New York will ban single-use plastic silverware beginning Monday
I loved the heading above. NYC has plastic silver?
If you order takeout food, you might be accustomed to receiving a packet of plastic cutlery with your food to prevent you from needing to potentially needing to use your fingers or perhaps a comb to consume your food. However, if you live in New York City, you soon won't receive one unless you make it a point to ask for it.
New York City passed a "skip the stuff" law earlier this year that prohibited "restaurants, third-party food delivery services, and courier services from providing eating utensils, napkins, condiment packets, and extra food and beverage containers to customers with their take-out and delivery orders, unless specifically requested."
In explaining the decision the NYC City Council said, "More than 320 million tons of plastic are consumed each year globally, with 95% of plastic only used once and 14% for recycling. The “Skip the Stuff” legislation would decrease the amount of plastic in our waste stream, and it would reduce expenses for food service establishments."
The law takes effect on Monday, and restaurants who are found to have illegally provided plastic utensils to customers face potential fines ranging from $50 to $250. To soften the blow of the new law, the city has promised that restaurants will only be issued warnings for violating the law until July 1, 2024, when the fines will become mandatory.
The "skip the stuff" law is the latest salvo in New York City's war on takeout food packaging and accoutrements. In 2019, the city banned styrofoam containers for takeout food, and a ban on plastic straws went into effect in 2021.
The new law also places the onus on third-party delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash to ensure compliance with the law as well.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/new-york-will-ban-single-use-plastic-silverware-beginning-monday
***************************************************The UN’s climate alarmism has gone too far
Ross Clark
UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres has declared that ‘the era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived’. As if that were not enough, Guterres declared that ‘the air is unbreathable, the heat is unbearable’.
Something is raging out of control but it isn’t the temperature: last week’s famous ‘heat domes’ have subsided, with only a few patches of southern Europe over 30ºC this afternoon. It is hyperbole over the climate.
What does Guterres – who appeared to be breathing normally as he delivered his speech – hope to achieve by using language that tries to make out that life on Earth is no longer sustainable?
We are in an arms race of extreme language, with everyone falling over each other to outdo each other. The world falls in on anyone who seeks to pooh-pooh the narrative around global warming – climate scepticism was one of the reasons Coutts cited for closing Nigel Farage’s bank account – yet no one ever seems to get into trouble for exaggeration.
Just as with Covid, there is a price to be paid for scaring people. For the past week, we have been shown footage of holidaymakers fleeing from fires on Rhodes, the impression given that the island has become permanently uninhabitable. Yet, as the island’s deputy mayor said today, actually only one hotel has been burned down. As it attempts to recover from the fire, Rhodes’s tourist industry has been greatly harmed, certainly for this season and possibly well beyond. Despite the apocalyptic language, as I wrote here the other day, wildfires are not on the rise globally, in spite of hotter and drier conditions in some places.
You might as well sit in a deckchair and listen to the band rather than seek a place in a lifeboat. That is the attitude that Guterres and his like are breeding
There is a wider point: if you are going to tell people they are effectively doomed, and a depressing number of children and young people appear to believe this. A 2021 poll by the University of Bath of 10,000 16 to 25-year-olds around the world found that 56 per cent of them agreed with the statement that humanity is doomed. What, then, is the incentive to do anything about it? You might as well sit in a deckchair and listen to the band rather than seek a place in a lifeboat. That is the attitude that Guterres and his like are breeding.
Three years ago, I wrote a satirical novel, The Denial, in which a future government kept renaming the Department of Climate Change so that it became, in turn, the Department of Climate Crisis, the Department of Climate Emergency, the Department of Climate Cataclysm, Department for the Climate Apocalypse, and the Department of the Climate Armageddon. (It also, incidentally, saw a character debanked for his views on climate change). Guterres has brought that hysterical world a little bit closer.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/the-uns-climate-alarmism-has-gone-too-far/
****************************************************It's not climate change that's causing heat waves this summer but no one wants to explain why
Every summer, heat waves inevitably hit the U.S. and other parts of the world, causing climate alarmists and left-leaning media outlets to demand dramatic, disastrous changes to the global energy system. Unfortunately, this summer is no different.
On Tuesday, U.S. media outlets published a wave of stories about supposedly "historic" heat waves in Europe and North America. For example, The Washington Post published an article titled "Heat waves in U.S., Europe ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change, study finds."
Similarly, Axios published a story titled "Historic and enduring U.S. heat wave, by the numbers."
Although certain parts of the U.S. have undoubtedly experienced strong heat waves this summer, there’s no reason to believe these weather events are evidence that the world is hurtling toward a climate change catastrophe. In fact, the best available evidence suggests that heat waves recorded a century ago were more problematic than anything we’re seeing today.
Government researchers have been tracking heat waves for more than 100 years. According to data from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, which is made available by the Environmental Protection Agency, the annual heat wave index for the contiguous 48 states was substantially higher in the 1930s than at any point in recent years. In some years in the 1930s, it was four times greater or even more.
Additionally, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a large database of daily temperatures that goes back to 1948. NOAA used 1,066 weather stations located across the U.S. to collect this data.
According to NOAA, huge swaths of the U.S. have experienced a significant decrease in abnormally hot days recorded since 1948, especially in the Midwest and northern and eastern Texas.
Although it’s true that some parts of the U.S. have seen the number of hotter-than-usual days increase over the past 70 years — including in California and the New York metropolitan area, both of which happen to be areas where a large number of media outlets are located — most weather stations have shown no meaningful changes or even declines.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts, who works with me as a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute, analyzed NOAA’s data in detail and found that 81% of the weather stations used in NOAA’s database reported that since 1948 there has been "either a decrease or no change in the number of unusually hot days."
If the available data so clearly reveal that there is no heat-wave crisis, why are media outlets suggesting the opposite is true? The answer is sloppy, irresponsible media reporting, combined with cherry-picked data.
Anyone who wants to show a long-term warming or cooling trend can do so by selectively choosing starting and ending points in datasets that will provide the answer you’re looking for.
For instance, if you start your examination of historic temperatures with figures collected in the 1970s, when temperatures were unusually low compared to the rest of the century, then current temperatures look abnormally high.
United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry lashes out in House hearingVideo
If you start around 2010, then temperatures over the past decade appear to have dipped below "normal" and are only now recovering.
When many media outlets and left-wing politicians talk about climate change data, they almost always selectively choose a range that offers an incomplete picture of the larger available dataset. This makes it appear as though today’s temperatures are "historic" when they are actually well within normal historical ranges.
Another problem is that media outlets have been using temperature forecasts in their news reports as if those figures were actual temperature data. A forecast is, by definition, a guess, and some alarmist analysts have recently made a bad habit of incorrectly predicting insanely high temperatures that never come to fruition.
For example, the Telegraph, one of the largest papers in the U.K., published an article on July 18 in which the author claimed, "The European Space Agency said thermometers could tip 48C in Sardinia and Sicily, while the temperatures in Rome and Madrid could both reach the mid to high-40Cs. In drought-stricken Spain, temperatures were set to reach highs of 44C in Catalonia."
If the available data so clearly reveal that there is no heat-wave crisis, why are media outlets suggesting the opposite is true? The answer is sloppy, irresponsible media reporting, combined with cherry-picked data.
None of these predictions came true. In fact, some of them were off by several degrees or more.
Heat waves happen every year, but this isn’t evidence that Americans are facing a global warming crisis. When heat-wave data are put into their proper historical context, it’s clear that everything humans are experiencing today has been witnessed in the past.
The ugly truth behind climate alarmism is that much of it is driven by a radical ideological agenda that is seeking to transform the global economy and American society, not by science. The best way to fight back against it is to use cold, hard facts. And those facts plainly show that there is no reason to panic about our ever-changing climate.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/not-climate-change-causing-heat-waves-this-summer-explain
********************************************************Why Australia's energy transition needs a price tag
On the ABC’s 7.30 earlier this month, presenter Sarah Ferguson asked Energy Minister Chris Bowen to forecast a time when power prices would come down.
After name-checking the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Bowen answered: “very clearly, the policy agenda indicates getting more renewables into the system, backed up by storage and by firming … (that) is the best way of seeing the cheapest possible energy prices”.
But is it? This is the multibillion-dollar question Australia’s future hinges on.
Bowen’s view that an ever-increasing share of renewables will lead to a reduction in power prices largely rests on one document: the CSIRO’s GenCost report. Updated on a yearly basis, this document is produced by a small team led by energy economist Paul Graham.
Although the document is treated as gospel by many, it has received surprisingly little scrutiny in the public arena. Given it is the most important document in Australia’s energy transition this lack of scrutiny may lead to policy disaster. One problem is that describing the problems with the report in accessible terms is no easy task.
Understanding the report requires a technical nous, and even those with industry expertise have found parts of it confounding.
Nevertheless, some experts do not hold back in their criticism. Stephen Wilson, from the School of Mechanical & Mining Engineering at the University of Queensland, told me in an email that the GenCost report is “inaccurate and misleading on total system costs”.
In a submission to Treasury earlier this year, energy economist David Carland points out that the report says nothing about the cost of “firming” of renewables and instead estimates the cost of “integrated” renewables from 2030 onwards – relying on the flawed assumption that firming has already taken place. But the most pointed criticism of GenCost has emerged this week from a Sydney-based data scientist.
Writing in the Fresh Economic Thinking publication, Aidan Morrison points out that the CSIRO’s claim that renewables are the “cheapest” form of energy rests almost entirely on a misapplication of the “sunk cost” assumption.
A “sunk cost” is economics jargon for money already spent. The sunk cost fallacy applies when you have already spent dollars and you try to recover them after they are gone. Say you buy a cake and put it in the fridge. You come to it later in the week but it has gone stale. You tell yourself you should eat it because you have spent money on it. In that situation – if you ate it – you would be committing the sunk cost fallacy. It would be better to just chuck it in the bin and reach for an apple.
In many situations, it makes sense to account for sunk costs. But the concept should always apply to money spent in the past, not in the future. By definition, costs that have not been incurred yet are avoidable, and are not yet sunk. This is common sense but, in the GenCost report, the CSIRO treats future spending on renewables as sunk – even before the spending has occurred – allowing the analysis to exclude this expenditure from the total cost of renewables.
This creative accounting method is how the GenCost report arrives at the conclusion that “integrated renewables” are the cheapest form of energy by 2030 onwards.
“By use of a bizarre ‘sunk-cost’ assumption in their modelling, CSIRO cleaves the cost of infrastructure built prior to 2030 (when we would supposedly already have reached over 50 per cent renewable penetration) from any solar and wind generators built thereafter that might depend on that infrastructure,” Morrison writes in Fresh Economic Thinking.
The CSIRO lists the projects that are written off as sunk: “Snowy 2.0 and the battery of the nation pumped hydro projects … various transmission expansion projects … New South Wales gas peaking plants at Kurri Kurri and Illawarra … The NSW target for an additional 2GW of at least eight hours duration storage is assumed to be met by 2030.” In response to this list, Morrison quips: “I’m losing count of the billions.”
“Every economist, politician, and policymaker relying on this report simply must hear about this,” he writes.
Morrison argues that a circular logic has taken root: “Politicians build transmission and storage because they think solar and wind are cheap because science says so. Science (ie, CSIRO) says solar and wind are cheap because high transmission and storage costs required to facilitate these renewable generators are an already built ‘sunk cost’ and ignored in their calculations.”
Of course, there may be good reasons why the CSIRO uses the sunk cost assumption for future and not past spending, and Morrison’s critique itself is worthy of scrutiny. But the problem is that we do not have a balanced conversation in this country about the true cost of our energy transition, and engineers who have expertise in alternative clean energy sources – such as nuclear – are frozen out of the conversation.
There is also a growing awareness internationally that when the full cost of firming renewables is incorporated into cost-of-generation metrics, the analysis looks rather different from what the CSIRO produces.
In a paper published in the journal Energy, German-American energy economist Robert Idel finds that when taking into account the full cost of renewables to an energy system, solar is 14 times more costly than nuclear energy, and wind is 4.7 times more costly.
In Texas, his methodology calculates that solar is 3.3 times more costly than nuclear, and wind is 2.3 times more costly. Such information is crucial for a balanced conversation about Australia’s energy transition. Especially in the context of power prices that just keep on rising.
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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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