Green Blob-Funded Report Calls for Massive Frequent Flyer Levies That Would Devastate International Air Travel
A radical new plan to reduce international air travel from Europe to minimal levels over the next few years has been proposed by a group of Net Zero fanatics led by the New Economics Foundation (NEF). Massive charges under a ‘frequent flyer levy’ are proposed, the effect of which could quickly destroy large sections of the international air transportation industry. Some of the money raised – or not as the case may be – will be sent abroad as ‘climate aid’ to less developed countries forced to stay poor by mandated restrictions on their use of hydrocarbons. Needless to say, the work is the product of what Ben Pile recently termed “bog-standard Green Blob fronts”. Writing and promoting the NEF publication involved a number of operations heavily funded by the usual suspects including the European Climate Foundation (ECF) and ClimateWorks.
The fantasy plan calls for large European surcharges to be added to ticket prices for multiple annual trips. Financial details are not provided in the press release but the report suggests €50 for a medium distance trip and additional levies of €100 for long and “comfort” classes. This would appear to suggest an extra €250 charge for long-distance business and first class travel. George Monbiot of the Guardian boasts of the report having been shared exclusively with his newspaper and writes that the €100 levy on both distance and class will rise with each trip. It is hoped the surcharges will raise €64 billion, a sum said to be equivalent to 30% of the entire EU annual budget. This would be spent, at least until the golden goose is killed stone dead, on accelerating Europe to a “fairer, greener economy”. More virtuous bungs can be sent to countries to stop them using hydrocarbons and recompense them for the non-existent climate crisis.
Although the report talks of reducing travel by around 25%, the blow will be much worse in financial terms. Many airlines rely on premium travel to keep economy tickets low and severe reductions would affect the economics of aviation, both in the air and on the ground. Reducing passenger traffic by a suggested 25% and very likely much more, would require massive restructuring across the board including air traffic control, baggage handling, security and border activities and airport management. Yet more lost jobs to be added to the increasing pile of Net Zero casualties.
Not that this is the end of the attack. Air travel has enabled countless millions to travel for pleasure, holidays, education, business and to connect with family over the last few decades. In pursuit of ther mad Net Zero policies, the eco-zealots tell us, further restrictions “would therefore be necessary”. These would include caps on the number of flights, airport slots, night flights, private jets and “limits on the more damaging comfort classes of travel”.
Want to know what is being planned by the Net Zero fanatics – look at what their Blob-funded puppets are writing. In this case, forget about flying within just a few short years.
The New Economics Foundation has been around for a few years pumping out Left wing propaganda. It is no surprise that the hard Left’s favourite money tree the Rowntree Trust has funnelled in cash, although much larger amounts have been supplied by the Laudes Foundation and the ECF. As Ben Pile noted recently in the Daily Sceptic, most of the organisations active in the climate domain in the U.K. are funded by the ECF directly, or by one of the half dozen or so of the ECF’s grantor philanthropic foundations. As Pile also observes, the “hapless consumer” is ensnared by the phantom institutions that represent the green-ideology-addled British Establishment.
The NEF report is co-written by the Stay Grounded Network which, perhaps to nobody’s surprise, is funded by the ECF. The aviation campaigner at this outfit, Magdalena Heuwieser, says that the single trip flyer is paying the same tax as a traveller making 10 trips. Except that the more frequent flyer is actually paying 10 times more tax. Designed to fit a political narrative, Left wing sums often diverge from reality. In his article, Monbiot notes that air travel, heavily taxed as most passengers are aware, is “heavily subsidised” since the fuel is exempt from duties. In Monbiot’s world, a lack of a specific tax is often seen as a ‘subsidy’, while an actual £12 billion annual subsidy loaded onto U.K. electricity consumers to pay for unreliable renewable power is passed off as an ‘investment’. One reason fuel duty is not levied on aviation is that mobile jet aircraft will ‘tanker up’ at cheaper locations.
Monbiot reports on the view of Marlene Engelhorn who states that the “mile-high club of private planet combustion, where wealthy people like me can ferment in our comfort zones, needs to close it doors”. Easy to say of course when you are a wealthy heiress who has inherited a fortune from the BASF chemical operation. Other people who work for a living and need holidays and some modest comfort as they travel to drum up business might take a different view.
According to Monbiot, the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) reviewed an early draft of the NEF report. Another Green Blob-funded operation of course, mostly it seems through ClimateWorks. This large operation channels considerable flows of money from other billionaire foundations such as Hewlett and Packard. These two latter operations are also direct funders of ICCT. Flying less is obviously the most effective solution to cutting emissions, states Sola Zhang, described by Monbiot as an aviation “expert”. Another operation quoted by Monbiot, More in Common, found that rich people would be most affected by a frequent flyer levy because they fly more. Again such value, such insight – funders ECF, the George Soros Open Society Foundation and Hewlett must be very pleased.
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Grid scale battery fires loom large
America faces a growing threat from grid scale lithium battery fires. Construction of huge battery arrays with no concern for potentially catastrophic fires is out of control. There are no established standards to follow and local permitting authorities seem oblivious to this very real danger.
The batteries are teamed with a big solar facility because until recently that was the only way to get the battery subsidies. Each lithium battery unit is the size of a tractor trailer or big shipping container and there are well over a hundred of them, with a rated storage capacity of 230 MW. This is a medium sized storage facility.
That these units can spontaneously burst into flames is well established. The question is how to design and prepare for this destructive event?
To scale the problem consider the following event. A battery powered tractor trailer rig recently crashed and it’s battery burned on an interstate in California. Lithium battery fires cannot be put out so this one burned for around eleven hours. In order to keep the fire from spreading to create a wildfire the fire crew continuously sprayed it using a reported 50,000 gallons of water in the process. The interstate was closed due to the toxic fumes from the fire.
One of these grid scale battery units is easily 10 to 20 times the size of that truck battery. If the water usage required to keep a grid battery fire from spreading scales with size that is 500,000 to a million gallons of water. The actual amount is an engineering calculation that needs to be established and incorporated into battery facility design standards.
Note that we are not talking about the fire spreading to create a wildfire although that is certainly a concern. The vital need is to keep it from igniting the nearby batteries. If this happened the whole facility could go up with a hundred or more giant batteries burning. That would be truly catastrophic.
So now look at the Desert Sunlight photo and note there is no water tank. There should be something like a million gallon water tank with a high volume system to deliver that water to every unit in the facility. Clearly there is not.
There is also the engineering question of how far apart these units should be to enable that water to work keeping the fire from spreading. I doubt the Desert Sunlight spacing is even close to big enough. It looks like just room to walk between them.
Now let’s turn to permitting these facilities where I have another example that speaks volumes. This is a facility that just got permitted by Washington State. It is a combined wind, solar and battery project with a proposed storage capacity of 300 MW, which is considerably bigger than Desert Sunlight. It might have 200 huge lithium battery units. That number is not disclosed.
The project is named the Horse Heaven Wind Farm despite its massive solar and battery components. The name, usually shortened to Horse Heaven, is truly ironic because it will be no place for horses. Horse Hell might be better.
The permitting authority is the Washington Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council or EFSEC for short. The permit is called a Site Certification Agreement or CSA and Horse Heaven just got one, with a big push from the Governor.
The astounding point is that there was no discussion, or even recognition, of the fire threat posed by this enormous lithium battery facility. The CSA has numerous requirements for lots of issues, big and small, right down to the facility having water to keep the road dust down. There is nothing on having a million or so gallons to prevent a catastrophic conflagration, nor on the environmental impact of such.
This is wildfire country so there should be liability insurance for harm to others from a fire. Other potential sources of harm are huge amounts of contaminated water runoff as well as toxic air emissions, especially if the whole facility burns.
This neglect no doubt flows from the Horse Heaven Application. The App is over 500 pages long and I can find just one sentence about battery fires. Buried in a long paragraph on PDF page 366 we read “Lithium-ion battery storage may pose a risk of fire and explosion due to the tendency for lithium-ion batteries to overheat.”
This single sentence does not even refer to the project. For that matter there are only a few paragraphs about the battery facility in the entire App, mostly just describing it in general terms. There is nothing about the number of giant battery containers or that it is a huge project in its own right, posing an equally huge fire threat. In fact the App says they might double deck these container sized battery units which is absurd given the risk of setting off a chain reaction in the whole complex.
One can easily think from the Application that the batteries are of no significance and that appears to be exactly what has happened at the EFSEC.
This systematic neglect looks to be what is happening around the country. We desperately need a national code or standard covering this issue. The National Fire Protection Association says it is working on one, but it is up to the permitting authorities to make something happen.
The growing threat of grid scale battery fires is a very serious issue calling for equally serious action.
https://www.cfact.org/2024/10/01/grid-scale-battery-fires-loom-large/
**************************************************IEA: The World Is Not on Track to Triple Renewable Capacity by 2030
Despite the surge in renewable energy additions, the world is not yet on track to reach the goal of tripling renewables capacity by 2030, according to the Renewables 2024 report published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) on Wednesday.
Global renewable capacity is expected to grow by 2.7 times by 2030, surpassing countries’ current ambitions by nearly 25%. But it still falls short of tripling, said the agency advocating for a swift move away from fossil fuels.
While climate and energy security policies have boosted the attractiveness of renewables by making them cost-competitive with fossil-fired generation, “this is not quite sufficient to reach the goal of tripling renewable energy capacity worldwide established by nearly 200 countries at the COP28 climate summit,” the IEA said.
The agency’s main case, assuming existing policies and market conditions, forecasts 5,500 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable capacity becoming operational by 2030. This implies that global renewable capacity additions will continue to grow every year, reaching nearly 940 GW annually by 2030 – 70% more than the record level achieved in 2023, the IEA said.
Solar PV and wind together are expected to account for 95% of all renewable capacity growth through the end of this decade due their growing economic attractiveness in almost all countries.
As a result of these trends, nearly 70 countries that collectively account for 80% of global renewable power capacity are expected to reach or surpass their current renewable ambitions for 2030. But this would still fall short of the COP28 pledge for tripling renewables capacity.
Growth is there, but governments need to boost their efforts to integrate variable renewable sources into power systems, the IEA said, noting that the rates of curtailment of renewable electricity generation have been increasing substantially recently, and already reaching around 10% in several countries.
In a separate report last month, the IEA said that the global goal to triple renewable energy capacity by the end of the decade is still within reach, but massive investments in power grids and energy storage would be needed.
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Australia is already a successful nuclear nation
ANSTO – the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation – recently celebrated 70 years since Australia’s nuclear age began in Sydney.
On April 15, 1953, Australia entered the nuclear science arena as the Atomic Energy Act came into effect. The Australian Atomic Energy Commission (AAEC) followed and in 1987 the AAEC evolved into ANSTO as it’s known today.
ANSTO is the home of Australia’s most significant landmark and national infrastructure for research. Thousands of scientists from industry and academia benefit from gaining access to state-of-the-art instruments every year.
Thousands of visitors, including many schoolchildren, have safely toured the site at Lucas Heights, which is located 40km southwest of the Sydney CBD. They had the opportunity to learn a great deal about nuclear science as a result of that experience.
I recently became one of those visitors when I was invited to a 3-hour escorted tour of their facilities. As former Executive Director of the National Safety Council of Australia (NSW/ACT) I was particularly interested in their WHS procedures as well as the management of waste, as the latter could impact on the wider community if poorly managed.
What impressed me most was seeing just how advanced we are as a nuclear nation. Despite being relatively small in scale compared to a full civil nuclear energy plant, it has much the same range of issues and complexities to deal with. And it certainly appears to successfully do so at both their Sydney and Melbourne campuses.
During his visit to Australia in July 2022, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Grossi expressed deep confidence in Australia, acknowledging the solid foundations established through ANSTO since its formation.
The obvious question is, why is the Albanese Labor-Greens government, together with the Teals, opposed to extending our obvious expertise into producing nuclear energy on a commercial scale, as proposed by Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s LNP?
As you’d expect, there are a number of reasons for both their reluctance to accept nuclear despite it being cheap, reliable and emissions-free and their manic obsession with unreliable, hugely expensive, and environmentally/socially disastrous wind, solar, and battery renewables.
Political factors play a major part. The Greens and Teals are directly opposed to nuclear, but for different reasons.
The Greens have shown beyond doubt that they want to disrupt society across as many issues as possible. They are doing this on a regular basis – even appearing to stand with crowds that hold sympathies toward recognised terrorist groups.
People who think the Greens are still a well-meaning environmental group like they were under Bob Brown are fooling themselves – they are not!
In the case of the Teals, they started life as political entities via funding from Climate 200, whose primary financial supporters are deeply entrenched in the lucrative and heavily taxpayer-subsidised renewables industry.
The Teals are ignorant pawns in the high-stakes game of climate change and the hysterical pursuit of ‘saving the planet’.
There is a lot of money involved in this issue and ordinary Australians are being played by the so-called elites, including left-wing mainstream media such as the ABC.
A good example is the almost total lack of media reporting on the very recent and hugely important US Department of Energy’s Nuclear Lift-off Report that includes significant findings:
The system cost of electricity with nuclear and renewables combination is 30 per cent lower than just renewables.
The jobs from nuclear are 50 per cent higher paying than solar or wind.
Nuclear provides the lowest emissions, is the most reliable form of energy production, has the lowest land use requirement, and lowest material usage.
The report also outlines a pathway for the USA to reach their ambition to triple their nuclear energy capacity by 2050, in direct contradiction of our government’s refusal to even legalise nuclear energy.
It also directly contradicts the policy position of the Albanese government.
The report debunks repeated claims that nuclear is ‘too expensive’ and will ‘increase power bills’ and outlines various other benefits of nuclear energy.
The DoE report could not disagree more with Australian anti-nuclear campaigners and the Albanese Labor-Greens government, Teals, and other sources of ignorance.
Their report also completely debunks the much-criticised report produced by CSIRO GenCost that our Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, refers to constantly as his renewables crusade ‘Bible’.
This is despite the fact that the CSIRO GenCost report totally failed to accurately estimate the likely total cost of renewables compared to nuclear.
It also used in its modelling a 30-year life for a nuclear plant instead of the far more accurate 80 years. This created a false financial outcome by not comparing the total cost of nuclear with renewables over an 80-year period.
It also totally neglected the fact that waste management costs for renewables will be many times greater than for nuclear. There will be the need to replace wind turbines and solar panels three or four times during an 80-year period.
And who is going to be responsible for dismantling and disposing of the millions of components – some of which have toxic ingredients?
Many people, including some of our top scientists and engineers, believe that the CSIRO GenCost report was simply designed to support the Albanese government’s narrative as depicted in their childish three-eyed fish media splash some months ago.
‘Blackouts’ Bowen promoted that infantile campaign in his usual gloating, arrogant manner and then compounded his evident stupidity by stating that he had not even read the US report – dismissing it completely!
And this typifies the problem we face with the Albanese government. They have Ministers like Bowen, Wong, Burke, Plibersek, Clare and, of course, Albanese whose sole objective is to win the coming election and thereby remain in power; they simply don’t want to suffer the ignominy of becoming a one-term government.
Hopefully, in the very best interests of our country, they will fail to achieve that objective because we need a government that protects our borders, controls immigration, decreases our cost-of-living, and helps young people to buy their own homes.
It’s becoming clearer on a daily basis that none of that will happen under the current Labor-Greens government.
One major impediment to reducing living expenses is the rising cost of energy.
Renewables alone will continue to increase the cost of electricity and that will in turn increase the prices paid at our shops and for commercial or residential electricity usage.
Nuclear energy will add to the range of resources available to us – as it has done in many other countries.
Nuclear power plants operate in 32 countries and generate about a tenth of the world’s electricity. Most are in Europe, North America, and East Asia.
The United States is the largest producer of nuclear power, while France has the largest share of electricity generated by nuclear power, at about 70 per cent.
The only way we are going to catch up with the rest of the world in relation to nuclear energy production is to replace our current government with Peter Dutton’s Liberal-National Coalition.
That might be hard to accept for some people – but it’s an undeniable fact.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/10/australia-is-already-a-successful-nuclear-nation/
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https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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