Floating Wind Madness in Maine

Good God!

The Government of Maine has really big plans for floating wind, a floating net zero fantasy, in fact. Since floating wind power is the next big green thing, it is worth taking a close look at this ruinous vision.

Floating wind is a fad, not an established technology. It has yet to be built at utility scale or tested in a hurricane. The world’s biggest grid-connected system is a tiny 50 MW and just came online off Scotland.

The cost of floating wind is necessarily much greater than fixed wind. A fixed wind tower sits on a simple monopile, while a floating tower sits on a huge complex structure called a floater. We are talking about massive 500-foot towers with 500-ton turbines on top and 300-foot blades catching the wind.

The floater has to be large enough to keep this monster tower from blowing over. Then, it has to be even bigger to contain enough air to be buoyant. It also has to be anchored to the ocean floor in ways that require a lot of different mooring lines.

The small existing floating generator systems cost around three times what fixed wind costs per MW, but the big and hurricane-proof generators might cost even more. Over a hundred designs have been proposed, which shows just how immature Floating wind technology is.

Which brings us to Maine’s floating green dream, a costly nightmare for its people. When it comes to electricity use, Maine is a small state with average generation of just around 1,500 MW. But in an act of madness, they passed a law saying they will buy 3,000 MW of floating wind. Fixed wind is not an option because the Gulf of Maine is too deep.

How do they justify buying so much floating wind? Simple, it is a net zero fantasy. They have a 115-page “Maine Offshore Wind Roadmap” that explains it.

For a start, they shut down all their existing combustion generators, mostly burning either gas or wood. Maine is 90% forest, so there is a lot of wood. Then, they electrify all the other forms of combustion. For example, 60% of homes are heated with fuel oil, so they switch to heat pumps or something that works in really cold weather. Of course, all the cars and trucks are electric.

The projected cost of the 3,000 MW of floating wind is huge. Using the reported three times fixed wind figure, I get a rough estimate of $50 billion for construction and an equal amount for financing and profit, giving a total cost of around $100 billion. It could be a lot more once large-scale and hurricane-proof technology is developed if it ever is.

Apparently, the astronomical cost is no object because it is never mentioned. Not in the law, roadmap, or various technical support documents. Jobs are frequently mentioned, but they are part of the cost. But then, too, there is the much larger cost of the energy transition, without which the floating wind is simply not usable.

Clearly, the floating wind development may never occur, which brings us back to the present day, where things get really crazy. The State of Maine has started the process to build a huge new port specifically to handle this floating wind fantasy. I am not making this up.

With fixed wind, the shore facility is merely a marshaling yard where the pieces are held until barged out to the offshore site for assembly. There are just four big pieces: the monopile, tower, turbine, and blade set.

Floating wind is completely different because the huge floater is built at the port. The tower, turbines, and blade set are mounted on the floater there as well. Then, the whole assembly is towed to the site and anchored to the sea floor using eight or more mooring lines.

So this is really a highly specialized shipyard, a floater factory, not a port. There will have to be one or more dry docks to build the huge floaters in, plus a great deal of specialized equipment, especially cranes. Reportedly, steel floaters for a 15 MW turbine could typically weigh 3500 to 4500 tons, while concrete floaters would be in the range of 17,000 to 22,000 tons.

The final configuration is completely unknown until the floater design is finalized. Note, too, that this shipyard might only be in operation for the few years it takes to build 3,000 MW of floating wind generators.

The presently estimated cost of this shipyard/port is a bit under a billion dollars but it could easily be more depending on the complexity of the design. The cost of a unique new system tends to go way up when the engineering is actually done.

Starting this billion-dollar port project now is just foolish. It is highly likely that the required energy transition will not occur. The electricity will be very expensive, perhaps four to five times the present cost. Plus, we have no idea what the technology will look like, assuming it can be made to work in the tempestuous waters off Maine.

The people of Maine are unlikely to accept these onerous conditions, nor should they. This whole nutty project needs to be reconsidered.

https://heartland.org/opinion/floating-wind-madness-in-maine/

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BBC Hails Green Election Letter From “408 Climate Scientists” Signed By Psychologists, Accountants And Landscape Designers

An open letter to all political leaders currently fighting a General Election in the U.K. calling for an “ambitious” programme of green policies has been signed by 408 climate activists.

The BBC refers to “the most distinguished of the country’s” climate scientists; Bob Ward, who organised the petition through the billionaire-funded Grantham operation, tweeted, “be ambitious on climate, scientists urge parties”, while James ‘the climate clock is ticking’ Murray from Business Green stepped up a gear by referring to “top scientists“.

Scientists, you say? The first ‘scientist’ in the alphabetical list is an Associate Professor of Accounting, the second is a geographer specialising in “disaster risk reduction”, while the third is an archaeologist.

The green Grantham stunt is of course the latest in a long line of attempts to suggest that most ‘scientists’ believe humans control the climate. The letter refers to “growing damage to lives and livelihoods” in the U.K. caused by increases in the frequency and intensity of many extreme weather events.

This evidence-lite but ubiquitous assertion is not even backed up by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which finds there has been no human involvement in most natural events such as floods, droughts, wildfires and cyclones to date. Nor is human involvement detected in forecasts stretching to 2100.

There are some academics who have signed the letter who can be fairly described as scientists, but the vast majority would struggle to justify such a title. The list is littered with lawyers, psychologists, philosophers, landscape designers, engineers and computer modellers.

One interesting take from the letter is to note how many ways a university Geography Department can be renamed to capitalise on the climate zeitgeist. A similar ‘scientists’ stunt was pulled last month by Damian Carrington in the Guardian, who polled 400 so-called scientists and in an ocean of emotional guff concluded the world is heading towards a “semi dystopian” future.

Signed up for both agitprop operations is Professor Lorraine Whitmarsh, who is described as the Director for U.K. Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformation. A more enlightening CV might note that she is an “environmental psychologist” whose first degree was in theology and religious studies with French.

Perhaps Marco Silva, the BBC Verify climate ‘disinformation’ specialist, could cast a critical eye over the Ward letter when he returns at the end of the month from his six-month re-education sabbatical at the billionaire-funded Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN).

One or two signing names might be familiar to him, including Saffron O’Neill, described as a Professor of “Climate and Society”.

She is a past speaker at the OCJN and is noted for speculating on the need for “fines and imprisonment” for expressing scepticism about “well supported” science.

Would any scientist seriously sign up for such a policy knowing that it would destroy the ongoing scientific process?

A process, it might be noted, that has served humanity so well, certainly since the time Pope Urban VIII played the ‘well supported’ argument and cut up rough with Galileo and his heretical view that the Earth orbited the Sun.

The Ward letter is a Grantham operation and is ultimately funded by the green billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham. Two Grantham Institutes are funded at the London School of Economics and Imperial, where a computer model ‘attribution’ operation is used to garner headlines with implausible claims that humans have caused individual weather events.

Investigate science journalist Ben Pile has tracked some of the major contributions made by Grantham up to 2021.

As well as significant sums paid to LSE and Imperial, there are major contributions dispersed to other green foundations that crop up all the time when there are global Net Zero collectivisation narratives to be spun in the media, politics and academia.

Jeremy Grantham has a long track record of preaching about the coming apocalypse, asking a 2019 meeting in Copenhagen, “what should I do, you say?” He met his rhetorical question by advising:

You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.

Ward is employed by Grantham at LSE to “communicate” climate science, notes journalist Matt Ridley. For years he complained to the newspaper industry’s self-regulator IPSO about climate articles that took a sceptical line.

It was part of a campaign of “sustained and deliberate” pressure put on editors to toe the alarmist line, states Ridley. Ward tied journalists down in a time-consuming process in the hope it deterred them and their editors from writing and commissioning work.

It worked, observed Ridley, noting, “he has frightened away some journalists and editors from the vital topic of climate change, leaving the catastrophists with a clear field to scare children to their heart’s content”.

https://principia-scientific.com/bbc-hails-green-election-letter-from-408-climate-scientists-signed-by-psychologists-accountants-and-landscape-designers/

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Home insulation is the latest net zero farce

Zoe Godrich of Swansea might best be described as collateral damage in Britain’s glorious march towards net zero. Three years ago, she had her three-bedroom home fitted with cavity-wall insulation – which the government is out to encourage through its Great British Insulation Scheme. Sadly for her, it has not worked out quite as intended.

With Labour now promising billions more to retrofit homes with this kind of stuff, what could possibly go wrong?

Within weeks of having it fitted, Godrich says her walls started to run with water, and black mould started to form on her walls. She can no longer use two of her bedrooms, and she and her children now have to slum it on mattresses in the one remaining habitable room. The company which installed the insulation also went bust and the guarantee for the work turned out to be useless. Her only option seemed to be having the insulation sucked out of the wall – for which she had to borrow £7,000 to have done. That work turned out to be botched, too.

Godrich’s experience, it turns out, seems to be becoming commonplace. Twenty miles away in Rhondda Cynon Taff, 280 homes had to have cavity-wall insulation removed after it made their walls damp. The BBC is reporting that Ofgem has told it that ‘hundreds of thousands’ of homes which have been fitted with cavity-wall insulation have been left with problems due to it being badly fitted. There are an estimated 15 million homes in Britain which have such insulation fitted – many of them courtesy of subsidy schemes launched by the present government and the last Labour government.

But if there is a lesson here, it is one that our leaders seem determined not to learn. While the present government has launched its Great British Insulation Scheme, which aims to insulate 300,000 households in a three-year period from last March at a cost of £1 billion, Labour is promising to go much further. Under its Warm Homes Plan, every home in Britain would be brought up to the standard of a ‘C’ on an Energy Performance Certificate over the next decade – using loft insulation, cavity-wall insulation and solid-wall insulation. A Treasury analysis suggests that it would cost taxpayers between £12 billion and £15 billion a year for the next 10 years. According to Labour, it will save households £500 a year on bills – unless, presumably, they have the same experience as Zoe Godrich and many others, in which case they may find themselves having to take out emergency loans to put right botched work.

It is possible to retrofit old houses properly to bring them closer to the energy performance standards of new homes, but it is also possible to damage them through such work. This is as true of solid-wall insulation as it is of cavity-wall insulation. Linda Griffiths of Carmarthenshire found that out the hard way, when she spend £30,000 fitting it to her home, partly with the aid of a £10,000 grant from another government scheme, the Energy Company Obligation. She, too, ended up with damp – and was left complaining that her home had been devalued by £100,000.

With Labour now promising billions more to retrofit homes with this kind of stuff, what could possibly go wrong? As with so much to do with net zero, reason seems to go out of the window as governments seek to meet their rashly-set targets.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/home-insulation-is-the-latest-net-zero-farce/

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Origin Energy warns costs and public support are inhibitors to nuclear power in Australia

Needless controversy from Dutton

The Coalition’s nuclear strategy will have to overcome high costs and community acceptance if it is to play a part of the country’s future National Electricity Market, Origin Energy chief executive Frank Calabria has warned.

The comments underscore the significant challenges that the Coalition will need to overcome if it to implement its signature energy policy, which is says will reduce the toll of the transition net zero by 2050 on households and businesses.

Mr Calabria said the industry is agnostic to technologies underpinning the country’s electricity market, but said nuclear has some sizeable hurdles, and it does not offer an immediate solution.

“There’s obviously also the public debate that’s going to go on about the acceptance of nuclear, and we would have to watch that as well. We’re not in control of that,” said Mr Calabria.

“The experience today around the world if you’re building a new one, it’s very expensive, but there are now new modular technology around the technologies that are being certainly development and research and that’s going to be something that continues, and we all look at that with interest.”

Opposition leader Peter Dutton has flagged seven potential sites, including AGL Energy’s Liddell Power Station in NSW and Loy Yang in Victoria and EnergyAustralia’s Mount Piper Power Station in NSW. The Coalition has also earmarked Western Australia’s Collie Power Station and South Australia’s Northern facility and Callide and Tarong in Queensland.

Australia’s energy industry has been careful to comment on the proposal amid concern of alienating a potential future government, but AGL Energy has rebuked the suggestion.

The most directly impacted companies did not immediately respond to the proposal, but AGL’s chief executive Damien Nicks In March said nuclear was not viable.

“There is no viable schedule for the regulation or development of nuclear energy in Australia, and the cost, build time and public opinion are all prohibitive,” Mr Nicks said.

“AGL’s ambition to add 12GW of new renewable and firming generation by 2035 does not include nuclear energy. Policy certainty is important for companies like AGL and ongoing debate on the matter runs the risk of unnecessarily complicating the long-term investment decisions necessary for the energy transition.”

While AGL has vowed to push ahead with its renewable energy strategy, Australia faces a looming shortfall.

The Australian Energy Market Operator estimates that the country’s coal power station fleet is likely to have been retired within 15 years, a fact acknowledged by Mr Calabria.

“We’ve got coal plants that are coming to very long into their lives, so we can talk about years, but they’re not going to be there,” Mr Calabria said.

“For decades, we are going to have a coal transition, but that’s all around timing. And so therefore, what we’re doing is, therefore having to make the investments and navigate that as a country to achieve what’s the best blend of technologies that does that?”

While Australia’s energy industry has been considered, Treasurer Jim Chalmers slammed the Opposition’s energy policy as the “dumbest policy ever put forward by a major political party” and accused the Coalition of “ideological stupidity”.

He said the Albanese government’s policy “couldn’t be more different to the economic madness, which is being peddled by our opponents today”.

“We are expecting to hear a bit more about the Coalition’s nuclear road to nowhere.

“With Australia’s advantages and opportunities, nothing could be more economically irrational, or fiscally irresponsible. Nuclear takes longer. It costs more, and it would waste Australia’s unique combination of geological, geographical, geopolitical and media illogical advantages.

“It might be the dumbest policy ever put forward by a major political party. It is the worst combination of economic and ideological stupidity.”

Energy now shapes as a defining theme of the election due by May 2025, with a diametrically opposed strategies threatening to create more policy uncertainty.

Mr Calabria said there was “certainly more” certainty today than five years ago as to the government’s position on renewable energy but said clarity was needed on the federal Labor’s centrepiece Capacity Investment Scheme.

“There’s certainly more in terms of where they want those renewable zones to be constructed and where they will be built,” he said. “And there’s more certainty in our role now … as you approach timing, and we’ve just committed for a gigawatt of batteries to be installed on our existing sites, and we see those have matured as being part of a solution.

“I think there are still some things that need to happen in terms of timing on transmission, timing on when those builds will occur. And probably the capacity investment scheme is the key one where they’ve announced that scheme, but we’re just waiting. More details need to be developed.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/renewable-energy-economy/origin-cautious-on-nuclear-costs-public-support/news-story/f51c92748148c7830e171b2331d0a694

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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

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

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

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The renewable green energy disaster off the northeastern US is getting worse Less than one per cent of the way to the Biden 2030 target

A slow-motion collapse in the offshore wind industry continues to grow as sticky inflation and supply chain challenges force developers to delay or cancel major projects. In particular, progress towards the Biden administration’s goal of building large amounts of floating wind off the northeastern US coast is just about stalled.

Shell, which invested in a series of offshore wind projects in recent years, including offshore the northeastern United States, announced last week it would lay off much of its offshore wind business staff as the oil giant advances its program of refocusing on its core oil and gas business.

“We are concentrating on select markets and segments to deliver the most value for our investors and customers,” a Shell spokesperson told Bloomberg. “Shell is looking at how it can continue to compete for offshore wind projects in priority markets while maintaining our focus on performance, discipline and simplification.”

Wind turbine maker Siemens Gamesa announced even bigger layoffs, saying it would cut 15 per cent of its global staff to adjust to a slowing market. The announcement comes after the company reported a €4.6 billion loss for 2023, a losing trend that has continued over the first half of 2024.

“Our current situation demands adjustments that go beyond organizational changes. We have to adapt to lower business volumes, reduced activity in non-core markets, and a streamlined portfolio,” said outgoing CEO Jochen Eickholt in a letter to staff.

On May 29 came survey results compiled by London-based energy consultancy Westwood indicating the global floating offshore wind industry is likely to deliver less than 3 gigawatts (GW) of new floating generation capacity by 2030, and a total of roughly 10 GW by 2040. Westwood cites lack of standardization of floating technology (55 per cent), manufacturing capability and capacity (51 per cent) and port infrastructure (50 per cent) as the primary impediments.

In light of the industry’s gloomy outlook, Westwood notes that “calls are ringing out for governments to provide more specific policy and regulatory support for technology development in addition to cost reduction and investment in port infrastructure to accelerate adoption.”

This is completely predictable, since the voracious rent-seeking wind business invariably calls for more government largesse in response to any challenge that arises. Unfortunately, the call is too often answered by policymakers who have made big political bets on being able to show off arrays of mammoth windmills floating atop various oceans and seas, intermittently producing some electricity – generally 25-30 per cent of nominal plant capacity over time.

This latest bad news for offshore wind could become especially troublesome for US President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign, since he has invested so much of his personal political capital in pushing a major buildout of floating offshore wind in the Atlantic northeast. A 2023 Department of Energy fact sheet sets the administration’s goal of installing 30 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030 for the US alone, exceeding Westwood’s just estimated potential for global new capacity by that year by a factor of 10 times over.

To date, regulators under Biden have approved permits for 6 major offshore projects, several of which have already been delayed or cancelled by developers in response to tougher economic factors. In late 2023, major Danish wind developer Orsted cancelled two projects off the Atlantic coast, and Shell divested its 50 per cent stake in another in March of this year. Equinor and BP announced in January they were cancelling plans for their Empire Wind 2 project, citing similar economic concerns.

One US offshore project, Vineyard Wind 1, was able to begin delivering its intermittent 25-30 per cent of 68 megawatts (MW) to Massachusetts residents in January with the activation of 5 offshore turbines. The South Fork Wind Project was also able to commence first deliveries into New York in March, with 12 turbines capable of generating some proportion of 130 MW.

But this is less than one per cent of the Biden goal of 30 GW, with just five and a half years remaining until 2030. Given the wind industry’s insatiable appetite for ever-increasing subsidies and constantly rising utility charges, it’s an open question how many more billions of dollars the federal government will be allowed to print to keep projects alive before the voters start to rebel at the cost.

It’s a rebellion that could commence as soon as this coming November.

https://stephenheins.substack.com/p/the-renewable-green-energy-disaster

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As Climate Lawsuits Increase Against Oil and Gas, So Could Energy Costs

As U.S. oil, gas, and coal companies struggle under an array of regulations and permitting roadblocks, they also face new challenges from climate activists in the form of lawsuits, fines, taxes, and shareholder activism from blue-state pension funds.

Meanwhile, U.S. states increasingly are set against each other, with liberal states leading the charge against fossil fuel companies, while red states attempt to defend them.

Starting in 2018, states including New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Delaware, Connecticut, and California, as well as the District of Columbia, began filing lawsuits against energy giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Sunoco, BP, and others.

Oil companies also face legal action from dozens of cities, including Honolulu; Chicago; Baltimore; New York City; Charleston, South Carolina; San Francisco; Oakland, California; and Boulder, Colorado.

Analysts say there are multiple goals driving these suits.

“It’s partly ideological, trying to drive these companies out of business,” Kenny Stein, policy vice president at the Institute for Energy Research, told The Epoch Times. He also said he believes it has to do with consumers’ use of fossil fuels.

“These governments are trying to mandate that people use less oil and less natural gas, but people want to heat their homes as much as they want, they want to drive as far as they want,” Mr. Stein said. “If the state banned the sale of oil, the population would revolt, so this is their backdoor way of trying to impose their will.”

Many of the climate lawsuits assert that pollution caused by oil companies creates a “public nuisance” and the companies intentionally deceived the public about the harmful effects when they caused global temperatures to rise.

The activist organization Climate Analytics tried to calculate the alleged damages.

“Between 1985 and 2018, we estimate partial damages of the combined CO2 emissions from 25 companies—oil and gas carbon majors—of about $20 trillion USD,” Climate Analytics states.
Meanwhile, on May 30, Vermont became the first state to pass a law that forces oil companies to pay for damage caused by “extreme weather events,” such as floods. According to this law, Vermont will tally the cost to residents of extreme weather events over the past 30 years; any company that has released more than 1 billion metric tons of CO2 from 1995 to 2024 will be forced to pay its share of that cost into a state climate superfund.

But it’s not just about money.

“This is simply a strategy for the left to accomplish what they’ve been unable to do in Congress through the ballot box, and that is to implement a nationwide climate policy that’s consistent with their green agenda,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall told The Epoch Times.

Mr. Marshall and 18 other attorneys general—all from red states—appealed to the Supreme Court on May 22, asking the justices to rule on whether individual states and cities can “assert the power to dictate the future of the American energy industry.

“Their actions imperil access to affordable energy everywhere and inculpate every State and indeed every person on the planet,” the attorneys general wrote. “Consequently, [they] threaten not only our system of federalism and equal sovereignty among States, but our basic way of life.”

States are not just suing oil and gas companies; they are also lodging climate-related lawsuits against food companies.

In February, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS USA Food Co., a U.S. subsidiary of the Brazil-based JBS Group, the world’s largest meat processor, alleging that the firm misled the public about its environmental impact and that “beef production emits the most greenhouse gasses of any major food commodity.”

The Climate Litigation Industry

The potential for enormous payouts from these lawsuits has attracted not only a seemingly endless supply of plaintiffs, but also numerous law firms and even wealthy investors who are placing bets that the lawsuits will succeed.
The plan to potentially wrest trillions of dollars out of energy companies has been developing for more than a decade. A 2012 workshop hosted by the Climate Accountability Institute sought to draw on prior successes that states had in suing tobacco companies.

A post-conference recap of the workshop stated that the group had fostered “an exploratory, open-ended dialogue“ about whether it might ”use the lessons from tobacco-related education, laws, and litigation to address climate change.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/as-climate-lawsuits-ramp-up-against-oil-and-gas-so-could-energy-costs-5660494?ea_src=au-frontpage&ea_med=premium-carousel-10

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Global Pushback Against the Greens

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has proclaimed fossil-fuel companies “godfathers of climate chaos,” but many Europeans, Africans, and Americans clearly disagree. They’ve shown recently what they think of the green agenda of costly renewables and instead support politicians who will let them keep their cars.

In elections for the European Parliament, a good number of Europeans joined the pushback that has already begun in the U.S and South Africa against the green-energy movement. Right-wing parties in Italy, Germany, and France, all with platforms opposing the green agenda, fared strikingly well.

French President Emmanuel Macron called national elections after Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party, which supports fossil fuels, gained 12 seats and won 31% of the vote: a plurality, and about twice the total achieved by Macron’s Renaissance Party.

Major losers in the European parliamentary elections included Renew Europe, the party that boasts “it has played a leading role in raising the European Union’s ambitions to reach climate neutrality by 2050,” and the European Greens Party, which seeks a green deal and wants the union to be powered 100% by renewable energy by 2040.

On June 5, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, indefinitely postponed New York City’s planned “congestion charge,” or tax, which was originally set to go in effect June 30. Had it been implemented, drivers would have been required to pay $15 per day to enter Manhattan’s central business district below 60th Street.

New York expected to raise $1 billion a year from drivers to fund public transit, although one congressional report commissioned by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., forecast revenues of over $3.4 billion.

Proponents said that the tax would improve air quality, reduce congestion, and fund public transit, but it would have disproportionately hurt small businesses, poor residents, and others who rely on personal transportation.

The tax would also have been harsh on older and handicapped people, many of whom can’t take public transit. And at a time when working from home has been hitting the economy of downtown Manhattan, it would have been an additional reason for office workers to forsake the city.

The Big Apple is fortunate to have escaped this outcome. There was vast resistance to the new tax, and Hochul was wise to cancel it. People don’t like to be without their cars, and she listened.

Virginia residents escaped a similar outcome recently, as Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin decided not to abide by California’s new Advanced Clean Cars II standards. Passed in 2022, the standards require 35% of new passenger vehicles sold in the Golden State to be electric or hydrogen-fueled by 2026 and 100% to be electric or hydrogen-fueled by 2035. Virginia will comply with federal law rather than California law.

Virginia’s prior governor, Ralph Northam, a Democrat, had required that the commonwealth embrace the 2021 automobile standards of the California Air Resources Board, which would have mandated that a certain share of auto dealers’ sales in 2025 be battery-powered cars. The 2022 standards are stricter but were passed after Virginia (and 15 other states) had signed on to California’s 2021 standards.

Virginia is the first state to walk away from California’s 2022 standards, and it will encourage others to do the same. People need affordable, reliable transportation for personal and business use. Electric tractors can’t substitute for diesel-powered ones. Small businesses rely on gasoline-powered pickup trucks that can tow equipment without having to stop for an hour or two to recharge during long trips. Construction workers need inexpensive cars to get to work. And this is a global reality.

In the South African general elections last month, the African National Congress won only 40% of the popular vote, failing to secure a majority for the first time since the party’s 1994 founding. Although South Africa has vast supplies of coal and gas, blackouts have damaged the economy and contributed to the ANC government’s unpopularity.

Unplanned outages rose from 176,000 in 2007 to almost 20 million in 2023. Between 2012 and 2022, South Africa’s gross domestic product per capita declined by 17%, from $8,174 to $6,766, and manufacturing output decreased by almost a third. The latest official unemployment rate is 32.9%.

South Africa’s new government will need to ensure a reliable energy supply to revive the country’s manufacturing sector and reduce unemployment.

Fossil fuels are demonized by the secretary-general of the United Nations, but they enable people to heat and cool their homes, operate their vehicles, and use electrical appliances reliably. And resilient sources of fuel are essential to many countries’ manufacturing sectors.

Voters know this, and they are making themselves heard all over the world.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/06/17/global-pushback-against-the-greens/

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Australia: A price to pay for climate change fantasy

Peter Dutton and Ted O’Brien haven’t reignited the climate wars, as Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen claim. The climate wars never went away and they are being waged all over the world. It’s just that almost everything you hear about climate policy in the official and semi-official discussion in Australia is basically misleading, if not outright wrong.

Let’s take a step back and look at the big picture.

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted, in the serene and beguiling Japanese city of that name, in 1997, 27 years ago. Kyoto itself built on the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. So for more than three decades the world has been decarbonising, right?

We’ve had many solemn moments and announcements, especially the 2015 Paris Agreement. Dutton says he would abandon Australia’s 2030 target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent, but he’s committed to honouring the Paris pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. He wants to do it in part by building nuclear energy.

In truth Australia, whether led by Albanese or Dutton, is a very, very minor player in all this, being responsible for a tick over 1 per cent of global emissions. Every Labor leader since Kyoto, and quite a few Liberal leaders, has told us the world is decarbonising. Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, early in the life of the Albanese government, caused a ripple of concern by rejoicing in the fact that coal was being phased out globally.

So after three decades of decarbonising, how is the world going in phasing out fossil fuels, to wit, gas, oil and coal?

Let’s start with gas. Everyone except the Greens understands that gas is, at the very least, a critical transition technology.

Much of the reduction in the carbon intensity of economies – that is, the amount of greenhouse gases emitted per unit of production – has come from substituting gas for coal and oil.

Nonetheless, after 30 years of relentless decarbonisation, you’d expect a pretty severe drop in gas use. Actually, according to the International Energy Agency, consumption of natural gas is at or just near its record high. The rate of growth of demand has slowed but demand is still growing.

Well, that’s a bit of a surprise. What about oil, that must be well down, with fuel efficiency standards, the global campaign for electric vehicles, the decline of oil in power generation?

Guess what. Last year, according to the US government’s Energy Information Administration, world use of oil was at a record high, higher than the peak before the Covid pandemic, at more than 100 million barrels a day. Not only that, the US under pro-green Joe Biden produced more crude oil, more than 13 million barrels a day, than any country has ever done.

Oil production dipped in the global financial crisis of 2008 and again during Covid. But it’s now roaring ahead, stronger than ever.

But surely the US constantly lectures everyone else about climate change, the dangers of fossil fuels etc. How is that consistent with record crude oil production? Bear that thought in mind, for it’s a clue to the wider reality.

OK, so we’ve struck out in looking for global reductions in gas and oil, but obviously coal use must be well down. I have myself caused something near pandemonium by suggesting on the ABC’s Q+A and on Insiders that coal has a future as well as a past. It was as though a leading atheist had infiltrated the Spanish Inquisition. So now I must face the truth about coal. Surely its use has declined?

But what do you know? According to the IEA: “Global coal consumption reached an all-time high in 2022, and the world is heading towards a new record in 2023.”

Advanced economies such as the US and the EU are using less coal but, says the IEA, “the growth in China and India, as well as Indonesia, Vietnam and The Philippines, will more than offset these decreases on a global level”. And the price of coal, at $US140 a tonne, is very healthy.

That’s a good thing because our top three export earners are coal, iron ore and gas. We couldn’t afford any fancy green measures, or Medicare, or the National Disability Insurance Scheme, or anything else, without the minerals industry.

According to the IEA, fossil fuels make up about 80 per cent of global energy, just a tick under their level 10 years ago.

So how has the world been reducing its greenhouse gas emissions for so long, with these fossil fuels all reaching record production and consumption levels? Well, actually, the world hasn’t been reducing its greenhouse gas emissions.

Oops again. Another surprise. According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, greenhouse gas levels are rising again, and reached record levels last year. The IEA’s own figures, and studies from Stanford and other universities, confirm this.

None of the foregoing bears on the question of what should be happening. But our debates ought to start with reality. What is happening in the world is more or less the opposite of what the government and the climate change propaganda agencies tell us is happening.

How often have you heard any of the facts above in the Australian climate debate? The debate is overwhelmingly dominated by people who are so committed to the idea of Australia taking radical action that they insist on pretending radical action is being taken globally.

The developed countries are reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but the developed countries are no longer the big story. China is the biggest greenhouse gas emitter by far. It accounts for more than 29 per cent of global emissions, more than the US and EU put together. The top 10 emitters are: China, the US, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Japan, Iran, Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Of those only two, the US and Japan, are rich, developed countries. Almost none of the others has binding targets or any commitment to when their emissions will even peak.

Indonesia is a fascinating case. Like China, it has a goal of net zero by 2060. It has nearly 280 million people and is still a poor country. It has more than 250 operational coal-fired power plants. It has an international deal to retire some of them early. Well, that seems to be progress, you might argue.

Except that it also has an out clause that says plants that have already been approved, or “captive” plants that don’t feed directly into the grid but only power an industrial park or a specific project, or are concerned with National Strategic Projects, can go ahead. There are 40 plants under construction and more in pre-approval.

Recently, Indonesia has had huge success expanding its nickel production. In 2020, Jakarta banned the export of unrefined nickel. Like Australia, it has a lot of nickel. It didn’t want to dig it up and ship it overseas. It wanted refining and processing to take place within Indonesia.

This move defied every tenet of orthodox economics and was almost universally criticised by international commentators (including me). Yet as so often, reality doesn’t conform to the textbook.

Indonesia’s move worked. It attracted Chinese partners who also bought the product. Low-grade nickel is used to make steel. High-class nickel is used for very sexy products like lithium-ion batteries. A bit like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, low-class nickel can be transformed into high-class nickel with enough money. There are industrial processes that will do the trick but they require enormous amounts of power. So Indonesia’s Chinese collaborators built a swag of coal-fired power stations to provide the power to work the magic on the nickel.

In 2017, Indonesia produced 385,000 tonnes of nickel. Last year it produced 1.8 million tonnes. It’s murdering the Australian competition. The Albanese government talks a lot about Australia’s position with rare earths, of which we have a lot in the ground, and how we’re going to become a renewable energy superpower.

By the way, almost every country in the world plans to be a renewable energy superpower (surely now one of the iconic cliches of our time), suggesting many, many of them will be sorely disappointed.

The Indonesian policy has succeeded magnificently from its point of view. Indonesia’s President, Joko Widodo, has genuine environmental ambitions. But he’s also determined to develop his nation. Similarly, anyone with even the vaguest familiarity with Indonesian politics will know just how entrenched and powerful are coalmining and energy interests. Indonesia pays its population fuel subsidies – the exact opposite of a carbon tax – and has typically subsidised coal energy.

But the deeper pattern and perversity of the industrial politics of renewable energy revealed in the Indonesian nickel example occurs more broadly across Asia, especially in China. The production and sale of wind turbines is dominated by China. To make them so cheaply, China typically uses cheap coal-fired power. Coal power is still mostly the cheapest power in the world despite what the Albanese government tells you (more on that below).

So the true carbon cost of even renewable energy ought to take into account the role of coal-fired power in making the renewable energy products. In any event, here’s the paradox of energy politics: to become a renewable energy superpower, you need lots and lots of cheap coal-fired power.

China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, The Philippines and in due course the poorer nations of Asia, and beyond that lots of African nations, are extremely unlikely to compromise their national development by embracing vastly more expensive and unreliable renewable energy over coal, gas and the like.

Two factors allow some modern, wealthy, industrial nations to run low emissions levels. One is a natural topography that lends itself to hydro-electric power. Hydro power is the only genuinely cost-competitive renewable energy and still the most important renewable energy. The other is already having a lot nuclear power.

None of this, as I say, is to argue what Australian policy should be. But the realities sketched here almost never figure in the Australian debate. How come?

Let me nominate one international factor and one specifically Australian factor.

Accompanying this article is a graph from the IEA showing the rise of the use of gas, oil and coal, measured in exajoules (one joule, a measure of energy, to the power of 18; that is to say, lots of joules, one joule being the equivalent of 107 ergs). The left side of the graph’s curve, up to the peak in 2022, which has been maintained in 2023, describes things that have already happened. That part of the graph is indisputable fact.

The right side of the graph shows a steep decline in the use of coal, oil and gas. But that’s purely speculative. That’s more or less taking an end point of declared policy, the Paris targets, and plotting a line that gets there. But that’s the future, and government predictions of the future have never been reliable. Indeed the Climate Tracker website describes Argen­tina, South Korea, Russia, Turkey, Canada, Mexico and Indonesia as “critically insufficient” in meeting their greenhouse gas reduction targets, and Australia, China, Brazil, the EU and Britain as “highly insufficient”.

The point about the graph is that huge amounts of climate literature are presented this way. The average reporter, the average citizen, tends to see such graphs as one entity and unconsciously gives the authority of the left-hand side of the graph, which represents factual history, to the right-hand side of the graph, which represents Nostradamus-like prophecy.

Within Australia, governments do this kind of thing very deliber­ately and with shockingly good effect. I’ve been following the national defence budget pretty closely for some decades. I’ve never seen a defence budget projection, or capability projection, actually come true if it concerns any period of the future longer than about six months. And defence is an area where the Australian government entirely controls what it spends. Australian governments can’t even predict what they themselves are going to do more than five minutes hence.

Yet somehow we are supposed to believe government agencies can forecast exactly what’s going to happen in energy and climate years and years, even decades, ahead. Gimme a break.

Thus the Albanese government has got great mileage from a Climate Change and Energy Department projection that Australia will reach a 42 per cent reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2030, just 1 per cent shy of our target of 43 per cent. Apparently the government now can predict the course of the Ukraine war, the effects of a possible Donald Trump victory in America, greenhouse gas emissions caused perhaps by a sudden spike in migration to Australia, and all the other manifold variables. You think?

Predicting we’ll be just 1 per cent short is a sweet touch. Just try a little harder, Australia! Yet a UN committee examining the issue doesn’t think even one G20 country will meet its target. The government is miles behind in the rollout of renewables. Electric vehicle sales are a small fraction of the forecast sales. But still we are, according to the magic forecast, just 1 per cent off target.

This is the problem, though. Almost every piece of information in this area is designed to produce a political effect. Disinterested information is at a premium.

When like is genuinely compared with like, coal is cheaper than renewables. Because with renewables you have to take account of the fact that most of the time they don’t operate so you need vast extra capacity, sometimes there are wind droughts and long cloudy periods so you need vast back-up systems of gas or coal or something else, the transmission infrastructure is enormous and the costs huge, and after 25 years or so you’ve got to throw away all the renewable stuff and replace it.

Almost everywhere that introduces vast renewable energy, apart from hydro, sees big electricity price rises. It might be that we still want to make the change because of our commitment to lowering our greenhouse gas emissions. But we need to recognise the cost, otherwise there will certainly be a backlash and the policy may well be reversed in time.

On the other hand, perhaps we should have some other conversations as well. Almost everyone wants to make some contribution to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. But given that whatever we do will have no discernible impact on the global environment, we should think pretty carefully about the cost. Especially given that it’s not happening globally.

Switching to renewables will make us poorer. They say the key policy dilemma for China is: will it grow rich before it grows poor?

For us the question is: do we want to grow richer before we grow poorer? And how poor do we really want to be?

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/a-price-to-pay-for-climate-change-fantasy/news-story/50e94ebdff8f5469dd008d895f6beb57

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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

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

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

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Study: An estimated 135 million premature deaths linked to fine particulate matter pollution between 1980 and 2020

Excuse me while I laugh! See both a popular summary and the originating journal article at the links below:

https://phys.org/news/2024-06-million-premature-deaths-linked-fine.html

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412024001739

The study was published in a rubbishy "pay to publish" journal. You get charged over $3,000 to get your article published there. I had over 200 academic journal articles published without once paying for it.

And the study is appropriately silly. What they were looking at was the correlation beteween pollution and disease. But, I quote:

"It is noted that only regions with correlation coefficients larger than 0.15 or smaller than – 0.15 and the corresponding p-values < 0.05 were selected in this study"

In other words they deleted from their study all cases that diagreed with their hypothesis. You couldn't make it up.

And don't suppose that I need to add that it was yet another "geography" study, looking at correlations between areas, not correlations between people -- with NO control for demographic confounders as far as I can see

It would have had no hope of getting into a "real" academic journal. The journal claims to be refereed but the referees must have just nodded it through on the basis of its congenial conclusions, if they read it at all. Serious referees would at a minimum have insisted on demographic comtrols. Some articles of this type do have such controls. It can be done.

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EU climate knaves and follies

The results of the European Parliamentary election this week have been a de facto referendum on Germany, and Europe’s, energy policies.

The Social Democratic party (SPD) of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz suffered an ignominious defeat winning less than 14 per cent of the vote, down from almost 16 per cent, its worst result in a national poll since 1949. Humiliatingly, it only came third in the overall tally behind the main opposition party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) which won almost 24 per cent of the vote, up more than one percentage point, and behind the much demonised Alternative for Germany (AfD) which increased its vote by almost 5 per cent compared with the last election. As SPD leader Lars Klingbeil put it, ‘There is no way to sugarcoat it. I think it is crystal clear that things have to change.’

But if the European parliamentary elections were devastating for Germany’s SPD, roughly the equivalent of the Australian Labor party, they were even worse for its ‘traffic light’ coalition partner, the Greens, which was incontestably the biggest loser, falling almost 9 percentage points to less than 12 per cent. This will no doubt come as a shock to Mr Bowen but it’s hardly surprising when you look at the appalling policies that the Greens tried to implement. Their Building Energy Act sought to mandate that all new heating systems use at least 65 per cent renewable energy which amounted to it effectively forcing people to install heat pumps that would have inflicted punishingly high costs on owners of older buildings. The law is deeply unpopular as is the plan to ban CO2-emitting cars.

One of the most damning aspects of the Green nightmare in Germany is that having campaigned to lower the voting age to 16, their vote crashed to only 10 per cent with those aged 16 to 24 years old, and their partner, the SPD, got a paltry 9 per cent. Instead, 17 per cent of these youths voted for the conservative Christian Democrats/Christian Social Union and another 17 per cent voted for the Alternative for Germany.

As the most populous country in the EU, the results in Germany had a big impact on the overall outcome in the European Parliament but in any event the same trend could be seen in France, Italy and Belgium.

In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally got more than 31 per cent of the vote, the first French party to do so since 1984. Macron’s Renaissance party got just over 15 per cent of the vote down from 22 per cent in 2019. The French Greens – the Ecologists – got a tad over 5 per cent, a steep fall from over 13 per cent in 2019 and more than 16 per cent in 2009.

Overall in the European Parliament it looks like the Greens will be pushed from fourth place into sixth place with only 53 seats out of 720. The only green shoot, so to speak, was Denmark where the Greens gained one seat and in the Netherlands where a Green-Left party is the largest Dutch party in the EU parliament with eight seats but where Geert Wilders Freedom Party went from one seat to six and the Farmer-Citizen party also got two seats.

What explains this collapse in the vote for Green parties and for climate-loving left-liberals is that Europe is suffering what it calls a greenlash to its Green New Deal. For months, farmers have been protesting EU climate policies that are driving them out of business. Yet the least palatable proposals of the EU’s delusional 2030 goal of cutting greenhouse gases by 55 per cent from 1990 levels look highly unlikely to be implemented. A carbon market for heating and transport fuels that is meant to be launched in 2027 would further exacerbate the cost-of-living crisis, and all new cars are meant to be emissions-free by 2035. But even that is not enough for the climate commissars who earlier this year called for a more ambitious goal for 2040 of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent relative to emission levels in 1990. That would require almost doubling the level of investment from the 863 billion euros per annum spent in the decade to 2020 to 1.5 trillion euros per annum. Good luck with raising the capital to splurge on such profoundly unproductive investments.

You know that climate policies have lost their appeal when even the most ardent of activists, such as Greta Thunberg, was wrapping herself in a keffiyeh last Friday to protest the war in Gaza in Berlin rather than ‘climate injustice’ per se. Bizarrely, the protesters managed to conflate Israel’s war against Hamas with a ‘Kick Big Polluters Out’ rally that called for oil and gas companies to be held accountable for enabling genocide in Gaza, systemic violence, and fuelling the climate crisis. In a strange way that they didn’t intend their protest almost made sense. After all, who is a bigger exporter of gas than Qatar, which bankrolls Hamas, the terrorists that are calling for a Jewish genocide? As William Blake wrote in his Proverbs of Hell, ‘If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise’, although perhaps more apposite when considering the EU’s climate policies is Blake’s proverb that ‘Folly is the cloke of knavery’. What does Mr Bowen make of all this? Very little it seems. Under Labor, Australia is set to follow in Europe’s foolish footsteps while the knaves laugh all the way to the bank.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/eu-climate-knaves-and-follies/

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Canadian skulduggery

The latest embarrassment for Canada’s Liberal administration is that they were caught deliberately suppressing information about their carbon tax.

And also caught in massive ethics violations in grant-making to insiders by Sustainable Development Technology Canada. Or was it the same pattern government-wide with regard to McKinsey?

No, we remember: it’s that they were caught suppressing information about subversion within the hallowed walls of our Parliament and when the news broke they refused even to apologize let alone mend their ways.

So much for “openness by default”. But we’re going after the carbon tax scandal here because it’s a classic illustration of how zealotry so often looks like deceit when it’s actually a terrible form of sincerity.

It is a curious feature of public affairs, and not just in Canada, that the people who aspire to govern spend very little time studying government.

It’s partly because whereas to gain entry to and promotion in almost any normal trade like, say, plumber or graphic designer, you show competence at plumbing or graphic design, whereas to flourish in government you have to be good at politics, quite a different business.

But it’s also because so many people hold the naïve view that good intentions translate smoothly into good results especially in the public sector, so they worry obsessively about motives (their own pure ones and their adversaries’ wretched ones) and neglect methods.

This habit leads them to assume that whatever they want to happen, really want, will happen and have the results they seek. They do not study the law of unintended consequences, and the related massive issue of the importance of incentives.

And particularly they do not ponder the importance of incentives in the public as in the private sector, and the enormous risk that those inside will learn to “game” the system in ways that range from job security to bonuses to hiding awkward information to steering contracts to outfits known to hire retired bureaucrats and politicians on generous terms.

As a result, when dreams do not transition seamlessly into reality, they assume they are being foiled by malevolent foes, that the apparent failure is just misinformation and everything’s secretly fine, or both. And then they become dismissive of criticism and frivolous in responses.

We mention this problem here particularly because the administration’s response to the mess in Sustainable Development Canada, which included the abrupt resignation of both CEO and chair under clouds last November, was to… fold it into another equally risk-prone entity.

A press release from something called the Council of Canadian Innovators, inexplicably not available on this innovative “internet” thing, said:

“Today in Ottawa, Canada’s Auditor General published a report into Sustainable Development Technology Canada, identifying significant governance lapses and procedural failures when dispersing government funds.

Following its release, Innovation, Science and Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne immediately announced that SDTC will no longer exist as an arm’s length entity and will be folded into the National Research Council going forward.”

So pretty much shoot, shovel and shut up. And thus the other key point is that they aren’t hiding this information because they know it proves them wrong.

They’re hiding it because they’re so sure they’re right that even their own research, when it says otherwise, is misleading and must be suppressed lest it cause confusion.

Humans are stubborn creatures, and rarely more so than when defending a cause. And we’re all for tenacity. But at a certain point firmness turns into idiocy.

And the suppression of carbon-tax information was so far past that point, and so brazen, that even the normally fairly cautious Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO) could stand it no longer. As the National Post reported:

“The federal government has a secret economic analysis of the impact of the carbon tax that confirms the parliamentary budget officer’s prior findings, and the budget watchdog said he believes that his office has been under a gag order to not talk about it.”

Strong words. But also a paraphrase so perhaps the press are dressing it up? Not at all. As the Post added, PBO Yves Giroux testified bluntly before the House of Commons finance committee that he and his staff had seen an in-house assessment but “we’ve been told explicitly not to disclose it and reference it.” And when:

“Conservative MP Marty Morantz asked Giroux if the government ‘put a gag’ on the PBO to not talk about their economic analysis. ‘That is my understanding,’ said Giroux.”

It’s no small matter, because the carbon tax and its true impact have been a matter of vigorous, even brutal partisan quarreling. The position of the administration is that the “price on pollution” actually gives most people more money than it takes from them; the Prime Minister has flatly accused the leader of the Official Opposition of wanting to take money from people by abolishing a tax.

Indeed, in response to this latest scandal, instead of expressing contrition and pledging to get back to that promised openness, Justin Trudeau robotically insisted that “We will continue to put money in people’s pockets and fight climate change,” although the only possible rational defence of a price on carbon is that it imposes behavioural changes on people by increasing the cost of actions you want to discourage.

If it actually gives back more than it takes, people won’t buy less gas or natural gas; they might even buy more. (For those who understand economics, unlike our Prime Minister, a crucial point is that these fuels are highly price-inelastic because there are very limited available substitutes.)

Since everything in Canadian governments appears to be broken, the PBO was obliged to concede that the analysis by his office also included the impact of industrial as well as consumer carbon pricing. And as Giroux told the committee, the stuff the government wants to keep hidden proves them wrong:

“[It] confirms the report that we have published essentially, so that’s why I’m comfortable with what we have already published with the understanding that it provides the impact of the carbon tax and the OBPS.”

(OBPS, for those wishing to get down into the weeds, stands for Output-Based Pricing System aka the industrial carbon tax).

So the state broadcaster CBC naturally ran a piece defending the administration using the “Conservatives pounce” angle:

“In the middle of some haggling over his report on Monday at the House of Commons finance committee, Giroux said the government has its own analysis of the impact of carbon pricing but he doesn’t have permission to release the report himself. That led the Conservatives to allege that the government is hiding a ‘secret carbon tax report’ and that the PBO is under some kind of ‘gag’ order.”

That Giroux himself said as much somehow didn’t make it into their copy. What did, however, was an insistence that unless you factor in the hideous cost of climate change you can’t really measure just how great the tax really is:

“‘The PBO compares costs relative to a world in which Canada simply ignores its emissions – and faces no consequences,’ experts with the Canadian Climate Institute wrote last year.”

No prize for guessing who funds these independent “experts”. It’s the same people who fund the CBC and created the tax in question.

https://principia-scientific.com/you-dont-need-to-see-that-information/

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Australia's Greens are Nazis in sheep’s clothing

FRANCIS GALBALLY

In my opinion there appears to be alarming similarities between Adam Bandt’s Greens and Hitler’s National Socialist Workers’ Party of the 1920s and 1930s. Both leaders are ideologues and demagogues. They are anti-Semitic in their rhetoric and this encourages in many a belief that the Jews are the cause of things wrong with society.

Bandt encourages the chant “from the river to the sea”. What does that mean other than the annihilation of the Jewish state and its people? But not just that, he seems through his rhetoric to want more. He encourages and attends pro-Palestinian demonstrations that are anti-Semitic and aimed at intimidating Australia’s Jews as they at least try to go about their ordinary lives whether as university students, workers or business people. Bandt supports gatherings that seem to me frighteningly similar to those pre-Nuremberg rallies in Munich in the 1920s. His rhetoric and actions appear to encourage the anti-Semitic demonstrations at parliament and on our city streets. This was Hitler at his most effective, and Bandt seems to have borrowed his playbook.

Bandt’s rant a few days ago has all the hallmarks of a Nazi rally. He accuses the major parties of “slandering this movement”. He calls on the Israeli ambassador to be expelled. He calls on sanctions against Israeli. He says “enough of the hand-wringing tweets, enough of the words that always come with conditions attached … they are being ignored by an extreme war cabinet that is hellbent on continuing this invasion”. And, like 1930s Munich, police had to move in to quell the violent protesters and use pepper spray (in Munich it was batons).

Bandt doesn’t mention how the Gaza war started, and appears to have no empathy for the abducted Israelis and the rape and killing of women and children. Bandt is a frightening demagogue; he distorts the truth, which suits a political agenda.

Bandt’s support of activists locking politicians out of their electoral offices bears the hallmarks of a potential dictator slowly cutting away at democracy.

Like Hitler, Bandt uses propaganda, discontent and fearmongering to gain support. He finds support among anti-Semites and uses climate action and anti-capitalist rhetoric to feed his supporters. Bandt would massively raise taxes and drive business from Australia. His rhetoric on tax and anti-business plays to his supporter base, much as Hitler did. And, like Hitler, he gets support from some individuals and businesses.

I do not criticise those who truly support the original Greens’ stand: protection of the environment and action to mitigate climate change.

But the Greens are now a party controlled by a rabblerouser who could destroy our way of life.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/these-duplicitous-modern-greens-are-wolves-in-sheeps-clothing/news-story/85782a0b1725d97060fc3d1b98db275f

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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

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

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

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Is protection from climate change a human right?

The European Court of Human Rights says it is but it is a body of fragile auhority, often criticized in Britain.

It is grotesque that a cluster of ill-qualified judges, several of them drawn from the most corrupt and ill-governed nations in Europe, should abuse their powers to lay down law, quite literally, to the Government of Britain.

The judges are political appointees from most member states of the EU. They incliude includes Linos-Alexandre Sicilianos from Greece, Dragoljub Popovic from Serbia, Nona Tsotoria from Georgia and Nebojsa Vucinic from Montenegro

The Swiss government has disregarded the ruling


In Case of Verein Klimatseniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland deliveredon 9 April 2024, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights, subject to the panic about climate change which for our elites justifies all things, has pushed the anti-democratic potential of human rights law to what might prove to be a limit. Four women, in their seventies or eighties when these proceedings were begun in Switzerland, complained that they had health problems caused by heatwaves that in turn had been caused by climate change. These women and a political association, Verein Klimatseniorinnen Schweiz, of which they were members, did not argue that the Swiss government lacked a commitment to mitigate climate change. No, incredibly they asked the judges to descend into the political theatre by arguing the government’s response was inadequate – so inadequate that it violated the Right to Life under Article 2 of the European Convention and the Right to Respect for Privacy and Family Life under Article 8. Staggeringly, the association succeeded under Article 8, these judges now opting to gainsay political choices around energy and environmental policies based on the above right. Whatever that is it ain’t democracy.

Legal recognition of human rights requires limits to be placed on the occasions when such recognition may prevent the discharge of public functions. If not interpreted in terms of the ‘negative liberty’ of protection against authoritarian governments that would do violence to their opponents, a Right to Life has enormous, perhaps universal, potential scope as a ‘positive right’ against harm. A Right to Private and Family Life interpreted so as to decouple ‘life’ from ‘private’ and indeed from ‘family’ has a similar if smaller potential. That national policies might be challenged because four elderly women, distressed by the weather, attributed their distress to global atmospheric changes caused by industrial civilisation might once have served as a cautionary, if satirical, hypothetical. The Articles 2 and 8 rights are therefore qualified by countervailing public interest considerations. Restrictive conditions also must be met for an Article 2 application even to be ‘admissible’, with similar if less strict conditions applying to Article 8.

To be admissible, the individual applications of the four women had to establish that the women were ‘victims’, and the Court found their arguments too vaguely remote. But the Court then regarded this as the very ground for allowing a political association to make those same arguments in a more general manner, thereby finding that the association was itself a ‘victim’! Of course, if the Swiss government suppressed the organisation, there would have been a legal issue. But this was far from the case, and the effect of the ECtHR judgment is to allow the association to enforce its policy preferences through legal proceedings. The Court did not require the association to meet the stricter Article 2 admissibility conditions but allowed it to proceed under Article 8. It then quite blatantly treated the issues as ones of a positive right to life. Of course, if one is dead, one doesn’t have a family life, but this shouldn’t mean one can make anyway tenuous Article 2 arguments under Article 8!

Climate change mitigation involves huge costs. The attempted pace of mitigation therefore must be determined by balances struck across the entire economy. The ECtHR evaluated the balances the Swiss government had struck and said in the most general terms ‘speed up’. Mitigation is an enormously complex technical matter itself beyond any court, but much more importantly it is a political matter of giving effect to the electorate’s choices about how fast it wants to go. The ECtHR allowed an Article 8 application to proceed in order to, under cover of law, politically accelerate the democratically chosen pace.

In doing all this, the Court went against important themes of Convention jurisprudence, and one of the 17 Grand Chamber Judges strongly dissented. But, albeit that they themselves were clearly hot and bothered by climate change, the majority was in line with a modern Convention jurisprudence which sees no limit whatsoever to judicial supremacy – save what is politically possible to get away with.

The separation of powers can work productively only in a constitutional ‘spirit’ of ‘comity’. Checks upon excesses must be balanced by respect for each branch of state’s proper powers. Whether the constitution is one of ‘judicial supremacy’ or of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ has important consequences for the way balances are struck. That choice of ‘starting position’ is open to rational debate, though this writer thinks democratic decision-making is clearly preferable to rule by judges. But, whatever the starting position, comity is essential.

The meretriciousness and authoritarianism of this ECtHR judgment therefore is of grave concern. It substitutes unworthy ingenuity of professedly legal argument in pursuit of a political objective for a wise concern with comity. This disregard of the proper spirit of constitutional argument may well take the subjection of democracy to politicised human rights jurisdiction to a crisis point.The problems inherent in enforcing all ECtHR decisions will be greatly magnified in this instance. But if this decision is given effect, it will have a most damaging effect in the countries under the Court’s jurisdiction. And because it has led the world in mitigation of climate change, these effects would first be manifested in the UK.

The mitigation efforts the UK has already made have incurred enormous costs, but so far UK citizens have largely experienced these as waste funded by stealth taxation and as lost opportunities for growth. Any determined pursuit of net zero from now on will cause undeniable hardship through absolute reductions of wealth and amenity. A majority of the electorate seeking to avoid hardship by bringing democratic pressures for change will find that such change is deemed by unelected judges to be a human rights violation. There will be no constitutional mechanism for the release of these pressures. The majority will be faced with a choice between resignation to hardship or disobedience.

This writer hopes and believes that as it muddles through, the UK will withdraw from the European Convention and make corollary changes to its domestic laws. He finds it incredible to now have to write that. Yet such is the hegemony of left-wing authoritarian rule in the UK, of which anti-democratic human rights law is a central pillar, that he has little hope or belief that the UK will in fact withdraw from the Convention, with its concomitant juristocracy and rule by unelected elites. And he is very concerned about the pressures that will build.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/06/big-trouble-with-human-rights/

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Much nitpicking at a country that defies global warming panic

Days after being sworn in as president of the Maldives in November, Mohamed Muizzu declared that his citizens would not run from rising seas.

"I can categorically say that we definitely don't need to buy land or even lease land from any country," Mr Muizzu told reporters, dispelling warnings by experts and former leaders that hundreds of thousands of Maldivians could become climate refugees.

"If we need to increase the area for living or other economic activity, we can do that. We are self-sufficient to look after ourselves."

Area for living is in short supply in the Maldives, a country whose 90,000-square-kilometre territory is 99 per cent ocean.

Almost half the population resides in the capital, Malé, one of the world's most densely populated cities, which occupies an island that can be circumnavigated on foot in 90 minutes.

The average household has 4.7 people – almost twice that of Australia.

Projections indicate that the nation's 1,200 islands, which have an average altitude of just 1.5 metres, could in a worst-case climate scenario be completely submerged by the year 2100.

Maldivian governments have long responded to this problem with a seemingly straightforward solution: building more land.

Over the past 40 years, the country has expanded its landmass by about 10 per cent (30 square kilometres), dredging sand from the sea floor and dumping it in shallow lagoons.

This approach has been a point of national pride for leaders and government officials in the Maldives.

In an opinion piece published by The Guardian last month, Mr Muizzu extolled so-called land reclamation projects as "true climate adaptation if ever I saw it", and called for more international funding to help the Maldives shore up its defences against climate impacts.

Those on the ground, however, tell a different story — describing a devastating trend that is riding roughshod over environmental law, destroying the Maldives' natural landscape and damaging local communities to prop up a luxury tourism industry.

Aishath Azfa, a graduate researcher at the University of Melbourne who grew up in Malé and has more than 15 years experience working in the Maldives' development planning sector, described land scarcity as an "ongoing chronic issue that all governments are struggling to find a solution to".

"In the Maldives, because the land is so scarce, there's really not enough land for people to live decently and have access to housing," Ms Azfa told the ABC.

"When there's no land you create land – but when you create land you are taking loans."

Within the past six months, both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have warned that rising public debt could place the country under severe economic strain.

Ms Azfa pointed out that such economic difficulties are likely to further inflame the Maldives' climate vulnerability, which is so often cited by leaders like Mr Muizzu as a way to unlock funding in the first place.

"Climate change is used as a selling point to access these finances," she said.

"But climate change is just the front they put [up] to make a compelling argument that, 'We are very vulnerable, please give us this money so that we can create a safe island.'

"Are people really benefiting from it? Is it equally distributed? Who are the winners and who are the losers?"

Ms Azfa said "the everyday person is losing".

The winners, according to her and several other Maldivians that the ABC spoke to, are politicians, the social elite, and the contractors and resort developers connected to them.

"We have more tourism resorts than local inhabited islands now," Abdulla Adam, an environmental advocate from the Maldives, told the ABC.

Mr Adam is from Kulhudhuffushi, an island in the country's far north where, between 2017 and 2018, the Maldivian government overrode environmental regulators and buried huge swaths of mangroves to build an airport.

Following the destruction of the mangroves, which act as a natural buffer against waves, tides and erosion, flooding on Kulhudhuffushi became more frequent, according to residents.

As Mr Adam put it: "We haven't seen this intensity in the past."

Elsewhere across the country, reclamation projects are having a range of impacts on the natural landscape, damaging lagoons, fishing grounds and sensitive coral reef ecosystems.

"The environmental cost of these projects is well documented," Patricia Gossman, an associate director for Human Rights Watch's (HRW) Asia division who has worked on the Maldives since 2018, told the ABC.

"It's not that communities don't want some development … but if [these projects are] carried out in a way that ends up harming the fishing communities or other businesses that people depend on, then they're not really to the benefit of the communities."

Some development projects have proven more beneficial than others.

In 2004, the government inaugurated Hulhumalé, a 4-square-kilometre artificial island built just north of Malé to relieve acute housing pressures and provide haven from rising seas.

Over the past two decades the project, nicknamed the "City of Hope", has served as an effective catchment area for the growing number of people spilling over from the capital.

According to the latest census data in 2022, it has a population of more than 65,700 people.

It is for this reason that, despite some environmental impact, experts and international bodies have lauded Hulhumalé, with the Global Centre on Adaptation describing it as a "monumental climate adaptation effort [that] raises hope in a threatened paradise".

Many believe most other reclamation projects, however, only threaten that paradise further.

Mr Adam explained that previously land reclamation was only done to create residential opportunities, as with the Hulhumalé project.

Things changed, he said, under president Abdulla Yameen, a close ally of President Muizzu who was jailed in 2019 after it was found he accepted bribes to grant a lease on an islet for tourism development.

Mr Yameen had his jail sentence overturned this year and was released in April.

It was during Mr Yameen's presidency, between 2013 and 2018, that the government started creating new artificial islands for the primary purpose of tourism, Mr Adam said — "not for the local inhabitants to live on, but rather for development of new tourist resorts".

It's an approach that has attracted controversy — not least from the Maldives environmental watchdog, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Ibrahim Naeem, the group's director general, told the Maldives Parliament in 2019 that "reclamation is not something we should ever do".

Mr Naeem clarified that he was not talking about the expansion of inhabited islands where land is scarce, but rather the reclaiming of land to build airports or tourist resorts which he said causes "severe" and "irreversible" environmental damage.

Yet despite ongoing calls for change, sand is still being dredged and islands built for purposes of tourism.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-15/the-true-cost-and-benefit-of-the-maldives-artificial-islands/103967268

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We Can and Must Adjust to Climate Change – and Not Kill Billions

Paul Driessen

Earth’s climate has changed many times over four billion years, and 99.999% of those changes occurred before humans were on this planet. During that short time, humans adjusted their housing, clothing and agriculture in response to climate changes. Can we now control the climate?

Except for decades-long droughts or massive volcanic explosions that ended some civilizations, humanity generally adjusted successfully – through a Pleistocene Ice Age, a Little Ice Age, a Dust Bowl and other natural crises. Numerous state high temperature records were set in Dust Bowl years.

After putting our current “microsecond” on Earth into its proper perspective, we might therefore ask:

* With today’s vastly superior technologies, why would humanity possibly be unable to adjust to even a few-degrees temperature increase, especially with more atmospheric carbon dioxide helping plants grow faster and better, providing more food for animals and people?

* How dare the political, bureaucratic, academic and media ruling elites – who propagate GIGO computer predictions, calculated myths and outright disinformation – tell us we must implement their “green” policies immediately and universally ... or humanity won’t survive manmade climate influences that are minuscule compared to the planetary, solar and galactic forces that really control Earth’s climate?

* How dare those elites tell Earth’s poorest people and nations they have no right to seek energy, health and living standards akin to what developed countries already enjoy?

Scientists, geophysicists and engineers have yet to explain or prove what caused the slight change in global temperatures we are experiencing today – much less the huge fluctuations that brought five successive mile-high continental glaciers, and sea levels that plunged 400 feet each time (because seawater was turned to ice), interspersed with warm interglacial periods like the one we’re in now.

Moreover, none of the dire predictions of cataclysmic temperature increases, sea level rise, and more frequent and intense storms have actually occurred, despite decades of climate chaos fearmongering.

Earth continues to experience climate changes, from natural forces and/or human activity. However, adjusting to small temperature, sea level and precipitation changes would inflict far less harm on our planet’s eight billion people than would ridding the world of fossil fuels that provide 80% of our energy and myriad products that helped to nearly double human life expectancy over the past 200 years.

Today, with fuels, products, housing and infrastructures that didn’t even exist one or two centuries ago, we can adjust to almost anything.

When it’s cold, we heat insulated homes and wear appropriate winter clothing; when it’s hot, we use air conditioning and wear lighter clothing. When it rains, we remain dry inside or with umbrellas; when it snows, we stay warm indoors or ski, bobsled and build snowmen.

Climate changes may impact us in many ways. But eliminating coal, oil and natural gas – with no 24/7/365 substitutes to replace them – would be immoral and evil. It would bring extreme shortages of reliable, affordable, essential energy, and of over 6,000 essential products derived from fossil fuels.

It would inflict billions of needless deaths from diseases, malnutrition, extreme heat and cold, and wild weather – on a planet where the human population has grown from 1 billion to 8 billion since Col. Edwin Drake drilled the first oilwell in 1859.

* Weather-related fatalities have virtually disappeared, thanks to accurate forecasting, storm warnings, modern buildings, and medicines and other petroleum-based products that weren’t available even 100 years ago.

* Fossil fuels for huge long-range jets and merchant ships move people, products, food and medications to support global trade, mobility, health and lifestyle choices. Indeed, more than 50,000 merchant ships, 20,000 commercial aircraft and 50,000 military aircraft use fuels manufactured from crude oil.

* Food to feed Americans and humanity would be far less abundant and affordable without the fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and tractor and transportation fuels that come from oil and natural gas.

* Everything powered by electricity utilizes petroleum-based derivatives: wind turbine blades and nacelle covers, wire insulation, iPhone and computer housings, defibrillators, myriad EV components and more.

Petroleum industry history demonstrates that crude oil was virtually useless until it could be transformed in refineries and chemical plants into derivatives that are the foundation for plastics, solvents, medications and other products that support industries, health and living standards. The same is true for everything else that comes out of holes in the ground.

Plants and rocks, metals and minerals have no inherent value unless we learn how to cook them, extract metals from them, bend and shape them, or otherwise convert them into something we can use.

Similarly, the futures of poor developing countries hinge on their ability to harness foundational elements: fuels, electricity, minerals and feed stocks made from fossil fuels and other materials that are the basis for all buildings, infrastructures and other technologies in industrialized countries.

For the 80% of humanity in Africa, Asia and Latin America who still live on less than $10 a day – and the billions who still have little to no access to electricity – life is severely complicated and compromised by the hypocritical “green” agendas of wealthy country elites who have benefited so tremendously from fossil fuels since the modern industrial era began around 1850. Before that:

* Life spans were around 40 years, and people seldom travelled more than 100 miles from their birthplaces.

* There was no electricity, since generating, transmitting and utilizing this amazing energy resource requires technologies made from oil and natural gas derivatives.

* That meant the world had no modern transportation, hospitals, medicines and medical equipment, kitchen and laundry appliances, radio and other electronics, cell phones and other telecommunications, air and space travel, central heating and air conditioning, or year-round shipping and preservation of meats, fruits and vegetables, to name just a few things most of us just take for granted.

There are no silver-bullet solutions to save people from natural or manmade climate changes. However, adjusting to those fluctuations is the only solution that minimizes fatalities which would be caused by the callous or unthinking elimination of the petroleum fuels and building blocks that truly make life possible and enjoyable, instead of nasty, brutish and short. The late Steven Lyazi explained it perfectly in his own column for Townhall from 2017, "Solar Ovens and Sustained Poverty for Africa."

https://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2024/06/15/we-can-and-must-adjust-to-climate-change-and-not-kill-billions-n2640515

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Fracturing Thwaites Ice-Shelf--Just a Normal Function of Nature

In case you’ve lost sleep worrying about the latest reports of melting ice in Antarctica, go back to bed and enjoy a good snooze. There’s nothing to the story. Here’s why.

University of California, Davis professor Eric Rignot just published more data he asserts support the notion that the Thwaites ice shelf is in imminent danger of self-destruction. He further asserts "warm" ocean currents (that are not warm or even tepid by ordinary standards) have undercut the massive ice shelf that extends into the Amundsen Sea along the western margin of Antarctica.

This is what glaciers do. They creep downslope from higher elevation into lower geographic regions where latent heat finally causes them to melt, or, as in the example of an active ice shelf, they calve into a free-floating iceberg to drift with ocean currents carrying them equator-ward.

Dr. Rignot expects the media, along with lay readership, will readily accept his brand of climate alarmism.

I and others addressed this canard several years ago, but the principals, Rignot and allies, persist in efforts to persuade any who will pay attention and particularly those who issue grants to fund their research projects.

The West Antarctic ice sheet and its subsidiary Thwaites glacier overlie an active volcanic region of the Earth's crust. Volcanoes are observed, from seismic observations, to be venting beneath the surface of the glacial ice. This fact is conveniently ignored by the authors.

Independent studies have implicated, not so much the impinging sea currents, but geothermal heat rising upward through the crust from the mantle below as the likely cause of the observed melting of the ice shelf and anticipated calving of another large block of ice. Once freed from grounding and afloat, it will be referred to as an “ice berg.”

But the process of melting at the terminus of a glacier, whether it be on land or at the edge of the ocean needs to be properly understood. Glacial ice flows (very slowly) down gradient under the influence of gravity (it behaves somewhat akin to a viscous fluid). In the instance of glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland, they continue their downhill courses until meeting the ocean where melting and calving of icebergs occur.

On arrival at the shoreline, the outward flow of ice, urged oceanward by additional glacial ice arriving behind it, forms an ice shelf often extending some distance out over the adjoining sea. The glacier behind continues to push outward until a portion of the shelf finally weakens and develops a crack. The crack deepens and a block of ice, if not securely grounded to land, breaks free and floats away as an iceberg. The 'berg then melts in warmer water as it is carried along toward the Equator by ocean currents. One such iceberg, after breaking free from Greenland in the North Atlantic, brought down the Titanic in April 1912.

The mass of ice (water) lost by calving is continuously being made up by sparse snowfall that falls across the broad expanse of highlands in the interior of the continent.

In fact, if the polar climate were to warm somewhat, the relative humidity would increase, inducing a higher precipitation rate over the interior. During past warmer periods (speaking relatively for Antarctica) increased snowfall is documented from the ice-core samples taken at the interior Vostok station operated by Russian scientists.

Counter intuitively, a warming climate over Antarctica (keeping in mind that most of its frigid interior never reaches a temperature above freezing) would result in the formation of more, not less snow falling on the affected polar ice cap, sufficient to make up for calving losses and helping to maintain a stable sea level.

Rignot points out correctly that if the entire West Antarctic ice shelf were to melt (irrespective of the primary cause), sea level would rise by an estimated two feet. That eventuality would cause disruption for human populations living in certain low-lying lands at a number of locations around the globe. But the overwhelming portion of Antarctica's landed ice is currently (and permanently) resident on the main continent that accounts for some 90% of all landed ice on the planet. Only the melting of landed ice would contribute to sea-level rise.

The Vostok corings also show that at no time during the past 600,000 years has Antarctica been ice free despite several prolonged interglacial periods when temperatures around the globe exceeded those experienced during the previous 10,000 years of the Holocene up to the present.

It is highly unlikely that any temperature rise that can be reasonably anticipated during the next century or two would be sufficient to cause significant melting of the main body of ice now covering Antarctica. The UN/IPCC climate models are shown to be not up to the task of making reliably accurate predictions and should be discounted.

In fact, it is believed by geologists that Antarctica has had a permanent ice cap for more than three million years, subsequent to the closing off of the Panamanian Strait that once separated North America and South America. The tectonic closing effected the termination of a prior free circulation of warmer equatorial water about the southern polar continent.

It is a futile and patently nonsensical effort to attempt to restrain climate change by enforcing draconian restrictions on usage of fossil fuels in order to lower CO2 emissions to the proposed net zero level being promoted by the UN/IPCC and the US government.

If every significant source of CO2 being emitted to the atmosphere were somehow to be eliminated (an impossible dream), the Thwaites ice shelf would quite possibly continue to melt because of the uncontrollable volcanism in progress beneath the ice.

We need less of the brand of climate fear-mongering that originates from academic centers in California and in many institutions elsewhere.

Will "Doomsday" arrive tomorrow for the Thwaites ice shelf or the entire West Antarctic ice cap for that matter? Not likely.

https://townhall.com/columnists/williamdbalgord/2024/06/15/fracturing-thwaites-ice-shelf-just-a-normal-function-of-nature-n2640346

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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

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

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

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