Climate and Energy Fantasy and Tyranny
It’s mystifying and terrifying that our lives, livelihoods and living standards are increasingly dictated by activist, political, bureaucratic, academic and media ruling elites who disseminate theoretical nonsense, calculated myths and outright disinformation.
Not only on pronouns, gender and immigration – but on climate change and energy, the foundation of modern civilization and life spans.
We’re constantly told the world will plunge into an existential climate cataclysm if average planetary temperatures rise another few tenths of a degree, due to using fossil fuels for reliable, affordable energy, raw materials for over 6,000 vital products, and lifting billions out of poverty, disease and early death.
Climate alarmism implicitly assumes Earth’s climate was stable until coal, oil and gas emissions knocked it off kilter, and would be stable again if people stopped using fossil fuels.
In the real world, climate has changed numerous times, often dramatically, sometimes catastrophically, and always naturally. Multiple ice ages and interglacial periods, Roman and Medieval warm periods, a Little Ice Age, major floods, droughts and dust bowls all actually happened – long before fossil fuels.
Tornadoes, hurricanes and other extreme weather events are not getting more frequent or intense. You might argue that Harvey and Irma marked a sudden increase in major hurricanes in 2017 – but that’s only because after Wilma there would have been a record twelve years of zero Category 3-5 hurricanes.
We need to ignore the fear-mongering, look at the actual records, and recognize that dangerous upward trends simply aren’t there. We must insist that alarmists distinguish and quantify human influences versus natural forces for recent temperature, climate and weather events – and show when, where and how human activities replaced natural forces.
The only place manmade temperature and climate catastrophes exist is in Michael Mann and other GIGO computer models. These climate models are worthless for policymaking because they aren’t verified by actual measurements, don’t account for urban heat island effects, and cannot incorporate the vast scale and complexity of atmospheric, planetary and galactic forces that determine Earth’s climate.
In reality, people and the planet are threatened far more by global cooling than warming. Even a couple degrees drop in average global temperatures would drastically reduce growing seasons, arable land, plant growth, wildlife habitats and agricultural output – especially if it’s accompanied by reductions in plant-fertilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Plants, animals and people would face starvation.
We’re also told ruling elites could prevent this imagined crisis by switching us to wind, solar and battery power. (They also want to eliminate cows and modern agriculture, over misplaced concerns about methane and fertilizer, but that’s anudder discussion.)
Build a coal, gas or nuclear power plant – and unless governments shut it down or cut off fuel supplies, the plant provides plentiful, reliable, affordable electricity nearly 24/7/365 for decades. Build a massive sprawling wind or solar installation, and you have to back up every kilowatt with coal, gas or nuclear power – or with millions of huge batteries – for every windless, sunless period.
The economic and ecological effects would be ruinous.
Coal, gas and nuclear plants can be built close to electricity-intensive urban centers. Tens of thousands of wind turbines and billions of solar panels must go where there’s good wind and sunshine, far from urban areas, connected by high voltage transmission lines. In fact, for Net Zero, says the International Energy Agency (IEA), the world would need 50,000,000 miles of new and upgraded transmission lines by 2040!
All those “clean, green, renewable, sustainable, affordable” wind, solar and battery systems, backup generators, transmission lines and electric vehicles would require millions of tons of iron, copper, aluminum, manganese, cobalt, lithium, concrete, plastics and numerous other metals and minerals.
Onshore wind turbines require nine times more materials per megawatt – and offshore turbines need fourteen times more – than a combined-cycle natural gas power plant, the IEA calculates. Solar panels and EVs have the same problem.
To get these materials, billions of tons of overlying rock must be removed to reach billions of tons of ores – which then must be processed in huge industrial facilities that use mercury and toxic chemicals, emit vast quantities of greenhouse gases and toxic pollutants, and are powered by coal or natural gas. Many components for these “green” technologies are derived from oil and natural gas.
US and other Western facilities control and recycle these pollutants. Chinese and Russian facilities pay little attention to air and water pollution, workplace safety, or fossil fuel use, efficiency and emissions – yet they supply over 80% of “renewable” energy raw materials, because the West increasingly bans mining and processing and makes energy prohibitively expensive to operate mines and factories.
Pseudo-renewable energy worldwide would cost hundreds of trillions of dollars, would have to be subsidized by trillions of taxpayer dollars, and would dramatically increase electricity rates.
Electric vehicle, appliance and heating mandates would double or triple all these infrastructure, materials, mining and land use requirements, ecological impacts and costs.
American residential electricity prices in 2023 ranged from 10.4¢ per kilowatt-hour (Idaho) to 28.4¢ per kWh (California). British families paid 47¢ per kWh! UK factories and businesses paid up to three times what their US counterparts did. German families, factories and businesses are in the same capsizing boat.
But EU industrial leaders say energy prices must continue rising, to cover the soaring costs of the “energy transition.” If they don’t, factories, jobs and emissions will move overseas. But if they do, families will freeze jobless in the dark.
What many call the Climate Industrial Complex has a monumental stake in perpetuating this situation. Collectively, its members have incredible power, control much of government and education, hold enormous financial stakes in green tech subsidies, and often censor contrarian viewpoints.
Just as ominous, if it becomes clear that the Brave New World of Net Zero Energy cannot provide sufficient affordable electricity and other necessities for modern industries, healthcare and living standards, two-thirds of America’s ruling elites favor food and energy rationing to combat climate change and retain their anti-capitalism, anti-growth agenda. It’s likely the same in Europe and Canada.
The Biden Administration and other governments are already dictating the kinds of vehicles we can drive and what appliances and heating systems we can use. They’re already exploring ways to limit the kind and size of homes we can live in, how warm and cool we can keep them, how often we can travel by air, the kinds and amounts of meat we can eat, and many other aspects of our lives.
Meanwhile, China, India, Indonesia and dozens of other countries are building hundreds of coal and gas generating units – further underscoring the insanity and futility of trying to control energy sources, quantities and emissions.
This is what America’s 2024 state and national elections are about – and elections in Europe, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. The longer these elites remain in power, the more our liberties, lives and living standards will resemble life a century ago under authoritarian regimes. Vote accordingly.
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Many Ways The Climate Scam Isn’t Aligning With The Facts
Much of the U.S. was frosted and frozen by bitter winter weather last week. But this is just further proof of manmade global warming, the media claim.
Because even as America freezes, “most of the rest of the world is feeling unusually warm weather,” which is merely a “contradiction” that “fits snugly in explanations of what climate change is doing to Earth,” says the Associated Press.
Of course what doesn’t fit “snugly” is ignored. And there’s plenty of that.
For instance, [all the right people have assured us for decades] that Arctic ice will disappear due to man’s wanton combustion of fossil fuels.
At a United Nations climate conference in 2009, Al Gore, always a gushing font of climate disinformation, said polar scientists had told him, according to CBS News, “that the latest data ‘suggest a 75% chance the entire polar ice cap will melt in summer within the next five to seven years.’ ”
A couple of months earlier [in 2009], the BBC reported that “the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free and open to shipping during the summer in as little as 10 years,” basing this statement on the word of Peter Wadhams, a University of Cambridge “top polar scientist.”
But the reality is that in the middle of January 2024, “Arctic sea ice for this date stands at its highest level in 21 years,” says Climate Change Dispatch.
No, it’s not summer. It’s the dead of winter in the Northern Hemisphere.
But this peak arrived immediately after Earth went through the “hottest” year on record. (It’s a meaningless claim, as our friend from Junk Science Steve Milloy has shown.)
How could Arctic ice be so healthy after a year that was so warm we’d guess from all the media and political fuss that it broke thermometers all over the world?
Furthermore, Arctic ice levels for the summer months of 2023 don’t show enough of a difference from the long-term averages to be alarmed.
Another fear that is supposed to paralyze us – as well as convince us to surrender our liberties and dollars to the mountebanks who promise they can tame our savage climate – is the loss of land to the rising seas caused by global warming.
The world’s biggest (and of course most important) cities, and the elites’ favorite tropical vacation spots, are on track to be flooded. (Didn’t Barack Obama’s very presence in the White House fix this)?
But reality and the global warming script simply aren’t in sync.
Or as Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado environmental studies professor, puts it, there’s “a large gap between narratives promoted in the media and real-world evidence.”
Pielke writes that “From 1985 to 2015 – a period when global sea levels increased by about 60 millimeters (about 2.4 inches) – the areal extent of global coastal land increased by almost 34,000 square kilometers (about 13k square miles), or about the size of Belgium, home to more than 11 million people.”
The additional terrain is due to “‘landification,’ or the emergence of new land area,” he says.
He cites a team of Dutch researchers who have “warned that popular anecdotes can present a misleading picture of global trends in changes in the Earth’s surface from land to water and vice versa.”
The researchers argue that “general conclusions cannot be drawn from a limited sample of case studies.”
Rather, “planetary-scale monitoring is” necessary if we are “to understand (and disentangle) the causes of detected changes and their attribution to natural variability, climate change or man-made change.”
Everything that proceeds from the mouths of the climate alarmists must be taken with a boxcar of salt. Truth has long been a casualty in their war on fossil fuels.
https://principia-scientific.com/many-ways-the-climate-scam-isnt-aligning-with-the-facts/
***********************************************Dark doldrums in renewable energy
For years, the media has supported politicians, NGOs, and environmentalists in the West who have been warning us about the harm fossil fuels are causing to the environment. We are continuously told that we need to invest in renewable energy in order to prevent a climate catastrophe. This narrative tells us that switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources is not only going to save the planet, but it will also significantly lower our energy bills. It will unleash a new post-scarcity green society with cheap, abundant energy that can power the world for eternity. If something sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
The radical experiment with renewable energy has been underway for some time. The United Kingdom’s carbon emissions target was enshrined in law in 2019 by former British prime minister Theresa May, thereby mandating the nation to reduce emissions to net zero by 2050. A crucial aspect of the policy calls for us to shift away from fossil fuels and towards more affordable, sustainable energy sources. In order to achieve net zero, we must have a reliable domestic renewable energy source.
Renewable energy companies in the UK receive a guaranteed price for electricity that is subsidised. The government sets this price before wind and solar farms are constructed. The theory is that government funding will spark a technological revolution and that future innovation will result in more affordable renewable energy projects. But things don’t operate in this manner. The British government raised the cost of offshore wind by 66 per cent, supposedly costing the consumer £44 per megawatt hour. In actuality, the cost rose to £73.
Energy costs have increased in every nation that has adopted the trendy theory of renewable energy. Consider Australia. The federal government wants to generate four-fifths of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, a target of 82 per cent. Australia now produces one-third of its electricity from renewable energy sources, so consumers should be benefiting from lower energy costs. The average wholesale price of electricity was $87 per megawatt hour in the first three months of 2022, a 141 per cent increase from the same point a year earlier. The Australian Energy Regulator attributes the price decline that started around the same time last year to the increased availability of black coal. Supply and demand work.
The same is true in California. Known as the renewable capital of the United States, the price of electricity increased five times faster in this state between 2011 and 2017 than it did in any other. Or Germany, which is among the biggest investors in renewable power in the world. The nation started its transition to a low-carbon, nuclear-free economy in 2010. It plans to phase out coal power by 2038 under a policy known as Energiewende, and it closed its last three nuclear plants in April of last year. As a result, electricity costs increased by 50 per cent between 2006 and 2017 – one of the most expensive in Europe.
But the primary problem with renewable energy sources is unpredictability. They are unreliable because their power generation depends on the whims of the weather. In today’s globalised world, where instant access to power is essential, this is not ideal. During the winter, when we most need electricity, renewables produce very little of it. Winter nights that are longer and colder are not ideal for solar power. It doesn’t help that wind speeds are a lot slower during colder months. The ironic situation is described by the Germans as Dunkelflaute –dark doldrums. Nature is a cruel mistress.
She’s not done yet. There are periods when the sun shines too brightly and the wind blows too fast. This also brings about problems. According to a report from Sky News UK, the Brits gave wind farm owners £215 million to compensate them for the days when the wind was too strong and they had to be turned off. Left to run, they could substantially overload the national grid. The same is true with solar energy: too much heat raises the possibility of blowout. The absurd situation we find ourselves in is having to switch them off on the sunniest days. California pays neighbouring states to take its excess solar energy.
Storage is the answer to the reliability issue. But there isn’t any technology that can store this extra energy in batteries. Building a battery facility in the US that could store solar and wind energy for just 12 hours would cost approximately $2.5 trillion – roughly one-third of all US federal spending, according to the MIT Technology Review.
Then there’s the restriction based on geography. To generate the same amount of energy, a solar farm would need to be 450 times larger than a nuclear power plant, requiring more land and causing real environmental damage. As for net zero? According to a report co-sponsored by the University of Melbourne, more than 120,000 square kilometres of land are needed to produce enough renewable energy to meet Australia’s net zero goal – equivalent to 90 per cent of England’s landmass, or half the size of Victoria.
And such renewables must be environmentally friendly, right? Hardly. Fossil fuels are used in the extraction and production processes. The carbon fibre used to make wind turbine blades needs both gas and oil. Polysilicon, which is produced using coal, is used in solar panels. A decommissioned solar farm, meanwhile, generates 300 times more toxic waste than a nuclear power plant.
Due to the release of energy from fossil fuels, the West has experienced unprecedented levels of material prosperity for the past 250 years. The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 89 per cent in 1820 to just under 10 per cent today. We are living in a time that historian Deidre McCloskey calls ‘the great enrichment’ because of fossil fuels. An activity as elementary as flicking on a light switch is the result of two hundred years of innovation and free trade. Something lost on our green comrades.
Western elites need to be more honest and forthright about the cost of net zero. There’s a reason that only three per cent of the world’s energy comes from renewables. Dunkelflaute indeed.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/dark-doldrums-in-renewable-energy/
*******************************************Climate of naivety Australia's greatest danger
Hubris is a well-known occupational hazard for self-made billionaires. They risk mistaking obsequiousness for admiration and are vulnerable to the knowledge delusion: the conviction that their business acumen qualifies them as experts about everything.
Andrew Forrest took the opportunity to share his wisdom on international security at a sod-turning ceremony at one of his wind turbine plants this month.
He claimed investing in wind and solar would make us safer in a world where bad actors want to control fossil fuel supplies. “I don’t want machine gun-toting, fruitcake extremists in Yemen, firing missiles in the Red Sea, to dictate if I can drive my kids to school here in Dubbo,” Forrest said. “Why would I back oil and gas when it’s controlled by people like Putin?”
You don’t have to be Henry Kissinger to spot the flaws in Forrest’s analysis. Whatever the assumed benefits of stripping native vegetation to erect wind turbines, they are not an obvious deterrent to Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. Warships tend to be more effective.
The Russian President may be a man of some influence, but he does not have the power to impose limits on Australian gas or coal production. Punitive royalties and activist judges are much better at doing that.
Australia is the world’s second-largest exporter of coal, pushing Russia into a distant third. We are the third-largest exporter of liquid natural gas, shipping three times more than Russia. We do less well when it comes to pipelines, but that’s a small price to pay for the security of living on an island continent.
We could be more than self-sufficient in oil if we put our minds to it. Geoscience Australia estimates our identified recoverable reserves of conventional oil at 1.8 billion barrels. There is significant potential for unconventional oil, which could be recovered with fracking.
It would be nitpicking to point out to Forrest that Yemenis sweeten their cakes with honey, not fruit. It is true that Iranian-backed terrorists from this dirt-poor but troublesome country are a not inconsiderable threat to our trade with Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa. They pose little, if any, threat to our oil imports, however.
Less than 40 per cent of international oil exports come from the Middle East, almost all of which comes from the Persian Gulf. The tankers the Houthis delight in setting on fire in the Red Sea are bound in the first instance for Europe and the Mediterranean.
One doesn’t have to travel to Dubbo to guess that electric vehicles are seen less frequently outside its school gates than in Cottesloe. For those concerned about domestic energy security, that’s a good thing. While Australia is rich in lithium, cobalt, rare-earth minerals and almost everything that makes a lithium-ion battery, nearly all of it is sent offshore for processing, predominantly to China. The Chinese manufacture two-thirds of electric vehicles, including the BYD Atto 3 and MG ZS EV, the third- and fourth-best-selling electric cars in Australia.
That’s no problem if you live in Twiggy Land, where the People’s Republic of China is a benign player in world affairs and is the country that will turn the battle against global warming. Back in the real world, however, outsourcing our energy future to the Communists in Beijing is about as stupid as government policy gets.
Turning to wind and solar makes us highly dependent on China. Most of the world’s solar panels come from there, and they are aggressively attacking the wind turbine market. Chinese belligerence is the most significant external threat by far to the security of energy supply as we continue to run down our coal-fired power stations and put obstacles in the path of gas.
The most significant risk to energy security, however, is homemade. Labor’s ambitious 2030 energy target and opposition to nuclear power is driving coal out of the energy mix with no alternative source of base-load energy.
Rising interest prices and lengthy approval processes are stifling the growth in insecure, intermittent wind and solar. Reaching the target of 40 new 7MW wind turbines a month has been a little trickier than Chris Bowen seemed to imagine in his first weeks in the job.
Bowen has precious few opportunities to turn sods, so it is hardly surprising he was prepared to travel to the picturesque NSW Central Tablelands this month for a photo opportunity with Forrest at Squadron Energy’s Uungula wind turbine development.
Uungula was the only commercial wind turbine project to reach financial closure last year. Hundreds of renewable projects are “in the pipeline”, as renewable enthusiasts like to say.
Mercifully for the local communities they are helping to destroy, however, precious few of them are likely to get off the ground. Uungula has been in the planning stage since 2011. In 2016, CWP Renewables, the previous incarnation of Squadron, sought approval for 249 turbines on the site that it claimed would be connected to the grid by 2020.
That proposal has since been scaled back to 69 6MW turbines and is unlikely to be connected until the end of 2025 at the very earliest after submitting neighbouring residents to two years of construction hell.
We must be thankful for small mercies. The original proposal threatened 1880 hectares of native vegetation. The revised proposal’s footprint covers just 639 hectares, an area some 1½ times larger than the Perth suburb of Mosman Park.
Sooner or later, the impossibility of reaching the government’s back-of-the-envelope targets will sink in. Governments in a liberal democracy are bound to obey the laws, including the laws of physics. They will take stock of the energy graphs and realise the last thing we need in the middle of the day is more renewable energy, and the last thing we need the rest of the time is energy we cannot rely on.
In a world that grows increasingly unstable and in which we, or more accurately our friends, are already fighting two wars, we will realise we are indeed the lucky country, blessed with abundant resources which we must learn to mine and process ourselves.
We will learn that the greatest threat to our future is not global climate change but homegrown naivety.
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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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