Patrick Moore: I was banned from speaking in Regina over this alternative CO2 point of view

"There is no doubt in my mind that on balance our CO2 emissions are 100 per cent positive for the continuation of life on Earth"

Commercial greenhouse growers around the world inject CO2 into their greenhouses to double and triple the concentration compared to present atmospheric levels.

Late last Friday I was deplatformed for the first time in my 45 years of giving keynote speeches at conferences around the world. The City of Regina, which through my speaker’s bureau had signed a contract with me to kick off their Reimagine Regina Conference in May, caved to local activists and told me I should stay home.

In its announcement regarding my banishment, the city said it did not want “to spark a debate on climate change.” It said the stated goal of the conference is “to make the city’s facilities and operations 100 per cent renewable by 2050.” In other words, municipal officials wanted me to say what they wanted me to say and not what I wanted to say to them. That’s just not how I operate.

Regina is one of at least 54 cities and towns in Canada that have declared a state of “climate emergency.” This is political virtue-signalling at its disingenuous best: the only people fleeing any emergency from these cities are doing so to escape the frigid winter by flying to a warmer country further south. Not a lot of Canadians from our southern regions are heading to Yellowknife or Inuvik, N.W.T, to escape global warming. The climate emergency is at best a bad joke. It might even be amusing were it not threatening to ban the primary energy sources — natural gas, oil and coal — that provide 85 per cent of global energy and make our civilization possible.

Of the 195 countries recognized by the United Nations, Canada is the coldest, with an annual average temperature of -5.35 C. (Russia is number 2 only because it doesn’t have islands situated near the North Pole.) It strikes me as odd that the world’s coldest country worries more about warming than the people of India, Brazil or Saudi Arabia, where it really is warm. These countries don’t have carbon taxes that punish farmers for fuelling their tractors or policies that are aimed at destroying much of their country’s natural resource sector.

Why do I believe CO2 emissions from using fossil fuels to power modern societies are not “pollution” that will bring about the apocalypse? Let me count the ways.

First and foremost, CO2 is the most important food for all life on earth. On both land and in the sea all the carbon for carbon-based life, which is all life, comes from CO2. All green plants on land and all plants in the sea, phytoplankton and kelps, combine CO2 with H2O and by photosynthesis produce the sugars that provide the energy source for all life, including ours. The increase in CO2 due to our emissions has resulted in a greening of the planet and an expansion of forests. This is not contested.

Second, during the hundreds of millions of years since modern life evolved from primitive, single-celled life in the sea, CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans has steadily declined. This is primarily due to the advent of calcifying marine species that use CO2 and calcium dissolved in the sea to make protective shells of calcium carbonate (limestone) for themselves (corals, clams, mussels, shrimp and many planktonic species, etc.). As a result, CO2 in the atmosphere fell from at least 0.6 per cent to 0.018 per cent only 20,000 years ago at the last glacial maximum.

Third, both cement production and our use of fossil fuels are putting CO2 back into the atmosphere and the oceans. Both its very long-term depletion and the return of CO2 to the atmosphere by our burning of fossil fuels and production of cement were inadvertent. There is no credit or blame, just pure scientific facts.

There is no doubt in my mind that on balance our CO2 emissions are 100 per cent positive for the continuation of life on Earth. Commercial greenhouse growers around the world inject CO2 into their greenhouses to double and triple the concentration compared to present atmospheric levels. By doing so they increase the growth and yield of their crops by 20 to 60 per cent. This, too, is uncontested.

I realize this is a hypothesis that not many people have heard about, thanks to the wall of “denial” that has been created by the climate emergency crowd. But I know that this analysis of CO2 history will eventually win the day, as it is a provable fact. I could have presented my ideas to the Regina audience — after all, science is about continual discovery — but they turned me away rather than listen to an alternative point of view.

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U.S. Leads World in Decreasing CO2 Emissions

When President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the dubious Paris Agreement in June 2017, climate activists, world leaders, and the Democrat Media Complex immediately protested, declaring that the Trump administration was signaling its intention to increase CO2 emissions. Fast-forward to Tuesday's report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) evaluating CO2 emissions around the globe. Lo and behold, the U.S. led the world in 2019 for "the largest decline in energy-related CO2 emissions." The IEA's report further noted that "US emissions are now down almost 1 Gt [gross tonnage] from their peak in the year 2000, the largest absolute decline by any country over that period." As Sen. Ted Cruz observed, that's a "fact you will never see on the 6 o'clock news."

In fact, far from the dire predictions since Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the U.S. has not only continued its trend of decreasing CO2 emissions but increased the rate of the decrease. The primary cause for this precipitous decline is not due to more government regulation; rather it has everything to do with the government getting out of the way of innovation brought on by capitalistic enterprise. "Coal-fired power plants faced even stronger competition from natural gas-fired generation, with benchmark gas prices an average of 45% lower than 2018 levels," the report notes. This move to more natural-gas-fired power plants is thanks in large measure to increased fracking lowering the cost of natural gas — "as a result, gas increased its share in electricity generation to a record high of 37%."

Furthermore, the dubious Paris Agreement seems to have had little effect on reining in the world's largest CO2-emitting country, China, which remains a signatory. As The Daily Wire observes, "The IEA noted that 80% of the increase in CO2 emissions came from Asia and that China and India both contributed significantly to the increase."

Meanwhile, climate alarmists like Democrat presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for a national ban on fracking — the very thing responsible for reducing emissions. On Wednesday, AOC announced her legislation, the Fracking Ban Act. "Fracking is destroying our land and our water," she asserted in her announcement. "It is wreaking havoc on our communities' health. We must do our job to protect our future from the harms caused by the fracking industry."

There is little evidence supporting AOC's dubious claims of harm, but there is solid scientific evidence of the benefits fracking has afforded the U.S. As National Review reports, "The fracking boom is widely credited with turning the U.S. into a net energy exporter and reducing the country's reliance on oil imports. While environmentalists have voiced concerns over the drilling method, fracking proponents have pointed to the economic benefit it brings to the U.S. and the industry's increased attention to environmental concerns."

In reality, should Warren and AOC's fracking ban occur, it would not only end America's energy independence but reverse the country's decreasing rate of CO2 emissions. Finally, if Warren and AOC were truly concerned with cutting the nation's emissions, they would be the biggest advocates for increasing the use of nuclear power. Instead, they have called for that to be banned as well. As Warren stated last September, "In my administration, we won't be building new nuclear plants. We will start weaning ourselves off nuclear and replace it with renewables."

It's clear the leftist agenda has little to do with addressing the challenges of climate change and everything to do with pushing socialism.

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Ocasio-Cortez Is Sponsoring a Bill to Ban Fracking Across US

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a nationwide fracking ban Wednesday.

The Democratic New York congresswoman’s bill is a companion to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ legislation seeking to ban fracking across the country by 2025. If passed, the laws would prohibit natural gas production within 2,500 feet of homes and schools by 2021 and help transition energy workers away from the industry.

“Fracking is destroying our land and our water,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote Wednesday on Twitter. “It is wreaking havoc on our communities’ health. We must do our job to protect our future from the harms caused by the fracking industry.” Sanders announced his bill in February.

“If we want to transition from fossil fuel emissions as we work towards building a 100% clean economy, pulling back from fracking is a critical first step,” he said in a statement. “Failure to act will only make the crisis at hand even more detrimental for future generations of Americans.”

Ocasio-Cortez and Soto’s bill comes less than a year after Ocasio-Cortez introduced the so-called Green New Deal, which, among other things, calls for “10-year national mobilizations” toward addressing climate change.

The Green New Deal would reportedly phase out fossil fuels within 12 years, but could cost trillions of dollars, reports show. Americans could be forced to pay up to $93 trillion to implement the proposal over 10 years, conservative-leaning American Action Forum noted in a study in February 2019.

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren signed on as Senate co-sponsor of the proposal before it met its demise in the Senate in March 2019.

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UK: There’s nothing democratic about this climate assembly. This is a cynical attempt to lend a democratic gloss to eco-austerity

BEN PILE

The first two meetings of Climate Assembly UK, dubbed a ‘citizens’ assembly’ on climate change, have taken place in Birmingham over the course of a couple of weekends in January and February.

The climate assembly has brought together 110 randomly selected members of the public to discuss a range of climate issues and policies with a range of experts, including David Attenborough. The task of the assembly, which will meet over two more weekends this spring, is to decide on a set of recommendations for how the government can best meet its pledge to achieve Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050.

The reason for establishing the climate assembly is clear enough. It is an attempt to exorcise the democratic deficit that haunts political environmentalism. And it seeks to do this by involving a tiny, but supposedly representative, sample of citizens in the policymaking process. But can it really achieve its aim, given it excludes approximately 45million other members of the electorate from its decision-making?

In short, no. Watching the proceedings of the first assembly, it became clear very quickly that the process is rigged in favour of the environmentalist agenda. Expert after expert, each echoing the same message, made his or her presentation to the assembly. This was followed by a rapid question-and-answer session in which the assembled were told what’s what by said experts. It didn’t look much like a democratic debate. It looked like instruction.

These shortcomings should not be a surprise, however, given the climate assembly’s origins. Initially advocated by Extinction Rebellion, the climate assembly was eventually set up last year by six House of Commons select committees, in partnership with several third-sector organisations. None of these organisations has a democratic mandate. But they do all have a commitment to promoting the green agenda.

Take, for instance, the participation of Involve, the Sortition Foundation, and mySociety. These three organisations claim to want to encourage democratic engagement, and to reformulate the democratic process. All noble aims. But their role in the climate assembly is less to encourage democratic engagement than to limit and set the parameters of debate. Hence, the climate assembly will not hear from anyone remotely critical of climate science, environmental ideology or emissions-reduction policies.

Dig deeper and you discover that the majority of the assembly’s funding comes from the the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation (EFF) (which also funds Involve and mySociety), and the European Climate Foundation (ECF). These are not neutral organisations. Both the EFF and the ECF are explicitly committed to promoting an environmentalist agenda. As the ECF puts it on its website: ‘[We call for] the transformation of our systems and markets and the creation of a Net Zero society.’

The ECF is also the major funding partner of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), which provides communication support for the assembly. Indeed, the ECF is one of the largest funders of climate-change campaigns throughout Europe.

The ECF itself is part-funded by the US-based organisation it best resembles: the ClimateWorks Foundation. According to its website, the ClimateWorks Foundation acts as a ‘strategist to a wide range of foundations, helping them evaluate the global landscape of greenhouse-gas-reductions opportunities, develop philanthropic strategies, and coordinate and evaluate their investments’. Or, in other words, it acts as an environmentalist coordinator, distributing millions upon millions of dollars to numerous climate campaigns, using the funds of a few foundations.

The ECF does something similar in Europe. It distributes funding to myriad campaigning organisations. These organisations, like the ECIU, are intended to appear as autonomous ‘grassroots’ groups. But they all act under the umbrella of the ECF. Such organisations make much of the virtue of ‘transparency’ in public life. But when I approached the ECF for details of which organisations it funds, and who it is funded by, its representative refused to tell me.

Through its various organisational money-go-rounds, the ECF is not so much fostering civil-society participation as it is trying to enforce groupthink. Just look at the climate assembly in action. It is a choreographed exercise, in which the participants are directed towards the ‘correct’ conclusions.

For instance, during one question-and-answer session, Joanna Haigh, a former co-director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London, was asked about other countries’ commitments to reducing CO2 emissions – the implication being that if other countries are committed to reducing CO2 emissions, then the UK ought to be, too. Haigh said that other nations were indeed set on reducing CO2 emissions. She even told the assembly that China, one of the world’s largest CO2 emitters, has decided it is not going to build any more coal-fired power stations.

But this is not true. In the period up to 2050, during which the UK has pledged to reduce CO2 emissions to Net Zero, China has committed to increase its use of coal. And not just domestically. It is also financing coal-infrastructure projects across Asia and Africa.

Haigh is not some undergraduate fudging an answer to an exam. She is an ‘expert’. Her role in the climate assembly is to provide the participants with the facts on which they are to base their decisions. But she didn’t provide a fact. She provided a fiction that suited the environmentalist agenda of the climate assembly.

Perhaps Haigh was simply mistaken. Either way, she was not challenged within the climate assembly. And that is the key problem with this setup. It doesn’t allow for the robust, open debate one might expect of the public sphere proper. Instead it elevates its chosen experts to positions of authority – positions, that is, above scrutiny. As a result, mistakes and falsehoods can proliferate unchallenged.

Of course, a few of the 110 assembly members might spot the errors. They might rise to the challenge and take on the experts. But it is far more likely that they will be hectored into submission by the endless ‘expert-led’ repetition of one side of the argument.

If, as seems to be the intention, the government uses the recommendations of the climate assembly to formulate future climate policy, it will not be a victory for democracy. The only true democratic test of the government’s carbon-cutting policies is a free and open debate, in which all views can be heard, not just those of 110 ‘jurors’ and their hand-picked ‘expert’ witnesses.

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Finkel: Coal could be sidelined by a push for gas to serve as a transition fuel, and a move toward renewably produced hydrogen

I watched most of Finkel's speech on TV. It was politely received: No eruptions from critics in either direction.  His logic about the interim use of natural gas was basically irrefutable.

Where he went off the rails was in his advocacy of hydrogen as the ultimate fuel. That idea has been around for many years but stumbles on questions of cost and safety.  Basically you take a fuel that is usable in its own right and use its energy to produce a new fuel.  That is very inefficient and inevitably more costly than just using the fuel you already have to do other things

Finkel saw hydrogen as particularly good for powering motor vehicles.  That is again pie in the sky. You need a heavy pressure vessel to store hydrogen and that is both more costly, more tricky to deal with and more dangerous than the simple sheet metal tank that normal motor fuels require

Not gonna happen


Australia’s chief scientist, Alan Finkel, has come out in support of the government’s strategy of using gas as a transition fuel to generate electricity while the sector moves away from coal toward clean energy sources.

“We cannot abruptly cease our use of energy,” he told the National Press Club this week. “Make no mistake, this will be the biggest engineering challenge ever undertaken. The energy system is huge, and even with an internationally committed and focused effort, the transition will take many decades.”

“Ultimately, we will need to complement solar and wind with a range of other technologies such as high levels of storage, long-distance transmission, and much better efficiency in the way we use energy.”

“But while these technologies are being scaled up, we need an energy companion today that can react rapidly to changes in solar and wind output. An energy companion that is itself relatively low in emissions, and that only operates when needed. In the short-term, as the prime minister and Minister Angus Taylor have previously stated, natural gas will play that critical role.”

The strategy was first flagged in 2015 by the then-Minister for Environment and Energy Josh Frydenberg but was picked up by Prime Minster Scott Morrison just last month, amid devastating bushfires, which climate scientists and bushfire experts have linked to Australia’s love affair with coal and other fossil fuels.

Since the Morrison government has shown a renewed interest in gas, some coalition MPs, most notably from the National Party and from areas that have for many years relied on exporting coal, have stepped up their defense of it and have begun petitioning for government subsidies for coal-fired power.

Australia’s incoming resources minister, Keith Pitt, hasn’t turned away from coal either, telling The Sydney Morning Herald that he will push for more exports. But Pitt also threw his support behind a plan to extract gas from an area in northern New South Wales following a landmark energy deal between the state and federal government, which would see an investment of $2 billion into the east coast market.

Gas is still a fossil fuel, but not all fossil fuels are created equal. Burning natural gas, for example, produces less than half as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity compared to coal and reduces emissions by 33 percent when producing heat.

While natural gas produces less carbon dioxide during burning, it is around 30 times better at holding in the atmosphere, meaning that if enough methane leaks during production, it could be as detrimental to the environment as burning coal, if not worse.

In the northern New South Wales region of Narrabri, the proposed big gas project has been met by both stiff resistance and support from locals. Some argue that the environmental effect will be disastrous for the region’s farmers, while others claim that it is essential to create jobs and boost the economy.

The federal government’s backing revived hopes for the plan, which involves ambitions to extract gas from coal seams lying deep beneath the Pilliga Forest.

In return, the federal government asks that the state government set a target of delivering 70 petajoules a year of new gas into the market. Coincidentally, that’s precisely the estimated output of the Narrabri project.

The project is yet to secure the final state and environmental approvals, but gas giant Santos has already invested around $1.5 billion into it, and now with federal backing, it’s likely to pass all checks unabated.

Morrison has ruled out making any similar energy deal with the state of Victoria to help reduce its carbon emissions and lower power costs unless the state government ditches its longstanding ban on onshore gas exploration.

Siding with the federal government, and also seeing gas as a transition fuel, business groups such as the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and the Energy Users Association have urged the state government to expand conventional onshore gas extraction and lift the ban.

The deal would likely also include guarantees against “premature closures” of coal-powered fire stations in Victoria, which provide around 70 percent of the state’s energy. In return, federal investment would likely include power from the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme delivered to Melbourne, Ballarat, Shepparton, and other urban centers across the state.

Finkel, who helped prepare and release the National Hydrogen Strategy late last year, stressed that coal was not an option and tipped hydrogen as the way forward during his speech at the National Press Club. “Enter the hero, hydrogen,” he said, after discussing the perils of climate change.

Hydrogen carries more energy than natural gas and is carbon-free, so the burning of it does not contribute to climate change. Hydrogen can, however, be produced in two ways, through the process of electrolysis, using solar and wind, or through chemical process, using combusting fossil fuels like coal and gas.

For now, the hydrogen strategy has recognized the need to reduce emissions to combat climate change and is only considering options using fossil fuels if they come with carbon capture and storage, which involves pumping carbon emissions into underground cavities. According to the Australian Institute, carbon capture and storage projects have a poor track record of delivering on their promises, and now the industry is using the same “unsuccessful technology” to promote hydrogen.

Fears also remain that hydrogen is being used as a lifeline for coal. Prior to discussing the terms of the strategy with Finkel and state energy ministers, Angus Taylor, the federal minister for energy, suggested that hydrogen production should be “technology neutral,” indicating it could be done using coal.

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