15 minute cities: burning to the ground
Are this century’s ideological peasants finally revolting? It certainly seems that way after residents set fire to road block ‘planters’ which had been erected to prevent them from driving freely around their community.
UK neighbourhoods are being used as test cases for the 15 minute city plan that is, after a fashion and a few intermediary thought bubbles, the child of United Nations Sustainability Goals and World Economic Forum collaborations.
Others might describe them as open air prisons where ‘global citizens’ are being confined to small areas to ‘save the planet’ under threat of being fined.
Not everyone is impressed by the experiment, with residents in Rochdale destroying the barriers which some are trying to pass off as ‘traffic control systems’ rather than sinister infringements on basic freedom of movement. Others have found themselves prevented from travelling to work by unofficial and legally powerless self-appointed enforcers who refuse to allow the movement of traffic. Surely that is an offence? It is like being ruled by a mob.
The unavoidable truth is that people are already free to leave their cars at home if they want to embrace the de-industrialised lifestyle, but they choose not to. Why? Their free choice is to drive and thus, as with all socialist policies, government has decided it must use force to guarantee what it sees as good social behaviour. Get used to it. We are going to be seeing a lot more of this behavioural intervention.
You can find plenty of 15 minute city defenders on social media insisting that this is just a ‘suggestion’ or some sort of voluntary adjustment to the way people move through their cities. Far from it. In Oxford, which is another ‘Low Traffic Neighbourhood’, similar blockades were being manned by bright-haired randoms. Everywhere 15 minute cities are put in place, the working class freak out.
For a long time, residents in these areas either didn’t realise what was going on or thought these mutterings and endless surveys put out by their local council were some kind of joke. After all, Net Zero policies read as fanatical madness. Now that Woke councils are trying to put physical barriers up to enforce ‘planet saving’ ideology, residents are reacting loudly and, in some cases, destructively.
Needless to say, the 15 minute city is being delayed for ‘further consultation’.
No doubt community feedback will involve something along the lines of ‘bugger off’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/15-minute-cities-burning-to-the-ground/
*************************************************American Forests Are Being Razed So Europe Can Cling to ‘Green’ Energy
To bolster its climate-friendly credentials, Europe is increasingly reliant on an energy source as old as fire itself — dead trees.
While European Union officials refer to it as the more environmentally friendly “biomass” and call it a “renewable resource,” little of it is coming from the continent itself. Much of the forests being razed to heat and cool the continent are in the southeastern United States.
A German green energy entrepreneur, Simon Göss, recently published a report on the future of biomass and biogas as a method of transitioning toward a carbon-free Europe by 2050. Mr. Göss found that as of today, woody biomass makes up a majority of Europe’s “green” energy sector — nearly 60 percent across the continent.
“Most of the time, wind and solar or energy carriers and technologies such as hydrogen or batteries make it to the headlines,” he wrote in his report. “The larger part of the EU’s renewable energy mix is, however, made up of biomass … in different forms (liquid, gaseous, solid) and origins (wood, grasses, agricultural residues by-products, etc).”
In the continent’s largest countries, biomass plants are cropping up in the thousands. In Germany, there are 14,922 plants that burn some form of biomass — a 17.5 percent increase in the last 10 years. The United Kingdom is home to 226 biomass plants nationwide, which is enough to supply the energy needs of more than eight million homes.
The main use of these biomass sources is for heating and cooling — something vital to the lives of everyday Europeans as gas prices reached historic highs this past winter. Nearly 75 percent of the biomass used in Europe is for heating homes in the winter or cooling them in the summer.
The sustainability of woody biomass — most notably trees — has been questioned by climate activists and scientists in recent years as deforestation has increased. Between 2001 and 2021, the world lost 11 percent of its total tree coverage.
Despite these concerns, the European Union and its legislative body, the European parliament, have fully embraced the practice. In September 2022, when gas prices were three times their current rate on the continent, the European parliament voted to adopt the Renewable Energy Directive, which called for more investment in and use of biomass as an energy source. The parliament voted at the same time to strengthen protections for its own forests and implemented new “sustainability guidelines” to maintain tree cover levels.
Instead of razing its own forests to flout its green credentials, Europe is using America’s. Tree farms in the southeast provide tens of millions of tons of biomass to Europe every year, and some residents of the Deep South are starting to balk about it.
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Europe consumed 23 million metric tons of wood pellets in 2021 and was on pace to burn 24 million metric tons in 2022. At the time, most of it came from Russia and the United States. The war in Ukraine and subsequent sanctions against Russia cut off that source, and now the United States provides as much as 99 percent of the wood pellets needed to power Europe annually.
The Southern Environmental Law Center is one group seeking to slow down the expansion of the industry in America. “Along with CO2, manufacturing and burning wood pellets produces harmful pollutants like nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, hazardous air pollutants, and microscopic dust particles that contribute to serious health risks,” the group’s website states.
Millions of tons of trees are extracted from the southeastern United States to feed this green energy sector, and many are issuing warnings about deforestation and the risks associated with it.
“Biomass energy has received growing attention in the United States,” the law group wrote. “We are committed to ensuring American lawmakers don’t make the same mistakes made in other countries, and that policy makers know the threats the biomass industry poses to the climate, local communities, and the South’s air, water, and millions of acres of forest land.”
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The Navy’s Climate Change Agenda
The United States Navy has long ruled the seas. That reputation was earned over many years, and while the Navy remains a formidable force on the world’s oceans, that strength may be waning more quickly than any of us realize.
China’s military has been on the rise in recent years, but instead of keeping pace with China’s emergence as a global sea power and making sure America stays on the cutting edge of technology, our Navy has another priority: climate change.
“The Department of the Navy is stepping forward with Climate Action 2030, a broad, multi-pronged approach,” explains the U.S. Department of Defense website. “The Navy is working to improve efficiency of ships, electrifying vehicles and greatly reducing emissions.” Furthermore, “The Navy is also funding efforts to help restore coral reefs and is eager to pursue further efforts on coral reef research, regrowth and even creation.”
Coral reef research? Electric vehicles? This is the Navy’s answer to China’s explosive growth as a naval power?
Unfortunately, the current Navy leadership thinks so.
“China, which is rapidly becoming the dominant marine force, doesn’t give a damn about adapting to climate change,” says journalist Daniel Greenfield, “except when it comes to peddling its junk solar panels assembled by slave labor to woke companies that will resell them at a massive markup while gobbling up tax credits because when we go ‘green,’ it only weakens us and strengthens our enemies.”
Indeed, while the West goes green, China continues building coal plants. “China became the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2006 and is now responsible for more than a quarter of the world’s overall greenhouse gas emissions,” reports the BBC.
Greenfield adds: “While our military brass obsessed over diversity, equity and inclusion, the PRC turned the South China Sea into its own private backyard, enabling it to potentially cut off traffic to the United States. China has built up chains of islands studded with its naval outposts so that its fighter jets and ant-ship and anti-aircraft missiles now encompass not only the coasts of Taiwan and China, but much of the coastlines of everything from Thailand to Malaysia to the Philippines.”
While current Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro publicly recognizes the threat from China’s navy, he and the Biden administration have planned to reduce the number of U.S. warships.
“The Biden administration released its proposed budget for 2024, which calls for shrinking the Navy fleet even though most military experts and senior Navy officers have called for more ships to deter China’s larger fleet,” Fox News reports. “For several years now, the Navy has set a goal of having 355 manned ships. But, for the last three years, the Biden administration has proposed shrinking the fleet below the roughly 298 ships it has available now, instead of increasing it toward a 355-ship goal.”
Meanwhile, the People’s Liberation Army is expected to have 400 ships by 2025.
But not to worry — President Joe Biden has mandated that each military service have a sustainability officer. Meredith Berger, assistant secretary of the Navy, talks about LED lighting and new salt-resistant paint for naval vessels.
That sure won’t deter China in a naval battle. But hey, if we can’t win, at least the paint on our ships won’t peel.
Even The Atlantic, not exactly a pro-military publication, warns: “It is time for the United States to think and act, once again, like a seapower state. As the naval historian Andrew Lambert has explained, a seapower state understands that its wealth and its might principally derive from seaborne trade, and it uses instruments of sea power to promote and protect its interests. To the degree possible, a seapower state seeks to avoid direct participation in land wars, large or small.”
That’s a clear, sensible assessment of the current state of the U.S. Navy compared to the gobbledygook in the Climate Action 2030 plan.
Assuming the Navy transitions to an electric vehicle fleet, reduces building emissions by 50%, implements nature-based erosion solutions, and diverts solid waste from landfills (all prominent objectives in its Climate Action plan), how will any of this prevent China from dominating the seas in the 21st century?
Of course, it will do nothing to combat China’s rise as the world’s new sea power.
A century from now, historians will scratch their heads and wonder how America could have been so naïve to give it all away. By then, maybe our leaders will have learned their lesson about the climate change religion.
Then again, maybe it will be too late to do anything about it
https://patriotpost.us/articles/96137 ?
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Australia's unsafe Safeguard Mechanism
And so, the Greens have joined the ALP in imposing additional carbon taxes on the top 215 greenhouse gas emitting firms. In passing the so-called Safeguard Mechanism, the voluntary program that the Coalition originally introduced is converted into a requirement on the nation’s top mining and industrial firms to reduce their emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. Those emissions are said to be 137 million tonnes a year. Their curtailment builds up to constitute 40 million tonnes a year. This is in addition to abatement measures already in place, which confer a subsidy on wind and solar, that has enabled those energy sources to displace a quarter of the supply formerly provided by coal.
One way to meet the new reductions is by internal measures (for some firms, like AGL, this simply means closing down generation facilities). Alternatively, the targeted firms can supply or buy emission reduction certificates under one of the schemes managed by the Clean Energy Regulator and state governments.
The Commonwealth schemes create large-scale generation certificates (LGCs) and small-scale generation certificates (STCs) by requiring electricity retailers to include increasing shares of wind/solar energy in their supply mix. The certificates only have a value because governments have placed (hidden) regulatory obligations on consumers to buy them. Unlike goods offered in normal markets, the certificates have no intrinsic worth but confer a value of $40-90 per MWh on the renewable supplies. That is more than the total average market price of electricity that prevailed before the subsidies themselves undermined the economics of supply from coal generation.
Anthony Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, drawing off faulty CSIRO analysis and the pressures of the renewables lobby, maintain that renewables are already the cheapest form of energy. That belief is largely behind their concoction of a $275 per annum reduction in household energy prices that they claimed their ambitious renewable replacement policy would bring.
The irony of all this – and one the ALP and their media supporters missed – is that if renewables really were cheaper the subsidy these schemes confer on them and the penalties they impose on coal and gas would be an unnecessary cost.
The previous government introduced a further scheme, which was funded from the budget, that created Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) that confer a value on selected activities. The ACCUs, like generation certificates, subsidise high-cost measures thereby increasing the cost of living. Eligible activities include carbon capture and storage, converting farmland to bush, and capture of waste gas. The ACCUs have provided a cheaper means of meeting obligations but Greens in Australia and elsewhere have (correctly) come to view them as con jobs that are easily manipulated and provide no real emission reduction. Hence, as part of the deal to pass the Safeguard Mechanism, their use is to be sharply curtailed. Naturally, farmers and carbon capture subsidy seekers are spitting chips at their loss of taxpayer largesse.
The creation of new LGCs is the most likely alternative to shutting down facilities and moving production offshore (which, of course, brings no consequent reduction in emissions!). These will come at a likely price of around $80 per tonne (roughly $80 per MWh). The cost of the 40 million additional tonnes the 215 targeted facilities are to abate annually by 2030 would therefore be some $320 million a year. As this would largely be imposed on the internationally tradable sector it will, of itself, severely dent the nation’s competitiveness and income levels.
But the Greens boast that, through the concessions they have won in acceding to the government’s measures, they will create additional damage. Some of this is due to the restriction on the use of the cheaper ACCU means of firms buying out their new liabilities under the Safeguard Mechanism. In addition, they claim that the government will be obliged to restrain all new or expanded coal and gas proposals.
The measures certainly introduce new machinery that intensifies the government’s oversight and approval of new proposals. That is a real bonus for a government seeking to ensure support from major producers and to constrain their criticism. It also promises considerable new outlets for lobbyists in their roles of not-so-hidden persuaders and in confecting plans that get promising new proposals over the regulatory hurdles.
These outcomes constitute an Antipodean form of fascism. As a vehicle for greater economic control, the present government finds this irresistible but it will bog down the economy in the tentacles of political corruption and new layers of costs.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/03/the-unsafe-safeguard-mechanism
***************************************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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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