Is this the Dutch farmers’ moment?
Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister for over 12 years, has announced he is resigning and leaving politics. He delivered the news on Monday morning, after the collapse of his coalition government on Friday.
The immediate cause of the government’s collapse is a row over the Netherlands’ growing immigration crisis. The issue has plagued the government for months, after chaotic scenes at a migrant-registration centre in Ter Apel near Groningen last autumn. People were sleeping outside for days and a baby was left to die in a crowded sports hall.
Rutte and his People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) wanted to impose tighter curbs on immigration. But the other three parties in the coalition objected. And so Rutte, unable to break the deadlock, gave the government’s collective resignations to King Willem-Alexander on Friday. Rutte and his cabinet will stay on in government in a caretaker capacity until a General Election, which is expected to take place in November.
A row over immigration may have been the immediate cause of the government’s downfall. But its problems went far deeper. As with almost everywhere else in Europe, crippling Covid lockdowns have cast a long shadow. There was also the child-benefits scandal in 2021, in which 26,000 parents were wrongly accused of making fraudulent claims. Now there is an energy crisis and a cost-of-living crisis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, polling suggests that voters feel Rutte and his cabinet have been doing a bad job in general.
Arguably, the Rutte government’s biggest challenge came from the agricultural sector. Indeed, Dutch farmers have been in open revolt against the government for four years now. And for good reason. Under pressure from the EU, the Dutch government has been trying to cut nitrogen emissions in the Netherlands by half in order to meet Net Zero targets. This policy would be devastating to farmers’ livelihoods. It amounts to an order to significantly reduce fertiliser use and to cut livestock numbers. To ensure emissions are reduced, the Dutch government is targeting around 3,000 of the most polluting farms for closure.
In response, the Dutch farmers have staged large-scale protests in towns and on highways. And, in November 2019, they formed a political party, the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB). Throughout this time, the farmers have won considerable popular support. At the Dutch local elections in March, the BBB inflicted heavy losses on Rutte’s VVD, and became the largest party in the senate. Recent polls put the BBB in a tie for the lead with the VVD.
So the BBB and its supporters will see the upcoming General Election as a real opportunity to gain significant political power. This would be a chance not only to stop the destruction of farmers’ livelihoods, but also to make a decisive break with the politics of the Dutch establishment.
It will not be easy. The BBB knows that in order to halt the closure of thousands of farms, any future government would butt heads with the EU. It would have to resist the EU’s Net Zero crusade. And everyone knows how ruthlessly the EU tends to respond to resistance from member states. While some Eurosceptic voters might relish a conflict with the EU, this prospect could also put off some voters who are otherwise sympathetic to the BBB’s cause.
Furthermore, the resignation of the unpopular Rutte could end up leading to a revival of the VVD’s fortunes. It’s entirely possible a new leader might be able to rebuild some of the bridges he broke over the past few years. A renewed VVD might start to look like a safe option for voters again.
So, in the run-up to this winter’s General Election, the Dutch farmers and their supporters will need to be brave. They will need to show that they are willing and able to take on the EU – and that there is an alternative to the Dutch establishment. The whole of Europe will be watching.
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Beware the habitual El Niño hype
The world is once again in the grip of a semi-regular climate alarm. I’m not referring to the latest onset of the El Niño cycle, declared in action on July 4th by the United Nations, but the amplified rhetoric about the pace and scale of warming temperatures that always accompanies such El Niño periods.
Do you remember what happened last time we had a record El Niño in 2015/16? Global temperatures increased rapidly – as they do during such an event – and, according to some, it was full speed ahead to a runaway thermal apocalypse … until global temperatures started to fall again.
Earlier this month, the world broke global temperature records for several days, inevitably leading to renewed speculation about the onset of runaway global warming. The Guardian asked if we have entered a more erratic and dangerous phase with the onset of an El Niño event on top of human-made global heating.
Well, not really, or at least not on the basis of the data we have so far.
The global temperature data which started these claims are of course preliminary and are in any case a mixture of real data and input from models so a note of caution is needed. Nonetheless it is expected that the temperature records will be confirmed in coming months.
The real situation is, as they say, a little more complicated than many of the exaggerated claims.
In recent months the atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic has been unusual. The Azores High – a semi-permanent area of high pressure – was much weaker than normal. To put this into context, for the past decade the Azores High was about or above average at this time of year. This years variation resulted in low wind speeds occurring at the same time as a so-called marine heatwave in the north Atlantic.
The lower wind speeds lead to a reduction in the mixing of surface water with the cooler water below, allowing the sea surface temperatures to increase. Another consequence is a reduction in the transport of dust from the Sahara westward over the north Atlantic. Usually Saharan dust reflects solar radiation back into space before it reaches the ocean surface, thereby cooling it. Another contributing factor is the decreasing particulate pollution over the northern hemisphere as the air gets cleaner over Europe and North America.
Now add all those effects to the multi-decadal fluctuation of north Atlantic circulation and the consequential transport of heat about which we have a very incomplete understanding.
Then there is the El Niño starting to snake its way across Pacific equatorial waters. All of this is against a backdrop of a global warming trend which, aside from the El Niño, hasn’t shown much of an increase, if at all in almost the past decade.
So looking at the events of the past few months, and the records broken, you would have to say it’s complicated and best left to a post-El Niño analysis. No such caution for the Met Office and the Guardian however: “If a few decades ago, some people might have thought climate change was a relatively slow-moving phenomenon, we are now witnessing our climate changing at a terrifying rate,” they quote Prof Peter Stott, who leads the UK Met Office’s climate monitoring and attribution team.
Given the complexity and disparity of recent events I look forward to the Met Office’s post-El Niño analysis of such extreme and rather premature hype.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/beware-habitual-el-nino-hype/
********************************************The religious cult of climate catastrophism
Andrew Montford
I HAVE been working in climate and energy for nearly 15 years, and it’s fair to say that it’s not often I find something that makes me radically change the way I look at the domain. But a new book, by Andy A West, has done just that.
The Grip of Culture makes the case that climate catastrophism is cultural – akin to religion or one of the extreme political movements that have assailed the world from time to time. This is not an entirely new idea; lots of people have alluded to the possibility that a religion has formed around the belief that we are facing a weather wipeout. You can certainly see lots of behaviour among climate zealots that is identical to that of zealots from other, older religious systems. So opponents are demonised, and waverers are threatened with expulsion to keep them on the straight and narrow. They have a hallowed text that few have tried to read, and fewer can understand. There are prophets and prophetesses, and a dizzying and ever-changing narrative of fear and redemption which is impossible to escape.
Circumstantially then, climate catastrophism looks exactly like a religion. Intriguingly though, West argues that he can prove the point, and at the heart of the book is a set of measurements of public attitudes to global warming from around the world. At first these seem very strange – inexplicable even – with national publics apparently simultaneously greatly concerned by climate change and not at all keen to do anything about it. Bizarrely, the more religious a country is, the more worried the populace is about the issue, and the less inclined to prioritise addressing it.
West shows that these apparently schizophrenic attitudes can be explained as the interaction between traditional religion and a new faith of climate catastrophism. The measurement chapters are really rather remarkable, with extraordinarily strong statistical relationships emerging between national religiosity and climate change attitudes: correlations where questions invite virtue signalling responses (‘How worried are you about climate change’) and equally strong anti-correlations when hard reality gets involved (‘How much are you willing to spend each week to reduce climate change’). Opinion polling on the subject will never be the same again.
It’s deliciously counterintuitive, and very powerful. For example, West shows that you can use the results to predict real-world phenomena such as the spread of renewables across different nations. Remarkably, he gets a better result from using religiosity as a predictor than, say, GDP, political inclination. And if you think sunshine hours should be a great predictor of solar power usage, think again; not only is religiosity far better, but absurdly there turns out to be a much stronger commitment to solar in cloudy (European) nations than in sunny ones!
This is a lot of fun, but there is an extremely serious message to the book. Religions – cultures, that is – are powerful influences on humanity. They bind societies together, and enable us to work towards a common goal. In this way they have been central to the rise of every great civilisation. But they also function subconsciously, and therefore without any reference to rational thought. It’s as though the culture has a mind of its own. So the common goals that end up being pursued are as often self-destructive as they are beneficial. The book outlines appalling stories of societies which have been torn apart and even ruined themselves in this way.
We are therefore warned. If we are truly in the grip of a new culture, then we need to be very worried about where it is taking us, because it could be to the brink of disaster and beyond.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-religious-cult-of-climate-catastrophism/
*******************************************Offshore wind: A perfect storm of costs
In the renewable energy industry hope ever springs eternal, with Australia and the US forging ahead with plans to build a host of offshore wind turbines just as the UK is realising its large offshore wind sector is only adding to its power woes.
After years of assurances from renewable energy advocates that the UK’s offshore wind farm sector will deliver cheap and plentiful power, with the equivalent of more than 15 gigawatts of capacity now installed, the country’s power prices are amongst the highest in all Europe.
A major reason for the increase is the price of gas, with wholesale power from gas plants three times more expensive than before the crisis, according to the UK media, but wind power is simply adding to the problem. By some estimates power from the offshore turbines is even more expensive than gas power during the crisis.
The costs of building wind turbines capable of surviving major storms well out to sea are immense and increasing, as are the costs of maintaining generators mounted at the top of 200-metre poles far from land. Despite subsidies and a system for allocating power contracts which greatly favours the industry, UK wind lobby groups have written to the government asking for a vast increase in assistance, including tilting the auction system for power contracts further in their favour.
However, Australia and the US seem determined to repeat all the mistakes of their UK cousins and add a few of their own. In Australia, plans for offshore wind are still in the early stages. A wind farm zone has been designated in the relatively shallow waters off Victoria’s southern coast east of Melbourne which also happens to be within easy range of major transmission lines. Although considerable interest in building 300-metre tall towers (the same height as the Eiffel tower in Paris) has been reported, the project is not expected to deliver power until 2032. Other wind zones are still being discussed.
In the US, the country’s third offshore wind farm was given federal government permission in early July, with several more in the approvals pipeline. However, the latest project, including 100 turbines to be built within sight of the tourist havens of Atlantic City and Ocean City, has generated considerable opposition from community groups objecting to the beach view being spoiled.
All these proposals come with the usual blather about how cheap such power will be, despite the fact that in the UK the cost of the ruling Tory government’s obsession with wind farms is now becoming apparent.
As an example, the UK Telegraph states that the offshore wind farms Hornsea Two and Moray East were completed in 2022 with capital costs of about £2.75 billion ($A5.28 billion) per GW, or more than four times the cost of closed cycle gas turbine capacity. Estimates of maintenance costs, according to the Telegraph, are as high as £200 million per GW installed, per annum. That adds up to a nominal cost of offshore wind generation of £170/MWh, or about the same or somewhat higher than for gas turbines, even in these dire times of high gas prices.
On top of that figure must be added the costs of accommodating the variable output of such turbines. This includes keeping conventional, that is fossil-fuel, capacity on standby to fill the power gap when wind dies. In addition, in the UK, a large, and growing, contribution to these balancing costs involves paying a wind farm not to put power onto the grid when there is an excess, say when it is windy in the middle of the night. (In Australia, wind farms over a certain size are simply required to stay off the grid when directed by power grid managers.)
According to the energy news website Energy Live, in 2022 the UK grid spent more than £4 billion on balancing costs, or many times the costs of balancing the grid in the pre-wind era.
In addition to balancing costs the UK has a contracts for difference system which, details aside, guarantees prices paid to wind farms for power delivered. The subsidies required for this system are raised through a statutory levy on electricity suppliers and ultimately passed onto power consumers.
The wind industry is now saying that despite all that assistance offshore wind farms are not making enough to keep their own lights on. RenewableUK, the country’s trade association for renewable energy, announced in early July that the leading wind energy lobby groups have collectively written to the government saying that various projects are under threat unless they get more money, and the tendering system for contracts is changed.
The letter itself does not seem to be available and the mainstream media have largely ignored the story. But from RenewableUK statements and available commentary, it is apparent the wind industry is saying the budget for fixed-foundation offshore wind alone has to be at least two-and-a-half times higher than its current level. That means the industry has it’s hand out for more than £165 million.
In addition, the sub-sector of floating wind generators should be given its own budget pot and the auction rules changed. Winners are not determined by lowest bids but by an administrative decision that weights bids according to their ‘value’ in contributing towards the net-zero targets.
To justify all of this the wind industry points to a surge in supply chain costs pushing up the price of wind turbines, while increases in global interest rates have raised refinancing costs substantially. Those cost pressures have pushed several projects into the red just a year after they won government contracts. A widely reported winning bid in that round of contracts was for about £75 per MWh, as opposed to the Guardian newspaper’s estimated cost of £175 per MWh
Then there are the problems at Siemens Energy’s wind turbines division, Siemens Gamesa, which bills itself as a leader in renewable energy, particularly in offshore wind in which it holds 44GW worth of projects.
According to the latest quarterly report for Siemens Energy the division managed to lose £386 million on revenue of £2.44 billion for just the three months to the end of March, with the parent company warning of ‘deeper quality problems’. The quarter’s loss was blamed on inflation, supply chain challenges, the ramp-up of offshore activities and the effects of ‘onerous projects’.
Offshore wind, it seems, is not a solution to anything but a perfect storm of costs which governments in the US and Australia are doing their best to replicate.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/gone-with-the-wind
***************************************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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