Emerging U.S. Energy Powerhouse

The United States is emerging as the world’s energy powerhouse. Two months ago, the United States became the largest producer of crude oil. Exports of crude oil, oil products and natural gas are rising rapidly. The “keep it in the ground” movement is losing ground.

U.S. crude oil production in August reached 10.8 million barrels per day, more than double the 5 million barrels per day produced in 2008. Last February, U.S. output surpassed that of Saudi Arabia. In August, U.S. production exceeded that of Russia, making the United States the world’s largest producer of petroleum.

U.S. natural gas production is up 40 percent from 2007 to 2017. The U.S. surpassed Russia as the world’s leading producer of natural gas in 2011.

Driving American energy dominance is the hydrofracturing revolution. Over the last two decades, U.S. geologists and petroleum engineers perfected the techniques of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, permitting cost-effective extraction of oil and gas from low-permeability shale rock formations. U.S. companies hold about a 10-year experience lead in shale extraction techniques over international competitors.

In 2000, only about 7 percent of U.S. natural gas came from hydraulically fractured wells. Today, about 70 percent of U.S. gas production and over 50 percent of crude oil production comes from fractured wells. Fracking operations are active in more than 20 states.

U.S. oil and gas production surged despite strong opposition from environmental groups. For more than a decade, green advocates have opposed drilling, fracking, pipeline transport, export terminals, and even investments in oil and gas. But the “keep it in the ground” movement is being trampled by the U.S. energy juggernaut.

Along with the rapid rise in production, U.S. oil and gas exports are exploding. U.S. exports of refined petroleum products increased by a factor of five from 2004 to 2017. Our nation became a net exporter of refined petroleum products in 2011. In 2015, the Obama administration lifted a 40-year ban on U.S. crude oil exports. Crude exports rose by 400 percent since 2014. The U.S. still remains a net importer of crude oil, but oil imports have dropped to the lowest level since 2000.

In 2017, the United States became a net exporter of natural gas, with Mexico the largest customer. Prior to 2010, terminals were under construction to import liquefied natural gas. But the fracking revolution produced a huge volume of gas at one-half of the price of gas in Europe and one-third of the price in Japan. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminals started operation in 2016 at Sabine Pass in Louisiana and in 2018 at Cove Point in Maryland. Four other new LNG export terminals are scheduled to come on line by 2020.

Propane, a hydrocarbon fuel used for heating and cooking, is a notable example of success. Prior to 2010, the United States was a net importer of propane. But U.S. propane field production doubled since 2010 and exports now approach 1 million barrels per day.

About 3 billion people around the world do not have modern fuels for heating and cooking. India has a program to get liquid propane gas to 80 percent of households by March 2019. Exports of U.S. propane are meeting this need in India, along with needs in China and other nations. The Panama Canal expansion completed in 2016 allows supertankers to deliver U.S. propane and natural gas to Asia.

A major benefit of U.S. energy resurgence is an improved balance of trade in energy. In 2011, U.S. energy imports exceeded exports by $325 billion. With growing production of oil and gas and rising exports, the US trade imbalance in energy fell to $57 billion in 2017. Energy plays a major role in the strength of today’s U.S. economy.

The U.S. plastics industry now enjoys a large cost advantage in global markets. U.S. oil and gas refineries produce the lowest-cost ethylene and propylene in the world, the basic materials for plastics. U.S. natural gas also provides a cost advantage for chemical and steel firms. Gas fuels generation of cheap electricity for aluminum, cement, paper, and other industries.

Despite environmental opposition, the United States is emerging as the world’s energy powerhouse. U.S. energyproduction is not only good for U.S. industry and the U.S. economy, but exports increasingly provide low-cost energy for Europe, Asia and the rest of the world.

SOURCE




Video: World to End Again: This Time They're Serious

Bill Whittle has heard this climate change warning before, and he has an answer.



The United Nations climate change panel’s new report says global temperatures climbing in just a decade will raise the oceans by feet (not inches), devastate almost all of the coral reefs, and otherwise ruin your day. They have a solution, but few of us will survive it. Bill Whittle thinks he’s heard this before. He has an answer.




Climate Alarmists Admit They Want to Dismantle Our Free Enterprise System

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is warning that the dire costs of climate change are going to be here sooner than we think.

The planet is close to reaching its alleged 1.5-degree Celsius warming threshold, and civilization only has 11 years to fix it.

Oh, yeah, and the solution is to tear down the global free-enterprise system responsible for human flourishing and raising levels of prosperity for billions of people.

Don’t take my word for it.

A writer for the eco-friendly Grist tweeted, “The world’s top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report itself warns: “There is no documented historical precedent” for the transformation (aka de-development) necessary to curb global warming.

The Associated Press reported:

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

The year 2000? Oh, wait a minute. The AP article is from June 30, 1989. Scratch that last warning from nearly three decades ago.

The reality is that, though the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report and proponents of dismantling the free-enterprise system have been shockingly honest in revealing their true intentions over the past few days, the sentiment is not new.

In fact, three years ago, U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres made similar remarks in a push for the Paris climate accord.

Figueres said, “This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”

The current economic development model that reigns supreme does so for compelling reasons.

People that freely exchange ideas and products, that have protection from government coercion and that have well-defined and protected property rights because of a strong rule of law have done quite well for themselves.

Free, competitive energy markets drive innovation and provide the affordable, reliable energy that families and businesses need, and yield a cleaner environment.

Conversely, international efforts to combat climate change have been centrally planned boondoggles. They’ve resulted in wasted taxpayer money, higher energy prices, and handouts for preferred energy sources and technologies—all for no noticeable impact on climate.

Eighty percent of all energy consumed by Americans comes from conventional sources, such as coal, oil, and natural gas. About 80 percent of the world’s energy needs are met by these natural resources, which emit carbon dioxide when combusted.

Levying a price on carbon dioxide will directly raise the cost of electricity, gasoline, diesel fuel, and home-heating oil. But the economic pain does not stop there.

When considering the impact of a carbon tax on individuals, it is important to note that carbon is intertwined in all parts of life. Energy is a necessary component for just about all of the goods and services consumed, so Americans would pay more for food, health care, education, clothes—you name it.

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report suggests policy proposals that would be economically cataclysmic.

It proposes a carbon tax of between $135 and $5,500 by 2030. A $5,500 carbon tax equates to a $50-per-gallon gas tax. An energy tax of that magnitude would bankrupt families and businesses, and undoubtedly catapult the world into economic despair.

Importantly, an extreme climate policy would also divert resources away from pressing environmental concerns, such as investing in more robust infrastructure to protect against natural disasters or new, innovative technologies that improve air and water quality.

Are those costs worth it? After all, having wealth, health, and affordable power don’t mean all that much if people don’t have a planet to live on. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates the climate costs could total $54 trillion without action.

But is there any new revelation in the scientific literature that makes climate doom imminent?

Not according to climatologist Judith Curry, a former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Curry asserts that the main conclusion from the report is that “things would be a little better at 1.5C relative to 2C.”

Furthermore, she notes, “Over land, we have already blown through the 1.5C threshold if measured since 1890.

“Temperatures around 1820 were more than 2C cooler.  There has been a great deal of natural variability in temperatures prior to 1975, when human-caused global warming kicked in any meaningful way.”

Another critical point Curry highlights is the fact that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change largely disregards the lower thirds of likely climate sensitivity values between 1.5C and 4.5C.

Equilibrium climate sensitivity attempts to quantify the earth’s temperature response to carbon dioxide emissions, answering the question: How does the earth’s temperature change from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

There is a lot of scientific debate about equilibrium climate sensitivity within the climate literature, with a fair amount of uncertainty. And, as Curry mentions, “Much of this problem goes away if ECS is actually 1.5 to 2C.”

What about natural disasters? The University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr., who specializes in analyzing extreme weather trends, emphasizes that “the IPCC once again reports that there is little basis for claiming that drought, floods, hurricanes [and] tornadoes have increased, much less increased due to [greenhouse gases].”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s politicization of policy actions presents another problem, and it is evident in the way the report treats nuclear energy.

Nuclear power provides nearly 60 percent of America’s carbon dioxide-free electricity, yet the climate panel engages in fearmongering about its expanded use. One would think that if climate change were an existential crisis, the world would need all the nuclear power it can get.

While the report acknowledges that any pathway to meeting carbon dioxide-reduction targets will include increased nuclear buildout, the report says more nuclear “can increase the risks of proliferation, have negative environmental effects (e.g., for water use), and have mixed effects for human health when replacing fossil fuels.”

Writing in Forbes, Michael Shellenberger documents the IPCC’s historic bias against nuclear power. Yet, the report unabashedly supports expanded wind and solar development and offers personal lifestyle changes to reduce the planet’s carbon footprint, such as air-drying laundry, eating less red meat, and biking to work.

Regardless of the cause, there are undoubted challenges from a changing climate.

Investing in coral reef protection or in preparation for extreme weather events can be worthwhile. However, the combination of fearmongering and offering solutions that would require a takeover of the global economy are unrealistic and counterproductive.

SOURCE





Researchers Argue Benefits of CO2 Outweigh the Harm

Global climate change gained a new urgency for world leaders when a new report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that it would take “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to avoid catastrophic levels of global warming as early as 2030. The IPCC warns that without draconian emissions cuts far above what the world has been able to achieve thus far, global warming will surpass the 1.5°C limit which global leaders have been discussing for years. Is that such a bad thing, though? Some say no, arguing that the benefits of industrialization have improved human life far more than global warming has harmed it.

According to the IPCC report, the situation is grim–global warming is unstoppable unless consumers start traveling less, ridesharing, eating less meat, and increasing the energy efficiency of their homes. Although the IPCC’s report speaks mostly of likelihoods and probabilities, the authors fret over harms that “will persist for centuries to millennia” unless action is taken now.

Even so, not everyone is ready to settle down to sitting at home with a vegetarian burger. Joseph Bast and Peter Ferrara, two senior fellows at the Heartland Institute, researched the human benefits of industrialization on the request of a California judge hearing the state of California’s lawsuit against BP and other energy companies. The evidence the two researchers found argues that it was better to industrialize and warm than not industrialize at all.

“Fossil fuels are lifting billions of people out of poverty, reducing all the negative effects of poverty on human health,” they write. “Fossil fuels are vastly improving human well-being and safety by powering labor-saving and life-protecting technologies, such as air conditioning, modern medicine, and cars and trucks.”

They explain that, for much of human existence, just keeping fed and warm required large amounts of time and labor. Not until the Industrial Revolution–and the introduction of coal, the first fossil fuel–were people able to improve their productivity and standard of living. Energy allowed for factories, cheaper goods, and a new, higher standard of living.

The same trend continues today. Cheaper energy allows for more economic growth and the creation of new businesses and new wealth, reshaping everything from manufacturing to farming. In fact, food production has been one of the less-publicized, yet still crucial benefits of fossil fuel production. As efficiency gains led farmers to trade their horses and mules for tractors, crop yields increased even as fewer and fewer people were needed to work in the fields. In the course of two centuries, some 80 percent of the developed world’s population left agriculture for other industries.

And the benefits don’t stop there. Ammonia fertilizer is produced from natural gas, allowing higher yields from less farmland. Talk of transitioning away from a “fossil fuel economy” often ignores these tertiary benefits in favor of a discussion of harms yet to be seen. Despite the predictions of inevitable famine, crop productions have continued to rise globally, sometimes even benefiting from warmer temperatures.

In fact, higher CO2 levels in the air actually boost plant growth, functioning like airborne plant food. Bast and Ferrara studied the impacts of predicted crop gains due to higher CO2 levels, arguing that they are likely to be significant enough to offset predicted harms.

“The benefits of CO2 fertilization are so great they exceed the entire “social cost of carbon” claimed by the Obama-era EPA. And even these estimates do not include the benefits realized by the timber industry, outdoor recreation, and other industries that benefit from the general greening of the Earth,” they wrote.

In light of the benefits of fossil fuels, the sort of dramatic efforts pushed by the IPCC to curb emissions start to look even more grim. Halting global warming would require the sacrifice of technology that has allowed the world’s population to surge in size while becoming richer. While western nations could perhaps absorb the cost of shifting their energy sources, severe cuts in global emissions would likely hurt the world’s poorest citizens.

“The bottom line is that an enormous increase in energy supply will be required to meet the demands of projected population growth and lift the developing world out of poverty without jeopardizing current standards of living in the most developed countries,” concluded one group of social ecology professors in a recent paper for BioScience.

If the cost of abandoning fossil fuels is so high, should it still seriously be considered as a policy goal?

The argument may become increasingly relevant as international and domestic policymakers are forced to grapple with the reality that it may not be feasible to limit warming to 1.5°C. Even the IPCC’s report mulled over this reality:

“There is no single answer to the question of whether it is feasible to limit warming to 1.5°C and adapt to the consequences,” the IPCC wrote.

SOURCE




There's no such thing as a happy Greenie

Bob Brown is Australia's best known Greenie.  Bob doesn't know the meaning of compromise or moderation when it comes to his causes.  One suspects that he has a genuinely paranoid belief in global warming

Today’s IPCC report is mealy mouthed and dangerous because it fails to tackle the world’s political delinquents like Australia, Bob Brown said today.

“Governments like Australia’s Morrison government will feel relieved that this stodgy panel of scientific conservatives has flagged that there may be more time than previously thought to take the drastic action required to turn around global heating. It is a mistake to give politicians subservient to the fossil fuel industry the message that things aren’t as bad as was thought, especially as the real impacts of global heating - coral death, cyclonic storms, bushfires, droughts, glacial melting, super-heated cities - is so obviously getting worse.”

As NATURE reports today: In the meantime, the newer and larger carbon budget could send the wrong message to policymakers, says Oliver Geden, a social scientist and visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany. He fears that the IPCC report undersells the difficulty of achieving the 1.5 °C goal. “It’s always five minutes to midnight, and that is highly problematic,” he says. “Policymakers get used to it, and they think there’s always a way out.”

“The global heating emergency is upon us and the IPCC is sending the wrong signal to assuage political fire. In the lifetimes of our children the blame for the massive cost of this failure, in terms of dollars and security, will be sheeted home not just to the fossil fuel industry but to powerful groups like the IPCC who hedged their bets,” Brown said.

Media release from Jenny Weber [jenny@bobbrown.org.au] of the Bob Brown organization

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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The Environmental Scam: One Quick and Easy Response

by Sean Gabb

Once you cut through their verbiage, the enemies of bourgeois civilisation have two demands. These are:

* Put me and my friends in charge of preferably a one-world government with total power over life and property; or, until then, or failing that,

* Give us a lot of money.

When I was younger, the occasion for making these demands was something to do with poverty or economic instability, and the alleged need was for a bigger welfare state, or state ownership of the means of production, or playing about with money to “move the aggregate supply curve to the right.” The nice thing about these claims and their alleged solutions was that they all had to be debated within the subject area of Economics. Because most of us knew a lot about Economics, we could always win the debates.

By the end of the 1980s, winning was so easy, the debates had become boring. Since then, the alleged need has shifted to saving the planet from some environmental catastrophe. The resulting debates are now harder to win because most of us are not that learned in the relevant sciences. Though I am more than competent in Economics, my main expertise is in Ancient History and the Classical Languages. Much the same is true for most of my friends.

Take, for example, the latest occasion for making the two demands stated above. This is that the sea is filling up with waste plastic, and that this looks horrid, and is being eaten by the creatures who live in the sea, and that they are all at risk of dying – and that this will be a terrible thing of all of us. For the solution, see Annie Leonard, writing in The Guardian: “Recycling alone will never stem the flow of plastics into our ocean. We must address the problem at the source.” You can take her last sentence as shorthand for the usual demands.

What response have I to this? Not much directly. Give me half an hour, and I will explain with practised ease that the Phillips Curve is at best a loose correlation between past variables, and that there is no stable trade-off between unemployment and inflation. But search me how most plastics are made, how long they take to degrade, or what harm they do if eaten.

A short search on the Web has brought up some useful information. There is, for example, an essay by Kip Hansen, published in 2015 – “An Ocean of Plastic.” He says, among much else:

* That the Great Garbage Patch said to be floating about the Pacific is a myth, and that the main alleged photographs of it were taken in Manila Bay after a storm had washed the rubbish out of the streets;

*That the amount of plastic waste floating in the sea is very small per cubic metre of water, and that it is invisible to the uninformed eye in the places where this Garbage Patch is said to be floating;

*That plastic waste quickly breaks down into tiny chunks that are then eaten by bacteria, who are not harmed by it;

*That larger chunks eaten by fish and birds are easily handled by digestive systems that have evolved over many ages to cope with much worse than the occasional lump of polystyrene foam.

His conclusion:

The “floating rafts of plastic garbage”-version of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a pernicious myth that needs to be dispelled at every opportunity.

That really is all I need to know. Of course, however, it is not enough to win an argument. Put me up against someone whose job is to lecture the world on the horrors of plastic waste, and I shall do a very poor job. He will pour scorn on the response I have summarised. He will draw attention to other alleged facts, and support these with reams of official statistics collected I have no idea how.

We shall be engaged not in a deductive argument about the science of human choice, but in an argument about facts that I am in no position to examine for myself, and about scientific claims that I am not remotely qualified to assess. What to do about that?

Here is my response. During the past half century or so, we have had one factual claim after another about the natural world. These include:

The claim my English teacher repeated to me in 1974 about the coming exhaustion of mineral resources – that, for example, there would be no more gold to mine after 1984, and that the oil would run out shortly after or before then;

* The claim, made around 1986, that aids would, by 1990, have killed two million people in England alone;

* The claim, made in 1996, that, by 2006, a million people in England would have had their brains rotted by eating beef infected with Mad Cow Disease;

* The claims, made in the 1980s, that factory emissions were turning the rain to acid, and that this would do terrible things;

* The claims, made about the same time, that our refrigerators and air conditioning units had opened a hole in the ozone layer, and that we would all soon be cooked by radiation from the Sun;

*The claims, that I noticed in 1989, that areas of jungle the size of Belgium were being regularly cut down in the Amazon, and how this would somehow be bad for us;

* The claims, made since about 1988, that our industrial civilisation as a whole was causing a rise in global temperatures.

I leave the last of these claims aside for the moment. What the others all have in common is that they involved predictions of substantial or total collapse unless the usual demands were met. These demands were not met, and the world carried on as normal.

Gold and oil did not run out. I am not sure how many people have heard about the ozone hole. I am not sure if anyone now claims it is getting bigger, or is still there. Nothing substantial was ever done about acid rain, but the world has still not become a giant desert. None of my friends has died of aids, nor of Mad Cow disease. My South American students do not report that Brazil nowadays looks like the surface of the Moon.

I now turn to the claims about global warming. I will not discuss the intricacies of how much carbon dioxide we are releasing, or what effect this may have on temperatures. I leave aside the persistent claims of scientific fraud and other corruption. As said, I am not qualified to comment on these or other matters. What I do note is that, in 2006, Al Gore

"[p]atiently, and surely for the 10,000th time, [explained to The Guardian] what’s going wrong. The atmosphere is like a coat of varnish around the globe, he says. When it’s thin, as it should be, heat naturally escapes. But when it gets thicker, thanks to carbon dioxide emitted by us, it traps in the heat and the world gets warmer. “It’s cooking and wilting the most vulnerable parts of the eco-system, melting all the mountain glaciers, the north polar ice cap, parts of Antarctica, parts of Greenland.” That molten ice-water will raise sea-levels, flooding food-producing areas that all of us rely on. Eventually it will submerge whole cities, from San Francisco to Shanghai. The site of the Twin Towers will not be a memorial garden: it will be underwater.

… He agrees with the scientists who say we have 10 years to act, before we cross a point of no return."

In 2009, the Prince of Wales – advised by the “leading environmentalists Jonathon Porritt and Tony Juniper” – said we had 96 months to change our ways. After that, we faced “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”

In 2005, George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian:

Winter is no longer the great grey longing of my childhood. The freezes this country suffered in 1982 and 1963 are – unless the Gulf Stream stops – unlikely to recur. Our summers will be long and warm. Across most of the upper northern hemisphere, climate change, so far, has been kind to us.

Ten years took us to 2016. Assuming my arithmetic is correct, 96 months take us to about now. If we have really reached the “point of no return,” why have these people not yet switched to telling us “I warned you: now it’s too late”? Instead, the apocalyptic warnings continue at top volume. Oh – and English weather remains as unpredictable today as it was in 2005. In March this year, there was an inch of snow in Deal.

The point of repeating these claims is that they were not random assertions, but appear to have been made on scientific advice – scientific advice that turned out to be wrong. Whether the scientists in question were lying, or whether they advised in good faith, is less important than that they were wrong. You do not need a degree in the natural sciences to notice when predictions are falsified.

It is with this in mind that I take the present claims of plastic waste in the sea, and reject them out of hand. It may be that, this time, the claims are true. But the whole burden of proof is on those making them. The burden of proof comes with the barely-rebuttable presumption that we are being fed yet another diet of alarmist falsehoods.

My general view is that our planet is a vast treasure house of resources that, properly used, will take us to the stars. We shall colonise the inner planets, and mine the Asteroid Belt. We shall find cures for every illness and extend our lives. We shall uncover every remaining mystery of the natural world. During the past three centuries, much encouraging progress has been made. The curve is now turning almost vertical.

It may be that, now and again, our scientific and technical progress throws up problems. If so, the solution is more scientific and technical progress. The only reasonable fear we should have is that the usual suspects will have their way, and return us to a past that I am fully qualified to describe, and that I assure you was horrible in every respect.

SOURCE





Must Read Lecture: Top Physics Prof Nails the ‘Global Warming’ Myth

In its latest hysterical bulletin, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has urged that we need to spend $2.4 trillion a year between now and 2035 to avoid the potentially catastrophic consequences of ‘climate change.’

But the truth is that ‘climate change’ – at least as perceived by the IPCC – is bunk and all that expenditure (which, added up, amounts to a sum greater than the entirety of global GDP) would be a complete waste of money.

Or, as Professor Richard Lindzen, arguably the world’s greatest expert on the subject rather more elegantly put it in a lecture in London last night:

"An implausible conjecture backed by false evidence and repeated incessantly has become politically correct ‘knowledge,’ and is used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization".

Lindzen, who for 30 years was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is probably the scientist most loathed and feared by the climate alarmist establishment. That’s because he knows the subject rather better than they do and has never been bested in argument.

He is withering in his contempt for man-made global warming theory, as he demonstrated in some scientific detail at the annual lecture of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, hosted by its president (Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer) Lord Lawson.

The global warming scare has little to do with science, Lindzen began by noting, but is rather the product of ignorance of science.

Hence his lecture title: Global Warming for the Two Cultures. This was a reference to the influential lecture given in the Fifties by the novelist and physical chemist CP Snow in which he decried the scientific ignorance among the supposedly educated elite. Little has changed since, said Lindzen:

"While some might maintain that ignorance of physics does not impact political ability, it most certainly impacts the ability of non-scientific politicians to deal with nominally science-based issues. The gap in understanding is also an invitation to malicious exploitation. Given the democratic necessity for non-scientists to take positions on scientific problems, belief and faith inevitably replace understanding, though trivially oversimplified false narratives serve to reassure the non-scientists that they are not totally without scientific ‘understanding.’ The issue of global warming offers numerous examples of all of this"

Later he singled out former Secretary of State John Kerry for especial scorn.

"Former senator and Secretary of State John F. Kerry is typical when he stated, with reference to greenhouse warming, ‘I know sometimes I can remember from when I was in high school and college, some aspects of chemistry or physics can be tough. But this is not tough. This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can understand this’. As you have seen, the greenhouse effect is not all that simple. Only remarkably brilliant kids would understand it. Given Kerry’s subsequent description of climate and its underlying physics, it was clear that he was not up to the task".

Lindzen’s scientific case against the man-made global warming scare is essentially this: the world’s climate is a chaotic system whose workings, even after decades of intense study and billions of dollars of research funding, scientists have but barely begun to comprehend. Yet here they are deciding on the basis of no convincing evidence to pin the blame on just one of the many contributory elements to climate – carbon dioxide – and trying to persuade us that this trace gas is somehow the master control knob.

This notion is so ridiculous, he said, it is close to “magical thinking”.

Now here is the currently popular narrative concerning this system. The climate, a complex multifactor system, can be summarized in just one variable, the globally averaged temperature change, and is primarily controlled by the 1-2% perturbation in the energy budget due to a single variable – carbon dioxide – among many variables of comparable importance. This is an extraordinary pair of claims based on reasoning that borders on magical thinking. It is, however, the narrative that has been widely accepted, even among many sceptics.

Until the late 80s, not even climate scientists subscribed to this theory. It only took off for political reasons and because there was so much money to be made from it.

When, in 1988, the NASA scientist James Hansen told the US Senate that the summer’s warmth reflected increased carbon dioxide levels, even Science magazine reported that the climatologists were sceptical. The establishment of this extreme position as dogma during the present period is due to political actors and others seeking to exploit the opportunities that abound in the multi-trillion dollar energy sector.

Elites are much more susceptible to this nonsense than ordinary people.  As Lindzen explained, elites are less interested in truth than in what is convenient.

1. They have been educated in a system where success has been predicated on their ability to please their professors. In other words, they have been conditioned to rationalize anything.

2. While they are vulnerable to false narratives, they are far less economically vulnerable than are ordinary people. They believe themselves wealthy enough to withstand the economic pain of the proposed policies, and they are clever enough to often benefit from them.

3. The narrative is trivial enough for the elite to finally think that they ‘understand’ science.

4. For many (especially on the right), the need to be regarded as intelligent causes them to fear that opposing anything claimed to be ‘scientific’ might lead to their being regarded as ignorant, and this fear overwhelms any ideological commitment to liberty that they might have.

None of these factors apply to ‘ordinary’ people. This may well be the strongest argument for popular democracy and against the leadership of those ‘who know best.’

The scientists, meanwhile, don’t know nearly as much as they pretend they know. And in any case, many of them have been corrupted by money or their left-wing politics.

1. Scientists are specialists. Few are expert in climate. This includes many supposed ‘climate scientists’ who became involved in the area in response to the huge increases in funding that have accompanied global warming hysteria.

2. Scientists are people with their own political positions, and many have been enthusiastic about using their status as scientists to promote their political positions (not unlike celebrities whose status some scientists often aspire to). As examples, consider the movements against nuclear weapons, against the Strategic Defense Initiative, against the Vietnam War, and so on.

Scientists are also acutely and cynically aware of the ignorance of non-scientists and the fear that this engenders.

But what about all the scary “proof” that global warming is happening? Lindzen has no truck with any of it.

"What about the disappearing Arctic ice, the rising sea level, the weather extremes, starving polar bears, the Syrian Civil War, and all the rest of it? The vast variety of the claims makes it impossible to point to any particular fault that applies to all of them. Of course, citing the existence of changes – even if these observations are correct (although surprisingly often they are not) – would not implicate greenhouse warming per se. Nor would it point to danger. Note that most of the so-called evidence refers to matters of which you have no personal experience. Some of the claims, such as those relating to weather extremes, contradict what both physical theory and empirical data show. The purpose of these claims is obviously to frighten and befuddle the public, and to make it seem like there is evidence where, in fact, there is none."

Just to repeat that last important point: Lindzen believes that there is no real-world evidence that supports man-made global warming theory. None.

Lindzen concluded:

"What we will be leaving our grandchildren is not a planet damaged by industrial progress, but a record of unfathomable silliness as well as a landscape degraded by rusting wind farms and decaying solar panel arrays. False claims about 97% agreement will not spare us, but the willingness of scientists to keep mum is likely to much reduce trust in and support for science. Perhaps this won’t be such a bad thing after all – certainly as concerns ‘official’ science.

There is at least one positive aspect to the present situation. None of the proposed policies will have much impact on greenhouse gases. Thus we will continue to benefit from the one thing that can be clearly attributed to elevated carbon dioxide: namely, its effective role as a plant fertilizer, and reducer of the drought vulnerability of plants. Meanwhile, the IPCC is claiming that we need to prevent another 0.5◦C of warming, although the 1◦C that has occurred so far has been accompanied by the greatest increase in human welfare in history. As we used to say in my childhood home of the Bronx: ‘Go figure’."

SOURCE





U.N. Ignores Economics Of Climate

New Nobel laureate William Nordhaus says the costs of proposed CO2 cuts aren’t worth it

By Bjorn Lomborg

The global economy must be transformed immediately to avoid catastrophic climate damage, a new United Nations report declares. Climate economist William Nordhaus has been made a Nobel laureate. The events are being reported as two parts of the same story, but they reveal the contradictions inherent in climate policy—and why economics matters more than ever.

Limiting temperatures to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels, as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change urges, is economically and practically impossible—as Mr. Nordhaus’s work shows. The IPCC report significantly underestimates the costs of getting to zero emissions. Fossil fuels provide cheap, efficient power, whereas green energy remains mostly uncompetitive. Switching to more expensive, less efficient technology slows development. In poor nations that means fewer people lifted out of poverty. In rich ones it means the most vulnerable are hit by higher energy bills.

The IPCC says carbon emissions need to peak right now and fall rapidly to avert catastrophe. Models actually reveal that to achieve the 2.7-degree goal the world must stop all fossil fuel use in less than four years. Yet the International Energy Agency estimates that in 2040 fossil fuels will still meet three-quarters of world energy needs, even if the Paris agreement is fully implemented. The U.N. body responsible for the accord estimates that if every country fulfills every pledge by 2030, CO2 emissions will be cut by 60 billion tons by 2030. That’s less than 1% of what is needed to keep temperature rises below 2.7 degrees. And achieving even that fraction would be vastly expensive—reducing world-wide growth $1 trillion to $2 trillion each year by 2030.

The European Union promises to cut emissions 80% by 2050. With realistic assumptions about technology, and the optimistic assumption that the EU’s climate policy is very well designed and coordinated, the average of seven leading peer-reviewed models finds EU annual costs will reach €2.9 trillion ($3.3 trillion), more than twice what EU governments spend today on health, education, recreation, housing, environment, police and defense combined. In reality, it is likely to cost much more because EU climate legislation has been an inefficient patchwork. If that continues, the policy will make the EU 24% poorer in 2050.

Trying to do more, as the IPCC urges, would be phenomenally expensive. It is important to keep things in perspective, challenging as that is given the hysterical tone of the reaction to the panel’s latest offering. In its latest full report, the IPCC estimated that in 60 years unmitigated global warming would cost the planet between 0.2% and 2% of gross domestic product. That’s simply not the end of the world.

The new report has no comparison of the costs and benefits of climate targets. Mr. Nordhaus’s most recent estimate, published in August, is that the “optimal” outcome with a moderate carbon tax is a rise of about 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Reducing temperature rises by more would result in higher costs than benefits, potentially causing the world a $50 trillion loss.

It’s past time to stop pushing so hard for carbon cuts before alternative energy sources are ready to take over. Instead the world must focus on resolving the technology deficit that makes switching away from fossil fuels so expensive. Genuine breakthroughs are required to drive down the future price of green energy.

Copenhagen Consensus analysis shows a ramped-up green-energy research-and-development budget of around $100 billion a year would be the most effective global-warming policy. It would be much cheaper than the approach pushed by the IPCC, and would not require global consensus. Most important, it would have a much better chance of ameliorating temperature rises. Under the IPPC’s approach, by contrast, the costs would vastly outweigh the benefits. Instead, the over-the-top reception to the latest IPCC report means that we are more likely to continue down a pathway where the costs would vastly outweigh the benefits.

SOURCE






Trump Should Kill Handouts to King Corn, Not Expand Them

Allowing for year-round sales of E15 gas is a political sop to the ethanol swamp

President Donald Trump is one of the rarest of all creatures — a politician who keeps his promises.

Sick of politicians making grandiose campaign promises, only to discard them after the election, the American people shocked the world by electing a billionaire businessman and political novice in Trump, hoping that he, not beholden to special interests, would battle entrenched politicians and bureaucrats who wield enormous power in the DC swamp.

Trump, from a conservative perspective, has excelled beyond all expectations, slashing massive amounts of economy-crushing regulatory red tape, opening the throttle on American energy production, creating a pro-growth economic environment, pulling us out of or reworking bad trade deals, and making American sovereignty and prosperity the yardstick by which policies are measured.

Unfortunately, not every promise kept is a good thing, as evidenced by reports this week that Trump is giving a sop to the ethanol/corn industry, issuing a waiver for summer restrictions on E15 (15% ethanol/gas blend) fuel, paving the way for year-round use.

This move is entirely political. In fact, after the announcement, Trump held a MAGA rally in Iowa, and that was no coincidence. Between helping Iowa Republicans in the election and heartland farmers hurt by Trump’s own tariffs, the political ramifications are significant, so this decision is, sadly, hardly surprising. For the American people, however, the benefits of expanding this boondoggle are dubious at best.

Last year, when former EPA Director Scott Pruitt announced rollbacks to the ethanol mandate, the response was swift and forceful. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued a not-so-veiled threat to President Trump that the move would have consequences; namely, seeing his judicial nominees move through Grassley’s committee at the speed of molasses. Trump got the message, and the changes were put on hold.

Grassley however, has held up his end of the unspoken deal, deftly ushering Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, through a vicious confirmation process that made the Democrats’ reprehensible “high-tech lynching” of Justice Clarence Thomas seem downright neighborly by comparison.

Additionally, this ethanol decision may be the help needed to get Iowa’s Republican governor, currently trailing her Democrat opponent in the polls, and at least two at-risk Iowa House members, over the finish line to victory. These wins would be critical when many are predicting a Democrat takeover of the House and Senate.

As for the ethanol change itself, it’s unlikely that it will take immediate effect. A lawsuit is planned that challenges the legality of the waiver. Additionally, a bipartisan letter from 20 members of Congress from oil-producing states went to President Trump last week, opposing the measure, arguing it would do nothing to protect refinery jobs and would actually harm American consumers.

And they are right.

The ethanol mandate his been a huge victory for Midwestern agricultural states, which are essentially guaranteed a buyer for every ear of corn they can grow, and then some.

Unfortunately, from a scientific and environmental standpoint, the mandate is a disaster. Ethanol harms gasoline engines, eating through seals, gumming up fuel systems, damaging tanks, and introducing stray moisture into the system. This leads to thousands of dollars of unnecessary repairs for consumers.

Ethanol is 33% less energy dense than gasoline — meaning you have to burn 33% more ethanol to travel the same distance — and ethanol is dirtier than gasoline, generating significantly more formaldehyde, creating twice as much ozone smog.

Investor’s Business Daily asks, “Do people want ethanol in their gasoline so badly they’re willing to pay extra for something that cuts their fuel efficiency by anywhere from 5% to 7% per mile?”

Then there is the destruction to the environment caused by clearing millions of acres of land for corn production. In the year 2000, only 5% of America’s corn crop went to ethanol production. By 2013, that had skyrocketed to 40%. To envision what a boondoggle the ethanol mandate is, consider that the amount of corn required to fill a truck’s 26-gallon gas tank would feed a person for an entire year!

A 2009 Duke University study found that growing corn for fuel production actually produces more CO2 than it saves. The Associated Press, in an in-depth investigation of the “green” energy industry entitled “The Secret, Dirty Cost of Obama’s Green Power Push,” concluded:

The ethanol era has proven far more damaging to the environment than politicians promised and much worse than the government admits today. As farmers rushed to find new places to plant corn, they wiped out millions of acres of conservation land, destroyed habitat and polluted water supplies. …

Five million acres of land set aside for conservation — more than Yellowstone, Everglades and Yosemite National Parks combined — have vanished on Obama’s watch. Landowners filled in wetlands. They plowed into pristine prairies, releasing carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil. Sprayers pumped out billions of pounds of fertilizer, some of which seeped into drinking water, contaminated rivers and worsened the huge dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico where marine life can’t survive. The consequences are so severe that environmentalists and many scientists have now rejected corn-based ethanol as bad environmental policy. But the Obama administration stands by it, highlighting its benefits to the farming industry rather than any negative impact.

President Trump has done much right since taking office, but this is a decision he needs to reconsider.

It’s also an area where bipartisan agreement — between limited-government, free-market advocates on one side, and environmentalists on the other — could be found and, who knows, maybe even generate enough goodwill to find common ground on other issues.

King Corn has ruled politics long enough. It’s time for a coup.

SOURCE






Australian PM returns serve on energy policy

Claims Australia's energy policy has descended into anarchy are rubbish, Prime Minister Scott Morrison says.

Scott Morrison has dismissed a stinging critique of Australia's energy policy, saying claims of "anarchy" by the architect of the government's dumped plan are rubbish.

Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott on Wednesday mourned the death of the National Energy Guarantee, which was abandoned when Malcolm Turnbull was knifed as prime minister.

But the current prime minister gave the short shrift to her policy grief, bluntly rejecting the idea the government had lost its way on energy.

"I don't agree with that at all. I think that's rubbish," Mr Morrison told 3AW on Thursday.

Dr Schott told a conference she was still going through the stages of grief over the government's one-time signature energy plan, but was yet to leave anger.

"I characterise the general state of affairs right now as anarchy," she said.

Mr Morrison insists the government is still pursuing a reliability guarantee with state and territory governments, a feature of the NEG.

"What is necessary is that we need to get more reliability into the national energy market which covers the east coast of Australia," he said.

He dismissed suggestions there was uncertainty about the government's emission reduction commitments.

"Everybody knows what they are and we're meeting them."

SOURCE 

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The Trump administration is moving to allow year-round sales of gasoline with higher blends of ethanol, a boon for Iowa and other farm states that have pushed for greater sales of the corn-based fuel

Having corn products in your gas tank is absurd.  Greenies put it there and Big Corn keeps it there. If alcohol is needed in fuel, it is most efficiently made from sugar cane.  And the nearby Caribbean is a historic source of cane sugar

President Donald Trump is expected to announce he is lifting a federal ban on summer sales of high-ethanol blends during a trip to Iowa on Tuesday.

The long-expected announcement is something of a reward to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who as Senate Judiciary Committee chairman led a contentious but successful fight to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The veteran Republican lawmaker is the Senate’s leading ethanol proponent and sharply criticized the Trump administration’s proposed rollback in ethanol volumes earlier this year.

At that time Grassley threatened to call for the resignation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s chief, Scott Pruitt, if Pruitt did not work to fulfill the federal ethanol mandate. Pruitt later stepped down amid a host of ethics investigations.

A senior administration official said Monday that the EPA will publish a rule in coming days to allow high-ethanol blends as part of a package of proposed changes to the ethanol mandate. The official spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of Trump’s announcement.

The change would allow year-round sales of gasoline blends with up to 15 percent ethanol. Gasoline typically contains 10 percent ethanol.

The EPA currently bans the high-ethanol blend, called E15, during the summer because of concerns that it contributes to smog on hot days, a claim ethanol industry advocates say is unfounded.

In May, Republican senators, including Grassley, announced a tentative agreement with the White House to allow year-round E15 sales, but the EPA did not propose a formal rule change.

The senior administration official said the proposed rule intends to allow E15 sales next summer. Current regulations prevent retailers in much of the country from offering E15 from June 1 to Sept. 15.

Lifting the summer ban is expected to be coupled with new restrictions on trading biofuel credits that underpin the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, commonly known as the ethanol mandate. The law sets out how much corn-based ethanol and other renewable fuels refiners must blend into gasoline each year.

The Renewable Fuel Standard was intended to address global warming, reduce dependence on foreign oil and bolster the rural economy by requiring a steady increase in renewable fuels over time. The mandate has not worked as intended, and production levels of renewable fuels, mostly ethanol, routinely fail to reach minimum thresholds set in law.

The oil industry opposes year-round sales of E15, warning that high-ethanol gasoline can damage car engines and fuel systems. Some car makers have warned against high-ethanol blends, although EPA has approved use of E15 in all light-duty vehicles built since 2001.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers, many from oil-producing states, sent Trump a letter last week opposing expanded sales of high-ethanol gas. The lawmakers called the approach “misguided” and said it would do nothing to protect refinery jobs and “could hurt millions of consumers whose vehicles and equipment are not compatible with higher-ethanol blended gasoline.”

The letter was signed by 16 Republicans and four Democrats, including Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch, a key Trump ally. New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Menendez, whose state includes several refineries, also signed the letter.

A spokeswoman for the Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol industry trade group, said allowing E15 to be sold year-round would give consumers greater access to clean, low-cost, higher-octane fuel while expanding market access for ethanol producers.

“The ability to sell E15 all year would also bring a significant boost to farmers across our country” and provide a significant economic boost to rural America, said spokeswoman Rachel Gantz.

SOURCE




UN: It's Climate Doomsday, and We Mean It This Time

As if we needed just one more apocalyptic warning to finally believe these Chicken Littles.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced in a new report that the world has just 12 years to make drastic and changes — “unprecedented in terms of scale” — to reduce global warming or we will suffer an irreversible climate catastrophe. As if we needed just one more apocalyptic warning to finally believe these Chicken Littles.

Remember, this UN report comes just 12 years after Al Gore declared we had 10 years left to save the planet. And 36 years after the UN itself said we had 20 years.

This latest doomsday scenario claims that if the nations of the world don’t take major steps to reduce carbon emissions, we will miss the last opportunity to reduce rising temperatures, basically signing humanity’s death warrant.

No really; they mean it this time!

The New York Times is appalled … at President Donald Trump. “A day after the United Nations issued its most urgent call to arms yet for the world to confront the threat of climate change, President Trump boarded Air Force One for Florida — a state that lies directly in the path of this coming calamity — and said nothing about it,” the Times harrumphed in an editorial masquerading as a news report.

The UN report calls for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over the next 10 years. In order to reach this goal, of course, governments must make “rapid and far-reaching” changes to their energy industries by switching to renewable energy sources and phasing out global coal production, while forcing automotive companies to ramp up production of electric cars. Several nations already want to ban combustion engines by 2040; California Democrats do too.

It’s a long shot that the nations of the world can reduce carbon emissions by one million tons a year, so the UN report conveniently notes that a brief overshoot of the temperature goal will still put us on track to save the planet, so long as everyone sticks to the overall plan.

This latest climate report follows the leftist game plan to use climate change as a path to global socialism, to bring sovereign governments and the international economy to heel under a Marxist cabal that would dictate what countries can manufacture and what people can purchase and how, or if, they travel.

The climate alarmism of the Left goes back decades, and it has always been tied to forcing people to change their behavior in a manner that suits the leftist worldview.

In the 1970s, we were told that overpopulation and a coming ice age would deplete our resources and cause massive starvation. The solution was for First World middle- and upper-class people to stop having children and consuming resources. In the 1980s, global warming became the new culprit with the claim that our coastal cities would all be underwater by the turn of the century. The cure? Massive price and tax hikes for First World energy producers and consumers to convince them to reduce their “carbon footprint.”

Why should the United States pay such a high price for global warming? Of all the nations that are signatories to the Paris climate accord, America is the only one that has actually reduced carbon emissions. And, of course, we’re the only signatory to withdraw, just as Trump promised. Yet most of the solutions that scientists propose to “fix” the problem disproportionately target the capitalist U.S., leaving communist China — the world’s largest polluter — alone.

In every instance, a large number of climate scientists have, either willingly or without realizing it, tried to advance the agenda of the Left. Some have admitted to manipulating data to enhance the danger. Others simply trash the reputations of any colleague who dares question the gospel of global warming. Reasoned debate and research, the backbone of good science, has no room when the real goal is to force a particular outcome or behavior upon the people.

Everyone suffers in this climate of fear. When UN panels, universities, and hustlers like Gore lay out doomsday scenarios and use cooked data to warn of “last chances” and “tipping points” to stop the apocalypse, how is the public supposed to know what is true and what is false about global warming? Environmentalists appear puzzled that people aren’t more concerned about the issue. Perhaps they would be more attentive if they weren’t being lied to so brazenly.

SOURCE





Stopping 'Catastrophic' Global Warming Is Impossible, UN Report Shows, So What's The Point?

Assume for the sake of argument that everything environmentalists say about global warming is true. If that's the case, then there is no chance of stopping it. That's what the latest UN report on global warming clearly demonstrates.

The headlines in stories reporting on the UN's latest climate change report all say something along the lines of: "Urgent changed is needed to prevent global catastrophe."

If global temperatures climb more than 1.5 degrees Celsius — compared with preindustrial temperatures — all hell will break loose, the UN says. There will be catastrophic flooding, drought, more weather extremes. Hundreds of millions will be susceptible to poverty by midcentury. Even at 1.5 degrees, terrible things will happen.

To be clear, we are highly skeptical of these doom-and-gloom scenarios. Past predictions of global warming catastrophes have failed to emerge. In the U.S., for example, there's been no trend toward more extreme weather, drought or flooding, even though the planet has already warmed 1 degree Celsius. This year's tornado season, in fact, has been the mildest on record. What's more, environmentalists have issued these "point of no return" warnings for decades, only to revise them once the supposed deadline passes.

Global Warming Is Inevitable

But even if the alarmist predictions are true, there's nothing that can plausibly be done at this point to stop it. That's the real message of the annual UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.

The chart contained in the "Summery for Policymakers" shows projected changes in global temperatures over the next 100 years. It also shows that temperatures will top the supposed 1.5-degree limit by around 2040, even if the world makes drastic reductions in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions within the next two decades.

How drastic?

The UN's forecasts all assume that the entire world become entirely carbon free by 2055 … at the latest. That's just 37 years from now. It also assumes that the world makes massive reductions in other greenhouse gases, such as methane.

Here's an example of what the UN says would have to happen within the next 12 years to meet that goal. Keep in mind, this is the low end of the UN's proposed changes:

* 60% of the world's energy would have to come from renewable sources by 2030, and 77% by 2050. (The Department of Energy forecasts that renewables will account for just 27% of the U.S.'s electric power generation by 2050.)

* Coal use would have to drop 78%, oil 37% and natural gas 25% — compared with 2010 levels — within 12 years. (Last year, global coal demand increased, and use of natural gas has massively climbed in the U.S.)

* There'd have to be a 59% increase in nuclear power by 2030, and a 150% increase by 2050. (Good luck getting environmentalist to buy into that).

* Farmers would have to figure out how to cut methane emissions by 24% by 2030, (and still feed a growing worldwide population).

Even those massive reductions won't produce enough CO2 reductions it. So, the UN assumes the world will also remove massive amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere. That's despite the fact that nobody knows how to do that today.

Unprecedented, Or Wishful Thinking?

The UN itself admits that achieving anything like these levels of greenhouse gas reductions "would require rapid and far-reaching transitions in energy, land, urban and infrastructure, and industrial systems."

It goes on to say that such an undertaking would be "unprecedented in terms of scale." And it would require a "significant upscaling of investments." In other words, massive amounts of money.

To say that changes of this magnitude within that time frame are unrealistic would be putting it mildly.

The last big attempt to get the world to cut CO2 emissions turned out to be a farce. As the UN itself admitted, the CO2 reduction pledges made by the 195 countries that signed on to the Paris Accords won't come anywhere close the level of CO2 reductions it says are needed to avoid "catastrophe."

And countries aren't even living up to those pledges.

In the EU, carbon emissions started climbing again last year. Germany is way off its carbon reduction goals, despite plans to spend $580 billion to overhaul its energy system. A recent report showed that only nine of 195 countries have submitted their CO2 reduction plans to the UN.

Does anyone honestly believe that these countries will suddenly decide to entirely decarbonize their economies in three decades?

Adapting To Global Warming

So, if the chances of avoiding a climate "catastrophe" are gone, what should be done?

Sure, we can research carbon removal technology. And, as the U.S. has shown, a free-market economy — simply by encouraging cost cutting and efficiency — can generate CO2 reductions without the heavy hand of government.

But in our view, the most prudent course of action isn't to wreck the global economy in hopes that it might make a small difference in the climate 100 years from now. The more reasonable approach is to adapt to whatever changes do occur.

Even if the horror stories told by environmentalists come to pass, mankind can and will adjust.

After all, the human race has shown the ability to survive in the most extreme climates. And it's done so with far less technological sophistication. We've learned to live in deserts. And in the Arctic. In hurricane alleys and earthquake zones. The idea that we won't be able to handle changes caused by a slightly warmer planet over the next millennium is ludicrous.

Meanwhile, if the environmentalists' horror stories don't come true, we won't have wasted trillions upon trillions of dollars tilting at windmills.

SOURCE







Four Reasons Why ‘Climate Change’ Is A Flat-Out Hoax

First, a disclaimer: I am not a climate scientist.  In fact, I am not a scientist of any kind.  But I do have a degree in electrical engineering, which I mention only to point out that I am at least as qualified as the next non-scientist to form rational opinions about global warming claims.

In obtaining my degree, I took enough classes in chemistry, physics, and geology to develop a keen appreciation of the scientific method, the best way ever devised for winnowing the truth from fakery and deception.

If taking the scientific method into account, no intelligent person can fail to see that the constant drumbeat of wild and hysterical claims about the climate are insults to the search for Truth.

Following are four reasons why I will bet my life that “climate change” is the greatest scientific and political hoax in human history.

1. Rampant scientific fraud

Ordinary people like me don’t understand climate science, but we can spot cheating a mile away. Without the assistance of a complicit Western media in burying multiple indisputable cases of outright scientific fraud, man-made global warming theory would have been blown out of the water years ago.

One of the most brazen instances of inexcusable scientific misconduct is documented by photographic evidence gathered during a three-month investigation by a veteran meteorologist.

As reported in this PDF, the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) placed hundreds of official global warming thermometers in locations entirely unsuitable for gathering natural temperatures:

* Adjacent to hot engines of parked vehicles

* On asphalt-covered roofs

* Near hot exhaust vents of air conditioning units

* On heat-retaining airport tarmacs and paved parking lots

* Next to heat-retaining rock formations and brick buildings

Global warming is measured in tenths of a degree, so every artificial upward nudge creates a deceptive picture of actual temperatures.

To avoid artificially elevated readings, NOAA’s own official site location standards require that thermometers be placed at least 100 feet from any paved or concrete surface, and in a level, open area with natural ground cover.

Those standards were clearly subverted, and every voter should demand to know why.

No supporter of man-made global warming theory who sees the photographs in the PDF linked to above – all of which have been downplayed, or outright ignored, by the complicit Western media – can fail to ascertain that the theory they support is being kept on life support by scientific fraud.

2. The duping of Mr. & Mrs. John Q. Public

As reported in Forbes, the following unguarded statement was made by one of the climate crisis industry’s loudest drum-beaters, the late Dr. Steven Schneider, lead author of numerous alarming U.N. climate reports and former professor of climatology at Stanford:

We need broad-based support to capture the public’s imagination, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts.  Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.

In other words, one of the climate crisis lobby’s most loyal sycophants told his like-minded colleagues that they not only must conceal evidence that casts doubt on global warming theory but also craft their research in dishonest ways designed to create terror in the minds of a trusting public.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that dishonesty and concealment of contrarian views have no place in legitimate science.

3. A long trail of wildly inaccurate predictions

As reported by Fox News, a 2015 report published in the journal Nature Climate Change compared 117 computer model projections during the 1990s with the amount of actual warming that occurred.

Of the 117, only three were roughly accurate, while 114 over-estimated the recorded warming. (The lopsided results suggest that those doing the modeling may have been guilty of using an unscientific technique known as garbage in, garbage out.) On average, the computer models predicted twice as much warming as that which actually occurred.

The wildly inaccurate predictions reported by Nature Climate Change were not alone.  In a terrifying May 11, 1982 prediction trumpeted in the Western media, Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) decreed that an environmental “tipping point” was closing in: “Earth faces environmental disaster as final as nuclear war by the end of this century unless governments act now.”

That bone-chilling assessment was seconded seven years later, in July 1989, by another senior U.N. climate official, Noel Brown, who warned: “Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by 2000.”

When that tipping point came and went 19 years ago, others were concocted, including one by NASA scientist Dr. James Hanson, who declared in January 2009, “President Obama has just four years to save Earth.”

As one frantic tipping point after another falls by the wayside, a new one is invented, each of which is breathlessly reported by the complicit Western media.

4. Intentional concealment of inconvenient parts of climate history 

In serving as willing propagandists for the climate crisis industry, Western media portray every severe weather event as the “worst ever,” which they are now doing regarding the drought in the Southwestern U.S. and the flooding caused by Hurricane Florence.  What the alarmists try to hide from voters at all costs are inconvenient parts of Earth’s climate history, such as these:

* Ancient mega-droughts were infinitely worse than anything people living in modern times have seen. Example: Around the year 850 AD, a mega-drought in what is now the Desert Southwest lasted a staggering 240 years, and that catastrophic climate event was preceded by another mega-drought a half-century earlier that lasted 180 years.

Absent that kind of information, it’s no wonder so many otherwise intelligent Americans have been conned into believing that the current drought is the “worst ever.”

* The Great Hurricane of 1780 killed 20,000 people in the Caribbean.  On Sept. 8, 1900, a Cat-4 hurricane obliterated the island of Galveston, Texas, killing an estimated 10,000 residents.

In 1927, weeks of heavy rains along the Mississippi River caused flooding that covered 27,000 square miles, leaving entire towns and surrounding farmland submerged up to a depth of 30 feet and displacing 640,000 people, from Louisiana to Illinois.

The Yangtze River flood of 1931, one of the deadliest single events in human history, was responsible for a death toll estimated at 3.7 million.

Hurricane Florence and the flooding it caused were unquestionably devastating.  But the worst ever?  You decide.

You won’t hear a peep about past ecological disasters in the debate over global warming.  The climate crisis industry conceals inconvenient parts of Earth’s climate history that undermine its “worst ever” claims.

Bottom line: Listed above are four reasons – I have many more – why I will bet my life that “climate change” is a flat-out hoax.

SOURCE





Australia: Minister backs science on weedkiller use

Agriculture Minister David Littleproud has backed the government's pesticide regulator over concerns the world's most popular weedkiller is unsafe.

The Cancer Council wants an independent review into glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, after it was linked to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

But Mr Littleproud said the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority had determined the chemical was safe.

"The science of the independent regulator says this chemical is safe if you follow the instructions," the minister told Sky News on Tuesday.

"I just say to everybody use some common sense, follow the instructions and you'll be OK."

Debate over glyphosate was reignited in August after a Californian jury ordered agribusiness giant Monsanto pay $US289 million ($A399 million) in damages to a former groundskeeper dying of cancer.

Mr Littleproud said that case and others aired by the ABC's Four Corners on Monday highlighted excessive exposure.

"Home gardeners shouldn't get too worried about this, You're not going to get exposed to levels so long as you follow the instructions," he said.

The minister said farmers were using the chemical in a sensible way, adding agriculture had come a long way in how pesticides were used.

"I just say to everyone calm down ... and have faith that we have the best science in the world," Mr Littleproud said.

APVMA's review came after a 2015 report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, a World Health Organisation body, found glyphosate was "probably carcinogenic to humans".

Labor seized on the concerns, demanding a Senate inquiry into the independence and decision-making of the pesticides agency.

"This issue is too important to the agricultural community, to Australia's farmers, and to consumers to be left unresolved," opposition agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon said on Tuesday.

Labor also wants to investigate the impact of moving the regulator from Canberra to Armidale in northern NSW.

"There is no doubt the government's decision to relocate the APVMA has impacted on its operations," Mr Fitzgibbon said.

But Mr Littleproud accused the opposition of playing politics, saying the agency's most recent assessment was conducted before the relocation started.

National Farmers' Federation president Fiona Simson said the scientific evidence overwhelmingly proved the chemical was safe.

"There is simply no alternative that is as safe and as effective as glyphosate, for these purposes," Ms Simson said.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Clothing is pollution!

That's the latest dotty shriek from the Greenies below. But what really is a source of severe pollution, the manufacture of solar panels, passes without a murmur from them.

And their picking out the shrinkage of the Aral sea (not to be confused with the sea of Azov, the world's shallowest sea) is particularly dotty.  Rivers flowing into the landlocked Aral sea were diverted in Soviet times.  It had nothing to do with anything recent or modern. The Aral sea does still exist.  The Russians have dammed off the bottom two thirds so that what is left of the inflow remains in the Northern third

The idea that the bright young things of Britain will refrain from buying clothes is a laugh.

And all modern industrial activities generate pollution of one sort or another so it makes no sense to pick on just one.  Why not pick on woodfires instead?  Because it is "natural", Greenies favour wood fires for domestic heating.  But such fires are now so widely used that air pollution in London is now nearly as bad as it was in the bad old days.  That would seem a clear type of harm rather than the  highly inferential harm caused by  dressing fashionably

And what about synthetics?  Should we use only synthetic fibres instead of cotton?  You can be sure that Greenies would have a kneejerk opposition to that.  Lets all go naked!  You could do that where I live but it might get a bit chilly in a British winter


Today, the scrubland that was once the Aral Sea in Central Asia is dotted with camels searching out sparse tufts of grass against a flat, sandy horizon. Only the bizarre sight of boats marooned hundreds of miles inland gives any clue to the area's history. In just four decades, what was once one of the largest inland bodies of water on the globe has shrunk by more than two thirds – an area the size of Ireland – leaving behind a poisonous dustbowl.

And the reason? Our insatiable appetite for cheap jeans – and the rapacious cotton farming that feeds it at almost any cost.

Tomorrow, in a devastating assault on an industry that dictates so much of our high street economy, investigative journalist Stacey Dooley will brand fashion one of the biggest environmental disasters to hit the planet.

With Britons buying twice as many clothes as a decade ago – last year we spent £50 billion – there is mounting concern about cheap, disposable fashion sometimes branded 'look and chuck'. Stacey's BBC documentary Fashion's Dirty Secrets will throw this into sharp relief. It reveals that, around the globe, millions of gallons of clean water have either been diverted to growing cotton, or have been hopelessly polluted by the toxic chemicals used for dyes and manufacture. The facts are stark: to grow enough cotton to make a single pair of jeans can take 3,400 gallons or 15,500 litres of water.

But that is only part of the issue – because the fashion industry's pollution problem is also out of control. Factories connected to high street brands have been dumping chemicals from clothes production into Indonesia's Citarum River, says Dooley, threatening the lives of millions.

Serious problems are already evident in the UK, too. The trend for cheap, disposable fashion means more than 300,000 tons of clothing are dumped in landfill in Britain alone each year, which last year worked out at 235 million items.

Meanwhile, microfibres from fleeces and sportswear are now a significant cause of plastic pollution in our rivers and oceans: 700,000 fibres are released in a single domestic wash.

Stacey, who is currently appearing on Strictly Come Dancing, says on the documentary: 'It's impossible to go down any high street without being bombarded by images luring us into buying cheap clothing. But the few pounds we spend on an item of clothing isn't the true cost.

'It's costing people their livelihoods. It's costing millions of people their health. In fact, it's costing us the earth. It's a situation that needs addressing and fast. There has to be a real sense of urgency now because to be totally honest with you we are running out of time.'

In fact, there is growing momentum on the issue, with many officials now recognising the need for urgent action. Last week, for example, Parliament's Environmental Audit Committee wrote to Britain's ten biggest clothing retailers asking them to reveal their environmental footprint.

They quoted evidence that British shoppers buy far more new clothes than any other European nation. The firms involved, all high street favourites and supermarkets, include Marks & Spencer, Primark, Next, Arcadia, Asda, T K Maxx, Tesco, J D Sports, Debenhams and Sports Direct International. Most churn out hundreds of new fashion lines a year, constantly updating their stock and fuelling trends.

MARY Creagh, chair of the Committee, said: 'Instagram is fuelling this as people are adopting a 'look and chuck' mentality – we've got a lot more fast fashion.

'If you look at Italy's fashion market, there's much more focus on high-end clothing and people tend to save up and buy just one or two garments, like Max Mara coats, which are timeless.

A spokesman for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: 'We are interested in any ideas to reduce the impact of waste on our oceans and wider environment. We have already cut waste from plastic bags and microbeads and we are also taking action on plastic bottles, straws, stirrers and cotton buds.

'We are funding research into new ways to deal with micro-plastics but there is more to do.'

SOURCE






UN issues yet another climate tipping point – Humans given only 12 more years to make ‘unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’

The United Nations has once again issued another dire climate change report claiming we must act before it’s too late. The media has dutifully reported this latest round of climate “tipping points.”  The latest UN report has extended the climate deadline by which we must allegedly empower the UN bureaucrats to save the world until 2030 or just 12 more years!

CNN reports: “Governments around the world must take ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ to avoid disastrous levels of global warming, says a stark new report from the global scientific authority on climate change.”

But as the new book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change”, reveals, climate tipping points have a long history of repetition, moved deadlines and utter failure. The book documents that the earliest climate “tipping point” was issued in 1864 by MIT professor who warned of “climatic excess” unless humans changed their ways.

Book excerpt (Chap 13):

“As early as 1864 George Perkins Marsh, sometimes said to be the father of American ecology, warned that the earth was ‘fast becoming an unfit home for its “noblest inhabitant,”’ and that unless men changed their ways it would be reduced ‘to such a condition of impoverished productiveness, of shattered surface, of climatic excess, as to threaten the deprivation, barbarism, and perhaps even extinction of the species.’” —MIT professor Leo Marx

The climate change scare campaign has always relied on arbitrary deadlines, dates by which we must act before it’s too late. Global warming advocates have drawn many lines in the sand, claiming that we must act to solve global warming—or else.

“We are running out of time. We have to get an ambitious global agreement,” warned then–UN climate chief Christiana Figueres at the 2014 People’s Climate March. “This is a huge crisis.”

At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Al Gore sought UN climate agreement—immediately. “We have to do it this year. Not next year, this year,” he demanded. “And of course the clock is ticking because Mother Nature does not do bailouts.”

Gore has warned repeatedly of the coming tipping point. Climate change “can cross a tipping point and suddenly shift into high gear,” the former vice president claimed in 2006.

Laurie David, the producer of Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, said in 2007 that “we have to have action we have
to do something right now to stop global warming.”

Prince Charles has also warned that time is running out. “We should compare the planet under threat of climate change to a sick patient,” urged the heir to the British throne.

“I fear there is not a moment to lose.”

“The clock is ticking. . . . Scientists believe that we have ten years to bring emissions under control to prevent a catastrophe,” reported ABC News.

But these “tipping points” and “last chance” claims now have a long history. The United Nations alone has spent more than a quarter of a century announcing a series of ever-shifting deadlines by which the world must act or face disaster from anthropogenic climate change.

Deadlines Come and Go

Recently, in 2014, the United Nations declared a climate “tipping point” by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming. “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” reported the Boston Globe.

But way back in 1982, the UN had announced a two-decade tipping point for action on environmental issues. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, that the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” According to Tolba, lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”

In 1989, the UN was still trying to sell that “tipping point” to the public. According to a July 5, 1989, article in the San Jose Mercury News, Noel Brown, the then-director of the New York office of UNEP was warning of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the Herald, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”

But in 2007, seven years after that supposed tipping point had come and gone, Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared 2012 the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced his own deadline in August 2009, when he warned of “incalculable” suffering without a UN climate deal in December 2009. And in 2012, the UN gave Planet Earth another four-year reprieve. UN Foundation president and former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth called Obama’s re-election the “last window of opportunity” to get it right on climate change.

Heir to the British throne Prince Charles originally announced in March 2009 that we had “less than 100 months to alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change.” As he said during a speech in Brazil, “We may yet be able to prevail and thereby to avoid bequeathing a poisoned chalice to our children and grandchildren. But we only have 100 months to act.”

To his credit, Charles stuck to this rigid timetable—at least initially. Four months later, in July 2009, he declared a ninety-six-month tipping point. At that time the media dutifully reported that “the heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the ‘age of convenience’ was over.”

At the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, Charles was still keeping at it: “The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control.”

As the time expired, the Prince of Wales said in 2010, “Ladies and gentlemen we only—we now have only 86 months left before we reach the tipping point.”

By 2014, a clearly exhausted Prince Charles seemed to abandon the countdown, announcing, “We are running out of time. How many times have I found myself saying this over recent years?”

In the summer of 2017, Prince Charles’s one-hundred-month tipping point finally expired.26 What did Charles have to say? Was he giving up? Did he proclaim the end times for the planet? Far from it. Two years earlier, in 2015, Prince Charles abandoned his hundred-month countdown and gave the world a reprieve by extending his climate tipping point another thirty-five years, to the year 2050!

A July 2015 interview in the Western Morning News revealed that “His Royal Highness warns that we have just 35 years to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.” So instead of facing the expiration of his tipping point head on, the sixty-nine-year-old Charles kicked the climate doomsday deadline down the road until 2050 when he would be turning
the ripe age of 102. (Given the Royal Family’s longevity, it is possible he may still be alive for his new extended deadline.)
Former Irish President Mary Robinson issued a twenty-year tipping point in 2015, claiming that global leaders have “at most two decades to save the world.”

Al Gore announced his own ten-year climate tipping point in 2006 and again in 2008, warning that “the leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis.” In 2014, with “only two years left” before Gore’s original deadline, the climatologist Roy Spencer mocked the former vice president, saying “in the grand tradition of prophets of doom, Gore’s prognostication is not shaping up too well.”

Penn State Professor Michael Mann weighed in with a 2036 deadline. “There is an urgency to acting unlike anything we’ve seen before,” Mann explained. Media outlets reported Mann’s made a huge media splash with his prediction, noting “Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036.”

Other global warming activists chose 2047 as their deadline, while twenty governments from around the globe chose 2030 as theirs, with Reuters reporting that millions would die by 2030 if world failed to act on climate: “More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2% of GDP by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday. As global avg. temps rise due to ghg emissions, the effects on
planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by the humanitarian organization DARA.”

As we saw in chapter five, top UK scientist Sir David King warned in 2004 that that by 2100 Antarctica could be the only habitable continent.

Tipping point rhetoric seems to have exploded beginning in 2002. An analysis by Reason magazine’s Ron Bailey found that tipping points in environmental rhetoric increased dramatically in that year.

The Last Chance

Michael Mann warned that the 2015 UN Paris summit “is probably the last chance” to address climate change.38 But the reality is that every UN climate summit is hailed as the last opportunity to stop global warming.

Newsweek magazine weighed in with its own tipping point: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find
it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.” That warning appeared in an April 28, 1975, article
about global cooling! Same rhetoric, different eco-scare.

Here is a sampling of previous “last chance” deadlines that turned out to be—well—not the last chance after all.

Bonn, 2001: “A Global Warming Treaty’s Last Chance” —Time magazine, July 16, 2001

Montreal, 2005: “Climate campaigner Mark Lynas warned ‘with time running out for the global climate, your meeting in
Montreal represents a last chance for action.’” —Independent, November 28, 2005

Bali, 2007: “World leaders will converge on Bali today for the start of negotiations which experts say could be the last chance to save the Earth from catastrophic climate change.” —New Zealand Herald, December 3, 2007.

Poznan, Poland, 2008: “Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery warned, ‘This round of negotiations is likely to be
our last chance as a species to deal with the problem.’” —Age, December 9, 2008

Copenhagen, 2009: “European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas told a climate conference that it was ‘the
world’s last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return.’” —Reuters, February 27, 2009

Cancun, 2010: “Jairem Ramesh, the Indian environment minister, sees it as the ‘last chance’ for climate change talks to
succeed.” —Telegraph, November 29, 2010 Durban, 2011: “Durban climate change meeting is “the last chance.” Attended by over 200 countries, this week’s major UN conference has been described by many experts as humanity’s last chance to avert the disastrous effects of climate change.” —UCA News, November 28, 201140

“Serially Doomed”

Perhaps the best summary of the tipping-point phenomenon comes from UK scientist Philip Stott. “In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. We have been serially doomed,” Stott explained. “Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s, if not earlier. By 1973, and the ‘global cooling’ scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years, exacerbated by the impacts of a nuclear winter.

Environmentalists were warning that, by the year 2000, the population of the US would have fallen to only 22 million. In 1987, the scare abruptly changed to ‘global warming’, and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established (1988), issuing its first assessment report in 1990, which served as the basis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

SOURCE






The Ontario declaration

BY GREG RICKFORD (Greg Rickford is Ontario’s Minister of Energy, Northern Development and Mines)

The only thing “green” about the Green Energy Act was the green that lined the pockets of well-connected insiders.

That’s why, yesterday, I was very pleased to be joined by my friend Minister McNaughton to announce that we are repealing this disastrous legislation that killed jobs, hurt families, business and manufacturing across our province.

For many people, the Green Energy Act is a symbol of a failed energy policy, driven by dangerous ideology and a culture of waste at Queen’s Park.

The Green Energy Act forced wasteful projects on unwilling communities while driving up the costs of hydro bills for families and businesses across Ontario. In 2017 alone, wind and solar projects added $3.75 billion in costs to hydro bills. Even worse, 26 per cent of this expensive electricity wasn’t even used, it was curtailed, and you paid for it. This is part of the reason why, under the previous Liberal government, energy rates tripled, hurting families, and driving manufacturing and jobs out of Ontario.

The Green Energy Act represents the largest transfer of money from the poor and middle class to the rich in Ontario’s history. Well-connected energy Liberal insiders made fortunes putting up wind-farms and solar panels that gouged hydro consumers in order to generate electricity that Ontario doesn’t need.

These projects were forced on municipalities, with little to no consultation. When communities raised concerns, they were ignored, in fact trampled by Queen’s Park.

One example of this is the Municipality of Dutton Dunwich. More than 80 per cent of residents in this community voted in a referendum to stop a wind farm in that community. The previous government ignored the people of Dutton Dunwich and forced this unpopular and wasteful project in this community.

These are the consequences of 15 years of bad decisions. That’s why one of my first acts as Energy Minister was to cancel 758 of these expensive and wasteful projects, including the wind farm in Dutton Dunwich. This will save electricity customers across Ontario $790 million. Future decisions on energy supply will not be driven by ideology but what matters most to the people of Ontario, their pocket books.

This legislation, if passed, will send a strong signal about our government’s energy priorities.

We are committed to putting more money in your pocket by lowering hydro bills by 12%.

We are giving power back to municipalities to ensure they are in control of where energy projects go.

We are committed to cleaning up the hydro mess left by the previous government.

We are committed to ending the sweetheart deals of the past that tripled your hydro bill.

SOURCE





Big Green

Major foundations handed nearly $4 billion to global warming activists, anti-fossil fuel campaigners and other environmentalists over the past eight years, according to a database debuted Monday.

The website Big Green, Inc. tracked $3.7 billion in commitments from major grant-making foundations to environmental causes from 2008 to 2016. It’s a project of the free market Institute for Energy Research and is based on nonprofit tax filings.

IER president Tom Pyle said the vast web of funding detailed by Big Green, Inc. shatters the notion environmentalists are locked in a David versus Goliath-like struggle against energy companies

“The truth is the environmental left is a deep-pocketed and powerful force in American politics that is working to stop all natural gas, oil, and coal production in the United States,” Pyle said in a statement.

IER’s project found, for example, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation gave out $2 billion in grants to environmental causes, including climate activism, between 2008 and 2016 — the largest grant-maker in the database.

The Energy Foundation handed out $444 million in grants and the Sea Change Foundation doled out $373 million. The Energy Foundation got funding from liberal billionaire Tom Steyer’s charitable trust from 2009 to 2013, the group disclosed on its website.

Steyer, a deep-pocketed environmental activist, is leading an effort to impeach President Donald Trump. The former Hillary Clinton campaign bundler has poured millions of his own fortune into his “Need To Impeach” campaign.

The Sea Change Foundation has been targeted by Congress over potential ties to Russian oligarchs. House lawmakers asked the Department of the Treasury to investigate a Bermuda-based shell company that gave Sea Change $23 million in 2010 and 2011.

Lawmakers on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology said the Bermuda-based shell company is run by a law firm with ties to Russian oligarchs.

IER followed the money to more than 1,500 environmental groups, including Climateworks and the Natural Resources Defense Council that got $1.7 billion and $79 million, respectively, from major foundations.

But IER’s database is only the tip of the iceberg. IER tracked more than 8,800 grants from the 10 largest U.S.-based grant-making foundations over an eight-year period. Notably, IER found about four times as much funding than a recent study.

Northeastern University communications professor Matthew Nisbet tracked nearly $567 million on global warming-related funding between 2011 to 2015 from major foundations.

“Significant funding was also devoted to mobilizing public opinion and to opposing the fossil fuel industry,” Nisbet wrote, later adding: “$69.4 million in grants focused on promoting policy actions and regulations to limit fossil fuel production and development.”

“In this case, $42 million was devoted to opposing coal power,” Nisbet wrote. “The major funders in this area were Bloomberg ($20 million) and MacArthur ($15 million) which supported the Sierra Club’s work on the issue.”

Billions more are on the way for the environmental movement. A group of 29 foundations pledged another $3 billion over the next five years “to reduce the rate of global warming,” according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

The foundations’ pledges were made at the end of a climate activist summit in San Francisco co-hosted by California Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and former New York City Independent Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

“And they have a strong ally in the mainstream media, which all-too-often has become a cheerleader for their harmful agenda,” Pyle said. “Big Green, Inc. is a first-of-its-kind research tool that provides a detailed accounting of the billions of dollars that flow into and throughout the green movement.”

SOURCE





IPCC push to dump coal-fired power not for us, says Australian PM

Scott Morrison has rejected a rapid global phase-out of coal-fired power and declared his government will not be bound by a landmark climate study, amid concern its blueprint for curbing temperature rises would see the “lights go out on the east coast of Australia”.

A special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has championed a quick end to coal-fired power across the world and found that unprecedented changes in all aspects of society were needed to meet the lower Paris Agreement target limiting warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

The Morrison government yesterday welcomed the report but stood by coal-fired power generation and defended Australia’s record in meeting its international emissions ­reduction targets.

“If we take coal out of our ­energy system, the lights will go out on the east coast of Australia — it’s as simple as that,” Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said.

The IPCC special report said rising temperatures were already affecting the weather in some ­places and there would be a big difference in the impacts on all ­aspects of the natural world from a 2C increase, compared with a 1.5C rise. Warm-water coral reefs would be more than 99 per cent gone with a rise of 2C, but some might survive at 1.5C.

The special report is set to ­become a central focus of a campaign to encourage countries to increase their ambition under the Paris Agreement, starting in ­Poland in December. At present, Paris Agreement pledges would lead to global temperature ­increases of more than 3C.

The Australian government said the report justified the controversial decision to spend $444 million protecting the Great Barrier Reef.

Environment Minister Melissa Price said the IPCC report was designed to inform policy makers but was not “policy ­prescriptive”.

The Prime Minister ­defended Australia remaining a signatory to the Paris Agreement, arguing it would not have any impact on electricity prices. But he said Australia would not be held to any of the IPCC ­report conclusions.

“We are not held to any of them at all, and nor are we bound to go and tip money into that big climate fund,” Mr Morrison told 2GB radio.

Bill Shorten said there was a need to ensure a greater proportion of renewable energy sources in Australia’s energy mix.

“But we are not saying that there won’t be fossil fuel as part of our energy mix going forward,” the Opposition Leader said.

According to the IPCC report, to meet a target of 1.5C warming compared with the 1851-1900 average, global net human carbon ­dioxide emissions would need to fall about 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050.

Renewables are projected to supply 70 to 85 per cent of electricity in 2050, under the 1.5C target. Nuclear and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS) were modelled to increase in most 1.5C pathways. The use of CCS would allow the electricity generation share of gas to be about 8 per cent of global electricity in 2050.


“The use of coal shows a steep reduction in all pathways and would be reduced to close to zero per cent of electricity (in 2050),” the report said.

CSIRO research scientist Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project, said the special report was probably the last reminder that there were no insoluble biophysical or technical impediments to meet the lowest temperature targets in the Paris Agreement.

But Dr Canadell said it would require the “almost immediate ­establishment of a global carbon market, carbon pricing across all sectors of the economy, massive energy efficiency gains, significant consumer changes in diets, actions to reduce peak global population, and the immediate and growing deployment of options for the ­direct removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, including the pervasive need for carbon capture and storage in most cases”.

There would be drastic changes in land use, including reforestation and planting crops for energy to suck carbon dioxide from the ­atmosphere and burying emissions when they were burnt.

A shift in diet towards less meat was described in the summary for policymakers as the need for “healthy consumption patterns”, “responsible consumption” and “sustainable diets”.

The provision of billions of dollars in finance to help developing nations would be crucial.

The IPCC said limiting global warming to 1.5C compared with 2C could “go hand-in-hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society”.

The advantages of meeting a 1.5C target rather than 2C were ­detailed in the report. Global sea level rises would be 10cm lower by 2100, the report said.

The likelihood of the Arctic Ocean being free of sea ice in ­summer would be once a century compared with at least once a ­decade. An IPCC official said that while limiting warming to 1.5C was possible within the laws of chemistry and physics, doing so would ­require unprecedented changes.

Global CCS Institute chief executive Brad Page said the ­report had reinforced the point that a 1.5C increase could not be reached without deployment of all clean technologies, and carbon capture was most definitively one.

“CCS must remain at the forefront of national, regional and international policy discussions and, as the IPCC said today, governments must act on this evidence,” Mr Page said.

Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy said: “The report makes clear that we need to get better at investing in storing carbon in the natural world and deploying technologies that can remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Our governments and industry should urgently investigate how they can better do this with the right incentives.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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