How Earth’s Climate Changes Naturally (and Why Things Are Different Now)

The heading above is from a long but emptyheaded article that catalogs in a  handwaving way the various influences on earth's climate.

One might expect that a consideration of all the natural influences would inspire doubt about the anthropogenic global warming thesis. One would think that a signal emanating from human deeds would be hard to distinguish from all the other influences at work.

No such luck. The article is straight warmism.  The idea seems to be to create an air of profundity in its claims.  By discussing all the other climate influences and still showing anthropogenic global warming at work the article reassures  us that a full scholarly exercise has been undertaken before concluding that anthropogenic global warming exists.  All "t"s have been crossed and all "i"s have been dotted.

But the article in fact gives no evidence at all for anthropogenic global warming.  The most it offers is a link to another paper which in turn relies on the IPCC reports. So it is all just the same old same old.  It's a long article but there's no reason to spend any time on it.

Earth’s climate has fluctuated through deep time, pushed by these 10 different causes. Here’s how each compares with modern climate change. Orbital wobbles, plate tectonics, evolutionary changes and other factors have sent the planet in and out of ice ages.

Earth has been a snowball and a hothouse at different times in its past. So if the climate changed before humans, how can we be sure we’re responsible for the dramatic warming that’s happening today?

In part it’s because we can clearly show the causal link between carbon dioxide emissions from human activity and the 1.28 degree Celsius (and rising) global temperature increase since preindustrial times. Carbon dioxide molecules absorb infrared radiation, so with more of them in the atmosphere, they trap more of the heat radiating off the planet’s surface below.

But paleoclimatologists have also made great strides in understanding the processes that drove climate change in Earth’s past. Here’s a primer on 10 ways climate varies naturally, and how each compares with what’s happening now.

MORE here




Study Finds Fossil Fuels Aren't Subsidized; They're Overtaxed

The CO2 Coalition of 55 climate scientists and energy economists today released a detailed economic study of subsidies and taxes on fossil fuels in the United States and internationally. Written by Coalition Director Dr. Bruce Everett, who taught energy economics at Georgetown University and the Fletcher School at Tufts University, the 26-page White Paper is titled
Do Government Policies Favoring Fossil Fuels Hamper the Development of Wind and Solar Power?

While advocates of wind and solar power often claim that these sources of power are disadvantaged by billions, even trillions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies, the Coalition White Paper finds that the net effect of government policies is to raise, rather than lower, the price of energy from fossil fuels.

The study concludes that: "Although most countries do offer some subsidies to fossil fuels, the massive taxes imposed by most governments are generally far higher, resulting in a net increase in the price of fossil fuels. Taking into account all taxes and subsidies, fossil fuels in the United States are overtaxed $50 billion per year. The 28 other largest industrial democracies are overtaxed $363 billion, and the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) are overtaxed $104 billion. The primary exceptions to this rule are found in oil-producing developing countries that offer their citizens heavily subsidized motor fuels but are not likely candidates for renewable energy."

Dr. Caleb Stewart Rossiter, the CO2 Coalition's executive director, said, "Wind and solar power, both in the United States and internationally, are heavily subsidized by mandates for utilities to purchase their costly electricity, as well as tax credits and public financing. It is renewables, not fossil fuels, that have the competitive advantage when it comes to government intervention in the energy markets. Despite this advantage, wind and solar remain in the single digits as a share of American and global energy consumption.  As a previous CO2 Coalition White Paper, The Social Cost of Carbon and Carbon Taxes, showed, their true cost is four times that of fossil-fueled power. They are not ready for prime time yet, but that's because of technological challenges, not wildly-exaggerated fossil fuel subsidies."

From the CO2 Coalition: info@co2coalition.org





Electric Vehicle Fees Increasing in California and Other States

In an effort to shore up flagging transportation funding and ensure drivers of electric vehicles (EV) contribute to road and bridge construction and maintenance, owners of electric and hybrid vehicles in several states will have to start paying new or increased registration fees in 2020.

California Fees Begin

Under a state law enacted in 2017, Californians driving electric vehicles began paying an upfront $100 registration fee for all zero-emission vehicles for model year 2020 on July 1. The law also added a new annual fee that varies depending on an EV’s value, from $25 for vehicles with a market value less than $5,000 up to $175 for vehicles valued at $60,000 or more.

The same 2017 law raised the state’s gasoline tax by 3.2 cents per gallon, increasing the tax to 50.5 cents a gallon.

State officials estimated the new fees and gas taxes will generate more than $50 billion the next decade, to be dedicated to maintaining state highways, local roads, and associated infrastructure projects.

New Electric Fees

California is not the the only state adding new charges for EVs in 2020. Alabama, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Oregon, and Utah also imposed new or increased existing electric vehicle fees this year. With the new states adding fees for EVs, more than 26 states now impose such fees on EVs or hybrid vehicles.

In Alabama, owners of electric or plug-in hybrid cars began paying a $200 and $100 annual fee respectively, beginning January 1, and EV drivers in Oregon started paying $110 more per year to register their EVs, increasing the overall EV registration fee to $306 for two years.

Utah’s EV and hybrid vehicle fees are also rising. In 2019, Utah’s fees were $60 for electric vehicles, $26 for plug-in hybrids, and $10 for gas hybrids. The fees increased to $90, $39, and $15 respectively 2020, and they will rise to $120, $52, and $20 in 2021.

SOURCE




Australia: Academic freedom bows at the altar of social media

The university was too canny to challenge Peter Ridd on his climate skepticism.  Instead they got him on a perverted legal technicality

It’s out with philosophers John Stuart Mill, John Locke and Isaiah Berlin and it’s in with “the internet, social media and trolling”. According to the majority judgment of the Federal Court of Australia in James Cook University v Ridd handed down on Wednesday, that is.

Peter Ridd was employed by James Cook University for 27 years before his employment was terminated in May 2018 for serious misconduct. At the time Ridd was a physics professor. However, he was not dismissed on any academic or teaching grounds.

Rather, Ridd went down because JCU maintained that he had failed to act “in the collegial and academic spirit” required and had denigrated a fellow staff member by failing to act “with respect and courtesy”. Oh yes, Ridd had also denigrated JCU, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

In fact, Ridd disagreed on scientific grounds with the views of some fellow academics and some influential organisations about the long-term viability of the Great Barrier Reef.

He maintains that sections of the Great Barrier Reef are in good shape and that coral dies and is reborn as part of the reef’s life. This is inconsistent with the scientific orthodoxy preached by JCU and like-minded organisations.

Announcing the termination in May 2018, Iain Gordon, then JCU’s deputy vice-chancellor, referred not to the quality of Ridd’s teaching and research but to his “manner” and “disrespect”. You see, he had been charged with having “trivialised, satirised or parodied” JCU’s disciplinary processes. Why, Ridd had even sent a private email to a friend dealing with JCU that was headed “for your amusement”. How shocking is that?

It is a long time since there was genuine academic and intellectual freedom in the groves of academe — if this ever existed. The ideals pronounced by John Henry Newman’s 1875 The Idea of a University are essentially utopian. What’s new about the current JCU case is that the curtailment of academic freedom that once prevailed in the social sciences has extended into the physical sciences.

Take Australia, for example. The two big cases of academic freedom in the past half-century involve philosopher Frank Knopfelmacher (1923-95) and physicist Ridd. In 1965 Knopfelmacher, who was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, was appointed to the position of senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney. The appointment was overturned by the university’s professional board.

Knopfelmacher’s appointment was strongly supported by David Armstrong, one of Australia’s finest philosophers.

Like Ridd, Knopfelmacher went down because of his irreverent manner and a tendency to criticise colleagues in addition to his unfashionable views. An articulate and well-informed anti-communist, Knopfelmacher upset the leftist fashions of the time with his vehement criticism of the communist regimes in central and eastern Europe (East Germany, the Soviet Union) and Asia (North Korea, China, North Vietnam), and their supporters in the West.

In 1964 Knopfelmacher wrote an article in Twentieth Century magazine criticising the leftist ideology that prevailed in many of Melbourne University’s social science departments. He claimed that left-wing academics discriminated against non-leftists and exercised significant veto powers “in matters of academic preferments and sinecures”.

This accurate comment was used against Knopfelmacher by his opponents on Sydney University’s professional board.

In the half-century since the Knopfelmacher affair, the attack on academic and intellectual freedom has moved into universities as a whole, including the physical sciences. That is Ridd’s problem. JCU appears to have a view that the Great Barrier Reef is dying fast and anyone who disagrees with this orthodoxy, no matter how well qualified, does not have a right to be heard, especially if they are irreverent and outspoken.

In one sense, the Federal Court’s decision in JCU v Ridd turns on the interpretation of the enterprise agreement under which the respondent was employed.

In September last year the Federal Circuit Court (Judge Angelo Vasta presiding) found that JCU had contravened section 50 of the Fair Work Act by making findings against Ridd, giving him directions with respect to confidentiality and speech along with a “no satire” instruction. All this, the court found, had led to an improper employment termination.

However, the current case is more important than mere industrial relations. The majority — justices John Griffiths and Sarah Derrington — essentially dismissed “historical concepts of academic freedom”.

So the thoughts of Mill, Locke and Berlin are out of date. Griffiths and Derrington instead cited the work of American philosopher Jennifer Lackey concerning the internet and social media. They quoted favourably from the Illinois academic, who has written that the concept of academic freedom has been challenged not only by no-platforming but also by student demands for “content warnings and safe spaces” that “leave us in uncharted territory”.

Newman, originally an Anglican who became a cardinal in the Catholic Church, was a deeply religious man who saw a role for an essentially secular university bestowed with intellectual freedom. But many a modern campus has become an institution that acts in accordance with the notion that “error has no rights”.

This was once the teaching of extreme religious sects. Now it is being put into effect by censorious administrators, academics and students who believe that those with whom they disagree have no right to be heard.

In his dissent, Justice Darryl Rangiah placed much more emphasis on Ridd’s right to intellectual freedom. Rangiah agreed with the majority that the decision of the primary judge contained material errors on industrial law.

However, he said that while the appeal should be allowed, the proceedings should not be dismissed but remitted for a further hearing. Rangiah did not support the majority view that some aspects of Ridd’s conduct cannot be characterised as an exercise in intellectual freedom.

While JCU v Ridd turns primarily on industrial law, it is likely to have the unintended consequence of discouraging academics who are at odds with prevailing fashions in the social and physical sciences from speaking out.

Australian universities need more Knopfelmachers and Ridds — not fewer.

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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Newest Polar Bear Alarm Fails Laugh Test

Google News and the establishment media are attempting to frighten people today with claims that polar bears may go extinct by 2100. The claims are absolute rubbish and fail the laugh test.

BBC, CBS, New Scientist, the New York Times, and Science Alert are among the many media outlets hyping the scare today. The scare is based on a new Nature Climate Change paper titled, “Fasting season length sets temporal limits for global polar bear persistence.” In the paper, the authors claim, “Our model captures demographic trends observed during 1979–2016, showing that recruitment and survival impact thresholds may already have been exceeded in some subpopulations. … It also suggests that, with high greenhouse gas emissions, steeply declining reproduction and survival will jeopardize the persistence of all but a few high-Arctic subpopulations by 2100.”

BBC’s uncritical coverage of the report is typical of establishment media coverage. In a story titled “Climate change: Polar bears could be lost by 2100,” the authors write in the first two sentences of the story, “Polar bears will be wiped out by the end of the century unless more is done to tackle climate change, a study predicts. Scientists say some populations have already reached their survival limits as the Arctic sea ice shrinks.”

However, as polar bear scientist Susan Crockford points out, the study’s claims are not based on data, but rather on projections based on extreme, unrealistic warming scenarios. Also, the authors extrapolate population declines from small segments of the polar bear population across the entire polar bear range.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation recently published Crockford’s report, The State of the Polar Bear 2019. Crockford, a zoologist specializing in polar bear research and population trends, provides comprehensive evidence and data showing polar bears are doing quite fine as temperatures continue their modest warming. Indeed, polar bear populations have been rising for more than half a century, and are likely quadruple the number that existed in the 1950s.

As real-world evidence shows something unalarming – in this case, substantial growth in polar bear populations – climate alarmists go to their usual bag of tricks and conjure up dubious computer models, projections, and speculation to trick the general populace into believing global warming is causing a polar bear crisis.

Very dishonest, and very sad.

SOURCE 





Net Zero: Every Urban Street And Front Drive in Britain Will Be Dug Up

The UK faces a £200 billion bill to rewire the country if the government follows through on plans to electrify the country’s homes and transport systems. That’s because installation of electric car chargers and heat pumps will push up demand for power beyond the capacity of the existing wiring.

The findings are set out in a new report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which is published today. According to author Mike Travers, this will mean that most streets in the UK will need to be dug up (with diesel-driven machinery):

“At present new home car chargers and heat pumps are using up all the spare capacity. But we will soon reach the point where the network will not be able to handle the extra demand. So in towns and cities, the underground cables which carry the power will be inadequate. That means that we are going to have to dig up almost every urban street and many rural ones too. The whole distribution grid is going to need to be replaced.”

And the cables that carry power into the homes will need to be dug up too.

According to Travers:

“The power cables taking electricity into your home probably run underneath your front drive. So if you want a car charger and a heat pump you are going to have to pay to dig it up. If you have an expensive monoblocked drive, that will not be cheap. Distribution boards, main fuses and smart meters in homes are going to have to be upgraded too.”

Travers has estimated the cost of all this work at around £200 billion, even before considering the cost caused by the disruption. “Many homeowners will be paying thousands”, he says.

The author:

Mike Travers CEng, MIMechE, FIET is an electrical engineer, whose career spanned periods in the Royal Engineers, in the hydroelectric sector, and industry. He previously sat on the the IET Wiring Regulations Committee and was the industry representative on the committee that rewrote the Grid Codes for Scotland.

His paper is entitled The Hidden Cost of Net Zero: Rewiring the UK

SOURCE 





Biden’s Spoon-Ready ‘Green’ Jobs Plan Is An Economic Disaster

Joe Biden announced plans to make America prosper through the magic of taxing, spending and regulating.

Biden’s plan for economic recovery includes inserting America back into the UN Paris Climate Agreement and spending two trillion dollars on climate change, with 40% of the cash going to “climate justice.”

This is as foolish as it is dangerous.

“When Donald Trump thinks about climate change, the only word he can muster is ‘hoax,’” Biden said, “When I think about climate change, the word I think of is ‘jobs.’”

Biden would create those jobs by mandating and subsidizing inefficiency.

Do you remember the story about the economist who saw workers digging out a canal? He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earthmovers, the workers had shovels.

“You don’t understand,” the bureaucrats explained, “this is a jobs program.”

“I thought you were trying to build a canal,” the economist replied, “If it’s jobs you want, then you should give the workers spoons, not shovels.”

No one seems able to agree on who was speaking, or when and whether this happened, but we all should agree that the lesson is valid. Productivity counts. Inefficiency places a drag on the economy to the detriment of all.

Replacing the energy producers who have given us American energy independence (at last!) with a legion of wind and solar installers is just that sort of inefficiency. They may as well be wielding spoons.

Biden pledged emissions-free electricity generation by 2035 and overall net-zero emissions by 2050.

Can you imagine the economic upheaval in store if we shut down oil, gas, and coal energy in just 15 years and try to replace them by converting our remaining natural spaces into wind farms and solar deserts?

Brace for major upheavals. Kiss automobiles, appliances, housing, and jobs as you know and prefer them goodbye if this misbegotten thinking rules the day.

Larry Bell reminds us in a post at CFACT.org that Biden has ceded his climate plans to the radicals.

His climate committee is co-chaired by John Kerry and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Even the phrase “build back better” comes right out of the UN.

“Approximately three months earlier,” Bell writes, “on April 22, the U.N. announced, ‘as the world begins planning for a post-pandemic recovery, the United Nations is calling on Governments to seize the opportunity to build back better by creating more sustainable, resilient and inclusive societies.”

Peter Murphy warns at CFACT.org that Biden “has become a Trojan horse for climate true believers.”

Don’t forget Biden’s call for “climate justice,” which is nothing more than code for redistribution of wealth.

Joe Biden’s economic and climate plans rest on false premises, are ruinously expensive, would cripple the economy, and would harm, rather than help the environment.

Biden and the Left have no idea how to build. We should leave the building up to free people exercising free choice if we really want to build back better.

SOURCE 





Will the Left Kill America's Energy Dominance?

If the "liberal" green movement had the political power during earlier periods of our nation's history that it has now, we would not have built the railroads. Also, there would be no interstate highway system, and the electric grid system that powers our country would be disconnected and shattered.

What else can one conclude when a significant and vital energy pipeline, the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline from West Virginia into the southern states, has been canceled because of environmental activist opposition? Another pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, has been suspended by a federal judge's order in recent days. Even the urgently needed Keystone XL Pipeline, which will transport natural gas and oil from energy-rich areas in Canada and the Dakotas down to Houston for export and delivery across the country, faces a court-ordered injunction. These actions are all said to be in the name of wetlands preservation, Endangered Species Act issues and other environmental protections.

It isn't safeguarding the safety of our nation. It is sabotaging it.

Pipelines are the most environmentally safe way to transport America's oil and gas resources across the country. They are vital infrastructures that enable America to be the world's energy superpower and make us no longer reliant on Saudi Arabia, Russia and other hostile OPEC countries. The alternative to pipelines is trucks and rail cars, which crash, derail and explode.

The crusade to stop pipelines has nothing to do with clean air or clean water. Natural gas is a wonder fuel. It is cheap, abundant, made in America and clean-burning. The fracking revolution that gave us low-cost natural gas has done more to reduce carbon emissions in the United States than all environmental groups since the beginning of time. It is an environmental blessing.

Let's be honest about what is going on here: The left hates fossil fuels and uses any tactic it can to stop energy development. They want to force America to use "renewable" wind and solar power, both of which are unreliable as stand-alone energy sources. They are also multiple times more expensive ways to generate power. More expensive energy makes everything else America produces more costly and less competitive in global markets.

Liberals say they care about working-class people, but between 5 million and 10 million jobs would be lost without U.S. access to abundant oil, gas and coal resources, according to the American Petroleum Institute. These are mostly union jobs and would be put at risk. At least 1.5 million would be put at risk in states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and other Midwestern states if the Marcellus Shale "shale revolution" were to end. But when the greens are pitted against the blues (blue-collar workers), the Democrats choose their precious environmental friends. This year, Joe Biden admitted that he is willing to lose thousands of oil and gas jobs to "go green." So much for "Lunch Bucket Joe."

The absurdity of the pipeline bans is that we don't have a cheap way to transport oil and gas from Ohio and middle Pennsylvania to significant urban Northeastern areas such as New York, Boston and the rest of New England. Without a pipeline, these cities may have to continue to import natural gas from Vladimir Putin in Russia. How is that in America's interest?

Free market advocates want to continue to drill here in the U.S., where we have at least 200 years of extractable energy resources, provide low-cost energy to families and businesses, and save millions of high-paying, middle-class jobs. The greens want to shut it all down. Stopping pipelines is the first step toward choking off production and surrendering economic and energy power to our enemies.

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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Greta Thunberg Wins €1M Prize; Will Give To Green Groups

I wonder what old Nubar Gulbenkian would think of this use of his money. He was pretty capitalistic so I doubt that he would like it

 Greta Thunberg has taken yet another prize for her woke climate activism, banking the one million euro Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity for her “contributions to mitigation and adaptation to climate change.”

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation was established in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1956 “to improve the quality of life through art, charity, science, and education” but 2020 marks its first-ever Prize for Humanity, an award created to stimulate climate change activism.

According to its website, the Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity “distinguishes innovative pathways with high impact potential to assist in processes of mitigation and/or adaptation to climate change, one of the greatest threats to this century and with devastating consequences for the well-being of current and future generations and for the economy and our natural ecosystems.”

The foundation shares the widespread conviction that humanity “is facing an unprecedented climate crisis,” which is “clearly visible in the ever-increasing frequency of heatwaves and droughts, the rise in seawater temperatures, melting glaciers and extreme weather events.”

The 17-year-old Ms. Thunberg was already named Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2019, joining a series of notable figures including Adolf Hitler (1938), Joseph Stalin (1939), and Ayatollah Khomeini (1979).

Thunberg was launched into the public limelight thanks to her Fridays for Future movement, whereby students are encouraged to skip school every Friday in order to protest climate change.

Thunberg also received broad acclaim from the international Left for her public scolding of world leaders at the United Nations last September.

“You have stolen my dreams, my childhood, with your empty words and yet I’m one of the lucky ones,” Thunberg said at the U.N. General Assembly. “People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?” […]

Soon after, a series of contrite contenders for the Democrat Presidential nomination began falling over themselves to praise the young activist for her prophetic words.

Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, and Kamala Harris all joined in the Greta love-fest, with Harris confessing that we are “failing our nation’s youth.”

The Maryknoll missionaries, a Catholic religious order, went so far as to compare Thunberg to the Virgin Mary.

“Christians getting their knickers all in a twist over the passionate, articulate & knowledgeable witness of Greta Thunberg because of her age seem to overlook the age of the Virgin Mary at the time of the Annunciation,” the group wrote on Twitter.

On receiving the award Monday, Thunberg immediately promised to donate the money to organizations devoted to combatting climate change, such as the SOS Amazonia Campaign the Stop Ecocide Foundation.

SOURCE




New Climate Summary Destroys Wildfire Myths

Wildfires throughout the United States have become much less extensive in recent decades as the climate has warmed, reports a new climate summary at the website Climate at a Glance.

Climate at a Glance is designed to provide policymakers, educators, students, and the general public compelling one- or two-page summaries destroying common global warming myths. Each summary begins with a few short bullet-points to concisely summarize the topic, followed by one or two explanatory paragraphs and an illustrative graphic.

According to the new summary on U.S. wildfires:

Wildfires are far less frequent and severe than was the case throughout the first half of the 20th

Occasional upticks in current wildfire activity still result in far less land burnt than was the case throughout the early 20th century

Even the worst recent wildfire years burned only 1/5thto 1/2 as much land as typical wildfire years during the early 20th century

Drought is the key climate factor for wildfires. As shown in Climate at a Glance: Drought, the United States in recent decades is benefiting from strikingly small amounts of drought.

SOURCE




EPA Leaves Current Ozone Standards in Place, Says They are Safe

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced it is leaving in place the current air quality standards for ground level ozone because the best available science indicates they sufficiently protect human health.

Ozone is an odorless gas produced at ground level by a reaction of sunlight with regulated pollutants emitted by a variety of sources such as automobiles, electric power stations, and industrial plants. Ozone is the main component of smog, which still plagues some cities, such as Los Angeles.

Current Standard Deemed Safe

Under the 1970 Clean Air Act, the EPA is required to review the standard for criteria pollutants, of which ozone is one, every five years.

The EPA lowered the standard for ground-level ozone to 70 parts per billion (ppb) in 2015, under the administration of President Barack Obama, down from 75 ppb set in 2008. EPA said at the time the 70 ppb level was sufficient to protect both human health and the environment.

In a January 13, 2020 press release announcing the existing ozone standard would be maintained, the EPA affirmed the best science still indicates the 70 ppb standard is safe. Ozone concentrations fell by 4 percent between 2017 and the end of 2019, the agency reported.

“Under President Trump, the U.S. has made significant progress in reducing ozone concentrations across the nation,” said EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler in the agency’s press release. “Based on a review of the scientific literature and recommendation from our independent science advisors, we are proposing to retain existing ozone standards, which will ensure the continued protection of both public health and the environment.”

The EPA’s action marks the second time in 2020 that, after the required review of the best available science, the agency has decided to maintain an existing standard for a regulated pollutant. EPA decided to keep the existing standard for particulate matter in place in April.

‘Win for Our Nation’

EPA’s decision to maintain the existing ozone standards will benefit cities and states while protecting public health, said Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) in statement.

“EPA’s responsible decision to keep current ozone standards continues to ensure that our air is clean and our communities are protected, while at the same time lowering the massive burden on states and localities to meet ever-moving goalposts of environmental regulations,” Gosar said. “Administrator Wheeler and President Trump have seen consistent decreases in ozone under this administration, and keeping the standards that have driven that success in place is a win for our nation.”

The current ozone standards keeps people safe, said Bruno Pigott, a commissioner with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, in a statement.

“This stringent ozone standard continues to ensure that Hoosiers have cleaner air than ever before,” Pigott said.

Avoids Jeopardizing Economic Recovery

By following the science and not being led by environmental advocates who pushed the Trump administration to set an even more stringent standard for ozone, the EPA maintained essential environmental protections while helping the economy to recover from the economic shutdown resulting from fears raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, said Rachel Jones, vice-president of Energy & Resources Policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, in a statement.

“Protecting the environment and improving public health for all Americans must come first,” said Jones. “Manufacturers’ commitment to clean air is why we support EPA’s proposal to retain the Obama ozone standards.

“Amid a global pandemic, manufacturers are serving on the front lines helping our nation respond to and recover from COVID-19.” Jones said. “So at a time when we are facing record-breaking unemployment, an even lower ozone standard could have jeopardized more than seven million manufacturing jobs.”

SOURCE





Dr. Ridd: James Cook University wins unlawful sacking decision

The grounds for the university's actions were contemptible.  He was sacked for disagreeing with his colleagues.  If academics cannot disagree with one-another, where does that leave the search for truth?

He was not even abusive in what he said. He just said that their conclusions needed more validation -- a scientific comment if ever there was one.

This needs to go to appeal but funding may be a barrier to that

The reason for the furore is that the JCU scientists said that the reef was damaged by global warming.  Dr. Ridd demurred


The Federal Court has allowed an appeal of a decision which found James Cook University acted unlawfully in its 2018 sacking of Peter Ridd, after the professor questioned colleagues' research on the impact of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef.

Dr Ridd was awarded $1.2 million in damages by the Federal Circuit Court in September, which had earlier found JCU sacked the physics professor unlawfully.

The case attracted intense focus due to Dr Ridd's scepticism of climate change science and the broader debate about free speech at Australian universities.

The university reiterated last year it would launch the appeal, and has maintained its sacking of the professor was based on his treatment of colleagues rather than the expression of his scientific views.

Dr Ridd had originally sought reinstatement to his position but later abandoned this in favour of compensation.

In a judgment published on Wednesday, the Federal Court set aside that compensation decision and allowed the university to appeal the earlier ruling it had acted unlawfully.

Justices John Griffiths and Roger Derrington found Dr Ridd's enterprise agreement did not give him "untrammelled right" to express his professional opinions beyond the standards imposed by the university's code of conduct.

The termination of his employment did therefore not breach the Fair Work Act, they said.

Outlining his final declarations and penalties last year in September, Federal Circuit Court Judge Salvatore Vasta suggested the university's conduct had bordered on "paranoia and hysteria fuelled by systemic vindictiveness".

"In this case, Professor Ridd has endured over three years of unfair treatment by JCU – an academic institution that failed to respect the rights to intellectual freedom that Professor Ridd had as per [his enterprise agreement]," the judge decided.

Conservative think-tank the Institute of Public Affairs described the new Federal Court judgment on Wednesday as a "devastating blow" to freedom of speech.

"Alarmingly, this decision shows that contractual provisions guaranteeing intellectual freedom do not protect academics against censorship by university administrators," IPA director of policy Gideon Rozner said. "The time has come for the Morrison government to intervene."

He added that Dr Ridd was now considering his legal options around a High Court challenge.

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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Antarctic ‘Doomsday Glacier’ Is Really Doomsday for Climate Alarmism

A fake climate scare making headlines comes from researchers who say West Antarctica’s Thwaites glacier may soon collapse, raising sea levels by 6 feet or more over the next century. Alarmists are dubbing this the “Doomsday Glacier.” This is ironically true, as the fake climate scare of the Doomsday Glacier is really a doomsday for climate alarmism.

The Financial Times (FT) in an article titled, “Climate change: what Antarctica’s ‘doomsday glacier’ means for the planet,” writes, “if Thwaites goes, the knock-on effect across the western half of Antarctica would lead to between 2m and 3m of sea level rise… a rise that would be catastrophic for most coastal cities.”

The FT article implies climate change is behind the Thwaites glacier’s rate of asserted melting and instability, ignoring evidence to the contrary. I debunked that claim in a July 3 Climate Realism post in which I pointed out global satellite data showed no warming or cooling trend at the South Pole since measurements began in 1979. In addition, since 1998, ground based temperature measurements across Antarctica show the continent has cooled for 20 of the last 30 years. So how can global warming cause alleged instability of the Thwaites glacier? It simply cannot.

Throughout geologic history, West Antarctica is also referred to as Lesser Antarctica, being the smaller half of the continent. The ice there has been unstable, with many regions, including regions in an around the Thwaites glacier, underpinned by subsurface volcanic activity. Moreover, “During past interglacials, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been completely removed,” states AntarcticGlaciers.org.

Even with any decline of the Thwaites glacier and other areas of West Antarctica, it is not even clear if Antarctica is adding to recent modest sea level rise. In 2015, NASA reported Antarctica as a whole was adding tens of thousands of tons of snow and ice each year in its interior. NASA wrote, “the Antarctic ice sheet showed a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001. That net gain slowed to 82 billion tons of ice per year between 2003 and 2008.” As such, at least through 2008, Antarctica ice change was, on net, reducing the rate of global sea level rise.

Alarmists, ironically, point to other studies that they claim place the NASA findings in doubt. Regardless, Antarctica’s average temperatures range from -60 degrees C (-76 F) during winter to -20 C (-4 F) in summer. Accordingly, no meltdown of the Antarctic continent is in the offing.

The so-called Doomsday Glacier is really Doomsday Nothing – other than a Doomsday Illustration of the flawed Climate Delusion.

SOURCE 





The Sordid History of Scam Science

COVID and global warming are not the first

What was not-so-novel about the COVID crisis was its origin in scam or junk science. John Ionnnidis, one of the leading critics of weak scientific work, jumped right in to alert people and policymakers about the many problems with various predictive models but he was largely ignored despite being one of the most highly-cited scientists alive. That is actually not unusual. Even before the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, Americans have been inundated with alarmist “scientific” claims that have not held up to close scrutiny. The problem is, they always hear about false claims but almost never hear about the retractions and whispered mea culpas (Latin for “my bad”). The net effect is undue pessimism about the state of the world.

Most scientific scares are rooted in the extrapolation of current trends to the point of disaster or desolation with no thought given to the possibility of cyclicality, natural limits, or behavioral changes. Ridley jokes about the nineteenth century prediction that by 1950 the streets of London would be ten feet deep in horse manure. Unfortunately, real scam science is no laughing matter. Here is a partial list:

Love Canal and Other “Cancer Clusters:” Love Canal refers to a housing development built near an improperly capped toxic waste disposal site in Niagara Falls, New York, where the media reported a cluster of cancer cases. It turns out, though, that cancer clusters are random events simply more salient than places where, again by sheer luck, cancer is rare. Most cancers, it seems, are not caused by man-made chemicals. Many more carcinogens lurk naturally in foods like cabbage and coffee than in pesticides.

Dioxin, the main chemical culprit at the Love Canal site, was claimed to be so toxic that 3 ounces of the stuff would kill one million people. When 3 pounds of it was accidentally spread over a 700-acre town near Milan, Italy in 1976, though, the worst that came of it were cases of acne, even in the resident who had the highest level of the substance ever found in a human body. A 1983 study also showed that a control group had higher levels of chromosomal damage than Love Canal residents! Nevertheless, environmentalists tried to prevent people fully aware of Love Canal’s history from moving back in.

Radon Panic: Radon sounds scary because it is a radioactive gas. It comes from uranium deposits and its “daughters,” the isotopes produced by its decay, like polonium, pose a real risk to uranium miners. The risk to homeowners, though, was never clear, so the media easily hyped it in the 1980s into a full blown scare labeled “The Colorless Odorless Killer” by Time. Like SARS-COV-2, radon wasn’t really novel but the ability to detect it in the small quantities found in most homes was. The so-called precautionary principle kicked in and the next thing you know the EPA mandated testing and set a limit of just 4 picocuries per liter of air even though miners exposed to 12,000 picocuries showed no adverse health effects, forcing homeowners to spend billions on radon mitigation technologies. (If you think that spending helps the economy, read this.)

Peak Oil: Remember when the earth was proclaimed to be just a few years away from maximum oil production and a rapid rise in oil prices followed by a production collapse due to an absolute dearth of the stuff? It didn’t happen and does not appear likely to anytime soon. Production recently declined along with prices but due to a demand shock, the covidic global economy, not vanishing reserves. The world will stop using petroleum when its price rises above the price of substitutes, just like it stopped using whale oil when its price went above that of petroleum. Likewise, the Stone Age did not end for lack of stone.

Superstorm Hell: Global warming was supposed to cause a spate of tropical superstorms that would wipe out coastal areas time and again. Some big storms have hit and were hyped to the sky but there is no indication that they are any larger or more frequent than in the past.

Air Pollution Armageddon: For all the talk of Greens, one would think that air quality is steadily degrading. In fact, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulphur dioxide, and various volatile organic compound emissions have been steadily decreasing for decades. Remember smog? Not many do, even in Los Angeles, the city with the worst air quality in America. But even in the City of Angels nobody dons gas masks anymore, except to slow the spread of novel coronavirus of course.

Turns out that “acid” rain, which sent me scurrying inside as a yute in the 1970s and 80s, was just slightly more acidic than regular rain. Although some predicted that acid rain would destroy all the forests in Germany by 2002, acidic rain did little to no net environmental damage then and has since become as rarified as smog.

And what happened to the “hole” in the ozone layer that Neil Young ranted about in his 1989 song “Rockin’ in the Free World?” and that Newsweek likened to “AIDS in the sky?” It was always seasonal and limited to the earth’s three “poles” (North, South, and Himalayas) and now scientists say it is “closing,” showing that environmental “damage” need not be permanent. The ban on the main human-produced causal agent of ozone depletion, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), was relatively easily achieved because cheap substitutes were available. To this day, however, scientists have not shown that the “hole” was primarily man-made or that it caused any ill effects on humans or any ecological systems. And because CFC substitutes are less energy efficient, they may contribute to global warming.

And that is just “hard” sciences like chemistry and physics. When we move into the biological and social sciences and nutrition, we encounter failed prognostications like:

Overpopulation: In middle income and rich nations, people are having fewer children, not more. Food production has outstripped demand, leading to lower food prices and more obesity, not starvation, in richer countries. Even in poor countries, famines are now rare and caused by governments, not absolute dearth. Even the fake New York Times now says that the human population will peak earlier than expected, in 2067 at fewer than 10 billion.

Ecological destruction: Ecosystems were supposed to collapse, leading to mass extinction. Instead, where property-rights have supplanted open commons, as with catch shares, natural resources like fisheries have stabilized and even rebounded. Many places in the United States sport too many deer, turkey, and wild hogs. The beepocalypse had no sting. Imagine that.

Paving Paradise: In the 1980s, the government claimed that suburban sprawl was going to swallow up most of America’s farmland, which was losing all its topsoil anyway, leaving Americans dependent on foreign nations for bread. Turns out that the USDA grossly overestimated lost acreage and soil erosion and, miracle of miracles, conversion slowed and then reversed when farm prices increased. Despite those revelations, the media continued to harp on the “farmland crisis” for years. Much like a covidic cat, it “seemed to have nine lives,” Simon said.

Death by Eggs: About the same time, the media made eggs seem akin to a tasty poison, like alcohol. It is okay to have one or two every now and again but if you developed an egg habit, you were a goner. Then eggs became okay as scientists began to differentiate between “good” and “bad” cholesterol. Now many consider eggs a “super food.” Would I be less fat today if I had eaten eggs as a kid instead of “healthy” food like Sugar Coated Gluten Flakes? We’ll never know.

Death by Apples: I also avoided death foods like apples “tainted” with Alar, an allegedly poisonous chemical applied to apples to slow their ripening. Until, that is, the manufacturer withdrew it under regulatory pressure after a slick media blitz coordinated by an environmental activist group in 1989. Turns out, though, that Alar was way less dangerous than the high fructose corn syrup I consumed instead of my daily apple juice. To induce cancer in lab rats, scientists had to have them ingest the human equivalent of 19,000 quarts of apple juice … per day, every day, throughout their lives! Who knew? Arguably scientists and the media gatekeepers should have, but money and kudos flow fastest to alarmists with no stake in the underlying reality.

Off-the-Charts Income Inequality: The mere framing of this concept belies its real purpose, to redistribute “income.” If framed correctly, as productivity inequality, the “problem” disappears or begs the question why a few people are so much more productive than most others and why some produce nothing at all. Hint: it is natural heterogeneity plus stochastic processes layered onto inequality-enhancing government regulations, like minimum wages, interest rate caps, and rent controls. In fact, rich countries have far less income and wealth inequality than poor ones and inequality cycles up and down rather than making a beeline towards either extreme. Most disturbing of all, it appears that some researchers are willing to distort statistics to match their doomsday scenarios. Thankfully, they have been called out repeatedly but not before their “story” had become a “stylized fact” widely accepted by the media and Twitter rage monkeys.

Why do scam science and flawed studies so consistently prevail?

For starters, the world is a complex place where parsing cause-and-effect is a tricky thing, especially where living creatures are involved. Existence does not easily yield its secrets.

Nevertheless, incentives all list toward preliminary studies with big, scary findings because that makes them novel and important and hence newsworthy. Even cub reporters know not to pitch their editors on stories with headlines like “Careful Scientific Study Replicates Previous Work Showing Small, Nuanced Causal Connection.” “Everything Will Be Just Fine If No Action Is Taken” is also a loser because it won’t sell papers or attract pageviews. Retractions of previous errors are also boring so they end up buried when published at all, leaving the impression that the alarmist hot take was correct even when it was clearly not.

“Bad Things May Happen in the Future, Unless”-type stories, by contrast, are commercial winners. If adroitly done they do not even elicit backlash, allowing their perpetuation. First, note the weasel word “may.” Next, the amount of possible destruction and the distance of the prediction in time usually vary directly. Finally, the unless provides yet more wiggle room and a segue into policy proposals. When the world doesn’t end in a decade, everyone has forgotten about the article, the reporter is long gone, s/he wrote “may” anyway so s/he wasn’t technically wrong, and besides, one of the policy proposals was kinda sorta implemented so if anything the story “saved us” from Armageddon. Pulitzers and Peabodys all round!

In 1983, ABC News reported on the unemployment situation in five states “where unemployment is most severe” without mentioning that unemployment was actually down in the other 45 states. That sounds a lot like recent COVID-19 “case” reporting by the New York Times and Washington Post. But if you intimate that such news is misleading, if not entirely “fake,” you get immediately smeared as pro-Trump.

In fact, there is a lot of misleading to fake scholarship because even scholars who took clear stances and were proven wrong beyond the shadow of a doubt — on crucial matters of policy — somehow manage to keep their reputations intact. Nobody is perfect, of course, but why do people who are routinely wrong remain relevant, and even revered? Neil Ferguson, the physics-trained mastermind behind nine of the last one pandemic, is simply one of numerous examples that include:

Rachel Carson: As Roger Meiners, Pierre Desrochers, and Andrew Morriss showed in their 2012 edited volume Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson (Washington, DC: CATO), any of Carson’s remaining mystique is sheer mysticism. Except for lung cancer, cancer deaths are down and were even trending that way when Carson, a marine biologist, scared the bejesus out of almost everyone about the dangers of DDT, a pesticide that extended half a billion human lives by killing disease-carrying mosquitoes. She accurately claimed that cancer was the leading cause of death among American children but failed to mention that was because other childhood diseases, especially the communicable ones, had been conquered. Ironically, she died of cancer, a viral infection, and a heart attack, but her fame lives on.

Paul Ehrlich: In 1968, predicted the explosion of a Population Bomb that would kill most of humanity through disease, starvation, and war before 2000. That didn’t even happen in Africa much less globally. He claimed that life expectancy in America would drop to 42 years by 1980, a surprisingly exact prediction considering how far off the mark it was. This famous entomologist (insect scientist) also bet Simon that the prices of metals would increase and, infamously, lost. Yet Ehrlich remains an environmental guru.

Paul Krugman: Has been wrong about almost everything since he won the Nobel in 2008 for his work on international economic trade theory and concentrated his efforts on the newspaper columnist career he began in 2000. His biggest errors are in labor economics, including the effects of minimum wage policies. See Contra Krugman by Robert Murphy for details.

When their views are directly challenged, such erudite individuals usually a) ignore the challenge and hope it goes away; b) belittle the challenger’s qualifications; c) label the challenge “simplistic” even though simpler explanations are generally preferred (“Occam’s Razor) and, as Sowell says, “evasions of the obvious can become very complex;” d) inaccurately ascribe to the challenge claims that are easily refuted; or, increasingly, e) insinuate that the challenger is a bigot or that her thought emanates from a presumably racist or sexist or fascist school of thought. In other words, they deflect instead of trying to defend the indefensible. That is perfectly natural as evidenced by the fact that small children also engage in such deflections, albeit more “simplistically.”

What does this all mean? We have to return to teaching people how to research and think for themselves and not just mindlessly jump on #bandwagons while falling for gross rhetorical tricks. Light rail, it turns out, is just a new term for trolleys. Call low-lying areas where stagnant water accumulates swamps or call them wetlands, they are still just sloughs where mosquitoes breed. Not everything labeled racist actually is; some claims considered “woke” are deeply racist. Calling a piece of legislation the Affordable Care Act does not mean that it will result in more affordable healthcare. Shelter-in-place orders may just be a soft form of martial law that leads to bankruptcy, default, and unemployment, not safety.

SOURCE 




U.S. Supreme Court Approves Trump Administration Clean Water Act Pipeline Rules, but Not for Keystone XL

The United States Supreme Court stayed a lower court ruling that was holding up dozens of oil and gas pipeline projects across the nation. The Court’s ruling allows most of the projects, approved under expedited procedures by the Trump administration, to proceed. However, the order exempts the long-delayed expansion of the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline, continuing the hold on it.

The Supreme Court’s order reverses a nationwide stay issued by Judge Brian Moore of the U.S. District Court of Montana in Army Corps of Engineers v. Northern Plains, on pipeline projects issued under rule developed by the Trump administration to expedite critical pipeline projects, called Nationwide Permit 12 (NP12).

Under NP12 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers allows pipelines to be constructed across or underneath bodies of water on an expedited basis, using standardized environmental impact statements. Moore ruled the Army Corps had failed to properly account for the impact individual projects might have on endangered species, ordering a halt to all pipelines approved under NP12, pending the completion of a separate environmental impact statement for each project under the rules that existed before NP12 was issued.

Partial Victory

The Supreme Court’s ruling provide a partial victory to the eighteen states and dozens of companies, consumer groups, and trade associations who sided with the Trump administration in the court battle over NP12 and its attempt to get pipelines built more expeditiously than under the Obama administration.

The ruling should allow more than 70 pipeline projects that had been delayed by Moore’s order to proceed.

Keystone Fight Remains

The last remaining portion of the 1,200-mile Keystone XL Pipeline to be constructed, which would link Canadian oil sands fields to refineries on the Gulf Coast, was not covered by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The vast majority of the pipeline did not need federal approval, having been finished in 2013, running from Alberta, Canada, to Illinois, Oklahoma, and Texas.

The final segment needed approval from the U.S. State Department.

Keystone’s developers have projected it will safely transport as much as 830,000 barrels of crude oil from Alberta to Montana, Oklahoma, and Texas, stretching 875 miles through Montana, South Dakota, and Nebraska.

Under President Barack Obama, the State Department twice issued reports concluding the pipeline would deliver large quantities of Canadian oil to U.S. refineries, create thousands of jobs, and have minimal environmental impact in the United States. Despite his State Department’s conclusions, Obama denied approval of the final leg of Keystone XL, saying it would contribute to climate change.

The court’s exclusion of the final portions of the Keystone XL pipeline from its order is a setback for President Donald Trump, who had promised to move Keystone forward during his 2016 campaign for the presidency.

Trump signed a presidential memorandum on Jan. 24, 2017, just days after being sworn in as President, ordering the State Department to “take all actions necessary and appropriate to facilitate [the] expeditious review” of the Keystone permit application.

As legal matters stand now, Keystone XL’s developers will have to go through the lengthy process in place under the Obama administration to get the final segment approved and completed.

SOURCE 




Australia: One-touch environment assessment regime to hand control to states

Control of environmental assessments will be handed to state governments in return for a new system of national standards under a Morrison government plan to speed up major developments.

Environment Minister Sussan Ley said the government was consulting with the states over the "one-touch" regime, which would "devolve" the Commonwealth's legal responsibilities to them.

The mining and agriculture sectors welcomed the changes, while environmental groups expressed concern Ms Ley had ruled out an independent watchdog to ensure the states complied with the new standards.

Ms Ley revealed the plan as former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Graeme Samuel released the interim findings of his review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which he found was "ineffective and inefficient" and created significant extra costs for business.

"It does not enable the Commonwealth to protect and conserve environmental matters that are important for the nation," Mr Samuel said on Monday.

The Samuel review recommended cutting duplication in environmental regulation by allowing states to approve developments should they meet a strong set of national environmental standards.

The EPBC Act makes the Commonwealth responsible for matters deemed to be of national environmental significance, including the protection and recovery of threatened flora and fauna and World Heritage areas.

Under the bilateral approval system, states would be accredited by the Commonwealth to carry out environmental assessments required under the act.

"This is our chance to ensure the right protection for our environment while also unlocking job-creating projects to strengthen our economy and improve the livelihoods of everyday Australians," said Ms Ley, adding she hoped to introduce legislative changes to parliament this year.

Noting widespread community distrust of the system's ability to adequately protect the environment, the Samuel report said "a strong, independent cop on the beat" that was properly resourced and "not subject to actual or implied political direction from the Commonwealth minister" was required.

Ms Ley said the government would "strengthen compliance functions and ensure that all bilateral agreements with states and territories are subject to rigorous assurance monitoring".

"It will not, however, support additional layers of bureaucracy such as the establishment of an independent regulator," she said.

Since the EPBC Act was established in 1999, the average time taken for large, complex resource projects to be assessed and approved had increased to 1013 days from 817, the Samuel review found.

The Minerals Council of Australia said the proposed changes could deliver "faster approvals, greater national co-operation" and clearer guidelines that would "boost jobs and investment and improve biodiversity outcomes".

National Farmers' Federation chief executive Tony Mahar said the changes were "imperative" to the farm sector and "we must not squander this opportunity for overdue reform".

But environmental advocates said such changes could make a failing system of environmental protection worse.

"Without strong standards and oversight, fast-tracking approvals just fast-tracks extinctions," Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive Kelly O'Shanassy said.

She said state governments had an interest in approving developments in their jurisdictions and were sometimes even the proponents of potentially damaging developments, and it was not enough to have officers inside a department in oversight roles.

The Wilderness Society's law specialist, Suzanne Milthorpe, said the report showed environmental protection laws were failing, yet the government had proposed devolving federal safeguards to states while also ruling out an independent regulator.

Labor environment spokeswoman Terri Butler said her party would consider the report and blamed a blowout in approval times on Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment budget cuts.

"Since 2014, job and investment delays resulting from federal environment decisions have exploded from 19 days to a massive 116 days – almost 4 months – over the statutory timeframes on average in 2018-19."

Greens environment spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young said "the outlook is worse than grim". "The PM must immediately drop his plans to make approvals for big developers, land clearing and new mines easier," she said.

Mr Samuel will consult further with stakeholders before delivering his final report in October.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott attempted to devolve environmental approval powers to the states in 2014 but the changes were blocked in the Senate.

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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Is peer review bad for science?

I have had considerable experience of peer review, both as an author (of c.300 articles) and as a reviewer and my overwhelming impression of the process is that most reviewers do not read what they review.  They just look at the conclusions of the article and if they sound right, the reviewer passes the article with just a few desultory comments.

There are some reviewers who put up detailed and apposite comments but their comments often betray an ignorance of the previous research on the subject. They may know some recent reports but not the deep background to the field.  For that reason I always tried to supply the deep background in my articles and that did seem to pay off in that about half of my articles got accepted on the first submission.

Many of the articles that were rejected were ones where reviewers seemed not to be interested in either the previous research or my findings, apparently because my conclusions were uncongenial to them

Articles that went strongly against the consensus certainly got much more negative treatment than ones that did not rock the boat


After studying the popular practice of peer review of scientific journal articles for several years, I have reluctantly concluded that peer review is bad for science. While the practice has its good side, there are several ways that it greatly impedes progress, and the bad greatly outweighs the good.

To begin with, let’s look at what peer review tries to do. The obvious thing is to block the publication of fake science. However this appears to be a rare event in most sciences. There are several million journal articles published each year, all peer reviewed, typically by two or three reviewers. Clearly these many millions of reviews did not keep any of these myriad articles from being published.

Paradoxically, however, most of these articles were in fact rejected based on peer review; many were rejected many times. Top journals often boast of having high rejection rates, like 80% or so. If this is the general practice then the average article must be submitted to something like five journals before it is accepted and published. If each submission is peer reviewed then that is a lot of reviews per article, perhaps ten to fifteen on average.

Given that all of these multiply rejected articles eventually get published, something other than simple gate keeping must be going on. This something looks to be an extremely laborious sorting process, whereby each article eventually finds the “right” journal. It is hard to see any value being added by these many millions of peer reviews. Given modern search technologies, which journal an article ultimately appears in no longer seems very important.

One negative aspect of peer review is well known. This is where gate keeping keeps great new ideas from being published. Max Planck, who discovered the quantum nature of energy, put it very nicely, saying something like “Your ideas will (only) be accepted when your students become journal editors.” This is the dark side of peer review blocking science, the novel good ideas get blocked as bad ideas.

But there are several other bad things that flow from peer review that I have not seen mentioned. These down sides are features of the incredibly time consuming and laborious nature of the practice.

First there is the huge time delay between the time a paper is written and when it is finally published. Let’s say that peer review takes four months, which is probably pretty fast. If the average paper is reviewed five times then that is almost two years of reviews before it is finally accepted. (Also, there are many other steps between these reviews, so the average might be more like four years from first submission to final publication.)

If two million papers are published each year, with an average delay of say two years each, due to peer review, that is an accumulation of four million years of delay every year. It is reasonable to believe that eliminating this vast tide of delay would dramatically speed up the progress of science.

Then there is the cost. Organizing and managing the peer review process is probably the greatest expense that journal publishers face. Keep in mind that given an 80% rejection rate, something like five articles will be reviewed for every one published. At three reviews each that means fifteen reviews per published articles.

The high cost of journals and articles is a major obstacle to access by all but the richest universities and researchers. This to probably greatly impedes the progress of science.

Then there is the huge amount of time that researchers spend reviewing each other’s articles. Reviews are expected to be comprehensive, so they probably take from 10 to 20 hours each, maybe more. If there are fifteen reviews per article published that is 150 to 300 hours of review time.

Multiply that by 2 million articles published and we get an incredible 300 to 600 million hours a year devoted to reviewing, rather that to research. Assuming that a work year is 2000 hours, this is like taking 150 to 300 thousand researchers off the job, just to peer review each other’s papers. Think of what that amount of research might create. Again, this is a huge loss to the progress of science.

Conclusion: Peer review adds an enormous amount of delay, cost and distraction to the process of science. It does not do enough good to justify these huge adverse impacts on the rate of scientific progress. Thus on balance peer review is bad for science.

SOURCE




Environmental Facts vs. Environmental "Fact-Checkers"

Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia, and Tom Steyer, who ran for president of the United States, are now trying to run me out of town. Abrams, Steyer, and the leaders of 17 large environmental lobbies recently asked Facebook to ban a research group that I direct - the CO2 Coalition, made up of 55 climate scientists and energy economists.

The annual budgets of these lobbies total over half a billion dollars, and Steyer alone is worth $1.6 billion. Their alarmist view of our supposedly impending environmental doom predominates in mainstream media, centering on the impact on the earth of emissions of carbon dioxide - a non-polluting, mild warming gas, and an important source of plant and plankton food.

By contrast, the CO2 Coalition's annual budget is half a million dollars. Like all scientists and economists who ask for any proof of the looming apocalypse, we are excluded from mainstream-media discussion. You might wonder: how did the Steyer-Abrams crowd even notice us, let alone conclude that we posed a threat to their enforced consensus, which calls for an end to the affordable, reliable energy that powers over 80 percent of the world?

The answer is found in the work of a Silicon Valley computer entrepreneur named Eric Michelman, who became fabulously wealthy creating a modification of the computer mouse. For more than a decade now, Michelman has devoted his wealth to squelching media debate on climate change - a successful dry run for the cancel culture that we see engulfing many other issues today. 

In 2016, Michelman was the founding and lead funder of a group called Climate Feedback, whose purpose is to "fact-check" and label as "false" any and all deviant thoughts about fossil-fueled climate catastrophe. The group has been certified as an unbiased source on climate issues by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which was founded by the Tampa Bay Times and operates the left-leaning PolitiFact. At some point, Facebook turned its censorship oversight over to the Poynter Institute's International Fact-Checking Network.

That's when our organization's problems started.

In September 2019, a "false" label appeared on Facebook when the Washington Examiner posted an article I had written there with Dr. Patrick Michaels, our senior fellow and a former president of the American Association of State Climatologists. The op-ed described the poor performance of climate models that had projected alarming increases in future temperatures. The "false" label triggered a wave of censorship from Facebook's algorithms, blocking reposting and advertising.

The detailed, scientifically referenced letter we wrote to Facebook that soon got the label reversed is almost identical in form and argument to responses this summer to similar Climate Feedback censorship written by environmental writer Michael Shellenberger, Dr. Michaels (after a televised appearance on Fox's Life, Liberty, and Levin), and climate statistician Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. All of us agree: Climate Feedback is biased, sloppy, and often just flat wrong. For example, in its "fact-checks," the group blatantly contradicts the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's finding that there has been no statistically significant increase in rates of sea-level rise, hurricanes, droughts, and floods during the carbon emissions era that began with the dramatic industrialization after World War II.

Climate Feedback is Michelman's third major attempt at promoting climate alarmism and silencing opposing views. First came the Climate Change Education Project, in 2008, followed by the More than Scientists campaign in 2015. When he set up that campaign, Michelman said:

It's about showing the science is settled. Studies consistently show that 97 percent of scientists agree. We want the public to both hear from them that, yeah, this is settled, but also see scientists for who they are. They're our neighbors, our fellow citizens, and community members. They're people with kids, and they're worried about the future. When they say, "I'm concerned about climate change and I think we need to act on it," you can understand they're saying it because they have kids just like you do.

Since Michelman had decided that the science was settled in favor of a 97 percent consensus on catastrophe before he even founded Climate Feedback, his group should never have been let into a network of "unbiased" reviewers. And its performance shows why.

I'm all for debating with Climate Feedback. For 15 years as a professor at American University, I invited to my classes on climate statistics and mathematical modeling many of the groups whose leaders signed the recent letter to Facebook calling for us to be banned. But there was no response because the cancel culture doesn't believe in debate. It believes in silencing its opponents by denying them a platform. We'll hold on as long as we can. I believe that the truth will out-even against "fact-checkers." 

SOURCE




Under President Trump, Americans are breathing cleaner air

Andrew Wheeler

Poor air quality was one of the main motivations for creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, when six of the most common air pollutants – carbon monoxide, lead, ground-level ozone, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide – known as "criteria" pollutants, were often at dangerous levels for public health in many cities.

When the president called me in 2018 and asked me to take over at EPA, he told me to continue to clean up the air and to push through deregulatory actions because he knew that we could do both at the same time.

And we have done just that.

Under President Trump’s leadership, EPA is announcing that combined emissions of criteria pollutants, which can harm public health and the environment, and their precursors have dropped 7% from 2017 to 2019.

Our latest air progress report shows a remarkable decrease in air pollution – both over the past three years and in the past half-century. This data shows conclusively that the U.S. can continue to have world-leading air emission reductions for our citizens alongside economic growth.

Since 1970, the combined emissions of the six criteria air pollutants and their precursor pollutants have dropped an incredible 77%, while the United States GDP grew 285%. In other words, today’s air is 77% cleaner than it was in 1970, which provides immense benefits to all Americans.

Under the Clean Air Act, EPA established National Ambient Air Quality Standards for each of the six criteria air pollutants in order to protect human health. Areas of the country that meet these standards are considered to be in "attainment" of those standards; areas that do not are designated as being in "non-attainment." In addition to the human health and welfare implications of failing to meet the standards, there are economic implications as well, making redesignation a goal that addresses many problems at once.

The core of our nation’s air quality success has been due to true partnership with our states. Since the beginning of 2017, 21 areas in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio have moved from non-attainment to attainment, easing lending and permitting restrictions for hundreds or even thousands of local businesses. These cleaner areas include places as large as Chicago and Indianapolis and as small as Williamson County, Illinois and Fulton County, Ohio. Another eight areas are likely to move into attainment in the next 12 months.

Achieving attainment means lower sulfur, particulate matter, nitrogen oxide (NOx), carbon monoxide, ground-level ozone and lead emissions for millions of people across the Great Lakes region. This is especially important for children, whose lungs are still developing, and those who suffer from respiratory conditions like chronic bronchitis and asthma – many of the same conditions that make COVID-19 viral infections more dangerous.

Since 2000, concentrations of fine particulate matter, which is sometimes referred to as PM2.5 or soot, have dropped by roughly 40%. A great deal of this progress has taken place in low-income communities and neighborhoods across this country. Average United States fine particulate matter levels are five times below the global average, seven times below China’s levels, and well below France, Germany, Mexico, and Russia.

Even after such significant progress, we are not resting on our laurels. EPA is developing a new standard for heavy-duty trucks, referred to as the Cleaner Trucks Initiative. This rule will further reduce NOx emissions from heavy-duty trucks by working closely with states and the private sector. This action will be key to helping many remaining nonattainment areas reach attainment in the coming decade.

Consistent with my goal of increasing the public’s access to information, EPA updated and relaunched our air quality website – AirNow.gov – last month. Our improved website reports real-time air quality using the official United States Air Quality Index, which tells the public how clean or polluted the air is, and steps they can take to reduce their exposure to pollution.

AirNow.gov will keep the American public better informed of real-time air quality conditions at the local, state, national and international levels.

As EPA’s 50th anniversary approaches this December, we can take pride that Americans now have significantly cleaner air, land and water than in the past. The Trump Administration is proving that environmental protection and economic prosperity can go hand-in-hand.

With the safe, responsible reopening of our economy underway, our country has already proved that building a strong economy can be achieved alongside meaningful environmental progress. With President Trump’s continued prioritization of clean air, EPA will ensure this progress continues.

SOURCE






Reform for Australia’s environment laws

Some rationalization

Minister for the Environment Sussan Ley will prioritise the development of new national environmental standards, further streamlining approval processes with State governments and national engagement on indigenous cultural heritage, following the release of an interim report into Australia’s environmental laws.

Professor Graeme Samuel’s interim report established that the existing Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 has become cumbersome and does not serve the interests of the environment or business.

“Not surprisingly, the statutory review is finding that 20-year-old legislation is struggling to meet the changing needs of the environment, agriculture, community planners and business,” Minister Ley said.

“This is our chance to ensure the right protection for our environment while also unlocking job-creating projects to strengthen our economy and improve the livelihoods of every-day Australians. We can do both as part of the Australian Government’s COVID recovery plan.

The Commonwealth will commit to the following priority areas on the basis of the interim report:

Develop Commonwealth led national environmental standards which will underpin new bilateral agreements with State Governments.

Commence discussions with willing states to enter agreements for single touch approvals (removing duplication by accrediting states to carry out environmental assessments and approvals on the Commonwealth’s behalf).

Commence a national engagement process for modernising the protection of indigenous cultural heritage, commencing with a round table meeting of state indigenous and environment ministers. This will be jointly chaired by Minister Ley and the Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt.

Explore market based solutions for better habitat restoration that will significantly improve environmental outcomes while providing greater certainty for business. The Minister will establish an environmental markets expert advisory group.

In line with the interim report findings, the Commonwealth will maintain its existing framework for regulating greenhouse gas and other emissions, and would not propose any expansion of the EPBC Act in this area.

The Commonwealth will take steps to strengthen compliance functions and ensure that all bilateral agreements with States and Territories are subject to rigorous assurance monitoring. It will not, however, support additional layers of bureaucracy such as the establishment of an independent regulator.

The report raises a range of other issues and reform directions. Further consultation will be undertaken regarding these.

“I thank Professor Samuel for his work and for his very clear message that we need to act,” Minister Ley said.

“As he works towards his final report, we will monitor its progress closely, while we continue to improve existing processes as much as possible.

“It is time to find a way past an adversarial approach and work together to create genuine reform that will protect our environment, while keeping our economy strong.”

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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"Jaw-dropping" global crash in children being born — just what the ecofascists want

Stupid history-defying predictions below which assume that the influences on human reproduction will remain the same. They will not.

Post-pill, all the non-maternal women are currently being removed from the gene pool by reason of the simple fact that they now rarely have children. Women like them will become rarer and rarer. And their decisions are a big influence behind the current "birth-dearth".

So all the births of the not too distant future will come from maternally-inclined women. And how many children will those women have? As many as they can afford (and then some in some cases).

So the birthrates in advanced nations will recover and the  population will start growing again -- albeit off a lower base.

And here's a way-out one:  It seems to have become fashionable for celebrity women to have children, multiple children in most cases.  You would not think that women who live by their looks would risk  their figures by having children, but they are in fact doing it -- the Kardashians, for instance.

Children now seem to have become a sign of affluence.  They are the ultimate luxury -- even better than big yachts and Gulfstream jets.  And lots of people DO emulate celebrities.  Many women in the near future may start having children because it is fashionable or simply because they want to show off.  One can imagine the conversations:  "I've got three.  How many have you got?"

So who knows what the future holds?


The world is ill-prepared for the global crash in children being born which is set to have a "jaw-dropping" impact on societies, say researchers.

Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century.

And 23 nations - including Spain and Japan - are expected to see their populations halve by 2100.

Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.

What is going on?

The fertility rate - the average number of children a woman gives birth to - is falling.

If the number falls below approximately 2.1, then the size of the population starts to fall.

In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime.

Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017 - and their study, published in the Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100.

As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.

"That's a pretty big thing; most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline," researcher Prof Christopher Murray told the BBC.

"I think it's incredibly hard to think this through and recognise how big a thing this is; it's extraordinary, we'll have to reorganise societies."

Why are fertility rates falling?

It has nothing to do with sperm counts or the usual things that come to mind when discussing fertility.

Instead it is being driven by more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, leading to women choosing to have fewer children.

In many ways, falling fertility rates are a success story.

Which countries will be most affected?

Japan's population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century.

Italy is expected to see an equally dramatic population crash from 61 million to 28 million over the same timeframe.

They are two of 23 countries - which also include Spain, Portugal, Thailand and South Korea - expected to see their population more than halve.

"That is jaw-dropping," Prof Christopher Murray told me.

China, currently the most populous nation in the world, is expected to peak at 1.4 billion in four years' time before nearly halving to 732 million by 2100. India will take its place.

The UK is predicted to peak at 75 million in 2063, and fall to 71 million by 2100.

However, this will be a truly global issue, with 183 out of 195 countries having a fertility rate below the replacement level.

Why is this a problem?

You might think this is great for the environment. A smaller population would reduce carbon emissions as well as deforestation for farmland.

"That would be true except for the inverted age structure (more old people than young people) and all the uniformly negative consequences of an inverted age structure," says Prof Murray.

Prof Murray adds: "It will create enormous social change. It makes me worried because I have an eight-year-old daughter and I wonder what the world will be like."

Who pays tax in a massively aged world? Who pays for healthcare for the elderly? Who looks after the elderly? Will people still be able to retire from work?

"We need a soft landing," argues Prof Murray.

Are there any solutions?

Countries, including the UK, have used migration to boost their population and compensate for falling fertility rates.

However, this stops being the answer once nearly every country's population is shrinking.

"We will go from the period where it's a choice to open borders, or not, to frank competition for migrants, as there won't be enough," argues Prof Murray.

Some countries have tried policies such as enhanced maternity and paternity leave, free childcare, financial incentives and extra employment rights, but there is no clear answer.

Sweden has dragged its fertility rate up from 1.7 to 1.9, but other countries that have put significant effort into tackling the "baby bust" have struggled. Singapore still has a fertility rate of around 1.3.

Prof Murray says: "I find people laugh it off; they can't imagine it could be true, they think women will just decide to have more kids.

"If you can't [find a solution] then eventually the species disappears, but that's a few centuries away."

SOURCE





Federal appeals court temporarily halts Dakota Access pipeline shutdown

A federal appeals court on Tuesday temporarily halted a judge’s order that the Dakota Access Pipeline be shut down in three weeks.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued an “administrative stay” of the judge’s order. Though the appeals court said it “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits” of the case, the Bismarck Tribune reported.

The stay will remain in place until the appeals court rules on whether developer Energy Transfer can keep oil flowing while the court decides the Texas-based company’s appeal of the shutdown order.

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg last week ordered the line shut down by Aug. 5 pending a lengthy environmental review. The line began pumping oil more than three years ago. Energy Transfer estimates it would take three months to empty the pipeline of oil and complete steps to preserve it for future use.

Pipeline supporter GAIN Coalition, which includes businesses, trade associations and labor groups, called the order “a key step forward in reaffirming the Dakota Access Pipeline’s critical role in the American energy infrastructure network.” North Dakota Republican U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer, another supporter, called the temporary halt “common sense.”

But Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman, who represents the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said the move is not significant.

Hasselman said in a statement an administrative stay is typical and “is not in any way indicative of how the court is going to rule — it just buys the court a little additional time to make a decision.”

The line was the subject of months of protests in 2016 and 2017, sometimes violent, during its construction near the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border. The tribe took legal action against the pipeline even after it began carrying oil from North Dakota across South Dakota and Iowa and to a shipping point in Illinois in June 2017.

The $3.8 billion, 1,172-mile pipeline crosses beneath the Missouri River, just north of the reservation. The tribe draws its water from the river and has concerns about pollution. The company maintains the line is safe.

SOURCE





Court strikes down Trump administration's methane rollback

A federal court late Wednesday struck down a Trump administration rule that weakened restrictions on methane gas releases from drilling on public land, restoring an Obama-era rule.

In 2018, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rolled back parts of the prior rule that limited the release of the greenhouse gas. The change was expected to allow for more methane leaks in a process called flaring and add to air pollution.

On Wednesday, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers determined that the rulemaking process used by the BLM was “wholly inadequate.”

“In its haste, BLM ignored its statutory mandate under the Mineral Leasing Act, repeatedly failed to justify numerous reversals in policy positions previously taken, and failed to consider scientific findings and institutions relied upon by both prior Republican and Democratic administrations,” wrote the Obama appointee.

“In its zeal, BLM simply engineered a process to ensure a preordained conclusion,” she added in the decision’s conclusion.  “Where a court has found such widespread violations, the court must fulfill its duties in striking the defectively promulgated rule.”

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas that can be 25 times more impactful than carbon dioxide in equal quantities. In 2018, it accounted for nearly 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity.

The judge’s order will go into effect in 90 days, and she is requiring the BLM to chart its course of action in a report due in 30 days.

BLM spokesperson Derrick Henry said he disagreed with the court's ruling.

"Our commonsense deregulatory actions were lawful and based on the best available science," Henry said in a statement to The Hill. "The Department will continue to implement President Trump’s agenda to create more American jobs, protect the safety of American workers, support domestic energy production and conserve our environment."

“The judge basically rejected every attempt by the Trump administration to gut these common-sense waste prevention measures on behalf of their oil & gas industry cronies,” said Earthjustice attorney Robin Cooley in a statement. “The judge said the administration cannot ignore the impacts on health and well-being of the people who live near oil and gas facilities.”

SOURCE





Australian rooftop photovoltaic installations may face grid constraints

Australian households have adopted rooftop PV with unprecedented relish, with families and small businesses both contributing towards the transition away from polluting fossil fuels while reducing energy costs. While a downturn is expected on the back of Covid-19, installation rates are still exceeding most forecasts.

However, the right to install a rooftop system is not a given and people looking to install small-scale solar systems as soon as this decade could face significant limitations to grid exports of their PV power and even their ability to connect a system curtailed by grid operators. The outcome could be rooftop PV assets that are not able to push all of the power they generate into the grid – pushing out assumed payback periods.

“It would be detrimental for the industry and for consumers,” explains Ben Cerini, a consultant with Cornwall Insight Australia. “Households may find themselves with stranded assets, which is a bigger issue for them than institutional investors because they are not as sophisticated [investors].”

The warning comes on the back of recent analysis from Cornwall Insight Australia, which found that 24.5 GW of sub-100kWp solar is set to be added to Australian rooftops through to 2030 – if, that is, such constraints are not put in place.

Some electrical network operators, or DSNPs, have intensified their efforts in communicating that the ability of a household to export power a rooftop PV system is far from being a given “right.” Victorian DNSP Powercor, which services the western suburbs of Melbourne and the west of the state, is advising households in the regions it serves to check into whether PV export is allowed.

“If no action is taken by 2026, customers serviced by almost half of our zone substations will experience difficulties when they try to export energy to the grid,” said Steven Neave, Powercor GM of Electricity Networks said in a statement, issued in late May. In the same press release, Powercor noted that the number of rooftop PV systems on its network increased from 142,200 at the start of 2020, to 150,500 by April – indicating the solar installation rate was likely to increase by 18% in 2020, up from 14% in 2019.

DNSPs clearly have an interest in highlighting the challenges caused by rooftop solar in operating their networks. At the same time, so do solar installers, who wish to highlight the quick investment paybacks delivered by rooftop solar. However the equations used by solar salespeople may be based on the ability to feed solar energy into the grid – something that is not given.

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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