Guterres Calls for More Money to Stop Mythical Sea Level Rise
The issue of sea level rise is all over mainstream media prompted by this UN News release of Aug. 26, 2024, and the visit of UN Sec. Gen. Antonio Guterres to the island state of Tonga, says Friends of Science Society.
As the one-day event alongside the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Sept. 25, 2024 “Climate Forward” meeting approaches, climate hysteria in the media is on the rise as well, says Friends of Science.
Friends of Science Society notes that on March 29, 2023, the Small Island Nation of Vanuatu submitted a request to the UN General Assembly to establish national obligations to address climate change.
As the UNGA reported at the time that “The General Assembly today adopted by consensus a resolution requesting an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the obligations of States in respect of climate change.”
Dr. John Harper, FGSA,FGAC, PGeol., explained that the more likely reason small island residents feel threatened is due to erosion by the sea, which looks like sea level rise to individuals, but empirically is not proven.
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Guterres issued a climate “SOS” from the island of Tonga calling for the phase-out of fossil fuels to stop the climate crisis which he claims is “entirely caused by humanity” as reported by The Guardian, Aug. 27, 2024.
Guterres ignores natural variability of climate.
As reported in The Conversation of May 29, 2024, the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption of Jan. 15, 2022, will be driving unusual weather patterns for perhaps a decade.
“Hunga Tonga produced little smoke, but a lot of water vapour: 100–150 million tonnes, or the equivalent of 60,000 Olympic swimming pools.” The heat of the eruption transformed sea water into water vapour.
The eruption shot it up into the stratosphere. Water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, says Friends of Science Society, referring to their Climate Change Science Essay.
The current media narrative suggests there may be further news on the UNGA’s initiative with the ICJ in this regard in September at the various climate summits. However, you can’t blame humans for the impacts of Hunga Tonga, says Friends of Science.
Climate activists saw the UNGA initiative as a step forward toward ‘climate justice’ – a nebulous concept that seems to encompass ‘climate action’ like that of “Just Stop Oil,” wherein protestors trample on rule of law while claiming to “Tell the Whole Truth” on climate.
For conspiring to create societal havoc, several Just Stop Oil protestors have been jailed in the UK, as discussed in this Friends of Science video.
Preceding “Climate Forward” will be “Summit of the Future” (Sept. 20-23, 2024) and New York Climate Week (Sept. 22-29, 2024) approach, Guterres is calling for more climate funding to stop sea level rise, which he claims threatens Small Island Nations.
In a 2016 interview for Friends of Science, Dr. John Harper, FGSA,FGAC, PGeol., former director of the Geological Survey of Canada, explained that the more likely reason small island residents feel threatened is due to erosion by the sea, which looks like sea level rise to individuals, but empirically is not proven.
In fact, most small islands in the Pacific have shown empirical and statistically significant growth in their land areas.
The authors of this paper by Sengupta et al (2021) used photos and satellite images of 104 atoll islands of Micronesia in the equatorial Pacific Ocean to show that the islands increased in area by 3% since the mid-20th century.
Using satellite images of 221 atoll island in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, this paper by Holdaway et al (2021) shows that their total area increased by 6.1% between 2000 to 2017; however, part of the increase was due to land reclamation.
The psychological threat of sea level rise has been exploited in the past by Guterres and TIME magazine in the June 13, 2019, edition, with a cover picture of Guterres in the ocean in a suit, with ocean water rising over the height of his knees.
Meanwhile, sea level gauges worldwide show a best fit rate of rate of sea level rise of 2.1 mm per year at 2020.
CLINTEL, the climate intelligence network of some 1944 scientists and scholars, has shown there is no climate emergency; we DO have time.
https://principia-scientific.com/guterres-calls-for-more-money-to-stop-sea-level-rise/
***********************************************The High Cost of the Biden/Harris IRA Climate Rules
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed on August 16, 2022, contained billions of dollars in spending on green energy initiatives intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in order to fight climate change. A new analysis of the literature by Tim Benson of The Heartland Institute suggests the bill’s cost is much higher than the Biden/Harris administration claimed it would be, while the impacts on climate change are unmeasurable or inconsequential.
The IRA allocated billions of dollars in support for “green” or zero carbon dioxide emitting (during operation, at least) energy sources such as wind and solar power, as well as battery storage, electric vehicles (EVs), and their chargers, largely although not exclusively in the form of tax credits.
The bill, which passed without a single Republican vote in support, was touted by Congressional Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration as good for job creation and carbon reduction. The administration said the green subsidies would cost about $369 billion, bragging that it was “the most significant action … taken on clean energy and climate change in the nation’s history.” As is typical of government programs, the estimated costs were radically undercalculated, with the actual costs being much higher, as determined by multiple independent organizations and agencies.
Benson writes,
In November 2022, Credit Suisse estimated total federal spending on these provisions would be more than $800 billion, double the Biden administration’s claims. An estimate from the Joint Committee on Taxation from April 2023 put the spending figure at $515 billion between 2023 and 2033. Also in April 2023, Goldman Sachs estimated the IRA’s spending incentives at $1.2 trillion through 2032. In a March 2023 report, the Brookings Institution produced a range between $900 billion and $1.2 trillion through 2031. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s February 2024 cost estimate was $870 billion through 2031. An estimate from the Cato Institute in March 2024 found the cost of the IRA’s green subsidies could be north of $1.8 trillion over a decade.
The true cost of these green subsidies is anyone’s guess, but it is a practical certainty that they will come in far higher than originally proclaimed. We know this because the last federal budget before the incorporation of the IRA—fiscal year (FY) 2024—contained a ten-year cost projection for green energy subsidies that was only $145 billion, while the FY 2025 budget—which does incorporate the IRA—saw the cost of these subsidies balloon to over $1.1 trillion. This clearly suggests the true price tag of the IRA’s green subsidies will be closer to $907 billion than $369 billion.
Talking about true costs, these figures are just government spending. It does not account for the opportunity costs hampering economic development and entrepreneurial activity, resulting in malinvestment in subpar or unnecessary technologies driven by political considerations rather than consumer demand.
Nor does it take into account the hundreds of billions in green spending under the earlier-enacted Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Looking at just one program funded in that law, the nearly $7.5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, provides a case study in the high and rising costs and limited benefits.
In May of 2024, more than two-and-a-half years after the law came into effect, Reason and other outlets reported that despite $7.5 billion dedicated to developing a planned 500,000 EV charging stations across the nation, only eight stations had been built, tantamount to $937.5 million per station. In early August, the online trade journal Inside EV fact-checked those figures, trying to argue the program was wildly successful. It found only $2.5 billion in EV charger funding had been delivered to the states so far, leading to the construction of 15 NEVI funded stations, each with multiple charging, providing 61 federally funded chargers in total.
That’s so much more encouraging. That amounts to $160 million per station, or $39 million per charger. And that’s for level two chargers, by the way, which take six to eight hours to provide a full charge. This is orders of magnitude greater than the cost of privately installed level two chargers at $400 to $6,500, and more than nine times the cost of the most expensive Level 3 charging system at approximately $45,000 per unit, although Level 3 chargers can be found for just $12,000 per unit.
Leave it to government to pay 97,500 times more for EV chargers than the private sector can provide them for. The EV charger extravagance makes solid gold toilets and million-dollar wrenches seem cheap in comparison. If one is concerned about climate change (or homelessness, health, or wildlife) one wonders how much low-cost energy-efficient low-income housing one could build for that money, or how many trees could be planted or ecosystems restored, or how many cancer patients could be treated, or hospitals built.
Building upon that record of “success,” after announcing it was releasing an additional $521 million in grants to build out the NEVI network (about 3 ½ charging stations or 13 chargers, based on the government’s buildout so far) the Biden/Harris administration bragged that 192,000 public EV chargers now exist, with about 1,000 new chargers being added each week. Other than pushing the use of EVs, however, Biden/Harris government support has almost nothing to do with those stations. In fact, if anything, it shows there has never been any need for government to involve itself in the EV charger buildout. The private sector, for its own reasons, is building out the network, at a fraction of the cost of government efforts.
As an aside, I did a little back-of-envelope calculating to put the relative range and cost benefits driving the government’s push for EVs in perspective. There are currently about 3.3 million EVs in the United States, served likely by an equal amount of home or office charging stations (I doubt a person or business would buy an EV unless they could charge it at home or at their place of business), in addition to the 192,000 public stations. Just looking at the public stations, that amounts to about 17 vehicles per public charger. Yet, range anxiety is still among the top two factors (cost being the other) cited by potential vehicle purchasers for not considering EVs.
By contrast, there are approximately 275.6 million gasoline and diesel vehicles licensed in the United States, fueled by nearly 197,000 gas stations. Despite the fact that there are 1,402 or so vehicles per gas station, rather than 17, range anxiety doesn’t seem to be dissuading buyers of internal combustion engine vehicles. Indeed, relatively fuel-inefficient trucks still top the annual list of new vehicle sales. And few people, aside from farmers, have personal gas pumps at their homes.
In the end, the federal government’s green energy programs are an increasingly expensive and unnecessary boondoggle. No climate change is averted, as if humans even had the ability to control climate, and peoples’ dollars are wasted for technologies the private sector can and is providing on its own to the elites who are really demanding (and benefitting with tax credits for) it.
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Toyota turns down power on electric car production
Toyota is set to slash its targets for electric car production by a third, according to reports in Tokyo.
The world’s largest carmaker has been slow to enter the full-electric car segment as it has concentrated on petrol-electric hybrid technology. It had said previously that it expected to produce 1.5 million battery electric cars in 2026, about 15 per cent of its annual production levels.
However, according to Nikkei, the Japanese media provider, Toyota has decided to lower that target to a million. After the report was published, Toyota said it still aimed to make 1.5 million electric cars in 2026 and that it would continue to aim to make 3.5 million a year by 2030, but it added that the numbers were not “targets” but “benchmarks”.
Senior motoring journalist Paul Glover discusses the declining electric vehicle sales in Australia.
The question marks over how many electric cars will be made by Toyota, the world leader both by volume and by innovation, come during a febrile few weeks for the automotive industry.
Employees at Volkswagen are being warned to accept potentially thousands of job losses because of a decline in car sales, not helped by a much slower demand than expected for zero-emission vehicles. Germany, Volkswagen’s home market, has been rocked in recent months by sharp falls in electric car sales after the federal government ended the regime of incentives and subsidies for the vehicles.
This week Volvo said it had scrapped its plan to become an electric-only carmaker by 2030. Though only a bit-part player on the world stage, the Chinese-owned Swedish carmaker had made a big play since the last decade of being a leader in the electric vehicle revolution. In Britain, Bentley, the luxury carmaker owned by Volkswagen, has reined back its earlier commitment to be all-electric by 2030.
Britain is Europe’s second largest market for electric cars, but the latest sales figures show that they account for only 17 per cent of new registrations. The industry is forecasting that the proportion might rise to 18.5 per cent by the year’s end with the arrival of new electric models in showrooms, notably from Chinese brands.
Nevertheless, that is 70,000 units short of the 22 per cent market shares envisaged by the last government when it launched the zero-emission vehicle mandate to promote electric cars. That mandate has a target of 28 per cent of the market in 2025, a figure that few in the motor industry think will be achieved.
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Australia: Victorians can keep cooking with gas after Allan government backflips on net zero road map
Victorian households with existing gas stovetops can continue cooking with gas after the Allan government moved to exclude the appliances from the state’s net zero road map.
The Premier confirmed the policy backflip on Monday morning, and said that gas cooktops and stoves that reach the end of their life would be able to be replaced with new gas appliances.
“We know that gas is a diminishing resource which is why we will always help those households and businesses who can, to go all electric,” Ms Allan said.
“I’m going to be really clear today … that Victorians can continue to keep cooking with gas.”
While homes can opt to continue using the gas appliance, Ms Allan confirmed that new homes will still be prohibited from connecting to gas.
Victoria has the highest use of residential gas in the country, with about 80 per cent of homes connected.
The government was previously considering a plan to phase out gas cooktops from existing homes, potentially by forcing people to replace their gas appliances with electric alternatives if they were broken or needed replacing.
“This is important because we’ve listened to Victorians and they’ve asked for this certainty to be provided, and we’re providing that today,” she said.
“It also gives us the opportunity to have conversation with the Victorian community about our future energy mix and our future energy needs.”
It comes as the state Labor government will this week introduce legislation to support new offshore gas storage projects.
“We’re continuing to provide support and certainty for the gas industry,” the Premier said.
“The (energy) minister has undertaken extensive consultation with industry and the industry was seeking greater legislative and regulatory certainty around offshore gas storage projects.
“We already have gas storage here in the state and we have a project proposal from Beach that has been through a vigorous planning and environmental approvals process and it’s just about ready to go.”
Victorian Greens leader Ellen Sandell called the government’s move “another cowardly political decision” and said gas cooktops are terrible for the climate and health.
“We’re in the middle of a climate crisis caused by burning fossil fuels, yet Labor wants to pour more fuel on the fire and encourage more offshore gas projects in Victoria,” Ms Sandell said.
“We’ve seen backflip after backflip from this Labor government. Instead of listening to climate science and the experts, Labor is pandering to the ring-wing conservatives and fossil fuel lobby groups.
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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