UK: Almost 3m elderly people turn off heating as ‘they cannot afford energy bills’

Around 2.8 million people over the age of 65 are set to ration their energy usage out of worry that they cannot afford their energy bills, according to new research by Compare The Market.

A further 84% think the cost of energy presents a ‘real threat’ to elderly people living in the UK.

Although a minority, 8% of respondents admit that their health suffers because they limit the amount of heating they use during the winter and 17% say they eat less or buy cheaper food to offset the cost of energy bills.

Findings of the research also suggest 18% of people over 65 are on ‘uncompetitive’ Standard Variable Tariffs, equating to 2.1 million elderly people who are currently on more expensive deals.

It said the cost of energy has increased by £106 in the last year – the average energy bill now stands at £1,813, up from £1,706 in 2018.

Peter Earl, Head of Energy at Compare The Market, said: “These findings should make sober reading for policy makers and energy company chiefs alike.

“We hear a lot of commentary about how today’s over 65s are more financially secure than previous generations, but such a broadbrush perception risks leaving millions of elderly people out in the cold and overpaying for their energy in silence.”

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Perspective: Are wind farms better in theory than they are in practice?

Wind turbines. Some people love ‘em, some people hate ’em. Environmentalists love them, so do people who rent land to energy companies and receive a regular check. People who live close without a paycheck, and who have their viewshed filled with towering machines — not so much love.

But wind energy keeps growing. CNBC business news reported in February that “Wind has become the ‘most used’ source of renewable electricity generation in the US.” The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports wind capacity totaled 103 gigawatts (billion watts) at the end of 2019. Generation from those windmills reached 300 million megawatt hours (one megawatt hour is one million watts for one hour), 26 million more than hydro production. Over the next few years the industry is expected to invest $62 billion or more into new projects.

But all this investment comes at considerable cost to taxpayers. For the first 10 years of production, wind energy producers get paid federal production tax credit (PTC) worth $23 for each megawatt-hour they produce. In some markets, that subsidy can exceed the wholesale price of electricity. When subsidies, grants, and tax credits given by states are added to the federal subsidies, turbines can sometimes be installed and operated nearly free. Warren Buffett, whose companies build and operate wind farms, has said, “We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the reason we build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.”

The average house uses about one kilowatt (1000 watts) of electrical energy every hour. A 1000 megawatt (million watt) dam is said to power one million homes. A 1000 megawatt wind farm, on the other hand, is said to power 300,000 homes, because the wind, on average, only blows 30 percent of the time. A more accurate statement would be to say it powers one million homes 30 percent of the time. The other 70 percent of the time, hydro, fossil fuel, or nuclear is supplying the power. When Amazon, or Facebook, or any other company says they buy all “green power,” that’s not what they get. When the wind farm they bought the power from is idle, they get whatever the grid is supplying, and the wind farm buys grid power to meet its obligations.

Before wind turbines, Northwest dams provided 98 percent of needed power for Northwest homes and industry.

“Only about 15% of the wind power in the [Columbia] Gorge is used locally, the rest is shipped south,” Gretchen Bakke said in her book, The Grid. “The high voltage DC line that carries electricity from the Gorge has a capacity of 3100 megawatts, half of L.A.s peak capacity. When the wind is blowing hard, this line won’t carry it. May 19, 2010. 1000 windmills were lazily spinning on the Columbia Rim Gorge. In an hour, they were at full throttle as a storm rolled out of the East. Suddenly almost two nuclear plants worth of power was added to the grid—the largest spike the Northwest had ever experienced…in May the dams are at capacity. Spilling water was the only option. And that option kills fingerling salmon. … The balanced power system in the Northwest that has taken a century to build is now out of kilter because of wind and solar.”

Wind now provides about 7 percent of the electrical energy in the Northwest. That is not an increase in renewable power because it only subtracts from hydro. Fossil fuel and nuclear stay the same because they cannot ramp up and down rapidly to compensate for wind generation. Some years, spring runoff is so great dams can’t curtail production and still meet spill requirements for salmon. In 2011 Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) had to cut off coal, natural gas, and wind generators to prevent overloading the grid. Federal power was supplied to them for free to serve their customers. That was OK for fossil fuel users, but wind generators were unhappy because they lost kilowatt-hour production subsidies from Uncle Sam. So they went to court, and when reductions were mandated again in 2012, BPA paid renewable producers $2.7 million for 47,000 megawatts of power not produced. You can see the problem with Northwest wind: It blows in the spring when hydro is abundant, and is often idle during summer heat and winter cold.

Nevertheless, we have it, and I decided to check the nuts and bolts of winds farms near me. Some of my friends say they produce no usable power because the wind is too slow and infrequent. Wind farms also use power from the grid when the wind is not blowing, and some say they never break even on power used vs. power produced. My clue that this was important is the fact that for at least three Public Utility Districts in nearby counties with wind farms, the farms are their biggest customers. But getting exact information on grid use by wind farms proved elusive. Turbine manufactures and wind farm operators don’t know or don’t want to release that information. One study from the University of Minnesota concluded grid consumption was about 50 kilowatts for a Vestas V82 1.65 megawatts turbine, or about 8.3 percent of its reported production.

Puget Sound Energy has a wind farm, Hopkins Ridge, in Columbia County, Washington, and an office in Dayton. So I sent them a long list of questions. The farm consists of 87 turbines, with a total nameplate capacity of 156.7 megawatts. Their website claims an annual output of 404,000 megawatt hours, or 29.4 percent of nameplate capacity. That seemed high to me, considering all that I had heard about low wind speeds and idle machines from residents. So I challenged that figure. The comeback was, “During the period 2006-2018, Hopkins Ridge generated 179 times more power than was consumed as station (grid) power.” So whatever the grid use is, it seems insignificant compared to power produced. It should be noted that all generating facilities use grid power when not generating, to run lights, heating and cooling, computers, etc.

At Hopkins Ridge, the turbine generators turn on a ratio of 111 to 1, meaning at the governed blade speed of 16 rpm, the generator is at full capacity — 1800 rpm. What wind speed is required for full production? Recently I went to Hopkins Ridge with a stopwatch to measure turbine speed. Surface wind speed was about 15 mph. Most turbines were turning at maximum, 16 rpm. Blade speed is governed by pitching the blades according to wind speed. Grid power is used to pitch the blades and power the magnetic field of the generator.

Presently there are 4714 wind turbines installed in the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, with a nameplate capacity of 8281 megawatts. These overwhelm the grid at times, but when they are most needed — late summer, fall, foggy and cold winters — they often stand silent. Too much power when we don’t need it; no help when water supplies run low. In my opinion we should stop installing them and shift subsidies to grid improvements and power storage projects.

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Germany Proves How Essential Natural Gas Is

No country ever has spent more money forcing the adoption of renewable energy than Germany. Passed in 2010, Germany’s Energiewende is an “energy transition” based on relentlessly installing as much wind and solar power capacity as possible, with little to no consideration to cost.

The Energiewende demanding the use of renewables could ultimately cost the country as much as $4 trillion by 2050. Already costing hundreds of billions of dollars, wind and solar now generate just ~18% and ~8% of Germany’s electricity, respectively, and still account for just a small fraction of total energy needs

Yet, the reality is that natural gas is also quickly becoming an even more important source of energy in Germany. Not just as a vital standalone energy source providing 25% of all energy consumed, gas is the backup fuel needed for intermittent wind and solar. As the energy policy advisor to the U.S., Germany, and the other 34 developed, rich OECD nations, the International Energy Agency (IEA) touts gas as the backbone of the electric power system, to have a flexible, reliable grid where gas supports renewables.

In fact, Germany is now looking at building LNG (liquefied natural gas) import facilities to loosen the grip of heavily resourced Russia, which supplies 50-60% of Germany’s gas. The ruling CDU, the Christian Social Union (CSU), and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) have a coalition agreement to build LNG infrastructure.

Germany wants to add three or four terminals to help expand Europe’s total LNG import facilities to nearly 35, a “dash to gas” that is extremely telling for a continent that has deployed massive funding and policy support to force more wind and solar into the system. IEA’s message is simple: LNG is becoming increasingly essential to help stop Vladimir Putin’s goal energy hegemony to exploit Germany’s energy unrealism that “only wind and solar” are required.

Amid energy hemming and hawing, Germany has already been forced to construct the nearly completed Nord Stream 2 pipeline to link even more to politically risky Russia. The U.S. remains confident, however, that its current sanctions on Nord Stream 2 will block the project from being completed.

Indeed, Germany offers a number of lessons for the U.S. and the world – a series of energy warnings that we must heed. Illustrated by Germany’s plan to eliminate both coal and nuclear, which effectively is happening here in the U.S., gas only becomes more essential.

Further, massive payouts to force more wind and solar power into the system can only last for so long, and there are physical and cost limitations that not even rich countries can ignore forever. To illustrate, as tax breaks run out, opposition grows, barriers to new power lines persist, and construction approvals slow, there is a major shortage of new wind projects: “Germans fall out of love with wind power.”

Many though probably see this slowdown in German wind as a positive, financially drained of the levies to pay for renewables subsidies. The “renewables only” tunnel vision has helped soar Germany’s electricity prices for families to being three to four times more expensive than they are here in the U.S.: “If Renewables Are So Cheap Why Is Germany’s Electricity So Expensive?”

After Denmark, Germany has had the highest electricity prices in the world. In fact, ridiculously high energy prices have sadly created a new term in Germany: energy poverty, “Renewable Energy Mandates Are Making Poor People Poorer.”

In contrast, global natural gas prices today are the lowest they have been in over 10 years, strengthening the economic argument for switching to gas. The U.S. has been at the forefront of an LNG export boom that continues to make gas more viable for rich and poor countries alike. LNG is the fastest-growing traded commodity in the world because natural gas is the world’s go-to fuel.

U.S. LNG must help lower Germany’s over-dependence on Russia, especially important now since other traditional suppliers Denmark and the Netherlands face major production problems of their own. The U.S. has been touting its “Freedom Gas” for Germany and the rest of Europe.

Starting in 2016 and soaring to third place last year, the U.S. is set to become the world’s top LNG exporter within four or five years – that is how fast our Federal Energy Regulatory Commission wants the industry to grow.

And this makes also makes perfect sense from an environmental perspective. Not just backing up wind and solar, the International Energy Agency specifically credits more gas usage as to why the U.S. has been cutting CO2 emissions faster than any other country – in “the history of energy.”

That is crucial enough to repeat: the shale gas revolution and the free market of the U.S. has us slashing emissions faster and much more cheaply than the renewables and regulation obsessed nations like Germany. Indeed, “U.S. Department of Energy’s Winberg: Tech will solve CO2 emissions.” Even Germany’s goal for more hydrogen means more natural gas: production processes center on pulling it from methane – or, natural gas itself.

But what does Germany’s requirement for more natural gas really say about the energy needs of the fast-growing poor countries, and the expectations that we wealthy Westerners should have for them?

After all, Germany is a rich country, has had almost no population growth for many decades, and has low incremental energy needs – the exact opposite of the 85% of the global population that still lives in undeveloped nations.

Just think about it: despite years of promises to effectively “get rid of them,” oil (33%) and gas (25%) still supply almost 60% of Germany’s primary energy needs (not all that surprising since wind and solar are strictly sources of electricity, a secondary energy source that accounts for just 20-30% of all energy demand).

If Germany cannot survive on just “wind and solar” how are the poor countries supposed to?

Unlike Germany (ditto California, New York, New England states), these still developing nations must put low costs – and the desperate need for more energy-enabled human development – at the forefront. It is just too bad that this is apparently so inconvenient for some of us most fortunate.

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Greta Thunberg self-isolates with coronavirus symptoms

Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate change activist, has revealed that she has self-isolated after showing coronavirus symptoms.

Where a member of a household has displayed symptoms, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, has said all residents should self-isolate for 14 days. Elsewhere, foreign governments have issued similar guidance.

Having travelled around central Europe, visiting Brussels and Hamburg to lead school strike events, Ms Thunberg, 17, decided she should stay at home.

She took to social media to urge young people in particular to take the virus seriously, noting that she did not feel particularly ill.

While Ms Thunberg has not been tested for coronavirus, because her home country of Sweden does not currently test for it outside hospitals, she said it is "extremely likely" she has had it.

In an Instagram post, she wrote: "The last two weeks I’ve stayed inside. When I returned from my trip around Central Europe, I isolated myself (in a borrowed apartment away from my mother and sister) since the number of cases of Covid-19 (in Germany for instance) were similar to Italy in the beginning.

"Around 10 days ago I started feeling some symptoms, exactly the same time as my father – who travelled with me from Brussels.

"I was feeling tired, had shivers, a sore throat and coughed. My dad experienced the same symptoms, but much more intense and with a fever. In Sweden you can not test yourself for Covid-19 unless you're in need of emergency medical treatment.

"Everyone feeling ill is told to stay at home and isolate themselves. I have therefore not been tested for Covid-19, but it’s extremely likely that I’ve had it, given the combined symptoms and circumstances.

"Now I’ve basically recovered, but – and this is the bottom line – I almost didn’t feel ill. My last cold was much worse than this! Had it not been for someone else having the virus simultainously (sic) I might not even have suspected anything.

"Then I would just have thought I was feeling unusually tired with a bit of a cough. And this it what makes it so much more dangerous.

"Many (especially young people) might not notice any symptoms at all, or very mild symptoms. Then they don’t know they have the virus and can pass it on to people in risk groups.

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Smoke from Australia's bushfires killed far more people than the fires did, study says

Smoke is particulate pollution and the study below looked at a standard measure of that pollution: PM2.5. And there is a great deal of prior research on pollution of that sort.  

The conventional assumption is of course that inhaling such pollution is bad for you.  The Australian experience would however seem to show that is is NOT very bad for you.  Australians were not dying like flies while experiencing it. They seemed to be going about their business in their usual way, in fact.

So how have the authors below got their apparently alarming findings:

Modelling garbage.  They had no real data on the health of  Australians at the time at all. They just used conventional assumptions to estimate what the effects would have been. But the conventional assumptions are crap, to use a technical term.  The existing research on particulate air pollution (PM2.5.)shows effects that range between no effect and effects that are so weak that no confidence can be placed in them. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here

The conventional assumptions take the occasional tiny effects that turn up in some research to build a great castle on, if you will forgive my prepositional impropriety. So you get statements that pollution causes such and such an ailment, without mentioning the very fragile evidential basis for such a posited effect.

So after that useless modelling it will be interesting if the authors do something more useful in the future -- such as comparing actual recorded deaths and morbidity during the smoke affected period with the same period in the previous much clearer year.  My hypothesis -- based on the actual prior research -- is that deaths and disease in the same period of the two years will differ trivially, if at all.

The "study" is just a grab for government funding

Smoke pollution that blanketed Australia’s south-east for many months during the bushfire crisis may have killed more than 400 people, according to the first published estimate of the scale of health impacts – more than 10 times the number killed by the fires themselves.

The figures, published in the Medical Journal of Australia, are “definitely alarming”, according to Chris Migliaccio, who studies the long-term effects of wildfire smoke at the University of Montana in Missoula and was not involved in the research.

Lead author Fay Johnston, an epidemiologist at the University of Tasmania in Hobart, estimates 80% of Australia’s population of about 25 million was blanketed by smoke this summer.

“The fires were unprecedented in Australia’s history, in terms of vast amounts of smoke, the huge populations affected by the smoke and the long duration,” she said.

Sydney experienced 81 days of poor or hazardous air quality in 2019, more than the total of the previous 10 years combined.

“When you’re affecting millions of people in a small way, there are going to be enough people at high enough risk that you’re going to see really measurable rises in these health effects,” Johnston said.

As data on hospital admissions, deaths and ambulance callouts was not yet available to researchers, Johnston and her team instead modelled the likely medical consequences of the pollution, which is the “the only other way to get a quick ballpark idea of the health impacts,” she said.

To come up with a picture of the overall health burden of smoke exposure, they looked at existing data on death rates and hospital admissions to get a baseline. They then modelled how the known levels and extent of smoke exposure across the southeast, during the height of the crisis from 1 October to 10 February, would have affected these.

Their results estimate that over this period there were 417 premature deaths, 3,151 extra hospitalisations for cardiorespiratory problems and 1,305 additional attendances for asthma attacks. This compares to 33 who reportedly died as a direct result of the bushfires.

Many of the deaths and hospitalisations are likely to have been older patients with heart disease or lung problems, such as chronic bronchitis or emphysema – but severe asthma attacks will likely have resulted in deaths in younger people too, Johnston said.

In patients with pre-existing cardiorespiratory issues, smoke exposure promotes inflammation, stresses the body and makes blood more likely to clot, increasing the risk of a heart attack. “In someone at high risk, subtle changes due to stress … can be the precipitating factor for a very serious or terminal event,” she said.

Guy Marks, a respiratory physician and epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney who was not involved in the research, said the findings “highlights the importance of the health consequences” and is useful in estimating fire-related deaths that may not have been recognised as the result of smoke exposure.

The findings concur with previous studies of the health consequences of wildfire smoke in North America, but the numbers “are more drastic, potentially as a result of the unprecedented nature of the exposure,” Migliaccio said. He added that while previous studies found increases in hospital visits, the addition of large numbers of premature deaths in the Australian study is significant and disturbing.

Migliaccio said that due to climate change increasing the frequency and severity of wildfires “these types of exposures are increasing in number and intensity, making this kind of research vital.”

To look into just such effects, a consortium of 10 air pollution researchers from across Australia, led by Marks and including Johnston, have already put up their hands for $3m in government funding, which became available in the wake of the crisis.

The research proposal, funding of which has yet to be confirmed, aims to plug significant gaps in knowledge about the health impacts of bushfire smoke and how these might be mitigated.

Marks says that questions he and his colleagues hope to address include whether there is anything unique about health effect of air pollution caused by bushfires, what the long-term effects of exposure are, and what the effects might be on newborn babies and pregnant women.

The researchers – all members of a collaborative consortium, The Centre for Air Pollution, Energy and Health Research (CAR), funded by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council – also hope to study whether it’s possible to filter air to make indoor refuges safe from pollution, and if public health advice can be improved.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Plastic bags and the coronavirus

"The eight states where lawmakers have imposed plastic bag prohibitions are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, New York, Oregon and Vermont, according the National Conference of State Legislatures," columnist Patrick Gleason writes. "Six of those statewide bag bans were enacted as recently as 2019. Hundreds of cities, towns, and counties have also imposed a bag ban or tax. All of these laws seek to force or encourage the use of reusable shopping bags, which pose a public health risk at any time and especially during the current pandemic."

Not just during a pandemic. A 2011 study was undertaken by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University. They collected reusable bags at random from grocery shoppers in California and Arizona, after which they conducted interviews with their owners.

What they discovered was problematic, to say the least. First, most owners seldom, if ever, washed their reusable bags. Second, many used them for multiple purposes.

The result of such practices? "Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half," the research stated. "Escherichia coli were identified in 8% of the bags, as well as a wide range of enteric bacteria, including several opportunistic pathogens. When meat juices were added to bags and stored in the trunks of cars for two hours, the number of bacteria increased 10-fold, indicating the potential for bacterial growth in the bags."

It gets worse. A 2012 study revealed that nine members of a soccer team contracted the norovirus, described by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as a "very contagious virus that causes vomiting and diarrhea" simply by touching a reusable bag, or eating the food contained in it. In what might be seen as the essence of unthinking behavior, the bag had been stored in a bathroom. "That might seem like an outlier," columnist Angela Logomasini explains, "but people cart these bags all over the place, touching surfaces on public transportation, taking them into public bathrooms, and other places, creating lots of opportunities for the bags to pick up bacteria and viruses."

Such opportunities were not limited to picking up bacteria and viruses. A 2018 study published by the National Environmental Health Association used a non-infectious proxy virus to assess the probability of norovirus transmission related to reusable bags. It revealed that shoppers with such bags transmitted that virus all over the store, including high concentrations of it on the hands of the shoppers themselves, as well a grocery checkout clerks.

According to the 2011 study, washing such bags would remove more than 99.9% of the bacteria on them. A survey conducted at the University of Arizona, however, revealed that only 3% of bag owners ever wash them.

Now add coronavirus to the mix. Any questions?

New York has seen the light — sort of. The ban the state enacted has been pushed back from the initial enforcement date of April 1 to May 15. Yet almost unbelievably, there is resistance to the idea from the state's Department of Conservation commissioner Basil Seggos. "DEC continues to encourage New Yorkers to transition to reusable bags whenever and wherever they shop and to use common-sense precautions to keep their reusable bags clean," Seggos. "We have consistently said since the beginning of our outreach campaign that we will focus on education rather than enforcement."

Such zealotry is unsurprising. The entire environmentalist movement has a cultish aspect to it, which brings us to the central aspect of that cult, namely global warming. For decades, a transnational movement promoted by elites as "settled science" and aimed at supplanting national governance has morphed into a full-blown campaign replete with the hysterical prediction that the world has less than a dozen years left between now and planetary armageddon.

Whether that brand of hysteria will take a back seat to the current pandemic remains to be seen. Yet all along, the underlying assumption of this movement is that higher global temperatures will be catastrophic. That many of the movement's predications have yet to materialize is largely irrelevant. Yet perhaps even more inconvenient, it is quite possible that it might be our best hope for containing coronavirus.

A study posted on March 10 and revised on March 20 asserts that "high temperature and high relative humidity significantly reduce the transmission of COVID-19, respectively, even after controlling for population density and GDP per capita of cities."

It's only one study, and pushback will be inevitable as such assessments are antithetical to the globalist agenda. Thus, entities like the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate that climate change will cause about 250,000 additional deaths per year by the 2030s. That would be the same WHO whose dubious relationship with China likely exacerbated the spread of coronavirus. Instead of holding the ChiComs accountable for their pathetic and secretive response, the organization's director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, praised Chinese President Xi Jinping's "political commitment" and "political leadership."

That would be the same Dr. Tedros who tried to appoint former Zimbabwe dictator Robert Mugabe as one of the organization's ... goodwill ambassadors.

The real tell regarding this seemingly corrupt group of bureaucrats? As reported by NBC News, WHO spends more money on travel, including first class and business flying, than the combined budgets for tuberculosis, AIDS, and malaria. "This may just speak to how misplaced international priorities are, that WHO is getting so little for these disease programs," stated Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.

Moreover, here's a question few ever ask: How many lives will be saved by global warming? Studies conducted in the UK in 2009 under the aegis of Professor William Keatinge of the University of London revealed more people die from excess cold than excess heat, yet such studies are rarely, if ever, part of any debate about global warming. Moreover one rarely hears about studies that show global warming could increase the amount of arable land for farming.

Proof positive? Certainly not, but one should be quite suspect of any agenda aimed at concentrating power beyond national borders to organizations accountable to no one but themselves.

Speaking of borders, an agreement between the United States and Mexico on banning all nonessential travel between the nations was implemented last Friday. Illegals attempting to cross the border will be returned — even those asking for asylum. Apparently both nations now recognize the necessity of border enforcement. So does the European Union, which not only has closed national borders, but erected barriers in an effort to contain the virus.

However the latest crisis plays out one thing is certain: We will never be the same nation again, and all agendas will be reassessed. Here's hoping those which elevate politics — especially transnational politics — above all other considerations will be the first casualties.

SOURCE 




"Clean, renewable" energy is neither

Eco-warriors are besotted with the myth that energy can be clean and renewable. The truth is that any "renewable" energy requires massive environmental impacts.

These impacts consume enormous amounts of environmental resources, which would make the most ardent environmentalist blush with shame if they only knew about them. Greens have so ensconced themselves in a humongous bubble of ignorance that it's doubtful if any but a handful know what I'm about to tell you.

And if that handful does in fact exist, they are keeping what they know to themselves as a closely held secret. Because if the truth got out, it would be the end of the environmental movement.

The vision of environmentalists is a peaceful, harmonious world in which human beings tool along on wind and solar energy alone, burn not an ounce of fossil fuel, and leave no human imprint on the environment at all. It's a beautiful, serene picture which has absolutely nothing to do with reality.

In this mythical world, the energy of the wind and the sun is captured and stored in batteries. There's your first problem, right there. As Mark Mills and Alexander Ackley write in The International Chronicles, "A single electric-car battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving and processing more 500,000 pounds of raw materials somewhere on the planet." If, however, you burned gasoline, you could deliver the same number of vehicle-miles over the battery's life span of seven years at 1/10 the total tonnage.

The green machines at some point must be decommissioned, which will generate millions and millions of tons of waste. By 2050, the International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that disposing of old solar panels alone will constitute more than double the tonnage of all today's global plastic waste. And waste is the word. A solar or wind farm that stretches as far as the eye can see can be replaced by a handful of gas-fired turbines, each about the size of a tractor trailer.

Both wind and solar require far more in the way of materials and land than fossil fuels. Just one wind turbine takes 900 tons of steel, 2500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of plastic THAT CANNOT BE RECYCLED. Wind turbines last about 20 years, and since there is no way to recycle the materials, they have to be dumped in landfills. And with blades that are 120 feet long, they're too big for convenient disposal even there.

A wind farm in Minnesota trucked more than 100 of these monster blades to the Sioux Falls Sanitary Landfill in South Dakota. But the director of the Sioux Falls Public Works Department says they're done. "We can't take any more unless they process them before bringing them to us. We're using too many resources unloading them, driving over them a couple of times, and working them into the ground."

If a wind farm includes 100 turbines, that means there are 500 million pounds of concrete which has been poured into what used to be farmland. How is that concrete going to be disposed of?

There is not even a moderately inexpensive way to get the energy that wind farms generate to the cities which need them. Cities are built near flat farmland, while the wind blows on high ridge lines.

And there are health hazards to these giant bird blenders. Germany, which is shifting radically to wind, has discovered these wind farms produce so much noise that, according to one poor unfortunate soul, it "drives you insane at night." Germany is actually now paying hush money to people who live near these farms. They're getting direct handouts from the government essentially to keep quiet. So the turbines can keep making noise, but the people can't.

Building enough wind turbines to supply one-half the world's electricity needs would require nearly two billion tons of coal to make the concrete and steel, and two billion barrels of oil to make the composite blades. We'd consume immense amounts of hydrocarbons in a radically stupid attempt to avoid consuming hydrocarbons.

Well, at least that leaves solar as an environmentally friendly, sustainable, and renewable source of energy. Except of course for the MINING of silver and indium, which will jump 250% and 1200% respectively in the next several decades. Demand for rare earth minerals required for the manufacture of solar panels will rise 300% to 1000% by 2050 to meet the goals of the Paris Accords.

The production of electric cars will require a 2000% percent increase in the production of cobalt and lithium. This will require mining operations in remote wilderness areas with a high degree of undisturbed biodiversity, which is where the cobalt and lithium are found.

One of the dirty secrets is that wind farms must be heavily propped up with taxpayer subsidies because no one in his right mind would build one otherwise. Warren Buffet, for instance, owns MidAmerican Energy. Said Buffett, "On wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."

Engineers joke about discovering "unobtanium," a magical energy-producing element that "appears out of nowhere, requires no land, weighs nothing, and emits nothing."

Bottom line: "clean, renewable" energy is neither. It's an environmental disaster. Fossil fuels, on the other hand, are readily accessible, affordable, and have a much, much smaller environmental footprint than all renewables. Gentlemen, start your engines.

SOURCE 




Renewable Energy Industry Seeks to Scam Public During Health Crisis

A coalition of House Democrats, environmental advocacy groups, and renewable energy trade associations are looking to take advantage of the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by sneaking several renewable energy tax credits into an economic stimulus bill.

Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether or not such stimulus packages are actually effective. The idea that renewable energy tax credits have anything to do with responding to the COVID-19 situation is, on its face, ridiculous. The focus of public policy in the wake of an extreme economic shock should be on allowing price signals to properly convey information to energy producers and consumers and on eliminating regulatory barriers that might prevent economic actors from adjusting to the changing circumstances presented by COVID-19.

But, it appears that House Democrats will instead use this situation to once again hand out favors to the renewable energy industry. Unsurprisingly, House Democrats plan to provide this support by promoting several tax credit provisions that they, along with environmentalists and renewable energy groups, failed to codify during the 2019 end-of-year funding package. These tax credit provisions would likely:

Provide batteries and electricity storage systems the same investment tax credit currently offered to PV solar

Extend the investment tax credit for solar

Extend the current production tax credit for wind

Extend the investment tax credit for offshore wind

Increase the number of vehicles that are available the electric vehicle tax credit

Of course, the renewable energy industry has a long history of taking advantage of economic stimulus bills. In the wake of the financial crisis in 2009, the renewable energy industry lobbied hard for the introduction of new tax credits, most of which were eventually included in the 2009 stimulus bill.

It should be obvious to any outside observer what this pattern says about the nature of the renewable energy industry. Although people in the industry often claim that renewable energy does not need the support of the government, we continue to see the renewable energy industry take advantage of every opportunity to benefit from government handouts.

As IER has explained in the past, renewable energy tax credits distort energy markets in several ways that ultimately raise energy prices for consumers. Lawmakers should therefore reject the renewable energy industry’s attempt to take advantage of another economic downturn.

SOURCE 





Eleven million jobs at risk from EU Green Deal, labor unions warn

The European Green Deal risks deepening economic and social divisions between east and western EU countries, trade unions say, warning the 27-member bloc risks imploding before it reaches its 2050 climate neutrality goal.

Trade unions have stepped up warnings that the Green Deal put forward by the European Commission in December last year will put millions of jobs at risk, without any assurances that workers in affected industries will have a future.

“We are talking about almost 11 million jobs directly affected in extractive industries, energy intensive industries and in the automotive industry,” said Luc Triangle, secretary general of IndustriAll, a federation of trade unions.

“Those jobs won’t necessarily disappear,” Triangle told EURACTIV in an interview. “But there needs to be a future perspective for jobs in these industries,” which is currently not clear, he said.

Last week, the European Commission tabled a groundbreaking EU Climate Law, aimed at putting into hard legislation the EU’s goal of becoming the first climate-neutral continent in the world by 2050.

The EU executive is now expected to follow-up with an industrial strategy on Tuesday (10 March), outlining new growth areas for Europe as it moves towards a greener and more connected future.

But while the draft strategy places great focus on digitalisation, it contains little for traditional manufacturing sectors like steelmaking, automotive and chemicals, which are expected to be hit hardest by the transition to net-zero emissions.

“It’s easy to say we need to reach ambitious climate targets by 2050 and 2030,” Triangle said. “But the industrial strategy should give the answer on the ‘how’ we will get there. And at the moment, we don’t have those answers yet”.

Green transition will require ‘Herculean effort’, EU admits
The European Union will need to “re-orient most, if not all” of its policies in order to protect vulnerable regions and workers in industries affected by the transition to a green economy, the EU Commission’s vice-president Frans Timmermans has said.

A new migration wave from Eastern Europe

Trade unions are particularly worried about the social and economic divisions that the green agenda risks creating between poorer eastern EU countries and their richer western neighbours.

According to Triangle, the green transformation “will be much easier in Nordic or western European countries” than in poorer EU member states like Poland, Bulgaria and Romania, where employment in some regions can be entirely dependent on a single, heavily-polluting industry.

“This could have a major impact on internal migration inside the European Union,” Triangle pointed out, saying “close to 22 million people” have already left Eastern Europe to find work in richer western and Nordic countries over the last 20 years.

“Well, this will only increase if we don’t manage this transition right,” he warned.

Politicians in Eastern EU member states have stepped up warnings that the green transition risks deepening divisions inside the EU. Traian Băsescu, a former Romanian President, said the European Green Deal “will definitely create tensions” between east and western EU countries, which have other economic priorities than the green transition.

Such economic and social discrepancies “are likely to generate huge tensions inside the EU, which could lead to some countries considering the possibility of leaving the Union altogether,” he told EURACTIV in a recent interview.

Basescu: European Green Deal risks pushing 'two or three countries' towards EU exit

The European Green Deal “will definitely create tensions” inside the EU, and risks pushing “two or three countries” to leave the Union altogether, warns former Romanian President Traian Basescu, saying the real priority in Romania is to build new infrastructure like motorways and exploit natural gas resources from the Black Sea.

EU risks disintegrating before reaching climate goals

Triangle echoed those warnings, saying the Green Deal risked putting the entire EU project in jeopardy if it ignores the social aspect of the transition.

“The divisions within Europe are already such that if the European Green Deal neglects the social dimension, there is a serious risk to see the EU disintegrate before it is decarbonised,” he warned.

According to trade unions, there is a genuine risk that the Green Deal ends up putting entire industrial sectors on their knees, and discredit EU climate policies in the eyes of the general public.

“Climate policies will only fly if you can sell them to the public opinion, if you can do that without social disruption in the industries and in the regions concerned,” Triangle said. “The social dimension is hugely important in order to make this whole climate policy sellable,” he said.

The European Commission is highly aware of the social aspects of the Green Deal, and insisted repeatedly that the transition to a climate-neutral economy should leave no-one behind.

But it is also convinced that a green industrial revolution is underway and that future growth lies in low-carbon industries. Last year, the executive calculated that the EU’s GDP will increase by 2% by 2050 if the bloc slashes its emissions to a net-zero level.

“The European Green Deal is our new growth strategy,” said Commission President Ursula von der Leyen after winning a confirmation vote in the European Parliament last November. “Our commitment is that no-one will be left behind,” said Commission vice-president Frans Timmermans when asked about worries over the costs of the transition in Eastern EU countries.

New EU chief flags climate policy as Europe’s 'new growth strategy'

The new President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, cited climate policy as the most pressing issue facing her new executive team, which was officially confirmed by a vote in the European Parliament on Wednesday (27 November).

Where is the money?

However, those promises are insufficient for trade unions who say the EU also needs to put money where its mouth is.

“It’s clear that our industries want to make the step to net-zero emissions. But there is a need for financial support. Without financial support and real investments, we will not be able to make that leap forward,” Triangle said.

According to estimates, European industries need to invest €250 billion on an annual basis for the next ten years if in order to stay on track with the 2050 climate neutrality objective.

“Where is the money for those investments?” Triangle asked. True, the European Investment Bank will be turned into a climate bank, with 50% of lending dedicated to climate objectives as of 2025. And there is a reshuffling of the EU budget, with 25% dedicated to the climate, trade unions admit.

But there is hardly any new funding to support the green transition, Triangle said, pointing to the “discrepancy between the high level of ambition on climate targets” and discussions over the EU’s next long-term budget, which some countries want to cap at 1% of their Gross National Income.

According to Triangle, the investment funding issue is particularly acute for energy-intensive industries, like steel and chemicals, which are hardest to decarbonise.

“That’s the problem for us with the 2030 targets: If we want to increase the objective to a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, I can assure you that energy-intensive industries will not be able to deliver. The technologies will be ready for commercialisation only after 2030, for example on low-carbon steel, which is only at pilot stage,” Triangle said.

This is where the industrial strategy could help, trade unions believes.

“For us it is important to keep an integrated industrial value chain in Europe. In the future, we will continue to need steel and chemicals produced in Europe,” Triangle said.

“We are expecting a lot from this industrial strategy”.

A European Green Deal with justness for all?
A fund originally conceived to convince Poland to sign up to the EU’s 2050 climate target has now turned into one of the most contentious aspects of both the Green Deal and the long-term EU budget.

SOURCE 





Turbine battle heating up in Beeville, TX

BEEVILLE – As one side fights to have the county offer a tax abatement to a proposed wind farm in north Bee County, another said that these towers will only benefit the few who have them built on their property.

During Monday’s court meeting, March 9, more residents showed to plead their case to commissioners.

Austin Brown, landowner in northwest Bee County, reminded that the wind farms proposed by Orsted affect more than the property where each is built.

“Do you want to live in a county that has these 400- to 600-foot towers flickering day and night and causing noise?” he asked.

Brown, a certified ranch real estate appraiser, said property values decrease 25 to 40 percent where the wind farms are located.

“Those wind towers will not be on my property, but they may be on the property adjoining my property,” he said. “Do you want to have the basis of the underlying tax value of this county depleted in that manner?”

As a certified ranch manager, he is also worried about the aesthetics of the towers.

“You are to be commended for the stand you have taken on this project,” he said referring back to the court’s recent decision not to create the reinvestment zone that would make an abatement possible. “This is one of the prettiest counties in Texas.

“This county needs to decide if it wants to be turned into an industrial wasteland.”

Mark Uhr, property owner in Bee County and real estate broker in Rockport, said that he has seen the affect these turbines have on the value of property.

“And now my people that live in the backside of Copano, they can see 400 blinking lights all night long, and it has depreciated the value of that waterfront property.”

Eric Barnett, with Lincoln Clean Energy and Orsted, said during a previous meeting that the towers proposed have sensors that only flash when aircraft are near.

Both Charlie Westmoreland and Garrett Tindol, with Tindol Construction, countered saying that the wind farm companies leave the county in better shape than before they arrive.

“... the revenue and the just goodwill that was brought to these communities with the wind farm coming in was just astronomical,” Westmoreland said, referring to his west Texas experiences. “Not only did it benefit the sheriff’s office, the police departments and the local EMS, it also benefited the road and bridge department.

“When these projects come into town, they’re bringing in 80-foot wind turbines, and the infrastructure has to be upgraded to accommodate this.”

When the county departments cannot keep up with the work, Westmoreland said, the wind farm company pays to have a contractor repair the roads.

“And when the project is completed and the wind turbines are in operation, basically the wind farm turns over these roads to the county in excellent condition,” he said. “And there’s also normally a maintenance agreement of about a year where the contractor goes in and just maintains these roads to make sure everything’s good to go.”

Tindol, co-owner of Tindol Construction which has contracted for construction of wind farms in other parts of the state, said, “We have had success adding new businesses and jobs in the area with all the activity at Chase Field.

“But do we really feel that is enough?

“With (Texas Department of Criminal Justice), one of the largest employers in the county, and now with one of those prisons closing, we need the Helena wind project to help us pick up the slack more than ever.”

The court has not had the abatement back on their agenda since it was denied last month.

SOURCE 

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Plastic pollution.  Is recycling the answer?

Plastic rubbish on land and sea is a big problem.  You can pick it up but what do you do with it then? That all discarded plastic should be recycled seems to be an article of faith -- as we see below.  But  nobody is saying why it should be recycled. What is wrong with just dumping it in landfill?  Digging a hole and filling it in again is not rocket science. Most plastic ends up in landfill anyway, so I am not proposing anything radical, unusual  or outlandish.

But how many holes can we dig for landfill?  What happens with all that landfill eventually?  Again the answer it not outlandish.  There is a fair chance that you are living on top of landfill already if your house is a recent newbuild.  As good urban land for home building becomes scarce, developers buy holes -- valleys in the landscape.  And they then fill up the holes to create flat land.

And what do they put in the holes?  Garbage, some of which will be plastic.  They then put in a layer of rocks to hold it down and then a layer of soil on the very top to facilitate people growing things in a garden. They will usually have to wait a year or two for everything to settle and then the "For sale" signs will go up.

It is a normal item in the precautions of conveyancing for buyers to hire a geologist to certify that the ground has settled into a stable state but the developers know that so will be sure to have sent in their own geologists before releasing the land for sale.

And the old method of dealing with garbage is still sometimes used -- particularly in small towns and cities.  The local authorities find a hole or small valley, use it as a general garbage dump and top it off with rocks and soil when it is full.  And what do they use the newly created flat "land" for?  It becomes parks, sportsgrounds and playing fields.  You would be surprised at how many of your local recreational areas originated that way.  A dump I used to go to is now a sportsfield.

So holes will become a valuable asset and urban areas will slowly become flatter.  That is the only penalty for putting plastic waste in landfill.


Plastic recycling enjoys ever-wider support among consumers: Putting yogurt containers and juice bottles in a blue bin is an eco-friendly act of faith in millions of households. But faith goes only so far. The tidal wave of plastic items that enters the recycling stream each year is increasingly likely to fall right back out again, casualties of a broken market.

Many products that consumers believe (and industries claim) are “recyclable” are in reality not, because of stark economics. With oil and gas prices near 20-year lows—thanks in large part to the fracking revolution— so-called virgin plastic, a product of petroleum feedstocks, is now far cheaper and easier to obtain than recycled material. That unforeseen shift has yanked the financial rug out from under what was until recently a viable recycling industry. “The global waste trade is essentially broken,” says Graham Forbes, head of the global plastics campaign at Greenpeace. “We are sitting on vast amounts of plastic, with nowhere to send it and nothing to do with it.”

This gargantuan overload is creating a conflict that industry and government can no longer ignore—one that pits the profitability and usefulness of plastic against its threat to public health and the environment. There are few places where that conflict is more visible than in Malaysia. Here, rock-bottom wages, cheap land, and a still-evolving regulatory climate have enticed entrepreneurs to build hundreds of factories in a last-ditch bid to stay profitable. The real economic and environmental costs of plastic recycling are on vivid display, as I discovered traveling across the country with photographer Sebastian Meyer. Over the course of 10 days, we visited 10 recycling factories—some of them, including Biogreen Frontier, operating without official registration, under threat of a shutdown—as they grappled with waste shipped by the boatload from across the world. And we saw how the consequences of the broken plastics economy spill over into waste dumps, container dockyards, private homes, and out into the ocean.

FOR HALF A CENTURY, plastics have seen rocketing growth, for good reason: They are cheap, lightweight, and virtually indestructible.

“There’s a great future in plastics,” a nervous young Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) is told by a would-be mentor in the 1967 movie The Graduate. Acting on that tip would have yielded spectacular returns. Global production soared from 25 million tons a year in 1970 to more than 400 million tons in 2018.

Behind this polyethylene deluge is an economic colossus: a global plastics market worth about $1 trillion last year, according to U.K. data analysts the Business Research Co. Demand for plastics has doubled since 2000 and could double again by 2050. “We have a growing middle class around the world that needs to improve their quality of life,” says Keith Christman, managing director of plastic markets for the American Chemistry Council, an industry organization whose members include major producers like Dow, Dupont, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil. “Plastic is a part of that.” You can find plastic not just in your water bottles and sandwich bags, but in sweatshirts and wet wipes, home insulation and siding, chewing gum, tea bags, and countless other items.

The durability that makes plastic so appealing, it turns out, also makes it an environmental time bomb. An estimated 90.5% of all the plastic produced since 1950 is still in existence, according to analysis by Roland Geyer, an industrial ecology professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science &Management. Only 8.4% of plastic waste in the U.S. was recycled in 2017, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. An additional 15.8% was burned to generate energy; the rest wound up in landfills. Recycling rates are even lower in parts of Asia and Africa. Even Europe, with its stringent environmental laws, recycles only about 30% of plastics.

For decades, plastics producers and their biggest customers—consumer-goods giants like Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Pepsico, and Procter & Gamble—have argued that improving these recycling numbers is the solution to the plastic-waste crisis. They frame the problem as one of behavior—ours. “It’s a knee-jerk reaction to say the problem is with plastic,” Tony Radoszewski, president and CEO of the Plastics Industry Association, tells me. “The culprit is the consumer who does not dispose of products properly.”

It’s true that recycling rates are low. But to blame that fact on consumers alone is disingenuous. The bigger problem is a huge shift in energy markets. Prices for oil and natural gas have plummeted over the past decade. That in turn has made it far cheaper for petrochemical companies to produce virgin plastics than for factories to create recycled plastic. And with big profits to be made, companies have sharply increased virgin production, further driving down prices. Recycling used plastic is labor- intensive and therefore expensive—and the shifting economics now work against recycling in much of the world.

In 2018, this ecosystem endured another major blow when China halted the importation of almost all plastic scrap, saying that its own recycling industry was becoming an environmental hazard. The decision has caused chaos in the world’s plastic-resuscitation economy. Up until then, for example, the U.S. had been sending about 70% of its plastic waste to China. Now, “recycling is on life support,” says Mike Engelmann, solid waste coordinator for Smithtown, N.Y., a town of 120,000 people on suburban Long Island.

“Hopefully things will turn around. But I am not sure how.”

SOURCE




Greenland lost 600 BILLION tons of ice last summer raising global sea levels by almost 0.1 inches in two months as the Arctic experienced its hottest year on record

Note the dog that didn't bark below:  No claim that the melting was the rsult of global warming.  Both poles are subject to extensive subsurface vulcanism, which is why the warming is both uneven and out of sync with the rest of the world. As usual, the Antarctic melting was in coastal West Antarctica only



Greenland lost 600 BILLION tons of ice last summer raising global sea levels by almost 0.1 inches in two months as the Arctic experienced its hottest year on record.

In Antarctica, meanwhile, ice has continued to melt from both the Amundsen Sea Embayment and the Antarctic Peninsula.

However, the southernmost continent also saw some relief in its eastern side, with levels of snowfall increasing in Queen Maud Land.

Changes in the ice volumes were measured by two twin gravity measuring satellite missions operated by NASA and the German Aerospace Centre.

'We knew this past summer had been particularly warm in Greenland, melting every corner of the ice sheet, but the numbers are enormous,' said paper author and earth scientist Isabella Velicogna of the University of California, Irvine.

In fact, Greenland shed more than twice the ice last summer than it did each year on average between 2002–2019 — a period in which it lost 4,550 billion tons.

For context, the whole of Los Angeles County only consumes around one billion tons of water a year.

'In Antarctica, the mass loss in the west proceeds unabated, which is very bad news for sea level rise,' Professor Velicogna said.

'But we also observe a mass gain in the Atlantic sector of East Antarctica caused by an increase in snowfall.

This, she explained, 'helps mitigate the enormous increase in mass loss that we've seen over the last two decades in other parts of the continent.'

In their study, Professor Velicogna and colleagues studied data from NASA and the German Aerospace Centre's late Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites, as well as their successor, the GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) mission.

The GRACE satellites — which operated as a pair — took extremely precise measurements of changes in Earth's gravity from March 2002–October 2017, operating for 15 years longer than they were originally intended to.

These readings have allowed scientists to monitor the planet's water reserves, including polar ice, global sea levels and groundwater.

The twin GRACE-FO craft — launched May 2018 — were based on similar technology, but incorporated an experimental laser interferometry device to gauge any minute changes in the distance between the two satellites, rather than using microwaves.

The gap in time between the operation of the GRACE and GRACE-FO missions meant that Professor Velicogna and colleagues had to undertake tests to see how well the data gathered by the different missions matched up.

'It's great to see how well the data line up in Greenland and Antarctica, even at the regional level,' Professor Velicogna said. 'It's a tribute to the months of effort by the project, engineering and science teams to make the endeavour successful.'

SOURCE


The real reasons Africa has another locust plague

The UN, environmentalist pressure groups and their financial backers have a lot to answer for

Paul Driessen

The ChiCom coronavirus and COVID-19 outbreaks, deaths and responses continue to dominate US, European and Asian news. Meanwhile, a very different infestation is devastating East African crops and leaving tens of millions at risk of starvation and death. If COVID hits these weakened populations, amid their malaria and other systemic diseases, it would bring tragedy on unimaginable scales.

“Across Somalia, desert locusts in a swarm the size of Manhattan have destroyed a swath of farmland as big as Oklahoma,” the Wall Street Journal’s Nicholas Bariyo reports. “In Kenya, billions-strong clouds of the insects have eaten through 800 square miles of crops and survived a weeks-long spraying campaign. They have “swept across more than 10 nations on two continents.” In parts of East Africa they “are destroying some 1.8 million metric tons of vegetation every day, enough food to feed 81 million people.”

East Africa has a Desert Locust Control Organization. But it, the region and the individual countries were totally unprepared for the onslaught, unaware the hordes were coming, irresponsibly underfunded, with almost no pesticides or aircraft to spray them. By the time they acted, it was too little, too late.

The massive swarms are hardly unprecedented. Locusts “covered the face of the whole earth, so that the land was darkened; and they ate every herb of the land and all the fruit of the trees which the hail had left. So there remained nothing green on the trees or on the plants of the field throughout all the land of Egypt.” [Exodus 10:15] Locusts pillaged long before that, and have returned hundreds of times since.

The 1986-87 plague was calamitous. As the late entomologist Dr. J. Gordon Edwards noted in 1988, four major locust species hatched simultaneously in 15 countries, and the crops were so totally devastated that the UN Food and Agricultural Organization predicted 50 million Africans and Asians might starve to death. Malnourished survivors would suffer reduced mental capacity and have greater susceptibility to diseases. Other near-biblical infestations have ravaged Africa with predictable regularity and results.

The obvious, burning, essential question is this: In this era of amazing modern agriculture, aviation and pest control technologies, how could Africa have reached this frightening precipice yet again?

These 2019-2020 swarms originated in the vast deserts of Oman, Somalia and Yemen, parts of which are lawless and war-torn. That made it difficult and dangerous to monitor them for the emergence of billions of “hoppers,” following tumultuous downpours two years ago – or to spray them with insecticides when they were most vulnerable, before their wings matured and they could fly thousands of miles. But it also means East African countries needed to work together, despite these obstacles, to prevent such plagues.

These are horrifically poor countries, where bureaucrats live relatively well largely on outside donor funds, often corrupt top-gun politicians live very well on the same money, and some 90% of the people exist on a few dollars a day, on the edge of starvation and debilitating disease, tilling tiny patches of land.

Too often their governments’ ability to plan for recurring crises like this are minimal, their priorities are skewed to whatever the donors want, and funding for insect control is minimal at best. Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda didn’t even pay their Locust Control membership dues for years, or decades – much less acquire the aircraft and pesticides they would need for the inevitable next locust plague. Their focus was on elections (getting reelected), essential or just showy infrastructure projects, and climate change.

Indeed, it seems nothing will be allowed to get in the way of the UN, EU and environmentalist obsession with climate change as the single greatest threat facing humanity and planet. But climate cataclysms exist in models and headlines, are decades away, are hardly unprecedented for East Africa, and can hardly be worse than these recurring locust cataclysms. But UN, EU, World Bank and eco-centered foundation money drives the agenda and pays Africa’s leaders and bureaucrats. So recurring real-world crises get short shrift.

When it comes to insect control, the driving force is aid money totally skewed to agro-ecology and its perverse focus on “food sovereignty,” and “traditional subsistence farming” with wood plows and oxen, “in harmony with nature,” free from Western seeds, fertilizers, tractors and, above all, pesticides.

The new moniker is clever, but the ideology and donor-driven attitudes are nothing new. Dr. Edwards documented them in his 1988 article. The FAO, USAID, USEPA, World Bank, Environmental Defense Fund and other organizations were pushing “all-natural, biological, integrated pest management” practices back then, too. They were totally opposed to the use of dieldrin and other insecticides that actually work. They keep families, communities, clinics and hospitals dependent on minimalist wind and solar electricity.

Just as today, their focus back then was on alleged, possible side effects from modern insecticides, which used properly by trained applicators are safe for people, livestock, wildlife and most non-target insects. The key is having the necessary staff, equipment and chemicals ahead of time. Under pressure by all these external forces, East Africa failed to do that – and now it is reaping the proverbial whirlwind.

The donor agencies and pressure groups’ attitude is akin to demanding that chemotherapy for cancer be banned, because the chemicals impair patient’s immune systems and cause hair to fall out. Saving their lives is inarguably far more important than these side effects – just as saving millions from starvation and associated diseases, and preventing total crop and habitat annihilation, is inarguably far more important than the temporary loss of some insects or even slight risks to cattle, wildlife or people from the sprays.

(An upcoming article will document who is behind the eco-manslaughter today, and who is funding them: from US, EU and UN organizations to their Swiss, Swedish, pseudo-African and other counterparts.)

Back in 1987, Dr. Edwards noted, Senegal requested and received the loan of four American DC-7 transport aircraft that could hold 18,400 pounds of cargo (8.4 metric tons). They sprayed two million acres and killed 95% of that country’s immature locusts. But elsewhere FAO anti-pesticide ideologies prevailed, and billions of locusts matured, flew off, mated and produced tens of billions of locusts the following year. They destroyed croplands, wildlife habitats, communities and lives in a dozen other African countries.

This year’s efforts are far too little, far too late. Kenya has eight small crop-spraying aircraft operating around the clock; the Locust Control consortium has four antiquated little planes. They’re apparently spraying fenitrothion (an effective locust killer), pyrethroids (somewhat effective) and malathion (also somewhat effective though it breaks down within a few hours under Africa’s hot, humid conditions).

But they didn’t get the hoppers. They waited until swarms the size of Manhattan were upon them. Against those countless billions of voracious locusts, ground-based equipment is useless. A dozen small crop dusters makes almost no difference. And traditional methods like banging on pots are a sick joke.

However, there could still be hope. A single Lockheed KC-130 Hercules tanker plane equipped with Modular Aerial Spray Systems can cover up to 150,000 acres a day. Each plane can carry 2,000 gallons of the most appropriate pesticide-water mixture. The benefits would be immediate and tremendous.

President Trump could order the Air Force to provide a KC-130 or two and enough fenitrothion, Lorsban or other effective insecticide for a few weeks of locust-eradication spraying. He could save millions of lives – and help change attitudes, policies and practices across Africa and the world.

The President could also order his US Agency for International Development (USAID), State Department and other agencies to end their funding of climate and agro-ecology programs, and start making the East Africa Desert Locust Control Organization the forward-thinking, effective operation it was meant to be.

He could have blunt discussions with the heads of EU nations about their agro-ecology, anti-pesticide and anti-biotechnology policies, funding practices and import restrictions toward Africa – which are an undeniable crime against humanity. Finally, he could direct the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service to review (and terminate) the tax-exempt status of organizations and foundations engaged in lethal, eco-imperialistic lies and pressure campaigns in Africa, Asia and South America.

The locust plagues, starvation and deaths from readily preventable diseases like malaria must end – now. The poorest people in these impoverished countries should not be the ones paying the price, too often with their lives. This president is one of the very few politicians who could make these changes happen.

Via email





Banning Fracking Would Be Bad News for Ohioans

A report released in December 2019 by the Global Energy Institute at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce details how a ban on hydraulic fracturing (colloquially known as “fracking”) would have devastating consequences for the Ohio economy and would displace “hundreds of thousands of jobs” throughout the state.

According to the study, if a fracking ban took place, the Buckeye State would experience the cumulative loss of 700,000 jobs thanks to higher residential and business energy costs and upstream production losses, as well as $245 billion in lost gross domestic product (GDP) and a $20.6 billion loss in state and local tax revenues by 2025. Over that same period, Ohio households would experience a $119 billion loss of income and Ohioans would suffer a per capita cost-of-living increase of $5,625.

These losses would naturally begin taking effect immediately. In 2021 alone, the study estimates 155,000 job losses, $18 billion in lost GDP, $1.49 billion in lost state and local tax revenue, and a $9 billion loss in household income.

A 2020 report from the American Petroleum Institute (API), with modeling data from the consulting firm OnLocation, has unemployment numbers in Ohio due to a fracking ban that mirror GEI’s study, with 500,000 lost jobs in 2022 alone.

The development of the Utica shale play in Ohio has turned the state into the fifth-largest producer of natural gas in the United States. This massive increase in domestic shale development, led by fracking, has caused natural gas prices to plummet in Ohio, saving state residents and businesses more than $40 billion from 2006 to 2016, according to a September 2018 study from the Consumer Energy Alliance. This is backed up by a September 2019 report prepared by Kleinhenz & Associates for the Ohio Oil and Gas Energy Education Program, showing total savings thanks to fracking for Ohio residents from 2008 to 2018 amounts to $45 billion.

Additionally, the oil and natural gas industries supported more than 262,000 jobs in Ohio in 2015, according to a 2017 API study prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Hydraulic fracturing activity delivers $1,300 to $1,900 in annual benefits to local households, including “a 7 percent increase in average income, driven by rises in wages and royalty payments, a 10 percent increase in employment, and a 6 percent increase in housing prices,” according to a 2019 study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Princeton University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Hydraulic fracturing enables the cost-effective extraction of once-inaccessible oil and natural gas deposits. These energy sources are abundant, inexpensive, environmentally safe, and can ensure the United States is the world’s largest energy producer well beyond the 21st century. Therefore, Ohio policymakers should refrain from placing unnecessary burdens on the natural gas and oil industries, which are safe and positively impact the Buckeye State economy.

SOURCE






WaPo Fact Checker: Biden ‘Misspoke’ About His Fracking Ban

A Washington Post fact-checker ruled Thursday that Joe Biden hadn’t lied when he said he supported a fracking ban during Sunday’s Democratic presidential debate. Rather, Biden had simply “described his fracking stance inaccurately.”

The Post gave Biden “Zero Pinocchios” for saying during the most recent Democratic debate that he opposed fracking entirely.

Instead, the paper pointed to the Biden campaign’s explanation that the candidate had “misspoken” and that “his position was the same as ever,” opposing fracking only on public lands.

Meanwhile, the Post criticized those who quoted Biden’s remarks verbatim. “Critics pounced,” the fact-checker wrote.

“Republican operatives cut a short video of Biden’s remarks, to use as a cudgel in races against moderate House Democrats. Sanders supporters accused Biden of misleading voters about his policy, which doesn’t ban fracking outright, as Sanders would.”

During Sunday’s debate, Sanders said that he was pushing for a ban on future fracking. “So am I,” Biden responded.

“Well, I’m not sure your proposal does that,” Sanders replied. Later, the Vermont senator said, “You cannot continue, as I understand, Joe believes, to continue fracking.”

“No more—no new fracking,” Biden said in response.

“The Trump campaign also used a Biden video snippet from the debate in a tweet claiming he would ‘ban fracking,'” the Post complained. “Right-wing media outlets including the Washington Free Beacon, the Daily Caller and Fox News all reported on Biden’s remarks as though he had adopted a tougher line.”

The Free Beacon article quoting Biden’s remarks, to which the Post did not link, covered Biden’s statement during the debate that there’d be “no more drilling” under his administration and only mentioned the fracking comments as an aside.

The Free Beacon accurately wrote that “Biden, confronted by Sanders for not taking dramatic enough steps to combat climate change, also said there would be no ‘new fracking’ and ‘not another coal plant will be built’ under his administration.”

Biden’s drilling comments, another instance of the candidate “misspeaking” in a way that made his environmental platform more palatable to his party’s left-wing base, was not acknowledged in the Post fact-check.

Biden previously said he “misspoke,” avoiding a bad rating from the Post fact-checker, after he was caught falsely claiming on two separate occasions that he opposed the Iraq war from the moment it started.

“Regular readers know that we withhold Pinocchios when a politician admits error. Biden was on his way to Four Pinocchios until his staff acknowledged that he misspoke,” the Post wrote. “So we will leave this unrated and let readers make their own decision.”

SOURCE

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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Containing methane and its contribution to global warming

This is pure modelling with no reality contact at all.  That methane might produce different effects in our actual complex atmosphere is not considered. Methane in the laboratory is as close to reality as they get.  That other gases have similar absorption spectra as CH4 appears not to be taken into account

Summary:

Methane is a gas that deserves more attention in the climate debate as it contributes to almost half of human-made global warming in the short-term. A new study shows that it is possible to significantly contribute to reduced global warming through the implementation of available technology that limits methane release to the atmosphere.
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Methane is a gas that deserves more attention in the climate debate as it contributes to almost half of human-made global warming in the short-term. A new IIASA study shows that it is possible to significantly contribute to reduced global warming through the implementation of available technology that limits methane release to the atmosphere.

According to the study published in the journal Environmental Research Communications, it is possible to achieve reduced global warming in the near term by targeting methane through the fast implementation of technology to prevent its release to the atmosphere. This could mitigate some of the otherwise very costly impacts of climate change that are expected over the next few decades. To achieve the significant reductions in methane emissions caused by humans needed to meet the Paris Agreement, we however need to know exactly where and from what sources emissions are emitted so that policymakers can start developing strategies to contain methane and its contribution to global warming.

"To develop policy strategies to mitigate climate change through reductions of global non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions like methane, we need detailed inventories of the sources and locations of current human-made emissions, build scenarios for expected developments in future emissions, assess the abatement potential of future emissions, and estimate the costs of reducing emissions. In this study, we looked at global methane emissions and technical abatement potentials and costs in the 2050 timeframe," explains study lead author Lena Hoglund-Isaksson.

Using the IIASA Greenhouse Gases -- Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies (GAINS) model, the researchers endeavored to find out how well the GAINS bottom-up inventory of methane emissions at country and source-sector level between 1990-2015 match top-down estimates of the global concentration of methane measured in the atmosphere. In addition, they wanted to see how much methane would be emitted globally until 2050 if we take no further measures to reduce emissions.

The results show that at the global level, the GAINS methane inventory matches the top-down estimate of human-made methane emissions' contribution to the atmospheric concentration of methane quite well. A reasonable match between bottom-up and top-down budgets, both at the global and regional levels, is important for the confidence in bottom-up inventories, which are a prerequisite for policy strategies to be perceived as "certain enough" by stakeholders in climate mitigation.

The authors' analysis revealed a strong increase in emissions after 2010, which confirms top-down measurements of increases in the atmospheric methane concentration in recent years. According to this study, these are explained by increased methane emissions from shale gas production in North America, increased coal mining in countries outside of China, for instance, Indonesia and Australia, and increased generation of waste and wastewater from growing populations and economic development in Asia and Africa. In addition, the findings showed a small but steady increase in emissions from beef and dairy production in Latin America and Africa, highlighting how different the distribution of emission source sectors are across different world regions.

The findings further show that without measures to control methane emissions, there would be a global emission increase of about 30% until 2050. While it would technically be possible to remove about 38% of these emissions by implementing available abatement technology, it would still mean that a significant amount of methane would be released between 2020 and 2050, making it impossible for the world to stay below 1.5°C warming.

With that said, the researchers point out that technical abatement potentials can still be used to achieve considerable reductions in methane emissions in the near-term and at a comparably low cost. Between 30% and 50% of future global methane emissions can be removed at a cost below 50 €/t CO2eq. The use of fossil fuels will however also have to be phased-down to really make a difference. Technical abatement potentials are particularly limited in agriculture, which suggests that these emissions must be addressed through non-technical measures, such as behavioral changes to reduce milk and meat consumption, or institutional and socioeconomic reforms to address smallholder livestock herding as a means of risk management in Africa and South-East Asia.

"There is no one-size fits all solution for the whole world. In the Middle East and Africa, for instance, oil production is a major contributor to methane emissions with relatively extensive potentials for emission reductions at low cost. In Europe and Latin America, dairy and beef production are the main sources with relatively limited technical mitigation potentials, while in North America it is emissions from shale gas extraction that can significantly contain emissions at a low cost. Our study illustrates just how important it is to have a regional- and sector-specific approach to mitigation strategies," concludes Hoglund-Isaksson.

SOURCE 






The myth of climate-change refugees

Climate change has become an excuse to abandon people living on the coast.

Much of the Welsh village of Fairbourne lies between just one and three meters above sea level. It was built on a salt marsh in the 19th century behind two metre-high sea walls to protect the settlement from the waves. Now climate change seems to threaten the village.

Local-authority planners say it would cost too much to extend the Victorian sea defences and the village must be abandoned – the homes will be dismantled and the land will be returned to the marsh. Headlines excitedly proclaim that, in three decades’ time, the inhabitants of Fairbourne will be ‘the UK’s first climate-change refugees’. Really?

Sea-level rise (SLR) is no doubt a problem. But the connection between sea levels and global warming or CO2 emissions is uncertain. There is good evidence that SLR is a phenomenon that long predates industrial society, and the notion of anthropogenic ‘acceleration’ is at best controversial. It is certainly not, as is so often claimed, a subject where there is a definitive scientific ‘consensus’. There is evidence to support both sides of this argument. And different approaches to measuring SLR, between tide gauges and satellites, produce different results, each confounded by many technical complexities. Tide-gauge records are sparse and inconsistent. The satellite era began only very recently in geological terms – in 1992. There is no clear picture and global estimates of SLR vary between 1mm and 3mm per year.

Overall, scientists expect sea levels to rise between three and nine centimetres between now and the mid-century. The consensus view provides a range of SLR between 28 and 82 centimetres by the end of the century, with worst-case scenarios projecting rises of as much as three metres. Moreover, this range of estimates, clouded by uncertainty, should be seen in the context of the science’s history, which has been drenched in alarmist prognostications.

Far from being a new phenomenon, rising tides, sinking lands, storms and erosion have claimed many of Britain’s coastal towns and villages through the centuries. And plenty of settlements along Britain’s coastline still stand at the literal and figurative cliff edge. The notion that sands don’t shift, that the natural landscape is immutable, and that houses stand forever may reflect the longings of the human psyche, but these are not facts about the natural world. And while salt marshes at the feet of mountains make for pretty locations, that does not make them safe. With or without man-made global warming, coastal settlements are at much greater risk than inland towns and villages – they always have been and always will be. Climate change increases that risk but by how much is hard to detect and to isolate from the risk that has existed throughout history.

One thing that has undoubtedly changed the risks for the inhabitants of Fairbourne is the policy decision to stop building coastal defences. This is framed in terms of climate policy – a framing which is totally helpful to the people of Fairbourne. The 460 homes in the sea’s way have lost half of their value following Gwynedd Council’s decision to ‘decommission’ the village. ‘I’ve lost £100,000 on this house’, said Bev to BBC filmmakers.

Coincidentally, £100,000 is approximately the cost that will fall on the average household as a consequence of the government’s ‘Net Zero’ agenda. And like Gwynedd Council’s incautious decision, this will create a constellation of unintended consequences, which rather than serving the public interest or protecting people is likely to do great harm.

For instance, according to the ‘wisdom’ of environmentalists, climate change is the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. One piece of evidence for this seems to be the threat posed by the rising seas for some small coastal communities. Yet the 460 homes in Fairbourne that lie in the path of the Irish Sea are less than the number of homes that are repossessed each month in England and Wales. The threats of illness, unemployment or substantial increases in the cost of living – often caused by ideologically blinkered policymakers – are a far more present and manifestly real threat to people living both inland and on the coasts than the angry waves could ever be.

None of which answers the question of what can be done for the people who live in places that are vulnerable to the sea. First, we cannot let any politicians or officials use climate change as an excuse or as cover for their rank incompetence and indifference to these communities. Second, given the costs that the government wishes to impose on the entire population in the name of fighting climate change, why can we not find the money to relocate people inland? If a suitable location were found for new houses, it would even be possible to keep communities intact. This will certainly be a lot cheaper than the trillions currently earmarked for a climate-change agenda that will produce net-zero benefit.

Climate campaigners have long sought climate victims. But this desire for puppets to act out a green morality play means that problems which require public debate are removed from their wider context, or are framed so as to preclude any solution. The people of Fairbourne have been swept up in journalists’ and politicians’ green hyperbole, and have been used to further an agenda that has done nothing for them and is indifferent to their plight.

Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – the scientific consensus – offers a far more sober perspective than the media. It advises that ‘the use of the term “climate refugee” is scientifically and legally problematic’. Moreover, it adds that ‘current alarmist predictions of massive flows of so-called “environmental migrants” are not supported by past experiences of responses to droughts and extreme weather events, and predictions for future migration flows are tentative at best’.

It is safe to say that the views of scientists have been a huge disappointment to green campaigners, who have gone in search of stories about ‘climate refugees’ all the same.

SOURCE 




Global warming does something useful

The motivation behind the technology below is dubious but the products could still be useful

On the CES floor in Las Vegas this past January, I saw dozens of companies showing off products designed to help us adapt to climate change. It was an unsettling reminder that we’ve tipped the balance on global warming and that hotter temperatures, wildfires, and floods are the new reality.

Based on our current carbon dioxide emissions, we can expect warming of up to 1.5 °C by 2033. Even if we stopped spewing carbon today, temperatures would continue to rise for a time, and weather would grow still more erratic.

The companies at CES recognize that it’s too late to stop climate change. Faced with that realization, this group of entrepreneurs is focusing on climate adaptation. For them, the goal is to make sure that people and the global economy will still survive across as much of the world as possible. These entrepreneurs’ companies are developing practicalities, such as garments that adapt to the weather or new building materials with higher melting points so that roads won’t crack in extreme temperatures.

One of the biggest risks in a warming world is that both outdoor workers and their equipment will overheat more often. Scientists expect to see humans migrate from parts of the world where temperatures and humidity combine to repeatedly create heat indexes of 40.6 °C, because beyond that temperature humans have a hard time surviving [PDF]. But even in more temperate locations, the growing number of hotter days will also make it tough for outdoor workers.

Embr Labs is building a bracelet that the company says can lower a person’s perceived temperature a few degrees simply by changing the temperature on their wrist. The bracelet doesn’t change actual body temperature, so it can’t help outdoor workers avoid risk on a sweltering day. But it could still be used to keep workers cooler on safe yet still uncomfortably warm days. It might also allow companies to raise their indoor temperatures, saving on air-conditioning costs.

Elsewhere, Epicore Biosystems is building wearable microfluidic sensors that monitor people for dehydration or high body temperatures. The Epicore sensors are already being used for athletes. But it’s not hard to imagine that in the near future there’d be a market for putting them on construction, farm, and warehouse workers who have to perform outside jobs in hot weather.

Extreme temperatures—and extreme fluctuations between temperatures—are also terrible for our existing road and rail infrastructure. Companies such as RailPod, as well as universities, are building AI-powered drones and robots that can monitor miles of roadway or track and send back data on repairs.

And then there’s flooding. Coastal roads and roads near rivers will need to withstand king tides, flash floods, and sustained floodwaters. Pavement engineers are working on porous concrete to mitigate flood damage and on embedded sensors to communicate a road’s status in real time to transportation officials.

There are so many uncertainties about our warming planet, but what isn’t in doubt is that climate change will damage our infrastructure and disrupt our patterns of work. Plenty of companies are focused on the admirable goal of preventing further warming, but we need to also pay attention to the companies that can help us adapt. A warmer planet is already here.

SOURCE 




Thawing Permafrost Is Unlikely To Increase Global Warming, Scientists Find

As Earth continues to warm, scientists were wary about the impact melting permafrost would have in furthering greenhouse gas warming. Recent research suggests that melting permafrost may not have a significant impact on increasing temperatures.

The primary concern was associated with methane gas release into the atmosphere, which is a much more potent heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide.

The research study focused on two types of permafrost, frozen soil and frozen methane hydrates in the soil underneath the world’s oceans.

Permafrost on land is predominantly found in Siberia, Alaska, and Northern Canada. As plants, algae and animals die in these regions significant amounts of the carbon are not decomposed but buried in frozen soil. This “locks away” this organic matter from the global carbon cycle.

As temperatures warm the soil begins to melt, introducing liquid water and oxygen to the organic matter and thus allowing bacteria to break it down and potentially release methane into the atmosphere.

Methane hydrates, the other main concern for permafrost melting, are a combination of water ice and methane trapped in frozen ocean sediment below the ocean floor. Similar to permafrost on land, as oceans begin to warm these hydrates will begin to melt and release both water and methane.

In both scenarios, the concern is that a warming planet will cause a sudden release of significant amounts of methane into the atmosphere, thus causing positive feedback and warming the planet more.

Recent research, published in the journal Science, looked at small trapped gas bubbles in ice cores to see what the atmosphere looked like on Earth for the past 15,000 years.

By analyzing the gas bubbles, which were sequentially trapped through time and represent past atmospheric conditions, the team believes methane release from permafrost did not play a significant role in warming during past warming events.

The scenario they used was from the last glacial period to modern times, analyzing how permafrost played an impact on a warming planet.

The team found that signatures of methane gas were small during these past warming periods and that methane release from permafrost likely did not cause a large warming event.

In the case of land permafrost, in most scenarios the bacteria decomposed the organic matter through organic respiration, releasing carbon dioxide as opposed to methane. While the carbon dioxide released does add to warming, as we stated earlier, each molecule of CO2 is less potent than a molecule of methane (CH4).

When looking at methane hydrates in the ocean sediment, the team found that a significant amount of the methane released never makes it to the ocean surface. It simply dissolves into the ocean water as trapped gas or is oxidized by microbes in the ocean.

SOURCE 




America shows the way

It achieves Greenie goals through the effects of capitalism, not anti-capitalism

The last year has been tough for climate activists around the world. The United States withdrew from the Paris Agreement, protests by Extinction Rebellion generated publicity but not much else, and the United Nations Climate Change Conference ended in failure. This helps explain why the bombshell report by the International Energy Agency which found carbon dioxide emissions related to energy did not increase last year was a much needed morale boost for those people intent on halting global warming.

However, this is not a rallying cry for the environmentalists to redouble their efforts. A closer look at the numbers shows that the conventional approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which relies on heavy regulation and government direction, is a dead end. But there is still hope. The International Energy Agency data identifies proven and successful models that any country can adopt to reduce emissions and slow global warming. They just are not in vogue right now. Globally, the amount of emissions stayed at the 2018 levels, but this was not a team effort. The European Union led the way cutting 160 million tons of carbon dioxide, then the United States at 140 million tons, and Japan at 45 million tons. That had been just enough to offset “the rest of the world” combined.

Since the European Union made the greatest cuts, it is tempting to think that other countries must adopt its regulatory heavy approach that most climate activists favor, however, this would be a mistake. Unfortunately, that model is nearing its limits, and even Europeans are starting to push back. The European Union announced with great fanfare that it planned to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, or rather, every country except Poland, which abstained from the deal. Despite this refusal, Poland is still set to receive more than a quarter of the 100 billion euro fund with which the European Union will grease the skids toward a lower emitting economy.

Although paying off uncompliant countries may work for the European Union, it simply could not work as a solution for the world. According to International Monetary Fund data, there are more than 130 countries with lower gross domestic product per capita than Poland, and among them are nine of the 10 most populous countries in the world. If Poland needs help to buy expensive and unreliable renewable energy, then those other countries will too. Does anyone really think that the United States and the European Union could subsidize all of them into true carbon neutrality?

By striking contrast, Japan cut 4 percent of its greenhouse gasses largely after it started back into operation its nuclear energy industry, which had been severely curtailed after the Fukushima disaster in 2011. This is good for Japan as well as for the environment, as overreactions to the reactor accident, such as unnecessary evacuations and policies that drove up the cost of energy, almost certainly killed more people than the radiation did.

Countries such as Germany that followed Japan in shuttering their nuclear industries had to switch back to coal to maintain the reliable power grids. Even now, the European Union climate fund will not pay for nuclear power despite its safe use across France. Despite its earlier mistakes, Japan has bowed to the basic reality that any realistic carbon neutral society needs lots of reliable energy, which only nuclear fission can supply enough of.

Despite ambivalence on nuclear power and an uncoordinated approach to reducing emissions, the United States capped off an extraordinary stretch of two decades in which it reduced emissions by almost one billion tons, more than any other country. Last year, the United States nearly matched the European Union emissions reductions without an overarching strategy for greenhouse gasses, while still growing its economy at nearly double the rate of the eurozone. This is largely due to private sector success like natural gas getting cheap enough and widely available to supplant coal.

Developing countries can learn from American and Japanese success to grow their economies with environmentally friendly methods. The climate change movement has no hope of succeeding without finding a way to make this happen moving forward. There are more than six billion people in countries that the International Monetary Fund classifies as “emerging market and developing economies.” These people want and need access to safe reliable food, water, clothing, housing, medicine, and sanitation that development brings, not to mention other advances that a modern society offers. While the approach of the European Union might work for it, developing countries that need to dramatically raise their standards of living would be better off studying how the United States cuts emissions without sacrificing growth and how pragmatism in Japan works as well.

Next time Greta Thunberg criticizes the United States, American officials should not respond defensively as they have before. Instead, they should invite her over to show her how the United States is getting her what she wants. Just be sure to send her along something to read on the boat ride

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

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