The attacks on "Roundup" go on

The Greenies will only be happy when we have no pesticides left.  Two of the most effective -- DDT and Dieldrin  -- went long ago and everything else has been targeted.  Methyl Bromide went recently, though it is still used in Australia

Dozens of cereals, oatmeals and snack bars contain trace amounts of a weed killer that has been linked to cancer, a new report says.

Released by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), the report found 26 of 28 oat-based cereal products that were tested had 'harmful' levels of glyphosate, the main ingredient of Roundup.

Products included variations of Cheerios and Quaker Oats, including Honey Nut Cheerios, Quaker Oatmeal Squares Honey Nut, and Quaker Overnight Oats.

The weed killer was recently at the center of a trial in which a California jury found Roundup was responsible for giving groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, 46, terminal cancer.

None of the products in the new report had levels above what is allowed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), but the EWG argues that customers should be concerned that any levels are being detected in products consumed by children everyday.

In August, the EWG conducted its first study, which found the presence of glyphosate in 45 samples of breakfast cereals from producers Quakers, Kellogg's, and General Mills.

On the heels of this study, the group wanted to dive further and test specifically Quaker Oats and Cheerios products, because high levels of glyphoste were found in the first study and they are two of the most popular cereal brands.

For the new study, the EWG purchased the products at grocery stores in San Francisco and Washington, DC, and had them tested at Anresco Laboratories in San Francisco.

Results of the samples showed glyphosate was detectable in all 28 products, and levels considered unsafe were found in 26.

The EPA caps glyphosate tolerance at 5.0 parts per million (ppm).

But the EWG's health benchmark is much more conservative and says any level greater than 160 parts per billion (ppb) is not safe.

In the report, the highest level was found Quaker Oatmeal Squares Cereal Honey Nut, registering at 2,837 ppb.

That number is nearly 18 times greater than EWG's benchmark.

However, government agencies, manufacturers and advocacy groups seem to be conflicted about what is - and is not - considered safe.

Following the results of the EWG's report, both General Mills and Quaker released statements insisting their products are safe.

'[The] EWG report artificially creates a "safe level" for glyphosate that is detached from those that have been established by responsible regulatory bodies in an effort to grab headlines,' a statement from Quaker, sent to Daily Mail Online, read in part.

'We believe EWG's approach is invalid, and we stand behind our statement that the Quaker products tested by EWG are safe.'

General Mills, the makers of Cheerios, also cited the group's benchmark, telling CNN: 'The extremely low levels of pesticide residue cited in recent news reports is a tiny fraction of the amount the government allows.'

The EPA itself released a statement saying the report should not leave consumers concerned.

But Dr Alexis Temkin, a toxicologist at the EWG who worked on the report, says the results are disconcerting.

'Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's safe or that it provides that extra level of protection for children,' she told Daily Mail Online.

She mentioned that the EPA increased the amounts of glyphosate residue allowed on oats from 20 ppm in 1997 to 30 ppm in 2008.

'The EPA likely saw it was increasingly being used as a pre-harvest dessicant (the application of a herbicide crops shortly before harvest) and increased the limit to allow it to be legal,' Dr Temkin said.

Glyphosate-based products are sold in more than 160 countries, and farmers use it on 250 types of crops in California alone, which is the leading farming state in the US.

In March 2015, the World Health Organization found that that the herbicide is 'probably carcinogenic to humans'.

Then, in 2017, California named glyphosate an ingredient that causes cancer under the state's Proposition 65, which requires Roundup to carry a warning label if sold in California.

Roundup's maker, Monsanto, says glyphosate is safe and that its product has undergone stringent testing.

However, in August, a California jury ordered the company to pay $289 million to a groundsman who claimed the weed killer is responsible for giving him cancer.

A judge upheld the verdict on Monday but reduced Monsanto's payout to Dewayne Johnson to $78million.

'The report shows that breakfast cereals are not a place for pesticides linked to cancer,' said Dr Temkin.

'What we show here is that there are detectable levels in common foods that children exposed to every day. Over a long period of time, that can be dangerous.'

SOURCE





India Rumbles Wind Power as Fake Electricity: Output Collapses During Dead-Calm Monsoon

It never takes them long to work out that wind power is the greatest economic and environmental fraud of all time. Eco-zealots have attempted to ram wind and solar power down the throats of Third World governments under the auspices of saving the planet and purportedly with the purpose of dragging millions out of poverty. As the initiated well-know, wind power rates zero on both scores. Pointless and expensive, wind power is a kind of first world disease being spread by UN endorsed lunatics, across the developing world.

Now, Indians have branded wind power an outright fraud, too. The calm, and very wet weather that comes with the monsoon has left wind ‘powered’ Tamil Nadu scrambling for the reliable stuff; and that means coal-fired power. The state had unscheduled power cuts for the first time since 2015.”

India is coal country with a 76 percent market share for the indigenous fuel. But authorities are pushing uneconomic renewables as part of a green central planning plan.

Wind Power in Tamil Nadu

One such place is my home state of Tamil Nadu. Its wind turbines have a capacity of about 7.9 gigawatts. Tamil Nadu is often glorified as a global leader in wind energy and regularly compared with Scandinavian countries.

Yet the reality is totally different!

Wind turbines’ poor capacity to provide electricity was exposed last month, when Tamil Nadu faced an unforeseen energy shortage due to a dwindling coal supply. The state had unscheduled power cuts for the first time since 2015.

Most of the state’s electricity (45 percent) comes from stable and reliable coal plants. They require 72,000 tons of coal per day. The coal demand rose, and the subsequent shortage of coal created a power-shortage panic. The federal government had to dispatch coal to the state.

In such situations, wind turbines cannot provide the required backup. Moreover, the rise in energy demand from coal plants can be attributed to the fall in wind energy this year.

Energy from wind turbines dropped 37 percent this year because of heavy monsoon rains. But heavy monsoon rains are not abnormal! They are blamed simply because they interrupt the turbines. Before the era of wind turbines, the rains were just as severe, but they didn’t interrupt power generation.

Wind turbines are infamous for their operational inefficiency. Wind factories usually are built with capacities far above their normal actual production in order to meet the required production targets.

But at times of steady optimum-velocity winds, they produce more than grid operators can use, leaving electricity to be sold at a loss to other locales.  This means that the wind turbines operate far below capacity most of the time, requiring grid operators to meet much of the demand from thermal plants.

SOURCE





Bad news for Ireland: Peat is most damaging fuel in terms of global warming, even worse than coal

Peat is the most damaging fuel in terms of global warming; even worse than coal.

It has a lower calorific value than coal (generating less energy per tonne when it is burned) and yet it produces higher CO2 emissions per unit, so it is the least climate-efficient way to produce electricity or heat in Ireland bar none.

As a consequence, the writing has been on the wall for peat production – including the once, much-loved peat briquette – and peat-burning power plants for some years; all because of climate change.

In a scenario where overall Irish greenhouse gas emissions are locked into a rising curve, especially those associated with heat, transport and agriculture, it became impossible to justify use of peat on environmental and sustainability grounds.

As a consequence, Bord na Móna committed to getting out of peat by 2030. Its announcement this week “is acknowledging that climate change is our biggest challenge globally” and commits to closing bogs by 2025.

Peat was responsible for 3.4 million tonnes of emissions in Ireland during 2016, of which 75 per cent was for electricity and 25 per cent in residential heating (which is about 9 per cent of carbon emissions from total fossil fuel use (including coal, oil, gas and peat). Phasing out that heat component will make a big difference to Ireland’s emissions.

The peat issue was so glaring, the Government’s independent Climate Change Advisory Council repeatedly said Bord na Móna should get out of peat a lot sooner than envisaged, though it underlined the need for “a just transition” for workers and communities affected. Its chairman Prof John FitzGerald has gone further, hitting out at the perverse decision to continue subsidising peat-fired electricity generation stations until 2030 – consumers pay for this through the public service obligation (PSO), a levy added to their electricity bill.

Peat is partially decomposed plant material; essentially coal in the making. It forms when plant material is deposited in an oxygen-poor environment, generally one that is saturated with water such as a bog. Its destruction releases vast amounts of carbon, particularly methane, into the atmosphere.

Burning, draining, and degrading peat bogs emits significant amounts of CO2 .

In contrast, bogs – and restored wetlands – have the potential to fulfil a major role in capturing and storing carbon.

The fate of peat burning power stations in the Midlands, however, will largely depend on the extent to which the EPA will permit “co-firing of peat with biomass” in coming years.

SOURCE





Trudeau’s Carbon-Tax Rebates A Pittance, Opponents Argue

The Official Opposition Conservatives criticized Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s promise of carbon tax rebates for consumers Tuesday.

At the House of Commons, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer held a news conference to call the rebates “an election gimmick,” saying what the Trudeau government proposes to give back to Canadians is a pittance.

“Canadians have known all along that Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax was just a tax plan dressed up as an emissions plan,” he said. “Now we know it’s all an election gimmick. And now Canadians are supposed to take his word that a measly $12.50 a month will cover the true cost of the carbon tax.”

Trudeau was in Toronto on Tuesday where he officially outlined his carbon tax and rebate plan in Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s constituency.

Trudeau now routinely refers to CO2 emissions as “pollution” and refers to his carbon tax as “the price of pollution.”

“Starting next year, it will no longer be free to pollute anywhere in Canada. And we’re also going to help Canadians adjust to this new reality,” Trudeau said. “Every nickel will be invested in Canadians in the province or territory where it was raised.”

The Liberals plan to impose the carbon tax on all gasoline, propane and natural gas products.

But they won’t directly tax all Canadian voters; instead, the government will go after the distributors of these products, who will then pass it along to consumers.

The tax is expected to increase the price of each of these energy sources by about four cents a liter.

SOURCE





The Australian government gets realistic on the drivers of electricity costs and is told about "The ‘hoax’ Australians have been sold on electricity

A comprehensive investigation of the drivers of electricity costs reveals that Greenie costs are not the only driver pushing costs upward.  Electricity firms are also making a motza. So PM Morrison takes modest measures to rein in those profits.  So the Left praise him for that?  Leftists don't like big business.

But, no, Morrison is "hypocritical" for doing that.  He said that enironmental costs were a big driver of costs so he should stick to that only apparently. He is not allowed to look at more than one cost driver at a time, apparently.  He'll get no logic or reason from Leftists, just hate. I suppose in the simplistic Leftist mind, things CAN have only one cause


WHEN the Abbott Government first romped to victory in 2013 on its promise to axe the carbon tax, it was to address one key issue — the rising cost of electricity.

Addressing climate change was costing too much, Australia’s future prime minister Tony Abbott argued, and was impacting people’s power bills.

Five years later and despite dumping the so-called tax, people’s power bills have still skyrocketed but it’s not for the reason they think.

As ABC finance analyst Alan Kohler highlighted in a series of graphs, electricity prices have jumped by 55 per cent since 2007.

The reason? While climate change policies have played a part, they were not the biggest factor and an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) report released in July gave an interesting insight into why prices had risen.

Mainly it’s because of network costs (which added 4 cents per kilowatt hour), the cost of wholesale electricity (2.8 cents), environmental costs (1.6 cents), retail margin (1.4 cents) and retail costs (0.8 cents).

Most of these terms mean nothing to average consumers. To simplify it, the climate change impact can be attributed partly to the lack of a good policy, which means there has not been an “orderly” transition to cleaner energy sources.

Big coal-fired power stations like Northern and Hazelwood have closed without much notice, making it difficult for the market to find alternatives. The closures have also driven up wholesale prices partly because there is less supply and competition. Gas prices also jumped up after the resource started being exported and this has also contributed to higher prices in Australia.

Meanwhile, there’s little incentive for companies to invest in new sources of electricity when the closures mean they can instead charge more for the energy they are already generating.

The ACCC also found “network costs” had driven up prices the most. In particular, in NSW, Queensland and Tasmania, there has been over-investment in networks, the so-called “poles and wires”.

But one of these figures have escaped much of the scrutiny applied to the others: retail margins.

For those not familiar with the jargon — this is the profit that electricity companies make. And this has grown by 1.4 per cent.

As Mr Kohler noted, selling electricity has become so profitable in Australia, retail margins are now the highest in the world.

The government focus has now turned to cracking down on retailers for confusing customers, price gouging and unfair late payment fees.

Yesterday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced measures to bring down prices, including that it ask the Australian Energy Regulator to put in place a “price safety net”, which is essentially an electricity price cap, something Australia used to have and then got rid of in 2007.

While the crackdown on retailers is in line with ACCC findings, some have noticed the government’s approach now appears to fly in the face of its previous scaremongering.

The new Morrison Government is trying to break the link between carbon emissions reduction and rising power prices, saying it will “comfortably” meet Australia’s Paris agreement targets while at the same time lowering prices.

It’s something that 7.30 host Leigh Sales questioned Energy Minister Angus Taylor about last night and the lack of response was telling.

“This government suggests that emissions reduction, carbon emissions reduction, and power prices are not linked,” Sales said. “If that is true, then you are admitting that your entire anti-carbon tax platform was a hoax because your opposition to it was based on it driving up power prices?”

One of the first things Mr Morrison did when he took over the prime ministership was get rid of the proposed National Energy Guarantee (NEG), which was aimed at reducing electricity prices, providing more stability in the system but also legislating an emissions reduction of 26 per cent over the next 10 years.

Now it looks like Australia won’t have a climate policy and may have to rely on the government topping up the Emissions Reduction Fund, which Mr Abbott introduced to pay businesses, community organisations, local councils or others to reduce their carbon emissions.

The Morrison Government has also left the door open to support new coal-fired power stations and may even protect these investments against the future climate change action.

Mr Taylor told The Guardian the government would look at absorbing the risks for companies, which had found it hard to get finance because they were unable to predict future carbon action, particularly because Australia has not been able to agree to a bipartisan policy.

Asked whether he acknowledged that would expose taxpayers to risk, Taylor said: “We’ll look at the risks and we’ll seek to minimise the risks to the commonwealth”.

SOURCE

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

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

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47,000 Ticks on a Moose, and That’s Just Average. Blame Climate Change

Maybe recent warmer years have had an effect on Moose.  But was that warmth anthropogenic?  No.  recent warm years were due to El Nino -- an influence that has now ceased and led to a fall in temperatures

The biggest number of winter ticks that Peter J. Pekins ever found on a moose was about 100,000. But that moose calf was already dead, most likely the victim of anemia, which develops when that many ticks drain a moose’s blood. So it was probably a lowball estimate, because some of the ticks had already detached.

“It’s about as grody a picture as you can imagine on a dead animal,” said Dr. Pekins, a professor of natural resources and the environment at the University of New Hampshire. (A warning: The pictures below are, indeed, grody.)

Between 2014 and 2016, Dr. Pekins counted ticks on moose calves at two locations in New Hampshire and Maine. He wanted to see how the moose were faring, given that climate change has been delaying snow’s arrival in New England’s winters.

The longer-lasting warmth gives the ticks a leg up as they glom onto the moose, their preferred hosts, in the fall. They then feed through winter and hop off in the spring to lay eggs.

The moose-tracking exploits of Dr. Pekins and his colleagues were published last month in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. They argued that three consecutive years of tick outbreaks “arguably reflects a host-parasite relationship strongly influenced by climate change at the southern fringe of moose habitat.”

While large numbers of ticks, literal bloodsucking parasites, aren’t great for adult moose, they’re especially bad for moose calves, which can die from the onslaught.

With the help of a team that shoots nets from helicopters to catch and tag the calves with radio collars (a process that takes about 15 minutes for the moose and eschews the use of drugs), Dr. Pekins was able to track 179 moose calves. The average number of ticks he found on them was 47,371.

In some ways, the moose are a victim of their own success.

“Maine and New Hampshire had less than 50 moose in the 1970s,” Dr. Pekins said. But their numbers have multiplied many times over since then, thanks to improvements in the available habitat and a lack of predators like wolves.

As a result, Maine now has anywhere from 60,000 to 70,000 moose; New Hampshire had as many as 8,000 or 9,000 in the early 2000s, though the numbers now hover around 5,000. And it’s the abundance of moose that enables the ticks to survive.

“You need a lot of moose on the landscape to have a lot of parasites,” Dr. Pekins said. “That’s the host-parasite relationship.”

That relationship was more or less in balance until the changing climate tilted the scales in the ticks’ favor. Over the long term, Dr. Pekins doesn’t expect the moose to die off completely, but there will be fewer of them.

The ticks don’t want the moose to die off completely, either. “The parasite doesn’t want to kill off its host — that’s bad evolution,” Dr. Pekins said. “Because the parasite loses the game.”

SOURCE






Professor urges students to vote Democrat in midterms or else ‘future generations’ will face ‘higher seas, much hotter temps’

A Texas A&M University professor is urging his students to vote in the 2018 midterm elections in order “to determine” how much the seas rise and how much global temperatures will rise.

Professor Andrew Dessler, a professor of Atmospheric Sciences, also implied that his students must cast those votes for Democrat candidates or else “future generations” will face “higher seas, much hotter temperatures, less ice, vastly different precipitation patterns, etc.”

Dessler wrote on October 23: “I’ve been encouraging my students to vote. This is what I tell them: they’re voting to determine whether we’ll be in the top row or the bottom row.” Dessler’s tweet featured a UN IPCC chart showing various rows of temperature scenarios from the years 2046 through the year 2200. The top row features the UN IPCC lowest temperature increase projections through the year 2200, while the bottom row shows a more severe temperature throughout the year 2200.

In response to a tweet declaring “I won’t vote democrat–sorry that party has lost it,” Dessler replied: “I’m sure future generations — as they live in degraded world with higher seas, much hotter temperatures, less ice, vastly different precipitation patterns, etc. — will totally understand and sympathize.”

Dessler is confident that a vote for Democrats can impact future temperatures in the years 2046 through 2100, that he retweeted a tweet claiming, “VOTE. Your vote can help us stay on the top row.”

Dessler has a long history of claiming that government taxes and regulations can regulate the climate and weather

Dessler has been a fierce critic of President Trump overturning so-called climate regulations

SOURCE






Sen Cruz: Climate Change Is A ‘Pseudoscientific Theory’ Concocted To Nix Big Oil

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas criticized the climate movement Monday night as a type of Trojan horse effort activists started to target the fossil fuel movement while also gaining control over aspects of the government.

Climate change is “the perfect, I believe, pseudoscientific theory because it could never be disproven,” the Texas senator said at a Texas Oil & Gas Association forum. He also chastised his Democratic opponent, Beto O’Rourke, for not being in line with the state’s energy industry.

Cruz, a Republican running for re-election in the first midterm election in the Trump-era, also noted that the environmental movement is predicated on government control over the energy sector.

“The solution for climate change is the same as global cooling and global warming, which is massive government control of the economy, the energy sector and every aspect of our lives,” he said. Cruz also told attendees that the climate movement has made huge gains over the decades.

The fossil fuel industry needs to counteract a “misinformation and propaganda effort,” he said, adding that journalists and celebrities are at the vanguard of the movement. “We’re getting killed — killed — in the culture.”

Cruz added: “The left has those commanding heights and uses it to push the agenda that all of you are bad,” he told the audience. “On the right, look, the best and the brightest, what do they go do? They go make money.”

He has spent several months railing against the use of taxpayer funds on programs devoted to influencing discussion on global warming. Cruz took issue in June with public funds going to the National Science Foundation, for instance.

“We find NSF’s stewardship of the federal taxpayer dollars devoted to the latter project particularly egregious for a number of reasons,” Cruz and colleagues Rand Paul of Kentucky and James Lankford of Oklahoma wrote in a letter to NSF Inspector General Allison Lerner. (RELATED: ‘It’s Unfortunate’: EPA Says Jilted Official Is Spreading Fake News About Her Suspension)

Their letter came after NBC News reported the non-profit group Climate Central “reached more than 500 local TV weathercasters” as part of its “Climate Matters” program that launched in 2012.

The program was backed by two NSF grants totaling more than $4 million that were rewarded in 2009 and 2014, according to federal records. The grants were issued to two universities and Climate Central, a website covering environmental issues.

SOURCE





Carbon Dioxide Emissions Dip Slightly in Trump’s First Year, EPA Says

Greenhouse gas emissions have declined across multiple sectors since President Donald Trump has been in office, the Environmental Protection Agency announced.

The latest figures show total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions dipped by 2.7 percent during 2017 compared with 2016, President Barack Obama’s last full year in office, the agency said as part of its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program.

The EPA collects emissions data from industrial sources on an annual basis. Those sources include power plants, oil and gas production plants, refining facilities, iron mills, steel mills, and landfills.

“Thanks to President Trump’s regulatory reform agenda, the economy is booming, energy production is surging, and we are reducing greenhouse gas emissions from major industrial sources,” Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, said in a press release Wednesday, adding:

These achievements flow largely from technological breakthroughs in the private sector, not the heavy hand of government. The Trump administration has proven that federal regulations are not necessary to drive CO2 reductions. While many around the world are talking about reducing greenhouse gases, the U.S. continues to deliver, and today’s report is further evidence of our action-oriented approach.

Environmental activists link greenhouses gases to what they consider man-made climate change, or global warming.

Other key findings identified by the EPA show that greenhouse gas emissions from large power plants declined 4.5 percent since 2016 and 19.7 percent since 2011.

More than 8,000 facilities submitted data to the agency’s program for the 2017 reporting year.

Greenhouse gases that the EPA says trap heat in the atmosphere include carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases. But it is the carbon dioxide emissions that stand out.

“The 2.6 billion metric tons of CO2 [carbon dioxide] reported for 2017 represent 90.7 percent of the [greenhouse gases] reported in 2017,” the EPA said. “Methane emissions represent 7.7 percent of reported … emissions, N2O [nitrous oxide] represents 0.9 percent, and fluorinated gases (HFCs, PFCs, SF6) represent 0.6 percent.”

The Trump administration anticipates that carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S. power sector will continue to decline if the government implements its proposed Affordable Clean Energy Rule.

The Trump rule would replace the Obama administration’s “Clean Power Plan” with guidelines that give states more flexibility to determine how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.

“Much of the world ridiculed the Trump administration for withdrawing from the Paris Accord [on addressing climate change] and rolling back the previous administration’s climate regulations,” Nick Loris, an energy policy analyst for The Heritage Foundation, said in an email, adding:

But they’re not singing our praises as market-driven innovations lead the world in reducing emissions, while they fail to meet their nonbinding commitments under Paris. It’s clear that talking the talk and walking the walk are two very different things.

Wheeler has described the Obama administration plan as a “top-down, one-size-fits-all” approach to energy policy.

In February 2016, the Supreme Court ordered a halt in enforcement of the Clean Power Plan until a lower federal court ruled on its legality.

That order—which came in response to legal challenges from 27 states, 24 trade associations, 37 rural electric co-ops, and three labor unions—marked the first time the high court had stopped a regulation before a lower appeals court issued a final judgment.

The EPA projects that the Trump proposal would lead to a decrease in carbon dioxide emissions of 35 percent below 2005 levels.

The agency will hold a webinar Oct. 24 to demonstrate a data publication tool on greenhouse gases called FLIGHT.

SOURCE





Australia: Conservative coalition could indemnify new coal projects against potential carbon price

The energy minister, Angus Taylor, has signalled the Australian government could indemnify new power generation projects against the future risk of a carbon price, and says it could also support the retrofitting of existing coal plants.

In an interview with Guardian Australia, the man dubbed the “minister for getting power prices down” by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, has also committed to keeping current subsidies for households and businesses to install renewable energy technology like solar panels until 2030, and insists Australia’s electricity sector will reduce emissions by 26% on 2005 levels in “the early 2020s”.

Taylor on Tuesday outlined a range of measures the government wants to implement to help lower power prices, including cajoling retailers into offering customers out-of-cycle price cuts so consumers could experience hip-pocket relief by January, ahead of the next election.

He also foreshadowed policy interventions to boost investment in new “reliable” power generation, including providing a floor price, contracts for difference, cap and floor contracts and government loans.

Morrison held out the prospect of government support for new coal-fired power stations “where they meet all the requirements” of the yet-to-be finalised mechanisms to boost investment in new electricity generation.

One of the key problems preventing private investment in new coal-fired power generation is proponents have struggled to get finance because they are unable to predict future carbon risk, particularly given Australia’s decade-long partisan standoff over emissions reduction policies.

Taylor told Guardian Australia the government would look to remove the risks stopping investment in new power generation. “I’m saying we will look at whatever risks that can’t be managed by the companies that need to be managed to get investment.

“What we are saying is the risks that government needs to absorb to get investment in reliable generation, we will look at absorbing. We need the investment.”

Asked whether he acknowledged that would expose taxpayers to risk, Taylor said: “We’ll look at the risks and we’ll seek to minimise the risks to the commonwealth.”

The concept of the government underwriting new investments in power generation in order to boost competition in the market was originally recommended by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission but with tightly defined criteria. The government is pursuing the ACCC’s general principle, but writing its own rules.

The ACCC was focused on encouraging new market participants, but the energy minister said the government could back the retrofitting of existing power plants to extend their operating life.

Asked how retrofitting an existing plant was bringing new generation into the market, he said: “It’s new generation if it would otherwise be gone, that’s the point.

“What we want is additional investment, new investment, that would mean we get capacity we wouldn’t otherwise have.”

Business is extremely wary of the government’s plans to impose price regulation in the energy sector, and about oft-repeated public threats by the government to wield a “big stick” – introducing divestiture powers to break up power companies engaging in price-gouging.

The chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, Jennifer Westacott, warned on Tuesday that “ad hoc intervention in the energy market, such as underwriting generation investment or forced divestment, is sending a signal to the world that investing in Australia comes with considerable risks”.

“In the long term this will only result in less investment in energy generation, less reliable energy and ultimately higher prices,” the BCA chief said.

Taylor told Guardian Australia he was confident the government had the power to legislate to force divestiture, and a toughening of regulatory options was required because of poor market conduct.

Asked whether he expected legal challenges from power companies in the event the government ever used the divestiture power, he said: “I can’t predict what people are going to do.”

Asked what trigger the government planned to use to break up badly behaving power companies, Taylor said it was a lack of competition and deliberate withdrawal of supply.

“The issue is, have we got enough capacity and supply in the market to meet customers’ needs and are companies in the sector thwarting that, are they deliberately taking anti-competitive action to withdraw supply from the market to drive up prices?”

Stakeholders in the energy market are also enormously frustrated with the Coalition’s chopping and changing on energy policy, which culminated in the ditching of the national energy guarantee’s 26% emissions reduction target.

Taylor insists the electricity sector will hit 26% well before 2030. Asked why the government ditched a target it was going to easily exceed, the minister said: “Labor want a higher target. We are not going to facilitate that in any shape or form.

“We are not going to load the gun for Labor to have a much higher target.”

Energy ministers will meet this Friday for the first time since the Morrison government grounded part of the Neg. Taylor wants to sound out his counterparts on whether they will agree to roll out new price regulations in the electricity market, or whether Canberra will force the change by overriding them.

The Victorian energy minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, has warned she has no intention of agreeing to anything on Friday, given the state is days away from entering caretaker mode ahead of the state election.

SOURCE 

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

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

*****************************************

Faith in science is undermined by peer-review failings

Science has been in the news ­lately. As part of the release of the latest UN Inter­govern­mental Panel on Climate Change report, the boast was made that the contents were based on the work of 91 of the top scientists and more than 6000 scientific references.

This carries on the tradition outlined by the chairman of the IPCC from 2002 to 2015, Rajendra Pachauri: “We carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry the credibility of peer-­reviewed publications, we don’t settle for anything less than that.”

The trouble for the IPCC — and for many other outlets that carry scientific findings — is that a crisis in science has been brewing for some time. Known as the replication or reproducibility crisis, the fundamental problem is that the results of many peer-reviewed ­papers and reports have not been confirmed when the experiments have been repeated or the data ­reanalysed. Eminent medical scientist John Ioannidis belled the cat as early as 2005 in a much cited technical paper, Why Most Published Research Findings are False.

He concluded that “there is ­increasing concern that most current published research findings are false … For many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” He further noted research findings were less likely to be true when “more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance”.

There is a variety of reasons for the failure of studies to be repli­cated. At one end of the spectrum is fraud and misconduct, while at the other end is manipulation and cherry-picking of data. Researchers have strong incentives to ­establish significant results while discarding inconvenient data and failed hypotheses. Authors often deliberately make it difficult for other researchers to re-do experiments or check findings.

Additionally, many referees, who are the gatekeepers in the peer review process, do a lousy job by simply reading papers and ­approving them if they agree with their findings. Peer review generally doesn’t involve re-running ­experiments, for instance.

One editor of an academic journal was so troubled by the issue of non-reproducibility that he decided to send out already published papers to new reviewers for their assessments. Apart from the fact a reasonable proportion of reviewers didn’t even recognise that the papers had ­already been published, several of the papers were actually rejected by the new reviewers. So much for the infallibility of peer review.

A serious effort was made in 2015 to replicate the findings of 100 experiments reported in three major psychology journals. Ninety-seven per cent of the original studies had reported significant results but only 36 per cent of the repli­cated studies could confirm these effects. This is a damning outcome.

More recently, a research project tried to reproduce 21 ­social ­science experiments published ­between 2010 and 2015 in the prestigious journals Science and ­Nature. Thirteen replication studies were successful, while eight others could find no effects at all.

The editors of Nature recently conducted a survey of nearly 1600 researchers. It was noted that 70 per cent of researchers had ­failed to ­reproduce other scientists’ experiments. Ninety per cent of respondents felt reproducibility in science was a significant or slight crisis. Only 3 per cent thought it wasn’t a crisis at all.

Whether economics should be regarded as a science is debatable, but a recent edition of the prominent Economic Journal ­included a reassessment of the ­results from several of its published papers. The conclusion drawn was that most of the underlying analyses were statistically underpowered, meaning no reliance could be placed on the conclusions. For the other studies that had enough power, there was a distinct tendency for the size of ­effects to be overstated.

A replication audit of 67 economics papers published in 13 prestigious journals was conducted by the US Federal Reserve and the Department of Treasury. Less than half the studies could be replicated, even with the help of the ­authors. “We assert that eco­nomics research is usually not ­replicable,” concluded the authors.

If all this sounds alarming to the layperson, it should. After all, the results of many of these peer-reviewed studies have had practical effects, warning people to alter their diets or lifestyles as well as influencing public policy initiatives.

At this stage, the disciplines most under a cloud are social ­psychology, neuroscience, chemistry, medicine (including cancer ­biology) and economics. No doubt the list will continue to grow as more replication studies are ­under­taken, although this is often difficult as such studies are generally not government funded.

One of the main elements of this crisis as identified by Ioannidis is the tendency of ­researchers to dredge data to get the most sig­nificant results. (Nobel prize-winning economist Ronald Coase famously quipped: “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.”) To this we can add the downplaying of any deficiencies in the underlying data.

In this context, it is interesting to note the findings of John McLean, an Australian who has been awarded a PhD for his audit of the HadCRUT4 data set on global temperatures used by the IPCC. There are a large number of anomalies in the data set. For ­instance, two stations tracking temperatures recorded monthly average figures above 80C. Another two stations in the Carib­bean recorded averages of 0C. A station in Romania recorded minus 45C and there is data sourced from ships that are located 80km inland.

More worrying is the use by the IPCC of a small number of global temperature recordings from the 1860s and 1870s — coverage was about one-eighth of the world at that time — as the measure of pre-industrial temperature levels. The accuracy of this assumption is highly questionable.

When the British Met Office was asked to respond to these criticisms, the answer was along the lines that there was an awareness of these weaknesses but they were few in number and the Met ­Office continuously was working to improve the data set, and this would be available to the IPCC when it next produced a report. On the face of it, this looks like a very unsatisfactory response, particularly given what we know about the crisis in science more generally.

What does the replication crisis mean for the credibility of science? Should we trust science to reliably inform public policy decision-making? Or should we conclude the scientific world is basically a club of self-serving, like-minded individuals who do not welcome dissenting views and are sloppy to boot? Should we just forget about scientific research and go with our instincts?

In my view, the preferred middle course is along the following lines. All research findings should be treated cautiously. Journals and research outlets should sign up to an open and transparent code of conduct, and published authors should be made to release all the details of underlying experiments, the data sets and computer codes. Studies that find no effects should be considered for publication.

Research funding bodies should allocate a portion of their funding to replication studies. An urgent priority in Australia is for the replication of several contentious studies about the Great Barrier Reef in which the overseas authors have never been prepared to hand over the data or the codes.

There is no doubt science has an important role to play in our ­society and economy. But as University of California computational biologist Michael Eisen warns us: “We need to get away from the notion, proven wrong on a daily basis, that peer review of any kind at any journal means that the work of science is correct.” The leadership of the IPCC should take note.

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Former Harvard U. Physicist rejects new UN IPCC report: ‘Similar claims are on par with the spam about penis enlargement’

Former Harvard University Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl on UN IPCC report: “I am no longer reading this garbage – and neither does an overwhelming majority of the people. There’s absolutely no true, useful, or original content in this stuff. Almost identical predictions have been proven incorrect hundreds of times…We’ve been bombarded by effectively equivalent garbage hundreds of times, the specifics of the newest report are completely irrelevant and uncorrelated with any events, insights, or new scientific evidence. All this fearmongering is just a random mutation of nonsense that everyone has seen many times, with some completely irrelevant and random new noise.”

“Only the people who consider themselves to be obedient soldiers of any far left-wing movement pay lip service to that junk but they don’t really believe it, either.”

“Message to all climate fearmongers: Give it up. This unscientific movement has already peaked in 2009, it has been dying a slow and painful death for about a decade, and you will be much happier if you accelerate it and make the climate hysteria die quickly and abruptly.”

“Climate fearmongers, you’ve become some of the most dishonest as well as useless people in the Earth’s history.”

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Is Renewable Energy a Fraud?

Can it be that wind and solar energy is a complete fraud? In the book "Dumb Energy," Norman Rogers makes a powerful and convincing case. His main point is that there must be backup generating plants because the delivery of electricity from wind or solar is erratic, depending on the surging or weakening of wind and sunlight. The backup plants supply kilowatt hours when the flow of green electricity falters. As a consequence one has to have two systems, the wind or solar system plus a backup system.

The backup system is usually a fossil fuel plant powered by natural gas. Natural gas plants are best suited to serve as backup plants, because a gas turbine is agile, able to increase and decrease power rapidly. Agility is needed because the variations in wind or solar can happen quickly.

The cost of generating electricity with wind or solar is nearly the same for either technology — about seven cents per kilowatt-hour. The cost of generation is mostly due to the cost of financing initial construction. Building a wind or solar facility costs about four times as much as a natural gas plant with the same average electricity output. A natural gas plant is cheaper to build, but burns about two cents worth of natural gas for each kilowatt-hour generated.

If you have to have a backup plant, why not eliminate the wind or solar and just use the backup plant? The outspoken supporters of wind and solar energy say consumption of fuel in the backup plant will be reduced whenever green electricity is generated. Burning less fuel means less carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted.

Let’s examine those alleged benefits of wind or solar.

Both wind and solar electricity costs about seven cents per kilowatt-hour but the fuel saved in the backup plants has a value of two cents per kilowatt-hour. Do the math. That’s a net loss of five cents for every kilowatt-hour of green electricity generated. Remember, the only financial benefit of wind or solar is the fuel saved in the backup plants. A wind or solar plant can’t replace a fossil fuel plant, because a fossil fuel plant has to remain in place as backup. The backup plants have to be capable of carrying the full load because sometimes there is no green electricity. Sometimes clouds set in and sometimes the wind just doesn’t blow.

The loss of five cents per kilowatt-hour represents a subsidy for wind or solar. Somebody has to cover that bill and just whom do you think that is? That’s right, taxpayers and electricity consumers’ pick-up the subsidy. The subsidy is paid for primarily by increasing rates to consumers and funneling tax-dollars to the plants.

Is wind or solar justified because it reduces CO2 emissions?

We can calculate how much it costs to use wind or solar to reduce CO2 emissions. Every kilowatt-hour of wind or solar electricity requires a five-cent subsidy. Generating that same kilowatt-hour using natural gas results in the emission of 0.8 pounds of CO2. So it costs five cents to reduce CO2 emissions by 0.8 pounds. That works out to a cost of about $140 to reduce CO2 emissions by a metric ton (2200 pounds). We use a metric ton, because that is the standard method of accounting for reductions in CO2 emissions. Reducing CO2 emissions by a metric ton is called a carbon offset. There are many companies selling carbon offsets, often for around $10 each. They create carbon offsets by such things as planting trees that absorb CO2. Why pay $140 for a carbon offset you can buy one for 10 bucks?

Utility scale wind or solar is 70 percent subsidized — five cent subsidy on a seven cent cost. Residential solar is far more expensive per kilowatt-hour due to the lack of economies of scale, while the benefit of fuel saved is the same. As a result the subsidy exceeds 90 percent. The homeowner that installs rooftop solar may actually save money depending on the economic relationship with the utility but the taxpayers and other electricity consumers pay for the homeowner’s savings. It is laughable that the advocates of rooftop solar depict their highly subsidized installations as allowing homeowners to escape the tyranny of greedy utilities. Actually, the homeowner is swindling the greedy utility, the government and the other consumers of electricity down the line.

The book has a chapter on the extensive propaganda campaigns used to plant the idea in the public mind that wind and solar are a cost saving wave of the future. Environmental non-profits and trade groups generate the propaganda, lots of it. For example they will quote the cost of wind power without revealing the extensive subsidies. Competitors to wind and solar, particularly coal and nuclear, are demonized as dangerous and polluting. Trick photography is used to make it look like coal generating plants are emitting black smoke from their smoke stacks. The meaning of the word pollution has been extended to include CO2, a colorless, odorless and harmless gas essential to plant life. CO2 is not pollution.

The book is primarily about energy, not global warming. But, there is a chapter on global warming. Global warming propaganda has been improved by replacing “global warming” with “climate change.” The reason is that the globe has not been warming significantly, undercutting the climate catastrophe theme. The promoters of climate change now blame every bad weather event on the emissions of CO2. The scientific justification for this is nil, but it makes for good propaganda.

There is a scientific establishment dependent on government money. Scientists are not high-minded and disinterested advisors. Scientific conclusions and advice are slanted to support the interests of the scientific establishment. Scientists who dispute the global warming theme are attacked and may lose their jobs. Scientific truth is discarded if it gets in the way of the money flow from Washington. Rogers provides many examples of corrupt behavior on the part of the scientific establishment.

Rogers does not claim that global warming is impossible. Rather his position is that there are so many different forces that can cause warming or cooling that it is difficult to isolate the effects of CO2 and similar “greenhouse” gases. The data on the Earth’s climate provides little support for the idea that we face a looming catastrophe.

A short chapter on nuclear power shows that nuclear power has been killed in the country where it was invented by environmental hysteria. Nuclear power thrives in Asia and some other countries. Nuclear does not emit CO2.

In contrast to the wildly exaggerated global warming catastrophe there is the danger of a real catastrophe caused by a long term collapse of the electric grid. There are about 2,000 very large transformers that are an essential part of the grid. These transformers are vulnerable to an attack by hacking or by an electromagnetic pulse. If the transformers are destroyed, the grid could be down for years with disastrous consequences for the country. An electromagnetic pulse can be created by a natural solar storm or by the detonation of a nuclear device in near outer space. This is a real danger that can be prevented by protective measures, but that danger is ignored, swamped by the constant propaganda promoting renewable energy and a global warming catastrophe. "Dumb Energy" is a book that takes direct aim at popular beliefs, or delusions, with solid arguments.

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Anti-Wind Farm Activism Is Sweeping Europe And The U.S. Could Be Next

In September, the Netherlands counterterrorism unit the NCTV identified a new group threatening public safety: anti-wind farm activists.

These activists, the NCTV claimed, had “radicalized” to the point that they represented a public risk. The picture the NCTV painted—of a group that has threatened, intimidated, and destroyed the property of politicians and developers—might sound bizarre to the casual follower of the renewable energy industry. But anti-wind farm activism is serious business, and it isn’t limited to the Netherlands.

At the December 2017 inauguration of France’s first offshore wind turbine, protesters set fire to tires in front of police in riot gear. Earlier this year, French protesters went even further, setting fire to wind turbines directly and lodging explosives in others. Across Europe, where last year countries erected about 5,000 wind turbines, the sudden emergence of the towering machines—both on land and offshore— has incited deep-seated anxiety in a small but vocal minority. Anti-wind activists are a diverse patchwork, from local residents stirred by NIMBY-ism to fishermen claiming wind farms displace fish populations to coal workers dreading a renewable energy future.

In the Netherlands, which is home to one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world (150 turbines in total) and which is planning another, even larger offshore wind farm that it will anchor to an artificial island, anti-wind farm activism reached a fever pitch this year. In April, activists distributed pamphlets calling pro-wind farm politicians Nazis and planted flags with swastikas that compare the encroachment of wind turbines to living in “occupied territory.” Farmers who have supported the construction of land-based wind turbines have discovered heavy chains, concrete-filled cans, and iron bars on their property, seemingly left by activists who want to damage their farm equipment.

This July, anti-wind farm activists in the northern regions of Drenthe and Groningen in the Netherlands issued a threatening letter to 34 companies involved in the construction of wind farms. Jan Nieboer, a leader of the anti-wind farm group Platform Storm, told the Dutch news service NOS that he has heard of people buying hand grenades and other explosives for protests.

The complaints of these activists are multitudinous. Many resent the way wind farms are located without their input. Others despise the presence of turbines along their skyline. Some fear that living near wind turbines will cut into their home values (although at least in the United States, research has shown no effect).

Another sore spot is that the money made from wind farms is rarely shared with the local community. “Communities are almost always more supportive of wind projects when the financial benefits are distributed widely among locals residents, rather than flowing to outside investors,” Bob Darrow, a PhD candidate at UMass Amherst who studies the politics of renewable energy, told Earther.

But, at least for onshore wind farms, the most galvanizing fears revolve around rumours that wind turbines punish the health of local residents. Activists claim that the low noise emitted by turbines triggers everything from persistent headaches to behavioural changes in animals in what they term “wind turbine syndrome,” a concept that scientists have largely rejected.

A 2013 analysis from researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia concluded that although noise from wind turbines can result in “annoyance” and potentially “poorer sleep quality” among residents, “there is no consistent evidence” tying that noise to many of the self-reported health effects. In a 2014 paper, King’s College psychology professors attributed “wind turbine syndrome” to the “nocebo effect”—a psychological phenomenon in which the expectation of negative health outcomes becomes self-fulfilling—and to anxiety about technological encroachment.

“There is also a lot of ‘fake news’ circulating about wind power,” said Darrow. “Often this misinformation is intentionally spread by groups with a vested interest in slowing the adoption of renewable energy.”

One prominent vessel for those false claims is U.S. President Donald Trump. During an August 2018 rally in Indiana, he insisted that people living near wind farms “go crazy after a couple of years,” before adding that wind turbines “kill so many birds” and that resisters “can blow up the windmills” if they need to.

Whether Trump’s rhetoric has stoked more wind energy resistance on the American right is unclear. But even land-based wind, which is a booming industry across parts of the midwestern U.S. and Great Plains, struggles against backlash from rural communities that pushed over 120 local governments to scrap or restrict turbines from 2015 to 2017. Offshore wind, meanwhile, has long struggled to gain a toehold thanks to fierce local opposition.

In Cape Cod, a 2001 attempt to launch what would have been the U.S.’s first offshore wind farm was abandoned in December 2017 after a decade of lawsuits from local residents concerned about disrupting fishing patterns and coastal views. Rhode Island’s 6-turbine Block Island Wind Farm, which opened in December 2016 after angry locals likened it to “visual pollution,” now holds the title of the first U.S. offshore wind farm.

Recently, U.S. states like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and New York have unveiled ambitious plans to build offshore wind farms that will power hundreds of thousands of homes within the next decade. But UMass professor Erin Baker, who has written about the rise of offshore wind farms, doubts that these projects will see opposition on the scale of Europe because most U.S. offshore wind farms will be located 40km or more from the coast. That distance “will not get the general public too interested,” Baker told Earther. Fears about “wind turbine syndrome” tend to dissipate when a wind farm is far offshore, and 40km is roughly the distance where wind farms become invisible from the shore, pre-empting complaints of visual pollution.

What’s more, only a small subset of the U.S. population actually opposes wind farm development. Just a quarter of residents living within half a mile of a wind farm have a “ negative” or “very negative” view of wind farms, while three-quarters take a neutral or positive view, according to a poll of Americans from researchers at the California-based Berkeley Lab. And most Americans, including roughly 8 in 10 Republicans, support expanding wind and solar energy, according to a May 2018 Pew poll.

In Europe too, the number of people who oppose wind farms is quite small. In the Dutch region of Groningen, where wind farm opposition is at its strongest, only 2 per cent of people have reported experiencing “a form of hinder in their everyday life by windmills,” according to statistics that University of Groningen researcher Tom Postmes shared with Earther. In Denmark, where wind turbines accounted for an unprecedented 43.4 per cent of the nation’s electricity last year, at least 8 in 10 people support their construction.

Still, the anti-wind minority remains an exceptionally vocal one. Especially for onshore wind farms, resistance in Denmark has grown so intense that it has become nearly impossible for some local governments to approve turbines, according to Darrow. “In many municipalities, officials are hesitant to support wind projects for fear of the public backlash such proposals inevitably generate,” he said.

One strategy to quell that backlash is for wind energy proponents to work more closely with nearby communities about where to site wind farms so that they will be the least disruptive. Denmark has seen some success engaging with fishermen to build offshore wind farms away from prime fishing territory, for instance.

But if there’s one thing proponents of wind energy have learned in Europe, Darrow said, it’s “not to get overconfident about the public supporting their projects.” And while U.S. opposition hasn’t reached the kind of fever pitch that it has across the Atlantic, it seems unlikely that the renewable energy source will continue to spread without a few fights.

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How the Supreme Court Could Now End the Climate Wars

Many climate skeptics were hopeful that the election of Donald Trump would end the climate wars in the US on favorable terms. Many of us assumed that this would be done by persuading EPA to overturn the greenhouse gas Endangerment Finding (EF). But so far all that has happened is that a number of Obama EPA climate regulations have been put on hold or started down the road towards repeal. If the Democrats should win the Presidency, all these changes could be undone fairly rapidly.

To start the process of EF reconsideration, a number of petitions have been sent to EPA by skeptic groups requesting that EPA reconsider the EF. Unfortunately, EPA has not announced such a reconsideration. I believe this is still the best overall strategy since if successful it would finish off climate alarmism as an option on a fairly permanent basis if upheld by the Supreme Court, which now appears possible. This is the strongest approach, and is still the preferred approach.

A second approach which should now be a possibility would be for the Court to overturn Massachusetts vs. EPA by finding that EPA does not have authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act (CAA). Mass. vs. EPA was decided by only one vote at the Court, including the justice that will  be replaced by Brett Kavanaugh. With such a ruling, the climate alarmists would have to persuade Congress to change the CAA to explicitly allow EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. This appears unlikely.

The  confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh  opens up a third possible approach, however, of getting the Supreme Court to declare the Obama Clean Power Plan (CPP) illegal by exceeding the powers granted by Congress to EPA under the CAA. By ruling that EPA cannot impose limitations on emissions beyond “the fence” of polluters, the Supreme Court could effectively prevent the legal cornerstone of the Obama EPA climate regulations from becoming a regulation. The action of the Supreme Court in staying the CPP has had a similar effect in the near term but leaves the way open for a reconsideration by a future Democratic administration.

Or what might be best is to try to get the Court to endorse all of these viewpoints, which are arranged in decreasing order of effectiveness. That would effectively prevent even a future possible Democratic administration from reviving the Obama EPA’s attempt to impose major decarbonization as the law of the land through regulations and the courts. The great danger is not that the Trump Administration will support decarbonization but that a new Democratic Administration would do so. But if the views above should be endorsed by the Court, that would be very difficult for many years.

The time has come to nail down the death of climate alarmism in terms of achieving its climate goals through regulations and the courts by using the now stronger conservative majority.

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NASA Sees Climate Cooling Trend Thanks to Low Sun Activity

The climate alarmists just can’t catch a break. NASA is reporting that the sun is entering one of the deepest Solar Minima of the Space Age; and Earth’s atmosphere is responding in kind.

So, start pumping out that CO2, everyone. We’re going to need all the greenhouse gases we can get.

“We see a cooling trend,” said Martin Mlynczak of NASA’s Langley Research Center. “High above Earth’s surface, near the edge of space, our atmosphere is losing heat energy. If current trends continue, it could soon set a Space Age record for cold.”

The new data is coming from NASA’s Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry or SABER instrument, which is onboard the space agency’s Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite. SABER monitors infrared radiation from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances that play a vital role in the energy output of our thermosphere, the very top level of our atmosphere.

“The thermosphere always cools off during Solar Minimum. It’s one of the most important ways the solar cycle affects our planet,” said Mlynczak, who is the associate principal investigator for SABER.

Who knew that that big yellow ball of light in the sky had such a big influence on our climate?

There’s a bit of good news in all of this. When the thermosphere cools, it literally shrinks, therefore reducing aerodynamic drag on satellites in low Earth orbit. In effect, the shrinking thermosphere increases a satellite’s lifetime.

But that appears to be where the good news ends, unless you prefer cold weather and increased space junk. “The bad news,” according to Dr. Tony Phillips, editor of spaceweather.com, is: “It also delays the natural decay of space junk, resulting in a more cluttered environment around Earth.”

Mlynczak and his colleagues have created the Thermosphere Climate Index (TCI), which measures how much NO is dumped from the Thermosphere into outer space. During Solar Maximum the TCI number is very high. At times of Solar Minimum, TCI is low.

“Right now, (TCI) is very low indeed,” said Mlynczak. “SABER is currently measuring 33 billion Watts of infrared power from NO. That’s ten times smaller than we see during more active phases of the solar cycle."

SABER has been in orbit for only 17 years, but Mlynczak and the scientists at NASA’s Langley Research Center have been able to recreate TCI measurements back to the 1940s. “SABER taught us how to do this by revealing how TCI depends on other variables such as geomagnetic activity and the sun’s UV output — things that have been measured for decades,” said Mlynczak.

In fact, TCI numbers now, in the closing months of 2018, are very close to setting record lows since measurements began. “We’re not quite there yet,” Mlynczak reports. “but it could happen in a matter of months.”

The new NASA findings are in line with studies released by UC-San Diego and Northumbria University in Great Britain last year, both of which predict a Grand Solar Minimum in coming decades due to low sunspot activity. Both studies predicted sun activity similar to the Maunder Minimum of the mid-17th to early 18th centuries, which coincided to a time known as the Little Ice Age, during which temperatures were much lower than those of today.

If all of this seems as if NASA is contradicting itself, you’re right — sort of. After all, NASA also reported last week that Arctic sea ice was at its sixth lowest level since measuring began. Isn’t that a sure sign of global warming?

All any of this “proves” is that we have, at best, a cursory understanding of Earth’s incredibly complex climate system. So when mainstream media and carbon-credit salesman Al Gore breathlessly warn you that we must do something about climate change, it’s all right to step back, take a deep breath, and realize that we don’t have the knowledge, skill or resources to have much effect on the Earth’s climate. God — and that big yellow ball of light in the sky — have much more impact on our climate than we ever could.

SOURCE




China Is Expected to Phase Out Renewable Subsidies, Continue to Build Coal Plants

China’s energy regulator indicated the country will speed up efforts to ensure its wind and solar power can compete without subsidies and achieve “grid price parity” with traditional energy sources. China is encouraging renewable manufacturers and developers to drive down costs through technological innovations and economies of scale in order to phase out power generation subsidies, which have become an increasing burden on the state.

China owes about 120 billion yuan ($17.5 billion) in subsidies to solar plants despite cutting its subsidies to solar power and capping new capacity at 30 gigawatts this year—down from a 53 gigawatts in 2017—because the government is concerned about overcapacity and a growing subsidy backlog.

China’s National Energy Administration issued the draft guidelines on September 13, 2018, indicating that some regions with cost and market advantages had “basically achieved price parity” with clean coal-fired power and no longer required subsidies, and that other regions should learn from their experiences. The draft guidelines urged transmission grid companies to provide more support for subsidy-free projects and ensure they have the capacity to distribute all the power generated by wind and solar plants. Currently, China is soliciting feedback from the industry and has not given a date for implementation of the guidelines.

Coal Construction Continues

While China is putting the brakes on its renewables, it has restarted coal-fired projects that had been put on hold. Approximately 46.7 gigawatts of new and restarted coal-fired power construction has been spotted through satellite imagery. The coal-fired power plants are either already generating power or will soon be operational, increasing China’s coal-fired power capacity by 4 percent.

Coal consumption in China increased 3.1 percent in the first half of 2018 compared with the same period last year due primarily to coal-fired generation. Electricity consumption increased 9.4 percent during that period. A rebound in industrial demand for electricity and electric power shortages during the summer in some regions have made policy-makers more accepting of overcapacity from demand-responsive generation. Economic data for the first half of 2018 indicate that China’s power demand is rebounding.

Despite the change in coal-fired plant construction, overcapacity is still a problem in China. Utilization rates for coal-fired plants recovered slightly from a 50-year low in 2016, but have not even returned to 2015 levels. About half of the country’s coal-fired power plants were running at a loss in the first six months of this year due to high coal prices. Because of capacity cuts in its domestic mining sector, China’s coal imports increased, driving global prices for thermal coal that is used to generate electricity.

Despite China’s push to ensure all solar and wind production is distributed by the grid, China’s thermal electricity production (coal, natural gas, oil, and biomass) is increasing much faster than its renewable (wind and solar) electricity production. In the second quarter of 2018, wind and solar generation increased by 51 terawatt hours while thermal electricity production increased by 176.9 terawatt hours—about 3.5 times as much. Together wind and solar power represented just 21 percent of the increased power generation in the second quarter, while thermal power provided 72 percent.

Conclusion

China is still counting on coal to keep the lights on and keep its industrialization booming. While it has invested heavily in subsidizing its solar power industry, it realizes it cannot continue with the massive subsidies and has issued draft guidelines to phase them out. Despite having overcapacity and underutilized plants, it is continuing to construct coal-fired plants to ensure that power is available throughout the country and throughout the day.

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The “No-Growth” Prescription for Misery

A growing number of academics are claiming that economic growth must stop because the planet is crossing environmental boundaries, and inequality between humans is increasing. They are wrong on both counts, and their agenda is a recipe for keeping poor people poor

LONDON – From their ivory towers, nearly 240 academics have declared that economic growth is bad for Europe and the planet. In two months, they and global supporters of the “no-growth economy” have held conferences in Mexico City, Malmö, and Brussels.

Their efforts herald a return to an earlier, thoroughly debunked form of alarmist environmentalism that is detached from reality and disdainful of billions of the world’s people.

The campaigners claim we must stop economic growth because the planet is crossing environmental boundaries, and inequality between humans is increasing.

But for the most important environmental issues, economic growth has solved problems, not created them. The cleanest places are not the poorest countries, but the richer economies that have cleaned up their act. As societies become richer, individuals can afford to stop worrying about food and sanitation, and to start worrying about the environment.

Indoor air pollution is the world’s biggest environmental killer, claiming lives because poor people burn dung and wood for cooking and heating. As societies get richer, people can afford cleaner technology. In 1990, indoor air pollution caused more than 8% of deaths; in 2016 it was 4.7%. Each year 1.2 million fewer people die from indoor air pollution, despite an increase in population.

Outdoor air pollution worsens as societies first leave extreme poverty. But then it declines markedly as growth, technological change, and public attitudes affect policies and regulations. In China, for example, sulphur dioxide emissions peaked in 2006 and have been declining since.

The world’s forests tell a similar story. For most of human history, trees were decimated wherever humans settled. Higher agricultural yields and changing attitudes have meant rich countries are increasingly preserving forests and reforesting.

Moreover, economic growth delivers improved access to all the vital things that most people on the planet demand or want: health, education, security, and mobility.  Both within and between countries, life satisfaction increases with higher incomes. A study in Europe asking whether prosperity enhanced quality of life found that, “Europeans’ life-quality is better in wealthier societies.”

The no-growth campaigners claim that inequality is at the heart of their concern, but they studiously ignore the vast majority of the planet. The US has experienced a clear increase in inequality: the top 1% earned 18% of income in 1913; this fell to 10.4% in 1976, and returned to 20% in 2014. But the experience is markedly different in most of the world, including continental Europe and Japan, where the top 1% earn about half what they did 100 years ago. Globally, inequality has been declining, because many more people in the developing world have emerged from poverty.

Income is not the only indicator of inequality that is dropping. Half of all welfare gains from 1960 to 2000 come from us living longer, healthier lives. In the past half-century, the gap in life expectancy between the world’s wealthiest and poorest countries has narrowed from 28 to 19 years. As a result, lifespan inequality is lower than it has been for two centuries.

Global trade and economic growth have transformed lives on a scale that was once unimaginable. Two centuries ago, around 94% of the planet was impoverished. In 2015, the World Bank found that for the first time ever, less than 10% of the world’s population was living in extreme poverty. Between 1990 and today, the number of people living in extreme poverty fell by more than one billion.

The latter-day Malthusians are opposed to extending these tremendous benefits to more of the world because they believe that global warming will be so bad that it justifies stopping growth. This contradicts the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which says, “for most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers” like changes in population, age, income, and technology.

According to the IPCC, the total impact of climate change amounts to about 0% of GDP now, and in 2100 will cost 2-4% of GDP. That’s a problem, but not one that remotely justifies blocking people’s opportunity to lift themselves out of poverty.

The solution to climate change – like so many other challenges – will come from technology. We need to work far harder to make green energy cheaper and more efficient than fossil fuels, so we can continue to lift millions from poverty without emitting carbon dioxide.

With blinkered analysis and misplaced concern, the academics essentially say that to reduce global warming slightly, we should end growth that can lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, avoid millions of air pollution deaths, and give billions the opportunity of a better life through improved health care, shelter, education, and income.

There is something deeply disturbing about academics’ telling others to forgo the benefits they have enjoyed. What the world really needs is far more growth and far less hypocrisy.

SOURCE






Fight tuberculosis, not climate change, to save lives

A tiny fraction of the resources wasted on combating climate change could eradicate tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease

BJORN LOMBORG

Global leaders recently swept into New York for the UN General Assembly, trailed by thousands of media, activists and protesters. During the high-level get-together, two very different meetings held at exactly the same time revealed much about their priorities — and their flawed approach to the planet’s biggest problems.

At a glittering gala event, the heads of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Google and the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, joined leaders from Denmark, France, New Zealand and beyond to pledge support for the acceleration of the implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

This is a very poor answer to climate change: even Al Gore’s climate adviser, Jim Hansen, now says it is “wishful thinking” that will increase emissions.

The big problem with the Paris treaty is that countries are expensively trying to cut relatively small amounts of carbon dioxide by subsidising today’s inefficient alternative energy. This doesn’t tackle the underlying problem that green energy sources are far from ready to replace fossil fuels: wind and solar energy meet only 0.8 per cent of our energy needs yet require $US150 billion ($212bn) in subsidies.

The best individual and collectively peer-reviewed economic models show implementing the agreement will cost $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion every year from 2030 by increasing energy costs and thereby slightly slowing GDP growth. Yet this will do almost nothing to solve climate change. It is widely accepted by climate scientists that keeping temperature rises below 2C requires a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to almost 6000 gigatonnes of CO2. The UN organiser of the Paris Agreement estimates that if every country makes every single promised carbon cut between 2016 and 2030, emissions will be cut by the equivalent of 56Gt of CO2 by 2030. Paris leaves 99 per cent of the problem in place.

A far more effective answer to global warming would be to ramp up research and development investments into green energy to outcompete fossil fuels, so all countries can switch without abandoning poverty-eradicating growth.

Across town from the climate event, the first UN leaders’ meeting on tuberculosis made a far smaller splash. Only 16 heads of government showed up, with none from Europe or North America, and no leaders from Silicon Valley or Wall Street.

Public health campaigners were requesting an increase of $US5.4bn a year for the fight against TB, the globe’s biggest infectious disease killer. The disease receives only 4.6 per cent of health development spending from rich countries.

For more than a decade, hundreds of top economists and seven Nobel laureates have undertaken cost-benefit analysis for the Copenhagen Consensus Centre to evaluate solutions to the world’s biggest challenges. Globally and at a national level, this consistently shows testing for and treating TB creates phenomenal returns to society.

TB is especially insidious because it hits mostly young adults, just as they establish families and careers. Recent CCC research looking at several states in India, which has the highest level of TB, found that improving detection and treatment generated huge benefits for society. In monetary terms, every dollar spent can generate a return to society worth more than $US100.

The difference is stark. The World Health Organisation estimates that since the 1970s climate change has claimed about 140,000 lives each year, rising to about 250,000 towards the middle of the century. The Paris response will cost the planet more than $US1 trillion annually, avoiding almost none of these deaths. At an annual cost of one-half of one-hundredth of the cost of Paris, we could avoid the deaths of more than a million people each year from TB.

The two meetings show how global priorities are askew. It shouldn’t be a struggle to get donor attention for challenges such as TB (or the many other health, societal and environmental problems that weren’t highlighted by the UN). This is especially disturbing when money and political capital are being poured into a flawed response to climate change by world leaders who — unlike Gore’s climate adviser — refuse to admit the obvious.

The blinkered focus is affecting development spending for the world’s poorest. The OECD estimates that more than $30bn of country-to-country aid — more than one-fifth — is climate related. That is more than three times what would be needed to eradicate the world’s worst infectious disease. Yet international organisations spend another $US19bn on climate-related aid.

This is not what the world’s poor want. Nearly 10 million people were asked their policy priorities. Education and better healthcare were the clear answers, both globally and from the world’s most destitute. At the bottom of the list came climate policies. We should tackle climate change effectively through green energy R&D. That would leave more attention and money for other important issues, from stopping air pollution and reducing malnutrition to ending child marriage — and for finally eradicating the world’s biggest infectious disease killer.

SOURCE






Oil Prices Could Fall Further on Rising U.S. Supplies, OPEC Report Says

Rising crude oil inventories and increased output in the U.S. could push oil prices down in the coming weeks, an internal OPEC report said Thursday.

A coming “seasonal scale back in refinery demand...could result in oil stock builds,” said an internal market report, which was circulated late Thursday within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The buildup, “amid the upward trend in US crude oil production, could be a bearish factor for oil prices in the coming few weeks," the report said.

OPEC’s assessment came as Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, fell below the $80-a-barrel threshold for the first time in nearly a month on Thursday, after data showed an unexpected rise in U.S. inventories.

Late Thursday afternoon, light, sweet crude for November delivery was 0.9% lower at $69.14 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude was 0.3% lower at $79.78 a barrel.

At a meeting last month, the cartel and its allies debated how much they should open up their spigots to make up for Iranian oil exports, which will fall under a U.S. ban next month.

But while Saudi Arabia and Russia have boosted output, some OPEC officials are worried about a global oil surplus.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration said Monday it expects American tight-oil production to rise by 98,000 barrels a day from October to November.

The planned maintenance of Russian refineries could hit oil prices charged by Moscow and its competitors in Europe in particular, the OPEC report said.

Meanwhile, revisions to global economic forecasts by the International Monetary Fund, fueled by trade disputes between the U.S. and its partners, “cast more uncertainty over oil demand growth in 2019,” the document said.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration on Wednesday reported crude oil stockpiles had risen by 6.5 million barrels last week, to stand at 416.4 million barrels.

Earlier in October, Brent breached the $85-a-barrel level for the first time in roughly four years.  But prices have come under pressure in the past week, amid global stock market turmoil and signs of weakening oil demand.

SOURCE

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

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

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It will take the Earth 3 million years to recover from the species going extinct in the near future

This is utter nonsense.  To make such a claim, you have to have a firm count of how many species there already are plus an equally firm count of the number of species that existed on at least one occasion in the past.  No such counts exist.  So it is all just guessing.

And in any case extinctions have always happened, sometimes on a massive scale.  On some estimates, 95% of all the species that have ever lived on earth are now extinct. We don't grieve that the once ubiquitous trilobites are no more so it would seem normal to accept the reality of death and extinction. But given the modern-day efforts at nature conservation, it is entirely open to us to conclude that extinctions actually have slowed down in the modern era.  LOL

Note that a lot of the extinctions we know about were from the pre-modern or early modern era, not the product of 20th and 21st century civilization:  The mammoth, the dodo and the passenger pigeon, for instance.  And the extinction of the Australian megafauna appears to date from the arrival of Aborigines in Australia, who were pretty good hunters of slow animals -- and that was about 50,000 years ago -- so definitely not the fault of modern man

And note the implicit assumption that the non-extinction of all animals is good.  Why is it good?  I think we could make a case that it does not matter at all -- excerpt perhaps for sentimental reasons.  The possibility that some one or other of the existing animals might do us some unknown good in the future would have to be vanishingly small at this stage of our knowledge.  We don't allow for all the possibilities in our lives -- or else we would never do anything


Humans will cause so many mammal species to go extinct in the next 50 years that the planet's evolutionary diversity won't recover for 3 to 5 million years, a team of researchers has found.

The Earth may be entering its sixth mass extinction: an era in which the planet's environments change so much that most animal and plant species die out. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature predicts that 99.9% of critically endangered species and 67% of endangered species will be lost within the next 100 years.

The five other times a mass extinction has occurred over the past 450 million years, natural disasters were to blame. But now, human activity is killing mammal species.

In a study published Monday in the journal PNAS, scientists from Aarhus University in Denmark calculated how fast extinctions are happening, and how long it would take for evolution to bring Earth back to the level of biodiversity it currently has.

The scientists concluded that in a best-case scenario, nature will need 3-5 million years to get back to the level of biodiversity we have on Earth today. Returning to the state Earth's animal kingdom was in before modern humans evolved would take 5-7 million years.

Evolution can't keep up

Evolution is the planet's defense mechanism against the loss of biodiversity. As habitats and climates change, species that can't survive die, and new species slowly emerge. But it takes a long time for new species to fill the gaps — and that process is far slower than the rate at which humans are causing mammals to go extinct.

For their calculations, the Aarhus University researchers used a database containing existing mammal species and mammals that already went extinct as humans spread across the planet. They combined that data with information about extinctions expected to come in the next 50 years, and used advanced simulations of evolution to predict how long recovery would take.

Their estimates are based on an optimistic assumption that people will eventually stop ruining habitats and causing species to die out, and the extinction rate will go back down. But even in that best-case scenario, the timeline depends on how quickly mammals start recovering. If the extinction rate doesn't start falling for another 20-100 years, more species will likely disappear, causing greater diversity loss, the study said.

The researchers noted that in their model, certain species were given more importance than others. Matt Davis, a paleontologist at Aarhus University who led the study, cited the shrew as an example. There are hundreds of species of shrew, so if one or two go extinct, that would not kill off all shrews on Earth.

But there were only four species of sabre-toothed tigers on the planet. So when they all went extinct, many years of evolutionary history disappeared with them.

"Large mammals, or megafauna, such as giant sloths and sabre-toothed tigers, which became extinct about 10,000 years ago, were highly evolutionarily distinct," Davis said in a press release. "Since they had few close relatives, their extinctions meant that entire branches of Earth's evolutionary tree were chopped off."

Today, other large animals like the black rhino are facing extinction. Asian elephants' chance of making it to the 22nd century is less than 33%, the study found. These elephants are one of only two remaining species from a group of mammals that once included mastodons and mammoths.

"We now live in a world that is becoming increasingly impoverished of large wild mammalian species," Jens-Christian Svenning, an Aarhus University professor who researches megafauna, said in the press release. "The few remaining giants, such as rhinos and elephants, are in danger of being wiped out very rapidly."

He noted that the planet no longer boasts giant beavers, giant deer, or giant armadillos.

Though the researchers' findings are dire, the scientists said their work could be used to figure out which endangered species are evolutionarily unique, which might help conservationists decide where to focus their efforts to prevent the most devastating extinctions.

SOURCE





Lady big eyes compares global warming to Nazism

Democratic socialist congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to address global warming the same way America defeated the Nazis during World War II.

Speaking at a campaign event on Friday, Ocasio-Cortez made the case that, since Nazi Germany and global warming are both “existential threats,” the same tactics used against one should be levied against the other.

“So, when we talk about existential threats,” said Ocasio Cortez, “the last time we had a really major existential threat in this country was around World War II. So, we’ve been here before, and we have a blueprint of what we did before. None of these things are new ideas.”

Thunberg's recent actions have been celebrated by climate activists including 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, who highlighted the march and thanked the teen for her leadership in a tweet on Saturday:

SOURCE

So stopping less than 2 degrees of warming is worth 60 million dead?  That's what it took to beat Nazism.  But Greenies hate people anyway so that might not be a problem to them





Warmists now relying on kiddy wisdom



Addressing some 10,000 people in Helsinki on Saturday at what some campaigners are calling Finland's largest ever climate demonstration, 15-year-old Greta Thunberg urged marchers to fight for the major systemic changes that experts have said are necessary to limit greenhouse gas emissions and avert a looming climate catastrophe.

"Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground, so we can't save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to change. Everything needs to change and it has to start today," declared the Swedish teenager, who traveled to the capital city of her nation's Nordic neighbor for Saturday's massive march.

"A lot of people say that Sweden or Finland are just small countries and that it doesn't matter what we do," Thunberg added. "But I think that if a few children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school for a few weeks, imagine what we could do together if we wanted to."

Thunberg garnered international media attention when, ahead of Sweden's September election, she refused to attend school and instead protested outside the Swedish parliament, handing out educational pamphlets to passersby. Now that the election has passed, the self-described "climate radical" and others who have joined the strike return to school for four days each week but still protest on Fridays.

SOURCE






Consumers will suffer the hangover from Trump's ethanol binge

President Trump announced earlier this week that he intends to take actions to increase the mandate to add ethanol to fuels. Currently, refineries producing transportation fuel must demonstrate each year that they have blended certain volumes of renewable fuel into gasoline or diesel, or else acquire expensive credits from others who do so.

The Trump administration’s action, which would require formal rulemaking, would direct the EPA to allow gasoline with 15 percent ethanol to be distributed year-round, reversing the current ban during summer months.

That action might be politically savvy, to make good on a campaign promise and to ease the impact of foreign tariffs on U.S. corn farmers by artificially raising demand for corn. (In this country, ethanol is obtained largely by fermenting corn.)

But it has little else to recommend it.

Politics aside, any defense of U.S. ethanol policy must embrace a series of fallacies which include: 1.) ethanol produced from corn makes the U.S. less dependent on fossil fuels, 2.) ethanol lowers the price of gasoline, 3.) an increase in the percentage of ethanol blended into gasoline boosts the overall supply of gasoline, and 4.) ethanol is environmentally-friendly and lowers global carbon dioxide emissions.

Not one of these claims is true. Yet, the ethanol lobby continues to promote them, and many politicians and lobby groups seem intoxicated by them.

Politicians like to say that ethanol is environmentally-friendly, but these claims must be put into perspective. Although corn is a renewable resource, it has a far lower yield relative to the energy used to produce it than does ethanol from sugar cane. Moreover, ethanol yields about 33 percent less energy per gallon than gasoline, so mileage drops off significantly when it is added. Motorists, who buy fuel in order to travel distances, are thus over-charged for every gallon of blended fuel. Fuel costs for Americans are artificially inflated due to the lower energy content of ethanol and the high costs faced by fuel companies trying to comply with ill-conceived fuel regulations.

The truth is that the federal Renewable Fuel Standard, which mandates ethanol blends in the first place, has failed miserably in achieving any of its stated goals.

Lower-cost biomass ethanol — for example, from rice straw (a byproduct of harvesting rice) or switchgrass — would make far more environmental sense, but large volumes of ethanol from biomass will not be commercially viable for many years. Moreover, production will be delayed by government policies that specifically encourage corn-based ethanol by employing subsidies.

American legislators and policymakers seem oblivious to the scientific and economic realities of corn ethanol production. Brazil and other major sugar cane-producing nations enjoy significant advantages over the U.S. in producing ethanol, including ample agricultural land, warm climates amenable to vast plantations, and on-site distilleries that can process cane immediately after harvest.

Thus, in the absence of cost-effective, domestically-available sources for producing ethanol, rather than using corn, it would make far more sense to import ethanol from Brazil and other countries that can produce it efficiently.

But, of course, this would defeat the purpose of the policy, which is actually meant to be a sop to Midwestern farmers.

The Renewable Fuels Association, a trade group, applauds the administration’s proposed action, because it creates increased demand for its flagship product. Several years ago, the organization opposed the EPA’s proposed lowering of the Renewable Fuel Standard when severe drought boosted corn prices. A spokesman made this particularly ironic comment: “Ultimately, the market will sort out any imbalances in supply and demand.” But the association had evinced little confidence in the forces of supply and demand when they convinced Congress to mandate the diversion of 38 percent of the corn supply to ethanol production.

This intense lobbying reminds us of this observation by 18th-century philosopher and economist Adam Smith: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Politicians may be drunk with the prospect of corn-derived ethanol, but it is consumers who will ultimately suffer the hangover.

SOURCE





Australia's climate policy not changing: treasurer

Climate change has been touted as an important contribution to the Liberals' loss in Wentworth but Josh Frydenberg says the coalition won't shift its policy.

Not even being on track for a minority government will force the coalition into a shift in thinking on climate change, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has confirmed.

Independent Kerryn Phelps is headed for victory in the Wentworth by-election after a historic swing of more than 20 per cent against the Liberal Party.

The expected result will see the coalition with 75 seats in the House of Representatives - one short of a majority - with Labor holding 69.

The Australia Institute's exit polling shows climate change and replacing coal with renewable energy was the biggest issue motivating voters in Wentworth.

The research shows 77 per cent of voters said it influenced their vote, with one-third stating it was the most important issue when heading to the polling booth on Saturday.

While Mr Frydenberg conceded climate change was important to the people of Wentworth, he believed other issues were at play.

He said the predicted defeat for candidate Dave Sharma was more about the Liberal Party's ditching of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who had been the local member since 2004.

"The message from the voters of Wentworth is you've been punished for the events of recent weeks with the leadership," Mr Frydenberg told Sky News on Sunday.

Mr Frydenberg went on to tell reporters on Sunday the government was on track to meet emissions targets. "What we will not do is increase people's power bills as a result of these policies," Mr Frydenberg said.

"That is very different to Bill Shorten. He has a 50 per cent renewable energy target and a 45 per cent emissions reduction target. That spells higher power bills for Australians."

Dr Phelps said the public was tired of the government's "self-interest" and important issues must be kept on the agenda. "They want to start to see some movement on action on climate change," Dr Phelps said.

Senior Labor MP Tony Burke said former prime minister Tony Abbott was still in charge of the coalition's policies. "The hard-right agenda has made this government incapable of dealing with issues like climate change and people have had enough of it," Mr Burke told ABC TV on Sunday.

Centre Alliance's Rebekha Sharkie said the message from the public on climate change was clear. "A couple of critical issues in the Wentworth by-election and people raise with me every day in Mayo is ensuring we have climate change action in the parliament," Ms Sharkie told ABC TV on Sunday.

SOURCE

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

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

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