Sales of powerful vacuum cleaners banned in EU

This is total nonsense, a re-run of the dishwasher fiasco. "Ecological" dishwashers just did not clean well so it became common to wash every load twice -- thus INCREASING electricity use.

It will be the same here.  When I switched from a 1,000 watt cleaner to a 2,000 watt one, everything was easier and quicker.  I now don't have to go over and over pesky patches.  The "savings" on electricity under the new rules will be entirely delusory.  The weaker cleaners will have to be used for quite a bit longer, thus using more electricity -- not to mention the cleaning time they waste.

A lot of cleaning is done commercially these days, so how about factoring in the cost of cleaning time?  That would make the stronger machine definitely more economical


Sales of vacuum cleaners producing more noise and heat than suction are restricted under EU rules from today.

Vacuum cleaners using more than 900 watts and emitting more than 80 decibels will be banned when stocks run out.

Some anti-EU campaigners say homes won't be properly cleaned if people have to buy lower wattage machines.

But energy experts say the best low-power appliances clean just as well as high-wattage machines.

They say some manufacturers deliberately increased the amount of electricity their appliances use because shoppers equate high-wattage with high performance.

'Widespread misconception'

The European Environment Bureau (EEB) said: "Power doesn't always equal performance, though the misconception has become widespread.

"Some efficient models maintained high standards of dust pick-up while using significantly less energy - due to design innovation."

Vacuum cleaner salesman Howard Johnson, who works in Coventry, told BBC News: "People want a more powerful vacuum cleaner but they can't see that more power doesn't mean more suction.

"The lower power machines are perfectly adequate, and better for the planet".

The EU's own website says: "With more efficient vacuum cleaners, Europe as a whole can save up to 20 TWh of electricity per year by 2020.

"This is equivalent to the annual household electricity consumption of Belgium.

"It also means over 6 million tonnes of CO2 will not be emitted - about the annual emissions of eight medium-sized power plants."

And the UK Climate Change Committee says that since 2008 electricity demand is down 17% (despite all our gadgets) and gas demand is 23% lower, thanks to tougher standards on energy efficiency in homes and appliances.

This, it says, has helped keep bills down.

SOURCE




Global warming – oops,…I mean climate change – is The Greatest Scam on Earth

It is a giant lie – perpetrated by some of the world’s biggest frauds

Being Leftist means never having to say you’re sorry. The climate change liars have been caught lying and falsifying and manipulating data too many times to count. They have been so wrong so often on so many things.

And yet The Establishment continues to take them gravely seriously. It’s a joke. A huge, unfunny, accidental attempt at humor.

One of the climate change Left’s biggest bete noires – is the biggest oil company on the planet, ExxonMobil. Exxon is currently suffering a years-long, multi-pronged Leftist attack. The climate freaks keep coming up empty – but they simply retrench and return to lie another day.

The Leftists are working an inside-out-outside-in approach. They have Leftist elected officials bringing governments to bear – while coordinating with outside Leftist groups, and the Leftist foundation funders. How do we know this?

NY’s Government Assault on Exxon: Coordinated in Advance with Leftist Groups: “(O)n Exxon, (New York Democrat Attorney General Eric) Schneiderman ain’t the lead attack dog – the Rockefeller Foundation is: ‘The Rockefeller Family Foundation (which has an endowment of about $130 million) has long targeted the oil industry and honed in on ExxonMobil last January….’

“The (Rockefeller January meeting’s) agenda was to ‘establish in the public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm’ and to ‘delegitimize’ Exxon as a political actor….Participants at the meeting included activist groups like Greenpeace and Public Citizen, and trial lawyers who have won judgments against the industry before….

“The ultimate goal would include ‘getting discovery’ from ExxonMobil through legal action brought by public officials, thus ‘creating scandal’ around the country.”

The latest salvo against Exxon – was happily water-carried by the utterly ridiculous New York Times.

What Exxon Mobil Didn’t Say About Climate Change

In which co-screed-ers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes try the Left’s (at least) fifth new attempt to say that Exxon knew about actual cataclysmic climate change (there isn’t any), that they failed to disclose what they knew (which is hard to do with nothing) – and that all of the above represents a criminal act of some sort or other.

This is a stretch so far – as to leave Gumby, Plastic Man and Reed Richards all gaping in awe.

Our co-auteurs – quickly give away their game: “Part of the impetus for these suspicions was reporting by Inside Climate News and The Los Angeles Times in 2015 that concluded Exxon Mobil had long known about the risks of climate change but denied them in public.”

The Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News, you say? Bizarrely, our co-creators – admit to their tightly-closed-circle Leftist scam:

“Today, we are publishing the results of our peer-reviewed analysis in the journal Environmental Research Letters. To our knowledge, this is the first academic, empirical analysis of Exxon Mobil’s 40-year history of climate change communications. (Our research was funded by Harvard University Faculty Development Funds and by the Rockefeller Family Fund, which also helped finance the reporting by Inside Climate News and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which published its examination of Exxon Mobil with The Los Angeles Times.)”

Get that? The Leftist Rockefeller Foundation paid for a bunch of Leftist hackery that they attempted to dress up as “news.”

The Leftist Rockefeller Foundation then takes that bunch of Leftist hack news – for which they paid. And pretend it serves as an impetus for a hack study – for which they paid – of the Leftist paid-for hack news – for which they paid.

In case you think we’re joking – here’s the study:

Assessing ExxonMobil’s Climate Change Communications (1977–2014): “We examine whether these (ExxonMobil) communications sent consistent messages about the state of climate science and its implications—specifically, we compare their positions on climate change as real, human-caused, serious, and solvable. In all four cases, we find that as documents become more publicly accessible, they increasingly communicate doubt.

Almost forty years – and these clowns come up with four cases. On which they have no definitive proof – only “doubt.”

And “doubt” about climate change – is quite understandable. For a whole host of reasons. The lies. The data manipulation. The prolonged, pronounced wrongness.

And there’s this. Back in the 1970s – when these clowns started their peek into Exxon – the avalanche of “news” headlines…was of the looming, impending Ice Age. Here’s seventy-one such stories – just for starters.

That Ice Age – never materialized. Just as the cataclysmic warming of which the likes of these two have more recently shrieked – hasn’t materialized. Yet the shrieking continues unabated.

This Leftist-funded “study” – allegedly predicated by their Leftist-funded fake news – is just the latest in a long line of climate lies foisted upon us by a Socialist-Communist Left that doesn’t like free markets, or companies that excel therein.

Here’s my global climate prediction: This newest, perhaps-lamest attempt at smearing ExxonMobil – will go absolutely nowhere. Just like all the others.

SOURCE




Yet another renewable energy boondoggle

Croplands, habitats, taxes, family budgets, safety sacrificed to enrich politically connected few?

Paul Driessen

Wilkinson Solar has filed papers requesting permits for a 74-megawatt solar electricity facility about 35 miles east of Greenville, NC. If approved, 288,120 solar panels would blanket 600 acres (0.94 square miles) of now scenic, serene farmland next door to the Terra Ceia Christian School near Morehead City.

The company wants to catch the solar wave, and make a lot of money under “net metering” policies that require payment for electricity added to the grid, whenever it is generated and regardless of whether the electricity is needed at the time. Electricity generated from these new panels would not be sold in the local area; it would be exported to Virginia, Raleigh-Durham and other locations.

Solar power installations doubled in 2016 over 2015, media outlets reported in February. There are now 1.3 million solar installations across the United States, with a cumulative capacity of over 40 gigawatts. That’s enough capacity to power 6,560,000 US households, they say. Of course, there are caveats.

There was intense effort to install as much new photovoltaic as possible in 2016 – driven by a fear that federal tax credits would not be renewed. Solar actually rose from 0.96% of US generation in 2015 only to 1.37% in 2016. 65% of electricity generation is still fossil fuels, 20% is nuclear, 6.5% hydroelectric, 2.0% biomass and geothermal, and 5.6% wind (which is as unreliable as solar).

The reliability factor is critical. The capacity to power 6,560,000 households does not equal actual power generation. It is what panels can generate if the sun shines at high enough intensity 24/7/365. It can be a lot of the time in areas that are bright, dry and sunny most of the year – to very little in other regions.

Those and related issues must guide decisions on whether the Wilkinson facility makes energy, engineering, economic and environmental sense for this North Carolina community, the Tar Heel State – or other locales facing similar decisions. Solar may be advantageous for politicians, corporations, renewable energy activists and their allies. But that should not override other considerations.

A 600-MW capacity coal, gas or nuclear plant operates 90-95% of the time. Its actual output will thus be 540 to 570 megawatts – from 300 acres (or less): 1.8 to 1.9 MW per acre, reliably and affordably.

Wilkinson would theoretically generate 74 MW from twice as much land. That’s 0.12 MW per acre – or 8.1 acres per MW. However, North Carolina averages only 213 sunny days per year, and perhaps 9 hours of good, electricity-generating sun per day.

Instead of 90-95% efficiency, Wilkinson would bring only 20% efficiency. The 288,120 panels would produce electricity only about 20% of the year. That is unpredictable, unreliable, less affordable energy.

The real output would be around 0.03 MW per acre or 33 acres per MW! Wilkinson’s claimed ability to generate enough electricity for 12,500 households shrinks to 2,750 homes, when the sun shines.

Wilkinson and farmers turned occasional power producers would still reap large sums of cash, via net metering and feed-in tariff policies. But crop and wildlife habitat lands would be converted to massive solar arrays, while neighbors would get a blighted landscape and no monetary or other benefits.

As Solar Mania and Solar Sprawl spread, electricity consumers would see their rates climb: from the 9 cents per kilowatt-hour average they now pay in North Carolina and Virginia, ever closer to the 16 to 18 cents per kWh that residents pay in “green energy” states like Connecticut, New York and California. Families, hospitals, schools, businesses, farms and factories would face increasingly tougher times paying their electric bills. Poor and minority families would be hit hardest.

Then there’s the survivability issue. Since 1879, North Carolina has been hit by twelve Category 3 hurricanes, one Category 4 (Hazel in 1954) and multiple tropical storms. Imagine the shards of flying glass that would be torn from solar panels and sent flying in all directions when the next ’cane inevitably hits. What that would do to people, animals and property is not pretty to contemplate. Torrential rains brought by these storms would send flood waters roaring through the installation, wreaking further havoc.

Solar proponents always tout energy, employment and climate stabilization benefits – which don’t exist.

Every megawatt of solar power must be backed up by coal or natural gas generators. Otherwise we have electricity when it happens to be available, instead of when we need it. Otherwise our offices, hospitals, assembly lines, televisions and internet go on and off constantly. No one can work or live that way.

The backup power plants must be running on standby (spinning reserve) all the time – then must ramp up to full power every time the sun stops shining. That slashes their efficiency, and sends their fuel costs and emissions skyrocketing. Any supposed energy, sustainability and climate benefits disappear.

Moreover, it is highly unlikely that any solar array can ever generate enough electricity over its entire life span to equal the energy that went into making, installing and servicing the panels. Mining the raw materials, turning them into metals and other panel components, hauling and installing the panels – all require enormous amounts of motor fuels, coking coal and electricity. The balance sheet is in the red.

Add in what it takes to build, fuel and operate the backup power plants, and solar is bankrupt.

Solar power does create jobs. In fact, U.S. Department of Energy data reveal that producing the same amount of electricity requires one coal worker or two natural gas workers – but 12 wind industry employees or 79 solar workers. That is hardly the ticket to a productive economy.

Even worse, Spanish and other studies have found that, for every renewable energy job created, two to four jobs are lost in other sectors that are forced to pay more and more for less reliable electricity.

Price and reliability are crucial in our digital age, with electricity the key to modern living standards, health, safety, and almost everything we make, eat and do. Solar electricity makes prices rise and reliability decline; its repeated electrical surges and slumps damage grid stability.

Some say using fossil fuels – which provide 82% of the energy that makes modern civilization possible – causes dangerous manmade climate change. But Hurricane Harvey just ended the nearly 12-year record absence of a Category 3-5 hurricane striking the United States. Average planetary temperatures are back to the same level we’ve seen for almost 20 years, following the end of the 2015-16 El Niño.

Those and other inconvenient realities completely contradict decades of alarmist climate predictions. And as just noted, overall fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions increase as solar power proliferates.

All this underscores why we must build more pipelines from areas that have become major natural gas production regions, thanks to hydraulic fracturing. Whether a gas-fired power plant serves as a primary electricity generator, or as backup for wind and solar, new pipelines are essential. They determine whether families, hospitals and businesses have affordable electricity when they need it.

Unfortunately, an array of governors, mayors, legislators, regulators and activist pressure groups are blocking pipeline projects from the Dakotas to New York and beyond, even as they promote more wind and solar. Pipelines and electricity are the backbone of our economy, civilization, jobs and living standards. Cut or paralyze that backbone, and our society will cease to function.

Hearing officials must give local residents and energy experts opportunities to explain these issues and voice their concerns about energy, land use, job, economic, environmental, hurricane and other impacts from solar installations like Wilkinson. Anything less is a dereliction of duty that benefits a few players – at the expense of everyone else. That must no longer happen.

Via remail



Never let a crisis go to waste

By Printus LeBlanc

President Obama’s first Chief of Staff in the White House, now Mayor of the war zone Chicago, famously said, “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” People are still being rescued from homes in Houston, and the storm is continuing to do damage to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle, but the mainstream media and the Church of Manmade Climate Change cannot help themselves.

When climate events like major snow storms that cancel climate change meetings or ice flows stall climate change research ships, they call it weather. When a hurricane hits Houston, they want to call it man-made climate change. You cannot have it both ways.

For anyone that has ever lived within 100 miles of a coast, they know hurricanes are a normal occurrence in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico. The “experts” might not know this, but there is actually a season for hurricanes that runs between June and late November, with the most intense storms happening in August and September.

The notion that Harvey was caused by man-made climate change is laughable at best, and fraudulent science at worst. What evidence is there to prove what the networks are reporting? Keep in mind, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) only has measurable data for hurricanes beginning in 1851. The amount of data needed to claim hurricanes are getting stronger is immense and the amount of data scientists have is infinitesimally small.

However, there is data on the strength of hurricanes for the last 170 years. There is a direct correlation between the barometric pressure in the eye of a storm and the wind speed. The lower the pressure, the tighter the eye, and the higher the wind speeds.

The lowest pressure on record for an Atlantic hurricane belonged to Wilma, a storm in 2005 with a barometric pressure of 882 millibars. The tenth storm on the list had a pressure of 910 millibars. Hurricane Harvey doesn’t even come close, with a barometric pressure of 938 millibars.

What about wind strength? Hurricane strength is also measured by wind strength. Surely man-made climate change caused Hurricane Harvey to have the strongest wind speed on record. Once again, the church of man-made climate change would be wrong.

In 1980, Hurricane Allen recorded the highest sustained wind speed ever in the Atlantic Ocean at 190 mph. The second highest wind speed ever recorded was the 1935 “Labor Day” hurricane at 185 mph. Once again, as strong and intense as Hurricane Harvey was, it had a maximum sustained wind speed of 130 mph, nowhere near the top 50.

Let’s try another method. How about inches of rain per hour? If man-made climate change caused Hurricane Harvey to be stronger than normal, then the rainfall per hour would be astronomical.

Harvey had around 3.5 inches of rain per hour at its maximum. Do not disregard the number, that is a tremendous amount of rainfall, but it is nowhere near the upper echelon of inches of rain per hour. An unnamed Florida hurricane dropped 6 inches per hour in 1947, while Tropical Storm Rosa was at 5 inches per hour in 1994. Once again, Hurricane Harvey is not abnormal for the data that is available.

Hurricane Harvey was not the result of man-made climate change. A high-pressure system over the southwestern U.S. prevented the storm from doing what hurricanes do, move and drop rain. The high-pressure system stalled the “dirty” side of the storm over Houston. So, as Houston is getting hit by the dirty side of the storm, the “clean” side is recharging over the Gulf of Mexico while the high-pressure system is stopping the storm from moving, keeping Houston on the “dirty” side of the storm for days. By the way, high-pressure systems in the desert southwest of the U.S. is kind of normal during the summer.

Because the storm was partially situated over the Gulf of Mexico while it was stalled, it created an extended tidal surge. Tidal surges are another normal byproduct of hurricanes. However, the tidal surge did not allow the Houston rainwater drainage system to properly work, because the rain water was draining into the space the tidal surge was occupying. It is kind of hard for Houston rain water to drain into the Gulf of Mexico, while Harvey is trying to push the Gulf of Mexico into Houston.

People are still in danger and the mainstream media believes it is its duty to push a narrative given to them by their progressive masters. If the mainstream media can see clear to stop pushing the Church of Manmade Climate Change and learn how to use google, they would see the truth, and perhaps gain a small amount of respect back from the citizens that distrust them so much.

SOURCE





Renewable Fuels Are Toxic DC Swamp Water

While President Trump promised to “drain the swamp,” he also voiced his commitment to the biofuels industry and the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS). These promises are in direct conflict. No federal program epitomizes the metaphorical swamp water of Washington better than the RFS.

This week, public comments are due on Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed RFS targets for 2018. The proposal is a mixed bag. As it stands, the administration needs to do more on RFS to maintain its credibility as a Washington change agent. There’s no having your cake and eating it too when it comes to fighting the DC establishment and appeasing the biofuels lobby.

RFS is a case-study in bad public policy. It hits most all of the broad systemic problems of big government routinely raised by free-market advocates.

Congress created RFS in 2005 and expanded it in 2007. Seeking to curb America’s reliance on foreign oil, Congress mandated increasing volumes of biofuels, primarily corn-based ethanol, be blended into the nation’s fuel supply. Congress set into statute raw gallon figures for these fuels and delegated authority to EPA to establish annual compliance rules. Essentially, RFS is nothing more the Soviet-style central planning of the fuel market—which is why it was destined to wreak havoc.

The first problem with RFS relates to the knowledge problem of central planning. Warnings of central planning’s follies date back to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, and were put on full display during the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. But that didn’t stop Congress from blundering into RFS a decade ago.

As explained by F.A. Hayek in his essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, “The economic problem of society… is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.” Central planning through programs like RFS doesn’t work because no single person or cadre could possibly possess all the information required to create an outcome more efficient than one reached by countless voluntary exchanges in the market.

RFS, in its current 2007 form, was instituted without knowledge of the Great Recession or the domestic oil and gas boom of the last decade. Thus, RFS mandates are based on rising fuel consumption and dependence on oil imports. Neither are today’s case. Fuel consumption has been flat since 2007 while crude oil production has spiked to record levels, making the US the world’s dominant energy producer.

This doesn’t just mean RFS is useless; it’s also creating economic distortions. Since RFS creates a guaranteed market for corn through ethanol mandates, corn prices have increased. This increases the cost of food across the market. More expensive corn raises the price of corn-based products, including livestock feed, and incentivizes farmers to divert more acres to corn production, reducing supply of other crops and therefore increasing those prices too.

Further, today’s economic conditions make the mandated volumes of ethanol harmful to the overall fuel supply. Most cars and fuel infrastructure can be damaged by ethanol blends beyond 10 percent. With overall fuel demand not increasing at the rate anticipated, the mandated amount of ethanol has crossed this threshold. This forced EPA to repeatedly lower annual ethanol standards below those required under law, doing so from 2014 through 2016.

RFS creates another conundrum by establishing a concentrated benefit and dispersed costs scenario. This is where RFS gets particularly swampy. Despite the glaring problems, RFS is vehemently defended by a collection of biofuels and agricultural lobbyists and Midwestern politicians. Who wouldn’t want a government mandate forcing consumers to buy your stuff? While the program is estimated to impose billions in economic distortions, that cost is spread out—nickel-and-dimed away from Americans with each trip to the pump and grocery store.

The special interests making those billions can afford more real estate on K Street than the average family paying more for gas and food. That’s how the DC swamp keeps boondoggles like the RFS in place, much to the amazement of disgruntled Americans—particularly those who voted for Trump.

While the EPA’s proposed 2018 RFS targets reduce the overall level of biofuels required, the ethanol mandate remains flat from 2017 and in-line with the misguided targets set in 2007. Industry experts insist this will exceed the recommended amount of ethanol in the fuel supply.

This is disappointing news out of the Trump administration. The president may have promised to support the ethanol industry, but his entire campaign rested on a bigger promise to end this kind of insanity in Washington. The White House would be wise to lean on EPA to utilize more of its RFS waiver authority and demand Congress kill this program for good.

Trump is going to break a campaign promise this fall. He just has to decide whether it’ll be his promise to biofuel lobbyists or the other 99 percent of Americans who supported his campaign.

SOURCE

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