Offshore Wind Is Gearing up to Bulldoze the Ocean
The Biden Administration has recently produced a wave of plans and regulatory actions aimed at building a monstrous amount of destructive offshore wind. No environmental impact assessment is included.
Time scales range from tomorrow to 2050. Here is a quick look at some of it, starting with the Grand Plan.
“Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Offshore Wind” is the grandiose title of the Energy Department’s version of Biden’s vision. Their basic idea is that having successfully traversed the unexpected cost crisis, offshore wind is ready to take off.
They point out that even though costs quickly jumped an average of 65%, the boom market is unchanged. The coastal States are raring to go with huge offshore wind targets and laws. In short, it is a seller’s market. Cost is no object.
They note that State mandates and targets already exceed the Biden goal of 100,000 MW by 2050. But why stop there? They say that Net Zero requires an incredible 250,000 MW of offshore wind. At 15 MW a turbine, this is just under 17,000 monster towers.
The word “environmental” occurs frequently in this 62-page grand vision but it is always about environmental justice. The cumulatively destructive environmental impacts of lining our coast with towers and cables are ignored apparently not worth mentioning. Neither is cost.
Next comes transmission, where we have “AN ACTION PLAN FOR OFFSHORE WIND TRANSMISSION DEVELOPMENT IN THE U.S. ATLANTIC REGION“. While the Pathways plan covers the US, this one is just about the Atlantic because that is where the big action is now.
This 110-pager is from the Energy Department and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is actually building the offshore wind monster.
The basic idea is simple. Instead of bringing the juice ashore individually from each giant wind facility, we will build a massive high-voltage grid in the ocean. This way, we can move the energy up and down the coast from wherever it is generated to where it is needed.
In the Plan, there are actually three backbone grids: northern, central, and southern, but this detail need not concern us. There is, of course, a huge network of feeder lines connecting the backbones to the legion of individual giant generation facilities.
Given the incredibly huge generation numbers in the Liftoff Plan, this is a very big grid indeed. It is a DC grid, so I guess the juice gets turned into AC onshore, where it then ties to the suitably beefed-up land grid. Beefing that up is another huge unknown cost.
There are many issues with this grand design, including legal and policy ones, and many of these are mentioned. How this ocean-going grid ties into State utility law is an interesting example.
Environmental impacts are only addressed as a research topic, not as a potential problem, except for floating wind, where some big problems are mentioned in passing. The feel-good idea of minimizing impact occurs frequently, but what those impacts might be is not said.
As is typical for BOEM, they talk about monitoring a good bit. Their approach to environmental impact is let’s build it and see what happens as though extinction of the North Atlantic Right Whale was reversible. The concept of cumulative impacts is not addressed.
Cost allocation is a major economic topic, but there is nothing whatever on what this underwater monstrosity might cost.
Returning to today, several things have happened. First, BOEM has announced a lot of new lease sales over the next five years (the Biden II years?). These run from Maine to Oregon, fixed and floating, with five scheduled for this year alone.
Some are in new places, while others are in already crowded areas like the New York Bight. As always, there is no cumulative environmental impact analysis. It’s like BOEM never heard of that, even though the law clearly calls for it when piling on the projects.
More ominously, there are new regulations governing the permitting of offshore wind projects. The developers love these new rules, which tells us they are not designed for environmental protection. This is from the BOEM press release:
“”The final modernization rule will streamline the permitting process and reduce regulatory barriers for developers. It will also lead to greater collaboration between federal, state, and local stakeholders, ensuring that offshore wind projects are developed in a sustainable and responsible manner,” said Anne Reynolds, the American Clean Power Association Vice President for Offshore Wind.”
The primary “regulatory barrier” is environmental impact analysis. The new rules require agencies to rush these, which means glossing over them with no time for serious analysis.
Today’s actions may seem small, but given the long-term Plans, they are anything but. It is all part of a huge rush to do something enormously expensive and environmentally destructive for which there is no need whatsoever.
This offshore bulldozer must be stopped before it is too late.
https://heartland.org/opinion/offshore-wind-is-gearing-up-to-bulldoze-the-ocean/
*************************************************The High Price of Climate Alarm
It is with no small amount of pleasure that I found a media outlet acknowledging President Joe Biden’s energy and climate policies have increased American’s energy costs. The Dallas Express, a local online alternative news outlet, published a story titled “Energy Prices 30% Higher Under Biden Admin.” Unlike so much of the mainstream media, The Dallas Express didn’t expend ink trying to explain how consumers really don’t realize that the economy and their lives are better despite the higher prices, or that the costs Biden and company have added to peoples’ power bills are justified as a means of fighting climate change. Rather, the Express took a Joe Friday, “just the facts” approach, explaining:
Energy prices in the United States are wreaking havoc on budget-sensitive households, making it harder for families to save money or get ahead financially.
Since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, Americans’ electricity bills have skyrocketed nearly 30%, or 13 times faster than in the previous seven years, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of the latest consumer price index data.
Despite the Federal Reserve holding interest rates steady since July 2023, inflation continues to pose a problem for policymakers and households.
“There is no improvement here, we’re moving in the wrong direction,” said Bankrate chief financial analyst Greg McBride in an interview with Fox Business. “The usual trouble spots persist—shelter, motor vehicle insurance, maintenance, repairs, and service costs. Add electricity to that list, up 0.9% in March and 5% over the past year.”
Part of the reason for the surge in energy prices is due to the push to replace fossil fuels and nuclear power plants with renewable subsidies and green-energy mandates.
Of course, The Heartland Institute has been on top of this story since Biden took office. We produced Energy at a Glance Documents in 2021 and 2022 detailing the Biden policies that have resulted in higher electricity, heating, and transportation fuel prices, and how much they went up. By our calculation, after less than 2 full years in office, Biden’s climate and energy policies hare increased average household energy costs by more than $2,300.
Interviewed for an Environment & Climate News story covering the lingering high prices energy prices in 2023, Gary Stone, executive vice president of engineering at Five States Energy, said:
The Biden administration has been a continually growing disaster for the domestic oil and gas industry. Using the ‘New Green Deal’ as a basis, they have halted or delayed drilling on federal lands, attempted to restrict drilling because of allegedly endangered species, cancelled pipelines, and restricted exports of crude and processed gas liquids.
While international oil politics, production, and pricing still control a significant portion of the market, there is no doubt the policies of the Biden regime have had a huge impact on prices.” Gas prices, for instance, were far lower under the Trump administration, crude oil prices were about $30 (per barrel) lower, and gasoline was around $2 per gallon less than now, all of which immediately rose under Biden.
Instead of encouraging domestic production as Trump did, the current regime is now implementing onerous methane-emission regulations and taxes that some sources estimate will result in the abandonment of as much as 30 percent of domestic wells and greatly increase the operating costs, and reduce the life, of the remaining producers. The Biden administration will serve the ‘green gods’ even if it bankrupts much of a major industry and greatly reduces the energy available to the country.
Of course those are just the direct energy costs to drivers, businesses, renters, and homeowners, not accounting for the ripple effect higher energy prices have on energy-intensive goods like food production and delivery, chemical production, and manufacturing.
Other rarely accounted for costs of Biden’s climate obsession—one not shared by the American public, according to recent polls—stem from government spending on Biden’s climate and energy policies. The costs of these programs are borne by taxpayers and future generations who will inherit the costs Biden’s energy policies are adding to the nation’s annual deficits and long-term debt.
How much are we talking about? Well, in early April 2024, the Biden administration granted outright more than $20 billion to unaccountable climate, finance, and community activist NGOs to promote green energy adoption across the country.
Author and energy analyst Robert Bryce has calculated that the subsidies and tax credits for wind and solar power alone have ballooned from an estimated $19.9 billion in 2015 to commitments of more than $425 billion by 2033, based on newly installed, approved, and anticipated wind and solar construction.
And, in December 2023, at a conference in Dubai, Vice President Kamala Harris bragged about the administration’s commitment to spend more than $1 trillion fighting climate change—less than the country spent on Social Security in 2023, but more than we spent on defense. This is likely an underestimate as past estimates of spending on these programs have repeatedly proven to be.
Government spending and regulations are a drag on the economy, basically a hidden tax, spending money on goods and services that consumers likely wouldn’t have freely chosen to spend their own money, or companies invested in, or banks financed, in a marketplace not directed by federal mandates or influenced by federal incentives: replacing market assessments of how to balance the concerns of climate change, energy security, and economic progress with spending decisions dictated by political overlords, their crony-capitalist allies, and climate scolds.
Any way you measure it, the price tag on Biden’s climate program on the American economy and its people is quite high and growing.
https://heartlanddailynews.com/2024/05/climate-change-weekly-505-the-high-price-of-climate-alarm/
********************************************************BBC Uses Bad Science To Promote ‘Climate-Induced’ Extreme Weather
A recent BBC article, titled “How climate change worsens heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and floods,” claims that climate change is linked to four types of extreme weather, specifically that it causes extreme rainfall, worse heatwaves, longer droughts, and more wildfires. [emphasis, links added]
Widely available data proves these claims are false.
The “evidence” given by the BBC is not evidence at all, as it eschews real-world measurements, [preferring] model outputs and predictions from a single climate activist organization.
The first section of the BBC’s report is dedicated to the idea that climate change causes more extreme rainfall.
The BBC presents a very simplistic vision of how the precipitation is related to average temperature, claiming that warmer air can hold more moisture, and therefore heavier rainfall. While the basic physics here is accurate, the atmosphere is more complex than that in reality.
For this section, they [didn’t rely on] available data, even from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which shows no evidence of the increasing intensity of rainfall, but rather the BBC solely referenced counterfactual modeling produced by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.
Climate Realism very recently explained why, contrary to the BBC’s insistence, attribution modeling is not evidence for climate change’s impact on flooding like that which was recently seen in Dubai.
In that same post, I pointed out that the IPCC does not admit to finding any evidence of climate change’s impact on heavy precipitation. (See figure below)
The next section in BBC’s report is no better. This time, the BBC writes “the distribution of daily temperatures shifts to warmer levels, making hotter days more likely and more intense.”
As evidence, they point to a recent heatwave in Mali and the Sahel region of Africa… and WWA’s analysis that concluded it could not have happened without “human-caused climate change.”
Again, WWA’s claims aren’t evidence. Many parts of the Sahel region frequently meet temperature maximums on average above 40°C – usually in April – which is what the recent heatwave brought.
There is no way to claim that such heat never happened before industrialization. This is pure speculation on the part of WWA and the BBC, lacking any facts or peer-reviewed research to back up their claim.
Once again, this exact claim was refuted in an earlier Climate Realism post, “Wrong, BBC and Reuters, No Evidence Proves West African Heatwave Is Unprecedented.”
Longer droughts, the BBC admits, are harder to link to climate change, but they attempt to do it anyway, asserting that recent short-term droughts in East Africa and the Amazon rainforests were caused by human-induced climate change.
The BBC once again relies only on the WWA’s say-so to support its claims, which, once again, are false.
Focusing on the Amazon rainforest, real-world data do not show that the Amazon is becoming more prone to drought because of climate change.
Myriad factors contribute to recent droughts, such as human causes like deforestation and increased agriculture putting strain on water supplies.
No research or data ties climate change to Amazonian droughts.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts points out that recent studies, including a paper from 2023, show that even worse droughts occurred in 1865 when the planet was cooler, and “several other years in the historical record were as bad or worse than the drought being experienced today.” (See figure below)
The final section again relies on WWA studies, this time promoting the idea that climate change is making the weather conditions needed for wildfires more likely, and claims that extreme wildfires are projected to become worse and more frequent in the future.
This is easy to refute, as data show that wildfire damage is becoming far less expansive.
NASA tracks the total acreage burned by wildfires since 2003. Their data show a steep downward trend in acreage burned—so, a decline in wildfires, not an increase. (See figure below)
Data from the European Space Agency display the same downward wildfire trend.
This is despite an increase in industry, deforestation, warming, and human encroachment on fire-prone areas, around the globe.
The BBC’s confidence in their assertions is utterly unfounded, and it is telling that they refuse to cite any historical data, instead relying exclusively on projections from WWA’s attribution models, which Climate Realism has refuted using historical data and present trends repeatedly here and here, for example, in addition to the articles cited above.
Reality paints a far friendlier picture of the climate and recent climate trends than does the BBC. Instead of attempting to frighten readers, the BBC ought to consider telling the truth.
https://principia-scientific.com/bbc-uses-bad-science-to-promote-climate-induced-extreme-weather/
*****************************************************Wrong, Mainstream Media, Climate Change Isn’t Spreading Malaria to New Places
Editor’s Note: The media seems to have gotten their marching orders. Multiple news outlets, including The Guardian, The Daily Express, and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, among others, published stories on the same day saying malaria and other mosquito borne diseases are on the rise in unusual locations due to climate change. We at Climate Realism have refuted similar claims multiple times in the past, here, here, and here, for instance. As detailed in Chapter Four of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the vast body of scientific literature refutes the recent mainstream media claims that climate change is likely to exacerbate the spread of mosquito borne diseases. Studies from Africa, to England and Wales, to North and South America, to Thailand and beyond refute any link between climate change and the spread of malaria, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, and other vector-borne diseases.
In this post guest analyst, Eric Worrall, uses classic literature, historical accounts, and scientific studies to show that malaria has historically been common in non-tropical areas, like Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, until modern societies learned to suppress them with medical and pesticide interventions. If such diseases become make a comeback in the future, it will not be because the climate has changed, making it new areas suddenly more conducive to malaria bearing mosquitos, but rather because we are no longer using the interventions which defeated such diseases in these regions and countries in the recent past.
Guest Essay by Eric Worrall
Famous British playwright William Shakespeare wrote about endemic Malaria in Britain in the 1500s. Malaria was the scourge of Scandinavia and Russia right up until the 20th century. But this has not stopped greens falsely claiming Malaria is a disease of warm climates.
Mosquito-borne diseases spreading in Europe due to climate crisis, says expert
Illnesses such as dengue and malaria to reach unaffected parts of northern Europe, America, Asia and Australia, conference to hear
Helena Horton Environment reporter Thu 25 Apr 2024 14.00 AEST
Mosquito-borne diseases are spreading across the globe, and particularly in Europe, due to climate breakdown, an expert has said.
The insects spread illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever, the prevalences of which have hugely increased over the past 80 years as global heating has given them the warmer, more humid conditions they thrive in.
Prof Rachel Lowe who leads the global health resilience group at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, has warned that mosquito-borne disease outbreaks are set to spread across currently unaffected parts of northern Europe, Asia, North America and Australia over the next few decades.
…
“Global warming due to climate change means that the disease vectors that carry and spread malaria and dengue [fever] can find a home in more regions, with outbreaks occurring in areas where people are likely to be immunologically naive and public health systems unprepared,” Lowe said.
“The stark reality is that longer hot seasons will enlarge the seasonal window for the spread of mosquito-borne diseases and favour increasingly frequent outbreaks that are increasingly complex to deal with.”
Studying Shakespeare is, or was until recently, a staple of British education. So why do people swallow the mistruth that Malaria is a tropical disease? Why doesn’t everyone know about Shakespeare’s references to Malaria?
The reason is back in Shakespeare’s day, they called Malaria something else. Shakespeare’s 16th century word for fevers like Malaria and Dengue was “Ague“
Sixteen references in Shakespeare’s plays – Ague was an important factor in people’s lives in Britain in the 1500s.
Ague was a changer of battles, a metaphor for fear or a sign of divine punishment, a disease which caused a burning fever with shaking, pale skin (anaemia) and weight loss, a disease whose worst phases left people bedridden, a disease which was stronger during Spring, when mosquitoes become active: “the sun in March, This praise doth nourish agues“.
Ague was Malaria.
The point is Malaria infection was prevalent enough to be referenced sixteen times by Shakespeare, during the Little Ice Age, during the period frost fairs were held on the River Thames, which froze solid enough in winter for people to walk around on the ice. Malaria is not a tropical disease.
The American CDC also provides evidence that tropical weather is not the main driver of Malaria;
From Shakespeare to Defoe: Malaria in England in the Little Ice Age
Paul Reiter
Author affiliation: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Abstract
Present global temperatures are in a warming phase that began 200 to 300 years ago. Some climate models suggest that human activities may have exacerbated this phase by raising the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Discussions of the potential effects of the weather include predictions that malaria will emerge from the tropics and become established in Europe and North America. The complex ecology and transmission dynamics of the disease, as well as accounts of its early history, refute such predictions. Until the second half of the 20th century, malaria was endemic and widespread in many temperate regions, with major epidemics as far north as the Arctic Circle. From 1564 to the 1730s—the coldest period of the Little Ice Age—malaria was an important cause of illness and death in several parts of England. Transmission began to decline only in the 19th century, when the present warming trend was well under way. The history of the disease in England underscores the role of factors other than temperature in malaria transmission.
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment