Tuesday, July 07, 2020



The Green Delusion continues to Perpetuate Costs upon the Poor

Those marketing the green delusion have convinced themselves and the public that intermittent electricity from wind and solar are somehow “clean, green, renewable and sustainable”. They have successfully kept transparency from those paying for the green delusion of any information that would damage their message.

Facts about greater human and ecological impacts around the world from intermittent electricity systems favored by the climate cult are numerous and purposely withheld from the Californians that can least afford rates that are already among the highest in the nation for electricity and fuel and the same Californians that represent less than half of one percent (0.5%) of the world’s population (40 million vs. 8 billion). Among a few subjects the climate cult avoids transparency are:

* Moving to electricity ALONE and eliminating fossil fuels would mean America would have to replace 100% of its gasoline and all its oil and natural gas feed stocks for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers, and plastics for cell phones, computers, car bodies, packaging, wind turbine blades, solar panel films and more than 6,000 products that are manufactured from petroleum derivatives. As a reminder, without transportation and the leisure and entertainment industries that did not exist before 1900, we would have no commerce.

* Dependency on intermittent electricity from wind and solar resulted in California importing up to 29 percent of its electricity to meet its demands. To the detriment of those that can least afford expensive energy, that lavishly expensive imported electricity has contributed to the poorest residents, particularly Latinos and African Americans, paying more than 50 percent more for electricity than the rest of the country.

* The impact of power plant closures in California are destined to increase the cost of power as California plans to shuttle three natural gas power plants and its last nuclear power plant. Those four power plants have been providing continuous uninterruptible electricity to Californians. With the state having no plans to replace the closure capacity with intermittent electricity from wind and solar, the state will need to import more high-priced electricity to fill the void and let residents and businesses pay the premium.

* The climate cult is fearful of sharing that all the mineral products and metals needed to make wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries are mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control, under minimal to nonexistent labor, wage, environmental, reclamation, and worker health and safety regulations. The mere extraction of those exotic minerals presents social challenges, human rights abuses, and environmental degradations worldwide.

* Those numerous documentaries about the atrocities that the workers are put through in the cobalt mines, i.e. actually digging the mines by hand along with the horrendous living conditions. Amnesty International has documented children and adults mining cobalt in narrow man-made tunnels along with the exposure to the dangerous gases emitted during the procurement of these rare minerals.

* For cobalt alone, over 40,000 Congolese children, as young as four years old, slave away alongside their parents in mines, for a dollar a day, risking cave-ins and being exposed constantly to filthy, toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air.

* These environmental and human rights travesties can happen only under a system of rampant double standards, i.e., if they do NOT occur in the backyard of the climate cult, they are okay with any and all adverse impacts on foreign sites.

* Even if California or the entire USA eliminated all fossil fuel use tomorrow – it would not make an iota of difference for global carbon dioxide levels as China and India have more than 5,000 coal fired power plants and are building 600 more to provide their populations with scalable, reliable, and affordable electricity, that will continue to increase emissions.

* Since 1990 CO2 emissions from the Developed world have decreased, whereas the Developing world has shown a fourfold increase since 1985.  This differential has arisen because of:
the off shoring of major CO2 emitting industries to parts of the world that have less rigorous environmental standards or who care less about CO2 emissions.
the growing use of Coal-firing for electricity generation in the Developing world.

The primary reason that the climate cult is voraciously against transparency of any data about intermittent electricity from wind and solar favored by them, is that they would need to justify to the rural, poor, minority and working-class families and communities that  the public needs to accept  the worldwide ecological, health and economic damages being inflicted in pursuit of their pseudo-renewable electricity utopia. Additionally, for those that can least afford the passion for intermittent electricity, they need to morally accept that Africans, Asians, and Latin Americans must endure slave labor status to advance the climate cult agenda.

Let us hope the now-silent majority can restore law, order, civil debate, thoughtful reflection on our complex history, and rational resolution of these thorny problems as current climate policies are essentially discriminatory toward poor people and minorities worldwide.

SOURCE 






Next-generation climate models: worse than ever!

Back in February, Pat Michaels dropped something of a bombshell. It was an exposé of the Achilles heel of alarmist climate science.

He did it in a lecture, just posted to YouTube on June 11, at a joint meeting of the Independent Institute and the National Association of Scholars. What he showed was that practically all the climate models on which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and lots of national governments rely are wrong—hopelessly, egregiously, starkly wrong. And all (but one) in the direction of exaggerating CO2’s warming effect.

Why? Because modelers tune their models to reproduce the 20th-century temperature record. Yet the models supposedly model how global average (near-surface) temperature responds to rising atmospheric CO2 concentration. And the problem with that is that there’s no way the first half (roughly) of the 20th-century temperature record was driven by CO2.

Michaels demonstrates that by showing that, if the comparatively small amount of added CO2 in the first half of the century drove as much warming as occurred then, then the much greater amount of CO2 added in the second half should have added a whole lot more warming than actually occurred.

Having made that point, Michaels reminds us that good scientists, when observations contradict predictions based on their models, revise the models so as to come closer to the observations. But that’s exactly the opposite of what’s happening in the alarmist climate modeling community.

The “Coupled Model Intercomparison Project” 5th generation models (CMIP-5) simulated, on average 2.75 times as much warming as actually observed by radiosondes (temperature sensors carried aloft by weather balloons) from 1979–2018, as Michaels showed with this graph, courtesy of John Christy:

Now the CMIP-6 models are starting to come out. One would expect that refinements would bring their simulations closer to the observations. The opposite is the case. The new models—as many as had been reported as of late 2019—simulate not 2.75 but roughly 3.5 times the warming observed by radiosondes

In short, far from improving the models, the modelers are making them worse than ever. After the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on them, one would hope for a different outcome.

Perhaps it’s driven not so much by honest scientific endeavor as by an agenda.

SOURCE 






3 Billion-A-Year Cost To Prevent Green Energy Blackouts

An in-depth study for the Global Warming Policy Foundation has revealed the skyrocketing costs of balancing the national grid, largely due to the intermittency of green power generation sources, most notably wind and solar. Since 2002, when these power sources began to be introduced at scale, the cost of balancing the grid has risen from £367 million to £1.5 billion per year by 2019. And now with the lockdown shrinking demand, balancing costs are optimistically projected to be £2 billion, potentially rising to £3 billion if the lockdown persists…

The conclusion of Dr John Constable, energy expert and author of the study, is stark:

“If demand remains low during the post-Covid recession the multi-billion pound costs of managing and subsidising renewables must be recovered from a much smaller volume of sales. That is a recipe for rapid and abrupt price rises, the like of which the British public have never seen. Enough is enough. In what everyone agrees is a very difficult moment the national interest demands a cost minimisation strategy for electricity, based on gas and nuclear.”

Fortunately, the UK could be on the brink of a nuclear revolution in small modular reactors (SMRs). Rolls Royce is leading a consortium of businesses urging the Government to accelerate plans for a swathe of high tech micro nuclear reactors across the north of England:


Plans are being discussed for sixteen micro-reactors to be built by 2050, providing enough consistent energy to power a city the size of Leeds and directly employing 40,000 people. Who knew that nuclear power stations even run when it’s not windy and at night!

SOURCE 






Norway to rein in wind power after raging opposition from locals 

Norway is set to tighten rules for building wind turbines, caving in to massive protests from locals.

A government proposal on Friday to slow down the development of onshore wind power comes after increasing local resistance mirrors sentiment in other European countries. Norway already decided to scrap a plan for a new permission framework last year.

Norway, which has already developed a massive hydropower network, faces an increased need for clean energy for the electrification of everything from transportation to oil platforms.

The proposed changes include that permits are valid for a shorter time before construction starts, height restrictions on turbines and noise requirements, in addition to local acceptance of the projects. For instance, a turbine can not be closer to a house or cabin than four times the height of the turbines.

Norway’s Petroleum and Energy Minister, who presented the white paper with the proposed changes on Friday, felt the wrath of protesters herself. Only a week ago, Tina Bru experienced being blocked physically from attending an event on the west coast while being pummeled with insults, she wrote on her Facebook page.

“It’s legitimate to be opposed to wind power, both in principle and where you live – I understand that wind power can stoke strong feelings and heated debate,” Bru said at a press conference on Friday. “But I reject harassment, threats and vandalism.”

Although Norway has developed onshore wind in the recent years, hydropower is meeting virtually all the nation’s power needs.

SOURCE 

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