"Fossil" Fuels Are Back — Everywhere Except The U.S.A.
While the greens in America, including their champion zealot, Joe Biden, howl their primal screams over climate change, the rest of the world is turning to coal. The dark stuff. The satanic fuel. But it’s back big time across the globe.
So is old-fashioned petroleum.
Bloomberg reported last week that because of high natural gas prices due to a reduced supply from the United States, Europe is “snapping up coal.” It’s cheaper now and unlike wind and solar is a much more reliable source of power.
Euroland is also starting to give up on the green energy dreams that are still alive and well in the minds of American pols in Washington, D.C.
Great Britain and Germany have experienced soaring energy prices at the gas pump and in electric utility costs for homes, factories, and businesses.
Some relief will come from natural gas that will eventually be supplied to Europe via a gas pipeline from Siberia, Russia. Don’t forget, Biden greenlighted that pipeline just a few weeks after killing the Keystone XL pipeline and thousands of jobs here at home.
Meanwhile, the nation with three times the population of the U.S. and the world’s largest energy consumer, China, is all-in on coal. The Daily Mail reported that China’s 1,000 coal plants “make a mockery” of any promises by Beijing that China will move to renewable energy.
Coal is by far the largest source of energy in China, and new plants are being built every week. This is, as the Telegraph put it, “Beijing’s dirtiest little secret.”
Despite those solemn pledges for China to clean up its air, the Chinese emit three to four times more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each year than the U.S.
Then there is the situation with oil. The price has been rising as demand remains steady. The Wall Street Journal reported that OPEC nations predict that demand for their oil will at least double over the coming decades. That doesn’t sound like a fuel source that is going out of fashion.
This is all happening just at the very moment that Democrats in Congress are about to pass green energy bills that will cripple our fossil fuel industry. These fuels could make America the energy powerhouse of the 21st century.
It’s hard to see how dismantling U.S. oil, gas, and coal will stop the rise of the oceans when the rest of the world’s addiction seems incurable.
Last month, Biden went to the United Nations and lectured the world about an international partnership to combat climate change. You could almost hear the snickering in the audience of foreign diplomats.
It is a foreign and economic policy driven not by realism but fantasy. Biden sees the world as he wants it to be, not as it is.
He reminds me of Britain’s Neville Chamberlain circa 1939, who believed Hitler’s promises of “peace in our time,” up to the moment the bombs started falling like rain on London.
The shame of all this is that when Trump left office, America was all but energy self-sufficient and even an energy exporter.
Thanks to the shale oil and gas revolution, the U.S. has access to more oil and gas (and coal) than any other nation. We have many hundreds of years of energy supply.
Now that the rest of the world is thirsting for U.S. oil, gas, and coal, the Left wants to shut down all domestic production by 2035, even though our fossil fuels are the cleanest.
So, instead of the world’s energy coming from the U.S., it will come from Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the OPEC nations.
To borrow a Trumpism: Those nations are now laughing behind our backs.
https://climatechangedispatch.com/fossil-fuels-are-back-everywhere-except-the-u-s-a/
***************************************Don’t Waste Time Or Money On ‘Silent Earth’
Book reviews usually tell people, buy this new hardback. This article advises, don’t bother reading "Silent Earth," much less purchasing a copy; it’s mostly a junk-science, anti-technology screed.
Dave Goulson’s book expands on "Silent Spring," Rachel Carson’s polemic against pesticides that helped rid Europe and the USA of deadly malaria, and now protect crops that require so much land, water, work, fertilizer and energy to grow and harvest that we dare not sacrifice them to hordes of hungry insects.
Carson falsely blamed DDT for her cancer – and launched the practice of using conjecture, poetic prose, hyperbole and even fraud, instead of evidence-based science, to advance environmentalist agendas. The Environmental Defense Fund used her book to drive its campaign to ban DDT and give environmentalists “a level of authority they never had before.”
The EPA ban led to the deaths of millions of Africans and Asians from malaria, which could have been reduced dramatically by using this powerful spatial repellant in conjunction with modern insecticides and anti-malarial drugs. (See here, here, here and here.)
Relying mostly on inventive speculation, Goulson claims a silent spring devoid of chirping birds could soon become a silent planet devoid of insects that pollinate flowers and crops, and feed birds, amphibians, reptiles, mammals and (if former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has his way) billions of us humans.
It would take another book to address all the new book’s errors and problems, but here are a few.
Goulson transforms the supposed “bee-pocalypse” of a few years ago into a global apocalypse for all insects, and potentially all life on Earth. He blames modern agriculture, “greedy corporations,” free-market/personal-choice capitalism, too many humans who eat too much and live too well, urban light pollution and o course manmade climate change. Above all, he blames modern synthetic pesticides, though he does recognize that many “natural” “organic” chemicals are toxic to insects, wildlife and even humans.
Honeybee populations have been on a happy rebound for several years now, after being hit hard by Varroa destructor mites, Nosema, and other bee parasites and diseases. They were also harmed by beekeepers who tried to address these problems, but sometimes misused or overused mitacides. US Department of Agriculture surveys now show there are now over 150,000 more beehives than in 1995.
Studies in actual farmers’ fields have consistently shown no adverse effects on honeybees at the colony level from realistic exposures to neonicotinoid insecticides, one of Goulson’s primary scapegoats. In fact, bees thrive in and around neonic-treated canola, corn and other crops in the United States, Canada, Europe and elsewhere. As to wild bees,98% don’t even pollinate agricultural crops – and the species that do are thriving, even though they have the greatest contact with neonics. That shouldn’t be surprising.
Neonicotinoids are used primarily to coat seeds. They are systemic pesticides that become part of the plant tissue and target only pests that actually feed on the crops, particularly during early growth stages. Sulfloxaflor is similar in that regard. Both are far safer for general insect populations than older pesticides or organic farming chemicals that are applied by air, hand or truck across entire fields – and often beyond.
Goulson ignores all this and advances his central claim that populations of all insects are in precipitous decline globally. He bases that largely on a 2017 study by him and several colleagues. They assert that insect populations plummeted by over 75% during a 25-year period in several German nature reserves – then extrapolate that and a few other studies to the entire planet.
But their study didn’t track the same areas from year to year and employed traps that capture insects only while they’re flying. That misses non-flying insects and is heavily dependent on rainfall and other weather.
There’s simply no reliable evidence of a general insect decline. Indeed, some 900,000 insect species have been identified around the world, though total estimates range from 2 million to 30 million species. That and extremely limited monitoring programs make it impossible to calculate global insect population trends. Moreover, an extensive insect population study published in 2020 found no overall decline in North America, with declines in some US areas offset by increases elsewhere. The verdict is still out.
Goulson also claims modern pesticides are vastly more toxic than their predecessors. However, an Agriculture Department analysis concluded that, between 1968 and 2008, overall US pesticide toxicity plunged by 98%– while the amount of pesticides (insecticides and herbicides) applied per acre declined by 60% and pesticide persistence in soils and waters was cut in half, as farmers used different, better, more-targeted pesticides more carefully and judiciously, and employed other measures to control pests.
He pillories glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, claiming the chemical is harmful to bees, has been linked to other insect and even bird declines, and causes cancer in humans. For evidence he cites the International Agency on Research and Cancer.
But as I explain in a medical journal paper, IARC has strong ties to American trial lawyers who have filed multiple lawsuits over glyphosate – and the agency’s claims have been roundly contradicted by a decades-long US National Cancer Institute Agricultural Health Study – and by more than 3,300 studies around the world that support glyphosate safety. Reliance on IARC puts Goulson on very thin ice.
He’s against synthetic fertilizers that help us grow far more food from much less land – because they can allegedly reduce floral diversity, make other plants less palatable for insects, pollute aquatic systems and contribute to climate change. He wants children to learn more about ecology and nature in school (presumably only his lesson plans) – and applauds the UK’s Extinction Rebellion lunatics.
These errors, omissions, exaggerations, falsifications and biases shouldn’t be surprising. A widely published biology professor, Goulson is also a trustee for Pesticide Action Network, an ideologically driven anti-pesticide organization.
Goulson’s proffered solutions to his imagined insect Armageddon are equally fanciful. While acknowledging that organic farming uses nasty chemicals and produces 80-90% lower yields than conventional modern agriculture, he wants still more organic farms – even though plowing billions more acres for the same overall crop yields would have horrific impacts on insects and wildlife.
With millions of jobs disappearing, he says the newly unemployed could work on organic farms, in backyard plots and in urban community gardens (doing stoop labor, pulling weeds and picking bugs off vegetables). Ruling elites wouldn’t do such work, of course, but we commoners should.
Amid his concerns about climate change, the author likewise ignores how industrial-scale wind turbines would splatter birds and insects, solar panels would obliterate habitats, and converting forests into wood pellets for “biofuel” electricity generation would destroy still more habitats.Mining and processing for Green New Deal metals and minerals would drastically harm people, insects and planet.
Ultimately, Goulson concludes, we need fewer people, who eat less and “switch to a predominantly vegetable diet, supplemented by small amounts of sustainably-harvested fish and grass-fed meat” (and bugs). Ruling elites once again likely exempted.
It all looks lie part of the Green warriors’ mission to stamp out prosperity as we know it.
"Silent Earth" will undoubtedly get rave reviews from environmentalists, leftist journalists, Big Tech, teachers unions, and the rest of the Cancel Culture. The insanity will get foisted on our children. Parents and policymakers should be wary.
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Senate Confirms Eco-Terrorist to Top Environmental Post
The Senate confirmed another one of President Joe Biden’s nominees on Thursday night, after a controversial confirmation process with bipartisan hesitation. Despite being credibly accused of eco-terrorism and lying to the Senate, Tracy Stone-Manning to lead the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
Senate Republicans urged Democrats to oppose Stone-Manning's confirmation, on account of her troubling history and lies to the Senate, unsuccessfully.
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2021/10/01/tracy-stone-manning-n2596813
********************************************Hack Attack: The Major Problem With EVs No One Is Talking About
When GM earlier this year started recalling Bolts, it issued a warning to owners of the EV: don’t charge your car battery to 100 percent. Normally, this would be easy enough to do. But what if your charger got hacked?
Last year, researchers from the Southwest Research Institute in Texas successfully hacked the most popular charging system used in North America. The hack limited the charging rate, then blocked charging, and then overcharged the battery.
The reason for the hack:
“This was an initiative designed to identify potential threats in common charging hardware as we prepare for widespread adoption of electric vehicles in the coming decade,” according to lead researcher Austin Dodson.
Mission accomplished.
Earlier this month, UK cybersecurity firm Pen Test Partners said that it had found cyber vulnerabilities in six home EV chargers and a large public charging network.
Some of the vulnerabilities were no small potatoes.
Among the findings of Pen Test Partners were a vulnerability that could potentially make possible the hacking of millions of EV chargers simultaneously and another that exposed user and charger data for the hacker to use.
Perhaps the most dangerous vulnerability that the cybersecurity experts uncovered, however, was the possibility for a hacker to take control over millions of chargers.
“As one could potentially switch all chargers on and off synchronously, there is potential to cause stability problems for the power grid, owing to the large swings in power demand as reserve capacity struggles to maintain grid frequency,” the firm said.
EVs have been touted as the future of transportation. Governments in Europe and North America are allocating billions in financing that focus precisely on public charging networks.
Yet, there is little talk about the cybersecurity implications of having a huge network of hundreds of chargers that can be hacked.
Public chargers are the riskiest, it seems. While one could hack a home charger, they would only gain access to that device and possibly the home network of that household.
If they hack a public charger, they could gain access to the whole network, explains Baksheesh Singh Ghuman, Senior Director of Product and GTM Strategy at Finite State, a cybersecurity firm that specializes in connected devices.
Gaining access to data is one risk associated with the vulnerabilities of EV chargers. Another is even more straightforward: electricity theft. If a hacker breaches a public charger, they could siphon electricity off it and make someone else pay, says Singh Ghuman.
Attacks on home chargers can be serious, too, despite their much more limited focus. Since both EVs and EV chargers are connected devices, hacking the charger could grant the attacker access to things like passwords and other credentials.
And that’s not even the worst that can happen.
“Threat actors can also gain control of the electric vehicles themselves, which includes control over steering, brakes, acceleration, and other functions which could result in an accident,” Singh Ghuman told Oilprice.
“They would have the ability to listen in on phone conversations held within the car and steal personal data from the vehicle’s connected network too.”
Everything is hackable, cybersecurity experts have warned repeatedly, from a corporate computer system to a pacemaker. And cybercriminals are often ahead of their opponents in the game of cat and mouse, forcing governments and cybersecurity service providers to often catch up.
Luckily, in the wake of the latest massive hack attacks in the U.S., action is being taken. A recent executive order by President Biden will oblige manufacturers of hackable equipment to start implementing more stringent cybersecurity standards, Singh Ghuman says.
It is important to act preemptively and remove as many vulnerabilities as possible as early as possible.
A lot of hopes are being pinned on electric vehicles as a crucial element of the low-carbon economy of the future. Automakers are spending billions on their shift to EVs, and one could only hope some of that money is being spent on guaranteeing the cybersecurity of the vehicles. It should be, given how much is at stake.
And with carmakers already aware of the challenges they face in promoting their EV models as the better cars, they need to be exceptionally wary of the possibility that the hackability of an EV could very well become a monumental issue alongside range anxiety.
Chargers are even more important. If a hacker can make several hundred chargers switch on and off when the hacker tells them to, that becomes a problem for the grid. And if a larger-scale attack can be launched, the situation would become a lot more serious.
There are already concerns about the addition of millions of EVs to city grids that were not built for this sort of electricity demand. Investments in the upgrade of grids so it can take the additional demand are seen at between $1,630 and $5,380 per EV, according to Boston Consulting Group.
And that’s for EV penetration rates of 10-20 percent. The more EVs are added, the more money will need to be spent to keep the grid stable.
The EV revolution is becoming a challenging endeavor in more aspects than one. The cybersecurity theme needs to be at the center of the EV discourse. The threats might be potential for now but let’s remember: everything can be hacked
https://climatechangedispatch.com/hack-attack-the-major-problem-with-evs-no-one-is-talking-about/
***************************************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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