Oregon’s Latest Climate Lawsuit Threatens America’s National Security
What began as a trickle of climate change lawsuits has become a stream in recent years, with litigation filed nationwide in state and local courts, the latest from Multnomah County, Oregon, which includes Portland. Multnomah County officials and other plaintiffs hope to collect billions in damages from American energy companies by blaming them for the global phenomenon of climate change.
The problem? Suing energy producers has major - and possibly catastrophic - implications for America’s energy security, foreign relations, and national security. Given the potential fallout, plaintiffs should think twice before suing over climate change.
By suing American energy companies, as Multnomah County just did, plaintiffs risk tilting the advantage to America’s adversaries, including state-owned energy companies that produce more carbon-intensive fuels and whose interests are routinely hostile to America’s national security. Successful lawsuits could shift the bulk of production to America’s adversaries, jeopardizing America’s energy security and rolling back the considerable progress we’ve made toward shedding our dependence on energy imports.
Evidence speaks clearly to this threat. In October 2021, the New York Times reported that foreign state-owned companies will likely increase oil and gas production if U.S. and European companies reduce supply because of climate concerns. In fact, economist Michael Lynch forecasted foreign-owned energy producers in OPEC will boost their share of the global oil and gas market from 55% to 75% by 2040. This trend could intensify if Western companies are forced to cut back production as they defend themselves from a barrage of lawsuits.
Ironically, climate lawsuits haven’t targeted foreign state-owned energy companies such as Saudi Aramco, PetroChina, Gazprom, Rosneft, and PDVSA, all exceptionally high emitters from adversarial regimes. In other words, the climate litigation lobby has absolved these high emission trouble spots while targeting American producers, a strategy that could force more production into the arms of some of the world’s biggest emitters. This fact shows the clear hypocrisy of the climate litigation lobby.
With oil and natural gas experiencing increased demand, energy prices remaining volatile, and U.S. officials seeking to reduce Russian energy imports, it’s clear that strengthening America’s energy security is critically important. It makes no sense, then, to constrain the domestic energy companies who provide essential products that Americans continue to demand. Doing so not only makes achieving these objectives more difficult; it also threatens energy supplies that could bring much needed downward pressure on energy prices for American families and businesses.
The narrative told by plaintiffs has at least two major plot holes. First, the entire world emits greenhouse gases through our daily activities, which means American firms aren’t solely responsible for climate impacts. When lawsuit activists speak of global warming, they themselves acknowledge the phenomenon is worldwide. Despite that, their lawsuits exempt foreign state-owned energy producers.
Second, there is a strong nexus between the fossil fuels spotlighted by these lawsuits and national security. The American military’s heavy reliance on fossil fuels won't likely change for decades, a point underscored in an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court filed by Air Force General (ret.) Richard Myers and Navy Admiral (ret.) Mike Mullen, both former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They argued that “energy security and national security go hand-in-hand” and that “reduction in fossil-fuel use can be accomplished only through comprehensive international, multi-lateral negotiations and treaties led by the Legislative and Executive branches. This is how reduction of nuclear weapons was achieved during the Cold War.”
Given the broad implications of climate lawsuits for both American energy security and national security matters, it makes no sense to adjudicate them in state and local courts whose judges lack the core competency to address challenges of such global magnitude. Nonetheless, elected leaders in over two dozen jurisdictions continue trying to make American energy producers liable for global climate change, using our courts to address an issue more appropriately handled by elected lawmakers.
Climate lawsuits aren’t intended to fight climate change and certainly aren’t aimed at benefiting Americans. Their goal, as plaintiffs freely admit, is to saddle American energy producers with damages so large that they raise energy prices drastically or go out of business. According to a lawyer representing Colorado plaintiffs, the goal is to drive up prices at the pump and create even higher household electric bills. Who is left unscathed? The foreign state-owned energy producers, who will gladly welcome greater market share and increased geopolitical influence from the aftermath of climate lawsuits against their Western competitors.
It’s time for state and local politicians to stop aiding and abetting our foreign adversaries by making American energy producers defend themselves in court for making products we all demand. The risk to America’s energy security and national security status is simply too high.
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Britain’s Offshore Wind Industry Is Running Out Of Air
Championed by politicians as a controversy-free alternative to onshore wind and solar farms, the Government wants offshore wind capacity to surge from 13 gigawatts today to 50 gigawatts by 2030.
“Offshore wind provides a secure and resilient source of energy,” Grant Shapps, the Energy Security Secretary, told MPs last month. “And we are already global leaders.”
Yet behind the scenes, the picture looks far less rosy.
A string of major projects is under threat from spiraling costs, sclerotic planning rules, and shrinking subsidies.
Industry sources warn that it risks tilting the economy into negative territory. “Things are very hard out there right now,” one source says.
Schemes developed by Ørsted, Vattenfall, and Red Rock Power are among those understood to be most at risk, despite them only winning subsidy contracts last year.
Adding to concerns is a sense that ministers are not listening to the industry’s warnings, with more than one senior figure describing Shapps as a “remote” figure who rarely meets with them.
“It’s not like he’s beating down the industry’s door, let’s put it that way,” says one insider.
The malaise is triggering fresh questions about whether the Government’s 2030 target is still achievable – and if the long–assumed maxim that offshore wind costs will keep falling can hold.
“It has turned into a perfect storm for the industry,” says Ana Musat, executive director for policy at industry group RenewableUK.
Britain’s offshore wind industry exploded over the past decade, with most development concentrated off the east coasts of Scotland and England.
Capacity has grown tenfold since 2010, when it stood at just 1.3 gigawatts, with ever-bigger turbines boosting output.
One example is Dogger Bank, a phased development in the North Sea that will eventually generate enough power for six million homes.
It will use turbines more than twice as tall as Big Ben and will be the largest offshore wind farm in the world.
But rising supply chain costs globally – fueled by energy prices that jumped after the Ukraine war – have slammed the breaks on this progress.
Inflation has also forced loss-making manufacturers of components such as turbine blades and nacelles to demand higher prices, just as rising interest rates are making it more expensive for projects to secure financing.
General Electric’s renewables business, which makes the 260-meter-tall Haliade X turbines used at Dogger Bank, reported a $2.2bn (£1.7bn) loss in 2022. The division has been loss-making for eight straight quarters.
Rival manufacturers Siemens Gamesa, Vestas, and Nordex also posted further cumulative losses of €3bn in the same year, notes Kathryn Porter, an independent analyst at energy consultancy Watt Logic.
“There has been this narrative that wind-farm costs are falling and will keep falling, but the reality is these prices are too low.
“Turbine manufacturers have effectively been selling at a loss – and those losses have become huge now.”
Other factors are aggravating the situation too. The “bigger is better” approach to turbines is leading to more failures, costing manufacturers more in warranty claims, Porter says. …
In an effort to cut costs, some developers are attaching the turbines using cheaper foundations on the sea floor, the executive adds.
“Offshore wind is not the Nirvana that everybody thinks it is,” they add. “The risks are enormous. And the rewards are not very good.
“Everyone is going for the biggest turbines, the cheapest foundations, and they’ve all gone for cabling solutions that mean if you get a failure, you could lose the wind farm.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/06/25/britain-offshore-wind-industry-at-risk/
**************************************************Wrong, CNN, Attribution Groups Prove Nothing About Extreme Weather and Climate Change
A recent article on CNN relies on the opinion of climate attribution groups, claiming that these groups are able to calculate exactly how much impact climate change has had on various weather events. These claims are always false. Attribution claims are unverifiable, untestable, and rely on the presupposition that climate change did make an individual weather event more severe.
The article, “Without climate change, these extreme weather events would not have happened,” relies on the testimony of the World Weather Attribution Initiative, whose members assert that climate change is indeed making weather events more severe, or severe weather more likely. The CNN post goes on to claim that extreme weather like “droughts, storms, wildfires, and heat waves” are becoming more intense and frequent.
But this is false, as Climate at a Glance shows: the data isn’t clear about whether droughts are becoming more intense according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; storms like hurricanes and tornadoes show no increasing trend; wildfire data in the U.S. indicates forest policy has more to do with them than warming does; and heat anomalies, especially in the United States, show no increasing trend.
The CNN post breaks weather events into two categories, “Impossible events,” which allegedly couldn’t happen without man-made global warming, and “more likely or severe” because of climate change. Both of these categories are nonsense.
Under “impossible,” CNN climate writer Rachel Ramirez cites several heat waves from around the world over the past few years, as well as drought from last year in the northern hemisphere and horn of Africa.
One of the examples she gives is the heat wave from 2021 in the Pacific Northwest, which at the time, all the media touted as evidence of climate change’s impact largely because of the World Weather Attribution Initiative’s say-so. In a Climate Realism post, here, colleague Anthony Watts points out that a single weather event is not evidence of climate change, and quotes from meteorology professor Cliff Mass, Ph.D., who conducted his own analysis of the heat wave alongside historic data. Mass found that there is no increasing trend for record highs in that part of the country over the period of recent warming.
Not a single one of the events listed by CNN was definitively linked to climate change—this link was assumed first, as with all climate attribution studies.
As Climate Realism has previously shown, climate attribution is a game of confirmation bias using computers, not falsifiable science.
Statistician Dr. William Briggs does the best job of describing the flaws of attribution science’s methodology, in a paper compiled by the Global Warming Policy Foundation:
All attribution studies work around the same basic theme. . . . A model of the climate as it does not exist, but which is claimed to represent what the climate would look like had mankind not ‘interfered’ with it, is run many times. The outputs from these runs is examined for some ‘bad’ or ‘extreme’ event, such as higher temperatures or increased numbers of hurricanes making landfall, or rainfall exceeding some amount.
The frequency with which these bad events occur in the model is noted. Next, a model of the climate as it is said to now exist is run many times. This model represents global warming. The frequencies from the same bad events in the model are again noted. The frequencies between the models are then compared. If the model of the current climate has a greater frequency of the bad event than the imaginary (called ‘counterfactual’) climate, the event is said to be caused by global warming, in whole or in part.
Attribution that claims to put a percentage likelihood or a percentage of intensity to weather events are not science, as Dr. William Briggs explained, they cannot be checked against existing data.
Although the CNN alarmist writer says the events were “impossible” or “all but impossible,” the events were labelled as “almost impossible,” “virtually impossible,” hundreds of times “more likely,” etc. This is not scientific.
Those classified as “made much more likely or more severe by climate change,” includes the “black summer” fires from Australia in 2019-2020, Hurricane Ian, Western US drought, and the flooding in Pakistan from 2022, Climate Realism has debunked every single one of these as they came up over the years.
For example, in a guest post, “Pakistan’s floods and the climate attribution con,” Dr. David Whitehouse explained that when it came to the flooding in Pakistan, World Weather Attribution Initiative members couldn’t honestly claim that recent warming made the flooding worse than it otherwise would have been.
Dr. Whitehouse wrote:
But then they admit the event is well within the range of historical natural variability pointing out that 2022 was the wettest years since err…1961! And let’s not forget that only a few years ago climate scientists claimed that “our analysis found that the summer monsoon rainfall is decreasing over central South Asia – from south of Pakistan through central India to Bangladesh.”
Pakistan’s flooding was neither unprecedented nor definitively connected to climate change in the attribution scientists’ own research, despite what headlines claimed.
This kind of rapid attribution without referencing historical data isn’t new, attribution scientists will make these claims for every weather event that makes headlines.
The World Weather Attribution team asserts that they use both “real-world data” and computer models, but comparing real data to fictional data is not appropriate or useful, except as confirmation bias. CNN should know better, and take more care when they craft their article titles and content, if they care at all about truth and not just promoting alarm.
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Love that gas!
Judith Sloan, writing from Australia
I love our gas heater. In these cold months, there is nothing better than getting home, switching on the gas heater, backing in the derriere and suddenly feeling much better.
In the past, I loved the open fire place we had in our family home but, let’s face it, they are a bit of hassle – getting it started, waiting until the heat really begins to radiate and, of course, cleaning it out. And just as the environmental hysterics can’t abide gas heaters, they can’t abide open fire places either.
Call me cynical, but does anyone believe these new studies that seek to demonstrate that gas heating is very bad for a person’s health? Why is it that these studies are only now emerging? Could it be a classic case of the tail wagging the dog, with authors determined to establish yet another reason to demonise fossil fuels?
And if it were really the case, why are age-adjusted life expectancies not significantly lower in Victoria where gas heaters and appliances are much more common than in the other states?
Now while I’ve got you in the box, can I make another confession, two actually? I love our gas stove. To be sure, I don’t do a lot of cooking these days but when I do, I really appreciate the quick response time of the gas stove. Very high and very low – both settings work well. Compared with our induction stove at our other place – that’s my other confession – the gas cook-top is far superior.
Indeed our relatively new, very expensive and rarely used European induction stove at our other place had the temerity to conk out while we had guests. It turned out to be a defective motherboard, which seems a very sexist description for a component of a stove – only kidding. It cost an arm and leg to replace it, but it would have cost several arms and legs to replace the whole stove with a newer induction model.
Evidently, having a second house, indeed having a spare bedroom, is now regarded as equivalent to a mortal sin by progressive thinkers. According to their astonishing insights, if only everyone could just share what accommodation is available, there would be no housing shortage and rents wouldn’t be rising. And if these undeserving rich bastards can’t be forced to offer up their spare accommodation, then they should be taxed to high heaven. (Note here the religious theme).
Returning to the issue of gas, gas, gas –OK, just gas – the little darlings down at the Grattan Institute have been jumping on the anti-gas bandwagon, telling everyone that they should be replacing their gas appliances and instead relying on the unreliable electricity grid. You know it makes sense – or not.
To be sure, no immediate wholesale replacement of gas appliances is being suggested, although government subsidies to push the process along are seen as necessary. Needless to say, all new housing should be deprived of the benefits of gas connections, according to the great minds from Grattan.
But here’s one of the problems with the central recommendation: if some residents abandon their gas appliances, then the economics of the domestic reticulation of gas begin to falter. It’s not worth servicing some areas unless a high proportion of residents use their connections. At that point, many people might be forced into abandoning their much loved gas heaters, gas stoves and gas hot water services but won’t be in a positon to fund the conversion. It is also likely that there will be insufficient replacement appliances and qualified tradies to do the installation at the time. The politics don’t look great.
But here’s the thing: when we are talking about gas, which is widely regarded as the only feasible transition fuel, it’s not clear why you would bother nagging households about their appliances. The majority of natural gas is used by industry and power generation and, if anything, we need to sharpen the incentives to ensure we have an adequate gas supply into the future.
And isn’t there an irony as the gas supply in the Bass Strait dwindles and any further extraction of gas in Victoria is essentially prohibited, that Dan the Man complains about Queensland gas being exported? That’s right: he thinks the federal government should limit gas exports so Victorians can have a plentiful supply while banning gas extraction in his state. But I guess lying straight in bed has never been Dan’s long suit.
Talking more generally about how the energy transition is going, if B1 (Chris Bowen) really understood matters, he would be losing a lot of sleep. There is no way that we are getting to 82 per cent renewables by 2030 – the target in Victoria is 95 per cent by 2035 – and there is no way that electricity prices are coming down, let alone falling by $275 per year as promised by Labor during the last election campaign.
In Victoria, it has dawned on the political masterminds there that the state’s land mass is actually not large enough to accommodate the necessary onshore wind and solar installations. One study has estimated that 70 per cent of the state’s land currently used for agriculture would have to be repurposed to generate sufficient (intermittent) electricity to replace coal and gas. Let’s face it, that’s not going to happen, even with Dan in charge.
It’s one reason why offshore wind is seen as the answer, with Gippsland waters nominated as the place for a renewable energy zone. It’s just a pity that offshore installations are so expensive and have much shorter lifespans than onshore ones.
It’s dawning on pretty much everyone, including even B1, that even if renewable energy projects go ahead at the pace he dictates – they aren’t and they won’t – the delays in the construction of the additional transmission lines constitute the biggest and most expensive obstacle.
It has been estimated that 10,000 additional kilometres of transmission lines are needed between now and 2030 but we will be doing well to achieve 500 to 600 kilometres per year. Thankfully, the completely understandable resistance of farmers and regional communities will ensure a slow rollout. Why should they bear the external cost of having unsightly high voltage pylons cutting a swath through their landscapes so the inner-city luvvies can pretend that the planet is being saved?
Back to the drawing board or should that be the gas heater?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/in-the-confessional-box/
***************************************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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