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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Jim Hansen and his twin
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