Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Climate change could force 216 million people out of their homes and into other parts of their country by 2050 to escape flooding, water scarcity and declining crop production
This is so brain-dead as to be hardly worth talking about. Warmer oceans would give off MORE rain, leading to BIGGER foodcrops, not "water scarcity. CO2 is good for crops too
Without immediate action to combat climate change, 216 million people could be forced to migrate to other parts of their country by 2050.
A new report from the World Bank modeled the impact of rising sea levels, water scarcity and declining crop productivity on six regions, concluding that climate migration 'hotspots' will emerge as soon as 2030.
The poorest parts of the world will be hit hardest, researchers said: Sub-Saharan Africa alone would account for 86 million of the internal migrants, with 19 million more in North Africa, the report showed,
South Asia would be home to 40 million internal migrants, and another 49 million in East Asia and the Pacific.
Such movements will put significant stress on both sending and receiving areas, straining cities and urban centers and jeopardizing development gains, the report said.
For instance, sea-level rise threatens rice production, aquaculture and fisheries, which could create an out-migration hotspot in Vietnam's low-lying Mekong Delta.
But the Red River Delta and central coast region, where those people are likely to flee, face their own threats, including severe storms.
Conflicts and health and economic crises such as those unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic could compound the situation, the bank said.
And the number of climate migrants could be much higher since the report does not cover most high-income countries, Middle Eastern nations, small island states, or people migrating to new countries.
An AI map developed in 2020 by researchers at the University of Southern California suggests that, in the US, nearly 13 million Americans will be forced to move internally by the end of the 21st century.
Many will relocate inland from coastal areas to land-locked cities such as Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Denver and Las Vegas.
Already, climate change is responsible for 37 percent of the planet's heat deaths each year, according to a May 2021 study published in Nature Climate Change.
That's equal to about 9,700 people in 732 cities.
'These are deaths related to heat that actually can be prevented. It is something we directly cause,' Ana Vicedo-Cabrera, an epidemiologist at the University of Bern's Institute of Social and Preventative Medicine, told the Associated Press in May.
But it's only a sliver of climate's overall toll on human mortality — more people die from other extreme weather amplified by global warming, like hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and droughts.
Kanta Kumari Rigaud, the World Bank's lead environment specialist and co-author of the new report, said the Earth was 'already locked into' a certain amount of global warming and that climate migration was a present reality not a future problem.
'We have to reduce or cut our greenhouse gases to meet the Paris target, because those climate impacts are going to escalate and increase the scale of climate migration,' Rigaud added.
According to The New York Times, without major changes, nearly 20 percent of the globe will be a 'barely livable hot zone' by 2070.
Rigaud and the other authors say their findings should be seen as an urgent wakeup call to regional and national governments to act now to reduce greenhouse gases, close development gaps and restore ecosystems.
Doing so, they said, could reduce that migration number by 80 percent, to 44 million people.
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Britain’s last coal power stations to be paid huge sums to keep lights on
And Greenies pretend we can do without them!
Owners of the UK’s last remaining coal power stations are in line to be paid record sums to keep the lights on as energy prices reach fresh highs, and could be pushed even higher by lower wind power.
Coal plants have been called on to supply power steadily in recent months, through one of the least windy summers on record since 1961 and sharply rising prices in the wholesale energy market.
The UK’s electricity system operator (ESO) spent more than £86m last week alone to keep the lights on, which involved making payments of up to £4,000 a megawatt-hour for fossil fuel power stations to generate electricity at short notice, including the West Burton plant in Nottinghamshire and a coal unit at the Drax site in North Yorkshire.
Britain has largely been weaned off coal power in recent years, but the remaining plants are available on standby to accept eye-watering offers from National Grid ESO at times of need, such as during cold spikes or low wind conditions . The Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal plant near Nottingham is also in line to benefit from record power prices this week.
The Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station near Nottingham is among the coal-fired plants to benefit from record energy prices.© Photograph: eye35.pix/Alamy The Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station near Nottingham is among the coal-fired plants to benefit from record energy prices.
The price of electricity on the UK’s main power auction rose above £400 a MWh for the first time on Monday, while the price of gas surged to a record of 150 pence a therm.
The increases follow market highs last week. Experts predict UK wholesale energy prices will climb higher in the days ahead owing to forecasts of low-wind speeds, which will limit the country’s renewable energy generation.
The price for electricity during Tuesday evening’s peak power demand hours has reached a new record of £1,750 a MWh, more than 2,900% higher than the average price over the last decade, according to Bloomberg data.
Prices have soared in recent months owing to a global gas market surge, which followed a cold winter in the northern hemisphere that left gas storage facilities depleted. The record gas price has made electricity more expensive in the UK, where almost half of all electricity is generated in gas power plants.
In addition, the UK has faced a “perfect storm” of power plant outages and low wind speeds that has forced energy prices higher despite demand “not being very high at the moment”, according to Rajiv Gogna, a partner at LCP Energy Analytics.
Phil Hewitt, a director at the energy consultancy EnAppSys, added that Wednesday and Thursday looked even more volatile than the start of the week, “so we suspect that this is not the end of the high prices”.
The record market prices are expected to lead to hikes in household energy bills through until 2022, plunging more than people in the UK into fuel poverty for the first time and causing many small energy suppliers to go bust.
Clare Moriarty, the chief executive of Citizens Advice, said it was deeply concerning that energy prices were continuing to rise, “meaning we’re likely to see yet another hike in bills next year”.
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New CO2 monitoring credit card enables tracking of ‘carbon footprint on every purchase’ – ‘Monitors & cuts off spending when we hit our carbon max’
For fanatics only
Get ready for a Chinese-style social credit system scoring when it comes to your personal spending habits and how they impact “climate change.” A new credit card called Doconomy, has launched that is “working in tight collaboration with Mastercard” and an alliance with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is now available so you can monitor your personal CO2 budget on every purchase you make.
The new CO2 monitoring Mastercard called Doconomy debuted in order to enable “all users to track, measure and understand their impact by presenting their carbon footprint on every purchase.” The credit cards feature the slogan on them reading “DO. Everyday Climate Action” and have a personal pledge on the rear of the card boasting: “I am taking responsibility for every transaction I make to help protect the planet.” The Mastercards feature the UN “Global Climate Action” logo on them as well.
The World Economic Forum praised Doconomy. “While many of us are aware that we need to reduce our carbon footprint, advice on doing so can seem nebulous and keeping a tab is difficult. DO monitors and cuts off spending, when we hit our carbon max,” the World Economic Forum wrote on the Doconomy CO2 monitoring website.
The Doconomy credit card website explains: “With fat, sugar and salt levels labeled on food we buy, why shouldn’t our CO2 emissions be just as visible?” asks the Doconomy website. “This type of information shouldn’t be a premium or luxury that consumers pay for, but rather an essential part of every shopping journey.” The website details how the credit card will help consumers “understand their impact by presenting their carbon footprint on every purchase.”
Mathias Wikström, the CEO of Doconomy, explained, “Reducing carbon emissions needs to be prioritized by all parties. At Doconomy we are proud to engage and educate around our lifestyle’s impact on the planet…The financial sector has developed a tremendous efficiency. Now that same force can address the planetary fragility.”
This new CO2 monitoring credit card follows on the heels of the new study in the Journal Nature in August 2021 calling for “personal carbon allowances” that would monitor individuals’ CO2 emissions through smart meters and tracking apps.
Doconomy’s new CO2 monitoring card boasts that it has started “providing 90 million consumers with carbon footprint insights.” The credit card was launched with the aim of “educating all consumers around climate impact information as a first step towards driving awareness around the climate crisis.” The Doconomy CO2 credit card website claims it is the “largest initiative ever taken by a bank in educating its users on the impact of consumption.”
“Working in tight collaboration with Mastercard, setting a global standard for carbon calculations on everyday transactions, and other frontrunners like Klarna in banking, Doconomy aims to reach 1 billion users by COP26 in November,” the Doconomy CO2 credit card website explains.
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Trudeau pledges to cut Canada's oil emissions even as country keeps pumping more
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's promise to reduce Canada's oil sector emissions starting in 2025 looks unlikely to slow the growth of crude production, environmental activists and oil companies say, raising questions about how effectively the pledge will help meet the country's goals to slow climate change.
Trudeau is in a close race with the Conservatives, and some voters are demanding decisive climate action
He promised late last month, if re-elected on Sept. 20, to immediately cap emissions from the oil and gas sector, which is responsible for 26% of national emissions, and require lower emissions in five-year intervals, starting in 2025.
The sector's emissions have stayed roughly flat since 2014, although oil sands emissions have risen.
The pledge would force the world's fourth-largest oil and gas producer to shift focus away from curbing emissions mainly on a per-barrel basis to cutting absolute emissions. Countries with much smaller production, including Denmark and France, have banned oil and gas exploration, while Norway's oil industry has voluntarily pledged to cut absolute emissions 40% by 2030 from 2005 levels.
The Canadian government has authority to set emissions levels, but it has less ability to influence oil production, which Trudeau's pledge does not address.
Regardless of who forms the next government, Canada is likely to keep raising oil production to satisfy growing global demand, while also cutting emissions, said Tim McMillan, president of Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.
"Canada should play a larger role in global supply," he said.
Canadian oil production will expand for nearly two more decades, the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) forecast last November.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Scientists warn polar bears are inbreeding due to climate change
The loss of genetic diversity sounds bad, but there is no evidence it actually is. They just assume it is. There is a reply to the story here which pretty well demolishes it
A new study on climate change’s effects on polar bears was published Wednesday in the Royal Society Journals.
The study, published Wednesday in the Royal Society Journals, found a 10-percent decrease in the genetic diversity of polar bears in the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard over a 20-year period, corresponding with the loss of sea ice.
“We found a drastic reduction in genetic diversity over the 20-year period," one of the study’s authors, Simo Maduna of the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, told ABC News. "And we could, in actual fact, associate this reduction in genetic diversity with the loss of sea ice."
As the sea ice melts due to climate change, polar bears have fewer encounters with other polar bears.
Researchers worry that as more bears begin to inbreed, it could lead to infertility among the polar bears, as well as an inability to combat disease.
"With genetic diversity, when the population becomes so small, you'll find that there will be a higher chance of closely related individuals mating and producing offspring," Maduna said. "But with that comes a risk in the sense that some of the traits ... that are recessive, will now basically be unmasked in the population."
Polar bears are already facing other detrimental effects of global warming, such as starvation from their dwindling hunting grounds. A previous study from 2020 estimated that all polar bears could be extinct by 2100 if the Arctic ice continues to melt at its current rate.
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‘The harm to children is irreparable’: Ruth Etzel speaks out ahead of EPA whistleblower hearing
The US Environmental Protection Agency is failing to protect children by ignoring poisons in the environment and focusing on corporate interests, according to a top children’s health official who will testify this week that the agency tried to silence her because of her insistence on stronger preventions against lead poisoning.
“The people of the United States expect the EPA to protect the health of their children, but the EPA is more concerned with protecting the interests of polluting industries,” said Ruth Etzel, former director of the EPA’s Office of Children’s Health Protection (OCHP). The harm being done to children is “irreparable”, she said.
A hearing will be held on 13 September in which several internal EPA communications will be presented as evidence, including an email in which EPA personnel discuss using press inquiries about Etzel as “an opportunity to strike” out against her. Among many witnesses to be called to testify are several former high-level EPA officials.
“I want this to be seen and heard,” Etzel said. “I think we should let some light shine on these dirty tricks.”
Etzel is among five current or former EPA scientists who have recently come forward with allegations that the agency, which is charged with regulating chemicals and other substances that may harm public and environmental health, has become deeply corrupted by corporate and political influence. That outside influence pushes agency scientists to make important assessments in ways that will protect their jobs, rather than protect the public, Etzel said.
The whistleblowers have alleged a range of wrongdoing by the EPA, including using intimidation tactics against the agency’s own scientists to protect the interests of certain industries, even when doing so puts the public at risk. The problems have continued into the Biden administration, according to the allegations.
‘Destroy the scientist’
Etzel is a pediatrician and epidemiologist who joined the EPA in 2015 after serving as senior officer in the department of public health and environment at the World Health Organization in Switzerland. She also previously worked for the US Centers for Disease Control and the US Department of Agriculture, and is well known as a global expert on children’s health issues.
In her role at the EPA, Etzel helped launch an initiative to accelerate the reduction of childhood exposure to lead from sources in air, water, soil, paint, and food. The federal lead strategy stalled, Etzel alleges, after the 2016 election of Donald Trump when the EPA came under the direction of administrator Andrew Wheeler.
Etzel filed her whistleblower complaint against the EPA in November 2018 alleging that her determination to push the initiative forward, including publicly complaining about EPA delays, triggered retaliation.
The EPA placed her on leave, demoted her, cut her pay, fabricated complaints against her, and conducted a smear campaign aimed at “humiliating” her and “undermining her career and professional stature”, according to her complaint. The EPA also blocked opportunities for her to speak at professional conferences, she alleges.
Internal EPA email communications included as evidence in the case shows that initial questions from media about Etzel’s administrative leave drew curt responses declining to comment on “personnel matters”. But as media inquiries about Etzel mounted, on 28 September 2018, a top EPA public affairs official wrote to the EPA press secretary and other public affairs officers: “This is our opportunity to strike.”
Then, in an email thread with the subject line “Push this around ASAP please,” public affairs officials agreed to a “stronger updated” statement about Etzel that said she was placed on administrative leave because of “serious reports made against her by staff … ” that were “very concerning”.
“The old playbook was attack the science,” Etzel told the Guardian. “The new playbook is destroy the scientist.”
The American Academy of Pediatrics and more than 100 other public health-oriented organizations and institutions sent a letter in 2018 to the EPA protesting the removal of Etzel, who has received multiple national and international awards for scientific integrity and advocacy in recent years.
‘Right the wrongs of the past’
In a pre-hearing statement, the EPA denied taking retaliatory actions against Etzel and said the federal lead action plan was issued in December 2018 and was a “major focus and significant accomplishment”.
“While appellant Ruth Etzel has alleged that EPA’s former administration delayed implementation of the action plan with the premise that it did not care about children and lead exposure issues, the profuse record and witness testimony will illustrate that appellant’s allegations are grossly unfounded,” the EPA said in the filing with the MSPB.
The EPA said there were numerous complaints about Etzel’s management, including complaints that she used “explicit language”, “failed to follow agency HR policy”, was unable “to control her emotions”, and often would “bully others”.
In a statement to The Guardian the EPA said: “This administration is committed to ensuring all EPA decisions are informed by rigorous scientific information and standards. Retaliation against employees who report alleged violations is not tolerated at EPA.”
Paula Dinerstein, a lawyer with the group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which is representing Etzel, said the EPA still has not taken action to implement the lead protection strategy, and has acknowledged the “libelous claims” against Etzel were not substantiated.
The Biden administration should not only reinstate Etzel to her previous position, but should also take steps to address the deeper problems revealed by whistleblowers, Dinerstein said.
“Etzel and other recent EPA whistleblowers have exposed EPA’s timidity and industry capture,” she said. “The Biden administration has said a lot of the right things, and has taken some good steps, but it will take a lot of effort and pressure to ensure they right the wrongs of the past.”
The case of Etzel v EPA is set for a hearing in front of the US Merit Systems Protection Board on 13-15 September. The proceedings are open to the public, and scheduled to be held via Zoom due to fears about the spread of Covid-19.
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Australia: Regions To Bear Brunt Of Feel-Good Emissions Target
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said that Australia would “not achieve net zero [emissions] in the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities”,
Rather, “it will be won in places like the Pilbara, the Hunter, Gladstone, Portland, Whyalla, Bell Bay, the Riverina. In the factories of our regional towns and outer suburbs,” Morrison said at the Business Council of Australia event.
But for the people who live and work in these regions, a net zero target is far from a “win”.
A net zero emissions target is a policy designed by inner-city elites, and it only serves their narrow interests.
These elites insist that Australia needs to drastically reduce its carbon emissions, even though we only account for about 1.1 per cent of global emissions. To put that in perspective, every 16 days China emits the same amount of carbon emissions that Australia does in an entire year.
“Reducing Australia’s emissions to zero will have no discernible impact on global emissions. But it certainly makes the inner-city elites feel like they’re being responsible global citizens.”
For Australians in the outer suburbs and regions however, the cost couldn’t be greater.
Research by the Institute of Public Affairs published earlier this year estimated that a net zero emissions target would place up to 653,000 jobs at risk. And, no surprises, these at-risk jobs are overwhelmingly concentrated in regional areas. Some regional electorates could see as many as one in four jobs placed at direct risk, and this doesn’t account for the flow-on effects of mass job destruction.
The experience of the loss of Australia’s car manufacturing industry demonstrates the point. A survey by the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union found that two years after Holden’s Elizabeth plant closed 24 per cent of laid-off workers remained unemployed, and two-thirds of those who found a job were in part-time, casual, or contract employment. Only 5 per cent of the workers had a new job that had the same or better working conditions.
We know from the experience to date that Australia has reduced its emissions at a great cost to those living in the regions. As National members of parliament Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan wrote in a newspaper article in February, “the emissions from people living in cities have gone up during the past 30 years, but their moral guilt has been eased by sending the bill to the bush”.
The mechanism for this was a clause in the Kyoto agreement that allowed Australia to claim a carbon credit if we cleared less land each year than the 688,000ha cleared in 1990. As Joyce and Canavan explained, this “led to state governments imposing ever tightening restrictions on land clearing.
Now Australia clears just 50,000ha of land a year. This is not enough to keep our farming land at a constant amount, let alone develop new areas. In fact, if we had not stripped the right from farmers to develop their own land, Australia’s emissions would have gone up, not down, in the past 30 years.”
The adoption of a net zero emissions target would do exactly the same thing: allow inner-city types to feel good about their so-called “action on climate change”, which does not extend beyond putting Australians living in the regions out of work.
When those working in relatively higher-emitting industries raise concerns about their job security, they are told that the new wave of “green jobs” will ensure that they can continue to work and provide for their family. But these promises ring hollow. IPA research has identified that for each renewable activity job created since 2010, five manufacturing jobs have been destroyed.
The NSW Electricity Infrastructure Roadmap details how the Berejiklian government plans to force expensive and unreliable renewable energy onto households and businesses.
Under the roadmap, the government will establish five renewable energy zones over the next decade and “support an expected 6300 construction jobs and 2800 ongoing jobs mostly in regional NSW”.
In other words, the NSW government’s plan admits that only 900 jobs would be created each year, with the vast majority of these being temporary.
Where the 107,000 people employed in agriculture and mining across the state are supposed to work if their jobs are destroyed as a result of the emissions reduction effort is not made clear.
Perhaps that’s because to the inner-city elites, some jobs are more important than others.
https://ipa.org.au/ipa-today/regions-to-bear-brunt-of-feel-good-emissions-target
***************************************‘Their views will not be muzzled’: News Corp’s Australian boss outlines climate campaign
News Corp Australia’s executive chairman Michael Miller has told local staff the company’s commentators such as Andrew Bolt and Rowan Dean will not be “muzzled” as part of a company-wide editorial project focused on climate change and reducing carbon emissions.
In an all staff email obtained by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, Mr Miller confirmed plans for a company-wide climate change campaign in October, but said the push was not conceived due to pressure from advertisers and that different viewpoints will be featured in it.
“Our plans are not in response to any advertiser questions or concerns,” he said. “However, since the coverage this week, it has been great to be contacted by our clients and major Australian companies who are interested in how they can be involved.”
“All our commentators and columnists will be encouraged to participate, and their views will not be ‘muzzled’” .
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age this week revealed plans for the Rupert Murdoch-controlled media company to begin advocating for reducing emissions, marking a major shift in its long-standing editorial hostility towards carbon reduction policies. The article said a plan was devised to limit – but not muzzle – dissenting voices among News Corp’s stable of conservative commentators.
The article sparked a furious response from Bolt, who said on his television program midweek he would leave the organisation if the plan was true.
“So we are going to champion a useless gesture by Australia that won’t lower the temperature but will cost jobs and money - when we are already in the schtuck?,” he said this week.
“A pretend fix, to a pretend crisis, after we campaigned against the carbon tax? Okay. But it’s the boss’ paper, it’s their right to campaign even for something stupid and seem like fools for once fighting against what we are now fighting for,” Bolt told his Sky News viewers. “If that is what the Murdoch media will ask of me, I am out of here.”
“If I’m still here, you’ll know it was all untrue. If I’m gone, worry,” he said.
News Corp’s campaign is set to feature in city tabloids including Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Melbourne’s Herald Sun, national broadsheet The Australian and on Sky News.
Mr Miller said the “major editorial project” was first discussed in March at a meeting of News Corp’s editorial board, which is chaired by The Australian’s editor-in-chief Chris Dore. He said the work will focus on key environmental and climate issues and the options Australia need to consider reaching a zero emissions target. It will feature leaders in the field and perspectives from lawmakers, scientists, academics and business leaders.
“Australians have told us that caring for the environment is a priority,” Mr Miller wrote. “They have told us that they are interested in the issues, the political and personal choices, as well as the costs and trade offs involved. They also want to know more about how their choices can help make the planet a better, greener place.“
“We will endeavour to ensure that all views, not just the popular ones, are heard,” he said.
Rupert Murdoch’s global media empire has in recent years faced growing international condemnation and pressure over its editorial stance on climate change, which has previously cast doubt over the science behind global warming.
Negative publicity about its coverage appeared in global outlets such as The New York Times and Financial Times during Australia’s deadly bushfires almost two years ago. The coverage by local tabloids and national masthead The Australian also triggered a comment from Murdoch’s youngest son, James Murdoch, who publicly denounced the outlets’ “ongoing denial” of climate change. Mr Murdoch quit the News Corp board last August due to concerns about its editorial stance.
Climate change scepticism has proven difficult to uphold as leading corporations start to aggressively push their green credentials. Woolworths and Coles used the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games to broadcast advertisements that focused on their green credentials. But Mr Miller said to staff that the reason for the editorial work was due to the changing needs of its audience, rather than any requests from advertisers.
Mr Miller said News Corp will also reinvigorate 1 Degree - an initiative which began in Australia in 2007 following a famous speech by Rupert Murdoch where he said the planet deserved “the benefit of the doubt”.
News Corporation’s global environmental targets include reducing its fuel and electricity emissions 60 per cent by 2030 on a 2016 base year, reduced supply chain carbon emissions 20 per cent by 2030 and hit net zero by 2050.
”No doubt other media and social platform users will try to take issue with our coverage and attempt to make News the story, however we have never been afraid of pushing boundaries and facilitating tough and uncomfortable conversations,” Mr Miller said. “This is a conversation which Australia needs to have.“
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Sunday, September 12, 2021
Climate Change Is Not a Crisis
President Joe Biden contends that the recent hurricanes that hit the United States prove we’re in a “climate crisis.” It’s a “code red” for the world, the president warns. White House national climate adviser Gina McCarthy added that climate is now a “health emergency.”
It is, no doubt, quite convenient for politicians to treat every hurricane, tornado and flood as an apocalyptic sign from Gaea — and then blame political apostates for the existence of nature. But it’s an irrational way to think about the world. Because our situation is, in most ways — including our ability to adapt to the vagaries of climate — quantifiably better than before on nearly every front.
This reality is probably difficult for a generation subjected to decades of fearmongering to accept, but climate anomalies are nothing new. When a freak snowstorm hit Texas earlier this year, the administration used it to push draconian policy ideas. But the Texas storm was no different than the rare 1973 blizzard that hit the South. It happens. And there’s nothing we can do about it.
While victims of Ida will take no solace in this fact, historically speaking, hurricanes aren’t touching land at higher frequencies either. Nor is there evidence that storms that make landfall do so with more intensity than in previous years. Certainly, they aren’t any more dangerous. Back in 1900, the Great Galveston hurricane likely killed somewhere around 10,000 people in Texas. In 1926, the Great Miami hurricane killed 372 people, causing an estimated, inflation-adjusted $157 billion in damage. Only around 150,000 people lived in all of Dade County in those days. When Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it was a Category 3. Most of the damage had to do with how ill-prepared the city was for any storm.
As Biden has pointed out, hurricanes are less destructive because governments and the private sector adapt and prepare. Acclimatizing to the realities of climate change — whatever they may be — are far cheaper and more moral than the state-compelled dismantling of modernity.
Indeed, climate has always been bad for our health. We’ve spent most of human existence attempting to mitigate its destructive power. Today, people still tragically die from, say, extreme heat (air conditioners save far more lives!). But overall, deaths due to nature have dramatically plummeted during the past century — falling over 98% since 1900, and over 70% since Joe Biden showed up in Washington. Weather accounts for somewhere around 0.07% of worldwide deaths, and 0.01% in the United States. We’re safer, even though far more people live in areas with extreme heat and freezing cold and in the paths of both hurricanes and tornadoes.
And the notion that places such as Central America and the Middle East are experiencing conflicts and migration because of some unique climate changes ignores the entirety of history.
By claiming we are in an unprecedented “crisis,” we distort not only a proper understanding of our technological abilities but our moral outlook as well. Ponder this rhetorical question of a columnist at The Hill: “Could climate change finally expose China as a global outlaw?” So, it wasn’t the concentration camps that did it. Or the ethnic cleansing. Or the slave labor. Or the decades of collectivist-induced economic misery and authoritarian control. Or the state censorship. It was the Chinese government’s refusal to live by the precepts of the Paris Accord.
Indeed, certain pundits have been openly envious of the ability of Chinese Communists to compel their citizens to adopt carbon-mitigation policies. The commissars must be such a disappointment to them. The problem, though, is that today’s progressives often embrace illiberal ideas as a means of solving the climate “crisis.”
As a recent Nature journal piece notes, COVID-19 lockdowns have prepared people for “personal carbon allowances.” Restrictions on individual freedoms “that were unthinkable only one year before” have us “more prepared to accept the tracking and limitations” to “achieve a safer climate,” the piece notes.
And many self-professed defenders of our “democracy” have been clamoring for the Department of Health and Human Services to take unilateral action and treat climate as a “public health issue” or to declare a “climate emergency.” The White House has given the issue a required identity-based twist, noting that global warming’s risks “disproportionately affect poor and minority communities.” (Which reminds me of P. J. O'Rourke’s old joke about NPR coverage — “World to end — poor and minorities hardest hit.”)
Americans experienced the authoritarian reach of government during the pandemic. We see what normalizing those ideas can look like in Australia. Carbon emissions are embedded into nearly everything in our economy. If Democrats believe that the CDC should be empowered to declare an eviction moratorium, retroactively tear up private contracts and unilaterally discard property rights, you can imagine what sort of things await this nation if they can declare climate change an “emergency.”
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/82625-climate-change-is-not-a-crisis-2021-09-10
*****************************************Prevailing ‘ethics’ models ignore vital energy, environmental, labor and human rights issues
Growing numbers of companies, banks, universities and investment houses are adopting Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) standards and disclosure rules. They’re pressured to do so by activists, legislators and regulators. Many expect to get rich via taxpayer-subsidized “renewable” energy projects.
Nearly all hope to “greenwash” their reputations, by claiming they’ll “make the world a better place,” by reducing fossil fuel emissions, and thus planetary temperatures and extreme weather events.
They recently got a boost from the US House of Representatives. It voted 215-214 party-line to pass a bill supporting Securities and Exchange Commission plans to impose new ESG rules requiring publicly traded companies to disclose “climate risks” allegedly caused by oil, gas and coal production and use. Some think the SEC might now give greater scrutiny to ESG climate claims and misconduct, but that seems unlikely.
Regardless, woke organizations need to wake up to climate, renewable energy and ESG realities.
The ever-more-hysterical climate and weather claims have been roundly debunked by Dr. Roy Spencer, Gregory Wrightstone, Marc Morano, Steven Koonin and others. But what’s truly outrageous about ESG is the way it studiously ignores the massive, widespread damage inflicted by pseudo-renewable energy.
Wind and sunlight certainly are clean, renewable and sustainable. But harnessing their highly dispersed, unpredictable, weather-dependent energy to meet humanity’s huge and growing energy needs absolutely is not. That requires lands and raw materials that are anything but renewable – using fuels and processes that are absolutely not clean, green, ecological or sustainable. Because they fail to recognize this, ESG programs are dishonest, even fraudulent – and must be reformed, investigated or scrapped.
Wind, solar and battery land and raw material requirements are astronomical. Onshore wind turbines require nine times more metals and minerals per megawatt than a modern combined-cycle gas power plant. One onshore 3-MW turbine foundation needs 600 cubic yards (1,500 tons) of concrete, plus rebar.
Offshore wind requires 14 times more materials per MW. Just the 2,100 850-foot-tall offshore turbines (30,000 megawatts) that President Biden wants to install by 2030 would require 110,000 tons of copper, plus millions of tons of steel, aluminum, fiberglass, cobalt, rare earth metals and other materials.
At an average of 0.44% copper in ore deposits worldwide, the copper alone would require mining and processing 25 million tons of ore, after removing 40 million tons of overburden to reach the ore bodies!
Add in materials for solar panels, more onshore and offshore wind turbines, backup battery systems, electric vehicles, transmission lines, and all-electric home heating and cooking systems – to run the entire USA, Europe and world – and the “green energy transformation” would require hundreds of billions of tons of metals, minerals and plastics, trillions of tons of ores, trillions of tons of overburden, and thousands of mines, processing plants and factories. Nearly all these operations employ fossil fuels.
America’s laws and attitudes make mining in the United States nearly impossible, even to support ESG-certified “green” energy facilities. That means most mining and processing will be done in Africa, Asia and Latin America, increasingly by Chinese companies. The manufacturing is done increasingly in China, which is why that country is building more coal-fired power plants every month.
Pseudo-clean-energy activities utilize hazardous chemicals and release toxic pollutants. They require vast volumes of water, often in the world’s most water-deprived regions. They cause acid mine drainage, create mountains of waste rock, and often result in vast “lakes” of toxic chemicals from refining the ores. Most are conducted under almost nonexistent pollution control, mined-land reclamation, endangered species, workplace safety, child and slave labor, and fair wage rules.
Cobalt mining already involves 40,000 African children, as young as four! Many Chinese solar panels are made with Uighur forced labor. ESG “green” aspirations would multiply this slavery many times over.
These travesties occur overseas – out of sight and out of mind – letting ESG activists and profiteers make incessant false claims that fossil fuel replacement energy is clean and virtuous. But when wind, solar and battery facilities are installed, adverse consequences will reverberate across the United States.
Hundreds of millions of acres of scenic, wildlife habitat and coastal areas would be impacted; millions of birds, bats, tortoises and other wildlife displaced, maimed and killed. And when their short productive lives are finished, billions of turbine blades, solar panels and batteries will be sent to gigantic landfills, because they cannot be recycled; their toxic metals and chemicals could leach out into soils, streams and groundwater. The same will happen in Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere.
Even on windy days, Mr. Biden’s 2,100 monstrous offshore turbines won’t meet New York State peak summertime electricity needs. Meeting just US coastal city needs would require tens of thousands of turbines. Dredge-and-fill operations associated with installing them would smother mollusks and other benthic species. Vibration noises would harm whale and porpoise navigation and communication. Their mere presence would create major safety issues for aircraft and fishing, naval and commercial vessels.
A single industrial solar facility near Fredericksburg, Virginia required clearcutting thousands of acres of forest habitat. Dominion Energy is planning solar facilities on Virginia acreage totaling one-fourth of Delaware. Solar installations proposed for the American Southwest would blanket millions of acres of desert habitats. Wind and solar operations would threaten or eradicate dozens of bird and other species that environmentalists have utilized for decades to stop drilling, fracking and pipeline projects.
Connecting far-flung wind, solar and battery installations to industrial centers and urban areas would require thousands of miles of new transmission lines – and still more steel, copper and concrete. Battery fires have already destroyed electric vehicles and homes. Imagine huge warehouses filled with thousands of battery modules erupting into enormous, uncontrollable conflagrations.
Biodiesel projects have already destroyed important orangutan habitats, and thousands of acres of US hardwood forest habitats have been turned into wood pellets for Britain’s Drax Power Plant.
Threatened, endangered, migratory and marine species must be protected – wherever mining, processing and manufacturing take place, and wherever “renewable” energy installations are contemplated. Human health impacts from infrasound and light flicker must guide decisions on how close to homes and businesses wind turbines may be installed.
Reformed ESG rules – call them Environment and Human Rights (EHR) principles – must require that all these issues are addressed for every wind, solar, battery, transmission and biofuel proposal.
People must know in advance how many turbines, panels, batteries and power lines are contemplated; how many tons of metals, minerals, concrete and plastics they will require; where those materials will come from; under what environmental, pollution, safety, wage and child labor standards. Companies and government agencies must certify that supply chains are free from child or slave labor.
Project-specific, comprehensive and cumulative US and global environmental studies must be conducted before any projects are approved, and must include regular, independent reviews of bird, bat, reptile, whale, porpoise and other wildlife displacements, injuries and deaths. Project studies must fully assess all environmental, human health, human rights and other impacts worldwide, and must not be fast-tracked.
These reality-based EHR principles will help ensure that any “green future” is founded on ethical standards that address all human and ecological consequences, and actually do make the world a better place. They can also help guide SEC investigations and prosecutions for ESG misconduct and fraud – and help spur much-needed mining in the United States, to reduce our reliance on China, Russia, Taliban Afghanistan and other adversarial countries for critical and strategic minerals.
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Environmentalists instinctively oppose deep-sea mining
Scattered three miles deep along the floor of the central Pacific are trillions of black, misshapen nuggets that may just be the solution to an impending energy crisis. Similar in size and appearance to partially burned charcoal briquettes, the nuggets are called polymetallic nodules, and are an amalgamation of nickel, cobalt, manganese and other rare earth metals, formed through a complex biochemical process in which shark teeth and fish bones are encased by minerals accreted out of ocean waters over millions of years.
Marine biologists say they are part of one of the least-understood environments on earth, holding, if not the secret to life on this planet, at least something equally fundamental to the health of its oceans. Gerard Barron, the Australian CEO of seabed- mining company the Metals Company, calls them something else: “a battery in a rock,” and “the easiest way to solve climate change.” The nodules, which are strewn across the 4.5 million-sq-km (1.7 million-sq-mi.) swath of international ocean between Hawaii and Mexico known as the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), contain significant amounts of the metals needed to make the batteries that power our laptops, phones and electric cars. Barron estimates that there is enough cobalt and nickel in those nuggets to power 4.8 billion electric vehicles—more than twice the number of vehicles on the road today, worldwide. Mining them, he says, would be as simple as vacuuming golf balls offa putting green.
But conservationists say doing so could unleash a cascade effect worse than the current trajectory of climate change. Oceans are a vital carbon sink, absorbing up to a quarter of global carbon emissions a year. The process of extracting the nodules is unlikely to disrupt that ability on its own, but the very nature of the world’s oceans—largely contiguous, with a system of currents that circumnavigate the globe—means that what happens in one area could have unforeseen impacts on the other side of the planet. “If this goes wrong, it could trigger a series of unintended consequences that messes with ocean stability, ultimately affecting life everywhere on earth,” says Pippa Howard, director of the biodiversity-conservation organization Fauna and Flora International. The nodules are a core part of a biome roughly the size of the Amazon rain forest, she notes. “They’ve got living ecosystems on them. Taking those nodules and then using them to make batteries is like making cement out of coral reefs.”
The debate over the ethics of mining the earth’s last untouched frontier is growing in both intensity and consequence. It pits biologist against geologist, conservationist against environmentalist, and manufacturer against supplier in a world grappling with a paradox—one that will define our path to a future free of fossil fuels: sustainable energy that will run cleaner but also require metals and resources whose extraction will both contribute to global warming and impact biodiversity. So as nations commit to lower greenhouse-gas emissions, the conflict is no longer between fossil-fuel firms and clean-energy proponents, but rather over what ecosystems we are willing to sacrifice in the process.
History is littered with stories of well-intended environmental interventions that have gone catastrophically wrong; for example, South American cane toads introduced into Australia in the 1930s first failed to control beetles attacking sugarcane, then spread unchecked across the continent, poisoning wildlife and pets.
Nevertheless, a radical embrace of electric vehicles will be necessary to limit global warming to less than 1.5°C above preindustrial levels, the goal of the Paris Agreement. But according to a May 2021 report by the International Energy Agency (IEA)—the Paris-based intergovernmental organization that helps shape global energy policies—the world isn’t mining enough of the minerals needed to make the batteries that will power that clean-en-ergy future. Demand for the metals in electric vehicles alone could grow by more than 30 times from 2020 to 2040, say the report’s authors. “If supply chains can’t meet skyrocketing demand, mineral shortages could mean clean-energy shortages,” the report argues. Fears of such shortages have countries and companies racing to secure the supplies needed for the coming energy transition.
By most assessments, existing mines on land could supply the needed minerals. But after decades of exploitation, the quality of the ore is going down while the energy required to quarry and refine it is going up. Meanwhile, the efforts to extract cobalt, which is mined almost exclusively in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are dogged by persistent accounts of human-rights and environmental abuses. According to deep-ocean-mining proponents, the seabed nodules could provide most of the minerals the world needs, with minimal impact. “The biggest risk to the ocean right now is global warming,” says Kris Van Nijen, managing director of the Belgium-based deep-sea-mining company Global Sea Mineral Resources (GSR). “And the solution can be found on the seafloor, where there is a single deposit that provides the minerals we need for clean-energy infrastructure.” GSR has already trialed a 12-m-long, 25-ton nodule-sucking robot that zigzags across the ocean floor on caterpillar tracks, kind of like a giant underwater Roomba. They dubbed their prototype “Patania,” after the world’s fastest caterpillar.
Commercial mining is not yet permitted in international waters. The International Seabed Authority (ISA), the U.N. body tasked with managing seafloor resources, is still deliberating how, and under what conditions, mining should be allowed to proceed. A few private companies, including GSR and Barron’s Metals Company, have scooped up a couple of dozen metric tons of the nodules on exploratory missions, and are now pressuring the ISA to approve commercial operations. Barron is already telling potential investors that he expects to be harvesting nodules by 2024. GSR says that by the time they are up and running, they will be able to collect up to 3 million tons a year with just two of their mining robots.
Not everyone is on board. Scientists, conservationists, the European Parliament and some national governments are calling for a moratorium on deep-sea mining until its ecological consequences can be better understood. The ocean environment is already under threat from climate change, overfishing, industrial pollution and plastic debris, they argue; added stresses from heavy machinery and habitat destruction could tip it over the edge. Three miles below the ocean’s surface, the deep seafloor boasts some of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on the planet; the perpetual darkness, intense cold and strong pressures foster unique life-forms rarely seen elsewhere, such as a newly discovered ghostly white octopus dubbed “Casper” and an armored snail that researchers believe doesn’t need to eat to survive.
The Metals Company’s exploratory vessel, the Maersk Launcher, conducting environmental studies in the CCZ
The region may look lifeless, but it is home to thousands of species of tiny invertebrates fundamental to the ocean food web, says deep-ocean marine biologist Diva Amon, whose work is focused on the CCZ. The nodules themselves host microbial life forms that scientists are just starting to investigate— they play an important but poorly understood role in the nodules’ formation that may be vital for a wider comprehension of how ocean processes work. Removing them would be akin to yanking a couple of wires out of the back of your computer just because you don’t know what they’re for. “A lot of the life in the CCZ is very small, but that doesn’t mean it’s unimportant,” says Amon. “Think about our world without insects. It would collapse.”
The little data available suggests that deep-sea mining could have long-term and potentially devastating impacts on marine life. For example, in 1989, scientists simulated deep-sea mining in an area similar to the CCZ, and in those simulations, marine life never recovered, according to a recent study published in the journal Scientific Reports. Plough tracks remain etched on the seafloor 30 years later, while populations of sponges, soft corals and sea anemones have yet to return. If the results of the experiment were extrapolated to the CCZ, the authors concluded, “the impacts of polymetallic-nodule mining there may be greater than expected and could potentially lead to an irreversible loss of some ecosystem functions, especially in directly disturbed areas.”
That said, it’s a hard call, says Amon. “We want to transition to a green economy. But should that mean destroying a potentially huge part of the ocean? I don’t know.”
In June, more THAN 400 marine scientists and policy experts from 44 countries signed a petition stating that the ISA should not make any decisions about deep-sea mining until scientists have a better understanding of what is at stake and all possible risks are understood. The ISA requires permit holders to undertake three years of environmentalimpact assessments before it will grant a commercial license, but given the slow-moving nature of the deep sea, scientists say it would be impossible to understand the impacts in such a short time. Nor is it clear on what grounds, exactly, the ISA will evaluate the results of such studies.
https://blendle.com/i/time/deep-questions/bnl-time-20210903-9cbd2768dcc
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Friday, September 10, 2021
Corals are climate 'fighters'
<>i>That they "need rising temperatures to slow" is just an assertion. No figures are given
Corals may be able to roll with the punches of climate change better than initially thought in coming decades, but need rising temperatures to slow to have a fighting chance.
Corals can pass down the ability to survive rising temperatures via their genes, researchers say.
That's the finding of new Queensland-led research, published on Monday and based on an analysis of 95 trait measurements across 19 species of reef-building corals from previous studies.
The authors determined corals, which have suffered widespread bleaching events in Australia this century, can pass down abilities to survive under environmental stresses such as rising temperatures through their genes.
"We found their ability to pass on adaptive traits is maintained despite increasing temperatures," said lead author Kevin Bairos-Novak, a PhD candidate at James Cook University's Coral Centre of Excellence.
"In particular, corals that are better than average at survival, growth and resisting bleaching stress under future ocean conditions should be good at passing those advantages on to their offspring."
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More Scientists Agree The Last Ice Age Was ~3-4°C Warmer Than Today
In a “major revision” to the “long-standing view,” scientists are increasingly concluding the last glaciation had summers “several degrees” warmer than today, with climate conditions warm enough to allow year-round grass grazing by horse, antelope, gazelle…in Siberia, Alaska, and north of the Arctic circle.
Multiple-degrees-warmer glacial temperatures pervaded both hemispheres.
The “long-standing view” is the current interglacial climate is distinctly warmer and more hospitable to plants, animals, and humans than at any time during the last Ice Age, or glaciation (from about 60,000 to 11,700 years ago).
This view “has undergone a major revision” during the last 20 years of geological study according to scientists publishing in the September (2021) edition of Quaternary International.
Vegetation and tree records with specific warmth thresholds and associated ice-free temperature requirements affirm the last glaciation needed to be “warmer than today by several degrees Celsius.” (Tarasov et al., 2021)
For example, these scientists document ~5°C warmer glacial climates (July) throughout Northern Asia (the study area):
“…reconstructed mean July temperatures above 12°C for most of the last cold stage [glacial] in the study area [throughout Northern Asia], where modern mean July temperatures are about 7°C”.
The widespread presence of grazing mammoths, horses, bison, deer, antelope, gazelle…in Siberia and Alaska and well north of the Arctic circle implies “year-round grazing grounds.”
This requires warmer temperatures and more pervasive ice-free grass-grazing ranges than exist today.
So, contrary to the long-standing view of a generally colder-than-present last glacial climate, there is a growing body of evidence that the distinction between interglacial and glacial climates may not be as stark as previously thought.
The CO2 concentration differential of ~180 to 200 PPM during the warmer glacial periods and 280 to 410 PPM during the colder modern period also contradict the long-standing view of higher CO2 levels accommodating warmer climates and vice versa.
Another new study (Wetterich et al., 2021) again affirms the last glaciation’s Siberian Arctic was warmer than it currently is (12-15°C vs. today’s 11°C) 51, 46-44, 41, and 39-31k yrs BP.
It was warm enough that horses, mammoths, bison…grazed year-round on Siberian grass.
The last glacial’s greater warmth also extended into the Southern Hemisphere, according to yet another new study (Civel-Mazens et al., 2021).
The Southern Ocean had “higher SST [sea surface temperatures] during the 40-24 kyrs period than during the Holocene” with LGM [Last Glacial Maximum, 24-18 kyrs ago] temperatures peaking at 13.6°C. Today’s temperatures are ~9°C, in this region, or 4.6°C colder.
During the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, 26-18k years before present), South Africa’s temperatures were “3-4°C higher than present in summer (and 2-4°C lower than present in winter)” (Kraaj et al., 2020).
https://climatechangedispatch.com/more-scientists-agree-the-last-ice-age-was-3-4c-warmer-than-today/
*****************************************Turning the Lights Off in America
Joe Biden’s new goal of vastly expanding solar power is not going to help the electrical grid.
The future’s so bright, Joe Biden’s gotta wear shades. At least that’s the message of his new goal of producing nearly half of the nation’s electricity from the sun by 2050. Maybe he just better eat his ice cream before it melts.
To what extent is this sunshine policy goal merely pie in the sky? Solar energy accounted for just 4% of America’s electricity last year, and Biden aims for 45%. “To achieve that growth,” report the Democrat propagandists at The New York Times, “the country would have to double the amount of solar energy installed every year over the next four years and then double it again by 2030.”
Oh.
That “will mean trillions of dollars in investments by homeowners, businesses and the government,” says the Times. “The electric grid — built for hulking coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants — would have to be almost completely remade with the addition of batteries, transmission lines and other technologies that can soak up electricity when the sun is shining and to send it from one corner of the country to another.”
Oh.
We might joke that Biden’s plan will reduce the amount of electricity produced, which will make his goal a lot easier, but that’s not what he wants. In fact, if achieving half solar electricity by 2050 wasn’t already going to be hard enough, Biden wants to compound the problem by goosing demand in a major way. 2030 is the same year he demands that half of all cars sold in the U.S. be electric.
Nevertheless, the Times reports, “The Energy Department said its calculations showed that solar panels had fallen so much in cost that they could produce 40 percent of the country’s electricity by 2035 — enough to power all American homes — and 45 percent by 2050.”
Why have panels become so much cheaper? The Times waits 12 more paragraphs to tell us the answer: “China dominates the supply chain for solar panels.”
Oh.
Complicating that supply chain, however, is China’s use of Uygher slave labor in the Xinjiang region. The Biden administration is blocking imports from there, but given that the “big guy” is in Beijing’s pocket, we don’t put too much stock in that ban.
We’re not saying that solar power, or other forms of renewable energy for that matter, are bad. We are saying that government mandates and favoritism distort the market in favor of energy sources that are inherently less reliable — and, again, all while increasing demand on that supply with things like electric vehicle mandates.
California’s rolling brownouts and blackouts have been a story for years, because the state has been struggling mightily to achieve exactly what Biden is now pushing. The state wants to be an example for the country, and it is that — of what not to do. California’s energy woes are a great case against the Green New Deal. Yet here Biden is, pushing it through anyway, apparently in an effort to go national with those blackouts.
That’s because “climate change poses an existential threat,” he says, and the only way to “fix” it is cramming through the ecofascist agenda. Or maybe not. “It’s here. It’s not going to get any better,” Biden said of climate change. Or maybe so. “We can stop it from getting worse,” he said. Who knows? Joe’s only been in Washington for 50 years.
“By 2020,” Biden declared this week, we’re going to “make sure all of our electricity is zero emissions.” Are we the only ones wondering if the lights are on but nobody’s home?
https://patriotpost.us/articles/82594-turning-the-lights-off-in-america-2021-09-09
*****************************************Australian Labor Party to resist Greens policies: Leader
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese says a Labor government won't be told by any minor party what to do on tax policy.
The Greens have announced a push for a new 40 per cent corporate super-profits tax on the excess profits made by big corporations, including mining corporations.
The policy would be part of its negotiating platform if the next election ends in a hung parliament.
Mr Albanese, who was a senior member of the last minority government, said Labor would have its own policies to put to voters.
"And I've said before, we won't be in a circumstance whereby any minor party tells us what to do," he told reporters in Sydney on Monday.
"We're seeking a mandate as a party of government to secure a majority Labor government after the next election, so that we can concentrate on fairness, concentrate on growing wealth, but also wealth distribution as well, making sure that no one's held back and no one is left behind."
Greens leader Adam Bandt told AAP he did not believe Mr Albanese.
"Whether it's Anthony Albanese or anyone else, if the Greens have two or three seats in the House and that's the difference between Labor being in government or staying in opposition, of course they'll talk to us," he said.
"If Labor seriously wants to remain in opposition because they won't tax billionaires and put dental into Medicare, then they're betraying the Australian people."
A minority-held parliament is not out of the question at the next election - due by May 2022 - with a uniform national swing of 0.5 per cent required to remove Scott Morrison's majority.
Meanwhile, veteran WA Greens senator Rachel Siewert has formally resigned from the upper house.
The Greens will need to nominate a replacement to fill the casual vacancy, which will then require the WA state parliament to rubber stamp it.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Thursday, September 09, 2021
Statistical Method Used to Link Climate Change to Greenhouse Gases Challenged
Flaws in attribution analysis
A new study in Climate Dynamics has criticized a key methodology that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses to attribute climate change to greenhouse gases, raising questions about the validity of research that relied on it and prompting a response from one of the scientists who developed the technique.
The new study's author, economist Ross McKitrick, told The Epoch Times in an exclusive interview that he thinks his results have weakened the IPCC's case that greenhouse gases cause climate change.
The methodology, known as "optimal fingerprinting", has been used to link greenhouse gases to everything from temperature to forest fires, precipitation, and snow cover.
McKitrick compared optimal fingerprinting to the way law enforcement officers use fingerprinting to identify criminals.
"[They] take this big smudge of data and say, ‘Yeah, the fingerprints of greenhouse gas are on it," he said.
McKitrick said the optimal fingerprinting research he criticized, 1999's paper in Climate Dynamics Checking for model consistency in optimal fingerprinting, is a "cornerstone of the field of attribution" -- the branch of climate science focused on identifying the causes of climate change.
But according to McKitrick, the authors of that paper, Myles Allen and Simon Tett, made errors in the steps needed to validate their strategy.
"When you do a statistical analysis, it's not enough just to crunch some numbers and publish the result and say, "˜This is what the data tell us." You then have to apply some tests to your modeling technique to see if it's valid for the kind of data you're using," he said.
"They claimed that their model passes all the relevant tests, but there are a couple of problems with that claim. The first is they stated the conditions wrong, they left most of the relevant conditions out that you're supposed to test, and then they proposed a methodology for testing that is completely uninformative. It's not actually connected to any standard testing method."
Their framework, McKitrick said, also assumes that a major chunk of climate change has to be attributable to greenhouse gases, so using that to prove greenhouse gases lead to climate change is meaningless.
"You're dependent on climate model data to construct the test, and the climate model already embeds the assumptions about the role of greenhouse gases," said McKitrick. "You can't relax that assumption."
McKitrick, who explained his results in more technical detail at JudithCurry.com, said the IPCC’s attribution of climate change to greenhouse gases is largely based on the 1999 paper or closely related research with the same problems.
Myles Allen, co-author of the 1999 paper McKitrick challenged, responded to McKitrick’s paper in an email to The Epoch Times.
“Fully addressing the issues raised by this paper might have made some difference to conclusions regarding human influence on climate when the signal was still quite weak 20 years ago,” Allen said.
He said the signal is now much stronger, whether one uses his 1999 technique or the simpler method employed at GlobalWarmingIndex.org. He also said that newer methods, including one in his own 2003 paper, have superseded the method from 1999.
“To be a little light-hearted, it feels a bit like someone suggesting we should all stop driving because a new issue has been identified with the Model-T Ford,” Allen said.
McKitrick responded to Allen’s argument in an email: “Even if it were true that [Allen’s method] is no longer used and people have moved on to other methods, [given] its historical prominence, it would still be necessary as a scientific matter for Simon and Myles either to concede their paper contains errors or rebut the specific criticisms.
“And the reality is the climate profession hasn’t moved on. The IPCC still discusses the Optimal Fingerprinting method in the AR6 and relies on many papers that use it.”
While Allen argued that his later 2003 paper superseded his 1999 paper, McKitrick responded that the 2003 paper, along with other more recent methods that Allen identified, “has all the same problems.”
McKitrick also argued that the method at GlobalWarmingIndex.org may have the same issues as Allen’s 1999 paper in large part because both studies cite a 1997 study from Klaus Hasselmann, which, McKitrick said, proposes the same method.
“Thus by Myles’ own examples, AT99 is still central to the attribution literature,” McKitrick said.
Allen argued that McKitrick’s criticism of his use of a climate model is misguided, as his 1999 method may actually be “overly conservative” in attributing climate change to human influence.
According to Allen, standard climate models may yield results in which the amount of statistical “noise,” and thus uncertainty, is overstated.
This rebuttal, McKitrick said, “does not address the core problem I point out,” which has to do with testing for errors in their fingerprinting calculations.
Allen and McKitrick also sparred over a specific statistical test in the 1999 paper, with Allen saying McKitrick had greatly overstated its importance and McKitrick countering that it is the only such test researchers have used in this context.
Attribution researcher Aurélien Ribes, whose papers were among those Allen claimed had superseded the 1999 research, declined to comment on the paper in detail in an email to The Epoch Times, though he said he had looked at an earlier version of it.
“I do not expect a very large impact in terms of attribution results,” said Ribes, a climate change researcher at France’s National Centre for Meteorological Research.
He said that some of his own research wasn’t dependent on fingerprinting. He also said that certain attribution findings, such as on global mean temperature, are “very robust.”
But another expert, Richard Tol, believes much of McKitrick’s criticism is on the mark.
“McKitrick is right,” said Tol, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex and a professor of the economics of climate change at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, in an email to The Epoch Times.
Tol said that Allen and Tett’s attempt to address a widespread statistical issue had “made things worse, not better.”
“To top it all off, many people have since used the method proposed by Allen & Tett,” he said.
“The implications are unclear. Many of the papers that use the fingerprinting method to detect the impact of climate change are simply wrong.”
“That does not mean that climate change is not real or that its effects cannot be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions. It means that many of the papers that made such claims will have to be redone.”
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Biden Chief of Staff Backs Green Energy Despite His Costly Role in Solyndra Scandal
When President Joe Biden signed an executive order early in August calling for half of all new vehicles to be electric by 2030, White House chief of staff Ron Klain predicted success.
“In the effort to combat the climate crisis—and create a lot of great jobs in the US doing it—today will be a historic day at the White House,” Klain tweeted.
Later in August, the Democrat-controlled House passed a Biden-backed $3.5 trillion budget framework encompassing many “Green New Deal” initiatives such as a “Climate Corps” and a program to encourage utilities to sell carbon-free energy.
Klain enthusiastically predicted success with green energy in the last Democratic administration’s $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, a politically connected company that made solar panels. That decision became one of the most embarrassing scandals of President Barack Obama’s two terms.
Government documents—some long public, others obtained by The Daily Signal in a Freedom of Information Act request—tell the story of how immersed Klain was in pushing taxpayer dollars to a company that soon collapsed. The Solyndra mess became symbolic of crony capitalism and climate boondoggles.
‘Progress on Clean Energy Front’
Despite how the government loan guarantee for Solyndra turned out, Klain’s enthusiasm for government support of green energy hasn’t waned—based on his tweets, anyway.
Last week, Klain touted climate-related aspects of Biden’s agenda in light of natural disasters.
“Extreme weather is killing Americans north and south, east and west,” he tweeted Thursday, later following with: “The Biden ‘Build Back Better’ plan would combat climate change.”
In May, Klain had boasted about the Biden administration’s approval of the first offshore wind farm.
“More progress on the clean energy front,” the White House chief of staff tweeted in March about a New York Times report.
The Times’ article boosted the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—better known as the Obama administration’s “stimulus” bill—and concluded that federal loans for green energy both created jobs and brought in revenue.
“This @NyTimes story reports that the ARRA actually made money for the taxpayers, and created 1 million green energy jobs,” Klain tweeted.
Klain was a Biden point man on Capitol Hill for the $1.1 trillion infrastructure legislation as well as the separate $3.5 trillion spending bill. He met in March with the House sponsor of the Green New Deal, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and other House progressives.
Biden nominated Klain’s wife, Monica Medina, as assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Science Affairs, a top environmental position.
In March 2020, Medina, founder and publisher of the environmental e-newsletter Our Daily Planet, wrote a Washington Post op-ed about the “environmental upside” of the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Potential for Another Solyndra’
The Times describes Klain, a longtime Biden loyalist, as “the essential nerve center of an over-circuited administration whose day-to-day doings reflect how this White House works and what it aspires to.”
Klain, who turned 60 in August, is credited by other left-leaning outlets such as The Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and The American Prospect with taming the Democrats’ progressive wing.
During the Solyndra scandal, Klain also was chief of staff to Biden, who was then vice president.
With Klain having more power today in addressing contemporary energy issues, remembering a decade-old scandal informs what might be ahead for the Biden administration, said Mike Palicz, federal affairs manager for Americans for Tax Reform.
“Ron Klain was at the heart of the Solyndra scandal,” Palicz told The Daily Signal in a phone interview. “There is potential for another Solyndra with subsidies for electric-vehicle charging companies. That’s about picking winners and losers, the same as Solyndra.”
Palicz also noted that the Biden administration is pushing for $174 billion in spending to “create good jobs electrifying vehicles.”
This, he said, is similar to the Obama administration’s failed “Cash for Clunkers” program, also funded under its stimulus legislation, which attempted to turn old cars into electric vehicles.
The National Bureau of Economic Research reported in 2014 that about 60% of the subsidies went to households that would have purchased an electric vehicle during the two-month program anyway.
The Brookings Institution, a center-left think tank, found in 2013 that the “Cash for Clunkers” program spent $1.4 million for every job it created.
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GOP House Oversight Members Launching Investigation into EPA's Ties to China
Republican members of the House Oversight Committee are launching an investigation into a senior official of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ties to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
In a letter shared on Tuesday, several members of the committee inquired about Dr. Chris Frey, the deputy assistant administrator for science policy in the Office of Research and Development at the EPA. He was appointed to his role by the Biden administration. Frey reportedly served as an adjunct professor at HKUST. On his official biography page on the EPA’s website, several previous job titles and other affiliations are listed. However, Frey’s ties to HKUST are omitted.
In the letter, it is noted that Frey did not resign from his previous position at HKUST before joining the Biden administration. Rather, Frey took an unpaid leave of absence and presumably plans to return to his role once Biden is no longer in office.
“At a time when the Biden Administration is pushing for costly climate change ‘solutions’ that benefit China, it raises questions about why a senior EPA official has such strong ties to China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases,” the letter reads. “It is imperative that all officials at EPA, particularly senior political appointees are taking their ethical obligations seriously and not using positions of public trust to benefit former employers or foreign governments.”
The letter requests a bundle of documents and correspondences pertaining to Frey and HKUST by Sept. 21. “These connections raise concerns about Dr. Frey’s role as the highest-level political appointee serving in the office charged with conducting ‘the research for EPA that provides the foundation for credible decision-making to safeguard human health.’”
The signers of the letter include Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Bob Gibbs (R-OH), Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX), and Rep. Yvette Herrell (R-NM).
In May, the ties between Frey and HKUST were first unveiled when a recusal statement, penned by Frey, was made public. In the statement, Frey said “I have a financial interest in North Carolina State University (NC State) and the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST) from which I have taken a two-year, unpaid leave of absence.”
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UK opens inquiry into Australian-backed 'net zero' mine
A month-long public inquiry has been launched into an Australian-backed plan for a £165 million ($307 million) coal mine in northern England and climate protesters have vowed to fight until the bitter end. The Woodhouse colliery in west Cumbria, which would churn out 2.7 million tonnes of metallurgical coal a year, has become a totemic test of Prime Minister Boris Johnson's climate credentials, ahead of the COP26 conference he will host in Glasgow in November.
The local council has backed the plan, which would be Britain's first new underground coal mine in 30 years; but political pressure from green groups AFRGA1 5012 QLD has forced Planning Secretary Robert Jenrick to "call in" West Cumbria Mining's application and set up an inquiry.
Said Coal Action Network cam-paigner Anne Harris at a small protest event outside the ministry building in London where the inquiry began on Tuesday: 'We've made it a political hot potato. The minister knows there will be a backlash if he approves this." Protesters tried to plant cardboard canaries on the lawn outside the build-ing and a larger group demonstrated at the site of the mine itself. Cumbrian community activist Jill Perry told demonstrators: "The government will be hoping this mine will fall off the radar once COP is over, and then they will secretly, surreptitiously slide a decision out to let it go ahead."
WCM is majority owned by Melbourne-based EMR Capital, a private equity group set up and run by Oxiana founder and former Rio Tinto executive Owen Hegarty. Mr Hegarty has chosen to remain silent while the process plays out, both when prospects of success looked high in early January, and amid the growing uncertainty.
WCM said in a statement a week before the inquiry that the company "looks forward to explaining its plans for the world's first net-zero under-ground coal mine" when its executives are called to appear. "We have considered the climate impacts of the project in great detail and implemented significant and world-leading techniques to demonstrate that the resources industry can also achieve net carbon zero operations," WCM chief executive Mark Kirkbride said in the statement. "I believe this will become a core part of the social licence to operate resource projects, and we fully comply with the Climate Change Committee carbon budgets and proposed net-zero test."
The Climate Change Committee, an influential arm's-length government advisory body, wrote to Mr Jenrick in January with a warning that the mine would affect Britain's ability to hit its carbon targets and "gives a negative impression of the UKs climate priorit-ies in the year of COP26".
The mine has its backers in the Conservative Party, including local MP Trudy Harrison, who won her seat from Labour in a 2017 byelection and is a parliamentary aide to Mr Johnson. She is keen on the employment boost for the area, which WCM said would amount to 532 new jobs on site and indirectly another 1618.
Campaigners beg to differ. Ms Perry said: 'We do not want a promise of 500 jobs in a dirty industry that will do its best to continue wrecking the climate. We want green jobs."
Ms Harrison said that if the coal is not mined in Britain, the country's steel furnaces would have to import it. "There is no viable commercial way to make steel, in all its grades and types, without coking coal at the moment. And there isn't anticipated to be a solution to that for decades to come," she told Cumbrian local radio station CFM.
From "Australian Financial Review", 9/9/21
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Wednesday, September 08, 2021
Climate change could DOUBLE the frequency of extreme regional summer droughts in Europe by 2099
What utter rubbish! Warming oceans would bring MORE rain and snow, not less. Elementary physics
Climate change could result in the number of 'extreme summer droughts' in Europe doubling by 2099, a report has warned.
The climate crisis has already had a number of drastic global impacts, including an increase in the number of droughts, 'causing considerable social, economic, and environmental costs', according to the researchers from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) in Germany.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says droughts are the most serious hazard to crops and livestock in every part of the world, affecting 55 million people every year.
To determine future risk, researchers used archive data on rainfall levels throughout Europe, the British Isles and Scandanavia with future climate prediction models.
Their analysis suggests that all areas will see some increase in the number of summer droughts, but in France, the Alps, the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula the number could double.
What is a meteorological drought?
Drought is a complex climate phenomenon covering a wide range of definitions and conditions.
Their impacts are economically, socially, and environmentally complex, and a universal definition that covers all consequences does not exist.
Droughts are instead classified by their impact: meteorological, hydrological, agricultural, or socio-economic.
Meteorological droughts are a predecessor of other drought types.
They have no clear start and end, unlike hurricanes, for example, which can easily be seen as they develop.
Drought is the absence of water, a creeping phenomenon that slowly sneaks up and impacts many sectors of the economy, and operates on many different time scales.
Meteorological drought happens when dry weather patterns dominate an area and can begin and end rapidly.
In contrast, hydrological drought takes much longer to develop and recover.
In their study, the researchers analysed the 'percent of normal index' (PINI), designed to give a percentage of rain in any given period.
They then compared that figure to the prediction of rainfall in a single climate model for eight regions of Europe over the next 80 years.
Each region they studied had a different climate, covering the British Isles, Scandinavia, mid-Europe, the Alps, Eastern Europe, France, the Mediterranean and the Iberian Peninsula.
In the long-term future, from 2080 to 2099, Europe will see an increase in frequency and intensity of summer droughts, but a drop in winter droughts, according to the research.
There will be greater differences between winter and summer rainfall levels as well, increasing during winter and decreasing over the summer months.
For mid-Europe there's a sharp rise in the likelihood of an extreme drought - up by about a quarter of current levels.
In Eastern Europe and the Alps, severe and extreme droughts have higher probabilities in the future, going from a 20 to 40 per cent increase.
France has one of the higher levels, with a 60 per cent increase in frequency of extreme droughts, while in the Mediterranean, the chance of extreme droughts in the future is around 80 per cent for the summer months.
Meanwhile, in the Iberian Peninsula, the chance of extreme droughts is the highest of all regions, reaching 96 per cent in July and 88 per cent in August.
In these two regions, however, the absolute rainfall values in July and August are already low, meaning that comparatively small absolute changes can lead to high percentages of the PNI, which is a relative measure.
Destructive events including storms, flooding and drought are causing seven times more damage than in the 1970s, but they're killing far fewer people, according to the UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO).
In the 1970s and 1980s, these events killed an average of about 170 people a day worldwide, but in the 2010s that dropped to about 40 per day.
The WMO's report looks at more than 11,000 weather disasters between 1970 and 2019, based on data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters.
A disaster related to a weather, climate or water hazard occurred every day on average over the past 50 years – killing 115 people and causing $202 million (£146 million) in losses daily, it found.
In total, just over 2 million deaths and $3.64 trillion (£2.64 trillion) in losses were attributed to such catastrophes.
The report follows Hurricane Ida and drought-worsened wildfires in the US, as well as catastrophic floods in mainland Europe this summer.
Researching the future occurrence of droughts is crucial for adequate climate crisis mitigation, according to the study, published in Frontiers in Water.
'Summer droughts are a highly relevant topic in Europe,' said author Magdalena Mittermeier, who shares the first authorship with Andrea Böhnisch.
'We find a clear trend towards more, longer and more intense summer droughts, in terms of a precipitation deficit, towards the end of the century under a high-emission carbon scenario (RCP8.5).'
This is the emission scenario currently most likely under global average emission levels, although governments hope to change this with new climate measures.
The impacts of droughts are economically, socially, and environmentally complex, and a universal definition that covers all consequences does not exist.
Instead, droughts are classified by their impact as meteorological, hydrological, agricultural, or socio-economic.
Meteorological droughts are a potential predecessor of other drought types and are therefore important to research, and are the type covered by this study.
Regional differences between drought events are high, and there is an urgent need to identify geographical hot spots for future drought events, the team added.
'Our study shows that unabated climate change will worsen the risk of hot-spot droughts drastically,' said Mittermeier.
'But also, in some regions where droughts currently play a minor role, the future drought risk is expected to get serious. We show that the Alps should be considered an additional future hot-spot.'
She said these extreme future events can be avoided by climate mitigation, including those agreed to under the UN Paris Agreement.
'These three key features of: first, increasing drought occurrence in summer; second, wetter conditions in winter as well as; and third, interannual variations due to the natural variability of the climate system are visualised in what we call "drying stripes".
'These allow an overview of our results at first glance. The drying stripes show the percentage of precipitation for every month and year summarised over our ensemble compared to the long-term mean in a counterfactual world with pre-industrial greenhouse gas concentrations.
'With this, they show the projected summer drying trend throughout the 21st century compared to a world without climate change.'
The findings have been published in the journal Frontiers in water.
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Britain starts coal plant after gas prices surge
Britain has fired up two coal units at one of its power plants to help keep up with energy supply demands.
National Grid ESO asked Électricité de France to heat up the units at its West Burton A power station in Lincolnshire following an increase in gas prices.
While the British government hopes to phase out coal-generated power by 2024, the alternative energy the country uses is either providing insufficient power or becoming too expensive, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Wind power produces energy for Britain but at a varying rate. Monday morning's power report showed wind power produced 474 megawatts, much less than the 14,286 megawatts that wind power produced on May 21.
Gas prices have also led to a return to coal as the price for gas has now jumped to £219.46 ($303) per megawatt-hour on Monday morning, according to Bloomberg. The result has forced Britain to return to using coal in order to keep up with its energy demands.
https://news.yahoo.com/britain-starts-coal-plant-gas-183800894.html
*************************************Australian superannuation juggernaut says it will not divest its substantial oil and gas holdings to meet newly detailed climate targets, as it announced plans to phase out thermal coal investments by the end of the decade
IFM, which is owned by 23 industry superannuation funds, is one of the world’s biggest infrastructure investors and owns substantial oil and gas pipelines in the US. The company announced plans to achieve net zero emissions in its $74 billion infrastructure portfolio, including by fully exiting thermal coal by 2030.
IFM’s global head of infrastructure Kyle Mangini said there is “relatively little debate” on the outlook for thermal coal – an energy source that governments around the world are rejecting in the quest to reduce carbon emissions and transition to renewable energy sources.
“We acknowledge that it is part of the energy mix today but it will be phased out of the energy mix over time, and from that perspective, it’s not a sound long-term investment,” Mr Mangini said. “We put the blanket exclusion on coal really because of the view it’s not viable and that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later.”
Major investment firms have set net zero emissions targets in recent years and are now using either divestment - selling out of carbon-heavy assets- or engagement - remaining invested to advocate for change - to achieve these goals.
IFM’s remaining exposure to thermal coal is limited to the Polish district heating business bought in 2006. But the fund manager owns other carbon-heavy assets including North American oil and gas infrastructure projects Colonial Pipeline and Buckeye Partners. Chief executive David Neal said there were no plans to sell these assets to meet decarbonisation targets.
“We’re really focused on transition rather than divestment,” Mr Neal said. “So what can we do to help the assets in the oil and gas sector at the right time and in the right way transition to support the new cleaner economy? There is a lot of opportunity to do just that.”
“Divestment might get the emissions down in our portfolio but it does absolutely nothing for the planet’s emissions and it certainly does not help the global economy. This is about being a responsible investor.”
IFM’s interim targets include reducing scope one and two emissions (direct emissions and emissions from electricity use) across infrastructure assets by 40 per cent by 2040. This will be achieved, for example, by encouraging its airports and ports to install solar panels or diversify operations to include clean energy projects.
Reducing scope 3 emissions is not part of IFM’s climate plan, which includes indirect emissions like those from airplanes using IFM’s airports or gas passing through IFM’s pipelines. Mr Neal said these were “incredibly important” to understanding long-term risks but were outside IFM’s “direct influence and control”.
“The more people are concerned about the emissions that come from flying, the less airports get used. Those sorts of things,” he said. “There’s a difference here between what we’re worried about and what risks we’re managing.”
The International Energy Agency in May released a report claiming there could be no new oil and gas projects if the world was to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Mr Neal said retaining its oil and gas assets would “in many cases but not exclusively” rely on the development of new technologies or carbon offsets.
Mr Mangini added the oil and gas sector would play a “really important stabilising role” for the adoption of renewable energy until “storage capability is built into the system more broadly”.
“The fact you can generate [energy] now with a renewable source that is less expensive than fossil fuels means you don’t require government subsidies in many cases is a huge development. Now you have investment being led by the market instead of being led by the government,” he said. “There has been tremendous progress, there is so much RND [research and development] I feel very optimistic we will see a lot more progress.”
Nationals MP George Christensen last week accused the major banks of “caving” to international investor pressure when making decisions to phase out exposure to thermal coal. Mr Neal also rejected any “pressure” from investors and said decarbonisation was rather a collaborative approach to managing investment risk.
“I think we are all on this same journey. Our investors are working through how is their long-term risk being managed? How are the opportunities from this massive energy transition that’s going to occur over the next couple of decades, how are those opportunities being embraced?
“There’s no doubt those engagements are much more intense than they used to be. There’s huge momentum across the investment world in understanding how climate risk can be managed.”
IFM will soon release interim decarbonisation targets for the remainder of its $174 billion portfolio including listed equities, private equity and debt.
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Australian State bans single-use plastics
Queensland has banned single-use plastic straws, stirrers, cutlery and plates, as well as containers and cups made from expanded polystyrene.
Initially announced in March, businesses had until September 1 to stop using items listed under the first stage of the state government ban.
The plan received huge support from the community during consultations, with 94 per cent of 20,000 respondents supporting the proposal.
The related legislation also makes provision for more single-use items to be banned through regulation in the future.
Environment Minister Meaghan Scanlon confirmed earlier this year more restrictions are likely in the future.
“There’s been a lot of commentary around things like coffee cups, a range of other plastics, so we’ll be making sure that we’re consulting widely around what the next phase of those products is,” she said in March.
“Queensland really is ahead when it comes to the rest of the country on single-use plastics, but we want to make sure that we’re continuing to progress with this.”
https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/state/qld/2021/09/01/queensland-ban-single-use-plastics/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
