Another Crack in the Climate Censorship Wall

In 'Reading Seawater," a review essay in the December 2019 issue of the science journal Inference, Lawrence University geosciences professor Marcia Bjornerud wrote that changes in ocean chemistry from carbon dioxide emissions damage shell health and may be leading to mass extinctions. Professor Bjornerud also argued that as deep oceans remove CO2 from the surface today, they "regulate" the climate.

Ecologist Patrick Moore, the chair of the CO2 Coalition, submitted a footnoted response to Inference disputing Professor Bjornerud's conclusions. In another sign of a reopening of debate in mainstream journals on claims of CO2-driven climate catastrophe, Inference printed the response in its May 2020 issue. This spring, the Chronicle of Philanthropy also printed an exchange on such claims.  However, daily news sources such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg, and CNN continue to refuse to print critiques of their climate narrative. 

Dr. Moore's response, below, is followed by the relevant excerpts from the Bjornerud article. The CO2 Coalition will shortly be publishing a more detailed White Paper on this topic, Ocean Health: Is there an 'Acidification' problem? This summary of decades of research on CO2 and ocean health was prepared by biologist Jim Steele, long-term director of San Francisco State University's Sierra Nevada research campus.

Here is Dr. Moore's letter to Inference, published May 4, 2020:

To the editors:

Marcia Bjornerud has written a tour de force on the history and chemistry of the oceans. She ties many aspects of the world's seas together in a thoughtful narrative. There are, however, a few subjects on which I believe some comments are needed.

Bjornerud asserts that "leakage of carbon from the surface into the deeper ocean is, in fact, essential for climate regulation" and that "this process, known as the carbon pump, has partly offset anthropogenic increases in CO2 arising from the combustion of fossil fuels." No evidence can be found in the geological record going back 500 million years that the oceans have regulated the climate by absorbing CO2. During this period, there is little correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperature. There is no support for a causal relationship.

During this 500-million-year history, atmospheric CO2 has declined from at least 6,000 parts per million (ppm) to 180 ppm. It reached its lowest level during the last major glaciation, 20,000 years ago. Far more CO2 has been sequestered into sediments as fossil fuels and carbonate rocks, such as limestone, than has been released back to the atmosphere. If this process had continued without anthropogenic emissions, CO2 would eventually have been reduced to lower than 150 ppm, leading to the eventual death of plant life. In this light, emissions can be seen as inadvertently rescuing life on earth from an early demise due to continued sequestration of an essential ingredient for all life.1

Even at the present 415 ppm, of which 135 ppm are due to industrial emissions, CO2 is still a limiting factor for the growth of most plants, including farm crops and trees. The anthropogenic increase in CO2 has raised crop production globally by 15 to 30 percent since 1900. Field experiments show that the expected increase in the next 100 years will have an even greater impact.2 It is standard procedure for commercial greenhouse growers to elevate CO2 to 800­-1200 ppm, increasing growth and yield 20-50 percent.3

Bjornerud also asserts that "excess CO2 in seawater can eat away at the shells of the tiny calcitic organisms that help to sequester carbon in mineral form." She refers to the contention that higher CO2 levels in seawater will result in ocean acidification that harms aquatic species, especially those that produce calcium carbonate from CO2 and calcium to build protective shells. There is no evidence to support this hypothesis. Marine and freshwater calcifying species survive in a wide variety of pH values, including freshwater species of clams, mussels, and crayfish that calcify in the acidic range at pH 6 and lower.4

There is no conceivable atmospheric CO2 concentration that will result in offshore ocean pH becoming lower than an alkaline 7.5, let alone neutral 7.0, in the foreseeable future.5 Many of the calcifying species evolved when atmospheric CO2 was 4,000 ppm or higher. These include the microscopic phytoplankton coccolithophores, the zooplankton foraminifera, the molluscs, marine arthropods, and corals. It is primarily these species that have removed large amounts of CO2 from the oceans in order to armor themselves with shells. Human emissions of CO2 have inadvertently reversed the worrisome depletion of CO2, the primary food for all carbon-based life on earth.

In her final paragraph, Bjornerud states, "All the mass extinction events evident from the fossil record have been linked to variations in ocean chemistry," and that "the demise of the dinosaurs, for example, can be attributed in large part to oceans poisoned by the constituents of the carbon and sulfur-rich rocks vaporized by the Chicxulub impactor." The cause of the Permian extinction is widely contested and there is no consensus on any of the suggested explanations. The only extinction for which there is relatively good evidence is that of the dinosaurs at 65 million years BP, which was coincident with a large asteroid striking the Yucatan peninsula. It is surmised that the asteroid penetrated the earth's crust. This caused a vast amount of material to be thrown into the stratosphere, where it remained for years, blocking the sun, ending most photosynthesis, and cooling the earth until it cleared. It is difficult to imagine how a change in ocean chemistry could eliminate all the terrestrial dinosaurs in addition to the marine species. It is not difficult to imagine that both terrestrial and marine species would die out for lack of photosynthesis and the food it provides.

Bjornerud concludes, "For this reason, some of the changes in ocean chemistry observed during the Anthropocene ought to give pause. The magnitude of these changes is comparable to the Great Dyings of the geologic past." It should be noted that the proposal to adopt the term "Anthropocene" has not yet been approved by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which oversees the official geologic time chart.6 On the question of CO2 emissions, there is simply no possibility that current emissions could make the oceans toxic for marine life.

Joy Ward et al. "Carbon Starvation in Glacial Trees Recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits, Southern California," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 102, no. 3 (2005), doi:10.1073/pnas.0408315102. ↩
"What Rising CO2 Means for Global Food Security," CO2 Coalition, February 23, 2019. ↩
T. J. Blom et al., "Carbon Dioxide in Greenhouses," Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, Government of Ontario, December 2002. Yunpu Zheng et al., "The Optimal CO2 Concentrations for the Growth of Three Perennial Grass Species," BMC Plant Biology 18, no. 27 (2018), doi:10.1186/s12870-018-1243-3. ↩
Wendell Haag, North American Freshwater Mussels: Natural History, Ecology, and Conservation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), doi:10.1017/cbo9781139048217. ↩
Caitlin Kennedy, "Ocean Acidification, Today and in the Future," National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, November 3, 2010. ↩
Meera Subramanian, "Anthropocene Now: Influential Panel Votes to Recognize Earth's New Epoch," Nature, May 21, 2019, doi:10.1038/d41586-019-01641-5. ↩

Here are the relevant excerpts from "Reading Seawater" by Professor Bjornerud:

On CO2-driven "acidity" and shell health: "Some of the carbon in organic matter is reoxidized-that is, decomposed and converted to CO2 again-which is one factor causing the oceans to become more acidic. Excess CO2 in seawater can eat away at the shells of the tiny calcitic organisms that help to sequester carbon in mineral form." 

On changes in ocean chemistry and mass extinction: 
"All the mass extinction events evident from the fossil record have been linked to variations in ocean chemistry, such as widespread acidification, anoxia, and associated perturbations to the carbon cycle.... For this reason, some of the changes in ocean chemistry observed during the Anthropocene ought to give pause. The magnitude of these changes are comparable to the Great Dyings of the geologic past."

On climate regulation:

"(L)eakage of carbon from the surface into the deeper ocean is, in fact, essential for climate regulation.... This process, known as the carbon pump, has partly offset anthropogenic increases in CO2 arising from the combustion of fossil fuels."

Email from tThe CO2 Coalition [info@co2coalition.org]





Calls to add ‘climate change’ to death certificates – New study demands ‘climate change’ be added as ‘pre-existing condition’

Professors in academia are touting a new study that is being used to call for “climate change” to be added as a cause of death on death certificates. “Climate change is a killer, but we don’t acknowledge it on death certificates,” co-author Dr Arnagretta Hunter, from The Australian National University (ANU) Medical School, said. The study was published May 20, 2020 in The Lancet Planetary Health.

Given the focus on COVID-19 infection rates and death tolls, it appears the climate activists in academia may want in on the scary and emotional death toll counts in order to draw attention back to their climate cause.

Hunter explained: “There is second component on a death certificate which allows for pre-existing conditions and other factors. “If you have an asthma attack and die during heavy smoke exposure from bushfires, the death certificate should include that information.”

“We can make a diagnosis of disease like coronavirus, but we are less literate in environmental determinants like hot weather or bushfire smoke.” …  “Climate change is the single greatest health threat that we face globally even after we recover from coronavirus,” Dr Hunter said.

The study claims: “Death certification needs to be modernized, indirect causes should be reported, with all death certification prompting for external factors contributing to death, and these death data must be coupled with large-scale environmental datasets so that impact assessments can be done.”

Statistician Dr. Matt Briggs reacted this way: “They discovered a way to boost fear and keep control!” Briggs added, “Daily body counts blasted from the evil media, ‘Over 100 people died from climate change today, raising questions about … blah blah…'”

But the climate skeptic blog Tallbloke was not receptive to claims that “climate change” should be added to death certificates. “Climate alarmists yet again strain credulity to the limit, no doubt hoping to stir up guilt in the populace about energy use,” the blog noted.

A comment on the Tallbloke blog also ridiculed the study’s claims, noting: “Australia must have a lot of health threats if the ‘single greatest’ one accounts for 2% of the mortality rate.”

SOURCE 






Destroying Virginia’s environment to save it

By Paul Driessen

Mere weeks after Governor Ralph Northam signed a partisan “Clean Economy Act” that had been rushed through the state legislature, Dominion Energy Virginia announced it would reach “net zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To do so, the utility company will raise family, business, hospital and school electricity bills by 3% every year for the next ten years – as they and state and local governments struggle to climb out of the financial holes created by the ongoing Coronavirus lockdown.

Just as bad, renewable energy mandates and commitments from the new law and Dominion’s “integrated resource plan” will have monumental adverse impacts on Virginia and world environmental values. In reality, Virginia’s new “clean” economy exists only in fantasy land.

The infamous Vietnam era quotation, “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” may or may not have been uttered by an anonymous US Army major. It may have been misquoted, revised, apocryphal or just invented. But it quickly morphed into an anti-war mantra.

For Virginia, it could reemerge as “we had to destroy our environment in order to save it.” (The same will be true for any state that travels this make-believe “clean, green, renewable, sustainable” energy path.)

Supposedly to reduce emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, Dominion Energy plans to expand the state’s offshore wind, onshore solar and battery storage capacity by some 24,000 megawatts of new (pseudo)renewable energy by 2035 and far more after that. It will retain just 9,700 MW of existing natural gas generation, and only through 2045, build no new gas-fired units, and retire 6,200 megawatts of coal-fired generation. The company also intends to keep its four existing nuclear units operating.

To “replace” some of its abundant, reliable, affordable fossil fuel electricity, Dominion intends to build at least 31,400 megawatts of expensive, unreliable solar capacity by 2045. Dominion estimates that would require a land area some 25% larger than Fairfax County, west of Washington, DC.

Fairfax County is 391 square miles (250,220 acres). It has more than 23,000 acres (36 square miles) of parks. That means Dominion Energy’s new solar facilities alone will blanket 490 square miles – 313,000 acres – of what are now beautiful croplands, scenic areas and habitats, teeming with wildlife.

That’s nearly half the land area of Rhode Island. It’s eight times the District of Columbia – and nearly 14 times more land than all Fairfax County parks combined. All will be blanketed by imported solar panels, plus more land for access roads and new transmission lines. Just for Dominion. Just for solar.

And those solar panels will actually generate electricity maybe 20-25% of the year, once you factor in the nighttime hours, cloudy days, and wintertime, early day and late afternoon to evening times when the sun is not shining brightly enough to generate more than a tiny smidgeon of electricity.

Dominion and other Virginia utility companies also plan to import and install over 400 monstrous 850-foot-tall offshore wind turbines – and tens of thousands of half-ton battery packs, to provide backup power for at least a few hours or days when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. They will supposedly prevent the economy from shutting don’t even more completely during each such outage than it has during the Corona lockdown.

Most of these solar panels, wind turbines and batteries – or their components (or the metals and minerals required to manufacture those components) – will likely come from China or from Chinese-owned operations in Africa, Asia and Latin America … under mining, air and water pollution, workplace safety, fair wage, child labor, mined land reclamation, manufacturing and other laws and standards that would get US companies unmasked, vilified, sued, fined and shut down in a heartbeat.

However, those laws and regulations do not apply to most of the companies and operations that will supply the supposedly “clean-tech” technologies that will soon blight Virginia landscapes.

Thus far, no one has produced even a rough estimate of how much concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, lithium, cobalt, silica, rare earth metals and countless other materials will be needed. All of them will require gigantic heavy equipment and prodigious amounts of fossil fuels to blast and haul away billions of tons of rocky overburden; extract, crush and process tens of millions of tons of ores, using explosives, acids, toxic chemicals and other means to refine the ores; smelt concentrates into metals; manufacture all the millions of tons of components; and haul, assemble and install the panels, turbines, batteries and transmission lines, setting them on top of tens of thousands of tons of cement and rebar.

No one has tallied up the oil, natural gas and coal fuel requirements for doing all this “Virginia Clean Economy” work. Nor the greenhouse gases and actual pollutants that will be emitted in the process.

Nothing about this is clean, green, renewable or sustainable. But neither Dominion Energy nor Virginia government officials have said anything about any of this, nor about which countries will host the mining and other activities, under what environmental and human rights standards.

When will we get a full accounting? Just because all of this will happen far beyond Virginia’s borders, does not mean that we can ignore the global environmental impacts. Or that we can ignore the health, safety and well-being of children and parents in those distant mines, processing plants and factories. This is the perfect time to observe the environmentalist creed: think globally, act locally. Will that be done?

Will Dominion and Virginia require that all these raw materials and wind, solar and battery components be responsibly sourced? Will it require independently verified certifications that none of them involve child labor, and all are produced in compliance with US and Virginia laws, regulations and ethical codes for workplace safety, fair wages, air and water pollution, wildlife preservation and mined lands reclamation? Will they tally up all the fossils consumed, and pollutants emitted, in the process?

Science journalist, businessman and parliamentarian Matt Ridley says wind turbines need some 200 times more raw materials per megawatt of power than modern combined-cycle gas turbines. It’s probably much the same for solar panels. Add in the backup batteries, and the environmental and human health impacts become absolutely mindboggling in their scale.

If you ignore all the land and wildlife impacts from installing the wind turbines, solar panels, batteries and transmission lines – you could perhaps call this “clean energy” and a “clean economy” within Virginia’s borders. But beyond those borders? A compelling case could be made that the world would be far better off if we just built modern combined-cycle gas turbines (or nuclear power plants) to generate electricity in the first place – and avoided all the monumental human and ecological impacts of pseudo-renewable energy.

And when it is time to select sites for these 490 square miles of industrial solar facilities, will Virginia, its county and local governments, its citizens, environmentalist groups and courts apply the same rigorous standards, laws and regulations – for scenic views, habitats, wildlife and threatened or endangered species – as they do for pipelines, drilling, fracking, coal and gas power plants, and other projects? Will they apply the same standards for 100-foot-tall transmission lines as they do for buried-out-of-sight pipelines?

Virginia’s Clean Economy Act will likely plunge every project and every jurisdiction into questions of race, poverty and environmental justice. Dominion Energy and other electric utilities will have to charge means-tested rates (even as rates climb 3% per year) and exempt low-income customers from some charges. They will have to submit construction plans to environmental justice councils – even as the utility companies and EJ councils ignore the rampant injustices inflicted on the children and parents who are slaving away in Chinese, African and Latin American mines, processing plants and factories.

Talk about breaking new ground. It will be interesting to see how Governor Ralph Northam, Attorney General Mark Herring, Senate Majority Leader Dick Saslaw, House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, and other Virginia government, utility and industry officials handle all these fascinating issues.

SOURCE 






The dark side of renewable electricity

The “Praise the Lord” (PTL) empire that preacher Jim Bakker built with wife Tammy crumbled thirty years ago. Today, it seems like we’re being mesmerized again in the press and social media. The rhetoric is about dispensing with thousands of products from petroleum derivatives so we can save the world from human destruction by switching to industrial wind and solar generated electricity.

Everyone knows that electricity is used extensively in residential, commercial, transportation, and the military. All of which to power motors, lite the lights and make all our medications and medical equipment. Yet it’s the thousands of products that get manufactured from crude oil that are used to “make” those motors, lights, medications and electronics.

We’ve had almost 200 years to develop clones or generics to replace the products demanded by society that we get from crude oil. The social needs of our materialistic societies are most likely going to remain for the products that have become part of our daily lifestyles, and for continuous uninterruptable electricity, not just intermittent electricity from wind and solar.

Despite the preaching about these renewable saviors, it’s becoming obvious that due to their intermittency, unreliability, and their inability to replace any of the derivatives from petroleum, societies around the world may not be too thrilled about needed social changes to live on just electricity.

Electricity is one of those products that came AFTER the discovery of oil. All the mineral products and metals needed to make wind turbines and solar panels rely on worldwide mining and transportation equipment that are made with the products from fossil fuels and powered by the fuels manufactured from crude oil.

A single electric-car battery weighs about 1,000 pounds. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving and processing more 500,000 pounds of raw materials somewhere on the planet. Never discussed by the GND or Paris Accord sponsors are the questionable and non-transparent labor conditions and loose, or non-existing, environmental regulations at the mining sites around the world for the products and metals required for renewables. To meet the goals to go “green” will most likely cause a rare earth emergency as those “green” goals require a massive worldwide increase in mining for lithium, cobalt, copper, iron, aluminum, and numerous other raw materials such as.

A list of the sixteen components needed to build wind turbines are: Aggregates and Crushed Stone (for concrete), Bauxite (aluminum, Clay and Shale (for cement), Coal, Cobalt (magnets), Copper (wiring), Gypsum (for cement), Iron ore (steel), Limestone, Molybdenum (alloy in steel), Rare Earths (magnets; batteries), Sand and Gravel (for cement and concrete), and Zinc (galvanizing).

A list of the seventeen components needed to build solar panels are: Arsenic (gallium-arsenide semiconductor chips), Bauxite (aluminum), Boron Minerals, Cadmium (thin film solar cells), Coal (by-product coke is used to make steel), Copper (wiring; thin film solar cells), Gallium (solar cells), Indium (solar cells), Iron ore (steel), Molybdenum (photovoltaic cells), Lead (batteries), Phosphate rock (phosphorous), Selenium (solar cells), Silica (solar cells), Silver (solar cells), Tellurium (solar cells), and Titanium dioxide (solar panels).

The origins of the products for wind and solar are mined throughout the world, inclusive of more than 60 countries of Algeria, Arabia, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Congo (Kinshasa), Cuba, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kazakhstan, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, New Caledonia, Oman, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Republic of Korea, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Suriname, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Western Sahara, and Zambia.

The signatories to the Green New Deal (GND) and Paris Accord, to sunset the fossil fuels industry for a world surviving on renewable electricity would also sunset its own renewable industry that’s supposed to be the salvation for the world, as there would be no components to build the turbines and panels!

All mining and processing activities to get the iron ore and other metals that go into turbine manufacturing, transporting the huge blade beasts to the sites, and decommissioning them, are all energy intensive activities that rely on fossil fuels and the products from crude oil and leave difficult wastes behind to dispose of during decommissioning.

The useful life of wind turbines is limited, generally from 15 to 20 years, but none of the decommissioning plans are public. Mining projects, oil production sites, and nuclear generation sites are required to provide for decommissioning and restoration details down to the last dandelion. Would governments and greenies allow a decommissioned mine, oil or nuclear site similar latitudes given to renewable sites?

We can be preached to forever about “clean electricity” messages, and bedazzle farmers with the prospects of on-going revenue from renewables. However, the extensive mining worldwide for materials for millions of wind turbines and solar panels, and the decommissioning and restoration details, and the social changes that would be necessitated for societies to live without the thousands of products from petroleum derivatives remain the dark side of the unspoken realities of renewables.

The dark side of renewable wind, solar and biofuel energy is that they are not clean, green, renewable or sustainable. They are horrifically destructive to vital ecological values that will last for generations to come.

SOURCE 

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

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

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

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

This is No Time for Green Giveaways

After spending nearly $3 trillion on everything from stimulus checks to small business relief to bailing out wealthy universities, lawmakers would be wise to take a breather.  But, some members of Congress led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) want to spend yet another $3 trillion. Unsurprisingly, a long line of lobbyists with empty tin cups have (virtually, of course) descended on Capitol Hill looking for perks and favors in the name of “Coronavirus relief.” Solar and wind producers have been at the front of the line, pushing hard for subsidies to “green” technologies that otherwise wouldn’t be able to compete with traditional energy sources. While these companies deserve the same opportunity to get relief as any other business and industry, lawmakers must be weary of narrow handouts that favor some industries over others. And, after $3 trillion already spent on taxpayers’ account, Coronavirus relief efforts must not morph into a grab bag of special interest goodies.

Companies across all industries are struggling to cope with the Coronavirus, and the energy and electricity sectors are no different. According to data from the nation’s two largest Independent System Operators, electricity demand in March 2020 was down about 7 percent compared to March 2017-19. Rail shipments of coal in March were down about 15 percent in March, while oil companies have struggled to cope with low or even negative prices. Meanwhile, solar installations may be 17 percent less than expected this year thanks to an unprecedented drop in demand. All of these technologies, ranging from solar to coal to oil, are a pivotal part of America’s energy portfolio.

But some manufacturers want to tip the scales in favor of some technologies while kneecapping others. Solar and wind manufacturers have long benefited from generous federal tax credits which offer investors up to 30 percent off of system costs and producers 1¢–2¢ per kilowatt-hour of energy produced (over the first ten years of production). In order for project developers to get these lavish credits they need to start construction on projects by a certain date and actually put the projects in service by year-end of the fourth year after the start of construction. Never mind that these tax credits have long outlived their usefulness and wind and solar companies are now well capitalized and more than capable of starting large projects without taxpayers’ help.

Four years is more than enough time to see projects through to completion, but solar and wind developers argue that COVID-related difficulties are holding up projects first started in 2016. And, in a surprising (and disappointing twist), the Treasury Department may extend out the tax credits from four years to five years.  If the Treasury Department doesn’t proceed with their plan, lawmakers are poised to act.

There are many indications that lawmakers aren’t done extending needless subsidies to “green” companies. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted on May 13, “The next #COVID19 package needs to include support for the clean energy sector, which has been devastated by the pandemic. Our response can’t just be a reaction, it has to be an investment in the technologies & workers who will power this country’s future.” On May 15, House Democrats approved the hastily introduced Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act, which establishes a 45 cent per gallon payout for biofuel producers. The bill’s backers are determined to usher in a “green” revolution on the taxpayers’ dime, even though biofuels aren’t exactly eco-friendly.

Getting America back to normal requires a free, vibrant market in energy without the government actively picking winners and losers. Over the past 40 years, the federal government has already showered more than $100 billion in tax subsidies on “green” producers and punished affordable alternatives with onerous regulations and mandates. It’s time to end this sorry track-record, and leave the door open to a diverse array of energy sources. Before Congress starts ramping up spending again, lawmakers need to get their priorities straight.

SOURCE




Gemini Solar: A Billion-Dollar Vegas Boondoggle

On May 11, the Interior Department approved Gemini Solar, the largest solar power project in U.S. history. It is to be built by Arevia Power, a California-based energy group, with backing from Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Nevada’s energy utility NV Energy, a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway, which will be the customer for the project’s electricity. Gemini Solar will sit on 7,100 acres of public land, the size of 5,369 football fields, in the Mohave Desert, about 30 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

The estimated $1 billion cost pales in comparison to the trillions of dollars being spent battling the coronavirus and its economy-destroying aftermath. But a boondoggle by any other name remains a boondoggle and, even though it takes NV Energy a step closer to complying with Nevada’s nonsensical law that requires utility providers to get at least half the energy they produce from renewables, Gemini Solar is certainly a boondoggle.

This ambitious three-year project will never come close to its target of 690 megawatts, enough to power 260,000 homes. And the 900 new construction jobs that the Department of the Interior (DOI) boasts will be created by Gemini Solar will quickly shrink to only 19 full-time workers required to operate the plant once it is completed in December 2023, according to the Reuters news agency.

Studies in Europe show that the cost of renewable energy such as solar raises electricity costs for consumer so much that, for every job created in the renewables industry, two to three are lost in the rest of the economy. So much for DOI’s Casey Hammond’s statement that, “This action is about getting Americans back to work, strengthening communities and promoting investment in American energy.”

That makes no more sense than employing millions of Americans to exercise on stationary bicycles connected to electric generators to make power. At least the bikes would increase our citizens’ fitness and give them long-term jobs.

The government tells us that a massive 380-megawatt lithium ion battery backup will be included to replace the power the solar plant is not able to generate at night. These batteries supposedly generate no greenhouse gases. Yet, even the left-leaning Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) pointed out that “Mining and processing the minerals, plus the battery manufacturing process, involve substantial emissions of carbon.”

In reality, no batteries exist that could take up the load for long when the sun is not shining. And, if they could, it would take hours or even days to recharge them.

Anyone who thinks all this is a ‘green solution’ must not have seen Michael Moore’s brilliant new documentary Planet of the Humans. The film shows how active solar projects such as Gemini Solar are anything but green. Moore demonstrates that, when one considers the materials that are required to build these massive facilities, they produce huge amounts of toxic waste.

The CBC cites Jennifer Dunn at Northwestern University’s Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience who explained: “the material that helps power the battery is produced from a number of different metals, things like nickel and cobalt and lithium.”

And, of course, China controls most of the lithium and cobalt which are often produced with child labor and near-slave labor, and with practically no health, safety or environmental safeguards. For example, CBC reports that “there have been mass fish kills related to lithium mining in Tibet.”

Moore’s film shows that solar stations are, in reality, just a front for more, not less, fossil fuel plants. And the negative impact on the fragile desert environment will be significant. The experts interviewed in Planet of the Humans don’t pull their punches: we have been lied to when it comes to the supposed environmental benefits of solar power and we have allowed ourselves to play-pretend for over three decades.

In The Hitchhiker’s Journey Through Climate Change, a new book by Terigi Ciccone and the senior author of this article, we show that the renewable energy debate is actually over and can be summed up with a simple rule of thumb that states: “in every community electric grid, an excess amount of fossil fuel or nuclear power must be available at the ready to go online in seconds, that is equal to the potential output of all intermittent solar energy considered a portion of the grids electric capacity.”

When one digests this simple rule, one wonders why the arguments over solar energy have gone on for so long without facing a stark reality: solar energy must never be an essential part of any energy portfolio. It must have 100% back up with rapidly variable fossil fuel-generated power to ensure that the communities’ electric grid will not let them down. Las Vegas of all places cannot afford a blackout.

After all, with temperatures at times spiking above 110 degrees Fahrenheit each summer and many hotels, homes and businesses with sealed windows, can you imagine what would happen if a city-wide power failure occurred during a heatwave and all the air conditioning suddenly shut off? Indeed, in such weather, homeless people must often seek cool indoor shelter or at least some will die.

Thinking that batteries are going to save Vegas has been and will be impossible for the foreseeable future. This project most likely will double down on lunacy, as in a few years it will need to build a fossil fuel-powered plant to back up the batteries that back up the intermittent and unreliable solar plant.

On top of that, this mandatory fossil fuel back up will need to run 100% of the time, at near full power, emitting pollution and greenhouse gases while burning almost the same fuel as if the solar plant was never there in the first place. And, when the fossil fuel backup is not at full power, they will be operating at low efficiency and so emit more CO2 and real pollution. Think of what happens to your car’s gas efficiency when driving in stop-and-go traffic.

In the final analysis, private and commercial customers will be burdened with considerable increases in their electric rates due to Gemini Solar. So, other than Warren Buffett and the relatively few people who will have temporary jobs during the construction phase, who will benefit from this adventure? Moore’s documentary shows exactly who the green energy opportunists really are.

The Trump administration must revoke, or at least suspend, the project’s approval until all decision-makers have seen Planet of the Humans and formal inquiries into its real environmental benefits and problems are held. To phrase this gamble in the common vernacular of Vegas, the odds that this plant will be the one that works as intended when so many others have failed is about the same as the odds of winning at the roulette table in your first try—practically nil.

SOURCE



Germany’s solar industry could implode this summer

Germany’s solar industry is in deep crisis and may implode in the summer. Solutions have been around for a long time, but internal power struggles and debates over distance rules between wind turbines are holding back progress. EURACTIV Germany reports.

The country’s solar industry is collecting signatures and writing incendiary letters to politicians to finally abolish the solar cap and thus save thousands of jobs.

According to the latest survey results of the German Solar Industry Association (BSW), the industry’s business expectation index has halved in just three months, and that’s not even due to the coronavirus.

“We have never seen a comparable slump in such a short time. More and more solar companies are having existential fears,” said Carsten Körnig, BSW’s chief executive officer.

The latest figures from the Federal Network Agency show how thin the air under the solar cap has become.

At present, Germany has solar plants with a capacity of 50.09 gigawatts.

However, once the 52 GW threshold is reached – probably as early as this summer – the cap will close. This means that smaller plants of up to 750 kilowatts, which make up the majority of newly built plants, will then no longer be entitled to subsidies from the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG).

Postponed, cancelled and ignored

There are no technical reasons why the solar cap has not been abolished despite all the promises made by the grand coalition since last year. The legislative text has long been drafted and is in the hands of the Bundestag’s energy committee, right next to a draft bill by the Bundesrat, which advocated abolishing the cap in October .

But there is no white smoke rising from the Bundestag building in Berlin just yet because internal resistance is blocking the release of the law to the plenary.

Business interruption during the coronavirus crisis has caused a 14% fall in demand for electricity in Europe over the past month. Combined with record solar output, this has caused a 39% drop in related CO2 emissions, according to a new analysis.

An eagerly awaited meeting of the federal states’ premiers on 12 March did not lead to an agreement, and the planned working group between the state leaders and the federal government did not even meet because the coronavirus had paralysed public life.

Little else has happened since then.

“With its blockade policy against renewable energies, the government endangers climate protection and investment security in equal measure. This is even more irresponsible for the economy in times of corona-induced uncertainty,” said Julia Verlinden, energy policy spokeswoman for the Greens and member of the economic committee.

On the last two occasions, there were no results either.

Last week, the federal cabinet passed a “mini-amendment” to the EEG to bolster the energy sector against the pandemic, such as longer implementation periods for solar parks, but ignored the topic of solar caps. Even a video conference of the energy ministers on 4 May did not deal with the topic.

COVID-19 crisis upsets Germany's coal phase-out timetable

In Germany, the coronavirus health crisis is keeping politics on tenterhooks as many legislative proposals are being postponed. Will the country’s coal phase-out carry on as planned? EURACTIV Germany reports.

Economic spokesperson remains silent

In an absurd way, the problem is not the solar cap itself, because there is broad consensus that it has to go. According to a poll by YouGov, more than 80% of voters from all parties, except the far-right AfD, are in favour of abolishing the cap.

The debate has for months been hinging on the controversial distance rules between wind turbines and buildings, for which Economy Minister Peter Altmaier (CDU) wanted to set a 1,000-metre minimum distance to reduce the countless civil lawsuits against wind turbines.

While Altmaier has since softened his proposal, this distance debate has long become a power game between the CDU and the SPD. The economic policy wing of the conservative Union of CDU/CSU is insisting the solar cap should only be adopted together with the coal phase-out law and a solution for wind energy, thereby blocking any rapid progress.

The Union’s economic policy spokesman, Joachim Pfeiffer (CDU), was not available to speak on the subject despite repeated requests.

SOURCE





Australian coal mine nears approval

WHITEHAVEN Coal has cleared another hurdle in its push for a $700 million coal mine expansion near Gunnedah, in north-eastern NSW.

The Department of Planning, Industry and Environment has recommended the project is "approvable" and pushed the application to the Independent Planning Commission (IPC).

The application seeks to extend the Vickery coal mine, about 25km out of Gunnedah, and develop a new coal handling and preparation plant, as well as a rail spur line to connect to the main railway that leads to the Port of Newcastle. This would mean the end of coal trucks transporting the goods on the road to Gunnedah.

The project - which went on public exhibition in the latter half of 2018 - attracted 560 submissions with 345 in support of the project, and 201 who opposed the plan.

In September last year, Vickery Coal submitted an amended application. It's expected to generate 450 jobs as well as 500 during construction, as well as a net benefit of $1.16 billion to the state.

The Department released its report on Tuesday and highlighted key issues for the IPC to consider which included impacts on water resources, amenity and biodiversity.

The report from the department will now be considered by the IPC who will hold a further public hearing in coming weeks. The IPC must make a final determination on the project within 12 weeks.

Whitehaven Coal issued a statement on Wednesday welcoming the release of the report.

"We know there is strong support for Vickery from the comprehensive community consultation process that has already been undertaken - 60% of public submissions to the Department of Planning and 75% to the IPC called for the Project to be approved," Whitehaven Coal Managing Director and CEO Paul Flynn said

But in April, the mining giant put all expansion decisions on hold due to "volatile financial market conditions", including the Vickery mine expansion.

"While coal markets in the March quarter have demonstrated their resilience, volatile financial market conditions caused Whitehaven to continue to be cautious in allocating capital to expansion," the company said at the time.

Lock the Gate - a vocal opponent of the expansion plan - has long maintained the coal mine "will damage local groundwater, put an iconic heritage property at risk, and worsen the social damage large-scale mining has already inflicted on the local community".

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

Trump issues executive order to protect power grid from attack

President Trump on Friday issued an executive order declaring a national emergency over threats to the U.S. power system, taking steps to defend the grid against cyberattacks and foreign interference.

The executive order bans the use of equipment for the power grid that was manufactured by a company under the control of a foreign adversary, or the buying of any equipment that poses a national security threat.

“Additional steps are required to protect the security, integrity, and reliability of bulk-power system electric equipment used in the United States,” Trump wrote. “In light of these findings, I hereby declare a national emergency with respect to the threat to the United States bulk-power system.”

The order also established a task force to protect the power grid from attacks and share risk management information to prevent interference. Members of the task force will include the secretaries of Commerce, Defense and Homeland Security, as well as the Director of National Intelligence. 

Trump noted in the order that the power system is a target for those “seeking to commit malicious acts” against the U.S., pointing to concerns around cyberattacks in particular.

“A successful attack on our bulk-power system would present significant risks to our economy, human health and safety, and would render the United States less capable of acting in defense of itself and its allies,” Trump wrote.

Secretary of Energy Dan Brouillette applauded the executive order, saying in a statement that it would “greatly diminish the ability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.”

“Today, President Trump demonstrated bold leadership to protect America’s bulk-power system and ensure the safety and prosperity of all Americans,” Brouillette said. “It is imperative the bulk-power system be secured against exploitation and attacks by foreign threats.”

The order establishes the secretary of Energy as the official tasked with identifying equipment currently in use in the bulk power system that poses a risk, and working to take out and replace that equipment. The secretary is also in charge of creating a list of “pre-qualified” vendors that are deemed safe to work with.

The Department of Energy has stepped up its focus on protecting the grid from attacks in recent years. Former Energy Secretary Rick Perry established the Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) in 2018 to help prepare and respond to threats.

The official CESER account tweeted Friday that the agency “stands ready” to help defend the bulk power system, adding that “malicious actors” have targeted the power system for the past decade.

SOURCE 




Wind farm taxpayer subsidies come with a now controversial beneficiary: China

U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley says he backs taxpayer subsidies of wind farms because they are good for his home state of Iowa.

But today, some 30 years after Grassley conceived the federal wind tax credit program, which birthed rows of turbines across the country’s emptiest spaces, he has another, somewhat improbable cheerleader: China.

China’s curious role in support of taxpayer wind energy subsidies in the U.S. is now raising suspicion, as Grassley tries to convince Trump Administration officials that their COVID-19 stimulus measures should include a boost to his beleaguered wind program.

The U.S. Treasury Department released a letter to Grassley last week suggesting it plans to “modify the relevant rules,” allowing wind farm developers facing a Dec. 2020 deadline four more years to finish their taxpayer subsidized projects.
 
The wind subsidy program was supposed to make wind energy makers self-sufficient within a decade— or by 2002. However, it is currently in year 29.

According to an analysis last year by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the wind Production Tax Credit (PTC), which goes to “corporations who either erect new wind turbines or refurbish turbines.” has cost U.S. taxpayers $65.1 billion.

A huge chunk of that taxpayer money has gone directly to companies in which the largest shareholder is the Communist Party of China (CCP).

Grassley’s Senate colleague, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) said Sunday that many Chinese companies operating in the U.S. are doing so for the sole purpose of spying on our country.

Americans “need to have their guard up against Chinese espionage,” Cotton said.

He is proposing legislation that would ban taxpayer-funded researchers from also accepting funding from Chinese-affiliated firms.

A University of Arkansas electrical engineering professor was arrested Monday and charged with secretly accepting $500,000 from the CCP.

“Steadfast in our approach”

The Chinese were minor, inconsequential players in wind energy when Grassley, 86, started arguing for U.S. taxpayer support of the industry in 1992. Now, they dominate the space, controlling five of the world’s ten largest wind turbine manufacturers.

According to a 2016 Navigant Research report, Chinese companies controlled 28.2 percent of the wind turbine manufacturing market, versus 9.2 percent for U.S.-controlled companies. It reported that China had five times as many workers employed making turbines (509,000) as did the U.S. (102,500).

Chinese-owned Goldwind is the second-largest wind turbine producer in the world, having installed more than 19,000 turbines in 17 countries. It controls 25 percent of the Chinese market— more than twice its next largest competitor.

Goldwind Chairman Wu Gang has worked in wind power since the late 1980’s. He previously served as the Chinese Communist “Party Committee” secretary at Goldwind’s parent company, Xinjiang New Energy.

In 2010, Goldwind opened a U.S. subsidiary, headquartered in Chicago, with an eye towards exploiting Grassley’s tax credit program here.

It has since purchased wind farms in Montana and partnered with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway on a wind farm project in West Texas.

“At Goldwind, we are steadfast in our approach to the United States and broader North American wind markets,” said David Sale, Chief Executive Officer of Goldwind Americas.

Buffett, whose Des Moines-based Mid-American Energy owns 2,600 wind turbines in Iowa, is a longtime backer of Grassley’s subsidy program, which he has used to reduce his company’s tax bill.

 "I will do anything that is basically covered by the law to reduce Berkshire's tax rate," Buffet said in 2014. "For example, on wind energy, we get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That's the only reason to build them. They don't make sense without the tax credit."

Wind subsidies started phasing out in 2017 and were supposed to finally expire at the end of 2019.

There are 58,000 wind turbines in the U.S.

In 1983, Iowa became the first state to mandate its utilities derive a percentage of their power from wind or solar. The state reports that 42 percent of its generated electricity came from wind in 2019, versus 35 percent from coal and 13 percent from natural gas.

That’s six times the national average for wind power generation of seven percent.

Nationwide, 38 percent of electricity is derived from natural gas, 24 percent from coal and 20 percent from nuclear.

SOURCE 






Wind and solar add zero value to the grid

Why is wind power and solar power, not making significant gains in providing a substantial amount of renewable electricity? The US has utilized, in its energy mix, about eight percent of wind and two percent solar for more than a decade. The reason it is not growing requires an understanding of the fundamental elements, of an electrical grid.

The grid is the electrical industry’s term for all of the hardware and software needed to convert fuel into electricity. The electricity is distributed by wires, transformers, sub-stations, etc. to all of us. The system must ensure our safety from malfunctions, security to customers, and safety for the community.

For a simple example, let’s assume we are a local electric utility in Smallville, USA. It’s a town with a population of 50,000 and another 25,000 people in the surrounding farms, along with small factories, professional offices, shops, a hospital, bakeries, etc. Everyone in the area needs reliable and affordable electricity. Over the years, Smallville set up a modern grid to assure a 99.98 percent reliability. In order to guarantee that reliable availability, the community’s grid must have at least a 75 percent excess capability above the everyday norm. Twenty-five percent of the excess must be in the “spinning reserve mode,” another 25 percent must be in the “peaking mode,” and 25 percent in the “back-up mode.” Let’s examine each of these portions of the necessary reserves.

Spinning Reserve. If some malfunction happens at any time and shuts down a generating plant, a back-up plant needs to kick-in and pick up 100 percent of the lost power in seconds. If it’s a few seconds too late, the electrical demand will overwhelm the grid, causing a “brown-out,” or worse, a “blackout.” It’s as if all the customers of a bank show up at the same time, demanding to take out all their money immediately. It’s a disaster.

The only way to ensure that this blackout doesn’t happen is to have a back-up fossil fuel power plant already running at about 90-95 percent of rated power. It burns fuel but creates no electricity. They will burn almost the same amount of fuel as they would if there was no solar or wind plants connected to the grid because solar and wind can not serve as backup power. The backup power must be 100% reliable. All existing solar and wind power must have fossil fuel back up, while solar and wind power can not be used to back up fossil fuel power as a result of its unreliability. (The wind may not blow adequately and the sun may not shine). As a result, electric utilities are wasting capital, fuel, and operating costs thinking wind and solar can contribute a significant portion of their available energy. It just increases the cost of community power.

Peak mode: This is the extra electrical power that’s needed twice a day, typically for two to three hours each. First is the morning peak demand, from six to nine AM to cook breakfast, get ready to go to school and work. The other high demand period is usually from about five to seven PM. That’s when the extra power is needed to cook dinner, fire up the AC or central heat, etc.  But solar plants can’t fill either of these peak demands. That’s because solar produces electricity near mid-day when it’s needed the least. Wind turbines might be put to work a few hours in the morning or evenings. In all cases, however they still need the spinning reserve fossil-fuel back-up plant running at about 90 percent of rated power, 100 percent of the time.

Back-up Reserve: These power plants are like a spare tire in the trunk of a car; they sit there until called to duty. But unlike the spinning reserve, these reserves don’t need to be up and on-line in seconds. So, they only operate when they are started, typically for scheduled maintenance on other plants. Depending on the type of plant, it may take several hours or more for them to come online, and then they may run for days, weeks, or a year non-stop.  Having a power plant just sitting there, doing nothing most of the time is very expensive, but is a valuable insurance policy against failure.

Let’s examine the real-life experience of Germany that made the bold decision to go all-in on being green. It is now the number one producer of wind and solar electrical power in the world on a per capita basis. In 2004 Germany launched an aggressive plan to replace many of their coal and nuclear plants with wind and solar. By 2018 Germany had an installed electrical base of about 210 gigawatts. Of that, 28 percent was wind power, 26 percent solar, and the remaining 46 percent was their remaining fossil fuel and nuclear power plants along with a little hydro. At least that is the nameplate rating of the power capability of these solar and wind installations when operating under the best conditions. However, the real production is startlingly different.

While these solar and wind plants could theoretically produce 46 percent of Germany’s needs, in actuality, they only produce about 12 percent of Germany’s total electrical output. Who knew that one of the world’s most prosperous and industrialized nations could not figure out how to produce enough electricity to meet the needs of its own people and industry from wind and solar power?

To relieve this national shortage, Germany has been importing vast amounts of electrical power, mostly from France, and are paying exorbitant rates for it.  The average cost of electricity in Germany is now almost three times the cost in the United States.

Germany is now launching a major program to rebuild dozens of fossil-fueled power plants. They have also signed a contract with Russia to build a natural gas pipeline from Siberia to fuel their electrical demand and to back up its unreliable wind and solar plants.Wind and solar add zero value to the grid

Sweden has a funny but sad story that needs to be told. They launched a vast wind program a decade ago, which is proving to be a problem in their challenging environment. In their northern latitudes, solar was out of the question. Wind also has some issues. This photo is from a recent article in the online service, “whattsupwiththat.com.”  Here we see a picture of a Swedish helicopter trying to de-ice a wind turbine like an airport tanker truck de-ices an airplane’s wings and fuselage . Only the windmill is about four to five times bigger than a Boeing 747’s. A helicopter can only carry 10-20 percent of what a truck can. So, by the time they’ve finished one or two-blades, they need to start all over again.  Now imagine a wind farm with hundreds of these turbines.  This picture is worth thousands of words and a few giggles. But it’s not funny for Sweden.

Note: Portions of this article were excerpted from the 2020 book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change with permission of the author Terigi Ciccone. The book is the best possible source for parents and grandparents to explain reality to their children.

SOURCE 




Minister says it is not Australia’s policy to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, despite signing up to the Paris agreement, because the Morrison government will not adopt a mid-century target in advance of a plan to achieve it.

The energy minister said on Tuesday that signatories to the Paris agreement, including Australia, had agreed to hit net zero “in the second half of the century”. But scientists say in order to meet the central Paris goal of keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C – a commitment Australia adopted in 2015 – signatories need to hit net zero by 2050.

A new review of the government’s climate policies headed by former Business Council of Australia president Grant King notes that “like other signatories to the Paris agreement, Australia has agreed to adopt progressively more ambitious targets beyond 2030 and has endorsed the agreement’s overarching long-term goals, namely to limit the global temperature rise to well below 2C – and if possible below 1.5C – by achieving net zero emissions as soon as possible in the second half of the century”.

Major business groups, including the Business Council of Australia and the Ai Group, say Australia should adopt the net zero by 2050 target. Earlier this month the Ai Group called for the two biggest economic challenges in memory – recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and cutting greenhouse gas emissions – to be addressed together, saying it would boost growth and put the country on a firm long-term footing.

Every Australian state has signed up to net zero emissions by 2050, and these commitments are expressed either as targets or aspirational goals.

But asked on Tuesday whether net zero by 2050 was the federal government’s policy, Taylor said: “No.”

“Our approach is not to have a target without a plan,” Taylor told the ABC. He said technology improvements would drive significant reductions in emissions “and we’d love to be able to achieve net zero by 2050, but ultimately that will depend on the pathways of technology to deliver that without damaging the economy”.

The King review has recommended new approaches to reducing pollution including paying big emitters to keep their emissions below an agreed limit, and allowing businesses to bid for funding from the government’s climate policy – the $2.55bn emissions reduction fund – for projects that capture emissions and either use them or store them underground.

The King review proposal to pay emitters to remain below their baseline looks like a voluntary carbon trading mechanism. The review says the idea “could be achieved by crediting emissions reductions below baselines and providing for the sale and purchase of … safeguard mechanism credits by the federal, state or territory governments or through voluntary transactions in carbon markets”.

Despite that clear description in the review, Taylor contended initially on Tuesday the proposal was not a form of voluntary carbon trading. He said the review proposed a “carrot” to give companies an incentive to overachieve on their pollution reduction commitments.

The Coalition has spent a decade opposing carbon pricing, and it abolished the emissions trading scheme legislated during the Gillard government. Rightwingers in the Liberal party also moved against Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership in part because he pursued a policy to reduce emissions in the electricity sector.

But after first saying the King proposal was not a form of carbon trading, the energy minister then argued that principle was “nothing new”. “You can trade Australian carbon credit units now. There is nothing new with that, that’s a pre-existing system we have through the emissions reduction fund.”

It is unclear whether some of the proposals in the review would garner majority parliamentary support, but Taylor said some of the proposals might be able to be achieved without changing legislation.

SOURCE 

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

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

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

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

Miami Herald Misleads Readers About Reassuring NOAA Hurricane Study

Among the top Google News search results this morning for “climate change,” the Miami Herald published an article asserting a new study shows global warming is causing more Atlantic hurricanes. In reality, the new study shows there is a declining trend in hurricanes in many parts of the world and concludes there will likely be a declining trend globally during the 21st century. Moreover, objective data show the number of Atlantic hurricanes is declining, just like the forecast global trend.

The Herald article, titled “Climate change, pollution impacts hurricane formation in the Atlantic, NOAA study says,” claims, “In the last 40 years, the East Coast, including Florida, has been hit by dozens of hurricanes. New NOAA research suggests human pollution may have increased the likelihood of those Atlantic basin storms….”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) study referenced by the Herald reports, “our climate models project decreases in the number of global TCs [tropical cyclones] toward the end of the 21st century due to the dominant effect of greenhouse gases on decreasing TC occurrence in most of the tropics, consistent with many previous studies.”

The NOAA study reported a trend of “substantial decreases” in Indian Ocean and North Pacific hurricanes is already detected in the record. The study asserts there has been an increase in Atlantic hurricanes since 1980, which “anthropogenic aerosols could have also influenced.”

The major takeaway from the NOAA study is there will be fewer hurricanes as the world continues its modest warming. That is good news. Rather than reporting good climate news, however, the Herald goes to great lengths to try to pull some bad news from a good-news study.

Even the study’s one asserted drawback, that Atlantic hurricane activity has increased, is quite a stretch. A 2017 article in The Economist, titled “Hurricanes in America have become less frequent,” documents how Atlantic hurricanes have became much less frequent during recent decades compared to the first half of the 20th century. In the six decades between 1900 and 1960, there were an average of 19 Atlantic hurricanes each decade. In the six decades since, there has been an average of only 14 Atlantic hurricanes per decade. In fact, there has not been a single decade since 1960 in which more hurricanes formed than the average decade between 1900 and 1960.

The only reason the authors of the NOAA study could report an increase in Atlantic hurricanes since 1980 is because the decade ending in 1980 was an abnormally low year, with the fewest number of Atlantic hurricanes on record. So, any trend line starting at the record-low point of 1980 will show more frequent hurricanes. However, a more complete and representative record shows a long-term and ongoing decline in Atlantic hurricanes.

Located in Florida, the Miami Herald surprisingly did not mention two very important facts about hurricanes and Florida. As documented in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, Florida recently concluded an 11-year period (2005 through 2016) without a landfalling hurricane of any size—the longest such period in recorded history. The Gulf of Mexico also recently benefited from its longest hurricane-free period in recorded history (2013 through 2016).

For completely misleading its readers about the recent NOAA study, and for asserting the exact opposite of the truth regarding hurricane frequency and Atlantic hurricane frequency, the Miami Herald earns a gigantic Pinocchio award.

SOURCE 






Electric Vehicle Sales Set to Crash in 2020 Amid Coronavirus and Oil Price Shocks

Global electric vehicle sales look set to crash this year, and the coronavirus pandemic won’t be the only culprit. Total EV sales will plunge 43 percent in 2020, according to new research from Wood Mackenzie.

The 2020s are the decade in which EVs are expected to move from the margin of the global auto market to its fast lane, as battery pack prices tumble, driving ranges extend and charging infrastructure becomes more sophisticated and widespread. But the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic shockwaves have not made for a good start.

WoodMac now expects global EV sales of 1.3 million units in 2020, nosediving from a record 2.2 million units sold last year.

The coronavirus pandemic deserves much of the blame. In China, the world’s largest EV market, sales of all types of cars fell 21 percent in January compared to last year, and by an eye-watering 80 percent in February. Things were even worse for EVs, with February sales projected to be down more than 90 percent.
Top Articles

“Most new EV buyers are still first-time owners of the technology,” Ram Chandrasekaran, principal analyst for transportation and mobility at Wood Mackenzie, said in a research note. “The uncertainty and fear created by the outbreak have made consumers less inclined to adopt a new technology.”

“Once the epidemic is contained in China, we suspect consumers will flock back to car dealers and reaffirm their confidence in EVs.”

The bounce-back could take longer in Europe and North America, where the COVID-19 outbreak is several months behind China's trajectory.

“The first lockdown in the U.S. did not start until March 20, but the effects have already begun to show in EV sales,” Chandrasekaran said. “General Motors is offering a discount of $10,000 for its Chevrolet Bolt. Further such rebates are sure to follow to move inventory as demand drops [more].”

Other factors are contributing to skidding EV sales, including the collapse of oil prices and a relative lack of new EV models set for commercial release this year, Chandrasekaran said.
Tesla's ambitious 2020 goal looks questionable

Tesla, the world’s highest-profile EV manufacturer and the dominant player in the U.S. market, is an exception to the lack of new models on the market, having last month started deliveries of its Model Y, a compact crossover utility vehicle built on the Model 3 sedan platform. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has mused that Model Y could outsell Model S, Model X and Model 3 combined.

Tesla roared into 2020, putting up unexpectedly strong EV delivery numbers in the first quarter after turning out the first vehicles at its new factory in Shanghai, known as Gigafactory 3. But its share price has fallen by 40 percent since achieving an all-time high in February, amid manufacturing disruptions and economic concerns related to the coronavirus outbreak. (The stock has still doubled over the past year.)

Tesla idled production at its Fremont, California EV factory last month, raising serious questions about the company's ambitious goal to hit 500,000 vehicle deliveries this year — concerns Musk has not yet addressed. Most of the workforce has been sent home at Nevada’s Gigafactory, where Tesla makes battery packs and other components with its partner Panasonic. Tesla has reportedly slashed employee salaries across the board, with deeper cuts of up to 30 percent for executives.

Beyond the Model Y, many anticipated EV models were not expected to hit the market until late 2020 or 2021 — and that was true before the novel coronavirus hit, WoodMac’s Chandrasekaran said.

General Motors brought hundreds of analysts, investors, journalists and policymakers to an event near Detroit last month to highlight its big ambitions for EVs, but none of those models will be available until late 2021. Ford's Mustang Mach-E is not expected to be widely available until late 2021, and Volkswagen's long-touted ID.3 won't hit the market until later this year.

Beyond any impact from the coronavirus, those sluggish EV-model launch timelines could weigh on the market this year as consumers hold off on making purchases.

“Unfortunately for EV adoption, this is likely to lead to a plateauing of sales in the near term," Chandrasekaran wrote. "While the pent-up demand from the pandemic will help a bounce-back in sales later in the year, new demand growth will [not be apparent] until 2021."

SOURCE 





‘Jurist Legal News’ Prosecutes Phony Case Against Climate, Hunger

Jurist Legal News is doing its best Michael Avenatti impression, prosecuting false claims that climate change is causing hunger and malnutrition.

In a May 14 article, “The Link Between Climate Change and Human Health,” Indian law students Sakshi Agarwal and Aniket Sachan quote speculative World Health Organization (WHO) predictions as proof that climate change is causing starvation and malnutrition.

That is the same WHO, by the way, that reassured us that Chinese officials found no evidence of human-to-human transmission of COVID-19, that wearing face masks makes you more likely to acquire COVID-19, and praised massive government efforts to “socialize the economy.”

“The World Health Organization (WHO) back in 2018 said that climate change will cause around 250,000 additional deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 due to malnutrition, malaria, diarrhea, and heat exhaustion,” the Jurist Legal News article reported.

Of course, predictions are not proof or even evidence. They are merely predictions. Let’s take a look at what scientific evidence shows.

History shows colder periods of time are linked to famine and malnutrition as crops fail, as during the little ice age. By contrast, hunger and malnutrition both decline sharply during relatively warm periods.

Indeed, food production, rather than declining as the climate has modestly warmed, has increased dramatically in recent decades.

This is thoroughly documented in Climate at a Glance: Crop Production, as well as in a video-archived panel discussion alongside the United Nations Civil Society Conference in August 2019.

Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, shows how modern agriculture, built upon and entirely dependent upon fossil fuels, is allowing farmers to produce more food than ever on less and less land.

In addition, as detailed by CO2Science.org, the carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere over the past century, along with modest warming, has resulted in crop yields setting records nearly every year.

The two factors combined have resulted in the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, poverty, and starvation in human history.

Forty-four percent of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty in 1981 – 40 years of global warming ago. Since then, the share of people living in such poverty fell below 10 percent in 2015.

And although 700 million people worldwide still suffer from persistent hunger, the United Nations reports the number of hungry people has declined by two billion since 1990 – 30 years of global warming ago.

Hunger and malnutrition, like a changing climate, have always been with us. The evidence, however, shows the only climate change consistently linked to increases in hunger, malnutrition, and premature mortality is a cooling climate.

SOURCE 






‘Snowpiercer’: Climate ‘Deniers’ ‘Doomed Us With Their Lies’

These days, the last thing we want to think about is being cooped inside for what seems like forever. Unfortunately for us, that happens to be the plot of TNT’s Snowpiercer which premiered May 17.

Based on the 1982 French graphic novel Le Transperceneige as well as the 2013 movie Snowpiercer, we follow a post-apocalyptic society that doesn’t forget to remind us about the true horror: climate deniers.

The pilot “First, the Weather Changed” introduces us to what it conceives as the future. Scientists attempted to fire chemicals into the atmosphere to fight against global warming, but the result instead led to a massive, uninhabitable Ice Age.

To survive, a wealthy industrialist designed and constructed a massive perpetual-motion train called “Snowpiercer” to house the remnants of humanity.

Very quickly, a caste system forms on the train, with the wealthy elite housed in the front and the starving poor at the tail end.

Riots, we soon see, are frequent as the tail-end passengers fight for more food and better conditions from the hoarding rich.

Amid the obvious class allegories and an entire apocalypse happening outside, the show throws several characters and conflicts into the mix to keep this engine going.

There’s Layton (Daveed Diggs), a former homicide detective who now leads the rebellion among the “Taillies,” along with Melanie (Jennifer Connelly), a first-class passenger who helps keep order within the train.

However, none of the characters compare to the horror brought upon by the “deniers” of the old Earth.

In an animated prologue, Layton describes the background of the train as well as what caused the new Ice Age.

Some of the very first words we hear from the episode emphasize how the climate change deniers “doomed us with their lies.” In a way, everything bad that happens in this series can now be attributed to them.

Layton: First, the weather changed. The deniers knew why, but still they doomed us with their lies. War made the Earth even hotter. Her ice melted, and all her species crashed. So, the men of Science tried to cool the Earth, to reverse the damage they had sown. But instead, they froze her to the core.

Contrary to what this show and every other leftist politician would have you believe, “deniers” are not “dooming” us with their “lies.”

In fact, a lot of the so-called “deniers” have actually exposed many lies from the climate activists including but not limited to melting polar ice caps, rising temperatures, and the end of life as we know it.

It’s almost more plausible to believe in a perpetually moving train than a cohesive climate change argument at this point.

As far as the show goes, blaming global warming deniers for the end of the world is hardly anything new. Neither is complaining that the rich are hoarding everything from the starving poor for that matter.

We still have a long way to go with Snowpiercer, but my interest has already left the station.

SOURCE 

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

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

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

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

The end of oil is not in sight

Environmentalists dreaming of a post-pandemic future free of fossil fuels need to wake up.

For once, the cliché ‘unprecedented’ really did apply. In April, the price of an American barrel of oil, delivered in May, briefly dropped from a low $20 to minus $40. Storage capacity for oil became so tight, producers paid people to take it off their hands, for fear that supply chains would clog up irreparably.

That has never happened in 150 years of processing oil.

Some believe that the world’s daily average supply of oil – about 100million barrels a day (mmb/d) – could drop by 20 per cent. After all, America’s lockdown has already made demand for oil there fall from 20 to 14 mmb/d. But it is the collapse of demand for it in transport that has attracted most attention. Indeed, in the OECD area (which includes Europe, the US and Central America), transport accounts for more than 60 per cent of overall demand for oil.

The green establishment, now complete with woke banks and investors, sees in ghost roads and empty skies the beginning of the end of oil. These are the ‘sunset years of the fossil-fuel era’, contends Sky News’ economics editor. The former head of BP, Lord Browne, now says ‘people who have spent months worrying about their lungs are more likely to want clean air’ than continued use of oil. The International Energy Agency’s chief energy modeller has proclaimed that renewables beat fossil fuels because they’re like children – immune from the effects of the virus. Overall, we’re told, the world faces peak demand for oil in just a decade or two.

These people need a reality check. They are convinced electric vehicles will supplant petrol and diesel ones, and that renewables will replace fossil fuels. But they’re fooling themselves.

Take electric transport, for example. It would take 14 years just to restock the entire fleet of cars on UK roads. And, even then, that would depend on: all new cars made being electric by law; the sales of these new cars remaining steady, at 2.3million per year, despite the coming depression; the eight million used, internal-combustion-engine cars sold every year being declared illegal; and the sunk costs of petrol stations and tankers being ignored in favour of new charging points everywhere. And that’s four very big ifs. In other words, it could take much, much longer than 14 years to replace the UK’s existing fleet of cars.

For decades, too, acquiring and transporting the materials for electric cars – as, indeed, for wind turbines and solar panels – will depend on oil much more than electricity. Remember, for example, that the cobalt in batteries isn’t mined in by far the world’s largest producer, the Democratic Republic of Congo, by electric robots and distributed by electric trucks. No, it’s mined using children and diesel.

Greens also expect far too much of China. I’m a big fan of China’s electric cars, but Asia’s rebound from Covid-19 will see demand there surge for cheap-to-buy-and-run conventional cars. Renault, for example, envisages electric vehicles taking just a quarter of the Chinese market by 2030. And it will not just be the Chinese in Asia who, with higher incomes, will want the freedoms provided by the conventional car.

Beyond oil and transport, what about heat and gas? In energy, the price of gas tends to follow trends in the price of oil; so right now, gas, like oil, is really cheap. Yet, obsessed with global ‘heating’, our electric fetishists nevertheless forget the role of heat in industrial processes – the production of steel, chemicals, fertiliser, food, drink, cement, pulp, paper, and plastics – and the centrality of gas within those processes. Even in advanced, electric-arc furnaces, for instance, only half the energy used to make steel comes from amps and volts. Similarly, it is just possible that, by 2050, all plastics production in the EU will be electricity-based, including that of PPE. But environmentalists themselves concede that, in such a case, costs would be two to three times higher than today. And the claims that we can replace ‘nearly all’ UK household gas boilers with electric heat pumps or other alternatives to gas by 2050 remain fanciful at best.

And what of power supply? Environmentalists again deceive themselves when they take the irresistible rise of ‘green electricity’ for granted.

The government’s Digest of UK Energy Statistics states that, in 2018, wind and solar provided just 63.5 per cent of the record 33 per cent of UK electricity produced by renewables. The rest was produced by biofuels, the use of which many greens criticise on the grounds that they emit CO2 and require excessive amounts of land to be grown.

In other words, what are generally understood to be ‘renewables’ amount to just 21 per cent of the UK’s annual electricity supply. Yes, breezy and sunny summers can famously generate higher quantities of UK renewable electricity. But wind and solar won’t dominate year-round UK power supply for ages.

Greens contend that renewables use will increase because wind and solar are always getting cheaper. Yet while wind and solar, like electric vehicles, will indeed benefit from improvements in production technology, so will oil and gas. Our electric fetishists ignore, for instance, how IT has raised the productivity of US shale oil and gas production.

Selective in their appreciation of technological advance, electric fetishists are downright dishonest about the work that goes into electric systems. As noted above, child labour, sweat and exploitation account for much of the production of cobalt for batteries. But for electric fetishists, such facts are inconvenient.

As, indeed, is the fact that nobody can really forecast oil prices. But one kind of forecasting we can do without is the sort that’s wishful, technocratic, and, above all, authoritarian. In the 1980s, the uber-Thatcherite minister Norman Tebbit famously told the unemployed: ‘On your bike!’ Now our wannabe electric rulers tell everyone: on your electric bike – or buy that £40,000 Tesla.

SOURCE 



Roll Call Caught Telling Farmers Lies About Drought, Floods, Crop Yields

At the top of Google News searches this morning for “climate change” is a Roll Call article titled, “Farmers are coming around on climate change.” The article’s subtitle is “Flooded fields, persistent droughts or ravaging wildfires are giving many a change of heart.” Factual data, as well as the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), establish there is no increase in drought or floods. Moreover, crop yields set new records virtually every year. Roll Call is simply peddling discredited climate lies dressed up into fake news.

Drought Claims Are Strike One

Let’s first examine Roll Call’s claim about “persistent droughts.” As documented in Climate at a Glance: Drought, the United States is benefiting from fewer and less extreme drought events as the climate modestly warms.

For example, in 2017 and 2019, the United States registered its smallest percentage of land area experiencing drought in recorded history.

Also, the United States is undergoing its longest period in recorded history with fewer than 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions.

Globally, the IPCC reports with “high confidence” that precipitation has increased over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) during the past 70 years. Moreover, IPCC has “low confidence” about any negative trends globally. (See https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/06/SR15_Chapter3_Low_Res.pdf, p. 191.)

Roll Call’s claims about climate change causing “persistent droughts” is fake news and strike one.

Flood Claims Are Strike Two

Next, let’s examine Roll Call’s claim about “flooded fields.” As documented in Climate at a Glance: Floods, there has been no evidence of increasing flooding frequency or severity as the climate modestly warms.

The IPCC admits having “low confidence” in any climate change impact regarding the frequency or severity of floods.

Also, IPCC admits having “low confidence” in even the “sign” of any changes. In other words, it is just as likely that climate change is making floods less frequent and less severe.

Supporting this, a recent peer-reviewed study on the climate impact on flooding for the USA and Europe, published in the Journal of Hydrology, Volume 552, September 2017, Pages 704-717, found “The number of significant trends was about the number expected due to chance alone.”

The study also reported, “The results of this study, for North America and Europe, provide a firmer foundation and support the conclusion of the IPCC that compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.”

Roll Call’s claims that climate change is causing “flooded fields” fake news and strike two.

Claim of Declining Crop Yields Is Strike Three

Finally, let’s examine Roll Call’s claim about reduced crop yields. This, when all is said and done, is the heart of the issue regarding farmers and agriculture. Droughts and floods are merely the climate instruments by which crop yields may be stunted, hurting farmers. Does crop data show declining yields as Roll Call claims?

As documented in Climate at a Glance: Crop Yields, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization document that U.S. crop yields and global crop yields are setting records nearly every year as global climate modestly warms. Thanks in large part to longer growing seasons, fewer frost events, more precipitation, and the fertilization effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide, farmers are producing more food on less land, allowing them to feed a growing global population.

Indeed, almost every important U.S. crop has set record yields per acre during the past three years, with most of the top 10 years in yields-per-acre occurring during the past decade.

Crop yields set new records virtually every year, yet Roll Call attempts to fool readers with lies claiming the contrary.

Roll Call’s claim about climate change causing declining crop yields is strike three.

Three Strikes, Roll Call, Yerrrrrr Out!

Three strikes and you’re out, Roll Call. Climate facts trump fake climate news.

SOURCE 




Alarmist Study Claims More Heat Deaths, Ignores Greater Number of Cold Deaths

CNN, the Washington Post, and other media outlets are touting an alarmist paper claiming the number of days with high heat and humidity has doubled since 1979 in some parts of the world, causing more heat-related deaths. In reality, if an increase in global temperatures and humidity is occurring, its primary effect is saving human lives.

Peer-reviewed research finds cold temperatures kill 20 times more people globally than warm or hot temperatures. With such a disproportionate amount of deaths caused by cold temperatures, clearly an increase in global temperatures will save many more people than it will kill. However, the new study being touted by the alarmist media fails to take into account the many more people who are being saved from cold-related deaths. As if often the case with climate alarmists and their ventriloquist dummies in the media, they isolate a minor negative repercussion of warmer temperatures, completely ignore the much greater positive benefits, and then cast the net overall benefit as a climate emergency.

For example, much of the focus in the new alarmist paper is on the southeastern United States. Yet the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports cold temperatures kill many more people in the United States than warm or hot temperatures. The new paper leaves readers with the false impression that the net impact of warmer temperatures is more deaths, when it completely ignores the much greater number of people saved due to less frequent, severe, and deadly cold.

Indeed, in the United States and around the world, many more people die each year during the cold winter months than the hot summer months. Any change that reduces the prevalence and severity of cold relative to heat will accordingly save lives.

SOURCE 







Greenies often assure us that we will run out of food. David Littleproud claims Australia has the best food security in the world. Is he correct?

Rice, pasta and some canned foods sold out in the weeks after state and federal governments imposed restrictions and urged Australians to stay at home, with a sudden rush to stock up severely straining supply chains.

State and federal government ministers have said repeatedly that buying huge volumes of food and groceries is unnecessary, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison labelling panic buying "ridiculous" and "not sensible".

The National Farmers' Federation also sought to quell concerns about food shortages, telling consumers not to "panic" as there was "plenty of food to go around".

The Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management, David Littleproud, went so far as to declare that Australia "[has] the most secure food security in the world".

"We're a nation of 25 million people," Mr Littleproud told ABC Radio National's Afternoon Briefing program on May 11. "We produce enough food for 75 million."

Is that correct? Does Australia have "the most secure food security in the world"? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

The verdict: Mr Littleproud's claim is in the ballpark.

According to many studies and experts, Australia enjoys a very high level of food security. The nation produces an abundance of food, exports far more than it needs, and has ample alternative sources of certain foods should they become scarce.

While Australia is not the top-ranked or "most" food-secure nation in the world, according to some comparisons, it nevertheless has plenty of flexibility in terms of food sources and could switch production priorities to alleviate shortfalls. One international comparison places Australia 12th among 113 nations in terms of food security.

Richard Heath, of the Australian Farm Institute, typified the response of the experts.

"By the most basic definition — which is, 'Are we at risk of starving because we cannot feed ourselves?' — we are so far from that, it's ridiculous," he said.

"When you consider the availability of irrigated-water area, the amount of arable land … we are a very secure nation in terms of food."

SOURCE 

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

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

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

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