore and Casino, destroyed houses and led to 30 fatalities, the deadliest cyclone in NSW post 1900.
Dorrigo received 809mm in 24 hours from TC137, a NSW 24 hour rain record which still stands today.
Going back even further to 1911, a tropical cyclone made landfall in the Gulf of Carpentaria on January 5.
It travelled south to NSW before moving out to sea again near Wollongong about the 15th.
According to the Bureau of Meteorology wind gusts of 137 km/h were recorded in Sydney, equivalent to the speed of a category two cyclone.
Could cyclones return to NSW this year?
There is obviously no guarantee, especially considering the recent climate change induced reduction in cyclone numbers around the world.
However, if the IPO remains strongly negative for several years, a major cyclone striking NSW would be far from unprecedented. And with the population more than double that of the 1950s the potential damage from a tropical cyclone is higher than ever.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-24/tropical-cyclones-could-return-to-sydney/101689762
***************************************23 November, 2022
Climate reparations dead in the water as US Republicans say 'No way'
Liberals and conservatives are criticizing a U.N.-backed deal supported by the Biden administration for richer nations to pay reparations to poorer countries for the impacts of climate change.
Attendees of the COP27 climate summit held in Egypt went into overtime last weekend to establish a global “loss and damage” fund. The historic initiative calls for wealthier nations like the U.S. and its allies in Europe to compensate poorer nations that have been most affected by climate change but are among the lowest emitters of greenhouse gases.
The agreement has frustrated the political left and right alike in the U.S.
Climate hawks argue the agreement failed to go far enough because it did not call for phasing out all fossil fuels — only reiterating that the world should wean itself from coal. They also say it delayed many of the thornier decisions, such as how the fund would work and how much should be paid, until next year’s annual conference.
The U.S. and other developed countries have failed to meet a prior pledge to provide $100 billion per year.
Michael Sheldrick of the climate change and poverty advocacy group Global Citizen questioned whether the money will ever come to fruition.
“We have to ask ourselves: how credible are any new commitments, given the failure to make progress in other key areas? How can we take any of these new commitments seriously given promises that continue to go unmet?” Mr. Sheldrick said in a statement. “COP27 seems to retract on the $100 billion pledge in climate finance, a promise already broken two years in a row.”
Conservatives, meanwhile, suggested it amounted to an international slush fund for richer nations to fork over tens of billions of dollars each year to developing countries.
“Simply put, the United States can’t pay. We could give a few billion dollars now and then, but we’re $31 trillion in debt and face trillion dollar-per-year deficits for the foreseeable future,” said Alex Flint, executive director of the right-leaning economic climate group Alliance for Market Solutions. “Even if we were willing to pay, we simply don’t have the resources, or at least enough to reasonably compensate damages.”
Diana Furchtgott?Roth, an energy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation and former Department of Transportation official in the Trump administration, argued the deal only further hamstrings poorer countries. As part of a broader agreement, wealthy nations want commitments from poorer ones to slash emissions to help meet the goal of limiting global temperature increases.
“The West should be encouraging all countries to use the most efficient forms of energy,” Ms. Furchtgott?Roth said. “They can’t get to Western levels of living without conventional fuels: oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear. For us to have these standards of living and then say to other countries ‘you can’t have them’ is selfish and oblivious to the situations these low-income countries are in.”
***********************************************************
COP-27 Financiers And Merchants Of Death
As Americans give thanks this week for our many blessings, let us recall the Pilgrims’ and Native Americans’ primitive agricultural knowledge and technologies, the hunger and disease that were constants in their lives – and how so many around the world are not much better off today.
Much of Africa still lives on the edge, with well over 600 million people not even having electricity. Many parts of India, Asia and Latin America also face serious energy and food deprivation.
Incredibly, so does Europe. “German industry stares into the Net Zero abyss,” “Europe’s energy crisis may get even worse next year,” “Even Germany’s wind industry is sliding into crisis,” “Millions face poverty and destitution in Green Britain, as Brits pay highest electricity bills in world,” headlines warn.
Banning Russian gas imports amid Putin’s war on Ukraine plays a role and is frequently scapegoated. But the primary cause is Europe’s love affair with intermittent wind and solar, and hate-fest for fossil fuels and nuclear, amid frigid winter realities that have caused Germany to obliterate ancient villages and recent-vintage wind farms to mine lignite coal beneath them.
Closer to home, New England and New York also face a cold, dark winter, because they too have voted against drilling, fracking, pipelines, coal and nuclear power – and now demand more oil and gas from the same companies that they and President Biden want to drive into oblivion.
However, the greatest hypocrisy of all was on full-throated display at the COP-27 climate circus in Egypt November 6-18 – where attendees kept asking whether Africa should be allowed to exploit its oil, natural gas and coal reserves to improve living standards, feed families and save lives!
Al Gore preached that fossil fuel investments should be terminated worldwide, including in Africa. UN Secretary General António Guterres absurdly asserted that “New funding for fossil fuel exploration and production is delusional” and will only “feed the scourge of war, pollution and climate catastrophe” (the manmade cataclysms found in computer models and COP-27 rants, though not in the Real World).
At the COP-27 climate gabfest in Sham-El-Sheikhdown, Egypt, John Kerry said African nations shouldn’t rely on natural gas to generate electricity and modernize. (Kerry has five houses, a yacht and private jet – but that’s OK because they’re in his wife’s name, and he merely “makes use of them.”)
Even worse, it’s not just energy these arrogant eco-totalitarians want to obstruct in Africa and other developing regions. It’s also modern fertilizers — indeed, all aspects of modern agriculture – everything that can actually help farmers feed hungry people and make enough money to build a home or barn, send their children to school, and buy tractors and other equipment.
They don’t even want Africa producing natural gas and using it to make nitrogen fertilizer, which dramatically boosts crop yields and is absolutely essential if the world is to feed eight billion people – especially without turning millions more acres of wildlife habitat into marginal croplands.
Poor countries are no long going to tolerate this outrageous, intolerable, racist neo-colonialism. Nor should they, especially when they realize now-rich countries are on the verge of de-industrialization and bankruptcy – and have neither the intention nor ability to shell out billions, much less trillions, of dollars in annual “reparation, loss and damage” payments for alleged impacts from manmade climate change.
So when the UN, now-rich countries and eco-pressure groups tell them there’ll be no financing for fossil fuels and modern agriculture – only for wind and solar energy, organic farming and “AgroEcology” – poor countries should just tell these purveyors of poverty, hunger, disease and death to buzz off. That would leave poor countries largely on their own.
But they have numerous advantages that their predecessors lacked: access to the incredible energy, agricultural, industrial, economic, medical, communication and other advances of recent centuries, especially during the fossil-fueled industrial era.
They simply need to chart their own destinies and utilize these advances. Every project they undertake will generate new wealth, innovation and self-confidence to undertake subsequent projects.
I’ve written about these callous eco-imperialists – these financiers and merchants of death – many times (here, here, here and here, for example).
Unfortunately, they never repent, never revise their lethal attitudes and policies. The global following they enjoy underscores how the ill-informed but well-intended really are led around by the well-informed but ill-intended – on climate, energy, agriculture and human rights.
Their AgroEcology schemes reject virtually the entire foundation of modern agriculture, which feeds feed billions of people with less acreage and water, using monoculture farming, carefully developed and tested chemical fertilizers and insecticides, biotechnology, hybrid seeds and mechanized equipment.
Instead, they demand “food sovereignty” – the “right” to “culturally appropriate” food produced through “ecologically sound and sustainable methods, in accord with AgroEcology policies – the kind that brought hunger and chaos to Sri Lanka.
They even vilify Golden Rice, which could end Vitamin A Deficiency, blindness and death among malnourished children.
Could the insanity and hypocrisy get any worse? Sadly – yes.
European leaders have been pleading with African nations to launch oil, gas and coal projects – for shipment to Europe. In their next breath, the EU Commission says supporting nitrogen fertilizer production in Africa would “clash” with EU climate goals.
The International Energy Agency worries that half of Sub-Saharan Africa’s population has no access to electricity. In its next breath, the IEA says stopping planetary overheating doesn’t allow for more African petroleum production.
Even more colonialist, Time magazine promotes the notion that “humans eating insects could help save the planet.” The New York Times extolls a new Julia Child “Joy of Cooking (Insects).” And a group of “renowned” African and European “ecology and nutrition experts” says climate change and other considerations make Africa “the perfect laboratory” for testing new ways to feed humanity – like turning lake flies from the Lake Victoria region into “crackers, muffins, meat loaves and sausages.”
COP-27 (or FLOP-27) claims to have reached another “historic milestone” in saving Planet Earth! But it’s all driven by unfounded hysteria about manmade climate cataclysms. Let’s all take a deep breath.
We certainly face climate fluctuations and extreme weather events – but no worse than in the past, and with no replicable, convincing evidence that manmade emissions have replaced natural forces. More importantly, we have far greater wealth, far more knowledge, far better technologies and resources than in the past – to help us adapt to climate changes, survive extreme weather events and rebuild afterward.
That’s infinitely preferable to blanketing the Earth with wind turbines, solar panels, battery modules, transmission lines, mines and factories to build the things – and processing plants to make bug burgers and other delicacies, in time for climate luminaries to enjoy them at COP-28.
Can’t we just be calm and rational (and thus colonialist?) just this once? Just asking.
https://www.eurasiareview.com/22112022-cop-27-financiers-and-merchants-of-death-oped/
*******************************************European industry exodus to US looms, driven by green handouts and cheaper gas prices
Politicians warn of investment exodus across Atlantic, driven by US incentives and cheaper gas prices. The Biden administration’s most senior trade official told the FT that the EU should introduce more subsidies.
Northvolt, Europe’s great hope in the global battery wars, began life as a start-up focused on the continent. Now the Swedish group, backed by Volkswagen, BMW and Goldman Sachs, is looking to the US to expand production.
The reason for the pivot is the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The US’s flagship green technology legislation, signed into law in August, would subsidise a factory in America by about $600mn-$800mn, according to Northvolt. That compares to €155mn in incentives on the table from Germany.
The IRA “is moving momentum a lot from Europe to the US”, Northvolt chief executive Peter Carlsson told the Financial Times, adding that it was not only affecting European companies. “There are new Asian players who are reallocating their strategic plans and investments to North America,” he said.
The combination of the Biden Administration’s $369bn package and high energy costs in Europe, where even after recent declines gas prices remain five times more expensive than in North America, is sounding alarm bells in EU capitals.
“I think we need a European wake-up on this point,” French president Emmanuel Macron told executives from domestic industrial companies such as glassmaker Saint-Gobain and cement maker Lafarge in a speech last week.
Germany’s economy minister, Robert Habeck, described the US support as “excessive” and “hoovering up investments from Europe”.
The EU has accused Washington of breaching World Trade Organization rules and set up a task force with the Biden administration to resolve their differences. It has asked for changes to nine provisions in the legislation involving subsidy programmes totalling $231bn, arguing they create a “race to the bottom” on handouts to business.
Brussels estimates the EU needs to boost annual investment by €520bn in the coming decade to meet its carbon reduction and environmental protection objectives.
While the IRA affects manufacturers in fields ranging from advanced machinery to heavy industry, EU executives are particularly concerned about the impact on the automotive sector. Only electric cars substantially made with parts from North America and assembled there will qualify for a $7,500 tax discount for consumers.
Europe is home to more than one-quarter of global EV production, and 20 per cent of the supply chain, according to the International Energy Agency. The US has just 10 per cent of EV production and 7 per cent of battery production capacity.
Luisa Santos, deputy director-general at BusinessEurope, a pan-European lobby group, said the US legislation had sent a “dangerous signal” that could encourage other jurisdictions to take protectionist measures.
Yet far from offering to extend the break to EU vehicles, Katherine Tai, the Biden administration’s most senior trade official, told the FT that the EU should introduce more subsidies.
https://www.ft.com/content/7f4b8029-258a-4af5-9e72-abcd736468e1
**************************************************Australia 1.47°C warmer than it was when national records began in 1910, State of the Climate Report reveals
Let's try a little logic here. If the Australian temperature is .37 of a degree above the global temperature of 1.1 degree then a significant part of the Australian warming is NOT due to global influences. That being so, how do we know that ANY of it is due to global influences? Both the global and Australian temperatures could be random fluctuations and probably are. Fluctuations are common in the long-term global record. Temperatures over the last 100 years or so are just a recent uptick from the Little Ice Age
Australia is 1.47°C hotter today than it was just over 100 years ago, putting it ahead of the global trend of 1.1°C of warming, the biennial State of the Climate report released on Wednesday reveals.
The report, from the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO, revealed Australia as a whole is 1.47°C warmer than it was when national records began in 1910, although there is a margin of error of 0.24°C.
Most of that increase in warming has taken place since 1950, and every decade since the 1950s has been warmer than the one preceding it, the report stated.
Australia’s warming trend was seen across all months of the year, in both day time and night time temperatures, with a marked increase in the number of extremely hot days.
In 2019 – Australia’s hottest year – there were 41 extremely warm days, which the report said were “about triple the highest number in any year prior to 2000”.
While the temperature trend for the country has been uniform, with regards to rainfall the results are more mixed
***************************************
22 November, 2022
As predicted, COP27 was a flop yet again
Every year, the annual UN climate conference heralds two weeks of intergovernmental pantomime.
Without fail, we are told that time is running out, that it’s one minute to midnight, and that it’s the last chance to save the world from doomsday.
There is an uncanny sense of déjà vu while global CO2 emissions continue to rise relentlessly and with no sign of slowing down.
Which is why we predicted with great confidence many months ago that there would be no breaking of the mould at COP27, and that the great conclave of climate cardinals would end in dismal failure yet again.
And how right we were. From the arrival of the very first delegates, it was just as we said it would be. Check out our updated history of the annual COP ritual, which shows how Sharm el-Sheikh 2022 has followed exactly the same pattern, exactly the same path to dismal failure as previous COPs did before this year’s talkfest.
After the annual excitement of hopes, hype and circus came the habitual 'deadlock' and finally the ‘breakthrough’ when the European Union said it was willing to create a new climate compensation fund … but only on the condition that ‘wealthier developing countries’ contribute too.
Yet the eternal question of who will actually pay the demanded $2trillion p.a. in ‘climate reparations’ has been kicked into next year’s Cop28 when a “transitional committee” will be tasked to “identify and expand sources of funding.” In other words, the endless search for climate $$trillions will go on for decades to come.
That being the case, we expect the same COP ritual all over again next year at COP28 in the United Arab Emirates.
https://mailchi.mp/074d0660af5a/as-predicted-cop27-was-a-flop-yet-again-192623?e=cc88839e92
***************************************************That Alluring Curve: The gaffe that lies at the heart of climate science
One of the central ideas underpinning climate change projection is that of the climate model ensemble. The thinking behind an ensemble is very simple. If one takes a number of models, each of which cannot be assumed to be a faithful and complete representation of the system being modelled, then the average of their projections is likely to be closer to the truth than any single one. Furthermore, the spread of projections can be used to represent the uncertainty associated with that average. This entails a well-established statistical approach in which the spread is assumed to take the form a probability density function.
However, nobody should underestimate the difficulties to be overcome by the climate modellers, since the models concerned will be subject to a number of parametric and structural uncertainties. Furthermore, the tuning of the models, and the basis for their inclusion and weighting within the ensemble, can be more of a black art than a science. Despite this, it is assumed that the resulting uncertainties are nevertheless captured by the properties of the probability distribution. The purpose of this article is to convince you that the problems are too deep-seated for that to be the case, since the uncertainties can actually invalidate the statistical methodology employed to analyse the ensemble. In reality, the distribution of projections is highly unlikely to form a true probability density function and so should not be treated as such.
To make my case I will be dividing my argument into two parts. In the first, I will introduce some basics of uncertainty analysis and explain how their consideration has led to the development of guidelines for the handling of uncertainty in system modelling. There will be no reference to climate science in this first part since the guidelines have general application. In the second part, I will examine the extent to which the guidelines have been embraced by the climate science community and explain the implications for evaluation of climate model ensembles. Finally, having made my case, I will briefly discuss the origins and significance of the climate science community’s mishandling of uncertainty analysis and what this may mean for the validity of climate change policy. The central premise is that no policy, least of all one associated with something as hugely important as climate change management, should be based upon the misapplication of statistical technique.
The background issues
Fundamental to an understanding of uncertainty is the ability to answer the following question: Does the uncertainty regarding the likely future state of a system have as its basis the inherent variability of that system, or is it due to gaps in our understanding of the causation behind the variability? To the extent that variability by itself can lead to uncertainty, one will be in the province of stochastic physics. Here the mathematics of randomness will apply, with the caveat that one may be dealing with a chaotic system in which the randomness stems from deterministic processes that are critically sensitive to boundary conditions. If the processes involved are fully understood, and the boundary conditions have been quantified with maximum precision, then the residual uncertainty will be both objective and irreducible. Such uncertainty is sometimes known as aleatory uncertainty, from the Latin for a gambler’s die, alea.1
In practice, however, the basis for the variability may not be fully understood. These gaps in knowledge lead to a fundamentally different form of uncertainty called epistemic uncertainty. Such uncertainty is subjective, since different parties may have differing perspectives that bear upon their understanding of the variability. It can be reduced simply by filling the gaps in knowledge. As a side-effect of the reduction of epistemic uncertainty, a consensus will emerge. However, care has to be taken when using consensus as a metric to measure levels of epistemic uncertainty, since there are also non-epistemic processes that can lead to the development of consensus.2
A simple example that can be used to illustrate the distinction between aleatory and epistemic uncertainty would be a system in which variability results from the random outcome of a thrown die. For a die of a known number of sides, the average score over time is determined by well-understood probability theory and it is a simple matter to determine the appropriate probability distribution. Furthermore, the uncertainty of outcome is both objective and irreducible – it is, after all, the titular aleatory uncertainty. However, now consider a situation in which the number of sides of the die is unknown. In this example the range of possibilities for the average score over time is greater, and there is both an epistemic and aleatory component to the uncertainty. It remains the case that the aleatory component can be defined using a probability density function but the same cannot be said of the epistemic component since it represents an entirely deterministic situation (i.e. it is a fixed number that is simply unknown). A set of probabilities can be provided representing the likelihoods for the various possible number of sides, but there can be no guarantee that the full state space is represented by such a set and there is no basis for assuming that stochastic logic applies to their allocation (as it would for the aleatory). For that reason the amalgamation of the epistemic and aleatory uncertainties cannot be represented by a true probability density function, or at the very least, such a function would not be as meaningful as that used for the aleatory component on its own.
You will also note that in both situations the likelihood (i.e. for the average score of the known die, and for the number of sides of the unknown die) has been characterised by the allocation of probabilities. This is a fundamental difficulty that lies at the heart of uncertainty analysis since probability has such a dual purpose of quantifying both variability and incertitude (between which it does not discern). Consequently, any mathematical technique for analysing uncertainty that is basically probabilistic will suffer from the same drawback, i.e. it runs the risk of conflating variability and incertitude. Yet, as I have just pointed out, only the former lends itself to a stochastically determined probability distribution. It is highly likely, therefore, that the application of such a probabilistic technique will lead to erroneous results if the epistemic and aleatory components have not been isolated prior to the positing of a probability distribution representing the overall uncertainty. As Professors Armen Der Kiureghian and Ove Ditlevsen have noted in the context of time-variant, structural reliability modelling:
The distinction between aleatory and epistemic uncertainties is determined by our modeling choices. The distinction is useful for identifying sources of uncertainty that can be reduced, and in developing sound risk and reliability models. It is shown that for proper formulation of reliability, careful attention should be paid to the categorization (epistemic, aleatory, ergodic or non-ergodic) of uncertainties. Failure to do so may result in underestimation or overestimation of failure probability, which can be quite significant (orders of magnitude) in certain cases.
‘Aleatory or epistemic? Does it matter?’, 2007
In real life, most systems are a lot more complicated than the throwing of a single n-sided die. Typically, a system’s mathematical model will have many free variables (i.e. parameters and boundary conditions) of uncertain value that will determine any projection based upon it. To handle this complexity, modellers employ a technique referred to as Monte Carlo simulation in which multiple runs of the model are aggregated to create a statistical spread of projections. Each run is based upon a random sampling of the possible parametric or boundary condition values allowed for by the model. When performing the sampling, the likelihood of selecting any particular value for a given variable is determined by the probability distribution that applies to that variable’s uncertainty. Note, however, that I used the term ‘random sampling’ here. This is because Monte Carlo simulation is a technique originally developed for the analysis of aleatory uncertainty (it finds widespread use in the field of stochastic physics). When the variable’s uncertainty is epistemic, however, random sampling is inappropriate because the actual value is subject to deterministic incertitude and not stochastic variability. For such variables, one would be sampling possible opinions of experts rather than variable states of the system. But Monte Carlo simulation doesn’t care. Give it a set of probabilities expressing a variable’s uncertainty and it will crunch those numbers merrily and provide you with a very aleatoric looking output. That doesn’t mean that it can be relied upon, however.
The restrictions on the applicability of Monte Carlo simulation are well-known and have led to written guidelines to be followed by mathematical modellers working within the field of risk assessment. Here, for example, is how the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has put it:
Monte Carlo simulation also has important limitations, which have restrained EPA from accepting it as a preferred risk assessment tool. Available software cannot distinguish between variability and uncertainty. Some factors, such as body weight and tap water ingestion, show well-described differences among individuals. These differences are called ‘variability’. Other factors, such as frequency and duration of trespassing, are simply unknown. This lack of knowledge is called ‘uncertainty’.3 Current Monte Carlo software treats uncertainty as if it were variability, which may produce misleading results.
‘Use of Monte Carlo simulation in risk assessments’, 1994
And here is what Professor Susan R. Poulter has to say regarding the guidelines issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS):
In ‘Science and Judgment in Risk Assessment’, the NAS noted the problems with incorporation of subjective assessments of model uncertainty into probability distribution functions, suggesting that such quantitative analyses of model uncertainty be reserved for priority setting and risk trading. For standard setting, residual risk determinations and risk communication, however, the NAS recommended that separate analyses of parameter uncertainty be conducted for each relevant model (rather than a single hybrid distribution), with additional reporting of the subjective probability that each model is correct.4
‘Monte Carlo simulation in environmental risk assessment –Science, policy and legal issues’, 1998
None of this is to say that Monte Carlo simulation is a bad idea or a technique that should never be used. On the contrary, it can be an invaluable tool when analysing the effects of variability in essentially stochastic systems. The problems only emerge when epistemic uncertainty features in the system’s mathematical model and this is not properly isolated, and allowed for, when assessing the extent to which the probability distributions produced by the simulation fully capture the uncertainty.
So, the key questions are these: Is there any indication that these issues and the guidelines arising have been taken on board by the climate scientists? Have they understood that ensemble statistics can be inappropriate or very misleading when epistemic uncertainties are present? And if they haven’t, can we trust the uncertainties they attribute to climate model projections, particularly when model ensembles are involved?
The relevance to climate science
In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the issues are familiar to the community of climate modellers. For example, there is the following from Professor Jeroen Pieter van der Sluijs, of the University of Bergen, regarding the uncertainties associated with climate sensitivity:
Being the product of deterministic models, the 1.5°C to 4.5°C range is not a probability distribution. There have, nevertheless, been attempts to provide a ’best guess’ from the range. This has been regarded as a further useful simplification for policy-makers. However, non-specialists – such as policy-makers, journalists and other scientists – may have interpreted the range of climate sensitivity values as a virtual simulacrum of a probability distribution, the ’best guess’ becoming the ’most likely’ value.
‘Anchoring amid uncertainty’, 1997
More here:
https://cliscep.com/2022/11/19/that-alluring-curve/
*****************************************************Pakistan: A Deluge of Bad Maths and Worse Reporting
Let’s give sanity and compassion a chance
Discussing climate stuff with your pals, it’s prudent to ask, “Is that true, or did you get it from the ABC? [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] ” Case in point: the Pakistan floods. Time and again since August, the ABC has told us that a third of the country is or was underwater. Horrific! But can that “third” be right? Isn’t a lot of the country desert and mountains anyway?
For the ABC’s ersatz tax-fed journalists, there’s no doubt about it. They show us satellite mapping with flooded parts (colored blue) clearly defined. Case closed…er, not actually. Blind Freddie can see on the ABC’s Pakistan map that the flooding is nothing like a third. Less than a tenth, more like it.
My intent is not to trivialise the terrible suffering of the subsistence villagers. But facts do matter. For example, Care organisation has been raising Pakistan relief funds from the public, claiming that more than a third of the country is flooded. Maybe they’re trusting the ABC?
Here’s the real deal. UN disaster agency OCHA reported,
Satellite-detected water extents mapped by the United Nations Satellite Center (UNOSAT) indicate preliminarily that of 793,000 km2 of lands in Pakistan analysed between 1 and 29 August, around 75,000 km2 [9.5%, or 8.5% for all Pakistan, TT] appear to be affected by floodwaters…
The ABC formula, as here, is (hat-tip to John Ridgeway at Cliscep.com)
# a heart-rending cameo of suffering mums and kids
# such weather events are “unprecedented”
# global warming’s the cause (no evidence required), the West’s to blame and net-zero’s the solution.
Works every time, as our Teal electees would agree.
Exaggerating the floods also bolsters the ABC’s new campaigning narrative that Australia and the West should hand over squillions to Third World corruptocrats.[1] Those squillions are for alleged loss and damage from global warming allegedly caused by the wealthy West (although China’s emissions now dwarf those of all the West combined.)
Columbia (pop. 52m) at Cop27 demanded $US800 billion per year compensation, that’s $A22,000 per Columbian p.a. for life. About 130 other third-world basket-cases are queued for the West’s money. After the all-night Cop27 deliberations, NZ plunked down a laughable $NZ20m, with Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Scotland offering similar small-change amounts. This ABC campaign for taxpayers to fund third-world compensation is as crazed as its CO2 net-zero fantasies and the urged destruction of our power grid by intermittent renewables aka ruinables. You can rely on the tax-fed ABC tribe to put the national interest last.
The BBC, even more woefully woke than the ABC, has nonetheless already corrected its “one third” flooding reports. It did this fix sneakily by interviewing a Dundee University academic, Dr Simon Cook, who set out the correct picture: “The scale of the disaster is huge, but is a third of Pakistan really under water?”
But the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency website still recycles the “one-third” nonsense, once again demonstrating the untrustworthiness of the world’s top climate “authorities”. [2]
For the ABC to properly correct its howlers, it’ll have to tack “We Were Wrong” notes to programs ranging from smarty-pants climate warrior Phillip Adams on Late Night Live, to TV and News, Radio National, and RN Breakfast, which said, “It [fund-raising] comes as new satellite images confirm a third of the country is underwater.”
The ABC’s most shocking abuse of its charter for accuracy and impartiality was on BTN i.e. Behind the News. These are the same ABC educationists who deluge schoolkids with 19 episodes of would-be Aborigine Professor Bruce Pascoe’s blather about pre-colonial indigenous agronomists.[3] BTN is
an educational news program aimed at 10-13 year old kids. It unpacks and explains news and current affairs to young people in a dynamic and creative way. A range of opinions are presented [but none right-of-centre] so students gain a greater awareness of differing points of view [What? Like warming skepticism and border controls?]. Through watching BTN Classroom, students increase their understanding of complex political, economic, environmental and social issues.”
I tuned into BTN’s Pakistan floods episode, produced by an Amelia Moseley. After referencing the “one third” meme, an unidentified female voice-over continued,
Hundreds of thousands of people are living in roadside camps, and now Australia’s being urged to increase its donations to Pakistan… Experts say this season (monsoon) is more intense because of climate change.
Oh really? They bring on an unidentified “expert”, a handsome young sciency-looking guy who tells kids, “The warmer climate means you have more intense rainfall and also warmer climate means glaciers are likely to melt and collapse quicker. Both of these things came together in this tragic event.”
Oh did they? Has someone been measuring the rate of glacier “collapse” up in the Himalayas, in real time and distinguishing alleged increased glacier flows from the worst monsoon downpours since 2010? Pakistan’s Flood Control Agency report of 2020 (p37) said merely that “the increasing temperatures in the northern mountains of the country are likely to result in glacier melting, thereby affecting the flows of Indus River System.” The ABC fails to mention the direct cause of the floods – a triple dose of powerful and natural el Nina events coupled with tropical cyclones.[4]
https://cliscep.com/2022/11/20/a-deluge-of-bad-maths-and-worse-reporting/
*********************************************************New Greenie plan to take gas out of Australian kitchens
At a time when the electricity grid is under great strain from Greenie meddling, this is insane. I personally remember occasions when my gas stove allowed life to go on unimpeded during an electricity blackout. These days I have multiple oil lamps in addition to my gas stove. I did use them during a late-night blackout recently
I have also noted that most chefs seem to prefer gas stoves. They give immediate and visible temperature control
They’ve been a staple of our kitchens for generations, and it seems Aussies will not give up their gas appliances without a fight.
On Tuesday, property firms Lendlease and GPT Group will come together to help launch the Global Cooksafe Coalition, with plans to phase out gas ovens and stovetops, citing health and environmental concerns.
The property giants have plans to stop installing gas kitchen appliances in new builds in all OECD countries by the end of the decade, and to only do all-electric retrofits in existing properties by 2040.
The campaign has the support of high-profile chefs including Neil Perry, Darren Robertson, Palisa Anderson, Rob Roy Cameron, William Gleave and James Edward Henry. At least one other major Australian property developer is expected to join the Coalition in the next few months, sources said.
But readers have rejected the idea, with a masive majority saying people have the right to use natural gas in their own home.
With more than 1900 readers voting in our online poll by 11.30am AEDT, more than four in five (83 per cent) said they opposed the plan to phase out gas kitchens.
Just 11 per cent said they were in favour of the campaign, while 6 per cent of readers said they were undecided on the issue.
Readers also expressed their opposition to the gas plan in comments, with some labelling it “insane” and “idiotic”.
One reader commented that gas “has been the saviour of many people duting the floods when power was out”, and that “we demonise everything these days”.
Some 76 per cent of poll respondents said they cooked with gas at home - slightly higher than the estimated 65-70 per cent of Australians who use gas domestically.
Chef Neil Perry said electric was “definitely the future of cooking” in both homes and commercial kitchens.
“It’s just cleaner, it’s more efficient and it’s definitely more beneficial for the environment. Everything tends to be neater and cleaner without gas,” he said.
Lendlease Global Head of Sustainability Cate Harris said electrification across operations was “essential” for the company to hit its goal of absolute zero carbon emissions by 2040.
“While the transition to electric cooking powered by renewables will take time, it’s already underway at our new commercial development Victoria Cross Tower in Sydney, and we’re looking forward to working alongside our Coalition partners to drive and accelerate industry change,” she said.
Dale O’Toole from GPT said all-electric kitchens “potentially present financial savings in new developments” and suggested moving away from gas would protect owners from having outdated appliances as the transition to renewable energy picks up momentum.
While the Global Cooksafe Coalition targets appliances in the kitchen only – so gas hot water or heating in the home would still be possible – several Australian jurisdictions are aggressively pursuing plans to electrify homes completely.
From next year, ACT infill developments will not be connected to the network, while Victoria has plans to take gas out of schools and hospitals, and from 2023 it will drop incentives for gas home appliances.
Why the moves against gas
The moves have been prompted by concerns over the health impacts of gas in the home, as well as the greenhouse emissions caused by natural gas.
Dr Kate Charlesworth from the Climate Council said cooking with gas was estimated to be responsible for up to 12 per cent of the childhood asthma burden in Australia, and a recent California study showed home gas stoves were associated with elevated levels of benzene, a known carcinogen.
***************************************
21 November, 2022
Loss and damage fund a COP27 ‘success’(?)
A favourite breakfast dish in Egypt is fool or foul made from fava beans and many will argue that both wealthy and developing nations were given a full serving at the COP27 climate conference at Sharm el-Sheikh.
Talks limped across the line two days behind schedule in the early hours of Sunday, Egyptian time, after convening for a final session at 3am.
The executive and government jets were finally scrambled from the Red Sea resort town to let it get back to what it does best, hosting sun-seeking tourists for snorkelling with dolphins, climbing the nearby Mount Sinai and quad biking in the desert.
Delegates agreed that nothing came easy at the COP27 talks.
But a breakthrough agreement was claimed on the issue that was always at the centre of negotiations, the establishment of a “loss and damage” fund through which rich nations can assist vulnerable developing countries cope with the impacts of climate change.
Developing nations are expecting about $US2 trillion a year but there is no agreement on who will pay, how or how much.
Rich countries led by the European Union and the United States are determined that China will be a contributor nation to the fund in cash, something China – the world’s biggest emitter but also a developing country – is not ready to agree to.
Climate activists want a levy put on all fossil fuel production worldwide to feed into the fund, and hasten the demise of the fossil fuel industry.
The G7 wants to reform existing structures such as the World Bank to administer climate funding, including as grants, soft loans and debt forgiveness.
Developing countries want grants not loans and, if the Green Climate Fund is any guide, lax rules on how the money is allocated and spent and by whom.
In Sharm el-Sheikh, getting the fund officially onto the agenda and now accepted is considered a big success.
Australia’s climate change Minister, Chris Bowen, played a role in making it happen. The Albanese government supported loss and damage being put on the formal agenda.
The issue has simmered in the background for 30 years with developed nations reluctant to agree to anything that could expose them to open-ended litigation and compensation.
Australia changed its mind in line with a new consideration for the concerns of Pacific neighbours who, as part of a group of small island states, hold a special place in the UNFCCC process.
Pacific Island nations have a lot to gain from a special purpose loss and damage fund and the issue will no doubt be a big feature as Australia bids to host COP31 with Pacific Neighbours in 2026.
A competing bid to host the COP that year has been lodged by Turkey.
Aside from loss and damage, the other outcome from COP26 was the preservation of what was agreed at COP25 in Glasgow. This includes keeping the target for future warming to the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious target of 1.5C.
This is despite the fact that global CO2 emissions continue to grow and fossil fuels continue to power the world.
The Glasgow COP agreed to phase down the use of unabated coal but rejected an outright ban.
Demands to strengthen the push against coal to include a phase down of all fossil fuel production was rejected in Egypt.
Economist Niki Hutley from the Australia’s non-government Climate Council said: “The fact that there is relief that the 1.5C goal has been kept, rather than seeing much stronger commitments from big emitters on emissions reductions during the past two weeks, tells the real sad tale of COP27.”
But UN Development Programme Head of Climate Policy Cassie Flynn said in a year constrained by competing crises including the Covid pandemic, inflation, a rise in energy and fuel prices, and the war in Ukraine, the outcome of COP27 had been “hard-fought”.
Greenpeace said the establishment of a loss and damage finance facility marked a “new dawn” for climate justice.
But exactly how it will work in practice remains to be seen.
COP delegates will regroup next year in Dubai Expo City in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, the world’s third-richest country courtesy of carbon intensive industries petroleum, petrochemicals, aluminium and cement.
***************************************************
Climate Catastrophism Is way more damaging than Climate Change
Earlier this week I noticed an editorial in the Colorado Springs Gazette describing the harm being caused by “climate change catastrophism,” which I think of as climate alarmists’ equivalent of the Chinese water torture: mainstream media platforms’ daily drip, drip, drip of demonstrably false or grossly exaggerated claims about potential harms from climate change. My colleague Linnea Lueken, a research fellow with The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, wrote about the editorial for Climate Realism after I brought it to her attention.
Essentially the editorial and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) article on which it is based make a critical point, as the Colorado Springs Gazette states: “Enough with climate-change scare tactics. They hurt people, possibly more than they will suffer from climate change.”
This truth echoes what we have said repeatedly at Climate Realism, Climate at a Glance, and Climate Change Weekly: the data does not support claims that extreme weather events are becoming more severe or more frequent. Policies to prevent a climate disaster that will never arrive are likely to produce worse harms than climate change itself. Prominent authors made the same points in three bestselling books released in the past couple of years: False Alarm, by Bjorn Lomborg, Ph.D.; Unsettled, by Steven Koonin, Ph.D.; and Apocalypse Never, by Michael Shellenberger.
In the meantime, these claims are doing untold damage. Children’s psyches are being horribly scarred as climate catastrophism has created whole new category of psychological disorder, “climate grief,” generated by fearmongering politicians, activists, and the mainstream media. This condition has spawned a new area of psychological practice: “ecopsychology.” Meanwhile, slavery, child labor, and environmental destruction are the foundations of the green energy technologies being pushed to replace fossil fuels to prevent climate disaster.
The Colorado Springs Gazette sums up the PNAS article thus:
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists warn of too much focus by the scientific community on unlikely worst-case scenarios—including imminent extinction of human life—rather than more plausible outcomes that fall between Armageddon on one extreme and “no worries” on the other. Alarmism, they explain, leads to impossible goals of ending all fossil fuel consumption by mid-century, social disarray, and mental health problems.
Specifically a team of three international researchers wrote in the peer-reviewed PNAS,
[H]istory also shows risks in overemphasizing the likelihood of calamity. Mindful of this, we argue Kemp et al. understate the degree to which recent scientific and public discourses already prioritize catastrophic climate scenarios. …
Simultaneously, IPCC reports also overemphasize catastrophic scenarios, as does broader discourse. …
Overemphasized apocalyptic futures can be used to support despotism and rashness. For example, catastrophic and ultimately inaccurate overpopulation scenarios in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to several countries adopting forced sterilization and abortion programs, including China’s one-child policy, which caused up to 100 million coerced abortions, disproportionately of girls. Past and present fascist and neofascist movements frequently use fears of environmental catastrophe to promote eugenics and oppose immigration and aid.
The PNAS article then discusses one fact that is truly alarming: surveys show the overemphasis on apocalyptic climate projections has resulted in 45 percent of the world’s youth feeling climate change is negatively affecting their lives, and because of that, approximately 40 percent of the youths surveyed say they are considering not having children. That is truly tragic.
Whether people choose to have children is none of my business. However, an entire generation should not be misled into rejecting having children based on a false climate alarm suggesting that any kids they have will be a burden on the Earth or be condemned to a lifelong struggle in an environmental wasteland. Both of those claims are lies. All the available evidence suggests the future for humans and the environment will be better than the past.
I’ll conclude with a quote from Lueken I think sums up the issue quite well:
Climate alarmists exaggerate the rate of recent warming and the risks of extreme weather to motivate radical political actions. The editorial board of the Colorado Springs Gazette and the PNAS should be thanked for making this point. The Earth’s climate does change, and will continue to do so, and it is wise to meet this change with realistic mitigation efforts. An overcorrection imposed by world governments, like banning fossil fuels, is likely to cause far more harm and destruction than climate change itself.
********************************************
Wrong, ABC News, Climate Change Isn’t Threatening Cocoa Bean Production
This scare seems to pop up amost every year
A Google news search for the term “climate change” today discovered a story published by ABC News which claims climate change is threatening cocoa bean production. This is false. Similar to the results for most other crops, cocoa bean production has been increasing, indeed, often setting new records amid the modest warming of the past 30 years.
In the story on ABC News, titled “Cocoa farmers fear climate change lowering crop production,” Associated Press reporter Hilaire Zon links climate change to this year’s sporadic rainfall in the Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivorie). Small farms in the Ivory Coast produce almost half of the world’s cocoa beans. The farmers that Zon interviewed expressed concern climate change may make rainfall less predictable making it harder to produce cocoa. Zon writes:
For more than 40 years, Jean Baptiste Saleyo has farmed cocoa on several acres of his family’s land in Ivory Coast, a West African nation that produces almost half the world’s supply of the raw ingredient used in chocolate bars.
But this year Saleyo says the rains have become unpredictable, and he fears his crop could be yet another victim of climate change.
“When it should have rained, it didn’t, it didn’t rain,” Saleyo said as he inspected the ripeness of one of his cocoa pods. “It’s raining now, but it’s already too late.”
Farming is always dependent on the weather and, ask any farmer, the weather is fickle—weather patterns are not consistent each year. Droughts come and go, and a single year’s “unpredictable” rainfall is not an indication of climate change. As pointed out at Climate Realism in multiple articles, here and here, for instance, weather is not climate and it is illegitimate to conflate them.
Just as there is no evidence the weather in Ivory Coast this year has been altered by climate change, there is also no evidence that climate change is hampering cocoa bean production. Indeed, real-world data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that cocoa bean production grew considerably between 1990 and 2020, even as the earth warmed modestly, setting new records for production multiple times in the Ivory Coast and globally.
FAO data show that between 1990 and 2020:
Cocoa bean production increased by nearly 173 percent in the Ivory Coast, setting new records for production 16 times;
Cocoa bean production grew more than 127 percent worldwide, setting new records for production 17 times.
As farm experience indicates and FAO data confirm, cocoa production waxes and wanes from year to year, due to weather, market, economic, and sometimes, political conditions. This is true for other crops as well. However, also, like almost every other crop, the long term production trend for cocoa shows an increase as the climate has changed. This is not surprising, because the fertilizing effect of higher global carbon dioxide levels has boosted plant production and improved rainfall conditions, as explained in dozens of articles posted at Climate Realism.
Rather than stoking climate alarm with misleading anecdotal claims, the Associated Press and ABC News should check the facts about cocoa production, in particular, and crop production, in general. That’s what good news outlets and the journalists writing for them do. Had they checked the facts before going to press, they would have found there is no cause for alarm, cocoa production is benefitting from climate change.
**********************************************
Canada’s nuclear power turns heat up on Australia's energy ignorance
Late last month, energy company AGL lodged an application to blow up its Liddell coal-fired power station in NSW. It’s a shame it can’t be dismantled and packed into shipping containers because the Germans would take it in a flash.
At Garzweiler, near Cologne, the demolition crews are chopping down wind turbines to get to the coal beneath the ground. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced the reopening of five power plants burning low-grade lignite. The life of three nuclear generators is being extended.
Yet Australia, apparently, has so much energy to spare that it can close its fourth-largest coal generator in five months’ time and the lights won’t even flicker. We’ll see.
In June we witnessed a dress rehearsal of Liddell’s closure. A series of outages by coal generators coinciding with rising winter demand brought the National Energy Market to the brink of collapse. The situation was so dire that NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean went on the radio to plead with customers to avoid using their dishwashers until after the evening peak.
At 6.55pm on June 12, the Australian Energy Market Operator ordered Queensland coal generators to turn up the throttle. By 6.30 the next morning, the interconnector from Queensland to NSW was running red hot. At 7am electricity was flowing at three times the safe capacity.
As the sun rose, solar panels offered some relief, but the emergency was far from over. At 6.30pm on June 13, desperate for every megawatt of dispatchable power it could muster, the AEMO ordered Snowy Hydro to crank up its turbines at Colongra on the NSW Central Coast. In normal circumstances, Colongra runs on natural gas. Since the price of gas had gone through the roof, however, the turbines were running on diesel.
READ MORE:State’s coal export bonanza to thrive until at least 2050|‘Don’t go there’: PM warned on new tax|Gas crisis forces Germany to flatten wind farm for coal mine
So much for a smooth transition from hydrocarbons to clean energy. NSW avoided blackouts last winter by turning to one of the dirtiest forms of fuel available. What happened on June 13 was far from an isolated incident. At the peak of the grid crisis in the second week of August, diesel was generating 2 per cent of dispatchable power in the NEM.
If any grounds remain by which the federal and NSW governments can prevent AGL committing this act of industrial vandalism then it must use them, because even if Liddell stays open, the grid will be stretched to the limit. Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen should insist demolition is postponed until AGL replaces like with like. Instead, we’re being fobbed off with puffery about AGL’s investment in wind and solar and its plans for green hydrogen.
AGL scrapped its plan to install gas generators on the site some years ago but it isn’t abandoning Liddell completely. The company has promised to install a 500MW lithium-ion battery in partnership with Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Future Industries.
Even if it were up and running by the time Liddell closes, which it won’t be, it will be virtually useless in the kind of emergency that came close to blacking out NSW in June. A 500MW battery stores the equivalent of 0.01 per cent of NSW’s weekly energy consumption.
Blowing up Liddell will be just the start of our woes. In August 2025 the country’s largest generator at Eraring will be replaced with another fizzer of a battery. Others must follow if the AEMO is to stay on track with its plan of retiring 60 per cent of coal capacity by the end of the decade.
For a moment, let us put scepticism aside and assume Bowen’s plan to install 64 million solar panels, erect 3800 wind turbines and string up 28,000km of transmission lines is the solution. But unless he can get them up and running by April, Bowen must abandon wishful thinking and face facts. The laws of physics and the challenges of engineering mean the near-instant shift to zero emissions many expect simply cannot occur. The modern world was built to run on hydrocarbons and transition will take much longer than we have so far imagined, if it can be achieved at all.
Not every Western country is making such a hash of things. The government of Ontario announced the closure of its coal-fired power plants in 2003. The Thunder Bay Generating Station, the final coal plant in Ontario, stopped burning in 2014. Today the province remains the powerhouse of the Canadian economy and a centre for manufacturing.
Ontario seized the advantage by investing in nuclear power and a relatively light touch with wind and solar. The province is home to five of six Canadian nuclear reactors including the largest nuclear power station in the world.
Ontario has become an early adopter of small modular reactors, the first of which is under construction at Darlington Point, adjacent to an existing nuclear reactor. The first SMR could be in operation by 2028 and will have a life of 60 years. Australia’s wind and solar infrastructure will need to be replaced three or four times in that period, if we were foolish enough to persist on that path.
SMRs would be the best possible replacement baseload generators for Australia’s remaining coal-fired power plants if we had a government bold enough to rise to the challenge. Four SMRs, stacked in sequence at Liddell covering as little as 18ha, would comfortably cover the gap left by the withdrawal of coal.
Bowen claims the adoption of nuclear would push up power prices and crowd out cheaper and cleaner technologies, insisting that firmed renewables are quicker to build and cheaper to operate. “Those who say otherwise are either dangerously ignorant or simply seeking to perpetuate the climate wars,” he says.
In fact, the retail electricity price in Canada was about the same as the price in Australia in 2005 before the renewable energy investment boom began. Today, Canadians are paying half as much as Australians and enjoy the third-lowest prices in the OECD. Energy ignorance runs deep.
***************************************
20 November, 2022
FRIDAY RAVE. Do as I say, not as I do
Andrew Stewart
Let’s hope that people are waking up to the manmade climate change fear campaign, that the globalist elite themselves don’t subscribe to, as evidenced by their hypocritical actions at COP27.
Using rational thinking, how can anyone take the climate crisis seriously when:
1. There is NO empirical data (without cherry picked starting dates) supported with evidence, of a manmade climate change catastrophe.
2. Those who tell us to take it seriously show no evidence of taking it seriously.
So concerned (not) about the impact of their carbon footprint contributing to a global warming catastrophe, the globalist elite, including politicians from around the world who recently met at COP27 (27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), couldn’t even pretend to set an example for the rest of us. Us, the masses, who they want to impoverish with their globalist political agenda, which rides on the back of the manmade climate change catastrophe hoax.
Please don’t forget what Klaus Schwab founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum told us “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy”.
So concerned about CO2 emissions causing a catastrophic temperature rise, the globalist Marxist elite hypocrites, are reported to have arrived in their four hundred private jets into Egypt during COP27 to:
1. lecture us over emissions and the sins of wanting affordable heat, food and travel.
2. Discuss wealth redistribution from the West, which is at the core of the Globalist Marxist, Paris Agreement of 2015.
So concerned about a catastrophic temperature rise, the globalist Marxist elite hypocrites, , didn’t have a bug or worm on their plate, as they gorged themselves on what they tell us to eat less of.
Are you aware that the globalist Marxist elite and their dodgy climate change scientists are trying to tell us that we need to consume less meat, as cow farts are contributing to destroying the planet? Reduce meat consumption is an agenda from the 1968 Club of Rome, as was open borders, depopulation and the use of global warming as a world crisis to achieve global governance.
Scottish author and political commentator Neil Oliver (who I featured in last weeks #FridayRave said: “They’ve come to lecture us about eating less meat while they sit down to menus featuring beef, chicken, salmon, and sea bass and cream sauces. This is not leadership that we are seeing now, it’s desperation, it’s trolling us proles on a galactic scale”.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/.../Cop27-Egypt-Activists-hit ...
https://www.breitbart.com/.../cop27-hypocrisy-globalists.../
which I hope challenges those deceived, to start caring for the people who are living now and stop supporting the globalist agenda of the religion of climate change.“Expensive energy is not a problem for those with private jets; it’s a nightmare for the impoverished”.
and
“The poorest in the world are already suffering to appease the guilt of the richest that fly around the world in private jets from their mansions and penthouses. The super-elites are the world’s greatest personal polluters but feel no guilt as they outsource the burden of living carbon net zero to others, with their get-out-of-jail Monopoly carbon credit swaps.
It’s hard to take seriously a celebrity who thinks climate change is such a crisis that he or she buys a beachfront property (sea levels rising?) and make no meaningful changes to address his or her’s duplicity. It’s the poor who should change, not us! How can this level of hypocrisy continue?”
For those who are still deceived by the manmade climate change catastrophe hoax, surely the hypocrisy shown by the Globalist elite at COP27, is stirring the brain cells to question, their actions, which expose that they really aren’t serious about manmade climate change catastrophe.
Worth reading Glenn Beck’s “The Great Reset” if you want a further insight to the real agenda, as it’s not about saving the planet from C02 (also known as plant food).
If you are from the left side of politics and want to read a book from a lefty exposing the fraud, it is worth reading Michael Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
Shellenberger, recently pointed out: “UN climate talks aren’t about the rich helping the poor. They’re about bribing corrupt leaders in poor nations to leave their fossil fuels for rich nations.”
According to Mr Shellenberger, “fanatical elites” are not pushing the climate agenda because they want to save the planet but because “they are against cheap energy and industrial capitalism because they lift up ordinary people and close the gap with the elites, who want distance and inequality.”
Further reference used in this rave
James Morrow: No time for concepts of distance, inequality
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/.../ec64bf5d1f90ed38cea ...
*********************************************
Critical Facts Ignored in the Climate Change Debate
Many Western countries are enacting policies to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil) to less reliable and costly “green” energy sources (mostly wind and solar) while ignoring the critical benefits that hydrocarbons provide.
The outcomes will be nothing short of calamitous for more developed countries as their energy industries are crippled. Witness the energy crisis in Europe. At the same time, less developed countries are being prevented from partaking of the many benefits fossil fuels provide.
It is no exaggeration to say that the wide availability of fossil fuels almost exclusively resulted in the steep rise in the standard of living over the 20th century and into the 21st century. People live longer, are safer from extreme weather events, eat more, travel farther and faster, have more leisure time, drink cleaner water and breathe cleaner air, and produce more goods and services.
Take crude oil, for example. Not only are fuels derived from crude oil ideal for various forms of transportation, but we make thousands of products from it.
And while other energy sources have been developed over the same time period, fossil fuels as a whole still provide about 80% of the energy people use worldwide.
Only some extraordinarily dangerous risk from the continued use of fossil fuels could possibly justify abandoning them. So, should we just trust the ruling class’ war on fossil fuels and accept the suffering that will inevitably come? After all, these are complex issues involving climate and economic models and new and emerging energy technologies. How can the average citizen wade through all the data to decide?
Exposing Climate Alarmism
Any policy decisions about climate change and fossil fuels must be based on comparing risks and benefits. But when it comes to supposedly human-caused climate change (specifically, greenhouse gas warming), official statements from governments and international agencies such as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change do not consider the incredible benefits of fossil fuels. It’s no wonder so many people believe that our greenhouse gas emissions only present risks.
These risks supposedly include increased hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, droughts, forest fires, and rapidly rising sea levels, among others. What’s more, alarmists claim the rising temperature will soon reach a climate tipping point, beyond which it all gets rapidly much worse and Earth becomes uninhabitable.
It’s surprisingly easy to disprove these claims, and you don’t necessarily have to be an expert. This makes me wonder how so many educated people can be so spectacularly wrong, but that is a topic for another day.
In disproving the claims, there’s no need to focus on personalities or dueling authorities. There are certain key findings that cut through the fog. The only tools you need are a basic understanding of trends and knowing how to spot misleading data.
For example, contrary to what most news outlets have claimed recently following Hurricane Ian, hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. have not increased in number or frequency since reliable records began being kept in 1851. Neither have they increased globally. Moreover, strong tornadoes in the U.S. have decreased significantly since 1954.
What was the worst decade for heat waves in the last 120 years? Would you have guessed the 1930s? And would you be surprised to learn that climate change has not worsened forest fires in the U.S.?
The average global temperature has risen by a little over 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century. No one disputes this. Since 1980, it has been rising 0.16 Celsius per decade on average.
How much of this warming is man-made and how much is natural? In short, climatologists compare models that include human effects on the climate with what has happened in the real world.
This is where expertise helps. But you don’t need to be a climatologist to know if the models match reality. In fact, the models have been running much hotter than the actual temperature in recent decades both globally and for the U.S. This implies that the climate models overestimate the human contribution to global warming.
Still, what if we are headed toward a tipping point, albeit more slowly than thought? This concern might be more believable if we were living in unprecedented times. But paleoclimatology research shows that the current temperature, if anything, is on the cool side relative to the whole Holocene period (the period since the end of the last ice age). Since Earth didn’t encounter a tipping point when it was warmer, then it is extremely unlikely it will encounter one any time soon.
Why Green Energy Alternatives Won’t Work
Even if the risks of fossil fuels use outweighed their benefits, we still need to know if it is even possible to replace them. It’s surprising that this question is not asked more often. Certainly, the ruling class believes it is possible. But the facts say otherwise.
First, consider that although fossil fuels are burned to generate heat and are often converted into other forms of energy such as electricity, they are also used to make many products we use every day.
Oil is especially versatile. Only 45% of U.S. oil consumption actually goes toward making gasoline and 9% is used to make jet fuel. About 25% is for products ranging from solar panels, wind generators, and asphalt to tires, plastics, and waxes.
Agriculture also depends heavily on fossil fuels, both for powering farm machinery and making fertilizers and pesticides.
It is also very unlikely that jets, merchant ships, or large trucks will ever run on batteries. There are currently no substitutes for oil-derived products in the quantities required to operate these larger vehicles.
In short, we will still need fossil fuels. Almost all aspects of our daily lives depend on them.
Second, are there even enough raw materials to build all the wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles needed for a fossil fuel-free world? These new technologies require more mineral resources than our current fossil fuel-based energy infrastructure.
In addition to the common metals, electric vehicles require lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, rare earths, manganese, and zinc. Studies are already showing that the projected supply of some of these minerals for the transition to a fossil fuel-free world would fall far short of what’s needed.
The prices of these key minerals will continue to rise steeply, having the consequence of increasing the costs of not only electric vehicles, but of all the other products that employ them, including laptops, phones, copper pipes, and more.
Third, if we want to preserve the environment, isn’t it better to obtain energy resources from the deep dead zones of the Earth rather than from the delicate veneer of life at its surface? Or is it better to mow down the wild forests to grow crops to make biofuels and strip mine the minerals needed for the green transition? Lithium mining is hazardous to the environment, as is cobalt mining.
Should we go back to the bad old days before whale oil, fuel wood, and rubber trees were replaced by kerosene, coal, and petroleum products, respectively?
The Real Green Revolution
The so-called green revolution is not some hoped-for net-zero emissions Utopia. It is here now, and it is actually fueled by carbon dioxide. The very carbon dioxide we put into the air from burning fossil fuels is plant food, as all the carbon in a plant or tree comes from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The benefits are already evident as we see significantly increased “greening of the Earth” over the past several decades as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/02/critical-facts-ignored-in-the-climate-change-debate/
*****************************************************Hudson Bay Sea Ice Freeze-Up In 2022 For 5th Time Since 2015
This is the fifth year out of the last seven that enough sea ice has formed along the west coast of Hudson Bay by mid-November for bears to be able to head out to the ice, just as it did in the 1980s.
One of the independent polar bear guides on the ground near Churchill had this to say about the bears and freeze-up conditions this year:
“Bears started leaving on November 10; conservation emptied the jail on the 10th as well.”
‘The jail’ is the Churchill Polar Bear Alert Program’s ‘holding facility’.
While the Alert program folks have not released a report for this week (gee, I wonder why?), nearby tourist outfit Great White Bear Tours not only confirmed the bears were released from jail but posted a picture of a ‘green dot bear’: the mark put on problem bears released from the holding facility to keep track of them.
Bears are not released before there is ample ice along shore for them to move out.
Great White Bear Tours have been tracking bears moving offshore.
This information suggests the average date for bears leaving shore will likely turn out to be 12-14 November, again earlier than the average for the 1980s (16 Nov +/- 5 days) (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017).
That makes five out of the last seven years (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022) since 2015 that bears have left about the same time as they did in the 1980s.
While there are still be a few bears on the shore of Wapusk National Park that seem to be in no hurry to leave, a few stragglers doesn’t mean there isn’t ice available for hunting.
Sea Ice Conditions On Hudson Bay
This amount of ice is more than the long term average for this time of year (week of 14 November), according to the following CIS comparison chart, where blue is more than average and dark blue is much more than average:
Bears In No Hurry To Leave Shore
Some bears in good condition appear to be in no hurry to get out onto the ice, as the images below from 12-17 November on the shore of Wapusk National Park, courtesy Explore.org.
This phenomenon seems to mirror the reluctance of some bears in early summer to leave the retreating ice even when there is very little left.
Only a couple of WH bears tagged by Andrew Derocher’s team had left shore by 11 November and he hasn’t yet updated this information.
As he’s done in the past, chances are he won’t post another tracking map until the bears are all offshore, so we won’t be able to tell when most of them left.
But perhaps he’ll surprise us this year.
https://principia-scientific.com/hudson-bay-sea-ice-freeze-up-in-2022-for-5th-time-since-2015/
*********************************************************UK: The austerity we don’t talk about
A new age of austerity is upon us. And it is going to hurt. Even proponents of ‘austerity 2.0’ seem to agree as much. UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who today unveiled a £55 billion package of tax rises and spending cuts, has previously described his own economic plans as ‘eye-watering’ and ‘horrible’.
Unsurprisingly, there is no shortage of opposition to the chancellor’s grim proposals. The Labour Party, the broader left, economists, think-tankers and the media are bemoaning the bitter medicine. What is striking, however, is that prior to Hunt’s statement, the UK government had already committed itself to a parallel austerity programme – a far more painful set of measures that will squeeze living standards and smother economic dynamism. It is one of the most significant government projects of the postwar period, and yet it barely receives any scrutiny or pushback. In fact, many of those who are implacably opposed to Hunt’s austerity measures are among the loudest cheerleaders for this other impoverishing project. I’m talking, of course, about Net Zero – a polite term for green austerity.
Opponents to Hunt’s austerity are right when they say the measures are punitive and counterproductive. Britain’s public sector is already crumbling. Planned cuts to infrastructure spending will hurt growth and productivity. And if public spending as a whole is reined in too quickly, or if taxes are hiked too steeply, this could easily prolong and deepen this winter’s recession.
So why, then, is there silence about the other assault on our living standards? At its core, the Net Zero agenda is about limiting human activity to keep carbon emissions in check. Most of all, it is about limiting our production and use of energy – the lifeblood of a modern industrialised society. The current energy crisis is just a tiny taste of how painful it can be to be short of energy.
For the past few decades, politicians across the spectrum have put decarbonisation at the heart of our energy policy. In doing so, they have not only failed to secure cheap and abundant supplies of energy – they have also boasted about their efforts to make supplies more precarious. They have bet the house on unreliable renewables, which stop producing power when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. And they have delighted in the abandonment of reliable fossil fuels.
Britain now produces less electricity than it did 15 years ago – a process set in motion by New Labour’s Climate Change Act, which imposed legally binding CO2-reduction targets. The Net Zero policy doubles down on those targets. It was signed off in 2019 with barely any pretence of a debate. The process has barely even got started and yet we are already facing catastrophic energy shortages – shortages that were apparent even before the war in Ukraine. The National Grid is now warning there could be blackouts this winter. Soaring energy prices are eating into household budgets, imposing huge costs on businesses and pushing up inflation across the board. Hardest hit are the poorest, especially in those regions already grappling with the consequences of deindustrialisation.
As well as reining in energy production, and switching to less reliable methods, Net Zero will mean limiting and managing energy ‘demand’. The Climate Change Committee (CCC), which advises the UK government on decarbonisation, says that an astonishing 62 per cent of emissions reductions should come not from new carbon-free energy infrastructure or production processes, but from ‘behaviour change and individual choices’. That is because the technologies we would need to have Net Zero carbon emissions while maintaining current levels of energy use either do not exist or are not yet viable.
These ‘choices’ and new ‘behaviours’ will not be freely made or adopted, of course. Under the current Net Zero plans, cheap methods of producing energy, heating our homes and transporting people and goods will be phased out, banned or taxed very heavily at the very least. And costlier methods will be encouraged or mandated. Few people will volunteer to make these ‘choices’ because they all mean accepting a reduced quality of life – less consumption, less travel, a colder home. The CCC even wants people to eat less of their favourite foods, like meat, dairy and fish. This is rationing in all but name.
These measures are far bleaker than anything being served up by Hunt in his statement today. Yet rather than decry this assault on our living standards or the sabotage of our energy supplies, those who think of themselves as ‘progressive’ are all on board with green austerity. In fact, they want the government to go further and faster in cutting carbon emissions, regardless of the consequences. The Labour Party, for instance, has pledged to decarbonise the UK’s energy system in the space of just six years. The eco-cultists of Just Stop Oil want us to halt domestic fossil-fuel production. All are in agreement that the people must make sacrifices and should live a diminished, substandard ‘green’ lifestyle.
This is the austerity we need to talk about. The austerity we need to get angry about. It poses a serious threat to our living standards that no nation should be expected to tolerate. And yet the supposed critics of austerity are nowhere to be seen.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/17/the-austerity-we-dont-talk-about
***************************************18 November, 2022
Flooded Earth: How the global map and countries' coastlines will change by 2100 as higher temperatures cause sea levels to rise, flooding cities such as London and New York
This is an old, old prediction -- going back to the '80s. But nothing has ever come of it
Vast swathes of London, New York, Bangkok and other major cities will be underwater by 2100, according to terrifying sea level predictions based on the current trajectory of rising global temperatures.
As a result of rising water levels, the global map is set to change as we know it before the end of this century. Coastlines will be altered, and many cities will be rendered uninhabitable - displacing hundreds of millions.
With a recent United Nations report finding 'no credible pathway' to stopping global temperatures from rising above the 1.5 decrees Celsius (the 'preferable' target set by the Paris agreement), rising sea levels as a result of increasing global temperatures are considered inevitable by 2100.
As they meet in Egypt for Cop27, some world leaders are working to limit global temperatures from rising any further. Thanks to the rapid growth in clean energy technologies, the world has already started to curtail emissions. However, the current emissions pathway is still predicted to cause a global temperature rise of 2.7C to 3.1C by the end of the century.
A global temperature rise of 3C by 2100 would have a disastrous impact on millions around the globe, and nowhere would be immune to the effects.
Heatwaves will last longer and become more common, causing droughts and global food shortages. Global migration will rise, as will the spread of disease. And, as polar ice melts, sea levels will rise.
Scientists at Climate Central, a non-profit organisation, estimate as many as 275 million people currently live in areas that will be flooded in this scenario.
Low-lying London is predicted to be one of the worst affected major cities in the western world. A rise of even 2C could see central parts of the British capital along the River Thames flooded by 2100.
According to maps modelled by Climate Central, other parts of England will not be spared, either. A large portion of the Midlands will be submerged, while cities and towns along the Humber - including Hull - will also be flooded. Much of the coast on the South-East will also be at risk.
Across the English Channel, Northern France, Belgium, Germany and then around half of the Netherlands will also be underwater by 2100. The situation is particularly bleak for the low-lying Holland region of The Netherlands, known for its flat landscape of canals, tulip fields and windmills.
Should the sea level rise in-line with current predictions, only the centre of Amsterdam, and The Hague further south, could become islands in an otherwise flooded landscape.
Some major cities in the United States also face disaster in the 3C scenario. Rising sea levels and floods resulting from more extreme tidal activity would see parts of New York City, including lower Manhattan, under water. Across the Hudson river, Jersey City and parts of Newark are also in the danger zone.
Looking east, the southern coast of Long Island and its Barrier Islands will also see rising floodwaters.
Further down America's east coast, several coastal communities are also at risk. In the South, New Orleans - like Amsterdam in Europe - is expected to become an island as the surrounding flood plains are submerged.
Some projections say Miami, on the southern coast of Florida, would simply cease to exist in 3C rises.
On the West Coast, southern Los Angeles including Long Beach and Seal Beach are predicted to flood in the 3C scenario. Further north, communities around San Francisco bay - including Oakland - are also predicted to suffer.
Northern France, Belgium, Germany and then around half of the Netherlands will also be underwater by 2100. The situation is particularly bleak for the low lying Holland region of The Netherlands, known for its flat landscape of canals, tulip fields and windmills. Amsterdam and The Hague could become islands in an otherwise flooded landscape
Rising sea levels and floods resulting from more extreme tidal activity would see parts of New York City, including lower Manhattan, under water. Across the Hudson river, Jersey City and parts of Newark are also in the danger zone
On the West Coast, southern Los Angeles including Long Beach and Seal Beach are predicted to flood in the 3C scenario. Further north, communities around San Francisco bay (pictured) - including Oakland - are also predicted to suffer
With all that being said, it is the population of Asia that is expected to be most adversely affected by rising waters.
When it comes to flooding, Shanghai in China is one of the world's most vulnerable cities. Models suggest that 17.5 million people could be displaced by a global temperature rise of 3C, thanks to the former fishing village's location on the Yellow Sea. The Yangtze river runs to the north, while the Huangpu river runs through the centre.
Cities such as Shanghai, which rely heavily on water-based infrastructure, are particularly vulnerable. The vast city is built on several islands, has two long coastlines, several shipping ports and miles of canals.
In recent years, China has been building vast flood prevention walls to protect Shangai. Some have blocked the ocean from view entirely to its residents.
Climate Central's projections of sea level rises also show Thailand's capital of Bangkok being all but wiped out by flood waters in the event the world hits 3C. While the sea level itself would not be enough to submerge the whole city, the whole of Bangkok would be at risk of severe flood waters.
***********************************************
Pols who push electric cars ignore basic math and physics
By John Stossel
Politicians praise electric cars. If everyone buys them, they say, solar and wind power will replace our need for oil.
But that’s absurd. Here is the rest of my list of “inconvenient facts” about electric cars.
“The future of the auto industry is electric,” says President Joe Biden. He assumes a vast improvement in batteries. Better batteries are crucial because both power plants and cars need to store lots of electric power.
But here’s inconvenient Fact 3: Batteries are lousy at storing large amounts of energy. “Batteries leak, and they don’t hold a lot,” says physicist Mark Mills.
Mills thinks electric cars are great but explains that “oil begins with a huge advantage: 5,000% more energy in it per pound. Electric car batteries weigh 1,000 pounds. Those 1,000 pounds replace just 80 pounds of gasoline.”
But future batteries will be better, I point out.
“Engineers are really good at making things better,” Mills responds, “but they can’t make them better than the laws of physics permit.”
That’s inconvenient Fact 4. Miracle batteries powerful enough to replace fossil fuels are a fantasy.
“Because nature is not nice to humans,” explains Mills, “we store energy for when it’s cold or really hot. People who imagine an energy transition want to build windmills and solar panels and store all that energy in batteries. But if you do the arithmetic, you find you’d need to build about a hundred trillion dollars’ worth of batteries to store the same amount of energy that Europe has in storage now for this winter. It would take the world’s battery factories 400 years to manufacture that many batteries.”
Politicians don’t mention that when they promise every car will be electric. They also don’t mention that the electric grid is limited.
This summer, California officials were so worried about blackouts they asked electric vehicle owners to stop charging cars!
Yet today, few of California’s cars are electric. Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that all new cars must be electric by 2035! Where does he think he’ll get the electricity to power them?
“Roughly speaking, you have to double your electric grid to move the energy out of gasoline into the electric sector,” says Mills. “No one is planning to double the electric grid, so they’ll be rationing.”
Rationing. That means some places will simply turn off some of the power. That’s our final inconvenient fact: We just don’t have enough electricity for all electric cars.
Worse, if (as many activists and politicians propose) we try to get that electricity from 100% renewable sources, the rationing would be deadly.
“Even if you cover the entire continent of the United States with solar panels, you wouldn’t supply half of America’s electricity,” Mills points out.
Even if you added “Washington Monument-sized wind turbines spread over an area six times greater than the state of New York, that wouldn’t be enough.”
This is just math and physics. It’s amazing supposedly responsible people promote impossible fantasies.
“It’s been an extraordinary accomplishment of propaganda,” complains Mills, “almost infantile . . . distressing because it’s so silly.”
Even if people invent much better cars, wind turbines, solar panels, power lines and batteries, explains Mills, “you’re still drilling things, digging up stuff. You’re still building machines that wear out . . . It’s not magical transformation.”
Even worse, today politicians make us pay more for energy while forcing us to do things that hurt the environment. Their restrictions on fossil fuels drive people to use fuels that pollute more.
In Europe: “They’re going back to burning coal! What we’ve done is have our energy systems designed by bureaucrats instead of engineers,” complains Mills. “We get worse energy, more expensive energy and higher environmental impacts!”
I like electric cars. But I won’t pretend that driving one makes me some kind of environmental hero.
“There’ll be lots more electric cars in the future,” concludes Mills. “There should be, because that’ll reduce demand for oil, which is a good thing. But when you do the math, to operate a society with 5 or 6 billion people who are living in poverty we can’t imagine, when you want to give them a little of what we have, the energy demands are off the charts big. We’re going to need everything.”
That includes fossil fuels.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/16/pols-who-push-electric-cars-ignore-basic-math-and-physics/
*****************************************************Earth CAN regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years to stay in a habitable range
Earth can regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years to keep them within a steady range, a new study confirms.
The planet contains a 'stabilizing feedback' mechanism that's able to keep the climate pendulum from swinging too far in either direction across long timescales.
It's believed this is accomplished through 'silicate weathering' - a geological process during which the slow, steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that draw carbon from atmosphere and into ocean sediments, thereby trapping the gas in rocks.
The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, are based on a study of paleoclimate data that record fluctuations in average global temperatures of the last 66 million years.
Researchers applied a mathematical analysis to determine if the data revealed any patterns that would show a stabilizing phenomena to keep global temperatures in line on a very long timescale.
They found that there seems to be a consistent pattern whereby the planet's temperature swings get dampened over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. That duration is similar to the timescales over which silicate weathering is thought to act.
'You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,' Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), said.
'But it's never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth's climate.'
Through previous research, scientists have observed the movement of carbon in and out of Earth surface environment to stay relatively balanced - despite global temperature swings.
Scientists believe we are currently in a period of warming and have urged policymakers to enact a range of changes to curb carbon emissions or become carbon-neutral.
Arnscheidt and his colleagues analyzed the history of average global temperatures across 66 million years to consider a range of different timescales, including tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, to see if any stabilizing patterns emerged within each timescale.
'To some extent, it’s like your car is speeding down the street, and when you put on the brakes, you slide for a long time before you stop,' Daniel Rothman, a professor of geophysics at MIT, said in a statement.
'There’s a timescale over which frictional resistance, or a stabilizing feedback, kicks in, when the system returns to a steady state.'
Although scientists have suspected for a long time that silicate weathering can help to maintain our planet's carbon cycle, this is the first time they've observed direct evidence of the mechanism.
'On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback,' Arnscheidt explained.
'But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.'
One noteworthy finding of their work is that on much longer timescales, meaning over a million years, the data did not reveal any stabilizing feedbacks - which led to the question: What kept global temperatures in check?
'There’s an idea that chance may have played a major role in determining why, after more than 3 billion years, life still exists,' Rothman offered.
'There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,' Arnscheidt said.
'We’re able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable.'
*****************************************************
The green mob won’t rest until Christmas joy is utterly destroyed
Lock up your fairy lights! Hide that door wreath! Block the chimney right this minute! The planet-saving Puritans are coming for Christmas, armed with righteous zeal and tins of soup to hurl at your father-in-law’s framed watercolours. There will be no DFS vans delivering new sofas in suburbia. Even the Pope’s festive tree is at risk of being cancelled.
Wait – is that Mariah Carey I hear playing, comrade? Cease and desist or we’ll glue ourselves to your porch. Cometh the most wonderful time of the year, cometh the Winterval wokeys who want to bully, harangue and guilt trip us into performative misery and handwringing Weltschmerz.
Yes, there is much to feel bleak about, what with inflation, energy prices and the war in Ukraine. But just because we could be depressed doesn’t mean we should, and it most certainly doesn’t mean we must.
Where’s the harm in putting up a Norway spruce and bringing an LED twinkle into our chilly homes? Frankly, warming the cockles of our hearts is a lot cheaper than warming the rest of us. And wouldn’t it be nice to set aside real life for a bit and enjoy the sort of celebrations that the Covid lockdowns made impossible? Why shouldn’t we make merry and feast on the last few turkeys that haven’t succumbed to avian flu? We’ll eat veg on Boxing Day.
There is something especially mean-spirited about protesting against the Vatican’s Christmas tree and refusing to allow the traditional 200-year-old fir to be felled, as green activists have managed to do in Italy. The centre of a religion with 1.3 billion believers surely deserves some respect. These foolish eco-warriors conveniently forget that Pope Francis is a vocal exponent of action against climate change. He wrote an encyclical on the ecological crisis back in 2015, for pity’s sake.
But no. Bringing people together (which in the long run is the only way to alter human behaviour) comes a poor second to the adrenalin-rush of bossy boots hectoring and virtue-signalling. And so Oxford Street’s atmospheric lights will go part-time, with a two-thirds cut compared to last year. This will apparently make it a “leading sustainable district”. Now, I may not be a world-leading economist, but I doubt Stygian gloom will do much for retailers desperately needing to boost lacklustre sales and promote family footfall.
Not even the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which is running its annual light show on biofuel in order to slash emissions by up to 90 per cent, has escaped the censuring gaze of the ultra-green lobby. It has been urged to “turn out your fairy lights” and encourage visitors to “look at the unviolated stars” instead. One particularly aggrieved ecotist asked: “What’s your carbon footprint on this? You should really know better.” What a self-indulgently bleak way to look at the world.
Like most people, I try my best to help the planet. I recycle. I reuse. I take the bus. Hell, I “identify” as flexitarian. But Christmas is for treats. So while John Lewis may once again top the tear-jerking advert league table, my favourite seasonal offering is the fabulously retro Argos ad in which an entire community descends on a young couple for December 25, bearing trifles and crackers. It is silly, joyful and sociable; as the best Christmases should be.
But I fear the militant green mob will not be happy until our high streets are shrouded in darkness and the light has died in our eyes.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/16/green-mob-wont-rest-christmas-joy-utterly-destroyed/
***************************************17 November, 2022
The global warming scare is being used as a front for wealth redistribution
Politicians of all stripes and in all Western countries have been obediently parroting the official IPCC line that Climate Change science knows best and that we must prepare for the worst. But as COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh (I refer to it as Sham in Chief) comes to an end (November 18), it’s worth noting that it was a cloaking device for the real agenda.
As long ago as November 2010, Ottmar Edenhofer, then co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, openly admitted what that agenda is. He is quoted by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:
‘Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.’
So was the next … and the next … and the next … and the last.
Delegates are told on the COP27 Sameh Shoukry’s Presidential page that: ‘Globally, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is impacting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Rising global average temperature and rapid global warming are causing alarming consequences on human beings and all other forms of life on earth.’ All this without evidence.
The ‘Targets’ set out for COP27 in the Presidential Vision includes the following:
‘A transformative adaptation agenda is needed now, one based on science and is responsive to the actual needs of countries and communities in climate vulnerable situations.
‘Action to clarify support for loss and damage, with the increasing impacts of more frequent extreme weather events, and speeding slow onset events. It is time to respond to the calls and needs for effective mechanism that delivers on the needs for action and support, in particular for those who are most vulnerable to the climate change impacts.
‘Providing, mobilising and delivering climate finance for developing countries is an urgent priority.’
It’s worth noting the dubious tactic of regurgitating claims about ‘more frequent extreme weather events’ since the IPCC itself debunked that notion – way back in 2011 – noting that man-made warming effects on climate extremes will be swamped by natural climate variability. But who cares? Who will fact check the COP27 President?
It was always the real agenda of climate activists to change the world for the better by redistributing income from wealthy capitalist nations to impoverished nations of the third-world. Some, like sly old China, are actually first-world powers, but hunger for victim status when it comes to ripping off the West.
This raises a consequential question for politics: given that political campaigns and major policy decisions are regularly made – at considerable social and economic pain viz energy etc – based on the (unproven) scientific assumptions about the dangers of ‘climate change’, are politicians incompetent and ignorant of the facts? Or perhaps are they complicit in the sleight of hand with policies that are not about curbing global temperatures (if it were a true premise) but about making western nations poorer and weaker? In other words, are policy decisions made on false pretences? Did the electorate vote on the redistribution of wealth via climate and energy policies? Or on the (laughably) false belief that we are saving the planet from overheating? The big lie or the big stupid?
I believe that politicians are feeble and incompetent rather than so massively corrupt (dishonest) as to hoist this agenda on an innocently ignorant voting public who never signed up for it. But time’s up and political advisors should begin devising new advice based on the known facts, so voters are not misled so egregiously. ‘Save the planet – vote for wealth distribution.’ ‘Vote to be poor so the world’s poor can get richer.’
Of course, it is not only Australian politicians (of all parties) but the politicians of the whole Western world who have been sucked into this sham. The special irony for Australia, though, is that if it is fossil fuel emissions that are the danger, ours is the least relevant, at around 1 per cent. So even if you were convinced that carbon dioxide (emitted when making energy) is a pollutant and warms the planet, with a just a few years left of life on earth … you can’t seriously believe that our drastic economy-destroying policies can be justified.
Total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 0.04 per cent. Man-made carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is about 0.0012 per cent; Australia’s contribution to that is 0.000012 per cent. You don’t have to be a mathematician or a scientist to realise that our coal has nothing to do with the climate changing.
While 30,000 ‘Climate Change’ activist industry delegates swarmed to Sharm el Sheikh, blinded by faith and hope for change, elsewhere, the real world was hunkering down to cope with energy shortages and inflation, and the coming northern winter.
The false assumption about fossil fuel emissions as the driver of warming has been sold with spectacular if fateful success. And a large dose of dishonesty.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/who-voted-for-wealth-redistribution-to-save-the-planet
***************************************************China tell COP27: We need more coal and won't make Europe's mistakes
China’s plans to add to its world-leading fleet of coal power plants are a short-term Band-Aid to address energy security concerns and don’t represent a shift in emissions policies, according to members of the team representing the nation at the COP27 summit.
New plants are being planned to address a spate of high-profile electricity shortages in recent years while providing a buffer to global energy markets that have become more volatile following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to interviews with three of China’s delegates at the climate meeting in Egypt.
In the long run, electricity market reforms and massive investments in renewable power and energy storage will eventually curb and curtail coal use, allowing the country to hit its targets of peaking emissions by 2030 and zeroing them out by 2060, they said.
The strategy underscores China’s desire to avoid the kind of energy crisis facing Europe, but it has set off alarm bells for climate scientists who say the fuel needs to be phased out by 2040 to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
“We need an energy transition that’s high-quality and secure so it can be sustained,” said Li Zheng, a climate change and energy professor at Tsinghua University. “We don’t want to be like Europe and transform at the cost of energy security. They are now declaring that they are taking a step back in order to take two steps forward later.”
The climate researchers downplayed the size of the expansion, saying the country’s total coal capacity wouldn’t change much because of simultaneous retirements of older plants. Earlier this year, an executive from China’s top energy engineering firm said he expects the nation to approve 270 gigawatts worth of new plants through 2025, more than the entire fleet in the US.
Coal has long been China’s mainstay fuel and still accounts for about 60% of the country’s power generation. But its role is shifting, with planners increasingly seeing it as backup for the country’s rapidly growing army of wind turbines and solar panels, said Wang Zhongying, a senior energy researcher with the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s economic planner.
*****************************************************
Journalists blind to facts as climate pantomime rolls on
Journalists who have followed the United Nations torturous path towards a global climate change deal have known for years its real bottom line is wealth transfer from the First World to poorer nations.
Political manipulation of the science by the UN was discussed in this column on October 23. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s AR6 report, released before last year’s Glasgow COP26, actually presented less scary scenarios than AR5 but was sold by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a former Socialist Party Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002, as “code red for the planet”.
This column has long argued forecasts of imminent climate emergency are not supported by the IPCC’s assessment reports and are about using fear to create political and media consensus. It all looks ever more silly as countries are urged at COP each year to make ever earlier commitments to net zero emissions of CO2 and each year the world burns ever more fossil fuels.
It should be obvious to all but the most naive catastrophist journalists that national leaders, presiding over a 6 per cent rise in global emissions this past year, don’t actually believe in an imminent emergency. Nor will many national leaders fall for the reparations line that is being repackaged as “loss and damage” payments at this year’s COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
Even former Tory PM Boris Johnson, who risked his prime ministership and his country’s economic security in the name of climate action, has said the UK does not have the financial resources to pay reparations to low-income countries affected by climate change, according to a report in the London Financial Times on November 7.
But there’s a better reason for scepticism about “loss and damage”. The Daily Telegraph in London the same day reported: “China has emitted more carbon dioxide over the past eight years than the UK has since the start of the industrial revolution. Between 1750 and 2020 the UK emitted 78 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide … compared with China’s emissions of 80 billion tonnes since 2013.”
This newspaper’s environment editor Graham Lloyd described the real UN climate agenda in 2011 when reporting that year’s COP17 in Durban, South Africa, ignominiously dubbed “Flop 17”. Lloyd wrote that much of the Durban conference looked like “an exercise in extravagant foreplay with a very messy ending”, until the situation was rescued by a commitment from developed countries for a $US100bn a year fund “to finance mitigation and adaptation in the developing world”.
Nothing much has come of that; hence the focus in Egypt. Most journalists, especially those at the ABC and Guardian Australia, refuse to call all this out for the diplomatic pantomime it is. Yet the general public is starting to understand fossil fuels are not being abandoned in most countries and the UN’s preferred power sources – wind and solar power – are not proving cheap or reliable.
RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas seemed surprised by the point former Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott made during an on-air interview last Monday morning. Karvelas wanted to discuss Schott’s proposed appointment by Grok Ventures’ Mike Cannon-Brookes to the board of AGL, which Cannon-Brookes hopes to wean off fossil fuels earlier than present management plans.
Asked by Karvelas to comment on a warning the previous week by AGL chair Patricia McKenzie that closing all the company’s generators early would destroy the reliability of the electricity grid because replacement capacity cannot be built in time, Schott said: “Well I think it may not be possible but I think we’ve got to try.”
This column, looking at Cannon-Brookes’s bid for AGL at the time, interviewed Schott last February. She said intermittent wind and solar could only be firmed by building thousands of kilometres of new poles and wires across the continent so power could be fed to major population centres from wherever the sun was shining and the wind blowing. That network infrastructure would need to be backed up by billions of dollars of new pumped hydro projects because batteries only harmonise the network and cannot yet store power for long periods.
It’s time journalists reported what is really happening. Copenhagen Consensus president Bjorn Lomborg in this newspaper on October 1 wrote: “Even the Biden administration expects the world in 2050 to be dependent on fossil fuels for 70 per cent of energy.
“Rich countries are showcasing the policies to avoid. Germany is on track to spend more than $US500bn ($A770bn) on climate policies (per year) by 2025, yet has managed to reduce fossil fuel dependency from 84 per cent in 2000 to only 77 per cent today.”
Wind and solar account for about 10 per cent of global power supply despite global investment of about $US1 trillion in such renewables every year.
So what does the future hold for the climate and for the business of climate reporting? In the digital age it is a business strategy aimed at securing clicks from vulnerable young media consumers who have not seen and read all the doomsday scenarios for 30 years and understood they never arrive.
For the real climate, warming oceans will increase evaporation and rainfall, but the IPCC is clear no single weather event can be attributed directly to climate change. Tropical storm data shows cyclones and hurricanes are becoming less frequent in the Pacific and Atlantic. Some evidence suggests such storms may be becoming more powerful.
Weather patterns such as this country’s east coast La Nina since 2020 will come occasionally but always have done. The La Nina events from 1954-56 and 2010-12 killed more in floods than this La Nina.
Global temperature sits about 1.2C above the pre-industrial era, which also coincided with a little ice age.
Evidence suggests temperatures were higher during the Medieval Warming and the Roman Warming. Latest research suggests climate is less sensitive to CO2 than previously thought. Media consumers seldom see these facts.
The world will need to build for resilience, but no serious scientist expects a climate emergency by 2030: the IPCC has essentially abandoned the scam RCP8.5 warming scenario upon which that scare campaign was based.
Coal and gas will continue to be burned in advanced countries, we will continue to export both because our fuels are cleaner than those extracted elsewhere but Australia will lose almost all of its domestic manufacturing industry, which will move to countries with lower emissions standards as we drive towards more renewable, less reliable power.
The political right here will be disappointed because Australia will never go down the nuclear path, even though it should.
But Australia will continue to export uranium to countries that see the obvious benefits of clean, emissions-free, baseload power.
Finally, while Australia will most likely pay climate bribes to Pacific Islands, the public will eventually find out what the ABC Fact Check unit confirmed in December 2018: most island nations in the Pacific are growing rather than shrinking. Don’t expect ABC reporters to admit that or to challenge Pacific Island leaders complaining about CO2 but taking Chinese money when China is the biggest contributor to global emissions.
*******************************************************
Solar Firm Collapses, Owing UK Taxpayers £655 Million
A solar energy company has fallen into administration after racking up more than half a billion pounds in debt to a local authority in Essex, southern England.
Toucan Energy Holdings 1 Ltd., which owns 53 solar farms across the country and was owned by the financier Liam Kavanagh, had borrowed £655 million ($773 million) over four years from Thurrock Council to fuel its expansion.
In September, Rob Gledhill, the former leader of the council, resigned after the government appointed a commissioner to take over the Conservative-led authority. At the time of his resignation, Gledhill said in a statement: “As Leader of the Council the political buck stops with me and as such it would only be right, and expected, that I resign as Leader of the Council.”
In July, John Kent, the council’s opposition leader, described the investments as “a scandal of huge proportions.”
Last week, Thurrock Council appointed administrators from Interpath Advisory, which has been tasked with selling off the farms to return cash to the council. While Toucan Energy Holdings 1 is in administration, Interpath said in a statement that the underlying parks were not, and would continue to operate as normal.
Mark Coxshall, leader of Thurrock Council, said in a statement that the move would “maximize recovery” for taxpayers.
***************************************
16 November, 2022
Get Ready for More Hype From Climate Fearmongers!
“Climate cops” are holding their annual Conference of the Parties (COP) doom-fest
In case you hadn’t heard, radical environmentalists and their globalist, “Great Reset” allies, people I like to call “climate cops,” are holding their annual doom-fest. The 27th “Conference of the Parties,” or COP, of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change started November 6 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and has drawn some 40,000 participants from pretty much every country in the world. It’s set to last two weeks.
True to form, organizers are using it as another opportunity to demand global action to fight catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW). Cornwall Alliance will comment from time to time about this COP, as we’ve done about previous ones.
The Associated Press reported on its first day that COP27 was taking place “amid a multitude of competing crises, including the war in Ukraine, high inflation, food shortages and an energy crunch.” Every one of these competing crises, including even the war in Ukraine, is in part a consequence of the very climate and energy policies promoted for the last three decades, and every one of them is exacerbated even now by exactly those policies.
Prodded by past COPs, developed countries have rushed to substitute wind and solar energy for abundant, reliable, affordable hydrocarbon energy. The result, predicted by critics, has been higher energy prices and, simultaneously, increasingly fragile energy infrastructures, especially in Europe. Those fragile, poorly supplied energy infrastructures led to European nations’ growing reliance on Russia for natural gas. That dependence, in turn, led to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculating that the risk that Europe would respond militarily to an invasion of Ukraine was slim — and he was right. European nations’ support for Ukraine has been tepid compared with the nearly $20 billion in aid the United States has given.
Meanwhile, pressured by developed nations, many developing nations have been forced to rely increasingly on wind and solar rather than fossil fuels, slowing their economic growth and prolonging poverty for their billions of people. That makes those nations vulnerable to the oil and gas price shocks that came with the war in Ukraine.
And more recently, again at the insistence of the COPs, some nations are adopting agricultural policies that depress crop yields in the name of fighting global warming.
Put them all together, and these mean higher prices for increasingly unavailable energy and food. I.e., the architects of all this suffering are the very people lecturing the world from Sharm el Sheikh for the next two weeks.
Negotiators at COP27 have put “loss and damage” — a.k.a. “reparations” — on the agenda, too. The idea is that wealthy nations, which developed their wealth using hydrocarbon energy and therefore are to blame for global warming and the increased numbers and intensity of extreme weather events, owe developing nations financial assistance as they deal with climate disasters.
Never mind, of course, that according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the hard data show no increase in the frequency or intensity of such events. The fact is, developing country cops are shaking down the developed countries for damage that would have occurred anyway.
Hoesung Lee, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, opened COP27 by saying, “This is a once in a generation opportunity to save our planet and our livelihoods,” essentially the same thing said by chairmen of lots of past COPs. Apparently, once in a generation means once a year. Kind of short generations, I guess.
The outgoing chair of the talks, British official Alok Sharma, said: “As challenging as our current moment is, inaction is myopic and can only defer climate catastrophe. We must find the ability to focus on more than one thing at once.” He added, “How many more wake up calls do world leaders actually need?” He cited recent devastating floods in Pakistan and Nigeria, and historic droughts in Europe, the United States, and China — but he did not point out that even the IPCC says you can’t attribute such events, which have happened over and over throughout history, to current climate change.
Over 120 world leaders were expected to join the 40,000 attendees, including President Joe Biden. But China’s President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India don’t plan to come. Their absence — China is the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases, and India is number three — means major deals for further cuts in emissions will be hard to achieve. Those countries have made it clear that they don’t intend to curb their emissions. Why? Because hydrocarbon energy is essential to their continued efforts to lift their people out of poverty — and they’re big enough and powerful enough to resist pressure from the climate alarmists in the West.
Good for them. Poverty is a far greater risk than anything related to climate — as the 98% decline in mortality from weather-related disasters over the last hundred years demonstrates.
That doesn’t mean no harm can come from COP27. Only time will tell. Meanwhile, the likely Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, where all spending bills must originate, is likely to put a significant crimp in the climate alarmists’ plans here. Let’s hope so.
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/92844-get-ready-for-more-hype-from-climate-fearmongers-2022-11-14
**********************************************************EU refuses to agree climate compensation fund
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 11 (Reuters) - Talks about how to compensate vulnerable countries for the damage caused by climate change are not ready to agree on a funding mechanism, a European Union negotiator said on Friday, but did not exclude progress on the issue at COP27.
The topic, known as "loss and damage", has for the first time made it to the formal agenda at the conference in Egypt in what was seen as a breakthrough for developing nations.
The European Union has said at the COP27 summit it does not rule out the possibility of a fund, a shift after rich countries have long resisted the idea because of fears of spiralling liability for emissions historically linked the developed world.
EU negotiator Jacob Werksman said negotiations were not ready to agree on a single funding solution, but he hoped the COP27 summit would achieve more than just scheduling further talks on climate compensation.
"We don't think that this process is ready to agree in principle that a new fund or facility is the right or the only way forward," he told a news conference.
Donors must act now to save East Africa from famine, IRC says
"But we are not excluding that and couldn't exclude that as a significant part of the conversation."
Climate-vulnerable countries say wealthy industrialised nations should help to pay for irreversible damage from floods, storms and rising seas, after decades of emissions have caused global temperatures to rise.
Developing countries are pushing for a climate loss and damage fund, and say alternative proposals such as a "Global Shield" initiative to strengthen disaster insurance by the Group of Seven (G7) leading economies, but are not a substitute for a new U.N. scheme.
Michai Robertson, lead finance negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), told Reuters the U.N. talks should create the fund because they are a rare forum where every country gets a say, including poor and climate-vulnerable states.
"What more legitimacy do you want than a process where all the states have signed up?" Robertson said. "It's gonna be a lot more work. But isn't it worth it?"
The EU has cautioned that new U.N. funds can take years to launch and that other funding routes could be more efficient in helping states struck by climate disasters.
Government ministers will take over negotiations at COP27 next week after diplomats have wrangled over technical details this week, and the aim is to clinch deals by the summit's scheduled close on Friday.
**************************************
Escaping From the COP-27 Insane Asylum
“Show us the money!” climate activists demand, and rich countries are expected to pony up.
Do I hear $100 billion? Would you give $1 trillion? Now, then, would you give $2 trillion?
The climate reparations bidding war is on. What began at $100-billion-a-year at COP-21 in Paris rapidly ballooned to $1.3-trillion on the eve of COP-27 in Sharm-el-Sheikh-Down, Egypt and now stands at $2.4-trillion annually! And we’re nowhere near “going once, going twice, sold.”
Of course, it was always about the money – endless sums of cash supposedly to help developing countries (like China!) adapt to dangerous manmade climate change, cover entire regions with wind and solar, and secure “fair, just and equitable” reparations for soaring temperatures, rising seas, destructive storms, floods, droughts and famines allegedly caused by countries that have used fossil fuels since 1850.
Yes, China. The Middle Kingdom has long postured itself as a developing country, when it comes to when it might start building fewer coal-fired power plants and slowly shift to “renewable” energy.
Now China says it will pay non-cash climate reparations, if the United States pays in dollars. Of course, any US, UK, German et cetera “fair share” would be exorbitant – and paid while they “transition” rapidly away from fossil fuels, regardless of the economic, social and ecological costs.
As Oliver Hardy would say, “Another fine mess you’ve gotten me into,” Joe, John and the rest of Team Biden’s climate-obsessed, fossil-fuel-eradicating, eco-justice warriors.
They and their activist, media and academia allies created the climate scare – the assertion that fossil fuel emissions alone are driving today’s climate and weather. Never mind that average global temperatures climbed significantly (Baruch Hashem) since the last Pleistocene ice age; sea levels rose some 400 feet; and floods, droughts, hurricanes and other disasters ravaged planet and humanity countless times. Anything happening today, however, is due to countries that got rich using fossil fuels. Or so they insist.
Therefore, naturally, COP-27 organizers, activists and attendees now say the “climate crisis” requires enormous payments from rich countries to poor countries – or more accurately, from poor people in rich countries to rich kleptocrats in poor countries. That raises another inconvenient truth.
Not long ago, Obama “science advisor” John Holdren intoned: “Only one rational path is open to us – simultaneous de-development of the [United States and other over-developed countries] and semi-development of the under-developed countries, in order to approach a decent and ecologically sustainable standard of living for all in between.” This de-development ideology is shared by many others.
Well, de-development and de-industrialization are already underway in Britain, Germany and elsewhere, because wind, solar and battery (WSB) energy cannot possibly replace abundant, reliable, affordable, non-weather-dependent fossil fuel and nuclear energy. Jobs, companies and entire industries are already disappearing across Europe, as it destroys fossil fuel power plants but has nothing viable to replace them.
So how are all these de-developing Formerly Rich Countries (FRCs) going to deliver billions or trillions annually, to pay climate reparations and help poor countries develop? They cannot possibly do so.
Even worse, eco-imperialist developed countries continue demanding that poor countries develop only to the minimal extent made possible with WSB technologies. Rich countries, the World Bank and global financial institutions also refuse to finance anything but pseudo-renewable energy.
These unconscionable policies perpetuate joblessness, poverty, disease and death – and advance the other basic goal of “climate stabilization” programs: controlling our lives and living standards. But poor nations have inalienable, God-given rights to develop, using fossil fuel, nuclear and hydroelectric power – and petroleum as feed stocks for fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, plastics and hundreds of other miraculous life-enhancing, life-saving products (developed by countries that are now expected to pay reparations).
Developed nations must help developing nations reach those goals. Instead, they too often block pathways to better lives. Still more outrageous, the USA and Europe have the nerve to ask African, Asian and Latin American nations to produce more oil and gas, but only for export to the USA and Europe!
Meanwhile, in Britain is setting up “warm rooms,” where people can go for a few hours a day, instead of freezing hungry and jobless in dark apartments. It’s as though Merry Old England has suddenly been transported back to the Middle Ages, by politicians who put climate virtue signaling above their constituents’ basic needs.
Meanwhile, Germany is dismantling an industrial wind power installation – so that it can extract the lignite coal underneath, to run generating plants, to keep factories operating and homes warm!
Even crazier, these are just a few examples of the insanity gripping the world’s political classes, especially during Conferences of Parties (COPs) on climate change. Happily, escaping this insane asylum requires little more than recognizing a few simple realities.
* The vast majority of nations signed the Paris climate treaty solely for the money – which they are now beginning to realize they will never receive. Moreover, coal, oil and natural gas still provide 82% of the world’s energy; nuclear, hydroelectric and biomass (wood and dung) provide most of humanity’s remaining energy needs, and less than 2% comes from wind and solar.
* Developing countries will be using fossil fuels for decades to come – and emitting more plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide in the process. Even if developed countries totally eliminated their fossil fuel use, atmospheric greenhouse gas levels will continue to climb.
* The 1.5 degrees C that we are supposed to avoid to avert catastrophe is arbitrary, meaningless – and tied not just to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but to the end of the Little Ice Age. Another degree or two of warming would be mostly beneficial, whereas another little or big ice age would devastate agriculture, habitats and wildlife.
* The entire climate crisis agenda is based on computer models that (a) cannot possibly reflect all the forces that govern climate, and (b) consistently predict planetary warming that is two to three times greater than actually recorded by satellites, weather balloons and surface temperature monitors.
* Basing economy-destroying, life-altering policies on useless models is sheer insanity – especially if the replacement energy comes from WSB systems that would require mining, processing, manufacturing and installations on scales that would ravage our planet.
The only reason these realities are so little known is that climate activists, politicians, academics, and news and social media studiously demonize, censor, silence, deplatform and demonetize scientists, economists and energy experts who challenge climate crisis narratives.
Thankfully, the Truth will eventually win out. Perhaps that is already happening at COP-27.
***********************************************
ESG Endangering America’s Farms and Your Food: State Treasurers
The latest threat to farming can be identified in three familiar letters.
State treasurers at the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF) told The Epoch Times on Nov. 14 that the United States’ agricultural base could be jeopardized by the top-down push for environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) scoring.
“It’s a real threat,” Nebraska State Treasurer John Murante said.
Farming is critical to the Cornhusker State’s economy, as that nickname suggests. The University of Arkansas reports that Nebraska produced over $21 billion in agricultural cash receipts during 2020.
During a panel discussion with Louisiana State Treasurer John Schroder and SFOF CEO Derek Kreifels, Murante warned that ESG criteria in the financial sector pose a real risk to agriculture as we know it.
Many asset managers and leading banks have committed to “Net zero by 2050,” often through participation in United Nations-linked entities such as the “Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero” and “Climate Action 100.”
If those powerful institutions decide farming and ranching are excessively harmful to the climate, the flow of capital to agriculture could slow to a trickle—well before consumers feel the impact at their dinner tables to know the impact of the ESG efforts.
“When it comes to farmers and ranchers, how to get to net zero when using fertilizer, which is produced by natural gas, is extremely difficult—if not impossible—which is why we sometimes joke that the policy of certain asset managers seems to be that farmers can continue growing food, they just can’t use water or fertilizer to grow them,” Murante told The Epoch Times.
“The attack,” he said, “has already begun.”
Murante pointed out that BlackRock CEO Larry Fink recently joined former president Bill Clinton at a Clinton Global Initiative meeting in September.
Murante warned, “They’re not talking in theory, they’re not using rhetoric, they’re making commitments to make it happen, and we don’t think it is at all appropriate for public finances to be used for that purpose.”
Murante believes the dramatic increases in fertilizer prices since 2021 can be traced in part to ESG or ESG-like policies that are among the factors increasing the price of energy.
And activist investors who want companies to divest from fossil fuels as fast as possible aren’t exactly eager to fund new fossil fuel exploration and production.
Between July 2021 and July 2022, the cost of anhydrous ammonia surged from $726 a ton to $1,469 a ton, per the University of Illinois. That’s over 200 percent of the original price. Other fertilizer prices similarly increased during the same period, according to the same source.
“Anytime you drive up energy costs, you make farming and ranching extraordinarily difficult,” he said.
“Farmers are not Wall Street bankers. They can’t afford to just absorb a 200 percent increase in their cost of goods and their cost of doing business,” he continued.
Louisiana State Treasurer John Schroder shares these concerns over ESG and farming, as well as other core industries for many states, including his.
“Louisiana is heavy in oil and gas and heavy in agriculture,” he told The Epoch Times.
Missouri State Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick told The Epoch Times he was not aware of many examples of ESG policies directly impacting farmers and ranchers. But he agreed that ESG is indirectly harming food production through its effect on energy prices and inflation.
“I think that we can certainly attribute the rise in the cost of energy to ESG activism,” he said.
He believes the ESG risk to farmers and ranchers will increase significantly if ESG-style regulations on banking and the private sector continue to expand.
Fitzpatrick is especially worried about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) proposed principles on what the U.S. government agency has classified as climate-related financial risks.
Virtually all banks in the United States carry FDIC coverage.
Coupled with proposed climate risk rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), a hard line on climate from the FDIC could ultimately make things even harder for food producers, Fitzpatrick believes.
“That’s when you’re really going to have a significant impact on [agriculture], I think."
***************************************
15 November, 2022
The methane hoax hits NZ
The "danger" of methane arises wholly from laboratory studies. In real life, the electromagnetic frequencies obstructed by methane are all also blocked by water vapor so methane does not add any extra obstruction
It might sound like the start of a humorous riddle, but it's the subject of a huge scientific inquiry in New Zealand. And the answer could have profound effects on the health of the planet.
More specifically, the question is how to stop cows, sheep and other farm animals from belching out so much methane, a gas which doesn't last as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but is at least 25 times more potent when it comes to global warming.
Because cows can't readily digest the grass they eat, they ferment it first in multiple stomach compartments, or rumen, a process that releases huge amounts of gas. Every time somebody eats a beef burger or drinks a milkshake, it comes at an environmental cost.
New Zealand scientists are coming up with some surprising solutions that could put a big dent in those emissions. Among the more promising are selective breeding, genetically modified feed, methane inhibitors, and a potential game-changer — a vaccine.
Nothing is off the table, from feeding the animals more seaweed to giving them a kombucha-style probiotic called “Kowbucha.” One British company has even developed a wearable harness for cows that oxidizes methane as it's burped out.
In New Zealand, the research has taken on a new urgency. Because farming is central to the economy, about half of the nation's greenhouse gas emissions come from farms, compared to less than 10% in the U.S. New Zealand's 5 million people are outnumbered by 26 million sheep and 10 million cattle.
As part of a push to become carbon neutral, New Zealand's government has promised to reduce methane emissions from farm animals by up to 47% by 2050.
Last month the government announced a plan to begin taxing farmers for animal burps, a world-first move that has angered many farmers. All sides are hoping they might catch a break from science.
****************************************************
‘Green’ policies are destroying the natural environment and changing local weather
All green energy degrades its environment.
Take wind power.
Wind turbines steal energy from the atmosphere and must affect local weather. Turbines are always placed on the highest ground and along ridges to catch more wind. Natural hills already affect local weather by causing more rain along the ridge, and a rain shadow further downwind. Wind turbines enhance this rain shadow effect by robbing the wind of its ability to take moisture and rain into the drier interior. Promoting more inland desertification is not green.
Climatists also plan to defend Australia with offshore wind turbines – using bird slicers to protect Australia from hang gliders, cruising pelicans, seagulls, eagles, and the occasional albatross.
Solar ‘farms’ prefer large areas of flattish ground. They steal solar energy from all plant life in their solar shadow. This deprives wild and domestic herbivores of sustenance. Neither kangaroos, cattle, emus, parrots nor sheep thrive in solar energy deserts.
Green energy is very dilute – thus large areas of land are needed to collect wind/solar energy. Even more land is cleared for the ugly spiderwebs of power lines and roads needed to collect green energy in intermittent dribs and drabs and conduct it to cities, where it is needed. But most of the time, every day, these expensive assets produce nothing useful.
Already there is a petition circulating in Australia calling for ugly destructive power lines to be put underground to save farms, forests, wildlife, and scenery.
What a good idea.
Let’s bury the noisy bird-chopping wind turbines too.
Wind turbines and solar panels soon wear out and have to be replaced. Some have already reached their use-by date. Most of this ‘green’ debris cannot be recycled. To calmly bury that complex toxic waste of plastics, metals, steel, and concrete is not green at all. Soon chemicals will be leaking into the groundwater and water supply dams.
The manufacture, erection, and final disposal of green energy generators use more energy than they can produce over their short life. Their whole-of-life net energy production is negative and their net emissions are also negative.
Greens also worship biomass energy like wood. This is the fuel that cavemen used for warmth, cooking meat, and repelling wild animals. Primitive people like the British still burn wood for power generation but too much of the energy is consumed in collecting, drying, chipping, and transporting this low-energy fuel from distant forests to power station boilers. Germans are now showing confidence that their massive wind-solar apparatus will cope with the coming winter without Russian gas – by gathering firewood. And anti-fracking, anti-coal Britain is forced to plan for week-long winter blackouts and/or shortages of gas.
Greens also promote world hunger by promoting ethanol made from plant foods to replace better motor fuels such as petrol and diesel. The hill-billies of Tennessee were specialists in distilling corn whisky which had many uses for recreation and medicine. Others found ethanol could be produced from most plant material especially grains, beets, and sugar cane. Greens then pollute good whisky with a touch of gasoline to make it unfit for human consumption and then subsidise/mandate its use in motor vehicles. While some people starve, food is used for motor fuel.
US government biofuel mandates have also made the refining of diesel and other fuels more expensive.
Reliable electricity generators produce electricity when it is needed. But green energy needs batteries to keep the lights on when wind/solar fails (as it does every day). And to charge those batteries while also serving consumers requires a very large increase in generator capacity. This increases the need for more spiderwebs of landscape destroying power lines and roads between wind towers, solar farms, ‘Big Batteries’, pumped hydro and electricity consumers.
Not green at all.
Compare for a moment this ugly green energy mess with tidy concentrated reliable energy from long-life coal, gas, hydro or nuclear power stations.
Of course, Big Miners love Green Energy and electric cars because they consume heaps of metals like copper, nickel, lithium, rare earths, cobalt, silicon, aluminium molybdenum, silver, graphite, and steel as well as limestone and gas for producing cement. But every lithium battery in every electric car or bicycle is a spontaneous fire hazard – park them far away from anything flammable.
Finally, we have maybe the biggest Green Scam of all – Carbon Capture and Burial. Big coal and gas companies love this trick – it will consume far more coal or gas to produce the same usable energy – the rest is wasted in gas capture, compression, pumping, piping, and disposal. And the whole silly scheme relies on the assumption that the buried gas will stay where it was put. In rare places, pumped CO2 can be used to increase the yield from depleting oil or gas reservoirs, but in general this green hoax wastes energy, deprives the bio-sphere of plant food, increases electricity cost, and reduces the life of coal and gas reserves.
And what about the COP27 climate jamboree? Four hundred private jets attended. Even Saint Greta thinks it is a scam.
Green energy costs are large, obvious, and measureable. The climate benefits are illusory.
Not green at all.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/not-green-at-all/ ?
***************************************************
ESG: The Merger of State and Corporate Power
In 2022, in the midst of a recession, record inflation, and a tumbling stock market, a corporate ideology known by the acronym ESG emerged from obscurity to become a headline topic. It has been called everything from a risk-management tool and a movement for a cleaner, more just world, to a “con,” a “fraud,” and even—in an Elon Musk tweet—“the devil incarnate.”
The term itself is opaque; ESG brings environmental, social, and governance causes together under one umbrella. The environmental component includes things like transitioning from fossil fuels to wind and solar energy, and from gasoline-powered cars to electric vehicles.
The social component includes racial and gender equity, diversity training for employees, economic equity, and gun control. The governance component focus on how companies are run and includes racial and gender quotas for corporate boards, management, and staff, and—in the case of Exxon—putting green energy advocates on the board.
The Origins of ESG Ideology
The ESG movement is a derivative of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). There are 17 SDGs in all, ranging from “no poverty, zero hunger, and good health” to “responsible consumption and production” and “peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development.”
In 2019, the World Economic Forum (WEF), an annual gathering of the world’s most powerful political and corporate leaders in Davos, Switzerland, signed a strategic partnership with the U.N. to advance the SDGs throughout the corporate sector. Led by founder and chairman, Klaus Schwab, the WEF issued the “Davos Manifesto 2020: The Universal Purpose of a Company in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
The manifesto declared that “a company is more than an economic unit generating wealth. It fulfills human and societal aspirations as part of the broader social system.”
During the annual meeting, Schwab told the gathered corporate executives and world leaders, “Let’s be clear, the future is not just happening; the future is built by us, by a powerful community here in this room. We have the means to improve the status of the world.”
In a CNBC interview in 2020, Bank of America CEO and WEF International Business Council Chairman Brian Moynihan said, “To solve these huge problems that the world faces—this is U.N. week and the SDGs are the statement to the world of what we’d like to make progress on—you have to bring capitalism to the task.”
On Nov. 4, 100 executives from the Alliance of CEO Climate Leaders issued a joint letter to attendees of the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP27), stating, “We are ready to work side-by-side with governments to deliver bold climate action.”
“Accelerating the transition to net zero requires significant collaboration and shared responsibility between the private and public sectors.”
Signatories of the letter included Coca-Cola, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, Nestle, PepsiCo, Siemens, Sysco, and Unilever.
Speaking at the COP27 conference, former Vice President Al Gore concurred, saying, “We need 4.5 trillion dollars per year to make this transition, and that can only come by unlocking access to private capital.”
Author and political analyst Michael Rectenwald told The Epoch Times, “This is a massive campaign that has already metastasized to almost all of the corporate world. The tentacles of the WEF extend to almost every sector of society.”
More than 500 of the world’s largest corporations have signed pledges to support ESG goals across industries including banking, insurance, asset management, tech, media, energy, manufacturing, and transportation. These pledges are signed as part of membership in international clubs like Climate Action 100+, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, the Net Zero Banking Alliance, and the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance. There’s no segment of the American economy that’s outside the reach of this movement.
From its origins in U.N. think tanks and WEF conference rooms, ESG is then passed down to the corporate world via Wall Street, marketed as an investment strategy for companies to follow, voluntarily or involuntarily.
BlackRock’s head of sustainable investing research Carole Crozat explained to investors that “while measuring the alignment of investments to the U.N. SDGs is a complex and evolving task, we believe that their integration in investment decisions can help secure long-term financial performance.”
“Redirecting capital toward U.N. SDGs could offer $12 trillion of market opportunities linked to our long-term social and environmental well-being,” Crozat said.
ESG in Practice
In principle, ESG means that companies look beyond making profits and consider higher political and moral issues like the welfare of the planet; in practice, it means that corporations become political agents for left-wing causes. This concept is also called “stakeholder capitalism,” which has been endorsed by CEOs across the corporate world.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/esg-the-merger-of-state-and-corporate-power_4858981.html
****************************************************Extreme rhetoric about climate doom raises the temperature in Australia
The reception for Anthony Albanese’s Labor government has been exceptionally warm, unquestioning and optimistic. There are a number of obvious reasons for this.
The political/media elite, progressive to a fault, always welcomes the arrival of a left-of-centre government, especially after spending years demonising its Coalition predecessors. This was probably exacerbated by the nation coming out of the pandemic and looking for a period of reopening and renewal.
And to give credit where it is due, Albanese and his team did not frighten the horses. On the contrary, they made a sure-footed and reassuring start on foreign policy, an area where many, myself included, feared weakness and regression.
Yet now the trajectory for this government appears clear, and it suggests a path to economic hardship and political chaos. When the scales fall from the public’s eyes – and that might be a year or two away – the reckoning will be savage.
There are two outstanding questions. How much damage will be visited upon the country? And will the Coalition make the hard decisions to present the necessary alternative for repair?
Jim Chalmers neatly summarised the nub of the problem while attacking the Coalition this week. “Before the government changed hands interest rates were rising,” the Treasurer said, “real wages were going backwards, inflation was going up and a big part of the reason for that was the electricity price and energy market chaos that the shadow treasurer should come to the dispatch box and take responsibility for.”
A reasonably factual analysis. But the missing fact was that on each measure the situation has become significantly worse since the election and, worst of all, Labor’s climate and energy policies will turbocharge the harm.
The hubris of Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is extraordinary. His evangelical zeal for a renewables-plus-storage model as the enlightened path to lower prices, more supply, green jobs and a cooler planet ignores the simple fact that, despite numerous attempts, no country has achieved this.
In fact, all that have tried have ended up in an energy supply and cost crisis.
The International Energy Agency warns that net zero cannot be achieved with current technology, and even net-zero and renewables advocate Kerry Schott, the former chairwoman of the Energy Security Board, admitted this week that the government’s renewables plan might be beyond our wit.
“It may not be possible,” she told the ABC. “But I think we’ve got to try.”
That such an admission from her did not generate broad news coverage goes to just how delusional the debate has become. Media, climate advocates, politicians and diplomats are sticking to a script of unchecked climate catastrophism while promoting implausible energy solutions.
When this bubble bursts it will get ugly. For a debate that is supposed to prioritise “the science” the biggest missing elements are scientific facts and rational arguments.
As an illustration, consider these numbered quotes:
1: “We are facing an existential crisis in our region, which is climate change.”
2: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.”
3: “We need radical change to save the planet.”
4: “There are no actions too extreme to take at this moment to draw attention to the urgency of fixing this problem now.”
5: “We are the developed country with the most to lose from unchecked climate change and natural disasters – floods, fires, and cyclones – all of this is at stake.”
These quotes are all of a likeness but come from the most radical protesters and people charged with implementing policy. We expect hysteria and hyperbole from the radical fringe but should see factual arguments and rational approaches from responsible politicians – yet now there is no difference.
The fearmongering from those who glue their body parts to roads at protests is indistinguishable from the speeches of the UN secretary-general or our own Climate Change and Energy Minister.
For the record, those quotes belong to Bowen; UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres; Mali Cooper, who locked her head on to a car’s steering wheel as she blocked the approaches to the Sydney Harbour Tunnel; retired teacher Tony Gleeson, who glued himself to a Picasso in an Extinction Rebellion protest at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne; and International Development and the Pacific Minister Pat Conroy at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt.
It should be deeply worrying that the fact-free alarmism is indistinguishable between this lot. It is as though the nation’s energy policy is being run by Greta Thunberg. (By the way, feel free to guess which quote belongs to who; I’ll include the quiz answers at the end of this column.)
Consider what this means for this country which, like every other developed nation, has built its prosperity on the foundation of cheap, reliable energy. We are accelerating an impossible renewable energy transition that has already constricted our electricity supply and elevated prices.
Through deliberate policy choices driven by ideology, we will further damage the reliability of our supplies while continuing to increase prices.
This is an act of national self-harm not seen since Kevin Rudd surrendered our borders – but the economic consequences will be much more severe and take longer to repair.
When the power shortages hit home, most likely over coming summers, the repercussions for the government will be dramatic. Ever-increasing power prices will cause household and business trauma along the way.
Two great lies are being perpetrated – and no, this is not climate denial, this is the opposite; this is recognising the supremacy of science, facts and rational analysis.
One is the gormless idea that renewables in countries such as ours are a practical solution to global warming, even as greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise globally, thanks especially to China.
The other is the promotion of all natural disasters and weather events as being “unprecedented” and attributable to global warming. Scientists cannot make such links for our most recent droughts, floods or fires, but that does not stop some insinuating as much, and certainly it does not stop politicians and journalists leaping to conclusions.
This week the Prime Minister said: “We’ve had the devastating bushfires, including in areas of rainforest that had never burnt ever before – ever before!” This is typical of the alarmist claims we hear that scare our children and, presumably, help to justify radical but largely futile energy policies. They are simply wrong – yet stand uncorrected.
I have been through this in detail in these pages previously. Back in the spring of 2019 retired NSW fire commissioner and former NSW climate change councillor Greg Mullins told ABC radio that fires were “breaking out in places where they just shouldn’t burn … the west coast of Tasmania, the world heritage areas, subtropical rainforests, it’s all burning. And this is driven by climate change, there’s no other explanation.”
But the South Australian Chronicle of February 1915 reported lives lost and the “most devastating bushfires ever known in Tasmania sweeping over the northwest coast and other districts. The extent of the devastation cannot be over-estimated.” And The Canberra Times in 1982 detailed a “huge forest fire” burning out 75,000ha of dense rainforest in that region.
Around the same time Mullins made his claim, Guardian Australia linked bushfires in Queensland rainforests to global warming.
“I never thought I’d see the Australian rainforest burning. What will it take for us to wake up to the climate crisis?” asked Joelle Gergis, of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute, who was then a member of the Climate Council.
“As a scientist, what I find particularly disturbing about the current conditions is that world heritage rainforest areas such as the Lamington National Park in the Gold Coast hinterland are now burning,” she wrote.
Yet the Cairns Post reported on October 25, 1951: “A bushfire in Lamington National Park today swept through a grove of 3000-year-old Macrozamia palms. These trees were one of the features of the park. The fire has burnt out about 2000 acres of thick rainforest country.”
We live at a time when clear, recorded, easily researched precedents do not preclude the use of the word unprecedented and do not prevent concocted hysteria. And on the back of this fabricated alarmism, we undermine the reliable energy sources that underpin our industry, agriculture, economy, health, education and prosperity.
There is a lot of science denial going on. And it is on the climate action side. Most of the media that has been complicit so far will not apologise for their role. Rather, when the reckoning comes they will pivot to the interests of their audiences and amplify the assault on governments.
There will be economic, social and political disruption. Then we will have to embrace gas generation or nuclear power, or even carbon capture and storage to reclaim our plentiful energy endowment.
Meanwhile, China will have continued its economic and military expansion, perhaps with the assistance of “reparations” from the West. Spike Milligan could not have conceived of such satire.
Of course, I could be wrong. We might see $1 trillion invested to build 28,000km of heavy transmission lines through landscapes where communities welcome them, linking tens of thousands of hectares of wind and solar farms in places where their aesthetics are appreciated, and they could be firmed up by massive battery installations yet to be invented, and all this could be delivered to us at a colossal loss to the investors so our prices do not increase dramatically. And the former coal and gas workers, and those who used to work in manufacturing, could all have jobs mowing the lawns between the rows of solar panels, or collecting bird kills from under the wind turbines.
And all the while heatwaves will subside, floods diminish, droughts will shorten and fires will be quelled. It sounds too good to be true.
***************************************
14 November, 2022
The ‘heroic’ climate book offering some hope for our future
The book review below is not only uncritical. It is positively laudatory. The one thing the review gets right is that the book is heroic -- heroic in ignoring the facts.
Author Gergis is one of the many on the Green/Left who see only what they want to see but Gergis is in fact an extreme case of that. Her research has in fact produced a vivid proof that there is NO long-term global warming. But she sees in it proof of warming.
Judge for yourself. She showed that the temperature was just nine hundredths of one degree warmer in the 20th century than it was in the 13th century. Some warming!
Below is the temperature graph underlying her "research". Going back centuries sure is pesky.
Gergis is the practitioner of a religion, not a scientist. Sadly, she has authored over 100 "scientific" publications on climate. She is a lead author on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on the Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, no less. That says a lot about the Warmist fantasy. Anything will do as evidence for it
The problem with climate change is the hot air. A belief, once widespread, was that rational discussion, awareness-raising and political debate were levers that could be pulled to correct an errant course. Today, heave though we might, these levers seem only to vent steam.
Here, Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope by Joëlle Gergis has a special role to play. Gergis is one of hundreds of scientists contributing to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) assessment reports, the gold standard of international scientific collaboration and rigour by which we discover just how much trouble we’re in.
Part of this book describes the report’s creation, an exhaustive and exhausting process of write, review and rewrite, which takes years to compile, the latest running at nearly 3000 pages. It is then flung into the centrifuge of the modern news cycle. Little but a few headlines survive intact. Humanity’s Moment is Gergis’ opportunity to translate the science in a controlled environment, outside the clickbait and pop-ups.
She does so with precision, fidelity and restraint. Our present predicament is harrowing enough. Yet floods in Pakistan, wildfires in Europe are but a taste of the likely future despite the trumpeting of net-zero target figures.
Humanity’s Moment is in three parts: the head, the heart and the whole. The heart is needed because science is simply not enough to fully grasp the loss, both actual and potential. It must be felt. The author intercuts exposition with personal accounts, often at the edge of despair. “We are witnessing the great unravelling; the beginning of the end of things,” she writes in her journal.
Through such entries, email correspondence with other scientists and the author’s bittersweet immersion in landscapes she knows are vanishing such as the Great Barrier Reef or Gondwana rainforest, we understand the price of again spelling out the case on the page. As an act of defiance, it is heroic.
Gergis states that the IPCC’s sixth assessment report released last year will be the last chance that scientists have to make a difference. In the time it takes to produce another, we’ll be too far gone. From here on, it’s politics, and we know how that goes.
Very bravely, she resists such easy cynicism, in which the apocalypse is simply another meme. I had to limit myself to a chapter a night but felt hopelessness long afterward. It’s also not an easy book to discuss with friends, especially those with children.
But in all darkness, there is light, as the opening chapter of the third part states. Here the concept of the tipping point that runs throughout Humanity’s Moment is applied to repair. When change happens, it is unexpected and accelerating. In the whole: social movements, art, technological progress and the teal revolution could be reaching a point at which politicians and businesses with vested interests in the status quo have no option but change.
Many climate books take on this structure but few have a final “hope” section that is believable. Most smack of compromise to an anxious publisher, a counterbalance to the grim forerunners. Yet Gergis has deployed a compelling metaphor, not least of all because things are improving. Denialism has lost mainstream credibility while fossil fuel companies are increasingly resorting to greenwashing, a definite retreat from attacking the science.
The chapter Life Imitating Art, on the growing cultural dimension of the climate movement, is particularly important. It represents the outflanking of vested interests to a place they struggle to follow – culture. A fossil fuel company can create an Instagram account where a guy in a hardhat stands before a seedling but for all its PR budget, it cannot create true art.
Still the BLM and LGBTQI+ movements that Gergis points to as examples of rapid change have never been achieved against the clock or on the global scale required by climate action. The holdouts are the same authoritarian states such as China and Russia needed for success on climate. It is those that reject “Western values” and resist global action the instant it is expedient to do so. Change will require a powerful diplomatic, not just social, justice dimension.
Another issue only glanced at is social media, another blocker. Now the sole news source for almost 50 per cent of people and lacking necessary bandwidth and nuance to convey the challenge, it’s the echo chamber filtering out challenging beliefs that truly allows misinformation to fester. Traditional media has had little choice but to mirror the dynamics of their ersatz distributors. All this justifies the need for a book. Hence Humanity’s Moment.
I have been told by those in the know that books on climate change, even those with high-profile authors, simply do not sell. I’m sure Humanity’s Moment sparked intense conversations before commissioning. Credit, then, to a publisher that has opted for urgency and gravity over entertainment and, of course, to an author who refuses to mollycoddle but instead provides genuine hope.
****************************************************
This is war: Renewables vs the West
Comment from Australia
The future of renewable energy is laid out before us, bound by inevitable consequences and engineering restraints. It is a failure of concept, buoyed by trillions of dollars in public money and the artificial destruction of its market competitors. The result is an energy crisis which is hastening the end of virtue-seeking energy systems that have benefited nobody except crafty investors and billionaire green playboys.
The public will pick up the bill for their hubris, as is always the case with political errors. Australians have been left sitting at the table with the scraps of the meal that was ‘renewable energy’ – bones picked clean by bankers, mining giants, bureaucrats, and diplomats.
State Premiers lie whenever they describe solar and wind as ‘cheap energy’, conveniently restricting their costings to the initial construction of the project while ignoring the required backup battery farms, re-wiring of the grid, and cyclic nightmare of the ‘rip out and replace’ reality of technology with a 20-year lifespan. Experts call this ‘re-powering’. Normal people call it madness.
This delusion is how we end up with the embarrassing antics of Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk declaring Brisbane Airport will be running on ‘100 per cent’ renewable energy for the bargain deal of $4.5 billion – except for the planes, of course. And no, the airport is not going to operate on an isolated renewables-only grid to prove the point. Are you crazy? What if the wind died in the middle of the night?
The ABC are too friendly with green ideology to ask the obvious question: why are the Pacific Islands and other third-world despots asking for billions in reparations while selling their fossil fuel and rare earths assets under the table to the world’s largest polluter, China? Or the follow-up: what happens if we end up at war with China over Taiwan and they won’t sell us any solar panels? Or the follow-up to the follow-up: will Australia be able to defend the Pacific with a ‘made in China’ sticker on our power grid?
It is a contradiction that speaks to profit, not apocalypse. The insulting paternalism of Labor’s attitude toward ‘those poor people’ on ‘sinking flooded islands’ leaves Australia as a victim of politicians who are more concerned with ‘looking good’ and shaking all the right hands at the United Nations than taking care of the Australian people, whose money they throw away like confetti at the monstrous wedding of globalism and eco-fascism.
As the human population grows, civilisation requires an energy grid with a dense fuel source – something that takes up as little of our productive land as possible. Covering river deltas and prime agricultural fields with solar panels and wind turbines is the work of morons who have confused steel bird mincers with chapel steeples. These are not monuments to the Green religion, they are symbols of inexhaustible human idiocy that will be rusting long after the climate apocalypse fails to manifest.
Why must we be polite about the vandalism of Western Civilisation? Why do conservatives tolerate the gutless, mute, spineless, and soulless Liberal Party playing along because they are too embarrassed to apologise for trying to gain political traction from the same green fibs as Labor?
Climate Change has drifted into a religion of convenience – an ‘Edenism’ that ignores basic geological history and makes unkeepable promises about the fate of humanity. We have transferred our personal fear of mortality onto the Earth, terrified of a terra hellfire (or is it another Noah-style flood?) instead of the metaphoric flames of the old religions.
The planet is not a sentient being, it is a self-destructive rock that cares very little for our survival and would sooner hurl an asteroid or open a flood basalt rift than thank us for the sacrifice of university virgins.
Try telling that to a screaming activist glued to a Renoir with bits of horse and petroleum…
Instead of transferring the innards of third-world mountains to Australian landfills – or listening to scientists talk about melting wind turbines down into gummy bears for our children to eat – why not skip to the end?
The answer to our energy woes was revealed last century – a solution so simple, clean, and practical that its existence threatens the survival of all other energy sources. Nuclear. With billions of years in fuel reserves, nuclear will outlive humanity.
It doesn’t matter that the argument in favour of nuclear is unshakable, whether you believe in the apocalypse or simply want to restore light to the West, nuclear must first win the culture war that was started by jealous fossil fuels companies and is being continued by renewables barons.
We have seen conflicts like this before.
In the 19th century, a clash of profitable scientific ideas slammed into the middle of another culture war. Society was turned into a stage upon which charismatic showmen, backed by competing corporate interests, fought for the future of human civilisation. Energy was then, as it is now, the most valuable commodity.
The War of the Currents between beloved American Thomas Edison and competing energy merchant George Westinghouse changed the world, in large part due to outspoken Serbian migrant Nikola Tesla. It was a showdown between Direct Current electricity and the mysterious Alternating Current motors devised by Tesla that came with distinct advantages. Merit won out, but the battle was an expensive mess that claimed many lives. Friendships were destroyed, fortunes lost, and barbaric acts committed within the hysteria.
Edison championed Direct Current. His business interests, and those of his corporate investors, were entrenched in the technology. Alternating Current was a superior product and the obvious answer to the technical issues that plagued Direct Current systems. From a logical perspective, if America wanted to become an energy empire, it would have to rip up its old DC systems and replace them with an AC infrastructure.
Obvious solutions are often hated.
Unable to dismantle AC with sensible arguments, Edison sought ways to frighten the public over to his side – playing on the cheapest of human emotions in the hope that public fear would put political pressure on the scientific realm and cause lawmakers to act as AC’s executioner. To spread fear you need victims, so Edison Electric arranged public demonstrations in which AC current could be shown frying animals to death. Eventually, AC was used in the creation of the first electric chair, ensuring that the technology became synonymous with killing.
Edison took the culture wars too far. His antics painted him as unhinged and childish, deliberately contriving acts of cruelty for corporate interest while Westinghouse and Tesla improved the safety profile of their generators. Westinghouse secured the contract for the Niagara Falls system with Tesla’s motors, finishing the argument. The loss was so complete that the war is often forgotten.
We see a similar level of moral panic levelled at nuclear, with the combined forces of international bureaucracies and the corporate elite inciting the useful idiots on social media to arms. Propaganda and political power are the glue that holds renewables together. A bit of sensible jostling would easily snap it apart.
Anyone in love with renewable energy should be afraid of nuclear energy. It is coming to murder the solar, wind, and battery industry. As Europe is swiftly learning, nuclear is the only solution to our immediate energy crisis – the way for humanity to advance with its standard of living intact.
Those who get themselves caught up in this new war of the currents – misguided citizens who lean into fear porn, apocalyptic rhetoric, and socially destructive activism – will look as foolish as the men electrocuting small animals to scare the mob.
Yes, this is a war, but it has already been won in the eyes of history. It is only the final bill that remains to be counted.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/this-is-war-renewables-vs-the-west/ ?
*********************************************
UK: Eco-loonyism is an upper-middle-class rite of passage
Greta Thunberg, the Shirley Temple of the apocalypse, let the cat out of the bag last week. She told the audience at her book launch that her environmental focus is merely part of her bigger secret plan to overthrow society. Apparently there’s a lot of ‘colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the so-called global North’ that has to be stopped. Gosh. Some have framed this as millenarianism’s Bonnie Langford saying the quiet part out loud, but surely it was always obvious?
More interesting, though perhaps even less unexpected, was her revelation a few days later to comedian Russell Howard (who wore the now-familiar ‘blessed by the Infant of Stockholm’ expression) that her critics were ‘heterosexual, white, privileged, middle-aged men’. Russell Howard is, of course, like the vast majority of Greta’s followers, a heterosexual, white, privileged, middle-aged man. What does this tell us?
Some have wondered why the eco-loons of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil aren’t heading to heavily polluting countries such as China or India to make their protests. There have been some vague replies from said loons that if Britain complied with their demands it would set a shining example for the world to follow. But this is terribly tenuous, half-hearted nonsense. You can see it turning to ashes as it leaves their lips. A similar idea was put forward in the heyday of CND, and it felt like desperate stuff then.
No. The real reason is because eco-loonyism is not about saving the planet, or even overthrowing society, at all. It has no possibility of achieving its aims by protest. It is in fact a curious mix of ecstatic atonement and the loons showing that they are certainly not, Heavens to Betsy no, like those yucky Tories or their yob voters, perish the thought.
Eco-loonyism is a curious mix of ecstatic atonement and showing that one is certainly not like those yucky Tories
Like many things – Glastonbury, the gap year, dyeing one’s hair bright blue – it is an upper-middle-class rite of passage, and occasionally also a pensioners’ pastime, a modern alternative to floristry classes and good works for the parish. And, most crucially of all, it annoys people which that ‘progressive’ section of the upper-middle-class don’t like – those ‘heterosexual, white, privileged, middle-aged men’ (well at least the ones Greta isn’t gassing to at that particular moment – her parents are an actor and an opera singer, after all). That is why Just Stop Oil is harassing British motorist and chucking soup at Old Masters.
So much of public life is claiming to be aggrieved about something but is really about carving out social and class distinctions, often within the same class, and winding up ‘the right people’. Elon Musk charging for blue ticks is a good example coming from a slightly different direction; a kick right in the status.
The imminent World Cup is the most brazen example of the phenomenon. Saintly footballers, plus luminaries such as the talkative Gary Neville and the monosyllabic David Beckham, are all happily pocketing the Qatari shilling (which is worth several millions pounds sterling). This makes a mockery of their constant haranguing and posturing about social issues, and exposes their concerns about slavery, racism, and homophobia as actually nothing to do with slavery, racism, and homophobia – which are all boom industries, right now, in Qatar.
It reveals that what this is really all about is signalling at home. It is the same with ‘anti-racism’ ideology across the board. Non-whites are simply props in that play, to be wheeled on and off stage when convenient. If lower-status whites cannot be blamed for something – as in the Uighur genocide, or Qatar, or Rochdale and Rotherham – these purportedly concerned anti-racists are simply not interested. It’s embarrassing. There is nothing in it for them, no status points to be garnered. Who cares?
Away from protest, so much of politics has a self-absorbed, tribal vibe. The Tories themselves fight shy of actually doing conservative things for fear of looking nasty and common. There is still a fear of social ostracism in them, of that Suella Braverman being terribly non-U. Robert Jenrick’s recent fluster about Braverman’s talk of ‘invasion’ was pure old-fashioned class discomfort. The Tories are hypersensitive to dropping social clangers in front of their progressive social equals.
Meanwhile Labour have taken the philosophy of ‘if they don’t like it, it must be a good idea’ to ridiculous lengths with their enthusiastic embrace of genderism. But even Keir Starmer is starting to look a little green about the gills on the issue now, at least when the dreadfully déclassé Mumsnet are watching. Immigration is a similar area. The transitory thrill of goading and annoying Farage and his kind is apparently worth admitting millions of people into the country on a whim.
Annoying ‘the right people’ is a powerful pull for us all. When I went to cast my vote in the EU referendum I never thought Leave would win, but I felt I had to do my duty. I’ll never forget what happened when I got into the booth and picked up my little pencil. Out of nowhere I experienced a visceral, whole-body thrill, a totally unexpected holy joy à la Saint Teresa of Avila, a release of UP YOURS! to Caroline Lucas, Steve Coogan, Bob Geldof, Stephen Fry, etc. I’m sure Remain voters felt much the same about Gove and Boris. The last thing actually on our minds – at that moment, anyway – was the European Union.
‘This is annoying all the right people’, we often hear. And yes, that gives us a warm glow, and a kind of guide to whether something is a good idea. But is it the best guide? Being more aware of this very human heuristic, and a little more honest about it, would do us all good.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/eco-loonyism-is-an-upper-middle-class-rite-of-passage
*****************************************************Electric cars are NOT Green
Electric cars sales are up 66% this year.
President Joe Biden promotes them, saying things like, “The great American road trip is going to be fully electrified,” and, “There’s no turning back.”
To make sure we have no choice in the matter, some left-leaning states have moved to ban gas-powered cars altogether.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order banning them by 2035. Oregon, Massachusetts, and New York copied California. Washington state’s politicians said they’d make it happen even faster, by 2030.
Thirty countries also say they’ll phase out gas-powered cars.
But this is just dumb. It will not happen. It’s magical thinking.
In my new video, I point out some “inconvenient” facts about electric cars, simple truths that politicians and green activists just don’t seem to understand.
“Electric cars are amazing,” says physicist Mark Mills of the Manhattan Institute. “But they won’t change the future in any significant way (as far as) oil use or carbon dioxide emissions.”
Inconvenient fact 1: Selling more electric cars won’t reduce oil use very much.
“The world has 15, 18 million electric vehicles now,” says Mills. “If we [somehow] get to 500 million, that would reduce world oil consumption by about 10%. That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t end the use of oil.”
Most of the world’s oil is used by things like “airplanes, buses, big trucks, and the mining equipment that gets the copper to build the electric cars.”
Even if all vehicles somehow did switch to electricity, there’s another problem: Electricity isn’t very green.
I laugh talking to friends who are all excited about their electric car, assuming it doesn’t pollute. They go silent when I ask, “Where does your car’s electricity come from?”
They don’t know. They haven’t even thought about it.
Inconvenient fact 2: Although driving an electric car puts little additional carbon into the air, producing the electricity to charge its battery adds plenty. Most of America’s electricity is produced by burning natural gas and coal. Just 12% comes from wind or solar power.
Auto companies don’t advertise that. “Electric vehicles in general are better and more sustainable for the environment,” says Ford’s Linda Zhang in a BBC interview.
“She’s a Ford engineer,” I say to Mills. “She’s not ignorant.”
“She’s not stupid,” he replies. “But ignorance speaks to what you know. You have to mine, somewhere on Earth, 500,000 pounds of minerals and rock to make one battery.”
American regulations make mining difficult, so most of it is done elsewhere, polluting those countries. Some mining is done by children. Some is done in places that use slave labor.
Even if those horrors didn’t exist, mining itself adds lots of carbon to the air.
“If you’re worried about carbon dioxide,” says Mills, “the electric vehicle has emitted 10 to 20 tons of carbon dioxide (from the mining, manufacturing, and shipping) before it even gets to your driveway.”
“Volkswagen published an honest study [in which they] point out that the first 60,000 miles or so you’re driving an electric vehicle, that electric vehicle will have emitted more carbon dioxide than if you just drove a conventional vehicle.”
You would have to drive an electric car “100,000 miles” to reduce emissions by just “20 or 30%, which is not nothing, but it’s not zero.”
No, it’s not.
If you live in New Zealand, where there’s lots of hydro and geothermal power, electric cars pollute less. But in America, your “zero-emission vehicle” adds lots of greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.
Politicians and electric car sellers don’t mention that. Most probably don’t even know.
In a future column, three more inconvenient facts about electric cars.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/02/inconvenient-facts/
***************************************13 November, 2022
Global carbon emissions will reach record levels this year
So much for all the policies that claim to lower it. Greenie policies are a total failure
Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels will reach a record high this year after the COVID-19 pandemic, with no sign of the deep reductions urgently needed to tackle global heating.
Preliminary data for 2022 shows a slight increase – about 1 per cent – in carbon emissions from fossil fuels relative to 2021, according to the Global Carbon Project, a network of dozens of researchers from around the world that has tracked carbon emissions for 16 years.
This projected growth brings global fossil CO2 emissions for 2022 slightly above the 2019 pre-pandemic levels.
This increase was primarily driven by the growth in oil consumption from the return of aviation following the COVID-19 lockdowns. If the current emission levels persist, there is a 50 per cent chance global warming of 1.5 degrees will be exceeded in nine years.
“The climate crisis requires crisis-like actions which I don’t see happening,” said Dr Pep Canadell, a CSIRO research scientist based in Australia and executive director of the Global Carbon Project. “It is a mistake to think that the energy transition will be a smooth transition.”
There is expected to be 40.2 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions from all human activity in 2022, which includes 36.6 gigatonnes of fossil CO2 emissions from coal, gas, oil and cement.
To get to zero emissions by 2050, which is the stated goal of many countries, including Australia, global emissions will need to decline by 1.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide each year, which is a similar amount to the fall in emissions seen in 2020 due to pandemic lockdowns.
Globally, during the pandemic, emissions declined about 5.5 per cent on 2019 levels because of COVID-19 measures. But in 2021, emissions rebounded about 5 per cent from the previous year.
Oil emissions – which represent about one third of global emissions – are projected to rise more than 2 per cent and dominate the global rise in fossil fuel carbon emissions.
Global gas emissions are projected to decline a tiny amount, due to the tightness of supply related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while cement emissions are projected to decrease about 1.5 per cent due to the slowdown of construction in China.
As the graph below shows, globally there has been a small but uncertain decline in emissions from land use change – the way that humans modify the natural landscape. Indonesia, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo contribute almost 60 per cent of global land use change emissions.
Global Carbon Project research does not include Australian-specific data, but government figures show our national greenhouse gas emissions were about 22 per cent lower in the year 2022 compared with 2005.
Professor Frank Jotzo, an expert on climate change from Australian National University, said Australia would need to cut about 16 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year over the next eight years to reach its new goal of reducing emissions 43 per cent by 2030.
But the electricity sector is the only industry where Australia has seen consistent and continuing decreases in greenhouse gas emissions in recent years, Professor Jotzo said.
“What’s driving that is a very substantial shift away from coal-fired [electricity] generation … made up for by increases in renewable energy, principally solar,” he said. “A lot needs to change in Australia’s emissions profile in order to achieve that 2030 target.”
Despite the negative impact of climate change, the land and carbon sinks continue to absorb about half of the world’s carbon emissions. But they have registered a 70 per cent loss of efficiency and 4 per cent, effectively. Oceans are less able to dissolve carbon dioxide when temperatures are higher.
The atmospheric level of CO2 is projected to average 417.2 ppm in 2022, 50 per cent above pre-industrial levels.
***********************************************************
Greenie rip-off in Egypt
Not since Howard Carter risked the curse of the Pharaohs to plunder the pyramids a hundred years ago this month at the Valley of the Kings has Egypt seen such a gang of thieves.
Only this time, forget the grave robbers, it’s the gravy train robbers who are pilfering the untold wealth of the West in the Valley of the Despots also known as the luxury climate change junket Cop 27 at Sharm el-Sheikh. As the Daily Mail reports, ‘World leaders and delegates jetting into Egypt for the Cop 27 climate conference will be able to dine out on £90 mushroom sauce covered beef medallions – and sip on fancy bottomless cocktails – while facing calls to cut down on meat consumption to save the planet. Those with a taste for the luxurious can snap up an Angus beef medallion with sautéed potatoes… after scoffing back a £43 seafood platter for starter.’
No wonder all the greatest and most powerful leaders of the climate cult are descending from far-flung cities, flying in by Lear Jet or luxury gas-guzzling yacht to lecture the rest of the world on how we should eat bugs and insects in order to reduce our emissions. Indeed, our Climate Change Minister has bravely gone to Egypt this week in search of riches beyond his wildest dreams. Mr Bowen, now known as the Nefertiti of Net Zero, the Ramses of Renewables, or the King Tut-tut of the nanny state, has returned Mummy-like from his dead career as a Rudd minister to plunder the hidden treasures of endless government renewables subsidies in order to save the planet. The poor old humble Aussie taxpayer will be defiled and desecrated and dragged into an afterlife of perpetual impoverishment.
Already the Australian delegation has insisted that the controversial issue of ‘loss and damage’ be added at the last minute to the agenda of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference as a gesture of solidarity for Pacific countries. Which translated means: Aussie taxpayers are going to hand over a king’s ransom to any lucky Pacific leader who sticks his hand out because apparently we ghastly Australians are to blame for their islands sinking under the waves even though, er, plenty of them are actually increasing in size as even the ABC admits.
When Howard Carter broke his way into Tutankhamen’s secret burial chamber in 1922 the wealth he discovered was estimated to be worth around $15 million. But that’s peanuts to the gold and rubies that Chris Bowen and his expedition intend to excavate from the coffers of the humble Aussie taxpayer. Australia owes an extra $2.6 billion to the UN’s $100 billion climate finance target, according to the luvvies. Australia has paid only 38 per cent of its fair share, apparently, ranking us third-worst country behind the US and Canada.
And in news that would have Carter spinning in his own grave, the eco-warriors are demanding that the United Kingdom pays up to £1 trillion in damages to the rest of the world for her role in ‘creating climate change’. You know, by inventing all the modern equipment, transportation, drugs, manufacturing, goods and products that have created the modern prosperity, good health and civilisation that we all enjoy.
That is Great Britain’s curse – to have been at the forefront of industrialisation, technological progress, innovation, and mainly peaceful colonisation that shared the just laws and moral values of the Enlightenment around the world in an era, today, where the past is denigrated and despised in favour of pagan earth-worship, superstition and cultural and racial guilt-trips. Indeed, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is already proposing ‘climate reparations’ to poorer countries like Pakistan.
The curse of Australia is to have fellow-traveller and climate carpet-bagger Chris ‘Blackouts’ Bowen as our Climate Change Minister at a time when we desperately need to be increasing our energy supplies and fossil fuel and uranium resources but instead are concentrating on madcap schemes like pushing water uphill and green hydrogen hubs.
Of course, like any ancient Egyptian cult, the climate change cult relies on scaring the living daylights out of anyone who dares question the orthodoxy. But forget ancient skeletons and mummies coming back to life from secret burial chambers, today’s climate warriors are much more adept at striking fear into the hearts of their loyal followers.
So we have Roger Hallam, the ‘founder’ of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and other fanatical groups, threatening that thanks to the inevitable social disruption caused by climate change in the future your sister and mother will be gang-raped in their own home before having their eyes poked out with a burnt stick.
Or you have UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres proclaiming that thanks to climate change we are in a global ‘suicide pact’ and we are all on ‘a road to hell with our foot on the accelerator’.
Take your pick which of these leaders is the most irresponsible.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/the-dummy/
**************************************************An Indigenous community in Ecuador fights to save its river from the greentransition fallout
What Clemente Grefa remembers most about his childhood are the sounds of the Piatúa River: the hum of insects, the chatter of children playing, the women whistling as they clean clothes, and the burble of water trickling.
“Living here has always been magnificent,” says Clemente, a 67-year-old Kichwa man who lives off the land. “We’ve been blessed with all the enchantments of the river.” The Piatúa, a tributary of the Amazon located in the Pastaza region of Ecuador, is thought to be millions of years old. It is one of the most biodiverse areas of the world; scientists believe it is home to many flora and fauna yet to be cataloged by academia. For the Kichwa Indigenous people of Piatúa, the river is sacred. It is a living being, with its own temperament, mood swings, and pulse. It is revered and feared, loved and protected.
Early one morning in 2018, while Clemente and his family gathered around the fire to drink their daily wayusa tea, they heard a crash. Upstream, a hydropower-dam company was blasting dynamite to clear the way for a $60 million project that if built would generate some 30 MW of electricity— but would also threaten the river’s ecosystem, and the lifestyle and cosmologies of the people who inhabit the area. Since 2014, the Ecuadorean electricity company Genefran S.A. has been approved by the Ministry of the Environment, Water, and Ecological Transition to build a hydro dam along the Piatúa River. Though the project is part of the government’s larger strategy to shift away from fossil fuels toward clean energy, the people of Piatúa don’t see it as a green endeavor. For them, the dam’s construction is an environmental death sentence: an estimated 90% of the river’s water volume would be lost, according to Yajaira Curipallo, who works for a governmental environment watchdog, and a potentially dangerous flood risk would be created at the nearby Jandiayacu River. “If they destroy the [Piatúa] river that gives us life,” says Clemente, “what will we be left with?”
For years, the people of Piatúa have resisted the dam. In 2018, when the initial construction began, Kichwa people took their case to the provincial courts. The judges granted the river partial protection, ruling the hydro dam could not be built until Genefran S.A. received consent from the Indigenous people. But in interviews, multiple river defenders reported receiving threatening phone calls and being told not to protest. Though they could not prove whom the calls came from, they say they feel the project is being pushed on them.
The people of Piatúa have not relented: while a date has not yet been set, they hope their case will soon be heard at the Constitutional Court, the country’s most powerful judicial body. It would be the first time a renewable- energy project is accused of violating the rights of nature as enshrined in Ecuador’s constitution. “This case could set a precedent worldwide for how we think about the impacts of renewables,” says Natalia Greene, a rights-of-nature expert and an executive committee member of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. But for the Indigenous communities, there is a bigger question at stake: Will their voices be heard in the green transition?
Ecuador made history in 2008 when it became the first country in the world to recognize, and legally protect, nature’s right to exist and thrive under its constitution. The goal was to incorporate Indigenous worldviews into the country’s legal system, and to reflect the belief that nature is alive and thus has value that can’t be accounted for in a capitalist market system. “When we’re talking about the rights of nature, we’re not just talking about protecting plants and animals, but about respecting nature’s cosmologies and its spiritual worlds,” says Greene.
Although Ecuador’s constitution states companies have to get prior free and informed consent from Indigenous communities before an infrastructure project begins, there is no clear definition of what consent entails. Oil and mining companies have exploited this legal loophole by withholding information about their activities when consulting with communities, in order to secure a few signatures of consent, and both Indigenous people and environmentalists have grown to expect this behavior from them. But these groups are disappointed to see renewable- energy companies increasingly taking advantage of the same loopholes.
Ecuador is not the only country grappling with this issue. Around the world, some clean- energy companies are being scrutinized for wreaking havoc on biodiversity, and perpetuating many of the same human- rights abuses as polluting industries, with Indigenous communities often paying the price. Experts say part of the challenge in holding these industries to account is that people are hesitant to critique the renewables sector over fears this may temper enthusiasm to move away from fossil fuels. But as Greene notes, “You cannot justify biodiversity loss and injustice on the basis that a project creates clean energy.”
https://blendle.com/i/time/arivers-day-in-court/bnl-time-20221028-adc72526286
**********************************************The UN takes on corporate greenwashing
Readers looking for thrills rarely turn to official reports written by groups of worthies. At first glance, one from a body soporifically named the UN HighLevel Expert Group on the NetZero Emissions Commitments of NonState Entities might be expected to cure insomnia. The team of experts, led by Catherine Mckenna, a former Canadian minister, has spent the past seven months poring over the proliferating climate commitments of banks and big businesses, as well as cities and regions.
Yawn? Not a bit of it. The group’s conclusions, presented to the un Secretary General on November 8th at the annual climate summit taking place in Egypt, made both ceos and activists sit up. In her opening letter, the refreshingly direct Ms Mc Kenna set the tone: “It’s time to draw a red line around greenwashing.”
Many companies are making bold promises to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases to zero. According to Accenture, a consultancy, around onethird of the world’s 2,000 biggest firms by revenue now have publicly stated netzero goals. Of those, however, 93% have no chance of achieving their targets without doing much more than they are at the moment. Few businesses lay out credible investment plans or specify milestones against which progress can be judged.
In order to curb such “dishonest climate accounting”, the report urges companies to make public disclosures of their progress towards decarbonisation using verified and comparable data. It implores regulators to make these disclosures mandatory. In addition, the authors say, firms should not claim to be netzero while investing in new fossilfuel supplies (which puts many investment funds in a bind) nor rely on reporting the intensity of emissions (per unit of output) rather than their absolute volume. And organisations making green claims must not simultaneously lobby against climate policies.
All very bracing, and perfectly sensible.
Will business take it to heart? The UN has no authority to enforce any of the recommendations. The idea that increased scrutiny will inevitably lead to better behaviour remains untested. It is all too easy to imagine that it might instead lead to what you might call greenhushing. A survey of some 1,200 big firms in 12 countries by South Pole, a climate consultancy, found that a quarter have set themselves stringent emissionreduction targets but do not intend to publicise them. Some companies are staying quiet to avoid attracting the ire of conservative politicians in places such as Texas, who decry “woke” corporations. Others, particularly in progressive redoubts like Europe, fear activist ire for not meeting targets quickly enough.
Many state entities are not helping— and not only because they shy away from policies with bite, such as carbon taxes. The day after Ms Mckenna set out her red lines, the American government launched a new scheme to spur large companies in rich countries to purchase carbon credits from developing countries that expand their renewablepowergeneration capacity. In theory, this could bring muchneeded capital to the urgent task of scaling up clean energy in emerging markets. In practice, worries Chris Cote of MSCI, a research firm, it will be hard to tell if a given project would have been financed even without inducements from deeppocketed multinationals. Without proper oversight, that could mean more greenwash, not less.
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/11/10/the-un-takes-on-corporate-greenwashing
***************************************11 November, 2022
Global carbon emissions will reach record levels this year
So much for all the policies that claim to lower it. Greenie policies are a total failure
Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels will reach a record high this year after the COVID-19 pandemic, with no sign of the deep reductions urgently needed to tackle global heating.
Preliminary data for 2022 shows a slight increase – about 1 per cent – in carbon emissions from fossil fuels relative to 2021, according to the Global Carbon Project, a network of dozens of researchers from around the world that has tracked carbon emissions for 16 years.
This projected growth brings global fossil CO2 emissions for 2022 slightly above the 2019 pre-pandemic levels.
This increase was primarily driven by the growth in oil consumption from the return of aviation following the COVID-19 lockdowns. If the current emission levels persist, there is a 50 per cent chance global warming of 1.5 degrees will be exceeded in nine years.
“The climate crisis requires crisis-like actions which I don’t see happening,” said Dr Pep Canadell, a CSIRO research scientist based in Australia and executive director of the Global Carbon Project. “It is a mistake to think that the energy transition will be a smooth transition.”
There is expected to be 40.2 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions from all human activity in 2022, which includes 36.6 gigatonnes of fossil CO2 emissions from coal, gas, oil and cement.
To get to zero emissions by 2050, which is the stated goal of many countries, including Australia, global emissions will need to decline by 1.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide each year, which is a similar amount to the fall in emissions seen in 2020 due to pandemic lockdowns.
Globally, during the pandemic, emissions declined about 5.5 per cent on 2019 levels because of COVID-19 measures. But in 2021, emissions rebounded about 5 per cent from the previous year.
Oil emissions – which represent about one third of global emissions – are projected to rise more than 2 per cent and dominate the global rise in fossil fuel carbon emissions.
Global gas emissions are projected to decline a tiny amount, due to the tightness of supply related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, while cement emissions are projected to decrease about 1.5 per cent due to the slowdown of construction in China.
As the graph below shows, globally there has been a small but uncertain decline in emissions from land use change – the way that humans modify the natural landscape. Indonesia, Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo contribute almost 60 per cent of global land use change emissions.
Global Carbon Project research does not include Australian-specific data, but government figures show our national greenhouse gas emissions were about 22 per cent lower in the year 2022 compared with 2005.
Professor Frank Jotzo, an expert on climate change from Australian National University, said Australia would need to cut about 16 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year over the next eight years to reach its new goal of reducing emissions 43 per cent by 2030.
But the electricity sector is the only industry where Australia has seen consistent and continuing decreases in greenhouse gas emissions in recent years, Professor Jotzo said.
“What’s driving that is a very substantial shift away from coal-fired [electricity] generation … made up for by increases in renewable energy, principally solar,” he said. “A lot needs to change in Australia’s emissions profile in order to achieve that 2030 target.”
Despite the negative impact of climate change, the land and carbon sinks continue to absorb about half of the world’s carbon emissions. But they have registered a 70 per cent loss of efficiency and 4 per cent, effectively. Oceans are less able to dissolve carbon dioxide when temperatures are higher.
The atmospheric level of CO2 is projected to average 417.2 ppm in 2022, 50 per cent above pre-industrial levels.
***********************************************************
Greenie rip-off in Egypt
Not since Howard Carter risked the curse of the Pharaohs to plunder the pyramids a hundred years ago this month at the Valley of the Kings has Egypt seen such a gang of thieves.
Only this time, forget the grave robbers, it’s the gravy train robbers who are pilfering the untold wealth of the West in the Valley of the Despots also known as the luxury climate change junket Cop 27 at Sharm el-Sheikh. As the Daily Mail reports, ‘World leaders and delegates jetting into Egypt for the Cop 27 climate conference will be able to dine out on £90 mushroom sauce covered beef medallions – and sip on fancy bottomless cocktails – while facing calls to cut down on meat consumption to save the planet. Those with a taste for the luxurious can snap up an Angus beef medallion with sautéed potatoes… after scoffing back a £43 seafood platter for starter.’
No wonder all the greatest and most powerful leaders of the climate cult are descending from far-flung cities, flying in by Lear Jet or luxury gas-guzzling yacht to lecture the rest of the world on how we should eat bugs and insects in order to reduce our emissions. Indeed, our Climate Change Minister has bravely gone to Egypt this week in search of riches beyond his wildest dreams. Mr Bowen, now known as the Nefertiti of Net Zero, the Ramses of Renewables, or the King Tut-tut of the nanny state, has returned Mummy-like from his dead career as a Rudd minister to plunder the hidden treasures of endless government renewables subsidies in order to save the planet. The poor old humble Aussie taxpayer will be defiled and desecrated and dragged into an afterlife of perpetual impoverishment.
Already the Australian delegation has insisted that the controversial issue of ‘loss and damage’ be added at the last minute to the agenda of the Sharm el-Sheikh conference as a gesture of solidarity for Pacific countries. Which translated means: Aussie taxpayers are going to hand over a king’s ransom to any lucky Pacific leader who sticks his hand out because apparently we ghastly Australians are to blame for their islands sinking under the waves even though, er, plenty of them are actually increasing in size as even the ABC admits.
When Howard Carter broke his way into Tutankhamen’s secret burial chamber in 1922 the wealth he discovered was estimated to be worth around $15 million. But that’s peanuts to the gold and rubies that Chris Bowen and his expedition intend to excavate from the coffers of the humble Aussie taxpayer. Australia owes an extra $2.6 billion to the UN’s $100 billion climate finance target, according to the luvvies. Australia has paid only 38 per cent of its fair share, apparently, ranking us third-worst country behind the US and Canada.
And in news that would have Carter spinning in his own grave, the eco-warriors are demanding that the United Kingdom pays up to £1 trillion in damages to the rest of the world for her role in ‘creating climate change’. You know, by inventing all the modern equipment, transportation, drugs, manufacturing, goods and products that have created the modern prosperity, good health and civilisation that we all enjoy.
That is Great Britain’s curse – to have been at the forefront of industrialisation, technological progress, innovation, and mainly peaceful colonisation that shared the just laws and moral values of the Enlightenment around the world in an era, today, where the past is denigrated and despised in favour of pagan earth-worship, superstition and cultural and racial guilt-trips. Indeed, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is already proposing ‘climate reparations’ to poorer countries like Pakistan.
The curse of Australia is to have fellow-traveller and climate carpet-bagger Chris ‘Blackouts’ Bowen as our Climate Change Minister at a time when we desperately need to be increasing our energy supplies and fossil fuel and uranium resources but instead are concentrating on madcap schemes like pushing water uphill and green hydrogen hubs.
Of course, like any ancient Egyptian cult, the climate change cult relies on scaring the living daylights out of anyone who dares question the orthodoxy. But forget ancient skeletons and mummies coming back to life from secret burial chambers, today’s climate warriors are much more adept at striking fear into the hearts of their loyal followers.
So we have Roger Hallam, the ‘founder’ of Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and other fanatical groups, threatening that thanks to the inevitable social disruption caused by climate change in the future your sister and mother will be gang-raped in their own home before having their eyes poked out with a burnt stick.
Or you have UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres proclaiming that thanks to climate change we are in a global ‘suicide pact’ and we are all on ‘a road to hell with our foot on the accelerator’.
Take your pick which of these leaders is the most irresponsible.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/the-dummy/
**************************************************An Indigenous community in Ecuador fights to save its river from the greentransition fallout
What Clemente Grefa remembers most about his childhood are the sounds of the Piatúa River: the hum of insects, the chatter of children playing, the women whistling as they clean clothes, and the burble of water trickling.
“Living here has always been magnificent,” says Clemente, a 67-year-old Kichwa man who lives off the land. “We’ve been blessed with all the enchantments of the river.” The Piatúa, a tributary of the Amazon located in the Pastaza region of Ecuador, is thought to be millions of years old. It is one of the most biodiverse areas of the world; scientists believe it is home to many flora and fauna yet to be cataloged by academia. For the Kichwa Indigenous people of Piatúa, the river is sacred. It is a living being, with its own temperament, mood swings, and pulse. It is revered and feared, loved and protected.
Early one morning in 2018, while Clemente and his family gathered around the fire to drink their daily wayusa tea, they heard a crash. Upstream, a hydropower-dam company was blasting dynamite to clear the way for a $60 million project that if built would generate some 30 MW of electricity— but would also threaten the river’s ecosystem, and the lifestyle and cosmologies of the people who inhabit the area. Since 2014, the Ecuadorean electricity company Genefran S.A. has been approved by the Ministry of the Environment, Water, and Ecological Transition to build a hydro dam along the Piatúa River. Though the project is part of the government’s larger strategy to shift away from fossil fuels toward clean energy, the people of Piatúa don’t see it as a green endeavor. For them, the dam’s construction is an environmental death sentence: an estimated 90% of the river’s water volume would be lost, according to Yajaira Curipallo, who works for a governmental environment watchdog, and a potentially dangerous flood risk would be created at the nearby Jandiayacu River. “If they destroy the [Piatúa] river that gives us life,” says Clemente, “what will we be left with?”
For years, the people of Piatúa have resisted the dam. In 2018, when the initial construction began, Kichwa people took their case to the provincial courts. The judges granted the river partial protection, ruling the hydro dam could not be built until Genefran S.A. received consent from the Indigenous people. But in interviews, multiple river defenders reported receiving threatening phone calls and being told not to protest. Though they could not prove whom the calls came from, they say they feel the project is being pushed on them.
The people of Piatúa have not relented: while a date has not yet been set, they hope their case will soon be heard at the Constitutional Court, the country’s most powerful judicial body. It would be the first time a renewable- energy project is accused of violating the rights of nature as enshrined in Ecuador’s constitution. “This case could set a precedent worldwide for how we think about the impacts of renewables,” says Natalia Greene, a rights-of-nature expert and an executive committee member of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature. But for the Indigenous communities, there is a bigger question at stake: Will their voices be heard in the green transition?
Ecuador made history in 2008 when it became the first country in the world to recognize, and legally protect, nature’s right to exist and thrive under its constitution. The goal was to incorporate Indigenous worldviews into the country’s legal system, and to reflect the belief that nature is alive and thus has value that can’t be accounted for in a capitalist market system. “When we’re talking about the rights of nature, we’re not just talking about protecting plants and animals, but about respecting nature’s cosmologies and its spiritual worlds,” says Greene.
Although Ecuador’s constitution states companies have to get prior free and informed consent from Indigenous communities before an infrastructure project begins, there is no clear definition of what consent entails. Oil and mining companies have exploited this legal loophole by withholding information about their activities when consulting with communities, in order to secure a few signatures of consent, and both Indigenous people and environmentalists have grown to expect this behavior from them. But these groups are disappointed to see renewable- energy companies increasingly taking advantage of the same loopholes.
Ecuador is not the only country grappling with this issue. Around the world, some clean- energy companies are being scrutinized for wreaking havoc on biodiversity, and perpetuating many of the same human- rights abuses as polluting industries, with Indigenous communities often paying the price. Experts say part of the challenge in holding these industries to account is that people are hesitant to critique the renewables sector over fears this may temper enthusiasm to move away from fossil fuels. But as Greene notes, “You cannot justify biodiversity loss and injustice on the basis that a project creates clean energy.”
https://blendle.com/i/time/arivers-day-in-court/bnl-time-20221028-adc72526286
**********************************************The UN takes on corporate greenwashing
Readers looking for thrills rarely turn to official reports written by groups of worthies. At first glance, one from a body soporifically named the UN HighLevel Expert Group on the NetZero Emissions Commitments of NonState Entities might be expected to cure insomnia. The team of experts, led by Catherine Mckenna, a former Canadian minister, has spent the past seven months poring over the proliferating climate commitments of banks and big businesses, as well as cities and regions.
Yawn? Not a bit of it. The group’s conclusions, presented to the un Secretary General on November 8th at the annual climate summit taking place in Egypt, made both ceos and activists sit up. In her opening letter, the refreshingly direct Ms Mc Kenna set the tone: “It’s time to draw a red line around greenwashing.”
Many companies are making bold promises to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases to zero. According to Accenture, a consultancy, around onethird of the world’s 2,000 biggest firms by revenue now have publicly stated netzero goals. Of those, however, 93% have no chance of achieving their targets without doing much more than they are at the moment. Few businesses lay out credible investment plans or specify milestones against which progress can be judged.
In order to curb such “dishonest climate accounting”, the report urges companies to make public disclosures of their progress towards decarbonisation using verified and comparable data. It implores regulators to make these disclosures mandatory. In addition, the authors say, firms should not claim to be netzero while investing in new fossilfuel supplies (which puts many investment funds in a bind) nor rely on reporting the intensity of emissions (per unit of output) rather than their absolute volume. And organisations making green claims must not simultaneously lobby against climate policies.
All very bracing, and perfectly sensible.
Will business take it to heart? The UN has no authority to enforce any of the recommendations. The idea that increased scrutiny will inevitably lead to better behaviour remains untested. It is all too easy to imagine that it might instead lead to what you might call greenhushing. A survey of some 1,200 big firms in 12 countries by South Pole, a climate consultancy, found that a quarter have set themselves stringent emissionreduction targets but do not intend to publicise them. Some companies are staying quiet to avoid attracting the ire of conservative politicians in places such as Texas, who decry “woke” corporations. Others, particularly in progressive redoubts like Europe, fear activist ire for not meeting targets quickly enough.
Many state entities are not helping— and not only because they shy away from policies with bite, such as carbon taxes. The day after Ms Mckenna set out her red lines, the American government launched a new scheme to spur large companies in rich countries to purchase carbon credits from developing countries that expand their renewablepowergeneration capacity. In theory, this could bring muchneeded capital to the urgent task of scaling up clean energy in emerging markets. In practice, worries Chris Cote of MSCI, a research firm, it will be hard to tell if a given project would have been financed even without inducements from deeppocketed multinationals. Without proper oversight, that could mean more greenwash, not less.
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/11/10/the-un-takes-on-corporate-greenwashing
***************************************11 November, 2022
Global news outlets ran headlines earlier this year that the Great Barrier Reef was suffering a sixth mass bleaching event, many with a picture from John Brewer Reef
Jennifer Marohasy
From The Guardian, by Graham Readfern, claiming John Brewer Reef as the centre of mass coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef,
‘More than half of the living coral cover that we can see from the air is severely bleached…’ CNN.com quotes an Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) coral biologist.
‘From the air’, we are told the state of the corals under the water. But what can anyone see of life under the water, from flying past in the air?
In my new film Bleached Colourful I show you the beauty and diversity that is Pixie Reef, and also John Brewer Reef, and also the corals fringing Heron Island from under the water. Pixie Reef and John Brewer Reef have been categorised as severely bleached and with major bleaching, respectively, based on aerial surveys. Based on fly-bys.
While John Brewer reef was reportedly suffering from major coral bleaching in March 2022, under the water many of the corals were popping pink. Photograph by Jennifer Marohasy.
When something is bleached, by definition it has lost its colour – by exposure to sunlight or, in the case of corals, by expelling their symbiotic algae.
To be clear, in early 2022, John Brewer reef was described as the centre of a sixth mass coral bleaching.
The map accompanying claims made by both Neil Cantin from AIMS and David Wachenfeld from GBRMPA that 90% of the Great Barrier Reef was badly bleached. No photographs or video from the flybys has been made available.
Yet when I went to see the corals at John Brewer reef, 40 nautical miles offshore from Townsville, and after I got in, and under the water, I was surprised to see so many of them pink. In fact, I had never seen a more beautiful coral reef, perhaps because I really like the colour pink.
My first three dives on 10th April were with underwater photographer Leonard Lim, and he took the most extraordinary photographs.
It is unusual to find pink corals at the Great Barrier Reef. Most corals, at reefs all around the world, are beige in colour. It is often the fish that really give a coral reef its colour and movement.
At John Brewer Reef early in 2022, the corals had changed colour. Many of them were now devoid of their symbiotic algae, yet they had become more colourful. They were bleached colourful!
This is not the only contradiction when it comes to the state of the Great Barrier Reef. Issues of coral cover and how to best survey the different habitats at the one reef are discussed in my new film, Bleached Colourful.
It was filmed and edited by Stuart Ireland who has more than 30 years diving Heron Island, Pixie Reef and more recently he has been documenting the state of the corals at John Brewer Reef.
The screening of Bleached Colourful will be in Perth on 1st December followed by a Q&A session. As well as answering questions, I will tell you about the corals that I saw during my most recent trip back to John Brewer reef that was just a couple of weeks ago.
The footage from that late October 2022 visit will be incorporated into a next cut of Bleached Colourful, that I hope to submit to a film festival next year, in 2023. So, the screening of this film in Perth on 1st December is very much a test screening, and I am going to be listening carefully to feedback from the audience.
Jen with the owner of Adrenalin Snorkel and Dive, Paul Crocombe just a couple of weeks ago at John Brewer reef that was reportedly at the centre of the most recent mass coral bleaching.
After the screening of Bleached Colourful that is still a work in progress, and the Q&A there will be intermission and then the chance to watch Finding Porites. That film first premiered in the Majestic Theatre at Pomona on World Ocean Day last year.
Finding Porites chronicles an adventure to Myrmidon Reef that is the most magical place with crystal clear waters, giant clams, and even bigger corals.
Remember Myrmidon! The coral reef that is beyond the Great Barrier Reef proper that I visited with Shaun, Rob, Dennis, Wizzy and, of course, Stuart filmed it all. That was back in late 2020.
This film, that also stars Peter Ridd, explains how The Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) once cored the massive Porites corals to report an annual growth rate for the entire Great Barrier Reef. AIMS haven’t reported on this since 2005, you can read more here.
Porites corals do have annual growth rings, like tree rings, and so they are time capsules of the ocean’s climate history, which is our climate history.
The oldest core dates to the year 1572, with 450 years of climate history.
*******************************************************
‘We’re not in a climate crisis’: David Frost joins think tank that disputes global heating
Former Brexit minister David Frost has joined a controversial think tank that denies global heating is a problem, declaring: “We’re not in a climate emergency.”
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) – founded by ex-Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson – has faced calls for it to be stripped of charitable status because of its policy stance.
But Lord Frost, a key figure on the Tory right, said the organisation provided an “objective view” of climate change, as he also suggested the drive for net zero is unachievable.
“One of the things we most need is open debate, full and frank debate,” the former Boris Johnson ally told the TV station GB News.
“The GWPF has been very good at promoting that, over a decade and more, given an objective view of what is going on – and I very much want to be a part of that.”
The backbencher also called for fracking to go ahead, after Rishi Sunak reimposed a ban, and said Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng “should have stuck to their guns” instead of U-turning on the disastrous mini-Budget.
“In my view we’re not in a climate emergency or a climate crisis in the very hysterical way some people want to suggest,” Lord Frost said.
The comments come amid criticism of Rishi Sunak for a “vacuum of leadership” over climate change, as his claim to be “at the forefront” of global efforts to avert disaster was ridiculed.
The prime minister initially refused to attend the Cop27 summit and the UK was criticised for being among 165 countries that have failed to beef-up promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr Sunak has also sent Alok Sharma, the respected Cop26 president, into exile, sacking from both his cabinet and his government.
The GWPF was launched in 2009 by Lord Lawson, who has called global heating a “non-existent problem” and “quasi-religious hysteria, based on ignorance”.
In the interview, Lord Frost said: “We do have a problem. And the way to tackle that is to adapt and to be serious about the kind of energy supplies we are trying to develop.
“But my worry is that we’re rushing this, trying to do too much too quickly – the technologies aren’t yet available and we’re running into problems.”
He pointed to the Ukraine war and added: “We are facing the prospects of, at least, severe strain on our energy supplies this winter.
“People are focusing on what really matters – which isn’t just carbon emissions, but will the lights stay on, do we have security of supply, and can we afford our energy?”
*******************************************
Wind lobby concedes its 'cheap-energy' pledge was a big mistake
Renewable-energy producers have long touted the promise of cheap electricity, an assurance that’s helped them eat into the dominance of fossil fuels. But the pledge has gone too far, according to the world’s biggest wind-turbine maker.
Manufacturers such as Vestas Wind Systems A/S are seeing losses pile up as orders collapse at a time when they should be capitalizing on the turmoil in natural-gas markets. To blame -- at least in part -- is the industry’s insistence that clean electricity can only get cheaper, according to Henrik Andersen, chief executive officer of the Danish wind giant.
Ford, GM in Talks With Posco Chemical on Battery Metal Hubs
US, Japan-Led Climate Pact Set to Offer Indonesia $15 Billion
Adani Green Profit Jumps as Power Demand Boosts Solar Output
“It made some people make the wrong assumption that energy and electricity should become free,” Andersen said in an interview in London. “We created the perception to some extent. So we are to blame for it. That was a mistake.”
While wind-power costs have steadily declined, to the point where many people concluded prices would eventually hit zero, technological advances can only go so far. Now the industry needs to charge more so that it can deliver the massive scale-up needed for countries to achieve ambitious climate goals.
Soaring commodity costs and supply-chain bottlenecks have wiped out profits for much of the wind industry this year. Vestas expects its profit margin to be around -5% in 2022.
“The output from the turbine has never been more valuable,” Andersen said. “But we are losing money in manufacturing a turbine.” Vestas has raised prices more than 30% in the past year to help stem losses.
To be sure, wind power remains competitive with other energy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up prices for fossil fuels. But government auctions for new wind farms put pressure on companies to keep prices low, while costly and lengthy processes to gain planning permission continue to inhibit growth.
Permitting in Europe is the “overriding biggest challenge,” Andersen said. While long-term targets for the electricity sector are set in the nations’ capitals, the actual approvals for individual projects are made on a local level in offices that are often understaffed and under-resourced.
“You have actually right now delegated your defense and energy policy furthest away from where it needs to be,” the CEO said. “You cannot run energy and defense policy in the municipalities.”
*******************************************
Net Zero? The hypocrisy of the religious clergy
It is a rootless age when 100 of the leaders of various Christian and other churches in Oceania can pen an open letter to Prime Minister Albanese demanding Australia stop ‘approving new coal and gas projects’.
This is not an area where they have any expertise, unlike morality. Whether from a practical or moral angle, this open letter is wrong.
Australia needs to produce more gas for its own use, and more gas and coal for the world’s use.
To deny that is to destroy any chance of a pivot to a low-carbon economy and to deny the role fossil fuels play outside the power grid, producing fertilisers, pharmaceuticals, plastics, and other necessities.
Ceasing the approval of new coal and gas projects would be a real death sentence on millions in the developing and developed world.
Take the practical first.
The official Australian Energy Markets Operator (AEMO) plan is for Australian power generation to transition from a mix that is currently 53 per cent coal, 19 per cent gas and 27 per cent renewable to 98 per cent renewable plus storage and gas backup.
Most of this under the federal government’s promises is to happen within the next 8 years.
How is this to work? Let’s look at exhibit one, the state of South Australia which is the furthest state along the road to decarbonisation, bar Tasmania, which is a one-off because of its extensive, and unique hydro capacity.
South Australia is 61 per cent renewable on average, and has been reported as high as 92 per cent for short periods of time, but if it weren’t for the gas-fired backbone, and interconnectors to Victoria, it wouldn’t function as a grid. Renewable energy is unreliable, so it requires grid-scale storage and/or flexible, on-demand back-up.
On the storage side, as far as the grid is concerned, batteries are almost entirely absent. Despite boasting the largest battery in the country at Hornsdale, SA only deploys about 0.75 per cent of its electricity from batteries according to the AEMO Data Dashboard.
The only currently viable form of larger-scale storage is pumped hydro. In 2019 there were four potential pumped hydro schemes in SA vying for ARENA funding of $40 million.
Now there is only one, a project at Baroota with a potential capacity of 250 MW (10 per cent of total state peak demand) and total discharge potential of 2 GWh (5 per cent of South Australia’s daily requirement). It was supposed to start construction in 2022, but as yet there is no sign of it, so perhaps it also has been shelved.
In the absence of pumped hydro, the only way of keeping the lights on in South Australia is gas, which currently supplies 38 per cent, the same amount it supplied in 2014-15, although it has been as high as 53 per cent in 2012-13 and 52 per cent in 2017-18.
It’s possible it could reduce further with the building of more renewables, but not by much without storage.
There are already so many renewables in the system that on days like Wednesday of this week when the sun is shining and the wind blowing, they can be 95 per cent of output.
In fact, that day there was actually more power being generated than the grid could use, so the price of electricity was negative at -$48.21 (14:14 GMT-10:00).
When power is so cheap you can’t give it away most of the time there would be no profit in building more of it.
These factors are recognised in the 2022 AEMO Integrated System Plan which projects a need for 10 GW of gas-peaking capacity in 2050 (p11) supplying overall around 2 per cent of energy demand (p38). In 30 years, the gas to fuel this capacity probably won’t come from any wells in existence today, it will come from new wells the government must approve.
So the clerics who demand the end of approvals to new gas projects want to sabotage the market operator’s thoughtful scheme to get to Net Zero. Because they know better, or because they know nothing? What is the morality behind this tinkering?
Australia also has a role to play in ensuring Europe doesn’t freeze to death because of the lack of Russian gas. Europe uses 400 billion cubic metres of gas per annum, of which Russia supplied approximately 160 bcm.
To replace Russian output to Europe we need to increase total internationally tradable production by 16 per cent. Australia, as the 5th largest exporter with 9 per cent of total volume, has a moral obligation to do more than its part because we have the scale to make a difference, along with the USA, Qatar, Norway, and Canada, the other big exporters. Otherwise, people will die from cold and starvation, and Europe will have to rely on activating mothballed coal-fired power plants, and burning forests, as it is now doing, to keep its citizens alive.
How many deaths do our churchmen want on their conscience? What is the point of their plea if it leads to increased emissions?
They might retort that climate change is killing people today, but the evidence is that many more lives rely on reliable energy for a prolonged life, and to deal with the challenges of climate, than any change in the climate currently threatens.
Does God value hypothetical lives in the future more than he values real lives in the present?
They also fail to take account of the other 50 per cent of oil and gas – the 50 per cent that goes to make plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilisers, and other useful substances like bitumen.
Without plastics to provide the lightweight components that reduce energy consumption the low carbon future is even more difficult. Without pharmaceuticals managing health becomes harder and life shorter. Famine in Sri Lanka shows exactly where absence of fertiliser leads. And without bitumen where will we drive our Teslas?
If churchmen and women want to make a statement about Net Zero, then let them start at home before lecturing the rest of us.
Most lead comfortable middle-class lives with tax-sheltered above-average incomes (an Anglican priest in Brisbane earns around $104,000 after tax, equivalent to $140,000 before tax). They have mostly working spouses, second cars, overseas sabbaticals, and often holiday homes.
As a consequence, their carbon footprint is much larger than the average.
Rather than signing open letters telling the government what to do, they should concentrate on their daytime job. The Bible has some good advice for situations like this.
‘And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me remove the speck from your eye”; and look, a plank is in your own eye?’ Matt: 7:4-5
Without a proper understanding of the practicalities, there is no way to make moral pronouncements. God might work in mysterious ways, but he only works within the physical world that he has made, and it has limitations.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/net-zero-the-hypocrisy-of-the-religious-clerisy/
***************************************10 November, 2022
UK: The eco-zealots' demands verge on the lunatic. The fact hardly anyone dares say so is the triumph of unreason
Until recently, political discourse in this country was usually conducted on a rational basis. There were sometimes bitter differences but even extremists made some sort of sense.
Just Stop Oil protesters, who yesterday again brought the M25 to a halt and caused injury to a policeman, are of an entirely different stamp. Their objectives verge on the lunatic, and their tactics are deeply anti-social.
Even if the Government wanted to cave into their demands — an instant moratorium on drilling for new gas and oil — it would be crazy to do so since the economy can only function at present if petrol is widely available, while some 25 million households depend on gas for heating and cooking.
As for the tactics of the activists, they go far beyond the inconvenience caused by trade union picketing in the 1970s. Patients being rushed to hospital are impeded, mourners on the way to funerals delayed. Thousands trying to go about their business are prevented from doing so.
Even the Greenham women, who demonstrated against nuclear missiles being deployed in Britain in the early 1980s, were not asking for the undeliverable — though I think history confirms that they were misguided — and their protests didn't mess up the lives of ordinary people.
This is something new, ugly and alarming. The protesters are fanatical and unreasoning in a way that is alien to our experience. They want a world without fossil fuels — instantly, not prudently achieved at some stage in the future — and are eager to force their priorities on the rest of us.
For an insight into their cockeyed thinking, I recommend looking at the video of Louise Harris, who was one of a number of activists who scaled the gantries over the M25 on Monday, causing miles of rush-hour queues for angry, helpless drivers.
Early in her tirade, Miss Harris (who, notwithstanding her frail grasp of reason, is a recent graduate of Cambridge University) started to cry. Because I don't like to see people upset, I briefly felt sorry for her.
But my sympathy swiftly receded as she warmed to her theme. She declared that she was perched on her gantry because she didn't 'have a future', which even by the hysterical standards of these protesters is obviously untrue. Of course she has a future, though some may wish it could be spent as far away as possible from these shores.
She invited us to direct our 'anger and hatred' at the Government, which she described as 'murderous', and then demanded an immediate end to new oil and gas exploration before making the preposterous assertion that 'Just Stop Oil offers the only chance of a future that we have left'.
In her frankly unhinged statements, Louise Harris seems typical of thousands of like-minded protesters. Many of them say they don't have a future — in effect that Armageddon is nigh. (Shades of 17th century religious zealotry here.) Theirs is the only way. The Government and big business are evil.
It seems never to occur to these deranged activists that the Government was elected, whereas they were not. They claim to be exercising their right to peaceful protest, but of course their actions aren't peaceful. They are coercive and disruptive. I fear it won't be long before someone dies.
The prescriptions offered by these eco-fanatics would, if adopted, lead to widespread poverty and the breakdown of society. We wouldn't be able to heat our homes, and the economy would collapse if oil were suddenly no longer available.
The success of the agitators is the triumph of unreason. Earlier this week, the charity War on Want, which I had previously thought sane, suggested that Britain give £1 trillion to poor nations affected by climate change in recognition of our contribution to greenhouse gases.
Never mind that since 1850 China and the United States have been responsible for vastly greater carbon emissions — and continue to be so, with Britain said to account for roughly 1 per cent of the global total.
One trillion pounds is appreciably more than the Government spends in an entire year. It is about 40 per cent of Gross Domestic Product. Even spread over many years, handing out such an enormous amount of money to supposedly victimised countries would impoverish millions of Britons.
In other words, it doesn't matter whether extremists are climbing gantries on the M25, or sitting behind desks in the offices of War on Want, their 'solution' to climate change is equally calamitous.
And yet almost no one dares say so. The danger exercising our rulers is not the one represented by the eco-maniacs with their grotesquely exaggerated accounts and shock tactics. The Government is preoccupied with the less concrete threat of climate change.
On the whole, the authorities have been remarkably relaxed about anti-social protests by extremists. It took the police months to take them seriously. Now they are beginning to do so, yet in their new officious mood they have arrested three journalists for doing their job.
It's no surprise to me that Work and Pensions Secretary Mel Stride should have said in an interview on Tuesday that Just Stop Oil protesters 'do have a point, in [a] sense'.
Maybe he meant they are right to be worried by climate change. But he didn't seize the opportunity to take issue with their hyperbolic language (e.g. the Government is 'murderous') or criticise their success in bringing the M25 and other motorways to a halt.
Meanwhile, at the Cop27 Climate Change conference in Egypt, officials have been lining up to deliver dire warnings calculated to make our flesh creep. These are dutifully handed down by the BBC and other media as Holy Writ.
On Monday, that anti-democratic horror show, President Sisi of Egypt, said the planet had 'become a world of suffering'. He could more honestly have thus described his own benighted country.
Antonio Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, declared that the world was on a 'highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator'. Countries must 'cooperate or perish'. Why can't these people speak in a more measured, and less hackneyed, way?
How I long for a statesman brave enough to say: 'Yes, we are taking climate change seriously. That is why we have set out plans to be carbon neutral by 2050. But we will not allow extremists to falsify the true position, or to terrorise ordinary people.'
For we mustn't think that what has happened on the M25 over recent days is a flash in the pan. It will manifest itself in other ways. Irrational forms of opposition will draw many followers, and there are lots of people sympathetic to the cause who won't quarrel with extreme tactics.
*******************************************************
UK cannot afford to pay climate change ‘reparations’, warns Boris Johnson
Former UK prime minister Boris Johnson on Monday said the UK did not have the financial resources to pay “reparations” to low-income countries affected by climate change.
Speaking at an event organised by the New York Times at COP27 in Egypt, Johnson said climate action had been “one of the most important collateral victims” of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and called for leaders not to give in to “energy blackmail”.
He said net zero would have to be achieved through investments from the private sector in partnership with the international community rather than through taxpayers in western countries.
“Per capita, people in the UK put a lot of carbon in the atmosphere,” Johnson said. “But what we cannot do I’m afraid is make up for that with some sort of reparations, we simply do not have the financial resources.”
https://www.ft.com/content/532e3c47-e4cc-4e37-bc4a-4810b76d4a4b?mc_cid=d2d8990a39&mc_eid=cc88839e92
**************************************************Australia: The voice of energy realism
The transition from coal is limited by the lowest level of renewable energy input to the grid on windless nights… Until that rises to meet the full demand, we had better keep all the coal and gas capacity that we have at present or be prepared to eat breakfast and dinner cold.
Reading literacy appears to be in decline – and that is causing concern – but spare a thought for the prevalence of ‘wind illiteracy’. This means a lack of awareness regarding the capability of wind supply, especially at the continental scale.
Wind illiteracy has enabled the biggest peacetime policy blunder in our history – connecting intermittent energy sources from sun and wind to the grid. That mistake has been compounded by subsidising these providers and mandating the use of the product.
The result is a mortal threat to the electricity supply which is the lifeblood of modern society since the horse and buggy days. At the very least the price of power will rise sharply, crippling energy-intensive industries, wrecking household budgets, and feeding inflation in every sector of the economy where electricity is an input.
The root of the problem is the combination of extensive and protracted wind droughts, the need for continuous input to the grid to match demand, and the lack of grid-scale storage to fill the gap in supply on windless nights.
Did anyone involved in planning the transition to intermittent wind and solar power think about the wind supply in the way that irrigation planners presumably pay attention to the water supply?
Did anyone call the Bureau of Meteorology or seek advice from some wind-literate person who might have warned them about the widespread wind-lulls that occur when high-pressure systems hover for a day or three, as they do, several times a year?
These are not the result of recent climate change. In the history of the Lameroo district in the Mallee of western Victoria:
‘A drought of a very different kind occurred in March and April of 1934. Because Lameroo sits above our underground water supply, windmills (wind pumps) were used to draw water to the surface for stock water and personal use. The period from mid-March to the end of April was almost completely windless; therefore no water. Farmers were soon desperate for stock water…’
Paul Miskelly accessed the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) records of the power delivered from wind farms attached to the grid. During the calendar year 2010 the total wind output across the entire grid fell rapidly to zero or near zero on 109 occasions in the year.
He showed that these droughts occurred when high-pressure systems fell over the area, these are visible in the weather maps that show the high and low-pressure systems that move from west to east across the continent.
He flagged the need for a fleet of fast-acting gas plants with enough capacity to match the installed wind capacity, on standby mode ‘to balance the wind’s mercurial behaviour’.
In 2010, there were only 23 wind farms with less than 2GW of installed capacity and it was anticipated that the supply would become more reliable as the number of sites increased. John Morgan reported that the situation was much the same in the 12-month period from Sep 2014 to Sept 2015 when the capacity of the wind fleet was approaching 4GW.
The problem persists with almost 9GW of installed wind capacity at present. Mike O’Ceirin, an independent analyst working with the Energy Realists of Australia, has an interactive site using the AEMO records.
The records can be interrogated to the depth and duration of all the wind droughts from 2010 to the latest serious episode which lasted over 40 hours through the 7th, 8th, and 9th of August.
People need to become wind-savvy and alert to the Achilles heel of the intermittent energy system, that is, the nights when the wind is low and there is next to no renewable energy input. During these periods, no amount of additional installed capacity will help until there is grid-scale storage to save the excess power generated on sunny afternoons.
Renewable energy promoters celebrate record high inputs like the wind just before the drought in August and the solar input for an hour in South Australia on the afternoon of October 16.
AEMO recently started to give out potentially misleading information (to the wind-illiterate user) on the data dashboard with a record of Renewable Penetration. (See the tab at the top of the page.) Admittedly, it is labelled ‘highlights’ but it could mislead the unwary casual viewer who doesn’t realise that the highs are useless as long as the lows persist. It is directly comparable to the fence around the cow paddock where the gate is always open or there are permanent gaps. Doh! The cows will get out regardless of the height of the fence.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/the-voice-of-energy-realism/
*****************************************************Sydney council warns residents against taking dangerous risks to charge EVs
A Sydney council has warned residents against running power cords onto the street to charge their electric cars.
It comes after several reports that residents had run hazardous extension cords from inside their homes out onto the street through trees and over public footpaths.
In one incident, a resident hooked a power cord through a tree over public land to charge their electric car.
Mosman Council was forced to issue a public warning urging residents to use the three publicly available fast charging stations in the suburb instead.
“Connecting power to a vehicle using this method is potentially unsafe to the public,” a Mosman council spokesman told The Daily Telegraph.
Sydneysiders took to social media to share their thoughts on the bizarre charging techniques.
“Still waiting eagerly for the first huge slip and trip injury claim against a council for allowing cables to be lying all over the footpaths,” they wrote.
Other commentators noted the lack of charging stations for electric vehicles throughout the city.
“Who would have thought … No infrastructure. But a race to get into overpriced throw away transportation … Now that’s moving forward,” one user wrote.
A NSW Fire and Rescue spokesman said failing to use an approved charging system would add increased fire risk to homes.
***************************************
9 November, 2022
Nitrous Oxide and Climate
Nitrous oxide (N20) has now joined carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) in the climate alarm proponents’ pantheon of anthropogenic “demon” gases. In their view, increasing concentrations of these molecules are leading to unusual and unprecedented warming and will, in turn, lead to catastrophic consequences for both our ecosystems and humanity.
Countries around the world are in the process of greatly reducing or eliminating the use of nitrogen fertilizers based on heretofore poorly understood properties of nitrous oxide. Reductions of N2O emissions are being proposed in Canada by 40 to 45 percent and in the Netherlands by up to 50 percent. Sri Lanka’s complete ban on fertilizer in 2021 led to the total collapse of their primarily agricultural economy.
To provide critically needed information on N2O, the CO2 Coalition has published an important and timely paper evaluating the warming effect of the gas and its role in the nitrogen cycle.
Armed with this vital information, policymakers can now proceed to make informed decisions about the costs and benefits of mandated reductions of this beneficial molecule.
See
https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Nitrous-Oxide-and-Climate.pdf
*********************************************************Climate change: Hidden emissions in liquid gas imports threaten targets
Europe's growing reliance on liquefied natural gas (LNG) is coming at a high environmental cost, new research shows. LNG imports have soared in the wake of the Ukraine war which has limited piped supplies from Russia.
Analysis, seen by the BBC, shows that the production and transport of LNG causes up to ten times the carbon emissions compared to pipeline gas.
In the UK and Europe, worries over energy supplies have seen an unprecedented uptick in imports of LNG, a liquefied version of natural gas.
Data shows that LNG cargo import volumes were up 65% in the first nine months of this year compared to 2021.
How Liquefied Natural Gas is made: 1: Natural gas is cleaned of impurities. 2: It becomes liquid after being cooled to approx -160C. 3: It is easier and safer to transport as a liquid (reduces volume of gas by 600 times)
But according to new analysis by Norwegian research firm Rystad Energy, shared with the BBC, the making and shipping of liquid natural gas is extremely energy intensive. To make it, fossil gas is cooled in giant fridges to -160C.
As the gas liquefies, it shrinks, and becomes six hundred times smaller, making it much easier to transport.
While the emissions from burning the gas are the same whether it's piped or in liquid form, the extra energy involved in making and transporting the liquid is significant.
"For piped gas from Norway, we see around 7kg of CO2 per barrel, but for LNG imports into Europe, we estimate the average is over 70, so around 10 times lower for piped gas versus LNG," said Patrick King from Rystad.
"By the end of next year, if Russia fully turns off the gas taps, and all that additional gas needs to come from LNG sources, we will see an additional 35 million tonnes of imported upstream CO2 emissions compared to 2021."
That extra CO2 is the equivalent of adding around 16 million cars to the UK's roads for two years.
For some observers, this rush for LNG is a triumph of short-term thinking.
"The real opportunity, out of a bad situation is to put incentives in place to reduce our gas usage," said Dr Paul Balcombe, from Queen Mary University of London. He wasn't involved in this new study, but has researched LNG emissions previously.
"We need to increase energy efficiency and our renewables deployment. Rather than just looking at the really, really short-term replacement, which is LNG, we need to look at the slightly longer term, which will have way better cost implications, financial and environmental."
Environmental campaigners are worried that the current embrace of extra LNG may not be a one off. While none are currently planned for the UK, there are plans for the installation of around 20 new LNG terminals on the European continent.
"It's really scary to be honest," said Eilidh Robb, who is with Friends of the Earth Europe.
"The challenge is that to make these terminals economically viable, countries have to agree to very long contracts to bring in the gas and the terminals themselves can last up to 40 years, which means a very long lock-in effect for these fossil fuels that we are trying to get out of."
One other problem with these imports is their origin. According to Rystad, around 16% of the liquid is coming from Russia.
In buying this gas from Russia, the UK and Europe are not just helping to fund the invasion of Ukraine, but they're also making it more difficult to win the war against climate change.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63457377
********************************************************Greta and her green-communism
Many breathed a sigh of relief when Greta Thunberg announced she was not going to attend COP 27 Climate Change meeting which is now underway at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. The COP process is a ‘greenwashing scam’, she explained.
It seemed that the girl, although not even having reached the age of 20, had already emerged from the catharsis of teenage simplistic idealism. Was she having doubts about promoting a goal of dubious worth at a cost that is unknown but without a scientific breakthrough is incalculably high? Seemingly so, and that corroborated the notion that at a coming of age (historically at 21), she reached a maturity society expects of each emerging generation to take balanced judgments sufficient enough to have voting rights.
Alas, this proved to be too sanguine as Greta’s true position emerged.
First, she announced that her foundation was to finance several like-minded people to attend the jamboree in Egypt, an act which rather undermines her declaration about the worth of the meeting.
Secondly, she released her new book which is a compendium of about a hundred of the world’s most radical left-wing writers. In announcing the book, she declared ‘normal’ was already a crisis and continued:
‘What we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on the exploitation of people and the planet. It is a system defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression, and genocide by the so-called global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.’
Her stated goal is to overthrow ‘the whole capitalist system’, which she says is responsible for ‘imperialism, oppression, genocide and racist, oppressive extractionism’. There is no likelihood that she is hitting the hammer on the nail by using oppressive extractionism to describe the use of African child labour to mine for cobalt and other materials vital for the ‘energy transition’ to renewables.
She is ranting against the system which, while creating many billionaires, has trebled the average living standards across the globe since 1950. And, far from being a north-south divide, we see those countries formerly defined as being the heartland of the oppressed, colonised, and exploited ‘South’ – India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China – growing much faster than the countries defined as the ‘North’. Indeed, former ‘South’ countries: Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea (not to mention Middle East oil states) now have living standards at least comparable to those for the majority of countries defined as being ‘North’.
Greta Thunberg is deluded by apocalyptic preachings and canalized via an extreme form of climate alarmism into a revolutionary whose ideology seeks to the overthrow of the system of governance and the global economic principles without which we would live in severe discomfort if not abject poverty. But many see insights and a forward program in her statements while irrational climate fear is prevalent among western nations’ youth.
20th century mass movement for Peace and Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament, like the modern green movement, included many malcontents seeking radical transformations of the economy. They too were fueled by slogans like Net Zero! Stop Coal! Solar not Nuclear! – slogans that were unaccompanied by realistic plan to accomplish the stated goals in a way that is in any sense affordable. For Australia to achieve Net Zero for electricity alone, in addition to the outlays for wind/solar and the quadrupling of transmission costs, would require 25 Snowy 2.0’s. That’s the equivalent in terms of battery costs of three times today’s annual Gross Domestic Product; this is for a system that would be immeasurably less reliable than the one we are being urged to discard.
However, aside from revolutionary communism, 20th century mass movements did not have leadership cadres including billionaires like George Soros, the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, and perhaps the UN’s Secretary General Antonio Guterres as well as Greta Thunberg, who openly promote replacing the system that has underpinned the present period of unprecedented global affluence.
Although the Climate Change movement, with its green energy solution, has similarities to the revolutionary ideals of socialism in seeking to replace the market system, it has some fundamental differences. The socialism of yesteryear was designed to replace what was deemed to be an anarchic system of production said to be accompanied by great waste because it depended upon private property and a market system that failed to orchestrate the disparate views of individuals and the different production potentialities.
20th century socialism was envisaged and sold as a means of making those states adopting it richer and more egalitarian. Yesteryear’s promoters of revolutionary communism and socialism, once in power, spectacularly failed to achieve these goals in the 20th century and, in attempting to avoid the failures, brought unprecedented curtailment of individual liberties.
Woke greens seek to use those same mechanisms of socialism, not to grow economies but to achieve other, less materialistic, targets. Adopting central planning and regulatory measures is a proven route to making us all poorer – and this is a goal of the more radical elements within the Net Zero movement and one that is regarded, at least in principle, as acceptable collateral damage by the movement at large.
At least by the standards and goals of the green leadership, greening of energy systems would not be considered a policy failure if it is accompanied by a marked reduction in living standards. This is unlikely to be the view of those who unthinkingly are attracted to their broad goals. Many of the supporters of forcing the replacement of coal and gas by wind/solar, attracted to superficialities, like the sun-and-wind-are-free, accept claims that renewable power is cheaper than that from fossil fuels.
Experience proves otherwise…
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/greta-and-her-green-communism/
************************************************The evidence is not ‘in’
The attack on fossil fuels has brought us closer to a dystopian world where fuel is a scarce and valuable currency.
It has been a spectacularly successful campaign to effectively brainwash people (those who were/are susceptible) into believing the premise that the planet was warming dangerously – because we were burning fossil fuels to generate our energy. The fear this scenario generated fuelled the campaign.
The scenario has been funnelled through what appeared to be credible scientific processes. Like the IPCC, whose scientific-looking front hides a politically driven engine room.
(November 14, 2010: Ottmar Edenhofer, then co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, is quoted by the Zuricher Zeitung: ‘Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.’)
Created with the objective of generating fear (with help from self-interest driven high priests like Al Gore), it is also the body that ‘keeps us safe’ from the danger, by urging limits on our fossil fuel burning. The ‘evidence’ used is modelling: the dark art that has been discredited for models being wrong every single time.
The tsunami of often dicey scientific data (eg Michael Mann’s widely criticised hockey stick graph, East Anglia ‘ClimateGate’ scandal, Australia’s temperature record ‘homogenised’ by BOM) was so successful that the fear of emissions has been absorbed. It is now accepted as fact. Nobody bothers to scrutinise the claims, check the data. Ask for evidence that our fossil fuel emissions drive global warming. They don’t. The evidence that they don’t is overwhelming and can be easily found in the geologist’s handbook. But nobody bothers to look.
The claim that man-made emissions are threatening the planet’s very existence – we have about 8 years left, apparently – is extraordinary. There is certainly no evidence for anything of the sort. As the late and great Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence…
Instead of evidence, the climate scenario relies solely on generating fear. The media has been seduced by this ‘movement’ partly because it is such easy drama copy. ‘The end is nigh’ is a better seller than ‘The end is not nigh’. Of course now, three decades later, the big drama story would be that it has all been a. ‘Climate change is a hoax’.
But my point in this article is not about climate change but about the need for evidence. Beware the risks that come from politicians promising to keep us safe. Keep us safe from global warming by banning fossil fuel emissions. Keep us safe from Covid death by banning everything we hold dear. Keeping us safe from Covid was a strategy taken straight out of the climate playbook: minimal evidence, lots of scary messaging. Like closing schools, not to really protect the children but to send a message, for example. ‘Keeping you safe’ is the mantra that could answer any probing question and shield our politicians’ bad policies from scrutiny.
It is my sad task to put much of the blame on the many journalists who have allowed partisanship to blind them to their professional responsibilities. That is, to ask questions – good probing questions. On the subject of climate policies, I don’t recallever seeing or hearing a question seeking evidence that led to a policy decision. It has just been taken for granted that the alarmist claims are valid. They’re not.
During the peak Covid years, evidence underpinning the ‘health advice’ – that drove those crazy, undemocratic orders, mandates, police brutality and lockdowns – is still in secret folders somewhere, hidden from scrutiny. Remember the daily feast of assertions about risks that are now revealed as having been false, whereas it was the decisions made that posed the real danger. Now, we see the extent of the catastrophe caused, and are seeking answers.
Imagine the catastrophe – or catastrophes – that could arise due to our failure to demand evidence for the dangerous climate change scenario. Many people, including it seems our politicians, think that such evidence has been provided: ‘the science is settled’.
In the nine years researching the subject, the one thing that I have consistently come across is the opposite of that sentiment: the deep uncertainty among scientists about how our climate works. It is a vastly complex phenomenon with multiple moving parts, impervious to modelling. Yet it is modelling that has been used as ‘evidence’ to forecast the warming that will extinguish entire species. But if we keep asking the great Greta how to save the world from species-killing ‘climate change’, we can’t expect anything but hot air.
Had we insisted on scientific evidence to show how CO2 drives warming, we would have heard from geologists that natural variability – warming and cooling, ice age/no ice age – has occurred for millennia? Carbon dioxide, we would have been relieved to discover, does not drive warming, much less man-made carbon dioxide, a mere trace gas in the atmosphere. Climate alarm would never have taken hold. Children would not be crying from fear of a fried planet.
Evidence found through the scientific method is in short supply. We really must insist on politicians refraining from making assertions that cannot be supported by evidence. Dear colleagues in the media: please always ask for it. Don’t wait until a catastrophe forces us to look in the rear-view mirror in regret. Like with Covid.
Perhaps we are seeing the beginning one such major catastrophe as climate change alarmism meets war in Ukraine. The war threatens food supplies, misguided climate-fear-driven energy policies have created fuel shortages … and you can bet it will all be Putin’s fault that millions starve or freeze to death. If only our leaders had been sceptical of alarmist claims and insisted on evidence.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/the-evidence-is-not-in/
***************************************8 November, 2022
Anticipating Senate majority, Republicans warn ESG law firms to ‘preserve relevant documents’ of ‘collusive effort’ to restrict American energy production in violation of antitrust
By Robert Romano
“Over the coming months and years, Congress will increasingly use its oversight powers to scrutinize the institutionalized antitrust violations being committed in the name of ESG, and refer those violations to the [Federal Trade Commission] FTC and the Department of Justice.”
That was Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), anticipating an imminent Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate on Nov. 8, in a letter co-signed by Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), being sent to 51 law firms whose clients utilize Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investment initiatives to attract so-called woke and green capital by emphasizing climate sustainability goals in an anticompetitive manner to artificially restrict investment into carbon-based energies including coal and oil in violation of federal antitrust laws.
The Senators alleged these firms and their clients are engaged in a “collusive effort to restrict the supply of coal, oil, and gas, which is driving up energy costs across the globe and empowering America’s adversaries abroad.”
Sen. Cotton and company warned the 51 law firms to preserve any and all records in anticipation of House and Senate oversight and subpoenas should Republicans reclaim majorities: “To the extent that your firm continues to advise clients regarding participation in ESG initiatives, both you and those clients should take care to preserve relevant documents in anticipation of those investigations.”
ESG investing has increased dramatically in the past two decades via private retirement funds regulated under the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) thanks to a regulation by the Obama Labor Department in 2015 allowing ESG investments into tax-exempt retirement savings accounts, and also by individually directed tax-free retirement accounts. A 2020 regulation by the Trump administration to water that down was promptly overturned by the Biden Administration.
In addition, the $762 billion federal Thrift Savings Plan (TSP) for federal employee retirees began investing in ESG funds in 2022, following state government employee retirement funds in California, New York, Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland and Oregon.
As a result, ESG is said to be worth $41 trillion this year globally, and $50 trillion by 2025, about one-third of all assets under management, according to Bloomberg.
U.S. corporations appear to be all in on BlackRock’s investing scam, with a recent KPMG survey finding 82 percent of U.S. corporations are touting ESG sustainability goals in their corporate filings. I’d add, even though doing so by no means guarantees inclusion in hedge funds’ ESG funds like BlackRock, Vanguard, etc.
In other words, ESG investing is so successful in shifting companies to the stakeholder capitalism model that companies are adopting ESG goals of their own accord — in mere hopes of getting some that investment money by virtue signaling — without necessarily even boosting their companies’ capitalization.
ExxonMobil, the largest producer in the U.S., announced that it would produce about 3.7 million barrels of oil a day — about 18 percent of all U.S. consumption — from its facilities throughout the world, a level which would remain relatively unchanged through 2025. This year, the estimate for 2022 was up slightly to 3.8 million barrels a day, only expected to rise to 4.2 million barrels a day by 2027.
Chevron, the second largest U.S.-based producer, it currently produces about 3 million barrels a day, expected to rise by just 500,000 barrels per day by 2025 to 3.5 million barrels per day.
To lock in the cartel’s purposeful production slowdown — which artificially drives up prices — BlackRock has placed green activists onto the board of Exxon. Other hedge funds like Vanguard also make significant ESG investments.
In his annual shareholder letter to investors Fink said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the supply crisis and the inflation would all lead to even more green energy in the future: “Longer-term, I believe that recent events will actually accelerate the shift toward greener sources of energy in many parts of the world.” Particularly, the inflation of carbon-based energy would make green energy more price competitive: “Higher energy prices will also meaningfully reduce the green premium for clean technologies and enable renewables, EVs and other clean technologies to be much more competitive economically,” Fink said.
In other words, the inflation we’re all experiencing right now is the point in order to drive more green investment and bring about the zero-carbon future — all at the expense of domestic energy production in what could be the worst winter in decades as the world runs short of natural gas and fuel oil for heat.
And Senate Republicans have noticed, including Cotton and Grassley, the latter of whom will once again be Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee should Republicans pick up a net one seat in the Senate on Nov. 8 in Nevada, Georgia, Arizona or New Hampshire while holding seats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and elsewhere.
The Senate letter comes after a group of 19 Republican Attorneys General led by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson have threatened the $10 trillion hedge fund BlackRock with antitrust legal action in an Aug. 4 letter to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink accusing the company of “intentionally restrain[ing] and harm[ing] the competitiveness of the energy markets” with its market dominance of retirement investments.
Brnovich and Peterson added, “coordinated conduct with other financial institutions to impose net-zero [carbon emissions by 2050] … raises antitrust concerns. Group boycotts, restraining trade, or concerted refusals to deal, ‘clearly run afoul of’ Section 1 of the Sherman Act [according to the Supreme Court]. Section 1 prohibits ‘[e]very … combination … , or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce.’ Regarding the definition of a ‘combination,’ the Supreme Court has held that this language prohibits ‘concerted action.’”
The fight against ESG is now being waged on multiple fronts. With anticipated House and Senate majorities, and state Republican Attorneys General on the case, Republicans here are strongly signaling they finally intend to rein in ESG’s stranglehold on American energy production, but it will not be easy. In addition to the 2015 Labor Department regulation for employer-based retiree plans and federal and state retiree investments, tax-free individual retirement accounts make up the bulk of investments.
To turn off the spigots, a GOP Congress and Republican-led states will have to be willing to address all of the government incentives, regulation-based, tax-based or otherwise — even and especially if they irk Wall Street — that are restricting American energy production when prices are rising and we need to boost our long term supply — before it’s too late.
**************************************************************
Green zealots are threatening real conservation
MATT RIDLEY
Environmentalists are increasingly finding themselves at odds with conservationists. Last week the head of the National Grid said the planning process will need to change because net zero requires the building of many new lines of pylons across the country. People in East Anglia are objecting to 110 miles of pylons scarring rural landscapes and ancient woodland to connect North Sea wind farms to the grid.
“We had to destroy the village to save it,” a probably apocryphal American general said in Vietnam. It is now clear that we are destroying the planet to save it from climate change. Many of the policies being pursued in the service of decarbonisation are not just economically damaging, but ecologically harmful too.
Wind farms kill hundreds of birds every year; so do cats, but these are rare species like golden eagles on land and red-throated divers offshore. They also kill bats by the thousand. If you or I killed an eagle or a bat we would go to jail. They spoil landscapes and require vast quantities of steel, concrete and rare earth metals, the mining of which is a source of pollution.
Then there’s the burning of wood by Drax power station in Yorkshire to generate electricity. Not only does wood produce more emissions than coal per unit of energy, this reverses a centuries-long trend of moving away from stealing the lunch of beetles and woodpeckers for our energy needs (nothing eats coal or gas). Much of Drax’s wood is imported from North Carolina because we don’t grow nearly enough timber in Britain. There, locals are horrified by the devastation to their woods. Yet it’s subsidised by you.
All over Wales, Scotland and northern England biodiversity-rich hills are disappearing under ecologically sterile monocultures of alien Sitka spruce thanks to government incentives to plant more trees to soak up carbon dioxide. Not only do grasslands and blanket bogs on moorland soak up CO2 almost as well, and sometimes better, they also hold back flood water and support rare birds like curlews.
In the south more and more fields are covered in futile solar “farms”, generating trickles of power when least needed – mostly on June afternoons. Sheep graze on the grass that grows under them, say their fans. Er, grass needs sunlight: the panels cut down the productivity of the land by around 90 per cent. They also displace food crops to other land elsewhere at the expense of natural habitats.
Biofuels, grown instead of food, put upward pressure on food prices and on the amount of land we need to grow food, while saving little or no emissions. On my local river, a new hydro plant generates a tiny quantity of power but threatens the migration of salmon smolts. The refusal to incinerate trash has led to it being fly-tipped in the countryside, or shipped to Asia for “recycling”, where it gets dumped in rivers or the sea. And don’t forget the diesel scandal, a worsening of urban air pollution as a direct result of a policy to reduce CO2 emissions by subsidising diesel cars.
Money available to save the red squirrel, the white clawed crayfish, or the water vole, is negligible; it all goes on decarbonisation. I once asked an ecological consultant why Natural England appeared to have lost interest in improving plant biodiversity on moorland. “You don’t understand,” she replied: “Carbon emissions are the only thing that count now.”
Climate change has become a convenient excuse for doing nothing about real conservation problem.
Where’s the outrage from environmentalists about the rape of the planet by the lucrative crony capitalists in the renewable industry? Silence. Real conservation can go hang, so long as we are seen to fight climate change.
*******************************************
You can have green or growth -- but not both
Just think of all the important world leaders that Rishi Sunak could persuade to join the UK in the great “net zero carbon” campaign when the British PM makes the trip this week that he originally said he didn’t have time for: to the Cop 27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. The leaders of China and India, whose combined refusal at the Cop26 meeting in Glasgow to agree any date for abandoning coal use reduced Alok Sharma, the British president of the event, to tears; the leader of the world’s second-largest exporter of coal, Australia; the leader of Canada, where oil production has reached record levels of more than five million barrels a day; the leader of Russia, the planet’s biggest exporter of hydrocarbons.
Except not one of those countries’ leaders will be present. Admittedly President Putin is too busy terrorising and murdering Ukrainians to find time. But Messrs Xi, Modi, Albanese and Trudeau also have more pressing engagements in their diaries. A chap might be forgiven for wondering if they are less than fully committed to playing their part in the great cause, and don’t want to be publicly lectured on the matter by Greta Thunberg.
Though it turns out that the world’s most feted environmentalist isn’t attending either, having denounced the whole process as “greenwashing”. However, Ms Thunberg did show up last week in London to promote the latest publication bearing her name: The Climate Book. She took the opportunity to explain to her adoring audience that “the climate crisis has its roots in racist, oppressive extractivism”.
This will come as a bit of a blow to the European car industry, which under the orders of governments notionally committed to the same cause as Thunberg is switching from the internal combustion engine to power from batteries. Not that such power is inherently green: in China, for example, those electric cars will, in effect, be vehicles powered by coal. But if it’s “oppressive extractivism” you are bothered about, let me introduce you to the miners — many of them children — of the Democratic Republic of Congo, holder of the bulk of the world’s known reserves of cobalt, used in the batteries that power most electric vehicles.
In fairness to Thunberg, she doesn’t think we should be driving any sort of vehicle at all: her vision of life in accord with our moral duty “to the planet” is a kind of reversion to the Garden of Eden, or perhaps something akin to the way the Amish live. Funnily enough, she does somewhat resemble a member of that fundamentalist religious movement.
But she, at least, does not delude herself that it is possible to become more productive — the source of all economic progress and prosperity — while “going green”. At the heart of the transformation of mankind’s prospects over centuries is the growing efficiency with which energy is produced. What Thunberg denounced as “extractivism” is the very process that has done most to lift the world’s inhabitants out of abject poverty. The more of our resources required to generate energy, the more that progress is reversed.
So, for example, according to the late Professor Sir David MacKay, who was chief scientific adviser to the British government’s energy department, if you wanted onshore wind power to meet all our domestic energy requirements, it would be necessary to cover half the land mass of the British Isles with turbines.
Only, as he also pointed out, the laws of physics would stop this working even if any government were crazy enough to attempt it. Wind power is inherently unreliable, because it is unpredictably intermittent. And it cannot feasibly be stored. Therefore, the more a country is reliant on wind power, simultaneously the more it requires gas, as that is the most flexible backup fuel. In the past it would have been coal, which can be stored easily and at almost zero cost.
Now look at Germany, whose Energiewende policy trailblazed the switch from fossil fuels to wind power. On one day in 2019 wind power supplied almost 60 per cent of the country’s demand; on another day it could muster only 2.6 per cent. Cheap Russian gas seemed to be the ideal backup, but then ... well, you know the rest. Result: the German government has just authorised the removal of a wind farm that sits over untapped coal reserves, which the country now desperately needs to keep its industry going (and voters warm). RWE, which owns both the wind farm and the coalmine, explained: “We realise this comes across as paradoxical. But that is how matters stand.”
Matters, however, are not standing but developing apace — and most unfavourably for Europe’s leading economy. America enjoys, through the development of vast reserves by the process known as “hydraulic fracturing”, gas prices about a fifth of those in Europe. So some of Germany’s industries have now gone west: literally. Ten days ago the country’s biggest chemicals company, BASF, said it would have to downsize “permanently” in Europe.
And what of our country, home to deliciously taxable onshore gas reserves that, even if only 10 per cent were recoverable, could provide 50 years of domestic demand at the present rate? For purely political reasons Rishi Sunak reversed Liz Truss’s decision to lift the moratorium on UK shale gas production, though last week a group of Conservative policymakers advocated lifting a similar block on new onshore wind. When you consider that to generate the same amount of energy over 20-25 years as a five-acre, ten-well shale gas site you would need a wind farm 725 times the size, you see just how politics conquers reason (and indeed the landscape) in UK energy strategy.
Our likely next government has set out a “green growth” plan hatched by its former leader — now shadow climate change secretary — Ed Miliband. He declared at the Labour Party conference six weeks ago that his plan would “make Britain the first country in the world to achieve the target of zero carbon power”. Not just “net zero”, but no carbon-based energy at all. Blackouts, here we come. Or, to put it another way, it’ll be green but there will be no growth. On the contrary.
No one seemed to pay attention to Gary Smith, leader of the GMB (the union whose large donation to party funds was cancelled out, in effect, by one from a renewable energy firm): “What’s your message to workers in the vital chemicals manufacturing sector who depend on imported fracked gas as feedstock for the industry?” He also urged Labour to stop bowing to the “bourgeois environmental lobby”.
Too late: that’s taken over policy across Europe. It’s only the rest of the world that understands what makes economies grow.
********************************************
Climate scepticism is rising across the globe'
A HUGE international survey measuring public concern about the threat of climate change appears to indicate growing scepticism across the globe.
The Gallup Risk Poll, which questioned 125,000 people in 121 countries, reported that less than half of those surveyed saw anthropogenic climate change as a very serious threat. There is now, it appears, a consensus of sceptics.
The most sceptical countries in the survey were China, where only 20 per cent view climate change as a clear and present danger, the Middle East and North Africa (27 per cent) and South East Asia (39 per cent). At the other end of the spectrum was the US, where ‘climate change awareness’ has grown, albeit slightly, since the survey was last undertaken.
To see the results, click on this link. From there, go to Report 1: A changed world. Perceptions and experiences of risk in the Covid age. You will then be able to access the survey results for every country in the report. One of the questions on Page 1 relates to perceptions of the risk of climate change.
The results have been collated by region, compared with the previous report, and are summarised in this syndicated article.
The overall survey result represented a 1.5 per cent drop in belief in climate change as a very serious threat. In a year of often hysterical headlines and saturation coverage of devastating floods, hurricanes and wildfires – and in the UK at least, spontaneously combusting houses and hedgerows, all blamed squarely on humans and their wicked fossil fuel ways – this is surely a significant outcome.
There are signs too that growing public questioning of the orthodox narrative may be starting to influence governments. The survey comes soon after the Swedish government declared it was scrapping its Environment Ministry and throwing its weight behind nuclear energy.
Sweden is not alone: Japan has fallen back in love with nuclear too after a ten-year hiatus induced by the Fukushima earthquake crisis, as has even Germany to some extent. In the UK, the government is expected to grant up to 130 new North Sea oil and gas licences and has, via Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has been critical of climate alarmism in the past, initiated a review of the whole Net Zero project.
The most obvious cause of all this is the focusing of minds and reordering of priorities precipitated by the war in Ukraine and ensuing energy crisis. With the looming possibility of being unable to heat your home or to cook, a more quizzical attitude quickly evolves.
Even the faith of the usually implacable green super-elite has been shaken. Greta Thunberg, no less, has distanced herself from the most diehard of her fans by acknowledging, in a ‘say it ain’t so’ interview, that under present circumstances nuclear power may have a place in the future energy mix of Germany.
But could there be a bit more to it than simply panicky self-interest? Climate change sceptical voices have been growing in confidence and becoming organised for some time now.
In September 2019, the European Climate Declaration (now the World Climate Declaration) was presented to challenge the orthodox apocalyptic narrative. It now has 1,400 signatures and is led by Nobel Laureate Ivar Giaever. And in Italy in January, four leading scientists produced a major study which concluded that the ‘climate crisis’ was not supported by evidence.
There may also be a spillover from the after-effects of the last two and half years of Covid-induced fearmongering. Growing suspicion of the relationship between Big Government and Big Pharma – witness the recently-launched official investigation into the EU’s vaccine procurement – could mirror similar disquiet of the ties between politicians and the green economy.
And Professor Neil Ferguson may have done climate sceptics a huge favour by permanently discrediting the use of computer-based modelling informing government policy, as exemplified by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Inconvenient truths have also played their part in stalling the green juggernaut, causing great difficulty for its media outriders. Even the avowedly climate-orthodox BBC had to admit, albeit at the very end of a long article, that the Sri Lankan government’s attempt to ban fertilisers had been the cause of a calamitous economic and food crisis.
Likewise, it has been hard to put a positive spin on the Dutch government’s plan to expropriate farms in a bid to reduce nitrogen emissions, which has met fierce resistance.
Signs of growing public dissent were seen when Sky’s Daily Climate Show was moved from its prime-time slot and reduced from 30 minutes to just ten. Sky had to admit that according to its own research, two-thirds of Brits don’t think climate change affects them and a quarter were unwilling to change a single habit to ‘save the planet’.
Over on the BBC, the previously untouchable David Attenborough has been criticised for overdoing the catastrophism and for basic factual inaccuracies in his recent wildlife documentaries.
One last factor is simple disgust. We may also have reached a tipping point in our tolerance of extreme climate activists. The death of two women caught up in a Just Stop Oil protest in London was as tragic as it was wearily predictable. The public patience at the infantile and dangerous antics of conspicuously privileged and idelologically possessed activists may have been exhausted.
If one good thing ever comes out of the last two and a half years, it is a return of healthy scepticism in the face of a relentless monotonous government/media barrage pushing one narrative and brooking no dissent. This survey appears to show evidence of such a renaissance. Some would say it’s not before time.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/at-last-sceptics-are-shunning-the-climate-scaremongers/
***************************************7 November, 2022
Climate crisis: past eight years were the eight hottest ever, says UN
The devious approach to the facts by the Green/Left is always amusing. In this case they had to go back 8 years to get an average that was above earlier years. There has been cooling in recent years so they could not trumpet any one recent year as being the hottest.
And if you look at the numbers it is a storm in a teacup. They put up great leaping graphs to create the impression that the rise has been large but that is just chartmanship. The rise looks large purely because of the large scale adopted for the Y axis.
But the numbers tell a different story. To quote the WMO: "The global mean temperature in 2022 is currently estimated to be about 1.15 [1.02 to 1.28] °C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average."
In plain language that means that in over 100 years the average temperature has risen by just a bit more than one degree. A slighter and slower rise would be hard to state with any claim to meaning. So all recent temperature movements have been in tiny fractions of one degree, meaning that they are totally trivial and unworthy of mention.
If you walked from one room to another where the temperature of the two differed by one degree, you would not notice it. A DAILY temperature change of ten whole degrees is common. And we seem to survive that! The whole Warmist fraud is to pretend that tiny numbers are large
The past eight years were the eight hottest ever recorded, a new UN report has found, indicating the world is now deep into the climate crisis. The internationally agreed 1.5C limit for global heating is now “barely within reach”, it said.
The report, by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO), sets out how record high greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are driving sea level and ice melting to new highs and supercharging extreme weather from Pakistan to Puerto Rico.
The stark assessment was published on the opening day of the UN’s Cop27 climate summit in Egypt and as the UN secretary-general warned that “our planet is on course to reach tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible”.
The WMO estimates that the global average temperature in 2022 will be about 1.15C above the pre-industrial average (1850-1900), meaning every year since 2016 has been one of the warmest on record.
For the past two years, the natural La Niña climate phenomenon has actually kept global temperatures lower than they would otherwise have been. The inevitable switch back to El Niño conditions will see temperatures surge even higher in future, on top of global heating.
The WMO report said:
Carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide are at record levels in the atmosphere as emissions continue. The annual increase in methane, a potent greenhouse gas, was the highest on record.
The sea level is now rising twice as fast as 30 years ago and the oceans are hotter than ever.
Records for glacier melting in the Alps were shattered in 2022, with an average of 13ft (4 metres) in height lost.
Rain – not snow – was recorded on the 3,200m-high summit of the Greenland ice sheet for the first time.
The Antarctic sea-ice area fell to its lowest level on record, almost 1m km2 below the long-term average.
“The greater the warming, the worse the impacts,” said the WMO secretary-general, Prof Petteri Taalas. “We have such high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere now that the lower 1.5C [target] of the Paris Agreement is barely within reach. It’s already too late for many glaciers [and] sea level rise is a long-term and major threat to many millions of coastal dwellers and low-lying states.”
António Guterres, UN secretary-general, said ahead of Cop27: “Emissions are still growing at record levels. That means our planet is on course for reaching tipping points that will make climate chaos irreversible. We need to move from tipping points to turning points for hope.”
A series of recent reports signalled how near the planet is to climate catastrophe, with “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place” and the current level of action set to see no fall in emissions and global temperature rise by a devastating 2.5C.
**************************************************
Joe Manchin demands Biden apologize for ‘offensive and disgusting’ coal comments
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin on Saturday demanded President Biden apologize for his “offensive and disgusting” pledge to shut down America’s coal plants — leading the White House to later reframe the tone-deaf message.
Speaking at an event in Carlsbad, Calif., Friday to promote the Democratic Party’s achievements heading into the midterms, Biden suggested coal plants would soon be extinct, the Washington Post reported.
“No one is building new coal plants, because they can’t rely on it, even if they have all the coal guaranteed for the rest of their existence of the plant. So it’s going to become a wind generation,” said Biden.
Biden is gaslighting Americans about his failed presidency
Manchin on Saturday ripped Biden’s comments as “outrageous and divorced from reality” and demanded he apologize to coal workers.
“Being cavalier about the loss of coal jobs for men and women in West Virginia and across the country who literally put their lives on the line to help build and power this country is offensive and disgusting,” the Democratic pol said.
Shortly after, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre issued a statement claiming Biden’s words were taken out of context and that the president has no desire to put even more Americans out of work.
“President Biden knows that the men and women of coal country built this nation: they powered its steel mills and factories, kept its homes and schools and offices warm,” Jean-Pierre said. “They made this the most productive and powerful nation on Earth.”
The schism between both powerhouse Democrats is unwelcome news heading into Election Day where the party is in danger lose control of House. Both Biden and Manchin are up for re-election in two years.
**************************************************
America’s Oil Supply Problem Worse Than You Think, Industry Leader Warns
America’s oil supply problem is worse than most predictions, Ezra Yacob, president of EOG Resources Inc., told analysts during a third-quarter earnings call. Oil production in the United States will maintain a low growth rate in 2023, he said.
The number of oil rigs, frac spreads, and workers indicated a low growth rate in the near future, he said.
Also, fewer companies have the capacity to produce oil after the pandemic and the companies are more cautious about investing more in this sector.
“I do think coming out of the pandemic, we’ve had a consolidation across the industry. … You’ve been left with less companies, and those companies that have the size, the scale, balance sheets, things of that nature to be able to continue to drill and operate,” he said. “And the majority of those companies are drilling and investing in a way that’s more disciplined than what was in favor prior to the pandemic.”
Yacob believes the trend will not end soon. “And quite frankly, a lot of those things that I’ve talked about are not necessarily transitory in nature. Some of these things will really continue into 2023 as well,” he explained.
EOG holds a view more pessimistic than many other estimations, Yacob acknowledged. EOG was known as Enron Oil & Gas before it separated from Enron in 1999.
Biden to Talk With Oil Companies
Oil production has been recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic since August 2020. However, the pace of oil production is relatively slow, though oil prices increased fast after the pandemic.
Oil production still hasn’t reached the level before the pandemic.
Industry insiders and experts warned that companies are hesitant to make long-term investments in the fuel industry because of uncertainty in Washington and hostile attitudes toward the industry by the Biden administration.
Low domestic oil production in America and oil production cuts by OPEC+ caused oil prices to stay high and drove gas prices up.
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has blamed the oil companies and gas stations for high gas prices. Biden said that he’s going to talk with the oil companies directly soon.
“I’m working like hell to deal with the energy prices. I’m going to have a little, as they say, come-to-the-Lord talk with the oil companies pretty soon,” he told the audience during an event in California on Friday.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed in October that the Biden administration is in touch with the oil companies.
“The Department of Energy has been in regular contact and has held meetings … with these different companies, and they’ll continue to have those conversations. Members of our team at the White House have also been in close contact,” she said on Oct. 17.
***************************************************
Green Britain: Biggest energy producer threatens to move overseas to avoid windfall tax
Britain’s biggest oil and gas producer says its shareholders are urging it to invest its money elsewhere as a result of the North Sea windfall tax and the possible extension of the levy.
Harbour Energy warned the government that any further increase in the energy profits levy could jeopardise its planned investments in Britain, as it disclosed that it expected to pay $400 million in windfall tax this year, taking its total UK tax bill to $900 million.
Rishi Sunak imposed the 25 per cent windfall levy as chancellor in May, increasing the effective tax rate in the North Sea from 40 to 65 per cent, and said that it could remain in place until 2025 unless oil and gas prices fell back to historically normal levels.
As prime minister he is now planning to increase the tax to 30 per cent and keep it in place until 2028 to help to fill a £50 billion hole in Britain’s public finances.
Linda Cook, Harbour’s chief executive, said: “The recently enacted UK energy profits levy [EPL] and speculation about further fiscal changes have created uncertainty for independent oil and gas companies like Harbour. As a result, evaluating expected returns from long-term investments has become more difficult and investors are advocating for geographic diversification.”
Harbour produced 194,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day in the North Sea in the first nine months of this year, accounting for 94 per cent of its total production and ranking it as easily the biggest producer in British waters. Harbour is looking at developing projects in Mexico and Indonesia and is also thought to be eyeing potential acquisitions in southeast Asia and the Gulf of Mexico.
In Britain it has interests in two proposed carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects that could entail billions of pounds of investment. Cook added: “While we fully recognise the significant challenge in the UK to put public finances on a sustainable footing, we urge the government to carefully consider the consequences of any increase in or extension of the EPL.
“At a time when oil and gas producers are being asked to invest more to help ensure the UK’s energy security and are considering longer-term, material investments in CCS, additional taxes would run the risk of undermining our ability to do either.”
***************************************
6 November, 2022
The PFAS scare again
This is an old Greenie scare but there is still no clear evidence that PFAS compounds are harmful to humans in the concentrations normally encountered
That the chemical concerned gets into people and animals one way or another has been known for decades. But the concentrations found are extremely minute -- measured in a few parts per billion. So how toxic is it? It certainly seems to be seriously toxic to a range of animals but evidence of toxicity to people is slight. And don't forget that this has been under investigation for a long time.
Additionally, it has been estimated that there is by now some of it in every American, so bad effects should be very evident by now. But they are not.
Toxic 'forever chemicals' linked [controversially] to a slew of diseases and disorders have been discovered in every baby product sampled in a new study.
Laboratory tests commissioned by the Washington DC based Environmental Working Group (EWG) found per- and polyfluorinated substances (PFAS) on toys, clothing, bibs and bedding.
PFAS are a common ingredient in clothing and other household items because they are durable and can repel grease, water, stains and heat.
But the scientists warned sometimes they can wear off as dust and are then inhaled by youngsters. They are also durable, and can stay in the environment for long periods of time.
The chemicals have been linked [controversially] to an increased risk of cancer, birth defects, autism and infertility.
Sydney Evans, an analyst at EWG and author of the study, told DailyMail.com the risks from them 'far outweighs any sort of stain proofing'.
The EWG, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization commissioned a series of independent lab tests on the products.
The research initially looked at levels of fluorine in the items, a chemical element used to make plastics which can cause teeth decay, osteoporosis and harm to kidneys, bones, nerves and muscles.
Researchers then tested the 10 items with the highest levels of fluorine for PFAS.
The 10 products were all children products that included Sealy and Graco bedding, bibs manufactured by Bumkins and Hudson, UGG boots, a Columbia jacket, a bucket hat and pajamas made by Carters and a snack bag also made by Bumkin.
There is no limit on PFAS chemicals in toys at a federal level, but limits have been put in place on its amounts in drinking water.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended in guidance issued in July that its levels should not exceed 0.004 parts per trillion (ppt) in drinking water.
Several states — including Maine — have also moved to ban its use in products including clothing and bedding.
In the study, the biggest offender was Hudson's Baby Unisex Baby Waterproof Bib, which had 191.985 parts per billion (ppb) of the substance.
The other products ranged from 1ppt to 52ppt, with researchers warning that any contamination is dangerous.
Researchers warn that exposure to 'forever chemicals' in youth can affect a child's social and physical development, and impact behavior as they get older.
A University of Texas study last year found that children exposed to PFAS in the womb were more likely to develop autism.
Long term exposure can [allegedly] also leave a person at higher risk of kidney, testicular, ovarian, prostate, thyroid and bone marrow cancer when they reach adulthood.
The EPA limits PFAS to 0.004ppt for drinking water. The metric measures the prevalence of particle within a swab sample.
EWG researchers found that fluorine on all 34 baby and infant products that they tested (left). The top ten products in fluorine concentration were also tested for PFAS.
What ARE 'forever chemicals'?
'Forever chemicals' are a class of common industrial compounds that don't break down when they're released into the environment.
Humans are exposed to these chemicals after they've come in contact with food, soil or water reservoirs.
These chemicals — known more properly as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — are added to cookware, carpets, textiles and other items to make them more water- and stain-repellant.
PFAS contamination has been detected in water near manufacturing facilities, as well as at military bases and firefighting training facilities where flame-retardant foam is used.
The chemicals have been linked [controversially] to an increased risk of kidney and testicular cancer, and damage to the immune system, as well as birth defects, smaller birth weights, and decreased vaccine response in children.
Ms Evans explained that the high levels of PFAS in these products add to the overall exposure in the household, spreading via dust particles that can be inhaled or ingested.
She warns that children in particular are at risk, because they are more likely to put their hands both on the floor and in their mouth — consuming pollutants.
Another bib, the Bumkins waterproof SuperBib, was also found to have the toxic chemical - with 3.482ppb.
The Sealy Baby – Waterproof Fitted Toddler and Baby Crib Mattress Pad Cover has 0.258ppb of PFAS, while the Sealy Baby – Stain Protection Waterproof Fitted Toddler & Baby Crib Mattress Pad Cover Protector had 5.71ppb.
Another bedding product, Graco's Quick Connect Waterproof Play yard Sheets, with 6.255ppb.
Clothing products were vulnerable to contamination as well.
UGG Unisex's Child T Mini Bailey Bow Fashion Boot was found to have 52.207ppb, was the most contaminated of any clothing good tested.
Other contaminated items included Columbia Boys Glennaker Rain Jacket (1.608ppb detected), Carters Reversible Bucket Hat (24,029ppb) and Carter's Baby Boys' 1–Piece Dinosaur Snug Fit Cotton PJs (1.016ppb).
A snack bag the researchers tested, Bumkins' reusable fabric, food safe, snack back, had PFAS contamination as well (7.159ppb).
*********************************************************
Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron: Prioritizing ESG Investments ‘Inconsistent’ With Law
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron previously warned that the state pension funds cannot legally make environmental, social, and governance considerations when investing the dollars of public employees.
This week, Cameron and state Treasurer Allison Ball, both elected Republicans, asked two state pension systems to provide proof that pension funds are primarily focused on return on investment in decisions on where state employee money goes.
“Recently, Treasurer Ball asked the Office of the Attorney General whether environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment practices, which introduce mixed motivations to investment decisions, are consistent with Kentucky law governing fiduciary duties owed by investment managers to Kentucky’s public pensions,” the Oct. 31 letter from Cameron and Ball says. “The Attorney General opined that such practices violate statutory and contractual fiduciary duties.”
The letter was sent to David L. Eager, executive director of the Kentucky Public Pensions Authority that manages $38.07 billion in retirement funds, and Gary L. Harbin, executive secretary of the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System, which manages $28 billion.
“We write today to request that you, as the executive directors of the Commonwealth’s major public pension systems, advise our Offices about your systems’ efforts to ensure that ESG considerations are not being implemented in your systems’ investment decisions, consistent with Kentucky law,” the letter continues.
The letter gave the pension directors a deadline of Nov. 23 to respond. However, that has been extended to early December after the respective boards of trustees for the pensions meet, Eager told The Daily Signal.
“That is a decision the board will make, not the executive director,” Eager told The Daily Signal in a phone interview.
Eager said the teachers pension board will meet on Dec. 1 and the public pension board will meet on Dec. 5.
In a more definitive way, a top official with the state’s Teachers’ Retirement System told The Daily Signal that it is not engaged in ESG investing.
“TRS is happy to respond to the recent letter from the AG and Treasurer as requested,” Beau Barnes, deputy executive secretary and general counsel to the teachers pension system, said in an email. “TRS is not an ESG investor. TRS investment policy makes enhancing and protecting asset value the goal of all investing, which is consistent with TRS’s fiduciary duty under law. This fiduciary responsibility is to achieve the best returns within acceptable levels of risk for its members.”
In a public statement this week, Cameron said: “Rising inflation has made protecting the retirement security of Kentucky’s public employees even more essential. Prioritizing ESG-related investments above the financial interests of investors is inconsistent with Kentucky law, and we’ve sent this letter to ensure these practices are not at work in the Commonwealth.”
Consumers’ Research, a national organization advocating against ESG investing in both the public and private sector, praised Ball and Cameron for taking this stand.
“The joint action of Treasurer Ball and Attorney General Cameron sends a clear message to Kentucky’s pension fund investment managers: their obligations are to work for the pensioners, not the Democratic Party, international climate groups, or megalomaniacs like Larry Fink,” Will Hild, executive director of Consumers’ Research, said in a public statement. “We applaud both officials in standing up for the citizens of Kentucky, who are being crushed due to reckless, illegal actions by companies like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street that put progressive politics above their legal and moral duties.”
The Kentucky attorney general’s office issued an opinion in May that pension managers must make investment decisions based on the interest of members and beneficiaries, under state law.
“In sum, politics has no place in Kentucky’s public pensions. Therefore, it is the opinion of this Office that ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and ‘environmental, social, and governance’ investment practices that introduce mixed motivations to investment decisions are inconsistent with Kentucky law governing fiduciary duties owed by investment management firms to Kentucky’s public pension plans,” the opinion says.
The opinion says investment managers “must be single-minded in their motivation and actions and their decisions must be solely in the interest of the members and beneficiaries [and for] the exclusive purpose of providing benefits to members and beneficiaries.’”
Ball initially requested the attorney general’s opinion on the matter.
“Kentuckians worked hard for decades to earn their pensions and rely on them for livelihood in retirement. It is important their investments are maximized, not politicized,” Ball said in a public statement. “As the watchdog of taxpayer dollars, I remain committed to ensuring funds are invested and spent consistent with the law.”
***********************************************
Annual parade of hypocrisy is set to descend at summit
Every year, global climate summits feature a parade of hypocrisy, as the world’s elite arrive on private jets to lecture humanity on cutting carbon emissions.
This November’s climate summit in Egypt will offer more breathtaking hypocrisy than usual, because the world’s rich will zealously lecture poor countries about the dangers of fossil fuels – after devouring massive amounts of new gas, coal, and oil.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed up energy prices even further, wealthy countries have been scouring the world for new sources of energy.
Britain vehemently denounced fossil fuels at the Glasgow climate summit just last year, but now plans to keep coal-fired plants available this winter instead of shutting almost all of them as previously planned. Thermal coal imports by the EU from Australia, South Africa and Indonesia increased more than 11-fold.
Meanwhile, a new trans-Saharan gas pipeline will allow Europe to tap directly into gas from Niger, Algeria and Nigeria; Germany is reopening shuttered coal power plants; and Italy is planning to import 40 per cent more gas from northern Africa. And the US is going cap-in-hand to Saudi Arabia to grovel for more oil production.
At the climate summit in Egypt, the leaders from these countries will all somehow declare with straight faces that poor countries must avoid fossil fuel exploitation, for fear of worsening climate change.
These very same rich countries will encourage the world’s poorest to focus instead on green energy alternatives like off-grid solar and wind energy.
They’re already making the case. In a speech widely interpreted as being about Africa, the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said it would be “delusional” for countries to invest more in gas and oil exploration.
The hypocrisy is simply breathtaking. Every single rich country today became wealthy thanks to exploitation of fossil fuels. The world’s major development organisations – at the behest of wealthy countries – refuse to fund fossil fuel exploitation that poor countries could use to lift themselves out of poverty. What’s more, the elite prescription for the world’s poor – green energy – is incapable of transforming lives.
That’s because sun and wind power are useless when it is cloudy, night-time, or there is no wind. Off-grid solar power can provide a nice solar light, but typically can’t even power a family’s fridge or oven, let alone provide the power that communities need to run everything from farms to factories, the ultimate engines of growth.
A study in Tanzania found almost 90 per cent of households given off-grid electricity just want to be hooked up to the national grid to receive fossil fuel access. The first rigorous test published on the impact of solar panels on the lives of poor people found they got a little bit more electricity – the ability to power a lamp during the day – but there was no measurable impact on their lives: they did not increase savings or spending, did not work more or start more businesses, and their children did not study more.
Moreover, solar panels and wind turbines are useless at tackling one of the main energy problems of the world’s poor. Nearly 2.5 billion people continue to suffer from indoor air pollution, burning dirty fuels like wood and dung to cook and keep warm. Solar panels don’t solve that problem because they are too weak to power clean stoves and heaters.
In contrast, grid electrification – which nearly everywhere means mostly fossil fuels – has significant positive impacts on household income, expenditure, and education. A study in Bangladesh showed that electrified households experienced a 21 per cent average jump in income and a 1.5 per cent reduction in poverty every year.
The biggest swindle of all is that rich world leaders have somehow managed to portray themselves as green evangelists, while more than three-quarters of their enormous primary energy production comes from fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Agency. Less than 12 per cent of their energy comes from renewables, with most from wood and hydro. Just 2.4 per cent is solar and wind.
Compare this to Africa, which is the most renewable continent in the world, with half of its energy produced by renewables. But these renewables are almost entirely wood, straws, and dung, and they are really a testament to how little energy the continent has access to. Despite all the hype, the continent gets just 0.3 per cent of its energy from solar and wind.
To solve global warming, rich countries must invest much more in research and development on better green technologies, from fusion, fission and second-generation biofuels to solar and wind with massive batteries. The crucial insight is to innovate their real cost down below fossil fuels. That way everyone will eventually switch. But telling the world’s poor to live with unreliable, expensive, weak power is an insult.
There is already pushback from the world’s developing countries, who see the hypocrisy for what it is: Egypt’s Finance Minister recently said that poor countries must not be “punished”, and warned that climate policy should not add to their suffering. That warning needs to be listened to. Europe is scouring the world for more fossil fuels because the continent needs them for its growth and prosperity. That same opportunity should not be withheld from the world’s poorest.
**************************************************
Australia: Price caps on natural gas a cure worse than the disease
When a good becomes scarcer, the logical response is to reduce its demand and increase its supply.
The “solutions” that are being floated to the recent surge in gas prices would do the exact opposite. Were the price spikes merely transient, the resulting damage might be acceptable. There is, however, no reason to believe they are a passing phenomenon.
It is true that the higher prices reflect the war in Ukraine, with the sanctions on Russia unleashing a worldwide scramble for alternative sources of natural gas.
But the sanctions are not about to be lifted; and even if they were, the supply disruptions will have a lasting impact in making relatively stable producers, such as Australia, more attractive to global buyers.
As those buyers switch from less to more reliable sources, demand for our exports will increase, placing added pressure on domestic gas availability and further raising prices.
The Albanese government will therefore face mounting calls to intervene on consumers’ behalf. The question is whether it can do so in ways that facilitate, rather than impede, Australia’s adjustment to the gas market’s new realities.
The strongest case for intervention is in respect of households. While welfare payments are indexed (and hence will adjust automatically as rising energy prices push up the consumer price index), most residential consumers remain fully exposed to price hikes. The Ukraine war and its consequences for energy bills are hardly events they could have insured themselves against; it can make sense for the government to step in as an insurer of last resort, smoothing the cost of wars, like that of pandemics and natural disasters, over time.
Providing low and middle-income earners with cash transfers that offset the war-related component of the price increases would be the best way of fulfilling that role. As consumers would still face the higher prices, their incentives to economise on energy would be undiminished, particularly if the transfers were clearly time-limited. Overall, the adjustment process would be neither slowed nor blunted.
In contrast, the approach many European countries have adopted of subsidising and/or capping power bills is administratively simpler but – unless the subsidies apply only to a basic level of energy use – has the perverse effect of boosting energy demand, aggravating the underlying problem.
The case for assisting commercial and industrial users is much weaker. Unlike residential consumers, whose incomes are largely fixed in the short term, businesses can raise their prices – and when cost increases affect entire industries, they typically do.
To that extent, their viability is determined through changes in the level and structure of prices. Moreover, because it is the firms that make the greatest use of gas that will have to raise their prices most, allowing the price mechanism to work will shift demand from energy guzzlers to more energy-efficient firms and products, curbing gas consumption and dampening the price spikes.
A hands-off approach consequently has compelling merits. But that is not going to quell the calls for a mandatory code that forces the major gas exporters to supply part of their output to the domestic market at a low, administratively determined, price.
Viewed in historical perspective, those proposals are a throwback to the days before the Fraser, Hawke and Keating governments progressively dismantled the byzantine regulations that kept the prices domestic oil and gas producers received below world levels. Unfortunately, in a far more globalised market, the current proposals could prove even more harmful than their unlamented predecessors.
To begin with, even assuming the schemes were workable, the assistance they provide would be completely untargeted. Far from rewarding firms that had economised on the use of gas, the largest benefits would flow to the firms that had cut back least; as those firms used the subsidies to displace more efficient rivals, overall productivity levels would fall, and living standards with them.
Nor is that effect likely to be trivial: in his classic study of broadly similar schemes, Yale’s Paul MacAvoy found those misallocations meant that each dollar in mandated sales cost the economy two.
Compounding the damage, artificially low, capped, prices would encourage gas to be used instead of other energy sources, whose prices would remain more volatile. Domestic demand for gas would therefore rise, slashing national income both by forcing gas producers to forgo higher-priced export sales and by promoting a use of resources that took no account of relative costs.
And as firms locked in gas-intensive methods of production, repealing the scheme would become ever harder, perpetuating the damage.
Last but not least, retrospectively imposing the proposed mandates on the gas exporters would deter new investment by directly reducing their profits and increasing sovereign risk.
The proponents of these schemes strenuously deny that investment would be chilled. But as far back as 1980-81, assessments by Treasury, the Industries Assistance Commission and the OECD all concluded that the two-price schemes had (in the words of the OECD) helped precipitate the “sharp decline in exploration activity throughout the 1970s”. To believe reinstating them in new form would not undermine the development of desperately needed supplies is as inconsistent with decades of careful analysis as it is with common sense.
As a result, were the proposals adopted, we would find ourselves in the worst of all possible worlds: greater demand, lower supply and pervasive inefficiency.
Despite that, the government may eventually feel obliged to increase the domestic availability of gas, particularly to the major industrial users.
In that event, it should purchase the gas at world prices and then require those users to bid for it in a competitive auction. That would ensure the gas went to the firms that expected to extract the greatest value from its use – and unlike the proposed schemes, whose economic costs are completely opaque, the difference between the amount taxpayers had paid for the gas and the receipts from its sale would transparently indicate the subsidy that was being provided.
In the end, if the current crisis is as deep as it is, and the prospects so alarming, it is because our gas market has been comprehensively distorted by ill-conceived policies.
Governments have stymied gas supply by prohibiting onshore development – while greatly increasing gas demand, both by encouraging the massive deployment of renewables (which, being highly intermittent, had to be matched by quick-start, gas-fuelled capacity) and by accelerating the decommissioning of coal-fired plants.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the lights are now flickering – nor that when they’re on, they are scarcely affordable. With year after year of failed interventions finally coming home to roost, squaring the error would be the greatest folly of all.
***************************************
4 November, 2022
Dozens of US coal plant closures delayed as green energy shift slows
As many as 40 US coal-fired power plants that were slated to shut will run for longer than expected, with operators delaying plans to retire them as supply-chain issues and reliability concerns slow the transition to greener energy.
The plants have almost 17 gigawatts of capacity, and some have pushed back their planned closures by as long as five years, according to Andrew Blumenfeld, director of data analytics at McCloskey by Opis. Consol Energy Inc., one of the largest US coal miners, cited the research in its third-quarter earnings report Tuesday as evidence that demand for coal remains robust.
The delays reveal headwinds for a large-scale shift to cleaner energy, said Blumenfeld. Some coal plants were supposed to be replaced by solar power, but renewables projects have had setbacks as clogged supply chains slow panel deliveries from China. In other cases, utilities or grid operators reconsidered closures to ensure that enough power would be available, especially during summers marked by extreme heat waves.
*********************************************
It’s sinister and anti-human to stop growth
The absurd and sinister vogue for degrowth reflects a society that is repudiating the optimistic rationality that created modernity. The WEF produces crackpot views because the demoralised, post-truth, post-rational West has become a culture of cranks.
Last month’s prime minister, Liz Truss, came to grief because her fanatical belief in economic growth crashed the economy into a wall. While condemning her recklessness, many nevertheless sympathised with the goal of growing the economy to produce increased prosperity and progress. After all, who wouldn’t agree with that?
It turns out that plenty of people wouldn’t, including the World Economic Forum.
The WEF is an international, non-governmental lobbying organisation whose membership comprises political and business leaders and other global movers and shakers. Known for its annual talk-fest in the Swiss resort of Davos, its mission is to improve the world “by engaging business, political, academic and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas”.
Those agendas involve concepts such as “sustainability”, “inclusion” and “stakeholder capitalism”, which its website suggests have been inspired by Greta Thunberg, the teenage green activist, who it says reminds us that the “environmental unsustainability” of the current economic system “represents a betrayal of future generations”.
The WEF is the target of tiresome conspiracy theorists who believe it dictates everything governments do that corresponds to the liberal internationalist and green agenda. A moment’s thought suggests this is implausible. The WEF, which is little more than a glorified talking shop, brings together participants from about 100 countries, many of which aren’t liberal, internationalist or green. But just because conspiracy theorists say silly things doesn’t mean the WEF isn’t also out to lunch.
Its new thing is something called “degrowth”. According to its website, this means shrinking the economy in order to use fewer of the world’s “dwindling resources” and combat climate change. It means no longer assuming that “growth is good”. You may think it’s good because it means progress, advancement, improvement. Tsk! Growth is apparently very, very bad — even though it has given the world everything from cancer treatments to indoor plumbing.
In The Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler observes that degrowth would suppress innovation and lead to stagnation. Societies that don’t grow, he writes, eventually devolve into oppression, chaos, anarchy and then ruin.
Not at all, says the WEF; supporters of degrowth maintain it doesn’t mean “living in caves with candles”, just living a bit more simply.
No it doesn’t. Degrowth involves deindustrialisation. Indeed, the WEF implicitly blames industrialisation for climate change, citing the claim that man-made global warming started in the 1830s.
So much energy is expended on climate trends that the philosophical origins of modern environmentalism tend to be obscured. Curbing growth is, in fact, foundational to the environmental movement, whose agenda is central to the WEF’s preoccupations.
In the 1970s, while western politicians were promoting technological expansion and the consumer society, the dread of overpopulation was also rising. The environmental campaigners Barbara Ward and René Dubos, who wrote the framework for the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, argued that the Earth’s species depended upon a finite stock of raw natural materials. In the same year, the Club of Rome argued that natural resources couldn’t support rates of economic and population growth much beyond the year 2100.
This all had its roots in the late 18th-century theory advanced by Thomas Malthus that population growth would outstrip food. This has been proved spectacularly wrong. Yet the WEF again channels Malthus by decrying “the myth of infinite growth” which must be curbed as natural resources “dwindle closer to their reasonable limits”.
Environmental apocalypse is, of course, the agenda of Cop27, next month’s UN climate change conference in Egypt. But it’s not the WEF that’s putting pressure on Rishi Sunak to change his decision to stay away. It’s because so many members of his own party have been swept up in this catastrophising, which has become unchallengeable and axiomatic for such a lot of people. This reflects a broader cultural shift that views modernity and progress as bad.
Western society, where industrialisation started and which drove progress and modernity, is said to be so mired in the original sins of whiteness and colonialism that it needs to be deconstructed and a new society created in its place. Critical race theory is intimately involved in upending progress, smashing the belief in achievement through merit, which is an engine of growth.
The shift has gone even further. Just as Malthusianism led to the horrors of eugenics — a progressive doctrine until the Nazi party gave it such lousy PR — so too the degrowth agenda is anti-human, based on the belief that the planet’s biggest problem is the human beings who people it. And the below-replacement western birth rate already suggests a culture that no longer wants to reproduce itself.
Halting economic growth wouldn’t just stop in its tracks the improvements in society that we all take for granted. Growth is a characteristic of the natural world. It is hardwired into us as human beings. To want to halt growth is akin to wanting to stop the world.
The absurd and sinister vogue for degrowth reflects a society that is repudiating the optimistic rationality that created modernity. The WEF produces crackpot views because the demoralised, post-truth, post-rational West has become a culture of cranks.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/f14f03ca-595d-11ed-9b1f-f7c251e9dfdc
*************************************************Wishful thinking about wind and solar is going to come up against reality soon ... and there will be a world of pain in the awakening
This time last year one bitcoin was worth more than $98,000. Today it is worth just more than $32,000, a 60 per cent decrease in 12 months. If you were around or were involved with cryptocurrency communities a year ago, it was common to see and hear vainglorious claims about the potential of bitcoin to replace the US dollar, revolutionise the financial industry and save the world.
Much of that rhetoric has quietened after this year’s crash, which has wiped nearly $US2 trillion ($3.14 trillion) off the cryptocurrency market. But the pain felt by everyday retail investors who bought into the hype and risked (and lost) their savings remains real. Go online to Reddit forums and one can read stories posted by real people describing their investment in crypto as the biggest mistake of their life.
Story after story shows ordinary people glimpsing financial freedom, only for it all to vanish in a matter of hours during the crash. At one point during the market collapse this year, the top-voted post in the Reddit cryptocurrency forum was a link to a suicide prevention hotline.
In a recent podcast with psychologist Steven Pinker, respected 98-year-old investor Charlie Munger says the biggest mistakes he has made in his long career were born out of wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking is the bias we succumb to when we are unable to separate what we want to be true from what actually is true and what is rational according to the evidence we have in front of us. At its core, wishful thinking is an inability to deal with reality as it is and an unwillingness to update our beliefs when new evidence emerges.
In financial bubbles, the wishful thinking of a single investor multiplies. When we invest in an asset or industry with all of our friends, and we all want the same investment to succeed, wishful thinking dovetails with conformity, creating what I call “wishful groupthink”. When wishful groupthink is infused with politics and ideology, it becomes cult-like, impervious to reason and impervious to new evidence.
The cryptocurrency bubble is one of many examples of wishful groupthink. Another is the overwhelming hype associated with renewable energy technologies, specifically wind and solar. While the scaling up of such projects in Australia is remarkable – and the increasing output of clean energy impressive – much of the ideological rhetoric remains overcooked, overhyped and downright irresponsible.
It is claimed by Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen and the teal independent MPs that renewable energies will a) reduce emissions and b) make Australia a “renewable energy superpower” while c) creating jobs and d) lowering power bills – all at the same time. It would be nice if this were true. And it is understandable that many people want this to be true. But reality has a way of making itself known, and much of this hype eventually will lead to pain.
The claim that the renewable energy industry will create a surplus of jobs (notwithstanding those jobs that will be lost when coalmines shut) lacks specificity. The assumption seems to be that once coalmines close, miners who may be used to living in one location, with families and community connections, suddenly will want to move from place to place as itinerant construction workers. Of course, this might happen. But it is by no means guaranteed. In reality, this is a risky bet. But our government presents it as a sure thing.
While the claims about job creation seem overhyped, the assertions that solar and wind will lower our electricity prices are far more irresponsible. It is true that renewable energy is cheap on sunny and windy days. But it is also true that on such days wind farms and solar panels deliver excess energy that stresses the electricity grid.
The 2016 blackout in South Australia was found to be caused partially by the shutdown of the state’s wind farms due to volatile weather, in particular excessive wind. So while solar and wind can deliver abundant energy at certain times, and while this abundant energy may be cheap, the mistake is to assume this translates into cheaper energy bills. It doesn’t because when the overall system is stressed, more intervention is needed, and more intervention naturally leads to higher prices. How could it not?
But what about batteries? Batteries are great, but they need to be built before we can use them and almost every country is scrambling to build batteries at the same time. This demand drives up prices. The idea that such costs will never be passed on to the consumer is fanciful.
Many claims about renewables, as with cryptocurrencies, sound grand in theory. String a few abstract concepts together, sprinkle with jargon, marinate in ideology and boom, a claim can sound plausible to the untrained listener. And while it may be true that we need to transition to renewables to meet our net-zero obligations, and that we can scale up solar and wind rapidly with enough government subsidy, this by no means guarantees cheaper power prices for consumers or ensures jobs for those bearing the brunt of the transition.
It would be better if our leaders, and the Energy Minister in particular, were honest with Australians about the pain and hardship our energy transition will bring. Given that the public is overwhelmingly supportive of action on climate change, this would be real leadership, which might be rewarded by the electorate. But concealing the difficulty and engaging in wishful thinking will lead only to more shock and anger down the track when promised outcomes fail to materialise.
As Munger says, to be rational we need to “recognise reality even when you don’t like it – especially when you don’t like it”.
************************************
The Real Climate Cause
BY CORY BERNARDI
If you scratch at the mask of climate change zealots you'll inevitably reveal their inner socialist. I say 'inevitably' because the ethos behind the climate change agenda has nothing to do with saving the planet. It's all about enslaving mankind.
If you doubt that, the latest ravings of one of climate's useful idiots should be all the proof you need. Now I know Greta Thunberg has a mental illness and that we shouldn't take her proclamations seriously, but the global left consider her to be a messianic figure. They all hailed this climate influencer as the source of great wisdom.
In fact, such was the esteem the global Green elites held her in, they invited her to address the United Nations, the US Congress and the billionaires at Davos. She's still getting gigs and making money off of the climate malarky.
The latest effort was earlier this week promoting her new book at London's Royal Festival Hall. In the rarefied atmosphere of a carbon closed shop, dear Greta let her climate mask slip.
What it exposed was the manifesto of the unhinged socialist. Hers was a clarion call to overthrow capitalism because 'capitalism was the source of the climate crisis in the first place'. Capitalism was also a system of 'colonialism, imperialism, oppression, genocide' and of 'racist, oppressive extractionism'.
All the buzzwords from the global left regurgitated to adoring numbats.
She even accused the COP climate conferences as being a 'scam' and 'facilitating 'greenwashing, lying and cheating'.
That's one point I agree with her on.
Greta's apocalyptic view of the world is what truly underpins the global climate movement. Sure, there are lots paying lip service to the green agenda but when it comes to the global elite you always want to follow the money.
They are still buying waterfront mansions, flying private jets and chugging around in super yachts. They can do so because they invest in the green scams that government are throwing trillions of dollars at. Those dollars are clipped, banked and spent by the sanctimonious Green kings.
However, while some are chasing the money, the true Green zealot is trying to destroy what we know as civilisation.
They've even said as much. The mob from Extinction Rebellion (XR), they're the ones who glue themselves to roads, have admitted their movement isn't about the climate.
One of the co-founders, Stuart Basden, wrote an article that highlighted the real ethos behind these activists.
"And I’m here to say that XR isn’t about the climate. You see, the climate’s breakdown is a symptom of a toxic system of that has infected the ways we relate to each other as humans and to all life. This was exacerbated when European ‘civilisation’ was spread around the globe through cruelty and violence (especially) over the last 600 years of colonialism, although the roots of the infections go much further back."
Apparently the problem is all to do with delusions attached to white-supremacy, patriarchy, eurocentrism, heteronormativity and class hierarchy.
If it sounds familiar it's because the Greens political party repeat the same mantra on every possible occasion. I can't help but think they are the ones suffering the real delusions
https://www.corybernardi.com.au/posts/the-real-climate-cause/
***************************************3 November, 2022
Perfect storm of weather events sees coral bleached at Abrolhos Islands off West Australian coast
Nice to see a coral bleaching event that is NOT being attributed to global warming. Why are similar processes not at work on the other side of Australia? Why are similar processes not at work on both the East and West coasts. There is no reason why. Water levels fluctuate on both coasts
In what's been described as an important natural process, thousands of hectares of coral at the Abrolhos Islands off the West Australian coast have been bleached after a combination of weather conditions repeatedly exposed the coral to strong cold winds.
Fisher and pearl farmer Jane Liddon has watched the ocean around her fall over the past few days from her home at Post Office Island in the southern group of the Abrolhos.
She said water levels had fallen to an unusually low level due to a combination of strong winds, a high-pressure system and new moon tides.
"When the coral first came out [of the water], it was bright and beautiful … the second day, the water was even lower and still very windy and cold. By the third day it was completely white," Ms Liddon said.
"The tops were bright white. It was like new islands have formed everywhere here."
Ms Liddon, who has spent her life at the Abrolhos, said in 50-odd years, she had often seen events where a low tide had exposed some stag coral, but this was unusual.
"It's a coincidence of having these weather events all come together that has made it extreme, this time of year you do get low tides in the middle of the day, that's common, but not as low as this event," she said. "The low tide is like a lawnmower on the coral.
"For three days we haven't been able to take our dingy off our jetty because our jetty was not in the water anymore, so we are marooned by low tide, which is very rare."
Murdoch University PhD student Jo Buckee is studying coral mortality events and the role that they play in determining coral cover on shallow reef platforms.
She said a similar coral bleaching event at Abrolhos Island due to low tide in 2018 impacted the 7,000-hectare area of shallow reefs and saw about 30 per cent of the coral die.
However, Ms Buckee said the coral was able to regenerate and recover relatively quickly and had re-established itself back to pre-2018 levels.
"The bulk of the corals that you'll see sticking out of the water are the fast-growing Acropora corals, branching and plating corals, and they are capable of fast growth rates," she said.
"This trimming off of the tops is a natural event, it looks very dramatic but it is a naturally occurring process. "It's important for keeping up with sea level rise, for providing the material for reef and island building."
Ms Buckee said sea level variability along with coral growth and mortality over thousands of years had formed the coral reefs and the Abrolhos Islands themselves and allowed them to remain in position.
"That is the material that you're walking on when you're walking on the islands, it's from previous periods when the sea level was slightly higher than it is now, but also fragments washed up from reef flats that surround the islands," she said.
"In order for the reef to keep up with sea level rise over time, it requires fragments of coral to be produced so that the overall height of the reef is able to change.
"These environments are very dynamic with a mixture of seaweed and coral, a reflection of the Abrolhos's position in the transition zone between tropical and temperate ecosystems."
Ms Buckee said with the diversification of land and water activities at the Abrolhos, leading to year-round visitation, previously unwitnessed coral bleaching events were now attracting interest and attention.
***************************************************
Economic Growth, Bad Science and Climate Alarmism
facebook sharing buttonlinkedin sharing buttontwitter sharing buttonemail sharing buttonsharethis sharing button
Follow the science,” we are told, especially the junk science that climate alarmists invent. I recently debunked a piece of junk climate science whose alarmism was featured in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, CBS, and elsewhere. The junk science was produced by the Federal Reserve. Fed officials claimed that warming will cut economic growth by a third, but my simple statistical analysis showed their results were within the margin of error and that minor improvements and new data flip their result!
Mainstream economics shows that warming will have minor economic effects compared to the economic growth we expect over the next century. That is a problem for the climate lobby, which unfortunately includes the Fed. Since economic growth will swamp the economic effects of global warming, the Fed set out, it seems, to prove that warming will reduce growth. The fact that Florida, on average 26 degrees warmer than Michigan, has grown faster didn’t faze them.
The Fed isn’t the only institution to fall into chicanery. The study was published in a peer-reviewed academic economics journal, given wide media coverage, and cited in a congressional report to justify the Green New Deal. Bogus research makes big splashes. But when it is debunked, there isn’t a ripple.
The best economic model, validated by a Nobel Prize for William Nordhaus, shows that if nothing is done to reduce emissions, warming will reduce world GDP by about three percent by the year 2100. If global GDP continues to grow at the rate it has been growing, then the world in 2100 will be five times richer than it is today. A three-percent reduction in GDP would make us 4.8 times richer instead of 5.0 times. Not exactly catastrophic! Mainstream economics doesn’t deny climate change and accepts that some policies to mitigate it might pass a cost-benefit test. But it does not predict a climate apocalypse, even if we do nothing.
To support apocalyptic predictions, the Fed, it seems, went after growth. Their study looked at the relationship between seasonal temperatures and growth, state by state and year by year, from 1957-2012. Higher summer temperatures were statistically associated with lower growth, while higher fall temperatures were associated with higher growth, but the fall effect was smaller than the summer effect. There was no statistically significant association between growth and temperatures in the winter and spring, so they subtracted the summer effect from the fall effect and concluded that the overall effect of higher temperatures was to lower economic growth.
The problem is that even if two estimates are statistically significant individually, their sum is not necessarily significant. For example, if moving to Florida would increase one person’s income by $1,000, plus or minus $100, but would lower his spouse’s income by $1,100 plus or minus $100, it is reasonable to say that the move will almost certainly raise the husband’s income and lower his wife’s income, but it is not nearly as clear that their total income will be lower. Even though the wife’s expected loss is higher than her husband’s gain, the odds that their overall income will be higher are substantial.
In addition, I found that removing California from the sample switched the result to an increase in overall growth from a temperature increase, though without statistical significance. Using different data that measured the same things, the sign of the effect also flipped, though again without statistical significance. A statistically insignificant result that changes sign when estimated with different samples is exactly what we should expect if no true relationship exists. My work was published in Econ Journal Watch, another peer-reviewed academic journal that specializes in critiques of articles published in other journals.
That the Fed engages in politically biased research should not surprise us. A recent study of Fed personnel shows that the institution is very lopsided, politically.
Following the habits of good science is a good idea, but following the dictates of people who call themselves scientists is not the same thing. Climate change might be real, but there are good reasons to reject calls for draconian policies that fail cost-benefit tests.
************************************************
A German company is mothballing eight wind turbines, which will make room for expanding a nearby lignite coal mining operation
Germany has huge easily accessible brown coal deposits, particularly in the East, so is rational to make use of them
RWE is also re-activating three coal-fueled power plants, one of which had been scheduled to be permanently shut down last month, according to the company and government sources.
The German Bundeskabinett, or Federal Cabinet, authorized energy company RWE to re-open the coal plants to help offset lowered energy imports caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to Fox News.
“We realize this comes across as paradoxical,” RWE spokesperson Guido Steffen told The Guardian. “But that is as matters stand.”
After complaints from climate activists, some German government officials protested the dismantling of the windfarm.
“In the current situation, all potential for the use of renewable energy should be exhausted as much as possible and existing turbines should be in operation for as long as possible,” a spokesperson for North-Rhine Westphalia’s ministry for economic and energy affairs said. “We don’t currently see any necessity to dismantle the wind power plant by the L12 [road] near the Garzweiler surface mine.”
The windmills, however, have been slated to be removed beginning this year since they were first constructed in 2001.
“One of the turbines was dismantled last week to make way for the mine’s expansion, with two others to be taken down in the first and last quarter of next year, said a spokesperson for WPD, which manages a portion of the wind park,” The Guardian reported. “A spokesperson for Energiekontor, which built and runs the rest of the windfarm, said a time limit to its operational permit meant it expected to have to dismantle the five remaining turbines by the end of 2023.”
According to the report, each of the 20-year-old windmills generates only about 1 megawatt of electricity hourly, about one-sixth of the electricity produced by more modern wind turbines.
In contrast, the lignite-fueled power plants will generate about 300 megawatts each, the company said.
Lignite coal, it should be noted, isn’t even very efficient source of energy, as far as fossil fuels go.
Environmental activists consider lignite, sometimes called brown coal, to be the “most polluting and health-harming form of coal,” according to a 2018 “HEAL Briefing” from the Health and Environmental Alliance, which describes itself as “the leading European not-for-profit organisation addressing how the natural and built environments affect health in the European Union (EU) and beyond.”
This is in part because lignite’s low carbon content and higher water content requires more of it to be burned to obtain the the same amount of energy than would be produced by burning a smaller amount of higher quality “hard coal.”
“Originally, it was planned that the three reserve power plant units affected would be permanently shut down on September 30, 2022, and September 30, 2023, respectively,” RWE said in September.
“With their deployment, they contribute to strengthening the security of supply in Germany during the energy crisis and to saving natural gas in electricity generation,” the company added.
Reducing natural gas consumption is key to avoiding a “gas emergency,” Klaus Mueller, head of Germany’s national energy network regulator, said last month.
“We will hardly be able to avoid a gas emergency in winter without at least 20% savings in the private, commercial and industrial sectors,” Mueller said, according to The Associated Press. “The situation can become very serious if we do not significantly reduce our gas consumption.”
Germany has also elected to keep open three nuclear power plants through at least mid-April, another move by German leaders that has angered Green Party politicians, according to the BBC.
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/energy-company-begins-demolishing-wind-farm-makes-room-coal-mine
*******************************************************Reviewer Exposes EV Truck's serious failings After Trip Takes 3 Hours Longer Than It Should've
Auto reporter Henry Payne is only the latest person to discover that electric vehicles are simply not ready to replace gas-powered cars, especially for long-distance driving, when his Ford F-150 Lightning got only just over half the mileage that the manufacturer claimed on a 280-mile trip.
Payne, an auto critic for the Detroit News, set out to travel from Detroit to Charlevoix, Michigan. His trip was to be around 280 miles, and he was driving a new 2022 F-250 Lightning EV.
Payne wrote that he charged the truck to a full 100 percent charge ahead of the trip, and that the manufacturer claimed that a full charge should have allowed him to travel the whole distance without another charge.
But it wasn’t even close.
Payne wrote that as he sat at his third charging station of the day, another driver asked what sort of mileage he was getting on his roughly $93,000 EV truck.
“I’m getting about 170 miles of range on this trip up I-75,” he told the other driver. “How about you?”
The man replied, “I’ve got the turbo-6 cylinder. I’m getting 600 miles and 22 mpg. I don’t think I’ll ever get one of those electrics.”
At the bottom of his tale of woe, Payne reeled off the F-150 Lightning’s statistics, which included that it was supposed to have a 320-mile travel range on a full charge. But Payne only got about 170 miles down the road before he had to find a charger.
Certainly, electric cars themselves are not entirely useless, especially for local driving. Instead, the problem comes with the Biden administration’s attempts to force Americans to switch to electric vehicles rather than allowing them to determine for themselves what kind of vehicle best fits their needs.
The auto writer noted that inside the city limits of his hometown of Detroit, the Ford Lightning was a great vehicle. But out on the open road, no so much, adding that out on the long haul, “the Lightning’s wattage starts to dim.”
Payne started out the night before with a full charge on his battery, but by the time he got to Saginaw, a little less than halfway to his destination, “the Lightning was getting just 60 percent of estimated range and it was becoming clear to the trip computer that we would not make it to Gaylord,” Payne wrote. He added that the “281-mile range (he was supposed to get) looked more like 168 miles.”
Saginaw had several charging stations, but even that experience left him with a less-than-satisfying outcome.
The first charging station that he found stated that other drivers were currently charging their vehicles. So, he tried a second location that supposedly had four charging stations. But when he got there, two were occupied and the other two were being serviced by technicians and were out of service.
Then it got worse. One of the drivers at one of the two portals pulled out and told Payne that the second charger was not working, meaning that only one of the four chargers at the station was any good.
A frustrated Payne then drove to the first station he found and waited, wasting a lot of time.
Perhaps it could have been worse. If Payne’s truck had needed a battery pack replacement on that trip, it could have cost him more than $35,000!
Payne also added that he had to calculate earlier chargings in areas he knew he could find a station instead of risking having to hunt for a charging station when he was dangerously low on power. It was a calculation about which he said manufacturers don’t warn buyers.
“Though I had traveled just 70 miles since Bay City, chargers are scarce in Charlevoix and so I wanted to top up. That’s something that in-car navi systems don’t tell you. Arrive at your destination with low battery and there may be no infrastructure to get you around town,” he wrote as a warning to his readers.
This fact brings to light the serious mental aspect about driving an EV. The phenomenon is called “range anxiety,” as drivers find themselves in anguish over whether or not they will make it to the next charging station before their EV conks out because manufacturer claims don’t ever seem to pan out.
Payne’s final report was a bit disheartening, especially for those who claim it is much cheaper to drive an EV.
“I arrived in Charlevoix after six hours, 40 minutes for what’s normally a stop-free, 4-hour trip by gas-fired pickup. I had been delayed by 45 minutes of construction and nearly two hours of charging detours across three stations. Cost? About the same as filling with $3.50 gas,” he wrote.
The disaster led Payne to conclude that road trips are the electric truck’s “kryptonite.”
Payne ruefully concluded his review of the F-150 Lightning with a statement made by the driver of a Rivian, an electric car made by a Tesla competitor.
“I recalled my conversation with the Rivian driver in Gaylord,” Payne wrote. “He said he hadn’t anticipated so many delays on his family trip to Mackinac Island. ‘Next time,’ he said, ‘I’m bringing a different vehicle.'”
That statement seems to be the common denominator in these stories. Everyone who tries using an EV for a long haul wishes they had driven a gas-powered car, instead.
For instance, a Colorado man found his 180-mile road trip through Wyoming took 15 hellish hours where it would take less than four hours in a gas-powered car.
In another case of an EV disaster, a Youtube user discovered that his electric truck was not suited for towing despite what the manufacturers said.
Towing is a particular problem which seriously limits the range of an EV. According to Autotrader, towing large loads reduces the range of electric cars significantly, sometimes by as much as one-third, or even by half.
American consumers are perfectly free to buy a far more expensive electric vehicle, of course, especially if they intend to use it only to drive locally. But the government’s idea that we all should be in an EV is simply not a logical goal considering the logistical and technological limits from which these vehicles suffer.
***************************************
2 November, 2022
A major U.S. fuel supply company has issued an alert about diesel fuel shortages in several Southeastern U.S. states
States that are expected to experience shortages include Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, and South Carolina, Mansfield Energy said in an alert last week. The company also noted “extremely high prices in the Northeast.”
“Poor pipeline shipping economics and historically low diesel inventories are combining to cause shortages in various markets throughout the Southeast,” the company said. “These have been occurring sporadically, with areas like Tennessee seeing particularly acute challenges.”
It noted that fuel prices are 30 to 80 cents higher than the posted market average due to “tight” supply, while saying that “fuel suppliers have to pull from higher cost options, at a time when low-high spreads are much wider than normal.”
Fuel carriers are now having to go to “multiple terminals to find supply, which delays deliveries and strains local trucking capacity,” it said.
Due to “rapidly devolving” conditions, the firm issued its “Alert Level 4” to address the volatility, according to the statement. For the southeastern United States, Mansfield said it is issuing a “Code Red” alert and is “requesting 72-hour notice for deliveries when possible to ensure fuel and freight can be secured at economical levels.”
Diesel enables most of the shipping across the United States and is used by long-haul trucks and freight trains. While gasoline prices have dropped since they posted record highs in June, diesel hasn’t decreased nearly as much and currently stands at $5.31 per gallon, according to AAA.
Bottlenecks in supply chains caused by COVID-19 lockdowns and soaring energy prices have added to rising price levels. Data released earlier this month show the Consumer Price Index, a key inflation metric, has risen 8.2 percent year-over-year in September.
Republicans, meanwhile, have targeted the Biden administration for its policies around oil drilling, pipeline construction, and unremitting focus on promoting electric vehicles. In response to the energy crunch, the White House has released tens of millions of barrels of oil from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, bringing it down to about 400 million barrels, or the lowest levels in decades.
Democrats and President Joe Biden, meanwhile, have blamed Russia’s war in Ukraine for the spike in prices and low supply.
There have also been concerns that the United States is running out of diesel. Oct. 21 data from the Energy Information show that the country had 25.9 days of diesel left.
“Russia produces a lot of heavy products, a lot of heavy oil that produce and yield more diesel,” GasBuddy’s Patrick de Haan told KGVO. “The other problem is simply demand post-COVID that has certainly recovered significantly with many trucks and many goods. We can all remember how ports have been stuffed full with goods that Americans have been buying and those all need to move out of port via trucks.”
***************************************************
Madness: methane emissions tax will rip heart out of NZ farmers
It seems inconceivable that at a time of hyperinflation and global unrest, any government would deliberately destabilise the agricultural sector by introducing policies that would increase costs to primary producers, reduce production, and fuel price increases. Yet that’s what Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government is planning to do.
Our Prime Minister, the poster child of modern-day socialism, wants once again to boast on the world stage that she’s taking the lead in climate policy – this time by introducing a price on agricultural emissions of greenhouse gases.
That she wants the owners of ruminant livestock to pay a penalty for a by-product of a digestive process that is older than the dinosaurs, is madness personified.
Methane, an atmospheric trace gas, is part of an ancient natural cycle. Plants absorb carbon dioxide and using the green chlorophyll in their leaves combine it with water to trap the sun’s energy as food. When plant matter is eaten by ruminants, methane is produced, which breaks down into carbon dioxide and water vapour to continue the cycle.
Over three-quarters of the planet’s methane comes from natural sources such as wetlands, with the balance produced by landfills, rice paddies, and livestock. Since New Zealand has only one per cent of the world’s farmed ruminants the actual contribution of Kiwi livestock to methane in the atmosphere is almost too small to measure.
Announcing her plan, the Prime Minister boasted: “No other country in the world has yet developed a system for pricing and reducing agricultural emissions, so our farmers are set to benefit from being first movers. Cutting emissions will help New Zealand farmers to not only be the best in the world but the best for the world; gaining a price premium for climate friendly agricultural products while also helping to boost export earnings.”
In other words, the PM plans to tax the agricultural sector so heavily that by 2030 an estimated 20 per cent of sheep and beef farmers and five per cent of dairy farmers will be forced out of business.
Agriculture is New Zealand’s biggest industry, generating more than 70 per cent of our export earnings and about 12 per cent of our gross domestic product.
The impact of Ardern’s tax on the sector will be significant. Prices of homegrown protein – including milk, cheese, and meat – will undoubtedly rise as local production falls. Our crucial export returns will decline – by up to an estimated 5.9 per cent for dairy, 21.4 per cent for lamb, 36.7 per cent for beef, and 21.1 per cent for wool.
We can see the potential fallout by reminding ourselves of the consequences of a previous reckless decision by our Prime Minister when, without warning, she banned new offshore oil and gas exploration on the eve of a meeting of world leaders – so she could boast about her decisive climate change leadership.
That decision contributed to the closure of the Marsden Point Oil Refinery – with a loss of 240 local jobs and many hundreds more indirectly – leaving New Zealand dependent on imported fuel that we used to produce ourselves – and, paradoxically, increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
Like that decision, this policy will have profound and widespread consequences, far beyond the damage to those farmers who are expected to be forced out of the industry; their departure will impact heavily on farm services, meat processing plants, local schools, and the other local businesses.
What’s even more irrational is that the forced exit of the world’s most emissions-efficient farmers will increase global emissions as other less efficient nations increase production to fill the gap.
The tax is being forced onto our productive sector at a time when almost 200 coal-fired power stations are under construction in Asia. The world’s major emitters of China and India have already admitted they’re not planning to take serious action on reducing emissions for up to fifty years, as they prioritise the economic wellbeing of their nations by expanding essential electricity supplies.
Robin Grieve – the Chairman of FARM (Facts About Ruminant Methane) and Pastural Farming Climate Research points out that the move is in contravention of the Paris Agreement which ruled out emission reductions that reduce food production.
“With farmers not able to take any useful actions to reduce emissions and avoid the tax, the Government’s scheme is only going to achieve emission reductions by increasing farm costs and pushing a percentage of farmers out of business,” he says. “The UN is acutely aware that previous climate policy initiatives, such as pushing biofuel use, resulted in mass starvation as food producing land was diverted to producing fuel. This was described by one UN committee as the greatest crime against humanity ever. Pushing New Zealand farmland out of food production and into forestry is the same thing.”
Federated Farmers Chairman Andrew Hoggard believes the plan will “rip the guts out of small town New Zealand, putting trees where farms used to be.”
He says the agricultural industry worked for two and a half years on a proposal which would honour the Paris Agreement by not reducing food production, but the Government then changed the rules: “It’s gut-wrenching to think we now have this proposal from government which rips the heart out of the work we did. Out of the families who farm this land. Our plan was to keep farmers farming. Now they’ll be selling up so fast you won’t even hear the dogs barking on the back of the ute as they drive off.”
***********************************************
Winter kills you, not warmth
Global warming would SAVE lives, not cost them
People die daily from causes ranging from common ailments, such as heart disease, to rare occurrences, such as getting hit by lightning. But during which month do the most deaths happen in the United States?
The deadliest month in the U.S. is the one that heralds the New Year: January. An average of 251,699 people in the U.S. died in January every year between 2010 and 2020, according to a Live Science analysis of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Wonder database, which tracks how and when people die. In comparison, the averages for the other months for this time period range from 218,102 (August) to 242,475 (December), Live Science found.
Other analyses also find that January is the deadliest month in the U.S. According to an analysis of the CDC Wonder database by The Washington Post(opens in new tab), there were 40,000 to 60,000 more fatalities during January than August or September from 1999 to 2014.
Why is January so dangerous? According to the World Health Organization(opens in new tab) (WHO), the culprit could be the world's most prolific killer: heart disease, a 1999 study in the journal Circulation(opens in new tab) found, noting that heart conditions were more fatal during the winter months, especially January and February. More body heat is lost during the cold months, so the heart has to work harder, which creates extra stress for people with existing heart conditions, the British Heart Foundation(opens in new tab) reported.
https://www.livescience.com/deadliest-month-us
***********************************************************Engineering disaster: Remaking the Australian power grid to fail
Europe may be in the midst of a power crisis and memories of the chaos on the Australian grid in June still fresh, but that has not stopped billionaire activist Mike Cannon-Brookes and the state governments of Queensland and Victoria sowing the seeds of a major power disaster.
These players are engineering the closure of the bulk of the reliable coal-fired power supply of the eastern half of the continent within 13 years with nothing but intermittent renewable energy projects, most of which have yet to be built, to replace them.
To add to the air of fantasy which now pervades any decision involving energy in Australia, the Queensland and Victorian governments acknowledged that there has to be some means of storing energy for the changes to work, but then made proposals that were either completely inadequate (Queensland) or contained no details (Victoria).
To make matters worse the entire effort, including the many billions to be spent trying to replace coal power plants with wind and solar generators will have no benefit for Australia. As is widely known (except by Australian activists) few countries are paying much attention to their obligations under the Paris Agreement. Even those countries that have proved willing to undertake the major pain required to make real cuts in emissions (the UK and Germany) have backtracked in the past few months, thanks to the power crisis.
That means the sole result of all the money and effort spent on decarbonising the grid will be to make it more erratic and unreliable, and push power prices through the roof.
As was known before the announcements in September and October AGL’s 1.8-gigawatt Liddell power station in NSW will close in 2023, and its 2.6-gigawatt Bayswater plant will cease operations between 2030 and 2033. In addition, Origin Energy will shut the 2.8-gigawatt Eraring coal-fired power station in 2025, and Victoria’s Yallourn power station (1.48 GW, brown coal) is scheduled to close in 2028.
After a sustained campaign by Cannon-Brookes, who became AGL’s largest shareholder with the express purpose of getting the energy giant to accelerate closure of its coal plants, AGL has also announced they will shut the shut the 2.2-gigawatt Loy Yang A power station in Victoria’s La Trobe Valley in 2035, a decade earlier than planned.
At about the same time as the AGL announcement, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk declared that her government would end the use of coal power in the state by 2035. There are eight coal-fired plants in the state, the newest of which is the 30-year-old 1.4-gigawatt Tarong station, which will now close more than a decade ahead of schedule.
Then in October, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews declared that if he is re-elected in the looming state election he will introduce tough new emission targets that are likely to end coal-powered electricity generation in the state by 2035.
To replace this gaping hole in generating capacity, the Palaszczuk government has announced that it will develop a $62 billion renewable energy ‘super grid’ which includes a new transmission line and two new pumped-hydro projects. About half of that investment is expected to be public money, including $9 billion from the state government and (hopefully) the rest from the federal government.
The plan commits to two new pumped-hydro power stations. The Borumba project, near Gympie, in south-east Queensland and the Pioneer-Burdekin project near Mackay. Borumba is expected to store the equivalent of 48 GWh but the only figure available for the Pioneer-Burdekin is the output figure of 7 GW (a facility which generates 7 GW for seven hours produces 49 GWh – commentators, activists and even government press releases routinely confuse GW and GWh).
Assuming the combined total storage will add up to 100 GWh, however, it is still equivalent to perhaps ten hours worth of operation by the coal plants the Palaszczuk government wants to close down. The Snowy Hydro 2.0 project, which is proving a ridiculously expensive white elephant, may add another 300 GWh, but these are all still inadequate amounts especially given the growing evidence of a weather phenomenon known as a wind drought.
As previously noted in this publication (‘Transition loses traction’, 9 July, 2022) there is evidence that wind can die across the whole of the National Energy Market (the east coast grid) for up to 33 hours – as far as anyone knows – meaning that it will require at least twice the amount of storage now either being built or in proposal documents to get through a wind drought period, and ideally several times that. Proper grid planning should also take into account major wind droughts occurring during periods of cloudy days and during rain droughts where there will not be much fresh water to fill the pumped-storage facilities.
In October, the Victorian government announced that it would revive the old State Electricity Commission but this time as a renewable energy agency with $1 billion to develop 4.5 GW worth of renewable energy projects. In late September the Victorian government had also announced that it would increase its renewable energy storage capacity target ‘to 6.3GW by 2035’, although it’s not clear from the announcement or any of the breathless media stories generated by it just how this target will be achieved, or even what it means. Does the Victorian government mean gigawatts or gigawatt hours? If it means gigawatt hours, it does not help very much. Three battery projects in various stages of development amounting to about one GWh are mentioned, and the state government is tipping in $167 million of taxpayer money, although it is not clear what the money is to be spent on. Otherwise, the announcement seems to be a statement of intentions.
While governments make muddled announcements about what they may be going to do, the power grid with its collection of aging fossil-fuel plants continues to stagger along somehow, and probably will until the Liddell plant ceases operation in 2023.
However, the June crisis in the power grid was in part due to the simultaneous failure of major coal-fired units. As the coal power stations are aging it is not surprising that they are off the grid, for one reason or another, more often. The forced closures will make such crises more likely and more frequent.
Instead of acknowledging this point, commentators descend into fantasy about how more renewables and extensive use of hydrogen will fix the problem. It seems that consumers must wait until they are left in the dark in freezing homes for extended periods until policy makers finally concede that renewables might not be the answer to everything.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/10/engineering-disaster/
***************************************1 November, 2022
Does attacking art change minds?
The article below offers no conclusions. I think that most people would see it as deplorable. It makes those who do it seem like nuts. I think it will discredit their message rather than promote it
First it was cake smeared on the Mona Lisa in Paris, then tomato soup splattered across a van Gogh in London, and then, last Sunday, liquefied mashed potatoes hurled at a Monet in a museum in Potsdam, Germany.
What these actions shared, aside from involving priceless art and carbs, was the intentions of the protesters behind them. Desperate to end complacency about the climate crisis and to pressure governments to stop the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, they said they had resorted to such high-profile tactics because little else has worked.
None of the paintings were harmed, as all were encased in protective glass. But the actions went viral and set off an international storm of outrage and debate. Were the activists misguided attention-seekers who harmed the climate movement’s legitimacy while doing nothing to help the Earth? Or did they force a spotlight onto everything at risk if significant climate action isn’t taken fast?
It’s unclear whether throwing food at artwork, which follows a long line of guerrilla protest tactics, was a success.
For the climate activists, the protests amounted to wins, insofar as they nabbed far more attention than anything they’d undertaken yet. Despite decades of lobbying, petitions, marches and civil disobedience, planet-heating fossil fuel emissions are at an all-time high, and the window to avert further climate catastrophe is closing.
“We tried sitting in the roads, we tried blocking oil terminals, and we got virtually zero press coverage, yet the thing that gets the most press is chucking some tomato soup on a piece of glass covering a masterpiece,” said Mel Carrington, a spokesperson for Just Stop Oil, the group behind the Oct. 14 soup attack on van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” at the National Gallery in London. After tossing the soup, the two Just Stop Oil activists glued their hands to the wall. “What is worth more, art or life?” asked one, Phoebe Plummer, 21.
Carrington said the act was intended to elicit a visceral reaction, to force people to emotionally experience the potential loss of a masterpiece. “When you think about it, this is what we face with climate collapse,” she said. “The loss of everything we love.”
The soup action was inspired in part by an episode in May at the Louvre Museum, in which a protester creamed the glass covering of the Mona Lisa with cake, and urged onlookers to think about the Earth. (Just Stop Oil activists echoed that tactic Monday by smashing chocolate cake onto a waxwork figure of King Charles III.)
“We want to have this conversation, and to bring it around to our demand about what we need to do to avoid climate breakdown and collapse,” Carrington said.
In Germany, climate activists took notice. Carla Hinrichs, a spokesperson for the group Last Generation, said her first reaction was disbelief until she saw how Just Stop Oil was using the moment to highlight the planned expansion of oil and gas exploration off England’s coast.
“I realized it was genius,” Hinrichs said. “People get shocked, and then this window opens where they start listening.”
On Oct. 23, two activists with Last Generation headed into the Museum Barberini in Potsdam and, in a nod to Germany’s penchant for spuds, tossed runny yellow mashed potatoes onto the glass front of Monet’s “Grainstacks,” which sold for nearly $111 million in 2019. “Our win is when politicians react to the climate crisis,” Hinrichs said. “This is a step on the way, one that people talk about, that’s not ignorable.”
Hinrichs and Carrington said their groups had made certain the artworks were protected by glass, and in all three instances the museums said the paintings were unharmed, except for minor damage to at least one of the frames. Some museums are now looking to step up security, and the Barberini announced it would temporarily close until Sunday. There are also concerns about a potential “art protection crisis” that could see works being hidden away or permanently ruined.
Art has been targeted by protesters before. Suffragists attacked a series of artworks a century ago, with one slashing “The Toilet of Venus” by Diego Velázquez with a meat cleaver and getting lashed for it in the press.
The soup and potato museum protests similarly elicited shock and confusion. “Embarrassing confession: Did not know that climate change was caused by French impressionists,” Scott Shapiro, a professor at Yale University, said on Twitter. Conspiracy theories blossomed about the activists’ motives, as both groups received backing from the Climate Emergency Fund, a nonprofit organization to which oil heir Aileen Getty and director Adam McKay have been significant donors.
Benjamin Sovacool, a professor of earth and the environment at Boston University, said the most effective social movements employed sustained and intense pressure for long periods of time, and that one measure of an action’s success was how much it builds a coalition or alienates people. While the museum protests were polarizing, he said, “at least we’re talking about it.”
*******************************************************
On Second Thoughts, Just Throw Plastic Away
Even Greenpeace has finally acknowledged the truth: recycling plastic makes no sense.
This has been obvious for decades to anyone who crunched the numbers, but the fantasy of recycling plastic proved irresistible to generations of environmentalists and politicians. They preached it to children, mandated it for adults, and bludgeoned municipalities and virtue-signaling corporations into wasting vast sums—probably hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide—on an enterprise that has been harmful to the environment as well as to humanity.
Now Greenpeace has seen the light, or at least a glimmer of rationality. The group has issued a report accompanied by a press release headlined, “Plastic Recycling Is A Dead-End Street—Year After Year, Plastic Recycling Declines Even as Plastic Waste Increases.” The group’s overall policy remains delusional—the report proposes a far more harmful alternative to recycling—but it’s nonetheless encouraging to see environmentalists put aside their obsessions long enough to contemplate reality.
The Greenpeace report offers a wealth of statistics and an admirably succinct diagnosis: “Mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic waste has largely failed and will always fail because plastic waste is: (1) extremely difficult to collect, (2) virtually impossible to sort for recycling, (3) environmentally harmful to reprocess, (4) often made of and contaminated by toxic materials, and (5) not economical to recycle.” Greenpeace could have added a sixth reason: forcing people to sort and rinse their plastic garbage is a waste of everyone’s time. But then, making life more pleasant for humans has never been high on the green agenda.
These fatal flaws have been clear since the start of the recycling movement. When I wrote about it a quarter-century ago, experts were already warning that recycling plastic was hopelessly impractical because it was so complicated and labor-intensive, but municipal officials kept trying in the hope that somebody would eventually find it worthwhile to buy their plastic trash. Instead, they’ve had to pay dearly to get rid of it, typically by shipping it to Asian countries with cheaper labor and looser environmental rules. In New York City, recycling a ton of plastic costs at least six times more than sending it to a landfill, according to a 2020 Manhattan Institute study, which estimated that the city could save $340 million annually by sending all its trash to landfills.
The environmental price has also been high because the plastic in American recycling bins has gone to developing countries with primitive waste-handling systems. Much of it ends up illegally dumped, burned (spewing toxic fumes), or reprocessed at rudimentary facilities that leak some of the plastics into rivers. Virtually all the consumer plastics polluting the world’s oceans comes from “mismanaged waste” in developing countries. There’d be less plastic polluting the seas if Americans tossed their yogurt containers and water bottles into the trash, so that the plastic could be safely buried at the nearest landfill.
The Environmental Protection Agency has promoted recycling as a way to reduce carbon emissions, but its own figures show that the benefits are relatively small and come almost entirely from recycling paper products and metals, not plastic. I’ve calculated that to offset the greenhouse impact of one passenger’s round-trip transatlantic flight, you’d have to recycle 40,000 plastic bottles—and if you used hot water to rinse those bottles, the net effect could be more carbon in the atmosphere.
While finally admitting the futility of plastic recycling, Greenpeace is making no apologies for the long campaign to foist it on the public, and the group is unashamedly pushing a new strategy that’s even worse. It proposes finally to “end the age of plastic” by “phasing out single-use plastics” through a “Global Plastics Treaty.” This is a preposterous goal—imagine “phasing out” disposable syringes—and would be laughable except that environmentalists have already made some progress toward it. They’ve found yet another way to harm both the environment and humans, as demonstrated in the movement to ban single-use plastic bags.
Progressive activists may not care that these bans have added to the cost of groceries, inconvenienced shoppers, and caused new headaches for merchants. (After New Jersey forbade stores from offering disposable plastic or paper bags, supermarkets ran out of handheld shopping baskets because so many customers were stealing them.) But progressives also don’t seem to care about the implications for climate change and public health.
Banning single-use plastic grocery bags has added carbon to the atmosphere by forcing shoppers to use heavier paper bags and tote bags that require much more energy to manufacture and transport. The paper and cotton bags also take up more space in landfills and produce more greenhouse emissions as they decompose. The tote bags aren’t reused nearly often enough to offset their initial carbon footprint, and they’re breeding grounds for bacteria and viruses because they’re rarely washed properly. Researchers have repeatedly found these bags to be responsible for gastrointestinal infections, but the warnings got little attention until the Covid pandemic suddenly revived respect for disposable products.
As stores and coffee shops banned reusable bags and mugs during the pandemic, Americans relearned the lessons of the early twentieth century, when public-health authorities promoted Dixie cups and other disposable products to counter threats like tuberculosis and the Spanish flu. This marked the beginning of the “throwaway society,” and the term wasn’t originally used pejoratively. Americans welcomed plastic products and packages because they were so much better than the alternative. Cellophane was considered a marvel because it was both moisture-proof and transparent, keeping food fresher and enabling grocery shoppers to see what they were buying. Advertisements featured housewives rejoicing that disposable plates and glasses freed them from dishwashing chores.
Environmentalists’ zeal to ban plastic is far more destructive than their former passion to recycle it; it’s also harder to explain. Recycling, while impractical, at least offered emotional rewards to hoarders reluctant to put anything in the trash and to the many people who perform garbage-sorting as a ritual of atonement—a sacrament of the green religion. But why demonize plastic? Why ban products that are cheaper, sturdier, lighter, cleaner, healthier, and better for the environment? One reason: the plastic scare helps Greenpeace activists raise money and keep their jobs. Environmentalists need something to replace their failed recycling campaign.
But there’s more to it than just financial self-interest. The best explanation I’ve come up with is that plastic bans are a revival of the sumptuary laws formerly imposed on the lower classes by monarchs, nobles, and clergy. Those laws forbade commoners from owning certain kinds of clothes, jewelry, furnishings, and other products. The restrictions consistently failed to achieve their ostensible purpose of reducing “unnecessary” spending, but sumptuary laws endured until the Enlightenment because they reinforced ruling-class power and status. An English countess could display her superiority by wearing a dress with silver stripes that were illegal for women of lower rank. Spanish prelates and Portuguese monarchs proclaimed their moral virtue and political authority by forbidding the masses from owning clothes, curtains, and tablecloths made of silk.
Today’s rulers and moral guardians achieve the same purposes with their petty edicts on plastic. California’s law forbidding hotels from offering disposable plastic toiletries is a gratuitous annoyance for travelers who’d like a little bottle of shampoo, but it enables the state’s politicians and environmental groups to exercise power and pretend to be saviors of the planet. The pretense is so ridiculous that even Greenpeace will eventually abandon it—but once again, that could take a few decades. The rest of us can start today.
https://www.city-journal.org/greenpeace-admits-recycling-doesnt-work ?
*********************************************************
The Greenies have failed
Where are the Greens, the environmental groups that were opposing us? You know, Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy[1], Greenpeace, National Wildlife Federation, Audubon Society, Natural Resource Defense Council, EarthFirst!, Sea Shepherd Society, Wilderness Society, Humane Society of the United States, People for the ethical Treatment of Animals, Smithsonian Institution, Union of Concerned Scientists, World Resources Institute, Friends of the Earth, and too many more.
They attacked property rights, ranching, mining, drilling, fishing, hunting, medical research, and so much more. They held huge meetings with wealthy backers like David Suzuki, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, and Prince Charles. Those meetings discussed how to get rid of us small guys – the protectors of the land and animal users and caretakers. In the early ‘90s, they concluded that there was “no silver bullet” to rid them of us at a meeting in Canada. We weren’t backed by big money. We got small donations from other “wise use” people – or, more often, we footed our own bill.
Why did they even think about silver bullets? Because we were so dangerous to society, they were backed by major $$$$$$$$$$. Here are the top ten “Environmental Grantmakers” for 1990, the heyday of the Green/Animal Rights/anti-industry war:
Richard King Mellon Foundation
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
The Pew Charitable Trusts
The Ford Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
W. Alton Jones Foundation, Inc.
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (there are tens and tens more feeding them.)
Corporations supply a great deal of funding to these Green organizations. Just some of those: Aldus Corporation, Amoco, ARCO, Burlington Northern, Burpee, Champion International, Conoco, Liz Claiborne, Orvis, Patagonia, Phillips Petroleum, Tabasco, U.S. Trust, Waste Management, Wells Fargo Bank, L.L. Bean, Chevron, Coca-Cola, DuPont, Eastman Kodak, J.P. Morgan, Philip Morris, Ciba-Geigy, Dow Chemical, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Mars Foundation, Mobil Oil, Monsanto, Penzoil, 3M, Weyerhaeuser, AT&T Foundation, Proctor 7 Gamble, Exxon, and again, so many more.
What was our crime? What did we do to sic all the major environmental groups on us and that the world’s major corporations needed to fund them? Supposedly, we were trashing the planet – killing birds and animals, tearing up the Earth, tearing down all the trees, despoiling the rivers, and polluting the skies.
Look at the situation now. Wind turbines are killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds. After not a long life, those turbines are buried, not very deep, but they stop any possible use of the land (and as they disintegrate, they pollute what Earth is there. I haven’t heard a peep or chirp from any Green group about all those dead eagles, hawks, or birds. Why not?
Far more creatures are being killed now than were ever in the past. Where are the Earth Liberation Front and the Monkey Wrench gang? We are watching the Earth being destroyed, and the so-called saviors of the Earth are sitting on their hands! They banned paper bags at the grocery store and replaced that biodegradable product with plastic bags!
Uh, Greenpeace, you are vocal about a kid’s birthday party losing 3 or 5 balloons, but plastic bags by the millions are okay? Ah, the makers fund you. Oops. The government is pouring millions of pollutants into the skies to reduce the sun’s heat. Two things there – pollution that is killing birds, animals, plants, rivers – oh, and us – but that last is probably what makes all the other things acceptable.
And where are those Greens now? No more environmentalists howling in the forest at the loss of trees because of environmental degradation? No Greens chaining themselves to a factory that is producing wind-turbine blades? No animal rightists march against PeTA for killing animals they take in?
So, we can assume those Green groups were either reinvented or bought out by big business to end the industrial revolution that allowed so many people to come up from poverty and survive to a decent age. That was their goal. Saying “the digital age” was replacing the industrial age was a farce from the beginning. I always wondered how those brilliant people thought they could build their computerized world without industry. Now I know; they couldn’t.
All those foundations and organizations listed above, and too many more in both categories, are trying to destroy 90% of the human population – and all the rest is collateral damage. Who cares? All those environmental organizations that were supposedly populated by nature lovers who couldn’t stand to see a mouse in a trap, a fur on a woman, a tree that was going to provide paper or walls for a house, a fish or cow used to feed us. Instead, they disappeared as soon as their marching orders were changed.
Now they man the barricades for Black Lives Matters (so the big boss can buy her mansions) and Antifa so they can cause wanton destruction and death while being eulogized for destroying people, businesses, and cities.
If the Greens were so dedicated to Mother Earth and her non-human denizens, why are they now letting it go to hell?
Our world is upside down. It is time for the silent majority to say NO! Loudly.
https://www.conservativehq.org/post/where-have-all-the-flowers-gone-long-time-passing
**********************************************************Italian eco-zealots lie in the middle of busy motorway in Rome as climate change hysteria sweeps Europe
Interesting that the Italian demonstrators seem to be PRO coal
Eco-zealots in Italy have blocked the busiest motorway in Rome as climate protests begin to sweep across Europe.
Protesters have sat in the middle of the Via Guglielmo Marcon in the country's capital holding banners aloft as part of Ultima Generazione, Italian for Last Generation, demonstrations.
The 'civil disobedience' movement was borne from Extinction Rebellion and the independent 'Ultima Generazioneâ' last year.
The protesters are demanding that disused coal plants be reopened and calling for a halt to a new drilling project for the research into and extraction of natural gas.
It was the latest such stunt by climate campaigners in a spate of high-profile incidents in which eco-warriors have targeted road networks and artworks across Europe.
Eco demonstrations, which have taken place in London every day this month, include two environmental activists who glued themselves to an exhibition of a dinosaur skeleton at Berlin's Natural History Museum yesterday to protest against the German government's climate policies.
In Berlin, two women wearing orange vests stuck themselves to metal poles supporting a dinosaur skeleton that was over 60 million years old, holding a banner that read: 'What if the government doesn't have it under control?'
They did not touch or do any damage to the skeleton itself.
The women were removed by the police after security guards at the museum alerted them to the incident.
The protest was the latest effort to force governments around the world to take swift action to reduce emissions over the damage global warming is doing to the planet.
One of the women, Caris Connell, said she was scared of 'forest fires, water shortages, famines, and war.
'Dinosaurs died out, because they could not withstand massive changes to the climate. That is also threatening us,' added the 34-year-old.
It comes after furious drivers resorted to dragging away a group of eco protesters who sparked fury by halting traffic on a busy motorway during a similar stunt in Rome earlier this month.
Rush hour motorists were blockaded on the Grande Raccordo ringroad outside the Italian capital by Last Generation activists who unfurled large banners protesting fossil fuels.
The disruption led to angry scenes as drivers got out of their vehicles to remonstrate with the eco-zealots and plead with them to get out of their way.
Some took matters into their own hands, physically dragging protesters out of the way.
One man on a motorbike begged to be let through, loudly arguing: 'I have to go, I'm a doctor.'
But a female activist refused to grant him permission to get through without seeing his medical identification and demanded he handed it over.
He eventually brandished his ID card and the demonstrator allowed him to bypass the human barricade.
In another tense exchange, one angry driver shouted at a protester: 'You have to move, move out of the f***ing way!'
When he started to physically drag the activist off the road, a woman intervened: 'Stop! You will hurt him.'
Another man stepped in and confronted the demonstrators, saying: 'This is not the way of protesting. Organise a proper protest, the motorway is not where you should protest. We have to go to work'
'Otherwise, this will become poor against poor. People will get angry and they will beat you and this is not fair... You're p***ing people off.'
The protesters' banners read 'no gas' and 'no coal' and they are calling for stronger government action on climate issue.
***************************************
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
*****************************************
Sidebars
The notes and pix appearing in the sidebar of the blog that is reproduced above are not reproduced here. The sidebar for this blog can however be found in my archive of sidebars
Most pictures that I use in the body of the blog should stay up throughout the year. But how long they stay up after that is uncertain. At the end of every year therefore I intend to put up a collection of all pictures used my blogs in that year. That should enable missing pictures to be replaced. The archive of last year's pictures on this blog is therefore now up. Note that the filename of the picture is clickable and clicking will bring the picture up. See here (2021). See also here (2020).
My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Personal); My Home page supplement; My Alternative Wikipedia; My Blogroll; Menu of my longer writings; Subject index to my short notes. My annual picture page is here; My Recipes;
Email me (John Ray) here.