Climate maniacs missing the forest for the trees
All the resources going into chasing “net zero” policies across the West are wasted in more ways than one.
The obvious one is that it all involves lots of pain for very little real gain when it comes to slowing climate change, since China, India and the developing world aren’t on board.
Worse, the passion distracts from the need to face actually looming environmental threats now confronting humanity.
Like overfishing.
That’s a genuine, short-term problem, one that could bring with it imminent catastrophe by disrupting marine food chains.
It has nothing — literally zero — to do with carbon emissions.
It can be solved by implementing policies that encourage fish farming and punish excessive drag fishing.
Not by forcing us all to use LED bulbs and eat mealworms.
Then there’s food waste.
By some analyses, as much as one-third of all food intended for humans now goes to waste.
That’s another massive environmental crisis, one that has nothing to do with carbon.
Its solutions lie with smart local network efforts and business innovation.
Or consider the insect collapse.
Global insect populations are dropping by as much as 2.5% a year.
No serious green thinker blames that on warming, and the risks it poses — mass plant death and subsequent planetary starvation — are far greater.
Green maniacs are actually causing terrible environmental problems, too. Like with solar, one of the chief renewables pushed by climate fanatics.
Turns out that the waste generated by the production of solar panels — which is 300 times as toxic as nuclear waste, and which is usually shipped from the rich countries that buy the panels to desperately poor ones — poses major health risks, all while solar does almost nothing to combat emissions.
And that’s to say nothing of green efforts to close down nuclear plants, forcing coal plants to come back online (at least 20 are being resurrected in Germany alone).
Look: Climate change is a risk, but it’s a long-term, moderate one.
Per the United Nations, as Bjorn Lomborg has noted, the cost of climate change by the 2070s will be equivalent to a per capita .2% to 2% loss of income. In other words, a moderate recession (albeit taking place in a much richer world).
That’s a legitimate, concerning risk.
But combating it doesn’t justify the wholesale reorganization of society, or keeping poor nations poor by denying them cheap energy.
Pushing to move from coal to LNG in developing nations and to build out nuclear capacity in developed ones would be a good start for those actually concerned.
But for greens, that’s a huge no-no.
So their focus on carbon emissions is not only causing the policies they advocate to miss real and immediate threats.
It’s making us all much worse off.
https://nypost.com/2023/04/08/climate-maniacs-missing-the-forest-for-the-trees/
*******************************************The Death of a Wind Farm
What can one wind facility in Southwestern Minnesota tell us about the state of the American electric grid? Quite a lot, actually.
In 2007, Minnesota began its quest to power the state with wind turbines and solar panels when the Next Generation Energy Act (NGEA) was signed into law, which mandated that 25 percent of the state’s electricity come from "renewable" energy sources by 2025.
These mandates, along with generous federal tax subsidies and monopoly utilities seeking to maximize their government-approved profits by building new infrastructure, led to a building boom in wind turbines and solar panels. From 2007 through 2021, Minnesota built thousands of wind turbines totaling 3,555 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity, and 1,093.5 MW of solar capacity en route to meeting the mandates in 2020, five years ahead of schedule.
However, many of the turbines built to comply with the 25 percent mandate are already being refurbished or “repowered,” long before the end of their supposed 25-year useful lives. In fact, one of these wind facilities, the Nobles wind farm, has already been repowered after just 12 years in service.
But why was Nobles refurbished more than a decade before the end of its useful life at a cost of $240 million? The official reason provided by Xcel Energy for repowering Nobles was to spur economic activity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and extend the retirement date of the facility from the year 2035 to 2045.
This story makes for good newspaper headlines, but the data tell a very different story. Digging deeper into the reasons surrounding Xcel’s decision to repower the Nobles facility illustrates how our state and federal energy policies are causing America’s energy decisions to grow increasingly irrational.
What is repowering and why does it occur?
To fully understand the depth and gravity of this situation and why it has a profound impact on energy policy moving forward, it’s helpful to take a closer look at what repowering is and why it is done.
Repowering is the process of retrofitting or replacing wind turbines in full (full repowering), or in part (partial repowering). Full repowering is the act of completely decommissioning smaller existing wind turbines at a facility and replacing them with larger, but typically fewer, wind turbines.
Partial repowering is the most common form of repowering, and it consists of replacing portions of old turbines, such as the gearbox, hub, main shaft, bearing assembly, rotor, and blades, while maintaining the original steel toners and concrete foundations.
New gearboxes can be needed because the bearings responsible for converting the relatively slow rotations of a turbine’s blades into the high speeds needed to generate electricity can develop cracks, reducing the wind turbine’s efficiency. Larger rotors and longer blades are frequently placed on the original steel towers to increase the wingspan of the wind tower, thus allowing it to access more wind energy and convert it to electricity.
All of these actions help increase the productivity of wind turbines, but the biggest reason that companies seek to repower wind turbines has nothing to do with how they perform, and everything to do with money. Repowering wind projects allows them to requalify for the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC), a lucrative federal subsidy that expires after the first 10 years of a project’s life.
It should come as no surprise, then, that data from the U.S. Department of Energy shows that the wind facilities repowered in 2021 ranged in age from 9 to 16 years old with the median age being 10 years. In essence, the lucrative federal subsidies paid to wind turbine operators are creating a perverse incentive to prematurely refurbish or replace wind projects long before the end of their useful lifetimes, including the Nobles wind project in Minnesota.
https://www.gridbrief.com/p/guest-feature-death-wind-farm
******************************************************A Belated Reckoning as Climate Act Costs Become Apparent
Four years after passage of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, NY state officials have finally begun to take a close look at the law’s consumer costs, and they don’t like what they see.
According to DEC Commissioner Basil Seggos, these costs could be “extraordinary,” such as a 62-cent increase per gallon of gasoline and an 80 percent increase in the price of natural gas, a devastating blow to the 60 percent of New York households that heat with gas.
Governor Hochul and state Senator Kevin Parker are scrambling to reduce those costs by changing how methane is accounted for under the Climate Act. The Act requires the use of a 20-year timeframe, while Hochul and Parker want to switch to the 100-year standard used by the federal government and 48 other states.
Under the 20-year time frame, each ton of methane emitted is calculated as equivalent to around 80 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), while on a 100-year basis, each ton of methane is equivalent to only about 25 tons of CO2. Understood this way, it’s easy to see that eliminating the equivalent of 80 tons of CO2 is more costly than eliminating only 20 tons worth.
And barring some other creative policymaking, these costs are likely to be passed onto consumers.
This belated recognition of the Climate Act’s consumer costs reflects the state’s failure from the beginning to seriously address how the law might affect New Yorkers’ wallets.
The Act was enacted in such a rush that neither the legislature nor then-Governor Andrew Cuomo bothered to produce any estimate of its fiscal and economic impacts, as the Empire Center pointed out during that process.
But they seem to have suspected the impacts would be substantial, because while the original draft of the bill required a scoping plan to be released by July 2022—just ahead of the legislative and gubernatorial elections—the final draft moved that deadline to the politically safer date of January 1, 2023.
A cost study may have been completed by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) and Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) under a promise by Cuomo to identify “the most rapid, cost-effective, and responsible pathway to reach 100 percent renewable energy statewide.” But when the Empire Center filed a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for this study, the agencies declined to provide it.
And when the Empire Center won an initial court order requiring the agencies to share the study, the agencies won on appeal by claiming that the study was not complete.
It’s uncertain whether this study ever was completed. And in March of this year NYSERDA again refused an Empire Center FOIL request for any internal cost-benefit analyses, despite an implicit admission that such a document exists.
An overall cost-benefit analysis was prepared by an outside consultant for the Climate Action Council as it worked on the Act’s Scoping Plan, but that study has many problems. Not least of those problems is that it was based on assumptions that were neither required by the Climate Act nor adopted by the Climate Action Council. That is to say, the policies assumed for that study are not necessarily those New York is actually implementing.
And when some members of the Council asked for a consumer cost analysis of the Act, co-chairs Seggos and Doreen Harris, President and CEO of NYSERDA, refused their request.
Now, at last, Seggos admits, “There hasn’t been a deep dive into costs . . . That’s what we are beginning to look at now.” But rather than acknowledge that they failed to do due diligence up front, the proposed change in accounting methods is argued as simply bringing the state into compliance with “internationally accepted best practices.”
However, Climate Action Council member and Cornell University climate expert Robert Howarth scoffs at the claim that a 100-year time frame is best practice. He argues that it is a scientifically archaic approach adopted when we had less understanding of methane’s heat-trapping potential. “The science since then,” he says, “has demonstrated that it severely under accounts for the climatic risk from methane emissions,” which have a much greater global warming potential than CO2.
Howarth has the better argument on which time frame is state of the art, but while countering climate change is one important value, the costs—both economic and political—of doing so are another. Even if the economic benefits ultimately outweigh the costs—a big if—people will feel the costs first and most immediately, which could create substantial political costs for the Hochul administration.
The administration, then, is finally coming to grips with the reality that while most New Yorkers support the Climate Act in the abstract, they also express a very limited willingness to pay for it. They have run headlong into the Iron Law of Climate Policy, which says that “when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time.”
Or as an op-ed penned by Seggos and Harris succinctly puts it, “Fighting climate change won’t work if people and businesses can’t afford it.”
But if the state had done its homework ahead of time—if it had analyzed the potential consumer costs before passing the law, or if the Climate Action Council had acted on its members’ request to do so—we could have had a more serious discussion about how to affordably reduce greenhouse gas emissions much earlier in this multi-year process.
https://www.empirecenter.org/publications/a-belated-reckoning-as-climate-act-costs-become-apparent/
***************************************************Australian scientists discover special crab to fix Great Barrier Reef coral destruction
The deadly starfish can devour up to 90 per cent of living coral tissue, and has contributed to an estimated 40 per cent of coral loss on the reef.
Scientists from the University of Queensland have now found a special species of crab which can eat the crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) before it reaches adulthood and begins feasting on the endangered coral habitat.
A team of biological scientists from the University of Queensland including researcher Amelia Desbiens, tested more than 100 species of crab, shrimp, worm, snail and small fish to see which creatures were potential COTS predators.
To their surprise, they discovered the red decorator crab had an impressive appetite for COTS. “You can’t imagine our excitement, we were beyond stoked,” Ms Desbiens said.
“We cast a wide net and to find such a voracious predator – each red decorator crab devoured more than five COTS per day while most other species barely ate a single one.
“It’s one of the best predators of COTS we’ve seen and could be a natural buffer against future outbreaks on the reef.”
Prior to the red decorator crab revelation, scientists held little knowledge of which COTS predators were most effective, with few animals able to eat adult COTS due to their ability to defend themselves with their toxic spines.
The new discovery is expected to help scientists rebalance the Great Barrier Reef’s natural predator ecosystem, with the crab able to effectively limit COTS mass-reproduction and population outbreaks.
“There’s already an extensive COTS culling program along the barrier reef and I can see this research fitting into the program ... which is really exciting,” Ms Desbiens said.
“The reef has already faced a lot of stress for climate induced issues, hopefully culling can provide a bit of relief from those other stresses.
“The next step is to look for the predators across other (reef) locations further than Heron Island and start searching for these crabs in places where the COTS outbreaks have been a real problem. Redirect our attention to more vulnerable areas.”
UQ senior research author Dr Kenny Wolfe agreed, saying scientists were now “on the right path” to addressing the COTS outbreaks along the severely damaged coral reef.
“We’d like to conduct broader surveys on the Great Barrier Reef across areas with and without outbreaks to evaluate whether the presence of this crab can help predict the chance of COTS gaining a foothold,” Dr Wolfe said.
“This preliminary study sets us on the right path to resolving the role naturally existing predators could play in controlling COTS outbreaks.”
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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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