Greens promote child slave labor and ecological destruction

Why don’t African black lives and ecological values matter? or impacts in and beyond Virginia?

Paul Driessen

The US Supreme Court recently ruled 7-2 to reverse a lower court ruling that had invalidated a permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which will bring West Virginia natural gas to Virginia and North Carolina, for home heating, factory power, electricity generation and manufacturing petrochemical feedstocks.

Environmentalists had claimed the US Forest Service had no authority to issue the permit, because a 0.1-mile (530-foot) segment would cross 600 feet below the 2,200-mile-long Appalachian Trail, which is administered by the National Park Service. Justice Thomas’s majority opinion scuttled that assertion.

Pipeline project developers Dominion Resources and Duke Energy should receive the USFS and other permits relatively soon – and have the pipeline in operation by early 2022 – unless a Biden administration takes over in 2021 (with AOC as woke climate and energy advisor to Biden and Democrats) and imposes Green New Deal bans on drilling, fracking, pipelines, and eventually any use of natural gas, oil and coal.

Meanwhile, environmentalist groups plan more lawsuits. They insist the pipeline would put rivers and streams at risk of increased sedimentation, scar pristine landscapes, and harm sensitive species.

These plans and assertions underscore how inflexible they have become in opposing any US fossil fuel use. How incapable of recognizing or rationally discussing the far greater human and ecological impacts from energy systems they favor. How reliant on blatant double standards and mob rule, instead of on rational, cohesive, persuasive discussion.

Barely a few years ago, the Sierra Club and allied groups gladly took $187 million and more from Michael Bloomberg, natural gas producers and other financiers to wage their War on Coal. Having closed down most US coal mines and power plants, they then turned gas from a “climate friendly bridge fuel” to evil incarnate. Today they to end fossil fuel use nationwide. Via delusion, incantation and cancellation of debate, they have convinced themselves that wind, solar, battery and biofuel “alternatives” are somehow “clean, green, renewable and sustainable.” Reality says otherwise.

The Atlantic Coast Pipeline will be underground, mostly invisible beneath a grassy right-of-way. Any sedimentation will occur during short term construction operations, when some wildlife will be scared off or displaced for a spell. Any threat to sensitive species, even in the event of a leak, will be minimal.

In stark contrast, their preferred energy systems will have massive, permanent impacts – in Virginia and far beyond its borders. Virginia solar panels will blanket more than eight times the land area of Washington, DC. Hundreds of 850-foot-tall bird-killing wind turbines will create an enormous obstacle course for whales, ships and planes off the Virginia Beach coast. Many thousands of 1,200-pound batteries will provide backup power to replace coal and solar for a sunless, windless day or two.

Hundreds of miles of new transmission lines will soar into the sky and snake across the countryside. Just bringing wind-based electricity from West Virginia to Blacksburg, Roanoke and Lynchburg, Virginia – and solar energy from all those Virginia panels to Staunton and Harrisonburg – will require several new transmission lines across the Appalachian Trail. Not 600 feet below it; right across it.

But somehow, we and our courts are supposed to believe, all these enormous industrial facilities – and the blasting, tree clearing, machinery, noise and other impacts associated with building and maintaining them – will cause no stream sedimentation, landscape scarring or harm to sensitive species.

In reality, the radical greens, utility companies and Democrats promoting these projects under the Virginia “Clean” Economy Act will simply demand that courts ignore the arguments they raised and environmental laws they cited when they raged against coal and gas power plants and the pipelines and transmission lines associated with them. They’ll demand that citizen groups opposed to these monstrous wind, solar and battery complexes be thrown out of court. They’ll want the same double standards applied nationally.

Eliminating fossil fuels would mean America would have to replace 100% of its gasoline and all its oil and natural gas feed stocks for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers – and plastics for cell phones, computers, car bodies, packaging, wind turbine blades, solar panel films and countless other products. That would require turning some 700 million acres of food crop and habitat land (four times the land area of Texas) into biofuel corn, sugarcane and canola plantations for ethanol and biodiesel.

More extreme versions of the Green New Deal would eliminate coal, gas and nuclear electricity and backup power, gas for home heating, coal and gas for factories, and internal combustion vehicles. We’d replace it all with wind or solar – and use wind or solar on good days to generate enough extra electricity to charge batteries for seven windless, sunless days. That’s 8.5 billion megawatts – twice what we used in 2018!

We’d need some 75 billion solar panels ... or 4.2 million 1.8-MW onshore wind turbines ... or 320,000 10-MW offshore wind turbines ... and some 3.5 billion 100-kWh backup batteries. The concrete, steel, copper, lithium, rare earth elements, aluminum, cobalt, plastic and other materials to build them would require vastly more mining and manufacturing than the world has ever seen – nearly all of it with fossil fuels.

Environmentalists oppose almost all mining anywhere in the United States, and even by US companies operating overseas under rigorous Western rules. That means essential metals and minerals get mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control, under minimal to nonexistent labor, wage, environmental, reclamation, and worker health and safety regulations. The mining and industrial areas have become vast toxic wastelands.

For cobalt alone, over 40,000 Congolese children, as young as four years old, slave away alongside their parents in mines, for a dollar a day, risking cave-ins and being exposed constantly to filthy, toxic, radioactive mud, dust, water and air. That’s today – for today’s battery, solar panel and wind turbine needs. Imagine how many would be needed to serve the Green New Deal. 400,000 perhaps? 4,000,000?

China alone will soon have 200 times more coal-fired generation than Virginia will be shutting down. During 2020, says consulting company Wood Mackenzie, Europe and the United States will close down 22,000 megawatts of coal-fired power capacity – even as Asia opens 49,000 megawatts of new coal-fired power plants, on top of those it already has and in addition to its growing fleet of gas-fired units.

China is building or financing numerous coal and gas power plants in Africa and Asia. India already has hundreds of coal-fired units and is building or planning 400 more. China and India are also building or planning hundreds of new airports, and putting millions of new cars and trucks on their roads. That (plus the GND mining, processing and manufacturing) means, even if Virginia or the entire USA eliminated all fossil fuel use tomorrow – it wouldn’t make an iota of difference for global carbon dioxide levels.

These environmental and human rights travesties can happen only under a system of rampant double standards: the same kinds that excoriate and ban religious services and funerals, anti-lockdown protests and Trump rallies – while permitting, excusing and praising Black Lives Matter marches that have too often turned into anti-police mobs, riots, looting, arson, beatings, and murders of people like David Dorn and Patrick Underwood, whose also precious black lives certainly haven’t mattered much to this crowd.

They also require that the woke Campus Cancel Culture spread its intolerant, authoritarian rule to our cities, media, social media, and even legislative bodies and courts – to instill constant anger and anarchy, and silence, defame and punish anyone who dares to offer nuanced or contrarian viewpoints. Every victory brings new demands, with no accountability for the mayhem and destruction they inflict.

Why should rural, poor, minority and working class families and communities have to accept the ecological, health and economic damages inflicted in pursuit of this pseudo-renewable energy utopia? Why should Africans, Asians and Latin Americans have to accept slave status to advance this agenda?

The situation is coming to a head. Let’s hope the now-silent majority can restore law, order, civil debate, thoughtful reflection on our complex history, and rational resolution of these thorny problems.

Via email





Energy density and the electric car charging dilemma

Given all the hype over renewable sources to generate intermittent electricity, the numbers from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) support none of the biased hype. Fossil fuels dominate the energy mix today and are projected to do so for at lest a decade as shown in the figure below.

Yet over the past four decades billions have been spent on solar, wind, corn and other biofuels, not to mention electric cars which I will cover shortly. The result of all this investment been only a modest gain in market share. Part of this is the amazing number of other lifestyle products derived from petroleum. EIA has calculated that they number over 6000. An added disadvantage is that renewables have no role in the military, or for airlines, cruise ships or supertankers.

While conspiracy theorists may prefer to believe that big oil, coal and nuclear have stifled the growth of renewables, it is not so. Only coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear can satisfy the four energy imperatives, power density, energy density, cost and scale. Renewables fall woefully short of meeting these requirements.

The biggest impediment to the growth of electricity generated by wind and solar is the newly coined Ciccione/Lehr Rule of Thumb which states “All wind and solar power on the electric grid must be backed up by an equal or greater amount of fossil fuel power running on standby 100% of the time” It has been described in detail in numerous previous articles by this author at CFACT.org.

Let’s turn our attention to the most over looked source of energy coming to the fore daily, that which powers so-called electric cars. California plans to have over 25 million such vehicles in the not too distant future. The utility companies have thus far had little to say about the alarming cost projections or the certain increased rates that will be required to charge their customers. It is not just the total amount of electricity required but the transmission lines and fast charging capacity that must be built at existing filling stations. Neither wind or solar can support any of it.

A Canadian engineer recently ran the numbers involved in the switchover to electric vehicles and concluded that in order to match the 2000 cars that a typical filling station can service in a busy 12 hours, the filling station would require 600, 50 watt chargers at an estimated cost of $24 million and a supply of 30 megawatts of power from the grid which would be enough to power 20,000 homes. Unlike home recharging stations, these would be operating at peak usage hours where the rates are the highest. Can you spell brownout and blackout. Basically new grids will need to be built at the cost of billions.

No-one likely thinks about the fact that it can take between 30 minutes and 8 hours to recharge a vehicle, depending on it being empty or just topping off. They will need lounge areas, holding areas for vehicles completed but waiting for owners to return from shopping or dining.

There is no question that electric vehicles have some positive attributes, low refueling costs, no air pollutants at the point of use and quiet operation, but are they actually clean anEnergy density and the electric car charging dilemmad green as their marketing insists. They have no tailpipes, as we know, on the car, but immense exhausts miles away. Aren’t they really coal or natural gas cars? They are certainly not wind and solar cars .

Regardless of their promise they continue to be hampered by their long standing drawbacks, extra costs, limited range, slow recharge rates, lack of recharging stations and a relatively short battery life with a high replacement cost against the life cycle of the average internal combustion engined car.

Although the modern lithium-ion battery is four times better than the old lead-acid battery, gasoline holds 80 times the energy density. The great lithium-ion battery in your cell phones weighs less than an ounce while the Tesla battery weighs 1000 pounds.

Do we still think electric cars are the wave of the future?

SOURCE 





America leads the world in pollution reduction

The constant hammering by the left at climate change is driven by a desire to destroy the very foundations that drive our economy. How can one come to any other conclusion when wAmerica leads the world in pollution reductione look at these charts? Guess who leads the world in the reduction of ocean pollution?

THE USA. Look at China, the worlds biggest polluter. Now look at Carbon emissions, Who is one of the greenest countries on the planet?

The USA. So why are we being subjected to a collective guilt trip on destroying the planet, when, if what they say is true, it’s large areas of the rest of the world that is doing it?
Does it even phase them that prosperity leads to better living conditions?

America leads the world in pollution reduction 1Here is the reason. Its not a concern about CO2 destroying the planet. How could it be when our capitalistic system has developed a way to reduce that for those that fear it? And guess what, there are more things that can be done that would ENHANCE, not destroy our way of life in this matter. So why would anyone hammer the USA?. Because its not the real agenda. They know darn well that though climate change is down on the list of most importance to most people, there is a bloc of INDOCTRIANATED VOTERS, that have no idea that their country is the leader because of its system, that can turn an election. We have enough swing states that if you have a bloc voting on their fears because they believe their country and way of life is evil, you get pushed over the edge. That bloc has no idea on the exact statistics, whether you believe CO2 is the devil or not. They are unaware that the USA is doing its share, in fact, more than our share if this is the real matter.

But it is not. Like so many things, there are informational predatory practices designed to prey on people to sway them, with no regard for other sides of the issue. They know few will actually look. So they hide information and push a missive to achieve another goal to seek a mass group think, where there is no dissent. Those very tactics are an attack on our way of life. So what can this possibly be driven by? And here is what is so maddening.

They seek to destroy the very system that could actually get rid of this if it was a problem. The problem now is not the climate, it’s the perception that an atmospheric apocalypse is on the way and you must in essence, commit economic suicide to stop it. Yet if that’s true, the USA is doing our part to stop that.

Simple logic dictates that if our way of life is leading the world in this matter. While a socialist/communist giant like China is at the bottom, why would anyone want to destroy the very nation leading the way and move toward a system that does not? The real reason can not be, for most, a true concern for climate, but instead to push the perception that we are not a force for good in the world, and that our way of life must be dismantled. They claim its for the good of the world, but it’s the opposite. This nation better wake up to the idea that this has very little to with science, but ulterior motives that run counter to what made this nation the envy of the world. Which if climate change was the real issue, the US already is in that matter!

SOURCE 





Mining lobby increases its virtue signalling

Australia's peak mining lobby group will release a road map on Monday to cut carbon emissions as it throws its support behind the Paris Agreement.

The Minerals Council of Australia wants to use clean energy and electric vehicles at mines across the country.

"This is a time for action, instead of vague virtue-signalling about future ambitions without the courage to outline concrete plans," chief executive Tania Constable told The Australian on Monday.

The three-year plan is expected to help Australia's major mining companies compete while calming community concerns on climate change.

Ms Constable said climate change posed risks and opportunities for the sector with sustained action needed to dampen its effects.

The federal government is currently designing its technology investment blueprint to entice funding in gas, hydro and hydrogen energy as a way to cut carbon emissions.

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

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

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Pro-Abortion Biden Says Climate Change Damaging Unborn Children

The NYT article appears too be referring to the Bekkar et al. study.  One notes that Bekkar et al considered only 68 out of 1831 relevant articles.  One wonders what the other articles said and whether or not their conclusions influenced their inclusion in the survey. There is much room for biased inclusion in such studies.

They also comment that "Accurate comparisons of risk were limited by differences in study design, exposure measurement, population demographics, and seasonality."

So the conclusions are very shaky, particularly when we note that the effects in studies of this sort are very weak.  Most of the articles will have reported effects that explain only a tiny amount of the variance -- so could easily have been influenced by extraneous factors


The media should launch a thorough investigation into determining whether Joe Biden has any brains at all. “Yes, but he talks a lot,” Biden defenders might say. “You can’t talk if you don’t have brains.”

Well, like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz reminds us, “Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking.”

Exhibit A in the case for no brains for Biden comes via a tweet that Biden posted responding to New York Times climate change reporter Hiroko Tabuchi.

Researchers looked at data from studies covering more than 32 million births from 2007 to 2019. Women exposed to high temperatures or air pollution are more likely to have premature, underweight or stillborn babies, a look at 32 million U.S. births found.

Biden’s reply was unintentionally hilarious.

Climate change is linked to increased pregnancy risks — and heartbreakingly, Black mothers are being hit the hardest. As President, I'll work every day to tackle the climate crisis head-on and root out injustice. Because they are intertwined

Protecting mothers and unborn babies is important, but Biden does not support the most fundamental of all protections: a right to life. Quite the opposite, he supports the so-called “right” to abort an unborn baby. And, to use Biden’s words, “heartbreakingly” black mothers and unborn babies are hit the hardest by abortions.

Since 1973 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Roe v. Wade, approximately 20 million unborn black babies have been aborted in America.

Though abortions hurt families of every race and culture, statistics indicate that abortions disproportionately hurt the African American community. Census data indicates that African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population, but they have nearly 40 percent of all abortions. And New York City health statistics indicate that more African American babies are aborted in the city than are born each year.

Does Biden realize the idiocy of his statement? How can you be for aborting babies and saving them at the same time?

He promised to end the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits taxpayer-funded abortions in Medicaid. He also said one of his first acts as president would be to restore funding to Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion chain in America.

In March, he even suggested using taxpayer funds for abortions as a solution to overpopulation in poor countries. Then, in April, he went so far as to call the killing of unborn babies an “essential medical service” during the coronavirus pandemic.

I can recall the slippery slope argument of pro-lifers when Roe v. Wade became the law of the land. They warned that eventually, abortion would be used to control populations, as they were already doing in China. The pro-life lobby was ridiculed for saying such nonsense. Through the years, everything that the pro-life lobby has warned about — including killing babies up to the moment they’re born — was dismissed as the ranting of lunatics.

Biden is looking to shamelessly pander to those who think abortion is a religion. He hit the trifecta by also pandering to blacks and greens. It’s like he has a checklist of groups that he has to reassure with every public utterance.

And yes, that’s brainless.

SOURCE





IPCC’s core hypothesis is dead

by Ed Berry, PhD, Atmospheric Physics, CCM

1. Introduction

1.1 IPCC’s claims are based on invalid hypothesis
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [1] bases all its climate claims on its core hypothesis. This hypothesis has three parts:

Natural carbon emissions remained constant after 1750.
Natural carbon emissions support a CO2 level of 280 ppm.
Human carbon emissions caused all the CO2 increase above 280 ppm.

IPCC claims its core hypothesis is true and concludes without scientific validation:

“With a very high level of confidence, the increase in CO2 emis­sions from fossil fuel burning and those arising from land use change are the dominant cause of the observed increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.”

“The removal of human-emitted CO2 from the atmosphere by natural processes will take a few hundred thousand years (high confidence).”

The truth is IPCC’s “high level of confidence” vanishes because it assumes incorrectly that IPCC’s core hypothesis is true.

1.2 What this paper does

Simple observation of IPCC’s report [1] shows IPCC’s human carbon cycle does not agree with its natural carbon cycle. IPCC’s own Figure 6.1 shows something is wrong with IPCC’s human carbon cycle.

To test the above observation, this paper derives a “Physics” carbon cycle model that uses only one simple hypothesis:

Outflow equals level divided by response time, herein called e-time.

This hypothesis is used in many scientific and engineering models. Even IPCC uses this hypothesis in several places. It is the simplest possible hypothesis for carbon cycle models.

This simple hypothesis is compatible with all applicable physical and chemical laws. This simple hypothesis shows it is possible and preferable to calculate the natural and human carbon cycles separately. The results of the separate calculations can be added together to produce the total carbon cycle.

IPCC’s carbon cycle model has four key reservoirs: land, atmosphere, surface ocean, and deep ocean. IPCC’s data show carbon levels for each reservoir and the flows between the reservoirs for both natural and human carbon cycles. IPCC’s data for its natural carbon cycle is not perfect but it may be the best data we have. IPCC says its natural carbon cycle data is good to about 20 percent accuracy.

This paper calculates the six e-times for IPCC’s natural carbon cycle data by simply dividing levels by their outflows. Why six? Because the atmosphere and surface ocean have two outflows while the land and deep ocean have only one. With these six e-times, the Physics carbon cycle model is complete, and it exactly replicates IPCC’s data for its natural carbon cycle.

Then this paper calculates the human carbon cycle model. This model begins with all reservoirs empty and inserts IPCC’s data for annual human carbon emissions into the atmosphere. In each model year, the Physics model lets human carbon flow between the reservoirs according the e-times defined by IPCC’s natural carbon cycle.

This simple calculation shows the “true” human carbon cycle because it requires human carbon to obey the same physical rules as IPCC’s natural carbon cycle. However, this “true” human carbon cycle differs significantly from IPCC’s claimed human carbon cycle.

The fact that IPCC’s human carbon cycle is significantly different from the true human carbon cycle – that corresponds to IPCC’s natural carbon cycle – proves IPCC’s human carbon cycle is invalid. IPCC treats human and natural carbon differently, which is unphysical.

Inspection of IPCC’s data shows IPCC did NOT derive its human carbon cycle from its data for the natural carbon cycle or from any data at all. IPCC forced its human carbon cycle to match its core hypothesis without any consideration of IPCC’s natural carbon cycle data.

Therefore, IPCC’s human carbon cycle has no basis in science. Put politely, IPCC’s human carbon cycle is a fraud.

This conclusion is independent of whether IPCC’s natural carbon cycle or the Physics natural carbon cycle properly represent the unknown true natural carbon cycle. All models are approximations to reality.

All that matters here is that the Physics model properly represents IPCC’s natural carbon cycle. Therefore, the Physics model properly calculates IPCC’s true human carbon cycle. This is sufficient to prove IPCC’s human carbon cycle is a fraud and that IPCC’s core hypothesis is false.

All three parts of IPCC’s core hypothesis listed in Section 1.1 are false. There is no other testable hypothesis to replace IPCC’s failed core hypothesis.

The political implications of IPCC’s scientific fraud are significant. IPCC told the world that its human carbon cycle was valid. IPCC’s fraud negates all its claims about human-caused climate change. IPCC’s fraud negates all IPCC’s so-called scientific papers that incorrectly assume IPCC’s core hypothesis is true. All such “scientific” papers are wrong.

Henceforth, no true scientist can claim or assume that natural carbon emissions stayed constant after 1750 and human carbon emissions caused all the increase in atmospheric CO2 above 280 ppm.

SOURCE





No, Google, Climate Change Is Not Killing Americans, It Is Saving Them

At the top of Google News searches this morning for “climate change” is an article titled, “Climate Change Is Killing Americans. Health Departments Aren’t Equipped to Respond.” The article, published by Columbia Journalism Investigations and the far-left British tabloid The Guardian, claims “a rise in dangerous heat in the United States” is causing a dramatic rise in climate-related deaths. However, just the opposite is the case, as objective evidence proves warmer temperatures are reducing deaths in America and around the world.

The Columbia article claims, “In contrast to a viral pandemic, like the one caused by the novel coronavirus, this [the asserted rise in heatwaves] is a quiet, insidious threat with no end point.” The article provides, as an illustrative example, the story of an Arizona man who lived alone, in isolation, in his rural desert home. When people hadn’t heard from him for three weeks, police checked on his home and found his dead body. His air conditioner had broken down and it was 99 degrees. An autopsy ruled “heat exposure” as his cause of death.

The premise of the Columbia article is that global warming caused the high summer temperatures in the Arizona desert that caused the man to die. As if Arizona was a cool, temperate, refreshing summer oasis prior to global warming causing the Arizona desert to begin getting hot in the summer just 50 years ago. People with common sense know better.

If you don’t trust your common sense, we can look at objective evidence. As shown in Climate at a Glance: U.S. Temperatures, there has been no warming in the United States since at least 2005, which is when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration implemented its most precise-ever temperature network throughout the United States. It seems rather odd that Columbia would publish an article claiming “Climate Change Is Killing Americans” by virtue of higher temperatures when there has been no increase in American temperatures for at least the past 15 years.

Also, scientists report cold temperatures cause more deaths than warm temperatures. In a peer-reviewed study published in the prestigious medical journal  Lancet, researchers found that colder-than-ideal temperatures kill 20 times more people globally than warmer-than-ideal temperatures. That includes the United States, where the U.S. Centers for Disease Control report far more Americans die each day during the cold winter months than during the warm summer months. Therefore, even if temperatures were warming in the United States, any such climate change would save the lives of far more people than would die because of the warmer temperatures.

It is a shame that Google doesn’t “fact check” itself to avoid promoting clearly deceitful alarmist articles as top results for climate change “news.”

SOURCE





Rooftop solar power law acts as subsidy for the wealthy

A policy meant to encourage more rooftop solar power generation could be costing all ratepayers and subsidizing the affluent.

The policy —net metering— allows consumers to offset their electric bill with electricity generated from rooftop solar panels. When the solar panels produce more electricity than the home is using, excess electricity is put back onto the grid. The meter “spins” backward, deducting the electricity generated from the resident’s bill. Homeowners pay only for the net amount their meter records, hence the name “net metering.”

Under Missouri law, net metering customers are paid at the retail electricity rate for the power they generate. However, retail electricity prices include more than just generation. Transmission and distribution costs, among other items, are included in a ratepayer’s retail electricity price. In Missouri, only about a third of the retail price is from electricity generation costs.

When net metering customers are paid retail rates, they receive payments not just for the electricity they produce but also the parts of retail rates that are used to maintain the electric grid, which they neither provide nor maintain. But the costs of providing and maintaining transmission and distribution infrastructure don’t disappear—utilities pass on the costs of net metering programs to other customers through higher rates.

The costs passed on to other customers can be quite high. According to research by the Brookings Institute, if a net metering customer zeroes out their monthly bill entirely, they shift $45 to $70 onto regular customers. Before reforms were enacted in 2016, net metering customers in Arizona shifted over $9 million in annual costs onto regular customers. Net metering customers in Nevada received a roughly $500 annual subsidy from regular customers; reforms in 2017 lowered that dollar amount, but only slightly.

Moreover, this cost shift has regressive effects. A survey by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that solar panel owners have incomes 50 percent higher than the median income of households that don’t own solar panels. Asking lower-income earners to subsidize wealthier solar panel owners is hardly an ideal policy.

So what can be done about this problem? One solution is to compensate net metering customers at wholesale, not retail, prices. Net metering customers would be paid the costs the utility saves by not generating this electricity, which would not include the many other costs—transmission, distribution, administration, etc.—that the retail rate includes. This approach better reflects the value of the electricity produced and doesn’t lead to such drastic cost shifting. Alternatively, an additional monthly fee could be charged to net metering customers to offset retail price overcompensation, as Kansas has done.

Rooftop solar power has room for growth in Missouri, but current net metering laws unfairly reward those with solar panels and punish those without. Missouri should consider altering the net metering policy to make it fairer for all ratepayers.

SOURCE

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

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

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Natural Variability Behind West Antarctic Warming—Media Silent

DAVID WHITEHOUSE

Ten days ago the journal Science issued an embargoed press release about a forthcoming paper that suggested the warming observed in West Antarctica was due to natural climatic variability.

West Antarctica has always been looked on by alarmists as being the southern example of polar temperature amplification – a phenomenon predicted by most climate change models.

The Arctic temperature amplification is very apparent so there must be an Antarctic equivalent, and there it is.

But while scientists have been well aware that Antarctica is warming asymmetrically, with West Antarctica experiencing more than East Antarctica and frequently attributed to climate change, the underlying causes of this phenomenon have been poorly understood, and the suggestion that West Antarctica may be experiencing natural warming has been suggested before though not taken up very enthusiastically, if at all.

This new paper, “The internal origin of the west-east asymmetry of Antarctic climate change”, expresses the dilemma well.

In explaining the asymmetry, it suggests factors such as atmosphere-ocean feedbacks along the coast of West Antarctica and the shape of the Antarctic terrain combine to create a pattern of upper troposphere circulation over the West Antarctic subcontinent that flows opposite to the Earth’s rotation.


Fig. 2: Two leading modes of the annual-mean Antarctic surface temperature and their characteristics from 1958 to 2012 in the CMIP5 historical simulations. Source: Sang-Yoon Jun et al., 2020

The researchers conclude,

The current west-east asymmetry of Antarctic surface climate change is undoubtedly of natural origin because no external factors (e.g., orbital or anthropogenic factors) contribute to the asymmetric mode.”

They add that the consistent pattern of warmer sea surface temperatures over the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Antarctic seas suggests that regional sea surface temperature anomalies around Antarctica are a driving factor behind the continent’s asymmetrical warming.

Paleoclimate datasets revealed variability in surface air temperatures spanning multiple decades, suggesting climate fluctuations in the tropics, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation, may also contribute to the discrepancies in warming rates between both subcontinents.

Overall, it’s a fascinating paper especially given the concern about the region’s ice decline leading to present and future sea-level change. But unless you look at two or three specialized outlets you won’t have heard about it.

The embargoed information from the Science journal is normally released four days before the embargo is lifted on Thursday evening UK time.

Thousands of journalists around the world see it as Science along with Nature are the world’s leading science journals. So why is it that no mainstream news media covered this important story? It’s not as though there were any other pressing environment stories to eclipse it.

What it demonstrates is the asymmetry in environment and science reporting. If the story confirms the dire news that anthropogenic climate change affects everything and is visible anywhere it’s much more likely to be trumpeted by the mainstream media than if it explains some of the climatic changes we see is due to mother nature.

Not every change we see is attributable to human influence. We still have to deal with the consequences.

Accurate knowledge is the first step because if we don’t understand the cause of particular climatic changes we will waste a lot of time and effort combatting things we never caused and have no power to influence.

SOURCE 





Virginia’s latest folly — offshore wind power

As reported in an earlier article, Virginia’s green electric power plan calls for 5,000 MW of offshore wind generating capacity to be built in the next decade or so. This is a huge amount given that the worldwide total is just around 15,000 MW. We are talking about something like 800 giant windmills, embedded in the ocean floor and sticking hundreds of feet into the air above the water. They will be on the order of one and a half times taller than the Washington Monument, which is really tall.

Two features make this offshore wind plan a folly — too little wind and too much wind. Let’s look at too little wind first.

The proposed site is around 30 miles offshore of the giant Norfolk naval complex. Sites are usually much closer in than this, but maybe the Navy told them to keep their distance. Or perhaps they are out beyond the very busy shipping lanes. Every ship from Central and South America, or the southeast U.S., headed for ports from Baltimore north to Canada, passes through this area. This in itself is a concern but not one we are looking at now.

The problem is that this area frequently gets periods of a week or more when the wind is too low to generate any power. These are winds of 10 mph or less. Normal wind turbines require sustained wind of 33 mph or more to generate full power. Some new models with giant blades can do full power at just 23 mph. But neither generates much of anything at 10 mph. It is not a matter of no wind; low wind is enough.

Weather records for Norfolk show just such an event last year, with the low wind period being August 17-23. The wind never measured over 10 mph for the entire 7 days.

To make matters worse, when these low wind periods occur in summer they often include very high temperatures. In the event cited above the high temperatures were in the upper 80’s and low 90’s. Away from the ocean, temperatures were even higher. Both Richmond and Washington DC saw high temperatures in the mid to upper 90’s for most of this week long period.

These high temperatures create the greatest need for electricity, called peak demand. Combining peak demand with no wind power means this huge, expensive wind facility does nothing when electricity is most needed. Some other form of power generation will have to be standing by to do what the 5,000 MW of useless offshore wind power cannot do.

There is no provision for this duplication of generating capacity in the Virginia plan. If it is not there when needed, then a prolonged blackout is the only option.

Week long periods of no generation low wind occur fairly often in the Norfolk area, perhaps once every few years. In a hot summer they may occur more than once. But there are also many shorter periods of low wind, with a high need for electricity, that occur more frequently. Then too there are no doubt longer periods of low wind that occur less frequently. At the one in fifty year frequency we might get a month or more of low wind. I see no evidence that these possibilities have been addressed in the Virginia plan.

On the high wind side we have hurricanes.

This area could be called hurricane alley because many storms turn north in the Caribbean and run up the American coast. Southern Virginia and northern North Carolina actually stick out into this flow. That is where these tall towers will be.

Category five hurricanes have sustained winds over 156 mph with gusts that can exceed 200 mph. To date no offshore wind towers have been designed to withstand these sorts of winds. Most have been built in Europe where hurricanes do not occur. The force of the wind is a function of the square of the wind speed, so a 160 mph wind is four times as destructive as an 80 mph wind.

In fact the US Energy Department recently announced a new research program to look into whether a hurricane proof design is even possible. Here’s how DOE puts it:

“Although hurricanes and the damage they can cause remain difficult to predict, with current R&D, the Energy Department is taking steps to alleviate potential risks to offshore wind systems that will eventually be deployed in the southeastern and mid-Atlantic regions.“

DOE puts a positive spin on it but it seems clear that we are in no position to build massive hurricane proof offshore wind facilities today. DOE says “eventually” and even that may be wishful thinking.

One thing certain is that if Virginia goes ahead, in effect playing chicken with cat 5 storms, these hundreds of towers will have to be far stronger than standard European designs. Stronger means more expensive. The standard cost is around $1.5 million per MW, which would be $7.5 billion in Virginia’s case. If hurricane proofing doubles the cost that puts a monstrous $15 billion at risk of destruction.

Conclusion: The Virginia plan is calling for a massive and incredibly expensive offshore wind generating facility, at high risk of failure, that will produce no power whatever when it is needed most.

Surely this is folly.

SOURCE 






Scottish Government’s failure to meet carbon emission target blamed on Cold Weather

I’m not making it up, this is a genuine headline run by the heraldscotland.com on June 16, 2020…

THE FAILURE of the Scottish Government to meet its own climate emissions target –net zero by 2045– has been blamed on the “beast from the east” bringing cold weather to the nation in 2018, reads the opening lines of the article.

According to statistics published yesterday, emissions in the power sector from fossil fuels actually increased by 51 per cent to 2.6 gigawatts from 2017-2018, with overall source emissions rising 1.5 per cent over the same period.

Scotland’s Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham said the annual increase is “certainly disappointing” and stressed that the bar has been “intentionally been set to provide an extremely stretching pathway to net zero”.

Cunningham put the increase in emissions from 2017 to 2018 down to “changes to the national energy mix and freezing temperatures from the beast from the east during the early months of 2018” which led to “a rise in emissions from energy supply and heating use for buildings.”

She added: “While emissions reductions were seen in all other sectors including transport, industry and agriculture, during 2018 the overall effect was a 1.5 per cent increase and we expect a substantial part of that was driven by the cold weather.”

Oh what a twisted, illogical mess these poor environmentalists have gone and made for themselves. Rising carbon dioxide levels are delivering catastrophic heating, goes their rhetoric — yet CO2 emissions are rising because folks need to heat their homes in order to stave off the record cold.

If this warped ideology wasn’t restricting our ability to prepare for what’s really coming then I’d surely piss myself laughing.

In addition, it appears that 2019 and 2020 aren’t looking too hot for these delusional carbon-(the backbone of all life)-hating hippies either. Chilly conditions in 2019 have tossed another spanner into the works, and now, thanks to the COVID-19 debacle, the low emission plans for the cities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee have all been put on hold.

Despite all of these major setbacks, the Scottish Government “remains absolutely committed to ending Scotland’s emissions contribution by 2045” with a 75 per cent reduction target by 2030.

Cunningham concluded: “Covid-19 means that our starting position has most definitely changed, but our ambitions have not. We are committed to delivering a green recovery from this pandemic.”

In other words, the BS goes on.

And will continue to go on.

Until the returning COLD TIMES render large parts of the mid-latitudes uninhabitable and people begin burning whatever the hell they can find to keep themselves warm (I recommend Greta Thunberg’s book, “No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference”).

SOURCE 







See the Slideshow AOC Tried, and Failed, to Censor

By Caleb Rossiter

This is my slide show and 20-minute talk that Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Chellie Pingree tried to censor at the LibertyCon 2020 conference in Washington, D.C. 

They wrote to sponsors of the event, including Google and Facebook, and asked them not to fund any event with an appearance by "climate deniers" from the CO2 Coalition. 

LibertyCon indeed lost some sponsorship, but because of its commitment to the free exchange of ideas still invited me back to speak in 2020. This is the talk I had prepared, before the coronavirus crisis forced the cancellation of the conference.

As background to this topic, I suggest that you watch the CO2 Coalition's "CO2-Minute" video, "Carbon Dioxide: Part of a Greener Future." 

Now, on to the talk! Click the link to watch the slideshow Climate Statistics 101.

Via info@co2coalition.org

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

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

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Failing Cities and States use Climate Change Lawsuits as Fiscal Escape Hatch

Cities and states are suing energy companies in a desperate attempt to erase their poor spending choices. Local officials argue oil and gas companies contribute to climate change and must be held accountable, but beneath this façade, leftist politicians are trying to win the lawsuit lottery to stave off fiscal insolvency.

 Government officials keep pursuing these suits because they can’t figure out how to fix the budget deficits they have created. Suing big corporations in friendly jurisdictions is an escape hatch to avoid the repercussions of decades of wasteful spending. Unfortunately, these efforts hurt the wallets of everyday Americans who have money invested in energy companies, and if successful, energy costs would likely rise across America.

 Analyzing the legal actions taken by various localities show they are trying to make a quick buck. Over and over, states and cities make unprovable and exaggerated claims contradicting Supreme Court precedent. Sometimes the mask slips and officials even admit that the suits are really about generating revenue.

 Local officials claim climate change will soon devastate their cities in legal filings, but argue the opposite when money is on the line.  Horace Cooper, a senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, describes this hypocrisy. 

 "It seems the left hand isn't watching what the far-left hand is up to. San Mateo County, California, for example, claims in its lawsuit against the energy industry that there's a 93% risk

of a devastating climate-change-related flood by 2050. Yet its municipal bond offering to potential investors dismissively notes that it's ‘unable to predict whether sea-level rise or other impacts of climate change or flooding from a major storm will occur.’”

 San Francisco city officials made similarly apocalyptic arguments in their lawsuit, only to claim climate science was uncertain when trying to win over investors. City leaders were either lying about the devastating impacts of climate change or tricking investors into buying property that would soon be underwater. Thankfully, a federal judge threw out the San Francisco’s case writing, "The court will stay its hand in favor of solutions by the legislative and executive branches."

 The Supreme Court reached an identical conclusion in 2011, finding 8-0 that the judiciary doesn’t have the authority to regulate emissions because the Clean Air Act gave regulatory powers to Congress and the EPA. Congress can change the law to make energy companies' activity illegal, but the courts can't.

 So why are localities filing dishonest suits attempting to penalize legal activity? Because local officials have spent years running up deficits on pet projects and now need to generate revenue before they go belly up.

 Public records reveal the leaders of Rhode Island view lawsuits against energy companies, as a way to prevent spending cuts. Janet Coit, director of the Department of Environmental Management, says suing oil and gas companies is meant to generate a "sustainable funding stream." Coit's comments show the real purpose of climate change suits, to bail out politicians who have made unwise choices for years and are now feeling the heat.

 Rhode Island is a prime example of spending run amok, as state officials have accumulated a structural deficit projected at $4.1 million for the 2019-2020 fiscal year. Instead of addressing government excess, Rhode Island's governor ignored the deficit in her January State of State address.

 A similar cycle is playing out in other jurisdictions, all governed by irresponsible leftist leaders. New York was facing an annual deficit between six and eight billion before COVID-19 hit because of an unwise minimum wage increase coupled with Medicaid expansion. State officials tried to fill this gap by suing Exxon Mobil but were humiliated in court. New York City leaders are picking up where the state left off by suing several energy companies for the alleged impacts of climate change.

Oakland's finance director was particularly blunt about why the city was running a deficit, "We believe expenditures are growing faster than revenues. We do believe this continues to have a lot of pressures on our core city services." The city's politicians racked up deficits of over $100 million, and now the same politicians are suing energy companies to make up for their poor choices. The same process is occurring in Baltimore and Boulder  where cash-strapped cities, run into the ground over generations of leftwing governance, are hoping to win the judicial jackpot.

 Cities and states that have racked up debt because of profligate spending are trying to avoid spending cuts. Local officials are playing the lawsuit lottery by filing exaggerated and meritless claims against energy companies in hopes of finding a sympathetic judge. Instead of dragging energy companies to court and threatening to punish the consumer for city officials’ irresponsibility, these bureaucrats need to focus on repairing their fiscal health. 

SOURCE 





Nuclear Power Is Crucial To Our National Security

The world is facing a time of great uncertainty. Amidst a pandemic, a global recession, and immense civil unrest, we are seeing global democracy also come under attack. China is using the current state of the world as an opportunity to continue their imperialist prospects by cracking down on the formerly autonomous city of Hong Kong and creeping into India.

The EU has been reluctant to condemn China for its actions in Hong Kong and its role in allowing COVID-19 spread. This leaves the United States with great responsibility, standing as the lone maverick against despotism. The question now becomes: what can we do and how do we protect ourselves? A huge part of the answer is energy independence, particularly a stable nuclear power supply.

Nuclear power is all around an incredible energy source. For one, it is very scalable, accounting for about 20% of the nation’s energy supply. This is due to the immense power produced each time a plant is fired up. One single uranium fuel pellet is capable of providing as much power as one metric ton of coal or 17,000 cubic feet of natural gas. This also makes nuclear the perfect energy source when disaster strikes and the grid needs more power. Furthermore, nuclear power emits zero CO2 to produce, making it the largest clean energy source in the country. In addition to these baseline benefits, we need a stable supply for our navy operations.

The Navy currently operates 101 nuclear reactors that power our aircraft carriers and submarines. Due to the concentration of fuel in each uranium pellet, ships can operate for 20 years without refueling. This gives us an unprecedented advantage on the seas. This advantage helps keep America, and much of the world, safe from the perils of oppressive regimes and bad actors.

Unfortunately, this key advantage is at risk of being lost. The pandemic and recession have only weakened our commercial nuclear energy suppliers and many will be on the brink of shutting down soon. The breakdown of the commercial nuclear energy industry threatens our Navy’s access to research, development, and uranium fuel. This is occurring while China and Russia are in the process of ramping up their nuclear energy industries. To make matters worse, our uranium supply chain is deeply problematic.

Most of the uranium fuel supply for nuclear reactors in the US came from domestic sources in the late 1960s and early to mid-1970s. Since then, however, the amount of domestically sourced uranium has been on the sharp decline and today it accounts for only a fraction of our supply. Though much of our uranium fuel comes from stable democracies like Australia and Canada, there is still a good portion coming from Russia and China.

It is clear that we must reinvigorate the commercial nuclear energy sector and rethink the way we obtain uranium. For starters, we can remove the archaic and overbearing regulatory barriers that are currently in place that don’t provide a net societal benefit. For example, regulations should be based on calculated risk and safety rather than arbitrary numbers like they are based on today. No nuclear project should take over a decade to approve.

Additionally, the Department of Energy should fulfill their contracts dating back to the 1990s with energy companies and begin collecting nuclear waste in a national repository. Because the DOE failed to do so, temporary storage of nuclear waste costs the taxpayers $2 million per day, making the national repository the most economical action for both energy companies and the taxpayer. The government should also embrace public-private partnerships to carry out important advanced nuclear research in order to meet the needs of both the public and private sectors.

Lastly, we need to obtain our uranium more responsibly and establish a national uranium stockpile. By authorizing more domestic uranium development and obtaining the rest from allies like Canada and Australia, we will shrink the global influence of countries like Russia while also ensuring our national security interests are addressed.

Nuclear power is crucial to our national security interests. Without it, we lose military strength and weaken American energy dominance. Scaling back regulations, reestablishing the national nuclear repository, and obtaining responsibly sourced uranium will translate to renewed investor confidence in nuclear power. Investments in nuclear power in the private sector will revitalize our commercial nuclear energy industry and, in turn, allow our Navy to retain their major advantage.

The United States is exceptional. We need to protect it for generations to come by embracing nuclear power again.

SOURCE 





Coronavirus: Inflated pandemic estimates weaken climate forecasts

Australia: Tony Abbott’s suspicion that climate change modelling was “absolute crap” soon will resonate more broadly — so spectacularly bad was expert modelling of the spread and lethality of the coronavirus, faith in all modelling must surely suffer.

Why trust the experts to forecast the climate decades into the future when they were so wrong about a disease related to the common cold?

Official coronavirus and climate change modelling share catastrophic predictions. Unfortunately for virus modellers, reality dawned a lot sooner and it has delivered an F for fail.

The pandemic has damaged the credibility of “experts” and highlighted the limits of “the science” and the misplaced hubris of the political class.

On whatever measure you choose — deaths, infections, rate of transmission — the epidemiological models that convinced governments to take a sledgehammer to their economies, now mired in unrest, have proved scandalously pessimistic and out by orders of magnitude.

We were told the virus’s spread would be “exponential”. It wasn’t; transmission was falling before mandatory lockdowns scared the daylights out of people.

The infection fatality rate, we were told, would be about 1 per cent; it’s closer to 0.2 per cent, akin to a severe flu.

Apparently, lifting lockdowns early would see cases surge; they haven’t. And we were all vulnerable — but most weren’t; the median age of death is well over 80. Driving is more dangerous. At least half of deaths globally have been in aged-care homes, which were already locked down. We understood you could catch COVID-19 again — also wrong. We closed schools and wore masks, but the evidence we needed to do so is scant.

The raw numbers speak for themselves. The death toll globally is on track to be smaller than the flu pandemics of the 1950s and 60s, when the world’s population was less than half that today.

Indeed, if you put the number of global deaths last year, this year, and next year (about 60 million each year) on a simple column chart you’ll struggle to see the ­impact of COVID-19.

Future historians will be shocked at the disproportionate response. At least they will chuckle at SAGE, the acronym for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, the expert panel advising the British government, which has presided over the worst performance of any country.

But it wasn’t only the British. Experts in Sweden warned 100,000 would die by June if it didn’t lock down as the rest of Europe had, yet fewer than 5000 were lost. Experts said 420,000 might die in Japan without a hard lockdown. Fewer than 950 did.

Our own experts at the Doherty Institute said 5000 intensive care unit beds would be required, even with strict isolation and social distancing; fewer than 50 were needed. For anyone here who is worried about a second wave of COVID-19, we’re still waiting on the first one.

Climate modelling was struggling even before the pandemic, given the planet has warmed about half as much as forecast by the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in back 1990.

“Almost the entire alarm about global warming is based on model predictions. If you just look at the last 30 to 40 years of data, nothing spectacular has happened, there’s no sign temperature increase is accelerating,” says Benny Peiser, founder of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London.

It’s remarkable we put so much faith in expert models, given their history of failure. The Club of Rome in 1972 notoriously forecast that growth would collapse as the world’s resources ran out, ignoring human ingenuity and the shale revolution.

Financial models failed to account for — indeed they probably facilitated — the global financial crisis. And as almost every utterance by a central bank governor since has reminded us, economists struggle to know what happened last month, let alone forecast the impact of a policy change tomorrow.

“In the late 1990s, models suggested the entire Great Barrier Reef would bleach every year by 2020, but in the last 15 years parts of the reef have bleached on only three occasions, with each event affecting only one-third of the reef,” says physicist Peter Ridd, a former professor of James Cook University.

It’s remarkable we put so much faith in climate modelling, given it is a far more complex task. “Climate sensitivity” — the size and speed of the response of global temperatures to a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — is harder to predict than a spreading virus. Even if we knew it, drawing implications about future economic growth is even more heroic.

“The big mistake that’s clearly been made is the failure to systematically appraise the models that underpin policy with actual data,” notes Gordon Hughes, a former professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, speaking on a panel about the pitfalls of mathematical modelling last month.

By April, we knew the coronavirus was not as dangerous as feared yet modellers and governments doubled down on the catastrophe narrative. It’s almost July and people in our capitals are wearing masks in their own cars.

How can we avoid the hysteria next time? It won’t be easy. All the incentives are stacked in favour of dodgy doomsday modelling; apocalyptic scenarios allow politicians to increase their power and appear caring. Public health experts enjoy more prestige. And some of the media naturally prefer models with horrifying forecasts to draw eyeballs.

Humans have a natural tendency to focus on extremes — what psychologists call a “negativity bias”. Models are almost cartoons, highly simplified versions of reality. History has proved a better guide to the future. It’s a pity we’re wasting res­ources on a royal commission into the bushfires. How and why authorities have overreacted so much, and how we can avoid doing so again, would be a better line of inquiry.

SOURCE 




Australian Left prepared to streamline environmental approvals for major projects

A pleasant surprise.  The conservatives are stressing this too

Labor is willing to fast-track approvals for major projects including mines and infrastructure in a new sign the Morrison government could reach a deal in Parliament to streamline environmental safeguards.

Labor environment spokeswoman Terri Butler backed the case for speedier decisions on big investments, declaring "every delayed decision is a delayed job" when projects deserved to go ahead.

The stance raises the prospect of an agreement between Labor and the Coalition on changes to environmental law after Prime Minister Scott Morrison this week said he would fix the regime in the name of creating jobs.

But Ms Butler blamed the government for allowing delays to blow out since the Coalition took power at the 2013 election with a pledge to cut red tape.

"They've been in government for seven years. Every delayed decision is a delayed job, a delay in getting a project kicked off and in getting jobs created," she said.

"Where an approval can be given to a project, where the project meets the environmental tests, where the environment can be protected, then that's not something that should be delayed."

Mr Morrison has opened negotiations with state and territory leaders to reach bilateral agreements that cut some of the duplication between the levels of government, potentially leaving more power with the states.

The idea has triggered warnings from environmental groups but the government is promising not to weaken safeguards and is not proposing detailed changes until it receives a review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act next month.

Ms Butler said Labor wanted faster decisions where it was safe to do so, where environmental protections were upheld and where decisions were made well.

"What we don't want is reducing decision-making times through having shoddier, under-resourced decisions," she said.

"If you rush a decision and you stuff it up, then that exposes you to litigation."

Ms Butler said Labor would support bilateral agreements between federal and state governments to reach the Prime Minister's ambition of "single-touch" approvals but said this could not sacrifice federal responsibility.

"The starting point has got to be that for matters of national environmental significance there always has to be a role for the commonwealth," she said.

Labor calculates that 86 per cent of project decisions were made on time under the EPBC Act in 2012 but this fell to 60 per cent in 2019.

The Gillard government attempted a single regime but dropped the idea after intense criticism from environmental groups and concerns that it could not achieve uniform rules for all states and territories. The Abbott government also sought to create a "one stop shop" for decisions.

Mr Morrison has revived those ambitions in national cabinet in the name of creating jobs during the recovery from the coronavirus crisis, but he is yet to receive the EPBC review by former competition regulator Graeme Samuel.

Labor is open to the idea of bilateral agreements on approvals to achieve faster decisions but Ms Butler said this would depend on the details, which would have to be made public.

Ms Butler also said Labor was open to the idea of amending the EPBC Act itself but only if it improved environmental protections when the country faced an "extinction crisis".

"Some wags, who don't like any form of regulation, will try to oppose this as a contest between jobs and the environment but of course that's ridiculous, because so many of our jobs depend on the environment," she said.

"Yes, I will be very interested to see what Graeme Samuel says about improving the EPBC Act, but it's got to have the twin focus of jobs and protecting the environment."

SOURCE 

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

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

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

Pesky snowpack in Montana

It takes months to fully clear winter’s snow at Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road, located in northern Montana, and the last big hurdle is an area known as ‘Big Drift’ where the pack reaches 40-80 ft annually.

The pack is at the higher-end of that range this year, but as weather.com and the National Park Service (NPS) desperately reassures us — this is still within the norm and a trend of increasing snowpack (which has been the case over the past few years) in no way disproves our beloved global warming theory.

But isn’t this the same NPS that for almost two decades warned the world that glaciers at Glacier National Park would be gone by the year 2020? The same NPS that went to the trouble of erecting signs across all of its visitor centers to serve as some 2020 doomsday countdown? Embarrassingly for these spineless, bandwagon frauds, that deadline of doom is about to uneventfully pass and the service has rather sheepishly pulled all ‘2020 signs’ from its displays after the computer models it relied upon from the early 2000s, which convincingly foretold of unending glacial retreat, turned out to be catastrophically inaccurate.

The ‘Big Drift’ is located just east of Logan Pass, at an elevation of 6,646 feet, where crews arrived on Friday to tackle the monster snowpack.

And while the AGW cabal continue to erase their past prophetic failures from the history books, one of their most infamous was that “snow would become a thing of the past” — and yet here we are:

Those extreme-environmentalists and disproven-scientists behind Montana’s snow-less predictions should have taken that Going-to-the-Sun Road a long time ago–because it’s the Sun and the Sun alone that changes Earth’s climate.

Every great civilization of the past acknowledged the Sun’s power, and they all worshiped it as a God. The Egyptians called it “Ra”, the Minoans “Ariadne”, and the Romans “Sol”.

Today, we humans consider ourselves the most powerful body in the solar system. Perhaps our recent technological advances and achievements have given rise to a sense of all-conquering self-confidence. But the Sun, as we call it, ended every one of those great civilizations of the past, and it will take down our modern one, too–and not in some raging fiery explosion but by a mere dimming of its energy known as the Grand Solar Minimum.

The COLD TIMES are returning, the lower-latitudes are once again REFREEZING, all in line with historically low solar activity, cloud-nucleating Cosmic Rays, and a meridional jet stream flow.

Even NASA agrees, in part, with their forecast for this upcoming solar cycle (25) seeing it as “the weakest of the past 200 years,” with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.

SOURCE 





UK: Electric cars are only cost-effective after five years – even with a £6,000 subsidy

The biggest stumbling block for drivers is the price of a new electric car

It takes almost five years to recover the higher purchase price of an electric car in savings from lower running costs, even with a proposed new subsidy, new research has found.

Last week it emerged that the Prime Minister is mulling a plan to give petrol and diesel car drivers up to £6,000 if they make the switch to an electric vehicle.

But even with this incentive, it would take on average four years and nine months for drivers to get a financial benefit from switching, according to research by price comparison website GoCompare. On running costs alone, electric vehicles work out £680.55 cheaper per year.

The biggest stumbling block is the price of a new electric car. For example, a brand new Ford Fiesta – the most popular car in Britain – costs £15,770. An electric alternative such as the Reanult Zoe – one of the cheapest electric vehicles on the market – is £25,000, leaving drivers £9,320 out of pocket, or £3,320 worse off after the £6,000 subsidy....

SOURCE 




Black vs. Green: Black Americans Fight Climate Measures That Increase Energy Costs

While I don’t often find myself agreeing with Jesse Jackson, I applaud his support of a pipeline to bring affordable natural gas to the predominantly minority and low-income farming community of Pembroke Township, Illinois.

As a black conservative who opposes Jackson on issues from racial preferences to economic policy to protecting our ballots from needless risks under the guise of voting rights, I think he’s courageous for breaking with the liberal establishment and radical environmentalists to help this struggling community benefit from affordable energy.

Rising above the political fringe, Jackson said about hooking up the rural community south of Chicago to natural gas: “This is our work – fighting poverty and connecting people.”

President Donald Trump has prioritized both increasing the supply of domestic energy and building out pipelines and other infrastructure to deliver it. Doing so creates jobs and ensures access to the most affordable energy available. This is especially important for low-income households where high energy bills raise the prospect of “energy poverty” – having to forego even the most basic necessities such as food and new clothing to keep lights on and homes warm.

With around 70% of black households having just a single parent, the affordable energy issue should be important to the reverend and the president.

But this pro-energy/pro-people agenda is criticized by environmentalists and their liberal allies. They seem to think no price is too high when it comes to fighting “climate change.” They are happy to block projects involving fossil fuels like natural gas, oil and coal – even if it is to the detriment of black Americans who have supported them politically.

Pembroke Township is far from alone. There are many minority and low-income communities that would benefit from affordable fossil fuel energy. Yet the necessary infrastructure to provide them with reliable, abundant and cheap fuel is often blocked by activists – sometimes under the pretenses of “protecting” them! 

In some cases – like the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) that would run from West Virginia through Virginia and into North Carolina – critics have effectively prioritized scenic trails for affluent hikers over jobs and upward mobility for struggling black families. Even liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg sided with the ACP in a recent decision that gave the U.S. Forest Service the authority to allow the ACP to run underneath the Appalachian Trail.

But troubles remain for the ACP in Buckingham County, Virginia. Environmentalists have recruited local black community leaders to help block a proposed ACP pumping station based on “environmental justice” claims. I imagine that, if the ACP is killed and those same black leaders later go looking for help for their community, their environmentalist “friends” will be long gone.

That’s why Jackson’s voice in Pembroke Township is so important. While supporting an alternative energy approach, he also thinks it must be balanced against the needs of people – especially when natural gas is the most affordable option. “When we move to another form of energy, that’s fine by me, I support that,” he said, “but – in the meantime – you cannot put the black farmers on hold until that day comes.”

Even Al Sharpton – whom I agree with less than Jackson – supports natural gas, saying that “people in communities of color should not pay the brunt of suffering through cold winters.”

Yet some on the left would apparently rather dictate to black people than listen to them.

Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, gets to the root of the problem. He said liberals pay too much attention to environmental activists while taking the black community for granted. “People are debating these issues in some instances without consultation with the leaders of the African-American communities and neighborhoods affected by these issues,” he said.

Not in our name. Not when the stakes are our economic survival.

SOURCE 





Australian Bushfires: Fire experts downplay reduction burns

I would like to know what else is as effective

NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro wants landowners to have more access to national parks for hazard reduction burns but fire experts warn that while prescribed burning can reduce bushfire risk it is not the solution

In a late submission to the Berejiklian government's bushfire inquiry, Mr Barilaro - who is also the minister for disaster recovery - said "now is the time for significant change and action" over fires. "We cannot afford to be complacent or waste the opportunity for reform," Mr Barilaro said.

His submission, one of 1000 made to the six month state-based inquiry into the devastating bushfire season that killed 25 people, also calls for cattle grazing to be used as a fire prevention method.

Mr Barilaro's submission said hazard reduction and traditional ecological burns are "under-utilised" and burn activities should be "prioritised to a level appropriate for the risk".

"Where there is great risk due to weather, fuel load, population etc the intensity of the burn activities should increase," the submission stated.

It also says "inadequate access to public land, including wilderness areas of national parks, creates unnecessary barriers to bushfire prevention activities".

However a separate, national inquiry into the recent bushfire season, the Royal Commission into National Natural Hazard Arrangements, heard on Tuesday from three top fire analysts who said that reducing fuel loads needed careful planning to ensure hazards did not actually increase if landscapes became more fire prone.

"One of the primary motivations for changing fire behaviour by manipulating fuel is to increase the potential for active suppression of the fire," Ross Bradstock, head of the University of Wollongong's Centre for Environmental Risk Management of Bushfires, said.

"So by reducing fire intensity, for example, and reducing the rate of spread [and] reducing ember propagation, you are increasing the chance that people can get in there and work safely and suppress the fire."

Professor Bradstock said there was clear evidence "the more you treat, the lower the risk" of house loss from fire, with the greatest benefit coming from burning near residential areas rather than in distant bushland. The practice, though, was more expensive given the resources needed to ensure fires remain controlled.

"If you want the most cost-effective strategy for protecting those assets or mitigating risk to those assets, then treatment in close proximity appears to be the best option at this stage based on the evidence," he said.

The royal commission heard that while hazard reduction burning was an important approach to curbing fire risks, it also needed significant funding commitments.

Kevin Tolhurst, an associate professor with the University of Melbourne's Ecosystem and Forest Sciences, said "a lot of case studies [show] that areas that have been burnt one or two years previously, have a dramatic impact on the spread of fire."

Over time, though, the bush grows back and "by the time you get to 10 or 11 years, the effect is largely gone".

David Bowman, a professor with the University of Tasmania's School of Natural Sciences, said some landscapes, particularly tall, wet forests, were not amenable to fuel-reduction efforts and yet, with the wrong weather conditions, "could burn terribly intensively".

"So prescribed burning is generally, we're talking about grassy systems, savannas, woodlands and dry sclerophyll forests, where we have this classical accumulation of fuel that can be burnt and maintained in different states and quite simple vegetation structures," Professor Bowman said.

SOURCE 

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

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

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Driller charged over contamination in ‘Gasland’ town

Over harmless methane emissions

Cabot Oil Gas Corp. was charged Monday, June 15, 2020, following a grand jury investigation that found the company failed to fix faulty gas wells in Dimock and surrounding communities that leaked methane into residential water supplies.

An energy company faces felony charges that it polluted residential water wells in a Pennsylvania community that has long been a battleground in the national debate over natural gas drilling and fracking.

Houston-based Cabot Oil & Gas Corp. was charged Monday following a grand jury investigation that found the company has failed to fix faulty gas wells that are leaking methane into residential water supplies in Dimock and surrounding communities.

The company has racked up hundreds of civil violations since 2007, and it has been banned from drilling in a 9-square-mile area of Dimock.

“We find that, over a period of many years, and despite mounting evidence, Cabot Oil & Gas failed to acknowledge and correct conduct that polluted Pennsylvania water through stray gas migration,” the grand jury wrote, criticizing Cabot’s “long-term indifference to the damage it caused to the environment and citizens of Susquehanna County.”

The Pennsylvania attorney general’s office charged Cabot with a total of 15 criminal counts, including illegal discharge of industrial wastes and unlawful conduct under the state’s Clean Streams Law. Maximum fines are $50,000 or $25,000, depending on the count.

“Cabot took shortcuts that broke the law, damaged our environment, harming our water supplies and endangering Pennsylvanians. They put their bottom line ahead of the health and safety of our neighbors,” Attorney General Josh Shapiro said in a video statement.

Cabot said it would respond once it had fully reviewed the charges, but that it values “community commitment and environmental compliance.”

“Cabot will continue to work constructively with regulators, political representatives, and most importantly our neighbors in Pennsylvania to be responsible stewards of natural resources and the environment,” Cabot said in a written statement.

The company has long insisted the gas in Dimock’s aquifer is naturally occurring, saying its pre-drill testing of thousands of private water wells in the area show a high percentage with methane. The grand jury asserted that Cabot’s initial sampling of wells and groundwater did not include tests for methane. State environmental regulators eventually determined that Cabot’s drilling and fracking operations leaked explosive levels of methane into private water supplies.

It was an exploding water well on New Year’s Day 2009 that first aroused public attention in Dimock, a patchwork of homes and farms about 150 miles (241 kilometers) north of Philadelphia.

Residents said they suffered ill health effects from the contamination of their water with methane and drilling chemicals, including nausea, dizziness, skin rashes, impaired vision and breathing difficulties. Property values plummeted, too, they said.

Methane is not known to be harmful to ingest, but at high concentrations it’s flammable and, if it escapes into enclosed areas, can cause asphyxiation.

Homeowners sued and later settled with the company.

One resident, Eric Roos, told the grand jury in 2019 that he wants to move, but can’t. “I don’t know who will buy my house now. How can I leave?” he said, according to the grand jury’s report.

Dimock resident Ray Kemble, who has long publicly denounced Cabot and is currently battling it in court, welcomed the news that it faces criminal charges.

“I’m ecstatic, man. I feel vindicated now,” he told The Associated Press. Kemble, who says his water supply was ruined by Cabot, said he wants the company shut down.

The contamination in Dimock became the subject of fierce debate among pro- and anti-drilling forces. An Emmy Award-winning 2010 documentary, “Gasland,” showed residents lighting their tap water on fire. Drilling supporters have long accused Dimock residents of seeking money and attention.

The criminal charges against Cabot stem from a two-year grand jury investigation into Pennsylvania’s huge Marcellus Shale gas industry. Last week, Shapiro’s office announced a deal with another company, Range Resources Corp., Pennsylvania’s most active shale gas driller, to plead no contest to environmental crimes over its handling of contamination at a pair of well sites in the southwestern part of the state.

Shapiro said Monday that the grand jury’s ongoing probe “will result in more criminal charges.”

Unlike Range, he said, Cabot “continues to abdicate their responsibility.”

“Cabot knows what they’ve done. The residents of the commonwealth whose lives have been impacted know what Cabot has done. The game that Cabot continues to play, risking the lives of people across the commonwealth for a profit, well, that cannot go on any longer,” he said.

SOURCE 





Could entomophagy end U.S. and African protein shortages?

Paul Driessen

Nearly two centuries ago, amid a fungal infestation that destroyed Irish potato crops and brought famine, starvation, death, and the emigration of countless men, women and children, Gulliver’s Travels author Dr. Jonathon Swift offered “A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick.”

Dr. Swift suggested that children too young to work could be eaten in place of potatoes. As he explained, “a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.” Surely, he said, this is preferable to aborting unborn or murdering newly born children.

Of course, his proposal was only in jest, a sly response to the callous disregard many of his countrymen displayed toward the Irish tragedy and the plight of poor families throughout the United Kingdom.

Today, despite enormous advances in seeds, fertilizers, irrigation, mechanized equipment, pest control and agricultural practices, famine still stalks dozens of countries, especially in Africa. Millions still live on the edge of starvation, all too often kept there by despicable government agencies, pressure groups and financiers that despise modern agriculture, promote “agro-ecology” and even oppose Golden Rice.

Africa’s poverty, malnutrition, despair and premature death have been made even worse this year by one of the worst plagues of desert locusts in memory. Swarms numbering in the billions descended on East Africa, which was completely unprepared to cope with them. The first swarms unleashed even larger second and third waves, with swarms larger than Manhattan.

The insatiable insects are devouring millions of square miles of crops, pasture lands, gardens and forests, creating massive food shortages that could cause hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation.

Meanwhile, coronavirus outbreaks among workers forced meat packing plants to close. Wendy’s took burgers off the menu at many locations, and the fast food chain’s customers are again asking “where’s the beef?” – echoing the iconic television commercials from 35 years ago. Pork is also in short supply, even as American pork shipments to China quadrupled in recent months. Chicken too is scarce.

But now we may have a fortuitous alignment of the stars, a happy confluence of events, wherein a modest proposal for abundant food in the form of locusts could benefit the hungry “publicks” of two continents.

Up to now, we have had an unhappy confluence of sick ideologies: the belief that too many people are a cancer on the Earth, depleting fossil fuels that are destroying our climate and planet, and ignoring what former Obama science advisor John Holdren insisted was a vital need for modern societies to de-develop, de-industrialize, and dictate to still-poor countries how much they will be permitted to develop.

The ideologies have forced too many Africans to continue living primitive subsistence lifestyles or pack into impoverished cities that lack basic energy, water, roadway, communication, refrigeration, hospital, sanitation, and employment opportunities. The locust plagues could turn this awful situation around.

Enormous nets strung between two trucks or airplanes could harvest millions of locusts at a time. Thousands could be employed constructing and operating food processing facilities, hauling insects to them, running them through roasting ovens and freeze drying machines, packing and shipping the finished delicacies to hungry families around Africa and North America, and teaching people to savor them.

Thousands more jobs could be created managing the new export and import businesses. Commercial airliners sidelined by COVID would be rejuvenated. Millions of people could go almost overnight from hunger to enjoying what Popular Science magazine has described as delicious, nutritious food, rich in protein and all nine amino acids essential for human development.

The new meat substitutes would give entirely new meanings to “in-flight meals.”

There is yet another benefit. These activities and facilities would require reliable, affordable electricity, on a far larger scale than can possibly be provided by wind turbines and solar panels. They will require coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric power plants. However, environmentalist pressure groups, UN agencies, the World Bank and multilateral (anti)development banks have been telling Africans that wind and solar power must be their energy future. They and the EU clearly won’t finance those power plants.

But perhaps Chinese agencies and companies will finance and build them, as they have in many other countries – often under exploitative, extortionist loan arrangements, to be sure. The projects could also be incentivized by a desire to resurrect China’s tarnished reputation for having unleashed the Wuhan virus on unsuspecting nations. They might also secure special prices on locust products that would be right at home in China’s wet markets and on its television equivalent to “Bizarre Food” with Andrew Zimmern.

Popular Science expresses deep concern that “raising cattle requires a lot of space and water, and more room for cattle means less [sic] trees, which in turn means a diminished natural capacity of the planet to process carbon dioxide.” Its writers clearly have no clue that modern non-organic farming with biotech crops enables fewer farmers to raise more crops, from less land, with less water and fewer pesticides, than any other farming methods in history – or that cattle typically graze on lands that have limited value for growing crops. They obviously have not read any of my reports and articles about the monumental impacts that wind, solar, battery and biofuel technologies have on farm, scenic and wildlife habitat lands.

Instead, PopSci cites a 2013 report by the ever-helpful UN Food and Agriculture Organization, which has worked for years with radical environmentalist groups to oppose modern farming, biotech and even hybrid seeds, synthetic insecticides and fertilizers, and even mechanized equipment like tractors. PopSci and the FAO extol the virtues of “entomophagy,” a fancy progressive term for eating bugs, not beef.

Indeed, they say, this could be “the answer humanity is looking for.” (If that’s the answer, it must have been a very foolish question.) The FAO report offers techniques for processing “edible insects” into tasty consumable products that can improve people’s diets and livelihoods, create thriving local businesses, and even promote “inclusion of women.” It has sections on overcoming the yuck factor and setting up industrial-scale processing operations. (I should have known the FAO would be ahead of me on that.)

The FAO study says bugs can have twice as much protein as beef and 1.5 times as much as fish and poultry. PopSci sings the praises of grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, ants and mealworms – whole or powdered – as snacks, desserts, guacamole or entire meals.

Mealworms have “an earthy flavor, similar to mushrooms or beets,” says Joseph Yoon, chef and founder of Brooklyn Bugs, a “catering company and education platform” in New York that serves an entire menu featuring insects. You can add them to brownies – or toss some salt on sautéed mealworms to get “protein-boosted potato chips.”

Since they are committed to saving the planet from fossil fuels, climate change, big corporations and modern technologies, people attending the next UN climate confab in November 2021 in Glasgow should expect to dine on an entire smorgasbord of tasty locusts and other bugs. Perhaps they can be paired with haggis, Scotland’s savory traditional pudding of bone broth, sheep heart, liver and lungs, onion, oatmeal, suet and spices, cooked together in the animal’s stomach.

Back here in the States, for the same reason, those delectable African locusts could figure prominently at the upcoming Democratic National convention in Wisconsin’s Brew City this August. They would pair very nicely with those pilsner beers that made Milwaukee famous.

Personally, though, I’ll stick with hearty beef, lamb, chicken, ribs – and really big bugs: shrimp, lobster, crabs and crawfish – served up at the Republican National Convention, accompanied by a good IPA.

Via email





Reality Is Gradually Catching Up To Green Energy

If you dutifully read your U.S. mainstream media, you undoubtedly have the impression that “clean” and “green” energy is rapidly sweeping all before it, and soon will supplant fossil fuels in powering our economy.  After all, many major states, including California and New York, have mandated some form of “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050, or in some cases even earlier.  That’s only 30 years away.  And reports are everywhere that investment in “renewables,” particularly wind and solar energy, continues to soar.  For example, from Reuters in January we have “U.S. clean energy investment hits new record despite Trump administration views.”   In the New York Times on May 13 it’s “In a First, Renewable Energy Is Poised to Eclipse Coal in U.S.”   The final victory of wind and solar over the evil fossil fuels must then be right around the corner.

Actually, that’s all a myth.  The inherent high cost and unreliability of wind and solar energy mean that they are highly unlikely ever to be more than niche players in the overall energy picture.  Politicians claim progressive virtue by commissioning vast farms of wind turbines and solar panels, at taxpayer or ratepayer expense, without anyone ever figuring out — or even addressing — how these things can run a fully functioning electrical grid without complete fossil fuel backup.  And the electrical grid is the easy part.  How about airplanes?  How about steel mills?  I’m looking for someone to demonstrate that this “net zero” thing is something more than a ridiculous fantasy, but I can’t find it.

To stay grounded in reality, there is no better source than the multiple-times-weekly email from the Global Warming Policy Foundation.  If you do not already receive these emails, you can go here to subscribe. As is typical, today’s email searches out back pages and specialized sources to bring us multiple pieces showing green energy running into its inevitable wall, with no known way to get past.  (Full disclosure:  I am on the Board of the GWPF’s American affiliate.)

We go first to green energy champion Germany, where Bloomberg reports on June 5 that “Germany’s Green Power Finance Is Becoming Unaffordable.”   Excerpt:

The German program that’s spurred the nation’s switch to green power is buckling under the weight of surging costs and needs an urgent fix. That’s the assessment of one of the scheme’s chief designers, Hans Josef Fell. . . .  Yet the system’s increasing costs have become glaring in the during the coronavirus pandemic, the veteran Green Party lawmaker said. High and guaranteed payments made to investors in clean power plants are the problem Fell said in an interview.

It seems that to get its wind and solar facilities built, Germany put in place guaranteed payments to producers that would kick in if market prices for power were insufficient.  The guaranteed payments are divvied up and added to consumer electricity bills.  This year, with prices for alternative fossil fuels plummeting, the guaranteed payments are projected to come in at some 26 billion euros — which is around $100 per month for every German household, on top of electricity prices that were already about triple the U.S. average.  Of course, Chancellor Merkel is proposing a “fix,” which is a government bailout as part of a supposed coronavirus relief package.  That may work for a little while.  Then what?

Also from Germany, we have a piece from the Financial Times of June 8 with the headline “Environmentalists on back foot as Germany’s newest coal plant opens.”   What?? — Opening a new coal power plant right in the midst of a transition away from fossil fuels??  What happened here is that they are closing all their nuclear plants, and they need something that works all the time, unlike the wind and the solar.  Just in January, Germany enacted legislation to completely phase out coal power generation by 2038; and then in May, they went right ahead and opened this new Dateln 4 coal plant.  The Financial Times piece quotes Greenpeace activist Lisa Göldner as calling the new plant a “climate crime.”  Meanwhile, the crew members of a barge bringing coal to the plant are described as “whooping and whistling in mockery” at environmental protesters seeking to block the opening of the plant. 

The fact is that Germany has nowhere further to go by building more wind and solar facilities.  When the wind blows on a sunny day, they already have more power than they can use, and they are forced to give it away to Poland (or even pay the Poles to take it).  On a calm night, no matter how much wind and solar they build, it all produces nothing.  Without the coal plant, the lights go out.  Talk about climate virtue all they want, but no one has yet even begun to work on a solution to get past this hurdle.

Which brings me to the most important piece in the GWPF email, from Cambridge Professor Michael Kelly, appearing in something called CapX on June 8, with the headline “Until we get a proper roadmap, Net Zero is a goal without a plan.”   Kelly makes the point that seems to me obvious, but that somehow has slipped past the New York Times and all the rest of the MSM, which is that if wind and solar energy are ever going to surpass niche status, there is a gigantic engineering problem to solve.  Somebody has to engineer an electrical system based on the intermittent sources that works 24/7/365.  But in fact, even as major states and countries have piously proclaimed commitment to “net zero” energy, nobody has even started the engineering project.  And as soon as you start to consider the question, you quickly realize that the whole endeavor is almost certainly impossible.  As an example, Kelly addresses batteries:

Take batteries. It is estimated that current battery manufacturing capabilities will need to be in the order of 500-700 times bigger than now to support an all-electric global transport system. The materials needed just to allow the UK to transition to all electric transport involve amounts of materials equal to 200% the annual global production of cobalt, 75% of lithium carbonate, 100% of neodymium and 50% of copper. Scaling by a factor of 50 for the world transport, and you see what is now a showstopper. The materials demands just for batteries are beyond known reserves. Would one be prepared to dredge the ocean floor at very large scale for some of the material? Should securing the reserves not be a first priority?

And that’s just one of the issues.  Others include vast costs constituting a multiple of current energy costs; the environmental impact of mining and transporting huge amounts of materials; need for vast amounts of rare elements, far beyond known world reserves; incredibly huge amounts of material to recycle when facilities wear out; and on and on.

Read enough of this stuff and you gradually realize that almost everything you read about supposed solutions to climate change is completely delusional.

SOURCE 




Australia: Investors face pressure over miner set to destroy Aboriginal artefacts

It's almost automatic for Aborigines to stand in the way of development projects.  The role of white Leftists in the background probably explains most of it

The world’s largest asset manager and a top superannuation fund are facing pressure to explain investments in a Chinese conglomerate set to destroy ancient Aboriginal artefacts at a coalmine in regional NSW.

China Shenhua Energy, the world's largest thermal coalminer, is planning to construct an open-cut mine next to the Liverpool plains near Gunnedah in the "food bowl" of the state.

The mine has been fiercely opposed by the site's traditional owners, the Gomeroi people, who fear it will lead to destruction of historic and culturally significant artefacts including grinding grooves showing markings of ancient warriors sharpening spears for battle, burial sites and sacred trees.

Funds management giant BlackRock, which manages more than $10 trillion in assets including substantial amounts of Australian retirement savings and money for the Future Fund, has billions of dollars invested in China Shenhua Energy, records show.

CBUS, the $54 billion super fund for construction industry workers, also confirmed a small investment in the firm, which is majority controlled by the Chinese government.

Failures by mining companies to preserve Indigenous artefacts have come into sharp focus after resources giant Rio Tinto last month decimated a 46,000-year-old site in Western Australia against the wishes of its traditional owners.

The Rio blast sparked an emergency Senate inquiry into how state and federal laws protect Aboriginal heritage.

There has also been rising scrutiny in the investment world over responsible and sustainable investing and best strategies for lifting corporate environment, social and governance standards.

The Gomeroi people last month filed submissions in the Federal Court against federal environment minister Sussan Ley in an attempt to overturn the mine's 2015 approval.

Gomeroi woman Dolly Talbott called on major institutional investors to boost transparency about where they put their clients' money.

"If you believe in preserving and looking after sacred sites, they need to know where they’re putting their money and what these companies are doing."

She said all Australians should be angered about cultural artefacts that will be destroyed if the mine proceeds, which include ceremonial corridors, burial sites and other items.

"Our direct ancestors are buried out there. You don’t go and blow up European burial sites so why should they be able to do that to us?" she said.

CBUS confirmed it owns around $4.5 million worth of shares in the company through a passive index fund.

The fund said it was considering divesting its stake as part of its broader climate change strategy and would ask its investment managers to incorporate First Nations heritage issues into engagement strategies.

"The sacred sites of our First Nations Peoples should be protected," CBUS head of responsible investment Nicole Bradford said.

BlackRock has positioned itself as a leader in socially responsible investing and last year pledged to reduce its holdings of thermal coal. The firm's founder, Larry Fink, has also been a prominent supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Market Forces campaigner Will van de Pol said the outrage over Rio Tinto's blasting should serve as a reminder for super funds about the role they play in actively managing investments.

"The Western Australia example should serve as a turning point that should have come long ago," Mr van de Pol said. "But at least from now on, we need to see super funds ensuring that that sort of destruction never happens again on their watch."

"As a firm committed to racial equality, we must also consider where racial disparity exists in our own organisations and not tolerate our shortcomings," Mr Fink said in a public letter on May 31.

An archaeological report commissioned by China Shenhua Energy said it could preserve roughly half of the more than 60 significant artefacts identified by adding fencing or moving them to another location.

SOURCE 

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

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

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