Then they came for your pets…
Judith Sloan
Do you sometimes read a sentence or phrase and think ‘I wish I’d written that’. Well, I came across one the other day written by Andy Kessler in the Wall Street Journal: ‘climate-excuse assaults on our liberties’. He was running through the range of restrictions, bans and taxes being imposed on citizens around the world in the name of climate change – or should I say, climate emergency or even global boiling.
But here’s the thing: these assaults are now going beyond reducing our freedoms; they are also driving up the cost of living while diminishing our scope to have fun. It’s early days, but there are some signs that the peasants are revolting – thank God.
The reaction to the extension of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone mandated by Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is a compelling story. Undertaken in the name of reducing air pollution, revenue raising or reaching net zero – take your pick – ULEZ now imposes a £12.50 per day charge on drivers of non-compliant vehicles in the middle and outer suburbs of London. It has applied to close-in areas for a while.
Of course, the rich toffs are not affected because they all have compliant cars bought yesterday, including expensive electric vehicles, or wouldn’t even notice the daily charge. But for many others, ULEZ imposes a very real burden as the owners of non-compliant vehicles go about their daily business. Imposing such a clearly regressive policy is quite astonishing for a left-leaning politician such as Khan.
The most adversely affected are business owners who must use their vehicles to make a living and those on lower incomes who cannot afford to buy new cars, even with the addition of the insulting grant – it’s around £2,000 – offered by the city. I love the irony that if your car is old enough – say a 30-year-old E-type Jag – you are exempt from the ULEZ charge.
Khan has encountered some choppy waters and one of the bits of the story I particularly like is the overt driver sabotage of the ULEZ extension. The spying cameras are being painted over; there is a brisk online trade in fake registration plates; and there is an adhesive you can buy that prevents the cameras from reading the plates.
At this stage, it is estimated that at least 2 million ordinary UK folk have engaged in these subversive activities.
Unsurprisingy, Khan, the messiah, decided to enlist some academic supporters for his campaign to make life even more difficult for Londoners. The dons down at Imperial College were happy to oblige to endorse ‘the benefits of the mayoral air quality policies’. Let’s face it, the fee of nearly one million quid is a lot of money for academics. Yet the results were very disappointing for the man waging a war against cars. The first ULEZ rollout was found to have had no significant impact on air quality in London. Even its extension was not predicted to do anything noticeable. And what has been the response from the climate zealots employed at the City of London? To fudge and bury the results – obviously.
It is worth noting here that London is part of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. According to the blurb, ‘C40 is a global network of mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis’. Needless to say, it offers a lot of opportunities for global junketeering paid for by ratepayers. Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, was president of the board and a driving force.
Both Sydney and Melbourne are part of the cabal. The recent show-off tactic of Clover Moore, Mayor of Sydney, to ban the reticulation of natural gas in the City of Sydney is an example of action designed to impress the other gravy train participants in the network.
The C40 cities have signed on to ‘an ambitious target for 2030’ which is packed with fun-filled ideas – not. No meat, no dairy, no private vehicles and only three new clothing items per person per year. One short flight every three years will be permitted.
Of course, the C40 is not the only organisation attempting to rob ordinary folk of fun and convenience. The Absolute Zero Report developed by Oxford and Cambridge Universities and released in 2019 contains an inventory of enjoyment-sapping proposals for the UK while driving up the cost of living. The demands include: smaller fridges, no beef or lamb, no flying, no shipping except for nuclear-powered ships, no cement or steel produced and no gas for cooking or heating. Road use would need to be reduced by 60 per cent and vehicles must be exclusively electric. By 2029, all airports in the UK must be closed with three exceptions.
My guess is the no flying rule doesn’t apply to the report’s authors because they must travel far and wide to spread the message, naturally.
Of course, academics on mad frolics are nothing new. But the UK government’s own Climate Change Committee, which is part of the legislated architecture on the UK’s road to net zero, has made a series of ‘helpful’ suggestions. It was headed by that mad green lefty, Lord Deben, who describes climate action in the UK now as ‘worryingly slow’.
The recommendations are all the predictable ones: more trees planted, flying less, no new coal or oil projects. Debs was mightily unimpressed, and let it be known, when Boris was PM – yes, mad green lefty Boris who first introduced ULEZ – he approved a 30-year coal mine in Cumbria.
One of the core recommendations of the CCC is ‘no net airport expansion’. Current UK Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has decided to ignore this suggestion and is approving various airport expansions. Seven of the UK’s main airports have plans to expand. It’s almost as if Debs and his like want to take away the joys of travel from the masses and return overseas travel to the elites, ‘people like us’-types. No doubt, they have always taken a dim view of Ryanair and the like.
But here’s a drum roll moment: pet ownership is bad for the climate and needs to be limited, if not prohibited. All those dogs, cats and whatever burping and farting and just think about all the meat they eat and the carbon emissions associated with that. Gosh, it’s the equivalent of (insert really frighteningly large number) of cars (non-electric, of course) on the road.
So farewell Fido, farewell Kitty – your days are numbered in the name of doing something about the climate crisis.
That will go down well with the masses – not.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/then-they-came-for-your-pets/
*********************************************************UK’s Onshore Wind Scheme Could Backfire, With Far More Potent Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Shortly after naming Claire Coutinho as secretary of state for energy security and net zero on Aug. 31, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a plan to accelerate the approval process for onshore wind projects.
Previously, a 2015 ruling allowed a single complaint within a community to halt an onshore wind program and fully stopped subsidies for such projects.
Under the new rule, communities can speed up the process for allocating sites through local development orders or community right-to-build orders.
However, wind farms can drastically raise the cost of electricity when the wind doesn’t blow and could leak a chemical that is exponentially more harmful to the environment than carbon dioxide.
Perhaps Coutinho isn’t aware of the influential 2019 BBC article that uncovered how the U.K.’s offshore wind turbine gearboxes are utilizing the world’s most potent greenhouse gas, sulfur hexafluoride, and that these gearboxes are leaking 15% of the gas over their lifecycle.
Sulfur hexafluoride is 23,500 times more potent than carbon dioxide. For reference, methane and nitrous oxide are roughly 25 and 298 times more potent than carbon dioxide, respectively. Additionally, these estimates are only over a 100-year perspective, and sulfur hexafluoride could exist up to 3,200 years in the atmosphere. Consequently, a single pound of released sulfur hexafluoride is the equivalent of 11 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere.
No energy source, not even wind, can be fully without externalities, even with the most advanced recycling techniques. That’s not to mention the hydrocarbons needed to fabricate the nylon and fiberglass for blades and to create the steel and concrete for towers.
Speaking of externalities, Coutinho should also acknowledge the potential of 100,000 birds killed every year by wind turbines in the U.K. However, losses could be minimized by adopting the Norwegian practice of painting one rotor blade black to reduce those deaths by an estimated 70%.
Despite the calls for expansion of energy generation, one of the largest hurdles is the time it takes to link to the grid, with more than 1,100 projects currently waiting to connect. With such a backlog of projects and the lack of transmission infrastructure, the U.K. government should contemplate allowing these projects to compete in an unsubsidized market to weed out economically unviable projects and restore reliability and adaptability to the grid.
Furthermore, the U.K. should also be wary of greenlighting or expanding every wind project without completing the due diligence to investigate local environmental harm and to acknowledge the wishes of local constituents.
Abandoning reliable generation capacity for intermittent wind power without first investing in viable storage capacity is a recipe for disaster.
For example, scalable gas-fired power stations saved the U.K. last winter by providing 60% of the needed electricity while wind turbines contributed a paltry 3%.
In order to end the economic malaise caused by ever-increasing energy prices and a culture of strangling economic freedom into stagnation, the U.K. needs to adopt an energy policy that will lower prices of electricity, rather than adopting the German model of closing reliable nuclear power stations and massively expanding intermittent solar and wind. Instead, the U.K. should adopt the Trump-era all-of-the-above strategy for energy security.
Similarly, the U.K. should roll back pre-Brexit European laws and rebuff current proposed measures that seek to control people’s everyday lives, such as mandating that properties meet net-zero targets or pay 15,000 pounds (about $18,750).
In an economic climate of spiraling inflation, the U.K. government should look to all avenues, including retaining its coal power until viable base-load generation alternatives can be secured.
The U.K.’s remaining nuclear reactors should be left online or expanded, and small modular nuclear reactors should be explored. Rather than solely expanding wind turbines that could leak a greenhouse gas 23,500 times more potent than CO2, the U.K. should explore scalable alternatives, such as the zero-emission natural gas plant that is being brought online in 2025.
With continuing inflation, connected insiders colluding with unelected bureaucrats, and a worldwide populace increasingly leery of increasing government censorship, the U.K. needs to abandon anti-energy policies and acknowledge that economic growth will always require more energy and more ingenuity. Lifting restrictions on wind power and other sources is but the first step to allowing the U.K. to become energy secure.
Intermittent sources alone cannot ensure energy security, as they are only as good as their storage capacity. Wind power must also be upfront about its tangible greenhouse gas emissions.
The U.K. needs stable and scalable energy sources to alleviate its energy woes. Only by lowering high energy bills and lowering the cost of living can the U.K. reignite the boundless energy of human potential.
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Huge cost of Australia’s renewable energy dream, according to industry leaders
The race to connect renewable energy to the grid is challenging and costly, industry leaders say, as they urge a focus on affordable electricity.
Alinta Energy chief executive officer Jeff Dimery said his firm was investing $10bn into renewable power, including offshore wind, battery technology and pumped hydro, but cautioned that affordability must remain a key driver.
He cited the giant Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro project, the cost of which in August was announced as having blown out to $12bn from an original $2bn.
Mr Dimery said this would deliver $100m of monthly revenue once complete, which translated to a capital cost of more than $60 per megawatt hour.
The market paid less than $15 per megawatt hour for pumped hydro less than three years ago – a more than fourfold cost hike.
“We need to clean up our energy supply..... And I guess what I’m saying is that, ultimately, I agree with the Prime Minister, his vision and how we need to get there. Where we’re differing is at the pace at which we might do that,” Mr Dimery said.
Transgrid executive general manager Craig Stallan, whose firm operates and manages the high-voltage transmission network in NSW and the ACT, said infrastructure needed to be built to create a superhighway across the national power grid.
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Climate change impacts Crop production MSN Pushes Rice, Sugar, Tomato Crises – Despite New Crop Records
This morning, the MSN news feed that displays for millions of people when they open a new Internet tab prominently displayed an article titled, “The climate crisis is here, the ecosystem is starting to collapse.” Embedded in the usual debunked claims of worsening extreme weather were claims that climate change is devastating crop production around the world. In particular, the article singled out rice, sugar, and tomato production as particularly ravaged by climate change. The objective facts, however, show just the opposite.
Fake claims of tomato shortages. According to the article, “India’s Burger King has taken tomatoes off their burgers after this year’s crop failed and the cost of tomatoes has become prohibitively expensive.”
An anecdotal claim that Burger King is taking tomatoes off its hamburgers in some locations does not prove that climate change is destroying tomato crops. Instead, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO), global tomato production is faring quite well. In fact, the UNFAO reports that global tomato production has set new records an amazing 10 years in a row.
Sugar data is record sweet, not sour. The article continued, “The world’s largest sugar trader expects the coming season to see a deficit for the sixth consecutive year as unfavourable crop forecasts in India will reduce global stocks of the sweetener. ‘The world will be as close to running out of sugar as it can be,’ said Mauro Virgino, trading intelligence lead at Alvean, a trading house controlled by Brazilian producer Copersucar SA, in a recent interview.”
Claims by a trading professional who has a financial stake in leading people to expect higher sugar prices are neither evidence of declining sugar production nor evidence of any climate change impact. Fortunately, the UNFAO keeps meticulous data for world sugar production, also. According to the UNFAO, 2019 saw the largest global sugar crop in history. All 10 of the largest sugar crops in history occurred during the past 10 years. During the past 15 years, global sugar production has increased by more than 33 percent.
Rice crops continue to set records. Also, claimed the article, “Most seriously of all, rice yields across southeast Asia have fallen sending prices up across the board. A rapidly escalating rice crisis is unfolding in Asia that has put hundreds of millions of people at food security risk. … The poor rice yields are going to get worse in the coming months as due to the record high sea waters, this year’s El Niño effect is expected to be especially strong that will cause rice yields to fall further. The food issue and soaring prices in Yangon in Myanmar has already become so bad that residents are turning to charity run food banks for help as they are unable to feed themselves.”
The UNFAO, however, reports an entirely different story. According to the UNFAO, global rice production set a new record in 2021, the latest year for which data is available. All three of the three largest crop years occurred during the past three years. All five of the five largest crop years occurred during the past five years. All 10 of the 10 largest crop years occurred during the past 10 years.
The article focuses special attention on rice yields in India, China, and Myanmar. However, the growth in India’s rice production is even more impressive than the growth in global rice production. India has absolutely smashed its rice production records six years in a row. In China, 2021 was the second-highest rice crop in history. All six of China’s highest-ever rice crops were produced in the past six years. Myanmar rice production is declining – an aberration compared to the global trend – but that is because of Myanmar’s horrible domestic political situation, not climate change. As reported by Human Rights Watch, “Since staging a coup on February 1, 2021, the Myanmar military has carried out a brutal nationwide crackdown on millions of people opposed to its rule. The junta security forces have carried out mass killings, arbitrary arrests, torture, sexual violence, and other abuses that amount to crimes against humanity.” Blaming climate change for Myanmar’s declining crop production is giving a pass to political brutality and human rights abuses.
The overall global crop picture is amazing. It is not surprising that MSN, when cherry-picking its worst-possible scenarios to claim a global crop crisis created by climate change, cannot even find one or two outliers to support its misinformation. The objective fact, as shown definitively by United Nations crop data, is that crop production of nearly all kinds throughout virtually the entire world is setting is setting impressive and live-providing new records nearly every year. This is happening in concurrence with more atmospheric carbon dioxide and modestly warming temperatures.
https://climaterealism.com/2023/09/msn-pushes-rice-sugar-tomato-crises-despite-new-crop-records/
***************************************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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