Climate “Reparations” Numbers Are Rigged

What a lot of stupidity. Poor nations are poor because of their foolish economic policies, nothing else

Nobel Prize–winning economist Esther Duflo thinks rich countries should pay poor countries $500 billion in compensation each year for climate-change damages. It is our “moral debt.” She proposes an international 2-percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich and an increase in the global minimum corporate tax rate to fund this $500 billion transfer.

You and I may be shocked by such a suggestion but don’t worry: “It’s really necessary. And it’s reasonable. It’s not that hard.” Only someone in an elite, progressive bubble could say something like that. Let’s check her reasoning.

Duflo claims that climate change creates costs, specifically through “excess” deaths due to excessive heat. Poorer countries from the global south near the equator will see more days of extreme heat, and so will see a disproportionate increase in excess deaths.

Other economists translated those deaths into an externality cost of $37 per ton of CO2. Multiply that by the roughly fourteen billion tons of CO2 emitted by the US and Europe and voila, wealthy countries generate $500 billion in externality costs per year.

She proposes paying for this by increasing the global minimum corporate tax rate from 15 percent to 18 percent and introducing an international 2-percent wealth tax on the ultra-rich, which she defines as the 3000 richest billionaires. We can’t go into the many problems and obstacles to such funding mechanisms here — suffice it to say such ideas will be nearly impossible to implement.

But Duflo’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, besides missing the bigger picture, are so speculative as to require playing make-believe. Let’s play along for a moment to see why. We’ll start by reverse-engineering her $500 billion number into a measure of harm.

Regulatory agencies and insurance companies use the concepts of “statistical value of life” or the “statistical value of a life-year” to do cost-benefit analysis on risk and the monetary value of life. These concepts are slippery, however, and calculated in a variety of ways with a wide range of estimates.

To keep things simple, let’s assume that the value of one life-year is $200,000. The $500 billion number proposed by Duflo suggests that the cost imposed by wealthy countries burning fossil fuels is the loss of roughly 2.5 million life-year” in poor countries per year.

That sounds like a staggering number!

But what about the benefits that have accrued to developing countries from activities that generate CO2 emissions? Important advances in medicine, such as antibiotics and vaccines, were developed in modern industrialized countries. So, too, were refrigeration, cars, the internet, smart phones, radar; modern agricultural methods with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers; improvements in plumbing, building materials, manufacturing, and much more. “Polluting” activities in industrialized countries improved nutrition and safety around the world. These advances, and many others, significantly increased people’s life expectancies — especially in poor countries.

Surely the value of these improvements should weight the opposite side of the scale from the expected harm of climate change — especially since the crusade against fossil fuels and carbon emissions will assuredly slow economic growth and innovation. Let’s consider the case of India for a moment.

Life expectancy in India has basically doubled from about 35 years in 1950 to about 70 years in 2024. If you consider that India has just over a billion people living in it, modern technology developed by rich CO2-emitting countries has added 35 billion life-years in India alone.

Translating life-years back into dollars, 35 billion life-years times $200,000 per life-year means that the benefits from greater life expectancy in India over the past 75 years is the equivalent of $7 quadrillion dollars — or in annualized terms, an annual benefit of about $93 trillion dollars. In other words, the benefits to India alone are over a hundred times larger than Duflo’s estimate of costs!

Nor is India cherry-picked. China has a similar story with life expectancy rising from 43.45 years to 77.64 years. Similar improvements in life expectancy occur across the global south.

https://www.aier.org/article/climate-reparations-are-rigged/

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More US Youngsters Are Turning Away From Climate Alarmism

A recent Monmouth University poll highlights a decline in the American public’s sense of urgency about ‘climate change’, especially among younger adults

While 73 percent still believe ‘climate change’ is happening, only half now see it as a very serious problem.

This decline is most pronounced among the younger demographic, with only 50 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds viewing it as a very serious issue, down from 67 percent in 2021.

This shift could show a growing skepticism and a reprioritization of immediate concerns such as economic pressures.

The poll also notes a decrease in support for government action on ‘climate change’, with 59 percent in favor of more federal intervention, a drop from past years.

This waning support coincides with a diminished perception of ‘climate change’ as an urgent crisis.

Given the evolution of climate science, it’s critical to distinguish between substantive metrics and those used primarily to push a narrative of impending catastrophe.

For instance, while metrics like the Earth Energy Imbalance and various climate indices are valuable for understanding changes in the climate system, they come with significant uncertainties.

These uncertainties often overlap with the claimed magnitude of the changes, which could lead to overestimations of the impact.

Furthermore, the narrative that supports drastic climate action often overlooks the substantial improvements in human resilience to climate-related disasters over the past century.

Despite a significant increase in global population and industrial activity, the proportion of climate-related deaths has decreased dramatically, indicating enhanced adaptability and mitigation capabilities.

The data presented below provides a compelling backdrop to the recent Monmouth University poll findings regarding ‘climate change’ urgency.

The infographic highlights that there has been no significant increase in the number of hydrological, meteorological, and climatological disasters since 2000, no substantial rise in deaths from these disasters, and no significant uptick in their economic cost as a percentage of global GDP.

This stable trend suggests that the decrease in perceived urgency and importance among the American public, especially younger adults, may be influenced by an observable lack of escalation in the direct impacts of climate change.

Such data can lead to skepticism or reduced concern, aligning with the poll’s finding that fewer people now see ‘climate change’ as a very serious problem. This reinforces the view that while ‘climate change’ is acknowledged, the catastrophic consequences often highlighted in media and political rhetoric may not resonate with the empirical evidence observed over the past two decades.

When placed in the broader context, this polling data suggests a possible realignment of public opinion towards a more measured and data-driven approach to climate policy.

It highlights the importance of focusing on direct human and economic impacts rather than abstract indices that may not reliably indicate imminent disaster.

As public sentiment shifts, it might be time to reassess how we discuss and prioritize ‘climate change’ in policy debates, ensuring that actions are proportionate to the actual, measurable impacts rather than driven by alarmist narratives.

https://principia-scientific.com/more-us-youngsters-are-turning-away-from-climate-alarmism/

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Those Endangered Polar Bears That Are Still Thriving

Polar bears have been very disappointing to Warmists. Odd that we now hear little about them. They are refusing to vanish

Remember the polar bears? Those cute, cuddly, incredibly dangerous apex predator icons of the climate emergency that once roamed the frozen wastes of the far north until climate change wiped them all out?

Well, in the late 1960s there were an estimated 12,000 polar bears spread out around the Arctic.

But with disappearing sea ice causing the bears not to be able to feed in the spring and summer, numbers have plunged to… 32,000. Whoa, wait a minute there….

In her report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, zoologist and polar bear expert Susan Crockford points out that the “official” estimate from the Polar Bear Study Group is 26,000, but it was last produced in 2015 and hasn’t been updated since then.

Perhaps they fear good news… and if so rightly because new regional surveys since 2015 have added thousands to the estimated sub-populations and by her reckoning the current population is likely around 32,000.

Note that among its other virtues, Crockford’s paper shows error bars rather than implying more certainty than is justified.

But even if the actual number is less than 32,000, and of course it could also be more, Crockford points out that back in 2007 the US Geological Survey forecast the polar bear population would fall by two-thirds to about 7,500 by now, due to disappearing sea ice, due to you wanting to fly to your holiday destination.

It was a spectacularly wrong forecast which at the time inspired a now-apparently defunct activist group called Plane Stupid to make a plain stupid video showing polar bears falling from the sky to their deaths on a city street below as a “J’accuse” against selfish polar bear killers who travel by ‘fossil fuel’-powered jets.

But if ‘climate change’ is what drives polar bear population change then hurray for ‘climate change’ because the polar bear numbers are not #Gettingworse, they’re getting better.

https://principia-scientific.com/those-endangered-polar-bears-that-are-still-thriving/

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Australia: Victoria stil refusing to develop much needed gas

Energy minister Chris Bowen deserves high praise for telling Australia the politically incorrect truth – that we need gas to support our accelerated roll out of renewables.

It could not have been easy for Bowen to tell the truth because it contradicted his previous statements and the “we need gas” truth does not accord with the view of many in the cabinet and the ALP supporter base.

As my regular readers know, over the years Bowen and I have often had different views. In Australia, it is rare for a minister to reverse previous statements.

Accordingly, Bowen rises dramatically in my estimation, and the nation could do with more federal and state ministers with that sort of courage.

Australia’s new gas policy means both the government and opposition have similar gas policies, and that suddenly puts Victoria in a position where it is holding the east coast of Australia to ransom by stopping development of its immense low cost onshore no fracking gas reserves.

Fascinatingly, the last time Victoria held the nation to ransom over gas was in the 1960s, soon after gas was discovered in Bass Strait. The then Premier, the late Henry Bolte, wanted to keep the gas for Victorians and to use cheap, reliable energy to boost industry in the state.

It worked and Victoria got a great boost, but eventually the gas was shared with NSW and other states, and we have an east coast pipeline grid.

It is time for Canberra to get much tougher with the delinquent Victorian state, which keeps crying poor when it in fact is not using its enormous riches.

If Victorians wants higher unreliable energy prices, I guess that’s their business, but there is no reason why the existing pipelines should not be used to send Victorian gas to NSW and Queensland who understand the value of gas to lower emissions while keeping reliable energy prices low.

Victoria can encourage its industry and people to follow its energy and go north.

Meanwhile, Victoria can still benefit from is the remarkable attributes of its gas, which is dissolved in deep water. In Queensland, the water that is produced with gas is not suitable to grow crops but the water that contains Victoria’s gas needs very little if any treatment to be used to grow carbon absorbing plants and to revolutionise parts of Victoria’s agriculture, including making it drought proof.

Bowen’s current energy policy still insists that nuclear is too expensive. It is certainly a lot more expensive than a Latrobe Valley gas fired power from the incredibly low-cost Victorian gas. But BHP has shown that Canadian nuclear power is much cheaper than current Australian power costs. .

By using Victoria’s low carbon gas not only can we remove coal from the power equation but suddenly by not rushing nuclear we can watch a nuclear revolution taking place that is led by China.

The world’s second-largest economy now operates nuclear submarines using molten salt cooled thorium, and the same fuel is being used in container ships and also new power stations. It looks to be the future if nuclear, so it makes sense to wait.

My regular readers know the detail of Victorian gas and the fact that former Premier Daniel Andrews gave a carefully selected committee $42m with the instruction to look for gas on shore in Victoria, but that instruction carried a strict caveat – they were forbidden to look where one of the world’s leading gas reserve estimators, MHA Petroleum Consultants, (now part of the giant Sproule group) had calculated Victoria gas reserves totalled 4.996 trillion cubic feet of gas.

That’s some 60 per cent of the last 50 years of Bass Strait production. Better still there was a “high” estimate of reserves at 12.6234 TCF which would make the Victorian reserves second only to the North West Shelf. Lakes Oil also has onshore gas, and its reserves were also in forbidden territory.

The Andrews Committee pocketed the money and dutifully reported Victoria has no on shore gas. Publication of the MHA calculated reserves was removed from government web sites.

The gas was first discovered when Victorian brown coal fields were being mapped in the decades leading up to the 1950s. Decades later, with Bass Strait running down, Exxon in Houston began researching this very deep gas that is dissolved in water and sent the data to MHA.

The first proposal to develop the gas included Esso and BlueScope in the consortium and was put to the then Coalition Premier Denis Napthine in 2014. Napthine incorrectly thought it involved fracking and would hurt farmers, so rejected it prior to the election he lost.

That first proposal emphasised that further wells (about six) must be drilled to make sure that production and permeability will duplicate the first test wells. But Exxon were so confident that they planned to spend $200m (in 2014) on the project, arranged for BlueScope and other major gas users to pencil intent contracts and signed six agreements with local landholders who would benefit from the development.

In the decade that followed Andrews and his energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio, must have known that fracking was not required and because the gas was on the national pipeline and next to the Exxon treatment plant the costs were very low. As a result, they had to be able to deny its existence to keep green seats.

To get Victoria to comply with national policy may require punishment. And also required, is a local media that is not engulfed by Victorian government propaganda.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/victoria-holds-australia-to-ransom-on-much-needed-gas/news-story/35a6f82bb79fa59f942dad9f93144de4

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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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Gas Stove Fearmongering Heats Up

The anti-fossil fuel lobby, in its zealousness, overlooks the undeniable benefits of gas stoves. These appliances, powered by one of the most cost-effective sources of energy in the world, have played a significant role in lifting much of the world out of abject poverty.

But it is fossil fuel, so it must be bad.

However, since Americans have been using gas stoves for generations, and because gas stoves are in many ways superior to electric stoves when it comes to cooking, merely proclaiming that gas is bad will not convince Americans to stop buying and using them.

With the Biden administration getting caught trying to underhandedly ban gas stoves, a move that a majority of Americans objected to, the anti-fossil fuel lobby began with demonizing gas stoves as a threat to people’s health. Doubling down on the “science” is the only way to make “progress.”

In that vein, The Washington Post recently ran a story titled “Gas stoves spread harmful pollution beyond the kitchen, study finds..” The subhead pushed the fearmongering even further, stating, “A study finds that the nitrogen dioxide emitted from stoves impacts the entire home, in some cases hours after the stove was turned off.”

The article notes that the study was conducted by researchers at Stanford University, which is an apparent attempt to suggest that this is actual scientific stuff here. The article then notes the study’s apparently startling claim “that long-term exposure to the staple kitchen appliance could be responsible for 50,000 current pediatric asthma cases from nitrogen dioxide.”

That’s right. Gas stoves are giving children asthma.

Furthermore, because of this woke world we are living in, those most negatively impacted by these dangerous gas stoves are poor minority kids. According to the study, “Indigenous, Alaska Native, Hispanic and Black households, as well as low-income households, experience the highest exposure to nitrogen dioxide from gas and propane from cooking.” Why do researchers think minorities are so inferior that they can’t stave off the danger as well?

The study’s principal researcher, Rob Jackson, claims, “It compounds the injustice of air pollution: Poorer people, and often minority communities, breathe dirtier air outdoors all the time. And it turns out they also breathe dirtier air indoors.” He adds, “And it’s not fair.”

We’re not sure how this is “not fair” because many white people and wealthy people also use gas stoves in their homes. It appears that Jackson is basing his comment on the average size of people’s homes, implying that those with smaller homes are poor minorities.

Tellingly, midway into the article, there is a qualifier that serves to undercut the fearmongering title of the story. The article quotes American Gas Association President and CEO Karen Harbert, who observes, “Despite the impressive names on this study, the data presented here clearly does not support any linkages between gas stoves and childhood asthma or adult mortality.” She adds, “The two major cited studies used to underpin the Stanford analysis directly contradict the conclusions they have presented. In short, the interpretation of results … are misleading and unsupported.”

Seeming to tacitly agree with Harbert that this study is basically bunk, the article notes the response of Michael Johnson, the technical director at Berkeley Air Monitoring Group: “It’s not that I don’t think there are health impacts from using gas stoves,” says Johnson. “There almost certainly are. But, trying to estimate what those health impacts are would need some type of randomized controlled trial.”

In other words, this study is effectively meaningless. It’s suitable only for propagating anti-gas stove propaganda. Besides, the government should focus on more pressing problems, such as securing the southern border. However, due to Washington’s bloated bureaucracy, Americans are subject to countless needless regulations that only infringe on our liberty.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/106816-gas-stove-fearmongering-heats-up-2024-05-15

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Biden’s EV Tariffs Are a Play for Michigan

Joe Biden wants all Americans to drive electric vehicles by 2050. This is part of his party’s extremist climate agenda, which is also apparently the motive behind Biden’s anti-fossil fuel agenda.

The trouble is that while EV technology has come a long way, thanks in large part to Elon Musk and Tesla, EVs aren’t cheap. Furthermore, their limited range, their relatively long recharging time, and the lack of a widespread charging network make them impractical for most Americans.

While EV sales have been rising over the last few years, they still only made up 9% of all vehicles sold in the U.S. last year. Even with Uncle Sam putting his thumb on the scales in the form of $7,500 in tax credits, the average price of a new EV in the U.S. is well over $50,000. Compare that to the median after-tax household income of $64,240, and you get a good idea why EVs remain little other than a luxury accessory for those with more disposable income.

Biden’s problem is that there are indeed more affordable EVs on the market, but they happen to be made in China. China has been looking to flood the U.S. market with lower-cost EVs that would undercut U.S. auto manufacturers — or at least undercut Biden’s agenda for developing all-American-made EVs. For Biden’s green agenda to work, he has heavily invested American tax dollars into developing green tech in the U.S.

In January, Tesla’s Musk warned, “If there are not trade barriers established, [China] will pretty much demolish most other car companies in the world.”

The most expensive component of EVs is the battery, and China dominates the industry. But with the promise of more government funding, companies in six states are investing in the EV battery industry with the hope of eventually competing with China. Incidentally, one of those states is Michigan, a swing state that Biden can ill afford to lose if he is to win reelection. The United Auto Workers, which has a heavy presence in Michigan, endorsed Biden earlier this year, and he has to deliver the goods.

In that light, the Biden administration announced it was looking to embrace one of Donald Trump’s more criticized policies — tariffs. Trump raised tariffs against China over our nations’ glaring trade imbalance. Now, with Biden desperately seeking to keep Chinese-made EVs out of the U.S., his administration is planning to soon slap a 100% tariff on Chinese-made cars. That’s up from the current 25% tariff.

While protecting American auto manufacturers from China is not a bad thing, the reason that car prices keep rising in the U.S. is in large part due to Biden’s effective EV mandate via emissions regulations. Instead of supporting the free market and allowing Americans to make the best decisions for their needs, Biden is trying to force them into buying something they don’t want — something that will cost them more of their hard-earned dollars, all in the furtherance of a radical climate agenda.

Whenever politicians manipulate the market by trying to pick winners and losers, it negatively affects the American consumer, often hurting the poorest Americans the most. Biden’s economic policies have only made everything more expensive. And far from making EVs more affordable for consumers, Biden’s proposed tariffs will have the opposite effect. Consumers will pay the price. Indeed, if Biden had not pushed his green dream agenda, cars would be cheaper today.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/106773-bidens-ev-tariffs-are-a-play-for-michigan-2024-05-14

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The H Stands For Hype

On June 10, 1975, during the 94th Congress, the House of Representatives held the first of two “investigative hearings on the subject of hydrogen — its production, utilization, and potential effects on our energy economy of the future.” The hearing was chaired by Mike McCormack, a Democrat from Washington state, who claimed hydrogen “has the potential of playing the same kind of role in our energy system as electricity does today.”

In 1996, the Chicago Sun-Times declared “The first steps toward what proponents call the hydrogen economy are being taken.” In 2003, Jeremy Rifkin, an “economic and social theorist,” published The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth. In that book, Rifkin claimed that “Globalization represents the end stage of the fossil-fuel era.” Turning “toward hydrogen is a promissory note for a safer world,” he averred.

President George W. Bush bought the hydrogen hype. In his 2003 State of the Union Address, he said, “With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles” to taking hydrogen-fueled automobiles “from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen, and pollution-free.” A few months after that speech, his administration announced a collaborative effort with the European Union for the “development of a hydrogen economy,” including the technologies “needed for mass production of safe and affordable hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles.” The White House claimed in a 2003 press release that the effort would “improve America’s energy security by significantly reducing the need for imported oil.”

The history of the hype matters because we live in ahistorical times. Or, as author Jeff Minick explained in 2022, we are plagued by “presentism.” Presentism, Minick wrote, “is the reason so many young people can name the Kardashians but can’t tell you the importance of Abraham Lincoln or why we fought in World War II.”

Presentism helps explain why, on April 30, the New York Times published a piece headlined, “Hydrogen Offers Germany a Chance to Take a Lead in Green Energy,” which ignores the long history of hydrogen’s failure to live up to the forecasts. But blaming presentism can’t account for the vapidity of the article, which hinges on this nut graf:

The concept of hydrogen as a renewable energy source has been around for years, but only within the past decade has the idea of its potential to replace fossil fuels to power heavy industry taken off, leading to increased investment and advances in the technology. (Emphasis added.)

The idea of hydrogen may (or may not) be taking off, but hydrogen is not a “source” of energy, it’s an energy carrier. Calling hydrogen an energy “source” is like calling Stormy Daniels an “actress.”

Hydrogen is abundant in the universe. But it’s not a source of energy. Instead, like electricity and gasoline, it must be manufactured. The most common ways are by splitting water through electrolysis, or via steam-methane reforming, which uses high-pressure steam to produce hydrogen from methane.

There are other forehead-slapping statements in the Times article written by Stanley Reed and Melissa Eddy, who traveled to the German city of Duisburg to visit a factory that makes electrolyzers. “If adopted widely,” they wrote, “the devices could help clean up heavy industry such as steel-making, in Germany and elsewhere.” Well, yes, if “adopted widely.” But despite decades of frothy predictions from Rifkin and others, electrolyzers haven’t been adopted widely because making and using hydrogen on a large scale is — as my friend, Steve Brick, puts it — “a thermodynamic obscenity.”

Reed and Eddy ignore the energy intensity of making hydrogen, only offering that by using “electricity to split water” the electrolyzer “produces hydrogen, a carbon-free gas that could help power mills like the one in Duisburg.” That’s true. But how much electricity is needed? And where the heck is German industry, which is already being hammered by expensive gas and power, going to get the juice? At what cost? Those questions are not addressed.

To be clear, lots of other media outlets are hyping hydrogen. And the hype is surging because of fat government subsidies. Reed and Eddy explain that the German government has earmarked some $14.2 billion “for investment in about two dozen projects to develop hydrogen.” Here in the U.S., the 45V tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act provides lucrative subsidies for hydrogen production. Big business is lining up to get those subsidies. In February, energy giant Exxon Mobil warned that it might cancel a proposed hydrogen project at its Baytown, Texas refinery depending on how the Treasury Department interpreted the “clean” hydrogen rules in the IRA.

Regardless of tax credits and subsidies, making and using hydrogen is a high-entropy, high-cost process. As a friend in the oil refining business told me last year, “If you like $6-per-gallon gasoline, you’re gonna love $14-to-$20-per-gallon hydrogen.”

https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/the-h-in-hydrogen-stands-for-hype

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Is the Goal Cleaner Air – Or Something Else?

In 1991, Oleta Adams sang “Get Here” on “Soul Train.” She spent 23 weeks on the Billboard top 100 with the love ballad, listing all the ways he could get to her: by railway, trailway, airplane, caravan, sailboat, swinging on a rope, by sled, horseback, or even by windsurfing, magic carpet, or hot air balloon. The conclusion is, “I don’t care how you get here, just get here…”

Government regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), ought to take that approach, but rarely do. This was the primary controversy surrounding EPA’s regulation of methane emissions, which sought not only to set and enforce standards for the pollutant, but also to dictate a one-size-fits-all outdated technology to monitor emissions.

Governments are often behind the curve in recognizing the latest technology. Innovation invariably moves faster than the intentionally slow processes of government. We saw that with the Biden Administration’s methane regulations, and we are seeing it again with its recent move to halt upcoming liquefied natural gas (LNG) export permits. The LNG export moratorium has sparked intense debates around the country, on both sides of the aisle, and will have repercussions for years.

Frankly, the public was blindsided by the Administration’s suddenly announced LNG export permit moratorium. That’s because the U.S. established itself as the world’s largest exporter of LNG last year, surpassing gas-rich nations like Qatar and Australia. In fact, the U.S. positioned itself as a steadfast partner to European countries by assisting them in diversifying their energy sources and reducing dependence on Russian imports. That could have a more profound effect on world peace over the long term than military aid, so the sudden reversal sent a decidedly unfriendly message to Europe.

But threatening our overseas relationships isn’t the only thing at stake. Our national security will face significant threats, as our allies return to importing LNG from foreign adversaries to make up the difference.

The Administration’s haphazard decision-making on this issue has left members of its own political party dumbfounded. Numerous Democratic senators have expressed concern about the moratorium. Colorado Senator Michael Bennet called it “a short-sighted decision” and further noted “it’s been very important for liquefied natural gas to replace the natural gas Russia was sending to Europe.”

Pennsylvania Senators John Fetterman and Bob Casey, Jr. both publicly encouraged the President to reverse course. They wrote that halting LNG exports would harm Pennsylvania’s economy, “undermine [the President’s] climate agenda, empower Russia and Iran, and create a schism with allies who depend on this clean energy to fuel their countries.”

It was a shock because only two years ago, the administration intended to deliver essential aid to a Europe grappling with energy shortages, aiming to mitigate the impact resulting from Russia’s withholding of crucial energy supplies. Just last year, President Biden said he was eager to ramp up U.S. LNG production and exports to help our allies. Now, in a dramatic and abrupt turnabout, the White House has flipped sides, stunting further energy growth in the U.S. and hanging its allies out to dry.

The fact remains that natural gas is the cleanest available fuel. U.S. Energy Information Administration data shows it is considered the least carbon-intensive fossil fuel. Producing natural gas results in fewer emissions of nearly all types of air pollutants and carbon dioxide, compared with oil or coal. In addition, in 2019 and 2021, despite an increase in production, U.S. natural gas and oil producers reduced methane and CO2 emissions by 28 and 30 percent, respectively. And to bring it full circle, these reductions fit hand-in-hand with the EPA’s stated goal to slash methane emissions by as much as 80 percent in the next decade.

If the Biden Administration wants to see results that help the environment and keep overseas relations intact, the President must realize that rash decision-making may pander to supportive interest groups, but it will not achieve these goals. In the case of the earlier methane rule, EPA listened to many of the concerns about its initial proposal, and attempted to address them by allowing companies to apply a variety of methane emissions detection technologies. But the abrupt decision on LNG exports takes a completely different approach, not letting companies help determine the best way to achieve goals, but again trying to dictate the technology to be used. It risks economic stability, may force allies back under Russian influence, and will likely lead to higher domestic prices – not to lower emissions.

If President Biden truly wants to meet his aggressive climate goals, regressive policies like restricting emissions monitoring technologies or banning LNG exports is a poor start. Deploying promising new technologies, including LNG, would set a clearer direction toward achieving emissions reductions goals everyone supposedly shares.

Cooperation, not edict, is the likely key to success. Government should establish clear goals and be ready to accept various ways to achieve them based on the latest technology. Regulators should come to the table with a simpler message: “We don’t care how you get there, just get there.

https://heartland.org/opinion/is-the-goal-cleaner-air-or-something-else/

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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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Children exposed to climate hazards are more likely to be stunted, underweight, and more vulnerable to early pregnancies

This is not as mad as it sounds. Some parts of India are so badly affected by floods, droughts and big wind events that their livelihood is endangered. They can suffer from semi-starvation. And that DOES have adverse health effects. It's nothing to do with global warming

Women and children in Bihar, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal and Telangana are particularly vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, reveals an internal study commissioned by Ministry of Women and Child Development. Children exposed to climate hazards are more likely to be stunted, underweight, and more vulnerable to early pregnancies, it further says.

The study exclusively accessed by The Hindu identifies climate and health hotspots in order to specifically understand the impact of floods, cyclones and droughts on health of women and children. Titled “How does climate change impact women and children across agro-ecological zones in India - A scoping study”, it was conducted by the non-profit M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF).

“The issue of climate-change impact on women and children is under-researched and often overlooked in policy formulation. In our scoping study we realised that up to 70% of Indian districts are at very high risk of floods, droughts, and cyclones. Women and children’s undernutrition, teenage pregnancy and domestic violence indicators in these hotspots are also very stark,” Soumya Swaminathan, chairperson, MSSRF and former chief scientist of World Health Organization told The Hindu on the sidelines of the WomenLift Health Global Conference 2024 at Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, in April earlier this year.

Overall, 183 districts were vulnerable to hydro-meteorological disasters such as cyclones and floods while 349 districts witnessed drought. The study was able to generate certain spatial hotspots where high exposure to hydro-met hazards such as floods, cyclones and droughts significantly co-exists with a higher prevalence of poor health variables such as underweight women and child marriage.

In northern areas of Bihar and Gujarat, the geospatial maps show hotspots where exposure to drought, flood, and cyclone co-exists with stunting and underweight children. In terms of women’s nutritional indicators too, these States need immediate attention, the study says. The northern parts of both States are flood-prone areas battered by heavy rainfall.

Also read: Fixing India’s malnutrition problem

The study also points out that the northern plains, including parts of Uttar Pradesh, have hotspots for stunting, while parts of north Maharashtra and south Madhya Pradesh are hotspots for underweight children. Children are 6% more likely to be stunted, 24% more likely to be underweight, experience 35% reduction in minimum diet diversity, and there is a 12% increase in likelihood of deaths if they are under five years of age and exposed to drought, the report said.

“Also, it should be noted that southern India and parts of coastal belts in Odisha have high exposure scores to hydro-met hazards but perform better in terms of child stunting and underweight, highlighting the role of stronger health systems,” the study points out.

The study further goes on to identify major hotspots in terms of impact on women and young girls in areas exposed to drought, floods and cyclones - northern Bihar and parts of Uttar Pradesh, southern West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh and parts of Telangana, eastern Maharashtra, parts of northern Madhya Pradesh and southern Uttar Pradesh.

“Exposure to drought events increases the likelihood of prevalence of underweight women by 35%, child marriage by 37%, teenage pregnancy by 17% and intimate partner violence by up to 50%,” the study states.

The climate change hotspots have been identified by spatio-temporal analysis encompassing 50 years of data on frequency and intensity of floods, cyclones and droughts and by using district-level climate vulnerability exposure scores published in 2021 by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW).

For health indicators of women and children, mapping and statistical analysis had been conducted by using the fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) which cites data of 2019-21.

The study recognises that each hazard has different implication and it is difficult to attribute effects of sudden and short-term hazards like flood and cyclone on various parameters. Contrarily, slow and long-term hazards like droughts are likely to have more chronic and long-lasting effects.

The document submitted to Ministry states that the study’s limitations include reliance on secondary data sources, with limited empirical insights into the health aspects of women affected by climate change.

The recommendation to Ministry also states that there is a key gap in evidence, in order to understand differential factors behind children’s vulnerability to heatwaves and develop a systematic method to measure children’s exposure to heatwaves, and relatively less research attention has been paid to this area of inquiry, particularly in India.

“Excess deaths due to heat are not recognised and every State and city should make a heat action plan to tackle the effects of heatwaves. There should be accountability for who is responsible for co-ordination, who will finance, how will messages be disseminated in case of heat stroke and so on. It is a multi-sectoral effort. For instance, the labour department should enforce laws to give a break to construction labour from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.,” Dr. Swaminathan said.

There is also an absence of national-level data on climate vulnerability considering all hazards. There is a need to study the extent of exposure of women and children at the individual, household, and community levels to seven types of hazards - floods, cyclones, droughts, rainfall variability, heatwaves, air pollution, and cold waves, the recommendation to Ministry points out.

“To identify statistically significant hotspots highlighting the prevalence of heatwaves or prolonged heat and poor health variables, there is a need to generate detailed district-wise monthly temperature data that is currently lacking,” the study document states.

https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/health/study-shows-impact-of-climate-hazards-on-women-children/article68164791.ece

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‘Gambling With The Grid’: New Data Highlights Achilles’ Heel Of One Of Biden’s Favorite Green Power Sources

New government data shows that wind power generation fell in 2023 despite the addition of new capacity, a fact that energy sector experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation demonstrates its inherent flaw.

Wind generation fell by about 2.1% in 2023 relative to 2022 generation, despite the 6 gigawatts (GW) of wind power capacity that came online last year, according to data published Tuesday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). That wind power output dropped despite new capacity coming online and the availability of government subsidies highlights its intermittency and the problems wind power could pose for grid reliability, energy sector experts told the DCNF.

The decrease in wind generation is the first drop on record with the EIA since the 1990s; the drop was not evenly distributed across all regions of the U.S., and slower wind speeds last year also contributed to the decline, according to EIA. The Biden administration wants to have the American power sector reach carbon neutrality by 2035, a goal that will require a significant shift away from natural gas- and coal-fired power toward wind, solar and other green sources

“Relying on wind power to meet your peak electricity demands is gambling with the grid,” Isaac Orr, a policy fellow at the Center of the American Experiment who specializes in power grid-related analysis, told the DCNF. “Will the wind blow, or won’t it? This should be a moment where policymakers step back and consider the wisdom of heavily subsidizing intermittent generators and punishing reliable coal and gas plants with onerous regulations.”

Between 2016 and 2022, the wind industry received an estimated $18.6 billion worth of subsidies, about 10% of the total amount of subsidies extended to the energy sector by the U.S. government, according to an August 2023 EIA report. Wind power received more assistance from the government than nuclear power, coal or natural gas over the same period of time.

“This isn’t subsidies per kilowatt hour of generation. It’s raw subsidies. If it were per kilowatt hour of generation, the numbers would be even more extreme,” Paige Lambermont, a research fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the DCNF. “This is a massive amount of money. It’s enough to dramatically alter energy investment decisions for the worse. We’re much more heavily subsidizing the sources that don’t provide a significant portion of our electricity than those that do.”

“Policy that just focuses on installed capacity, rather than the reliability of that capacity, fails to understand the real needs of the electrical grid,” Lambermont added. “This recent disparity illustrates that more installed wind capacity does not necessarily correlate with more wind power production. It doesn’t matter how much wind you add to the grid, if the wind isn’t blowing at peak demand time, that capacity will go to waste.”

Wind power’s performance was especially lackluster in the upper midwest, but Texas saw more wind generation in 2023 than it did in 2022, according to EIA. Wind generation in the first half of 2023 was about 14% lower than it was through the first six months of 2022, but generation was higher toward the end of 2023 than it was during the same period in 2022.

In 2023, about 60% of all electricity generated in the U.S. came from fossil fuels, while 10% came from wind power, according to EIA data. Beyond generous subsidies for preferred green energy sources, the Biden administration has also aggressively regulated fossil fuels and American power plants to advance its broad climate agenda.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) landmark power plant rules finalized this month will threaten grid reliability if enacted, partially because the regulations are likely to incentivize operators to close plants rather than adopt the costly measures required for compliance, grid experts previously told the DCNF. At the same time that the Biden administration is effectively trying to shift power generation away from fossil fuels, it is also pursuing goals — such as substantially boosting electric vehicle adoption over the next decade and incentivizing construction of energy-intensive computer chip factories — that are driving up projected electricity demand in the future.

“The EIA data proves what we’ve always known about wind power: It is intermittent, unpredictable and unreliable,” David Blackmon, a 40-year veteran of the oil and gas industry who now writes and consults on the energy sector, told the DCNF. “Any power generation source whose output is wholly dependent on equally unpredictable weather conditions should never be presented by power companies and grid managers as safe replacements for abundant, cheap, dispatchable generation fueled with natural gas, coal or nuclear. This is a simple reality that people in charge of our power grids too often forget. Saying that no doubt hurts some people’s feelings, but nature really does not care about our feelings.”

Blackmon also pointed out that, aside from its intermittency, sluggish build-out of the transmission lines and related infrastructure poses a major problem for wind power.

“Wind power is worthless without accompanying transmission, yet the Biden administration continues to pour billions into unreliable wind while ignoring the growing crisis in the transmission sector,” Blackmon told the DCNF.

Another long-term issue that wind power, as well as solar power, faces is the need for a massive expansion in the amount of battery storage available to store and dispatch energy from intermittent sources as market conditions dictate. By some estimates, the U.S. will need about 85 times as much battery storage by 2050 relative to November 2023 in order to fully decarbonize the power grid, according to Alsym Energy, a battery company.

The White House and the Department of Energy did not respond to requests for comment.

https://dailycaller.com/2024/05/04/data-wind-generation-decrease-2023-grid-reliability/s

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Solar's Been Taking a Beating Lately

A massive blaze plunged a swimming carnival into chaos with hundreds of school children forced to evacuate a busy aquatic centre.

The solar panels on the roof of the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre in Homebush, western Sydney, went up in flames at about 12.30pm on Monday.

Children who were attending a swimming carnival inside the facility were forced to evacuate the building in their swimmers.

Thick plumes of smoke were seen coming out of the building as emergency services rushed to the scene.

Half a dozen NSW Fire and Rescue crews fought the blaze and three ambulance crews were also called to the venue.

Emergency crews got there and found the fire was literally in the solar array itself.

..."Six appliances and 24 Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) firefighters responded to the incident in Shane Gould Avenue at 12.15pm after reports of black smoke issuing from the building.

"Upon investigation, crews found a working fire in the solar panels on the roof of the sporting facility."

Fire crews used a ladder platform to attack the flames and were able to get the blaze under control within about 45 minutes.

FRNSW confirmed that more than 2,500 people had to be evacuated during the incident.

...Multiple witnesses phoned Sydney's 2GB to report the incident, with one caller named Peter claiming "all the solar panels are going up on the roof".

Thank goodness they got there that quickly and that the number of people at the venue could be evacuated efficiently and safely. I've only seen reports of one injury so far. Kudos to all involved.

https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2024/05/13/solars-been-taking-a-beating-lately-n3788320#google_vignette

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Biden Signs Suicidal ‘No Coal’ Pact, While Rest of World Builds 1,000 New Plants

The Biden administration has just signed an economic suicide pact that would require the United States and six other Western democracies to shut down its coal power plants by 2035, while China, India and the rest of the world currently have more than 1,000 new coal power plants in the planning or construction phase. The no-coal pact allows all nations but the Suicidal Seven to continue using as much affordable coal power as they like.

Climate activists often point to China as a climate role model, noting that China manufactures more wind and solar power equipment than any other nation. China, however, isn’t stupid enough to use much of that equipment. Realizing that conventional energy – and especially coal power – is more affordable and reliable than wind and solar power, China manufactures wind and solar equipment, sells the equipment to America and Western Europe, and then powers its own economy primarily with coal power.

In America, government intervention has already caused the shutdown of many coal power plants and the construction of expensive wind and solar projects. In more than half the states, renewable power mandates require a certain percentage of electricity in the state to come from wind or solar. Federal laws and regulations punish coal power at nearly every step of coal mining and utilization. Massive subsidies for wind and solar allow wind and solar providers to charge substantially reduced prices for their product at taxpayers’ expense.

Even with government tipping the scale so heavily in favor of wind and solar power, the so-called green transition is coming with an enormous price tag. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, there was a 21 percent increase in wind and solar power since Joe Biden took office in January 2021 through the end of 2023. At the same time, electricity prices also rose by 21 percent. Prior to Biden taking office, the long-term electricity price trend was an increase of approximately 1 percent per year. The green transition has increased the pace of electricity price inflation by 700 percent. And that doesn’t account for all the wind and solar subsidies that are hidden in our tax bills.

There is little reason to believe we are on the verge of a climate crisis. A good resource documenting this good news is ClimateRealism.com. Yet, even if a climate crisis were imminent, unilateral coal disarmament is a foolish way for America to approach carbon dioxide emissions.

Since 2000, the United States has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions more than any other country in the world. U.S. emissions are down 21 percent, while the rest of the world has increased its emissions by 47 percent. Clearly, America “showing leadership” reducing carbon dioxide emissions is leading to nothing other than the rest of the world free license to jack up their own emissions. Even if the United States and the rest of the Suicidal Seven could somehow eliminate all of their emissions, it would have little impact on the global trend.

Ultimately, Biden’s pact to eliminate American coal use will further ramp up inflation. After all, energy is an important cost component in almost every product bought and sold in the economy. In addition to the inflation impact, Biden’s pact will force American businesses into a major competitive disadvantage versus businesses in China, India, and the rest of the world, which will be paying substantially lower energy costs than American businesses.

Under Biden’s plan, we will end up sinking vast economic resources into eliminating coal power and as much carbon dioxide as possible from the American economy. Even then, we will still be looking at global emissions continuing to rise. At that point, Biden’s plan is for America to assume the lion’s share of global “climate reparations” and financial bribes to induce China, India, and the rest of the world to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. After sabotaging our own economy with higher energy prices, we will literally borrow money from China in order to then bribe China to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions.

It would be hard to think of a crazier domestic energy policy.

https://heartland.org/opinion/biden-signs-suicidal-no-coal-pact-while-rest-of-world-builds-1000-new-plants/

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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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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Many of the ‘Climate Experts’ Surveyed by the Guardian in Recent Propaganda Blitz Turn Out to be Emotionally-Unstable Hysterics

The Guardian last week published its survey of ‘climate experts’. The results are a predictable mush of fire-and-brimstone predictions and emotional incontinence. This stunt may have convinced those already aligned to the newspaper’s ideological agenda to redouble their characteristically shrill rhetoric, but encouraging scientists to speculate and emote about the future of the planet looks like an act of political desperation, not scientific communication.

For the purposes of creating this story, the Guardian’s Environment Editor Damian Carrington contacted 843 ‘lead authors’ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports (IPCC) and 383 responded to his questions. The actual substance of the survey does not seem to have been published by the paper, but the main response Carrington wanted to get from his respondents was an estimate of how much global warming there will be by the end of the century. “World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5ºC target,” claims one headline. A graphic in the article shows the responses:

The obvious problem this raises is that such a wide range of views on the next three quarters of a century discredits the notion that the IPCC represents a ‘scientific consensus’ on climate change. The ‘consensus’ – the putative expression of agreement by the worlds ‘top climate scientists’ – is the lynchpin of the narrative, epitomised by the Guardian, that the climate debate is between scientists and denialists. “Seventy seven per cent of climate scientists expect a rise of at least 2.5ºC,” explains the chart. Well, yeah, but 23% of climate scientists do not. And a good number of those connected to the IPCC believe that there will be just 1.5 degrees of warming – a third less warming than is anticipated by their colleagues at the other end of the spectrum. Clearly, there is, or needs to be, a debate.

This in turn raises the question of why this survey was necessary at all. The IPCC’s main output is an Assessment Report (AR), of which six have so far been produced since 1990. Each AR consists of three main volumes, each produced by a Working Group (WG), whose focus is on assessing the available research on “the physical science” (WG1), impacts and vulnerabilities (WG2), and mitigation options (WG3). A Guardian opinion survey is hardly going to shed any light on science that these scientists, who authored the reports, have not already published. It would seem rather silly to ignore the thousands of pages of summaries of the state of scientific understanding that hundreds of scientists and other experts have compiled and substitute it with a DIY opinion poll.

Opinion isn’t science. Even scientific opinion is not science. Yet Carrington seems to believe that tapping into the emotions of scientists is of greater value than reading their work. And all sorts of mush seems to have been unleashed by his project. “‘I am starting to panic about my child’s future’: climate scientists wary of starting families,” claims one headline based on the survey. According to the article, the victim of the panic is a Professor Lisa Schipper, whom Carrington describes as “an expert on climate vulnerability”. Schipper’s profile, however, reveals her actual occupation: “I am particularly interested in socio-cultural dimensions of vulnerability, including gender, culture and religion, as well as structural issues related to power, justice and equity.” I’m smelling a rat here, and more than a whiff of humbug. Schipper is not a climate scientist at all, as Carrington seems to imply in both his headline and his article.

Another article – an interactive page on the Guardian website – claims: “We asked 380 top climate scientists what they felt about the future.” The article quotes, among others, Lorraine Whitmarsh from the University of Bath, who tells Carrington:

[Climate change] is an existential threat to humanity and [lack of] political will and vested corporate interests are preventing us addressing it. I do worry about the future my children are inheriting.

But Whitmarsh is not a climate scientist either. According to her academic profile at Bath, She did a BA in Theology and Religious Studies with French at the University of Kent, graduating in 1997. She followed this with a Masters in ‘Science, Culture and Communication’, before completing a PhD in Psychology in 2005. Now Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST), Whitmarsh researches “perceptions and behaviour in relation to climate change, energy and transport” and “regularly advises governmental and other organisations on low-carbon behaviour change and climate change communication”.

I have discussed the nature of climate psychologists’ work before in the Daily Sceptic. And of course, CAST is of that lofty academic milieu which wraps naked Stalinism in motherhood-and-apple-pie. “We want to work closely with people and organisations to achieve positive low-carbon futures — transforming the way we live our lives, and reconfiguring organisations and cities,” says the group’s website. What it doesn’t have an answer to, however, is people who do not share CAST’s radical ideology and do not want their lives, cities or organisations transformed or reconfigured by self-regarding shrinks – who are manifestly the ones in need of help.

There are of course a number of respondents with scientific backgrounds who have replied to Carrington. But these scientific credentials do not seem to have made those who own them any more rational. “Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken,” says climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota, who at least appears to have a PhD in Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, “after all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change…”

But perhaps Cerezo-Mota forgot to read IPCC AR 6 in which her colleagues conclude that any detectable increase in floods and meteorological and hydrological droughts cannot be attributed with confidence to anthropogenic climate change. And perhaps she forgot that two decades of wildfire data in all regions of the world show significant declines.

I think it is probably for the best that such nervous wrecks do not reproduce. Their grasp on the data is particularly myopic. Despite their apparent belief that the climate crisis is upon us, life for children born in recent years is immeasurably better that of earlier generations. Rather than being dominated by the weather, today’s children are not only far more likely to survive their fifth birthday, they are going to live longer, healthier, wealthier and safer lives than any generation before them.

That is, unless these crazy climate scientists get their way. Because they would strip away every last benefit of industry, capitalism,and freedom to ‘save the planet’, and deny those children the abundant and affordable resources that has created their historically unprecedented position.

It goes further than humbug. I sense very little data and science underpins their anti-natalism, but a great deal of ideology and manipulation. So how can we explain these scientists’ views, if we don’t believe that they emerge from science?

One answer might be that, for nearly 40 years now, green ideology has been poured into classrooms throughout the world, without any care for the consequences. It has largely bounced off most people. But several generations of children have now come up through this system into the adult world, through higher education. The institutions of climate and environmental science have increasingly become the centres to which unhinged individuals are drawn. Emotionally unstable people naturally seek reasons to explain their dysphoria and believing there is a crisis unfolding in the skies above their heads (rather than in them) is a way to explain their anxieties. After all, if you were not a climate loon, why would you volunteer your time to the IPCC? Gradually, rational views have been weeded out of these institutions.

I believe that is the implication of Carrington’s series of Guardian articles and his survey. It shows that people with no scientific expertise to speak of are nonetheless routinely presented as ‘scientists’ and experts. It shows that even those with scientific expertise will happily and radically depart from both the consensus position and the objective data on both meteorological events and their societal impacts. And it shows they have no reluctance to use their own emotional distress as leverage to coerce others. Carrington thinks that showing us scientists’ emotional troubles will convince us to share their anxiety. But all it shows is that it would be deeply foolish to defer to the authority of climate science. It’s an unstable mess. Science must be cool, calm, rational, detached and disinterested, or it is just a silly soap opera.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/05/13/many-of-the-climate-experts-surveyed-by-the-guardian-in-recent-propaganda-blitz-turn-out-to-be-emotionally-unstable-hysterics/

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Concerns Mount Over Exploding Electric Vehicles

Safety concerns around electric vehicles continue to mount with Australian fire and rescue services in New South Wales stating they might have to make a “tactical disengagement” of a trapped car accident victim if the battery is likely to explode.

Australian journalist Jo Nova covered the story, which was first mentioned in the EV blog The Driven, and commented: “They say the first responders need more training as if this can be solved with a certificate, but the dark truth is they’re talking about training the firemen and the truck drivers to recognise when they have to abandon the rescue.”

The Driven, a widely-read blog that seems highly sympathetic to a rollout of EVs, was reporting on recent testimony given to the NSW Government’s Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Batteries Inquiry. The writer suggested that first responders did not have adequate training to deal with electric vehicle collisions, and in the most serious cases, crews could be forced to abandon rescues.

One particular area of concern seemed to revolve around the need to extract a trapped casualty quickly after a crash by dragging the person out in a “very undesirable manner”. Fires are a grave risk in any vehicle accident, but they can be quickly brought under control in an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle.

Worries about the potential dangers inherent in EVs is likely to grow as numbers on the roads continue to rise. EV battery explosions can occur very quickly, triggering the release of highly toxic gases. When they roar into thermal overdrive, they create very high temperatures and are very difficult to extinguish.

The explosion can occur after almost any collision, or be due to a fault in the initial manufacture. The fire often takes hours to control and it can reignited days after it was thought to be out. With Net Zero fanatics desperate to drive ICE cars off the road in short order,

EVs are the only mass private transport solution offered. Many of the issues, including safety, that make them an inferior product compared to petrol-powered combustion cars are often ignored.

Just what can be involved in putting out a fire in an EV was dramatically detailed in a recent press release from the Wakefield Fire Dept in Massachusetts. It was called out to deal with a burning Tesla on a snowy Interstate 95, and reported:

Wakefield Engine 1 and Ladder 1 initiated suppression operations, applying copious amounts of water onto the vehicle. Multiple surrounding mutual aid communities responded as well to support firefighting operations and to create a water shuttle to bring water continually to the scene. Engines from Melrose, Stoneham, Reading,

Lynnfield as well as a Middleton water tanker assisted. Firefighters had three 1¾-inch hand lines as well as a ‘blitz gun’ in operation to cool the battery compartment… Lynnfield crews established a continuous 4-inch supply line from Vernon Street up to the highway. The fire was declared under control and fully extinguished after about two and a half hours…

The vehicle was removed from the scene after consulting with the Hazmat Unit… The crews did a great job, especially in the middle of storm conditions – on a busy highway.

There is little doubt that EV fires are on the rise. In the U.K., CE Safety runs Freedom of Information checks on local fire brigades and its latest survey shows an alarming rise in conflagrations. In Greater London in the 2017-2022 period, there were a reported 507 battery fires from a number of EV types, but CE Safety found a “gigantic” 219 conflagrations in 2022-23 alone.

Lancashire was said to rank second with 15 EV battery fires, but this was 10 more in a single year than recorded in the five years between 2017-2022. Overall “it was concerning” to discover that the number of electric battery fires during 2022-2023 was higher in most areas than the data showed over five years from 2017 to 2022. During that year, 14 buses suffered battery fires.

There was a substantial increase in the number of e-bikes catching fire, with CE Safety noting that lithium is highly flammable and reactive. “Over-charging presents a massive risk to households with lithium-powered vehicles,” the safety organisation observed.

Concern is also rising over the transportation of EVs on car ferries. Recently, Havila Kystruten, which operates a fleet of car ferries around the coast of Norway, has banned the transportation of electric, hybrid and hydrogen vehicles.

According to a report in the Maritime Executive, it is the latest step by the shipping industry, “which has become acutely aware of the increasing danger of transporting EV and other alternate fuel vessels”.

Havila’s Managing Director Bent Martini said a risk analysis had shown a fire at sea in a fossil fuel vehicle could be handled by on-board systems. “A possible fire in electric, hybrid or hydrogen cars will require external rescue efforts and could put people on board and the ships at risk,” he said. That of course is the nightmare scenario.

If fire breaks out on a ferry making a 20-mile crossing in good weather, the chances of all passengers and crew surviving are good. Less good, perhaps, if fire was to break out and fill the ship with toxic smoke in the middle of a stormy November night while crossing the Bay of Biscay. Chances of survival would be diminished if the high temperatures caused nearby EVs to explode.

Mercifully, we are less and less likely to see such accidents. The list of disadvantages of EVs is lengthening by the day. Environmental concerns about the manufacture and mining of raw materials have been raised, while ‘range anxiety’ is common among drivers. EVs are more expensive than ICE cars, while knackered batteries mean that second-hand values are very poor.

https://principia-scientific.com/concerns-mount-over-exploding-electric-vehicles/

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Recent past a poor guide to climate future

Don’t look to the recent past to understand near-term global warming, “the spatial pattern of global warming in the most recent 40 years doesn't look like the long-term pattern we expect in the future. The recent past is a bad analogue for future global warming,” according to Kyle Armour, of the University of Washington.

Instead it is the more distant past that might hold important clues about the warming we may expect by the end of this century. Short-term climate cycles like those we have recently experienced, coupled with the effects of atmospheric pollution, suggest that we can’t use recent data to reliably predict the rest of this century.

The caution is expressed in a new study published in Science Advances. It doesn’t alter the best-case warming scenario from doubling CO2 — about 2°C – but it does reduce the worst-case scenario from 5°C to 4°C.

This climate sensitivity estimate comes from looking at the recent paleoclimate record – a few tens of thousands of years ago – that includes long periods that were much warmer or colder than our current climate. This was caused by many factors, such as the influence of large ice sheets and greenhouse gases. Scientists take an interest in these past times because knowing, however roughly, what the past temperature changes were and what caused them, sheds light on what to expect in the future.

The researchers looked at the Last Glacial Maximum, a period 21,000 years ago when the Earth was on average 6°C cooler than today. Ice core records from the time show that atmospheric CO2 then was less than half of today’s levels, about 190 parts per million. Using new statistical techniques, the researchers have incorporated the paleoclimate data into climate models, producing temperature maps of the time.

The study shows that CO2 played a lesser role in influencing ice age temperatures than was thought. This suggests that the most extreme predictions for global warming from rising CO2 are less likely.

Cloudbase conundrum

In other recent research, scientists note that clouds are a major source of uncertainty in climate models. Some make the Earth warmer by trapping heat, others make it cooler by reflecting sunlight. Exactly which type of cloud influences climate is a major problem. In some cases it is unknown if they cause overall cooling or warming.

New remote-sensing measurements could provide a way to estimate droplet concentration in clouds, which will enable scientists to gain insights into how changes in atmospheric aerosol levels could affect clouds and climate.

They have made the first-ever remote observations of the fine-scale structure at the base of clouds. The results have just been published in Nature Climate and Atmospheric Science and reveal that the air-cloud interface is not a perfect boundary, but is a transition zone, where aerosol particles suspended in Earth’s atmosphere give rise to the droplets that form clouds. Most cloud droplets initially form at the cloud base, in the so-called ‘droplet activation zone’, and the number of them will affect the properties of the cloud later on, including how much sunlight it reflects.

To investigate this zone, scientists fired laser beams into the atmosphere and measured the backscattered reflection from molecules, aerosols, and cloud droplets. Recently, a new higher-resolution laser, firing at 20,000 pulses a second, has focused in on this important area. Cloud microphysical properties and processes are crucial to understanding weather and climate and this new technique may provide a valuable contribution.

https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/recent-past-a-poor-guide-to-climate-future

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UK: The Net Zero juggernaut grinds relentlessly onwards

Did you know that there is an Interministerial Group for Net Zero, Energy and Climate Change?

Hardly anyone does. But there is such a thing, comprising representatives of the UK Government, the Welsh Government the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive, which together form the UK Emission Trading Scheme Authority, and it issues, in the style of aristocratic, haut en bas, international diplomacy, occasional ‘Communiqués’ on its meetings.

The latest, reporting a discussion on the 21st of February, was released on the 2nd of May. In spite the long interval the substance of the public statement is brief and can be quoted in its entirety:

What was discussed

The Interministerial Group discussed the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, specifically the UK ETS Authority’s plans set out in July 2023 for expansion of the scope of the scheme to additional sectors of the economy.
Is that it? you ask. Yes indeed; that’s all you are allowed to know about a discussion and perhaps a decision that will add further industries to the UK ETS, and bring yet more of the economy under the low-carbon whip, loading consumers with still further costs. But it will not be the last of such opaque and ridiculously brief ‘communiqués’ from the four governments on this and many other matters related to Net Zero.

If the man and woman in the street said that this looks more like bureaucracy than democracy, it would be hard to disagree. The low-carbon policy agenda is now deeply embedded within the process of UK government, binding the four devolved authorities together in the collaborative development of policies to deliver one agenda – Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The policy and the process are now indistinguishable, and in spite of the turbulence affecting the Net Zero plans here and abroad, the green juggernaut grinds relentlessly onwards behind closed doors and away from prying eyes. The public may think that the Prime Minister is responding to concerns about the costs, and he may even think this himself, but the truth is that the ‘Interministerial’, and other similar Net Zero delivery agents such as Ofgem, carry on their work relatively undisturbed by such external criticism.

This matters a great deal. Direct income support subsidies to renewable generators are now well-known, and controversial. The OBR estimates that the Renewables Obligation will cost consumers some £8 billion in the current year, the Contracts for Difference scheme some £2.1 billion, the Capacity Market some £1.4 billion. The Feed-in Tariff for small scale generation adds a far from small scale £1.73 billion.[1]

But the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, which the ‘Interministerial’ communiqué is preparing to expand, already adds at least another £6 billion a year to consumer costs, equivalent to about half the other green levies in total. This cost is incurred by companies to purchase permits to emit carbon dioxide, the funds being received by the government. To avoid these costs, emitters must reduce their emissions by adopting low-carbon technologies. But this is not a cost-free option, since low-carbon energy supply is, and in spite of government propaganda, much more expensive than unpenalised fossil fuels.

Of course it is true that, in an otherwise undistorted market, companies would only choose to avoid emitting carbon dioxide if that were cheaper than buying emissions allowances. But the UK economy is not otherwise undistorted, and company directors are under considerable legal and media pressure to adopt Net Zero measures, regardless of cost and in anticipation of an emissions-free economy in 2050. My own paper, A Little Nudge with a Big Stick (2021),[2] discusses one of these, the embedding of the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting Framework within the Companies Act, thus making it a criminal offence for directors to fail to report or to misreport their emissions and energy consumption and best efforts to reduce them.

The costs of the UK ETS to the consumer, then, is in two parts. Firstly, the cost of permits purchased by companies that cannot avoid emitting carbon dioxide. Secondly, and obscurely, the cost of low-carbon technologies and fuels adopted to avoid the ETS penalties. Government revenues may fall as the ETS drives the economy towards Net Zero, but consumer costs will only fall if the low-carbon alternatives are cheaper, and there is no evidence that this is generally the case.

It is rational to infer that expansion of the ETS to the domestic maritime sector from 2026, to waste and incineration, including energy from waste, and the inclusion of emissions from carbon dioxide venting by the upstream oil and gas sector, will all eventually load additional cost on to the consumer, and it is this which the Interministerial was discussing in secret.

In addition, to make the UK ETS fully Net Zero consistent, the UK ETS Authority, which is comprised of the four governments making up the Interministerial, will reduce the number of emissions allowances by 30% by 2030. Even the authority itself admits that this is ‘ambitious’, [3] implying a steep rise in the cost of permits.

The governments are aware of the dangers of expansion of the scheme and a reduction of allowances, and in their jointly authored 2023 Review of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, they announced a smoothing measure, redistributing allowances from existing reserve ‘pots’ of allowances between 2024 and 2027. Just over 50 million additional allowances will be released, which will in part but only in part offset the effect of introducing the Net Zero consistent pathway and the expansion of the scheme, ‘reducing the risk of upward price shock’.

This smoothing effect probably explains the projected falls in revenues from the ETS over the next few years. The OBR estimates ETS revenue will drop from £6.1 billion in 2023/4 to £3.6 billion in 2024/5, with further falls bringing the annual cost to £1.6 billion a year in 2028/9.[4]

But as we have seen, a fall in government receipts from the ETS does not necessarily result in a fall of costs to consumers. The low-carbon alternatives required to prevent emissions may not be much cheaper than the ETS at its height, and may even be more expensive.

Thus, while the OBR’s figures suggest that the costs of Net Zero are falling, this is an almost certainly in part an illusion. While companies are buying emissions allowances, the policy costs are explicit; when companies avoid those costs by turning to low-carbon energy, perhaps through corporate power purchase agreements, the costs are internalised and buried in the overall cost of doing business. One could in principle laboriously extract them from company reports, but these Net Zero costs will no longer be on the government books.

The main take-home here is that the full, actual cost of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme as it is expanded and as allowances are cut to put it on the Net Zero consistent trajectory is very hard to determine. If you believe, as Lord Callanan, the well-meaning UK government representative on the Interministerial apparently does, that low-carbon fuel costs are low, then you will think the costs will fall. But if you judge, from a host of empirical indicators such as audited wind farm accounts, industry demands for subsidy, and underlying physics, say, that the costs are extremely unlikely to be low, then you will guess that the actual cost to consumers over the coming decades will be considerably upwards of the £6 billion a year that the ETS generated in revenue in 2023/4 and 2024/5.

This is a non-trivial cost, and it would be extremely interesting to know whether the members of the Interministerial, effectively the UK ETS Authority in full session, showed any awareness of this risk in their discussions on the 21st of February. Net Zero Watch will submit an FoI for the full minutes of this meeting in the public interest.

https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/ukets-interministerial-group

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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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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What The Media Won’t Tell You About The Green ‘Energy Transition’

Robert Bryce

Over the past few days, I’ve searched the NewsBank archive for uses of “energy transition.”

One of the earliest uses of that now-ubiquitous phrase occurred in the Christian Science Monitor in 1981.

In a dispatch from Nairobi, a reporter named Richard Critchfield explained that some “4,000 delegates from 154 countries” were gathering in the Kenyan capital for a two-week United Nations conference on new and renewable energy sources.

“The purpose of the conference,” Critchfield explained, was to “promote a better understanding of the global energy transition from oil to such new sources as geothermal, solar, wind, ocean, and hydropower or energy from biomass, fuelwood, charcoal, peat, draught animals, oil shale, and tar sands.”

The article doesn’t mention climate change. Instead, it focuses on Kenya’s reliance on imported energy, the country’s geothermal potential, and the “classic third-world poverty trap of soaring oil costs and stagnant export earnings.”

Today, 43 years later, we are inundated with news reports about climate change and claims that we are in the midst of an energy transition that will eliminate our need for hydrocarbons.

Myriad examples can prove that point, but consider the Earth Day press release from the White House. The April 22 release included the word “climate” 52 times and references the energy transition three times.

For instance, President Joe Biden has launched a new “Clean Energy Supply Chain Collaborative to work with international partners to diversify supply chains that are critical to a clean and secure energy transition.”

It continued, saying the president is “mobilizing other governments to follow the U.S. lead and commit to achieve net zero government emissions by 2040.”

Before going further, let me be clear about my politics. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not a Republican. I am Disgusted. I have no truck with either party.

As a journalist focused on energy and power systems, I am affiliated with math and physics. My job is to spotlight the trends and the numbers and to separate the hype from the reality.

Unfortunately, much of the media coverage about the energy transition is just that: hype. As I will show in these charts, the hype has soared during the Biden administration.

Last month, the EPA announced rules to “reduce pollution from fossil fuel-fired power plants.” In the agency’s April 25 press release announcing the new regulations, the word “transition” appears three times.

The EPA said it was providing “regulatory certainty as the power sector makes long-term investments in the transition to a clean energy economy.”

It also quotes the BlueGreen Alliance’s Jason Walsh as saying the EPA mandate provides a “toolbox of critical investments targeted to the workers and communities experiencing the economic impacts of energy transition.”

In the 10 charts, I abide by W. Edwards Deming’s commandment: “In God we trust, all others must bring data.” The numbers I’m presenting aren’t my numbers, they are THE numbers.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll repeat it: the concept of the energy transition is essentially a Western conceit. The U.S. and Western European countries are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on programs like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Energiewende to fund buildouts of solar, wind, batteries, and tutti-fruity-colored hydrogen, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world will do the same. There is no evidence that China and India are going through an energy transition. Instead, the numbers show those two countries are building staggering amounts of new coal-fired capacity. That capacity is far greater than the amount of nuclear capacity they are building

According to Global Energy Monitor, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam are all building new coal plants. That new capacity, totaling nearly 188 gigawatts, is roughly equal to all existing U.S. coal-fired power plants (200 GW).

Furthermore, since 2019, according to Global Energy Monitor, China and India have added some 216 GW of coal capacity. One more number is relevant here: Those five countries have a combined population of 3.4 billion, or about 42% of all the people on the planet. Their electricity use is a fraction of the 12,000 kilowatt-hours per capita per year we use here in the U.S. For instance, in Bangladesh and Indonesia, electricity use is paltry: less than 500 and 1,200 kWh/capita/year, respectively.

Perhaps the most straightforward way to observe the surge in the marketing of the “energy transition” is to look at the number of times it has been used during the presidential terms of Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Both, of course, are Democrats, and both, of course, have focused on climate. According the National Archives, Obama “believes that no challenge poses a greater threat to our children, our planet, and future generations than climate change — and that no other country on Earth is better equipped to lead the world towards a solution.” However, as seen in the graphic below, the Obama era had far fewer mentions of the energy transition than what has occurred under Biden. Indeed, that phrase has appeared more than 75,000 times during Biden’s presidency. Thus, the media has used the phrase “energy transition” 36 times more during Biden’s three-and-a-half years in the White House than during eight years of Obama’s presidency.

We can think this as the “Woozle Effect,” named after a Winnie The Pooh story by A.A. Milne. The Woozle Effect is also known as “evidence by citation,” which occurs when a source “is widely cited for a claim it does not adequately support, giving said claim undeserved credibility.”

The punchline here is obvious: We are not in the midst of a major energy transition. Instead, what we are seeing is the media echo chamber at work. Media outlets are giving undeserved credibility to the idea of the energy transition despite a metric ton of evidence that shows no such transition is happening, particularly in developing countries like Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Indeed, the surge in the use of the phrase by the Biden administration — and its many allies in big media outlets — shows that we’re being bombarded by a public relations campaign that’s designed to convince the public and policymakers that an energy transition is happening and that we should be spending staggering sums of money on it.

A decade ago, energy analyst and polymath Vaclav Smil wrote, “hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is fueled mostly by wishful thinking and a misunderstanding of recent history.” He explained that “for any new energy source to capture a large share of the market require[s] two to three generations: 50 to 75 years.” He concluded, “Energy transitions on a national or global scale are inherently protracted affairs.” That statement was true in 2014. And will be true for decades to come. Just don’t expect to read about it in major media outlets.

https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/what-media-wont-tell-you-about-energy-transition

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Environmental protesters attempt to storm German Tesla plant, clash with police

Tesla used to be seen as good guys by the Green/Left because of their pioneering of electric cars. It looks like the gloss has worn off

Protesters opposed to expansion of electric vehicle maker Tesla’s plant in Grueneheide near Berlin clashed with police as some of them attempted to storm the facility on Friday.

Some 800 people took part in the protest, according to the organizing group Disrupt Tesla, which claims the expansion would damage the environment.

A Reuters video showed dozens of people wearing blue caps and face-covering masks coming from a nearby wooded area and attempting to storm the company’s premises with policemen trying to prevent them, including by force.

“Why do the police let the left-wing protestors off so easily?” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote on his social medial platform X, adding that the demonstrators didn’t manage to break through.

“We are here today to draw attention to the Tesla factory in Grunheide for the environmental destruction here,” Disrupt Tesla spokesperson Ole Becker told Reuters.

The group also wants to highlight environmental destruction in countries like Argentina or Bolivia, brought about by lithium mining, according to Becker. Lithium is a key resource for electric vehicle batteries.

“We protect the freedom of assembly,” Brandenburg police spokesperson Mario Heinemann said, “but we are also responsible for public order and safety. That means we will also intervene when necessary.”

Some of the demonstrators have damaged a few Tesla cars using pyrotechnics and paint at a nearby car storage site, the police spokesperson added.

Tesla earlier this week said it will shut the factory for one day on Friday, without specifying a reason.

https://nypost.com/2024/05/10/business/environmental-protesters-attempt-to-storm-tesla-german-plant/

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‘Green’ Housing Mandates Push Americans Further Into the Red

Home prices across the nation are back up near a record high. That makes this a particularly bad time for the Biden administration to have rolled out its new “green” energy mandates, which will add $31,000 to the cost of a new home.

The mandates are being pushed through the Department of Housing and Urban Development and while they technically won’t apply to all homes, all homebuilders will effectively be forced to comply with them.

The Biden administration doesn’t deny this higher upfront cost. It simply claims it’ll pay for itself via lower energy bills. Unfortunately, the break-even point is 90 years.

So if a young couple buys one of these new green energy homes and has a child one year later, the regulatory costs still won’t have paid for themselves in that child’s lifetime, let alone the life of the couple who bought the home.

HUD argues that homebuilders will be able to get tax credits via the Inflation Reduction Act to offset some of these costs, with those savings hopefully passed along to homebuyers. However, this is not a real reduction in costs; it’s merely passing the buck to taxpayers. Instead of a homebuyer’s bearing the full freight of these green energy mandates, some of the cost will be passed on to taxpayers, including renters.

This is just the latest example of how failed public policies are creating a two-tiered society in America, where an entire generation of Americans will likely never be able to afford their own homes.

Amid a cost-of-living crisis, renters today are paying more than ever in housing costs, with half of them reporting difficulty paying their rent on time. Over 20% said they did at least one of the following to stay current on rent: skipped meals, worked extra hours, sold personal belongings.

With the average monthly rent for a home up 50% in just four years and the cost of other necessities like food, clothing, and energy also skyrocketing, many Americans have nothing left to save at the end of the month. Small wonder the average savings rate today is less than half what it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.

That means many renters can never afford to save for a down payment, so they’re stuck renting forever.

Even those who manage to scrimp and save for their jumbo-size down payment still may not be able to afford the monthly mortgage payment, which has doubled since January 2021. Despite record-high rental prices, owning a home has never been so expensive relative to rents.

The fallout from people being unable to afford a home goes far beyond dollars and cents. Young people delay marriage and having children. A two-tiered society springs up between the “haves,” who were lucky enough to buy a home at the right time, and the “have nots,” who were too late. Americans become increasingly divided along racial lines. People lose hope.

These new green energy mandates will worsen conditions in the frozen housing market for the same reason that other failed public policy caused the mess in the first place: These energy mandates increase prices.

Runaway government spending caused 40-year-high inflation that drove up prices everywhere, including for housing. Inflation also necessitated higher interest rates, which have made it impossible for many people to sell their homes since that would mean losing a 2%-3% mortgage in exchange for a 7%-8% one.

Inflation has also driven construction costs to record highs, and those costs are passed to homebuyers in the form of higher prices. Since most people cannot afford a home at these higher prices, homebuilders are producing fewer houses.

Thus, the supply of new and existing homes has been severely curtailed. The growth in apartment buildings will likely fall sharply and soon, too. Forward-looking indicators such as building permits are declining; the number of job openings in construction fell in March by the biggest drop on record. Less construction of apartments will mean even more upward pressure on rent prices.

Americans need relief, not regulation, in their struggle to find affordable housing.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/05/09/green-housing-mandates-push-americans-further-into-the-red/

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Tesla driver's warning after run-in with a kangaroo activated a safety feature and left him with a significant expense

More electric car woes

A run-in with a kangaroo on the road left a Tesla driver with a repair bill in the hundreds because of a little known safety feature.

Adam Goff reported his troubles to fellow Tesla drivers in a dedicated Facebook group after hitting a 'roo on a rural NSW road around 6am on Tuesday.

Mr Goff slammed the brakes and his dashcam caught the kangaroo colliding with his car so softly that the animal did not even fall over.

Despite both the 'roo and the car escaping without a scratch, Mr Goff soon found himself $500 out-of-pocket to get his Tesla Model 3 serviced after its 'active hood' feature was set off.

The active hood pops the rear part of the Tesla's bonnet after detecting a crash in order to reduce damage to the car itself as well as any persons or animals that are hit.

'Had a run in with a roo, only tapped him by the time I jumped on the brakes so no damage to the car,' he wrote.

'The active hood has deployed though, how much is it to get reset and is there anyway I can push it back so it's less embarrassing to drive around with.'

After parking the car, Mr Goff tried to jig the bonnet back into place but those in the comments said it needed a service.

'The process of the hood deploying is destructive. It needs the explosive struts replaced. Probably best go through insurance. It’s not as simple as it just simply being pushed down,' one man wrote.

When the explosive struts are activated an error message remains on the dashboard until the car is serviced and the bonnet restored.

Another commenter advised Mr Goff to immediately book a service for the car as the owner's manual stated that it was the correct course of action.

'It says immediately take the car to the service centre, so do that - you can point them to the website as justification,' they wrote.

When Mr Goff confirmed the quote from the service centre was $500 to put the bonnet back into place, some people observed he either 'got off lucky' or that there was more expense to come.

'Happened to me about a month ago... initial quote they gave was $500. After a technician had a look at the service centre, I received a call saying it was going to be $2,000,' one Tesla owner commented.

Many commenters observed that Teslas are not well equipped to deal with kangaroos because of their overly sensitive safety features.

Another complaint was that the car's motion sensor cannot detect them on the road.

The multi-camera 'Tesla Vision' system can detect pedestrians, cyclists and dogs, and then display them on the dashboard for the driver to see and avoid.

Kangaroos, however, appear to be phantoms to the system as one driver proved when they took a photo of one sitting right in front of their car undetected.

'Just a heads up to Tesla owners who are driving cross country... Tesla Vision does not recognise our national fauna such as our iconic kangaroo,' he said.

'Please take the usual precautions to slow down and keep an eye out, especially during sundown and sunrise.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13402387/Tesla-active-hood-safety-feature-kangaroos.html

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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)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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