Tuesday, January 23, 2024
What Happened With The 'Stranded Teslas' EV Charging Panic In Chicago
Frigid weather and electric cars: it’s known for quite some time now that they’re not the best of friends. Even though this frosty relationship isn’t breaking news, a new furor sparked this week following a FOX 32 Chicago report that showcased several Tesla drivers struggling to charge their EVs at a Tesla Supercharger in Oak Brook, Illinois.
As temperatures in this Chicago suburb plummeted to under zero this week for the first time in ages, the situation seemed to have become dire, with owners having to tow their Teslas out on flatbeds because chargers weren’t working, and their EVs had run out of juice. The TV station didn't mince words: “Public charging stations have turned into car graveyards,” reporters said, while calling depleted EVs “dead robots.” A barrage of similar stories emerged out of this report, with several major publications echoing this voice.
The FOX station mentions that some of the stranded owners were those who had just landed at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, which is just 14 miles north of the Oak Brook Supercharger. Tesla’s official documentation says that its cars use around 1% of its battery per day at idle. But if Sentry Mode—which remotely monitors outside conditions via the car's cameras—is enabled, the car can sap as much as 15% of pack capacity in 24 hours. That means someone who leaves Sentry Mode enabled while parked at the airport may return with a significantly reduced battery capacity.
Fortunately, there are several Supercharging stations close to O’Hare. There’s just one problem: at least three of these stations, including the two closest stations (Rosemont and Oak Brook) were reportedly non-functional. In fact, across 13 stations in the region (which, to be clear, is just a handful of the total number of charging locations near Chicago), nearly 50 stalls were said to be out of order.
Our friends over at The Autopian also found reviews on plugshare about Supercharging problems at many of these locations, some of which outlined fights breaking out between owners looking to charge.
Chemistry And User Error Challenges
Battery chemistry is an issue here too. Tesla most commonly uses two different battery chemistries in its cars: Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LFP) and Nickel-Cobalt-Aluminum (NCA). LFP batteries are found in the standard range-trimmed Model 3, for example. The prismatic cells are cheaper to produce and not as energy-dense as cylindrical NCA cells found in the Long Range and Performance variants of the Model 3 and Y.
While both NCA and LFP batteries are affected adversely by cold weather, LFP batteries perform slightly worse. For starters, the overall range is reduced more so than NCA cells. LFP packs also have a harder time charging in colder weather. This means that if the battery pack is unable to precondition—a process that warms the battery up to an optimal temperature making charging more effective—before arriving at a DC fast charger, the overall charging speed will be significantly slower. Couple that with the reduced range in extreme cold, and you’ve got a recipe for arriving at a Supercharger with a state of charge (SoC) in the single digits.
One major thorn in the process was probably the lack of knowledge about battery preconditioning. Preconditioning itself requires energy, so leaving your EV at a low SoC can hamper that process. Owners have pointed out that preconditioning can consume between 7.5 to 12 kilowatt-hours, and those figures can vary depending on the set defrost level and set cabin temperature.
And since Teslas typically stop preconditioning at a lower SoC to avoid running out of charge ahead of reaching a fast charger, that battery conditioning isn’t started until the car is plugged in, which means a slower fast charging session, assuming the charger is functional. If it’s not, it could mean a SoC too low to reach another Supercharging station, thus leaving the car stranded.
It’s also possible that those who were routing to the out-of-service Superchargers were doing so out of memory. Perhaps those individuals rely primarily on Supercharging due to not having a charger of their own at home. The cold weather sapping the range and efficiency coupled with the lack of preconditioning may have caused these owners to become stranded at the Oak Brook Supercharger.
Moreover, owners have highlighted how charging performance declines in bone-chilling weather. One owner said on Reddit that even after preconditioning the battery for 20 minutes, with an additional 10-minute “preconditioning for fast charging,” the Supercharger didn’t immediately add real driving miles.
It’s something Kyle Conner of Out Of Spec Reviews also highlighted in a video that showcases how batteries behave during “deep freeze” conditions. Superchargers often don’t add range until batteries are first heated to optimal temperatures, and even then, stalls engineered to deliver 150-250 kilowatts only deliver 20-50 kW.
Also, it’s high time we accept the reality of EV range in winter, and instead focus on solutions to optimize it.
During the 2022-2023 winter, battery health and data startup Recurrent collected data from 10,000 EVs to analyze the impact of cold weather on the range. After analyzing over two dozen models in the U.S., Recurrent found that the average observed range in winter—range after factoring in real-world variables like climate, terrain, and driving patterns—was 70.3% of their normal range.
Chicago is a busy hub, and this would be similar to many gas stations running out of fuel with a bunch of cars running on fumes pulling up to the pump. Of course, such failures can attract a lot of media coverage. But our readers told us that the cold weather in nearby Michigan has been just as harsh to chargers in that area—five Supercharging locations with 56 stalls outside of Detroit, 12 were recently reported as unavailable.
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Legacy Manufacturer Slashes Production of EV Truck Biden Drove to Promote Green Agenda
Ford is cutting back production of its F-150 Lightning electric vehicle, a model that President Joe Biden took for a test drive to market his administration’s EV agenda.
Ford made the official announcement that it will be reducing its F-150 Lightning output in 2024 amid slower-than-projected growth in EV demand. Biden test drove a F-150 Lightning in Michigan in May 2021 to promote his administration’s EV agenda, which aims for EVs to make up 50% of all new auto sales by 2030.
“Ford is reducing production of F-150 Lightning, the top-selling electric pickup in the U.S., to achieve the optimal balance of production, sales growth and profitability,” the company announced on Friday. “Ford expects continued growth in global EV sales in 2024, though less than anticipated, and is preparing to launch next-generation EVs.”
The company is not currently sharing specific details regarding changes in production volume for the model, a Ford spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation, but earlier reports indicated that the company could slash production by about 50%.
“We see a bright future for electric vehicles for our customers who value their advantages, especially with Ford EV drivers’ access to Tesla superchargers beginning this quarter,” the Ford spokesperson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “We are engaged with the regulators to help ensure the emission standards align with the market, and Ford will comply with the standards.”
The F-150 Lightning typically costs approximately $50,000 compared to the conventional F-150’s $36,570 price tag, making the EV version considerably more expensive even with the help of $7,500 consumer tax credits provided by the Inflation Reduction Act.
The Biden administration is using enormous government subsidies and aggressive market regulation to push EVs on Americans. Despite these efforts, the industry as a whole finds itself in a tenuous position to start 2024: Ford and several of its competitors are losing vast sums of money on their EV product lines while executives are backing away from short-term production targets.
Additionally, the nation’s charging infrastructure remains highly concentrated in coastal, densely populated regions rather than in the vast American interior as the Biden administration’s $7.5 billion spending blitz to build out a nationwide charging network has been slow to develop. The charging infrastructure that does exist, meanwhile, does not always function properly, whether because of hardware issues or weather conditions.
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Climate chiefs admitted net zero plan based on insufficient data, leading physicist says
Key committee only looked at ‘a single year of data’ when making controversial green energy claims. Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith says the Climate Change Committee admits that a mistake was made
Britain’s climate watchdog has privately admitted that a number of its key net zero recommendations may have relied on insufficient data, it has been claimed.
Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, who led a recent Royal Society study on future energy supply, said that the Climate Change Committee only “looked at a single year” of data showing the number of windy days in a year when it made pronouncements on the extent to which the UK could rely on wind and solar farms to meet net zero.
“They have conceded privately that that was a mistake,” Sir Chris said in a presentation seen by this newspaper. In contrast, the Royal Society review examined 37 years worth of weather data.
Last week Sir Chris, an emeritus professor and former director of energy research at Oxford University, said that the remarks to which he was referring were made by Chris Stark, the Climate Change Committee’s chief executive. He said: “Might be best to say that Chris Stark conceded that my comment that the CCC relied on modelling that only uses a single year of weather data ... is ‘an entirely valid criticism’.”
The CCC said that Sir Chris’s comments, in a presentation given in a personal capacity in October, following the publication of his review, related solely to a particular report it published last year on how to deliver “a reliable decarbonised power system”.
Enshrined in law
But, in response to further questions from this newspaper, the body admitted that its original recommendations in 2019 about the feasibility of meeting the 2050 net zero target, were also based on just one year’s worth of weather data. The recommendations were heavily relied on by ministers when Theresa May enshrined the 2050 target into law. A CCC spokesman said: “We stand by the analysis.”
In October 2021 The Sunday Telegraph revealed that assumptions underpinning the committee’s 2019 advice to ministers included a projection that in 2050 there would be just seven days on which wind turbines would produce less than 10 per cent of their potential electricity output. That compared to 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018, according to analysis by Net Zero Watch, a campaign group.
Sir Chris’s report for the Royal Society, published in September, concluded that a vast network of hydrogen-filled caves was needed to guard against the risk of blackouts under the shift to wind and solar generation, which the Royal Society described as “volatile” because it depends on wind and sun to produce energy.
The report was one of the starkest warnings to date of the risks faced when relying on intermittent weather-dependent energy sources without sufficient backup.
Overestimate
It stated: “The UK’s need for long-term energy storage has been seriously underestimated... Studies that do not consider long sequences of years underestimate the need for long-term storage. Studies of single years cannot cast light directly on the need for storage lasting over 12 months and overestimate the need for other supplies.”
In a presentation delivered on Oct 31 2023, Sir Chris said: “By looking at one year you underestimate storage and you grossly overestimate the need for everything else. That’s exactly what the Committee on Climate Change have done.”
He added: “The Committee on Climate Change, as I already said, looked at a single year and they have conceded privately that that was a mistake. But they are still saying they don’t differ that much from us. Well that’s not quite true.”
The Royal Society report found that up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed by 2050, to mitigate variations in wind and sunshine. This was based on 37 years of weather data rather than the single year relied on by the CCC.
Real weather data
The report noted that the CCC model required “a much greater level of supply ... from other sources, and/or wind and solar than would have been required if storage had been allowed to transfer energy between years.”
A CCC spokesman said: “Our recent report modelled the 12-month operation of Britain’s power system in 2035 using hourly energy demand and real weather data from a low-wind year, stress-tested to simulate a 30-day wind drought.
“We welcome Sir Chris’ work, which considers other aspects of the energy challenge in 2050, under different assumptions about the future energy mix.” Asked if the CCC disputed Sir Chris’s account, the spokesman said: “We’ve got nothing further to add.”
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Energy bills must rise to pay for Net Zero, says Siemens Energy boss
The German boss of Britain’s biggest wind turbine maker has warned energy bills will have to keep rising to pay for the green transition as he attacked “fairytale” thinking about net zero.
Joe Kaeser, chairman of Siemens Energy, suggested higher energy bills were inevitable as turbine makers grapple with huge losses, forcing them to pass on costs to their customers.
The company is the owner of the UK’s biggest wind turbine manufacturing site, in Hull, and employs thousands of British workers.
Mr Kaeser said manufacturers had become locked in a harmful “rat race” to build ever-bigger turbines and claimed developers and governments were in denial about the costs this entailed.
He also warned that inflation is battering industry balance sheets and warned of separate growing problems with faults and breakdowns in the sector.
Mr Kaeser told The Telegraph: “Every transformation comes at a cost and every transformation is painful. And that’s something which the energy industry and the public sector - governments - don’t really want to hear.
“I believe that for a while [customers] need to accept higher pricing.
“And then there might be innovation – about the weight of the blades, other efficiency methods, technology – so the cost can then go down again.
“But the point is, if there is no profit pool in an industry, why should that industry innovate?”
His comments come after the UK Government bowed to industry pressure in November and increased the power prices offered in future renewable energy auctions, after a competition in the summer received no bids from offshore wind developers.
The earlier auction flop triggered serious doubts that the UK would be able to meet its target of 50 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr Kaeser criticised what he described as “a lot of big mouths but little action” that had gone on for years in the wind industry.
Governments and developers are failing to follow through on their own green transition promises quickly enough, he said, while many are reluctant to admit the full costs of their plans to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Monday, January 22, 2024
Italian activists now face huge fines
Climate protestors could face fines of up to €60,000 for damaging monuments or cultural sites in Italy.
Under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, Italy is cracking down on everything from English language to raves and synthetic meat to ChatGPT.
The right-wing PM’s latest bugbear is climate protestors.
On Tuesday (11 April) the Italian government announced plans to bring in hefty fines for people who damage monuments or cultural sites.
The penalties are aimed at activists who in recent weeks have made headlines for their public stunts highlighting the climate crisis.
Two environmental activists from the Last Generation protest group are the latest to receive a large fine as well as a suspended jail sentence.
Why is Italy ramping up fines for criminal damage?
At the start of April, members of climate activism organisation Last Generation turned the waters in Rome’s La Barcaccia fountain black to draw attention to the country’s water crisis.
This is the latest in a long line of eye-catching protests, ranging from activists glueing themselves to a famous painting in Florence to hurling paint at Milan's La Scala opera house.
Under the new law, actions like this would be punishable with fines of between €10,000 and €60,000. This will be additional to existing fines and prison sentences for criminal damage.
This week, two members of the Last Generation climate protest group were fined €30,000 and given a suspended prison sentence for damages during a stunt last year. The activists glued themselves to the base of the ancient Laocoon statue housed in the Vatican museums.
Italy’s Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano says the fines will be used to cover the cleanup costs of such actions.
The bill also targets vandalism and antisocial activity carried out by tourists in Italy - such as last year’s incident of an Australian riding a moped through Pompeii. It is yet to pass through parliament.
Laws like this one have been criticised as a ‘weapon of mass distraction’ from more urgent issues like the energy and cost of living crisis.
The UK is also cracking down on climate protest tactics
Across Europe, activists have been blocking roads and runways, targeting monuments and disrupting oil refineries to draw public attention to the climate crisis.
The legal response has been most severe in the UK, which ramped up fines and prison sentences last summer for those defacing public monuments.
Damage of less than £5,000 (€5,675) was previously subject to a maximum three-month prison sentence. This has now been raised to 10 years.
This was partly in response to widespread targeting of statues in 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests but also targets an ongoing wave of climate actions.
The UK has also cracked down on ‘disruptive’ protests, giving police wider powers to shut them down and arrest participants. In some incidents, protestors have been detained for six months before trial due to a backlog of cases.
The recently announced Public Order Bill criminalises the protest tactic of individuals attaching themselves to others, objects or buildings to cause serious disruption. The offence will carry a maximum penalty of six months' imprisonment, an unlimited fine, or both
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Are kids starting to see through the climate cult?
Should it really be any surprise that not all teenagers are on the same page as Greta Thunberg? According to a poll by Survation, 31 per cent of Britons between the ages of 13 and 17 agree with the statement ‘climate change and its effects are being purposefully overexaggerated.’
It does rather restore faith in the current generation of teenagers to realise that a third of them can see through this guff
I am not entirely sure what is meant by the now commonplace concept of ‘overexaggeration’ – which presumably means something beyond the optimum level of exaggeration – but never mind. I’ll take it as the teenagers themselves presumably interpreted it: that they are not entirely convinced by the rhetoric thrown at them daily, such as ‘the world is on fire’ (Greta Thunberg) or ‘there will be the slaughter, death, and starvation of six billion people’ (Rogar Hallam, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion) or ‘we have five years to save the planet’ (the World Wildlife Fund in, er, 2007) and think that the reality is quite likely a lot more modest than that.
But, no, this can’t possibly be a sign of teenagers thinking for themselves and working out that climate activists are spinning apocalyptical visions to promote their cause. Rather it is a sign that our youth have fallen victim to a dark conspiracy to poison their minds with shameless lies. Or so the Center for Countering Digital Hate (‘hate’ in this case seeming to mean anything which diverges from its own left-wing views) seems to think. It says it has analysed 96 YouTube channels which it thinks might be responsible, including ones which have spread such blatant untruths as ‘climate policies are ineffective or flawed’ (they are, as we all know, fully-baked and 100 per cent effective) or that ‘Clean energy technology or biofuels won’t work’ (it is wrong to single out wind and solar energy sources as being intermittent, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, because gas and coal powered stations sometimes need to be taken offline, too). It also seems to think it is a lie to deny that the world is suffering from more storms – even though that assertion is flatly contradicted by the observational evidence presented by the IPCC.
The world, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, is engaged in an ‘enlightenment battle of truth and science versus lies and greed’. And YouTube and other social media platforms are disgracefully giving airtime to the latter when of course they should only be hosting videos informing us that we are all going to die.
It does rather restore faith in the current generation of teenagers to realise that a third of them can see this guff for what it is: left-wing activism trying to erect a false divide between ‘science’ and unreason. When today’s teenagers reach adulthood and start witnessing predicted doomsdays pass without incident I dare say a few more of them will move into the camp which believes there is quite a bit of exaggeration over climate change.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/are-kids-starting-to-see-through-the-climate-cult/
*************************************************Right, Wall Street Journal, John Kerry Did Fail to Persuade China to Give Up Reliable Energy
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) ran an article noting that despite John Kerry’s failure as President Joe Biden’s climate envoy to get China to curb its coal use in order to save the world from climate change, Kerry is now being brought over to Biden’s reelection campaign. If Kerry does as good a job with Biden’s campaign as he did in changing the course of the world’s fossil fuel use, Biden’s reelection efforts are in trouble. The WSJ is right, Kerry failed in his biggest mission as the U.S. climate czar, curbing greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries, especially China.
Describing Kerry’s lack of success, the WSJ wrote:
For three years Mr. Kerry has been preoccupied with getting China to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. But excluding emissions from land use and forestry, China’s emissions rose 13% between 2015 and 2023, according to Climate Action Tracker estimates. U.S. emissions fell by some 9% over the same period.
You can’t say Mr. Kerry hasn’t tried to persuade China, including the use of green flattery. “China has produced more renewable energy, more solar and wind than any other country,” he said last year.
But China’s CO2 emissions have still soared as demand for electricity surged. In 2022 China accounted for 53% of the world’s coal generation, the Ember think tank says, and new permits for coal power plants in 2022 reached “the highest level since 2015.” That’s the year Beijing signed the Paris climate accord Mr. Kerry negotiated, promising to reduce its emissions starting in 2030.
China also expanded it coal mining, despite Kerry’s efforts, setting a new record for production in 2023.
In September 2023, Kerry’s counterpart, Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said, “It is unrealistic to completely phase out fossil fuel energy,” echoing statement made by China’s President Xi Jinping 2022 that the country’s carbon dioxide policies, “can’t be detached from reality.”
Looking at some of those realities, one can see that regardless of what one believes about humanity’s role (or lack thereof) in climate change. Kerry’s climate outreach to China and elsewhere was largely an expensive fool’s errand.
An article on Turning Point USA points out that the salary for Kerry’s small staff cost U.S. taxpayers $4.3 million each year, with all but one of the 27 employees with the office of Special Presidential Envoy for Climate making more than $100,000 per year. This doesn’t include the costs of office space and equipment, travel, and other associated costs with running Kerry’s independent office. I say independent because Kerry’s position was created by President Biden, reporting only to him. Despite being charged with negotiating international climate agreements, Kerry’s office was outside the normal chain of command. It was not part of the State Department, and Kerry did not report to the Secretary of State.
All that money bought no climate progress. During Kerry’s time as Special Climate Envoy, coal use set new records. In 2023, the International Energy Agency reported:
“The demand for coal is seen rising 1.4 percent in 2023, surpassing 8.5 billion tonnes for the first time as usage in India is expected to grow 8 percent and that in China up 5 percent due to rising electricity demand and weak hydropower output, IEA said in a report released on Friday,” writes Al Jazeera, reporting io the IEA’s findings.
Indeed, data from Statista shows that the capacity of the coal plants announced, permitted, and under construction have risen each year since Kerry was on the job, reversing a declining trend global trend in coal power construction that existed under the Trump administration.
To be fair, John Kerry does not run China, India, or any of the other developing countries where coal use for electric power generation and industrial uses is rising, but his main job was to persuade the leaders of those countries to shift to alternative, less reliable, more expensive forms of energy, as Western Europe and the United States are largely doing. In that task, he abjectly failed. And the reason for the failure is clear, the Biden administration with Kerry as its point man, put climate pipe dreams above economic realities of the developing world.
The result was aptly summed up by the WSJ, writing, “Mr. Kerry’s problem has been a failure to recognize reality, which is typical of America’s climate lobby.”
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Wrong, Harvard, Alarmists’ Media Stories, Not Climate Change, Are to Blame for Mental Trauma
A recent news post at the Harvard School of Public Health “Understanding the mental health consequences of chronic climate change,” claims that climate change, which researchers dub “chronic,” is leading to negative mental health consequences for people around the world. Researchers claim that long-term, gradual changes to the environment are also traumatic. This is false. While natural disasters can traumatize those who survive them, individual weather events can’t be causally linked to climate change, and since environmental changes have always occurred throughout human history, Harvard’s new hypothesis is worthless or empty. In reality, and especially in the Western world, it is frantic and alarmist media coverage that leads to self-reporting of climate change related anxiety.
In answer to a question about gaps in what is known about how climate change impacts mental health, researcher and assistant professor of social and behavioral sciences at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Christy Denckla said that we “already know a lot about the mental health effects of climate-related disasters like hurricanes and wildfires.”
Indeed, Climate Realism has on several occasions, here, here, and here, for instance, refuted claims that suggest climate change itself, through the impact of natural disasters, is causing anxiety and other mental health problems. The reality in those cases is that while suffering through an extreme weather event, during which lives and property may be lost, definitely can be traumatic, no one would blame that trauma on “climate change” had the media not told them the weather event was caused by it.
In one particularly egregious example, several news outlets back in 2023 reported on a study that analyzed individuals who survived the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California, and found widespread diagnoses of PTSD, anxiety, and depression. The researchers blamed those mental health problems on climate change. However climate change did not cause the fire in Paradise, poor maintenance of power lines did. Nor has the modest warming of the past century or so caused any statistically significant change in the number or severity of wildfires on Earth. In fact, data from NASA suggests that the amount of land lost to wildfires each year has declined substantially.
The same goes for hurricanes – there is no statistically significant trend in the number or severity of tropical cyclones and hurricanes.
This new research Harvard is reporting on further expands upon these previously debunked claims into even more nebulous territory. In addition to blaming mental health issues on particular weather events, Denckla goes on to explain that “the most urgent research priority is to understand the mechanisms through which slower-moving aspects of climate change such as temperature variability, ecosystem shifts, and changes in precipitation affect mental health.”
She goes on to say that the effects of climate change disproportionately impact particular populations, like “adolescents and children, indigenous communities, displaced migrants, economically marginalized groups, and nations and regions on the frontline of the climate crisis, such as Africa and countries most vulnerable to climate extremes.”
It is true that the poor and people in the third world are more impacted by natural disasters, in large part because they do not have as storm-resilient infrastructure as wealthier parts of the world do, and have less access to good medical care, and the food abundance delivered by modern agricultural systems built on fossil fuels. Meteorological drought, for example, in a small sub-Saharan tribal community without water storage and transport will produce more severe misery and harm than a similar drought would for the people of a developed city like Phoenix, Arizona.
Denckla seems to suggest that modern warming is a novel situation that uniquely impacts human mental health, however history clearly demonstrates that human civilizations have always suffered from natural disasters and slowly changing ecosystems and landscapes. Nature is never in stasis.
What is certain, however, is that climate change alarmism is the overwhelming narrative consensus pushed by mainstream media and activists. Climate Realism responds to disinformation every day from the media, and despite occasionally acknowledging that the “catastrophe” angle taken on climate-related issues is going too far, they continue to double down. It would be surprising if the constant battering by false and inflammatory climate news did not negatively impact the mental health of media besotted adults and children, alike. The ratcheting up of hysterical coverage, misleadingly linking damage from natural disasters to climate change, while harping on the fact no major climate policies are being passed, is leading to depression and anxiety about the future. It would serve the mental health of the general public better if Harvard devoted some resources to an alternative study, about how fearmongering by the media leads to mental health issues, and better still if its scholars began following and promoting the data which shows that no climate crisis is in the offing.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Sunday, January 21, 2024
The Greenland ice sheets are melting much, much more quickly than anticipated
Ho Hum! As usual no mention of subsurface vulcanism. And the ice loss is mostly along the West coast, exactly where the subsurface volcanoes are
To give them their due, the galoots below did NOT attribute the ice loss to global warming, which is rather heroic of them
New data suggests the extent of ice sheet loss since 1985 has been underestimated by as much as 20 per cent, scientists wrote in a new paper published in Nature.
More freshwater ice in the Atlantic could affect ocean circulation, disrupt fish ecosystems and accelerate the melting process, contributing to rising sea levels.
How the ice loss was missed
The paper, Ubiquitous acceleration in Greenland Ice Sheet calving from 1985 to 2022, describes how scientists have failed to consider the full impact of ice calving – when large chunks of ice break off from the edge of a glacier.
“The surprise was just the ubiquity of the signal,” said lead author Chad Greene, a glaciologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. With the exception of “one minuscule little glacier” that grew modestly, Greene said, “there’s just been retreat everywhere we’ve looked. It’s on every corner of the island.”
NASA satellites tracked a rapid decline in the mass of the ice sheet between 2001 and 2021, when it shed 280 billion tonnes of ice a year on average. That marked a significant acceleration compared with the preceding decades and is equivalent to 767 million tonnes of ice lost every day.
The above animation, which is based on data from NASA satellites, appears darker where ice mass was lost between 2002 and 2022. The barely perceptible blue patches represent growth in ice mass, while white means little to no change.
Most of the loss was along Greenland’s west coast, while central high-altitude areas were relatively unchanged. Lower elevation and coastal areas lost five metres worth of water over the 19-year period.
Impact on rising sea levels
Much of the newly discovered lost ice shelf was already underwater, so while the additional mass identified by the team will have affected ocean circulation and temperatures, it will not have contributed to rising sea levels directly.
However, this loss means more of Greenland’s mainland will be exposed to warming waters which, in turn, lead to melting and rising seas.
“What we’re seeing is that the clog in this bottleneck has been removed, and as a result, the glaciers all around Greenland have been able to speed up the melting process,” Greene said. “You take the ice out of the fjord and glaciers speed up and start contributing to sea level rise.”
Disrupting ocean cycles
Large blocks of freshwater ice floating away into the ocean are problematic as they could disrupt the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation, a crucial ocean circulation pattern.
Ice cannot hold salt, so when seawater freezes in the Arctic, the salt sinks to the bottom making the water denser. The denser water then moves south with cold currents, and the warm water rises to the surface and flows north in response. This cycle warms Europe and distributes crucial nutrients for ocean life.
It is not known how the large chunks of ice floating off into the sea will affect this cycle, but they have not been included in climate models. In the long term, it will depend on where the billions of tonnes of freshwater end up – and that is not easy to predict.
https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/greenland-s-ice-sheet-is-shrinking-much-faster-than-we-thought-here-s-what-it-means-20240118-p5eya8.html
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Supreme Court Hears Fishermen’s Challenges to Costly Regulatory Authority of Feds
The U.S. Supreme Court took up two cases Wednesday regarding the regulatory authority of the federal government as fishermen argue that government agencies are exceeding their authority by imposing costly mandates.
In Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. vs. Department of Commerce, fishermen are challenging administrative law, dubbed “Chevron deference,” that asserts that when a federal statute is ambiguous about specific regulations, courts should defer to the implementing agency’s interpretation of the law.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration implemented a rule in 2020 forcing fishing companies (such as Relentless Inc.) to pay for federal observers to monitor the fishermen at sea on their own fishing boats—even though Congress did not give the agency authority to do so.
The fishermen argue that the mandate violates the U.S. Constitution’s Article I, accusing the agencies of exceeding their statutory authority.
“Overregulation is imperiling the future of American fisheries and the maritime communities who depend on them,” Jerry Leeman, founder and CEO of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association, said in a statement. “Worse still, fishermen have long struggled to fight back, because Chevron deference skews the legal process in the government’s favor. We thank the fishermen plaintiffs in this case, who are truly relentless.”
Paying for the monitors is also expensive, costing more than $700 a day, according to the New Civil Liberties Alliance (the nonprofit organization representing Relentless Inc.), which might often exceed the fishermen’s daily profits for herring, the species the boats and the North Atlantic fishery involved are mostly focused on.
“It is time for the Supreme Court to fish or cut bait on the Chevron doctrine,” said Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance. “This deference charade has gone on long enough. Executive agencies cannot be allowed to serve as judges in their own cases any longer.”
While Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have called for curtailing Chevron deference, Fox News reports, Chief Justice John Roberts’ and Justices Brett Kavanaugh’s and Amy Coney Barrett’s views on the matter remain to be seen. Justice Samuel Alito is seen as entertaining some skepticism of Chevron deference. The three liberal justices, by contrast, are thought to see no constitutional problem with it.
In a press release, the New Civil Liberties Alliance argued that “when a federal judge defers to an agency’s interpretation of law, doing so denies due process of law to the entity opposed to the government in that litigation.”
“Employing such a deference also abandons a judge’s Article III duty of judicial independence,” the release asserts. “The logic of Chevron deference cannot withstand this devastating dual critique.”
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/01/17/supreme-court-hears-fishermens-challenges-to-costly-regulatory-authority-of-feds/
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Are Hurricanes Really Getting Worse or Is That Really Just Climate Alarmists’ Hot Air?
Climate alarmists, including President Joe Biden, have consistently said that America could look forward to worsening hurricanes and extreme weather, thanks to climate change.
In fact, at COP28 in Dubai, there was talk about creating a fund to aid countries incurring damages from hurricanes due to climate change.
Don’t take the bait. Such inane arguments do nothing but generate clamor for raising money to solve a nonexistent problem.
Just look at the data. For example, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data in Chart 1 depict the number of hurricanes hitting the U.S. mainland from 1851 through 2022.
Hurricanes are categorized according to severity by the Saffir-Simpson Category Index at levels ranging from 1 (least severe, exceeding 74 mph winds) to 5 (most severe, exceeding 157 mph winds).
As the chart illustrates, there has been significant variability in hurricanes since 1851, with no meaningful increase since preindustrial times.
Since the start of the 20th century, America has seen an average of 17 hurricanes per decade, with slightly more than five hurricanes per decade exceeding Category 3 levels. That data also indicates that there were slightly more than two hurricanes at or exceeding Category 4 levels (exceeding 130 mph winds) per decade and thus relatively rare.
Myriad factors affect hurricanes, and the associated variation and unpredictability of such factors make it difficult to isolate trends. For example, oceanic temperature events such as El Nino and La Nina, as well longer-term cycles, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), may contribute greatly to the incidence and severity of hurricanes in particular localities.
When the Atlantic Ocean was cold in the 1960s to early 1990s (negative AMO), Atlantic storms were much less frequent and landfalls were mostly limited to the Gulf Coast. On the other hand, when the Atlantic swung into its multidecadal warm mode in the late 1990s, the activity in the Atlantic Ocean more than doubled on average, and some hurricanes made landfall further north, as we had seen in the prior warm period from 1938 to 1960.
A broader, global analysis can allow scientists to see beyond such seesaw effects. Fortunately, good satellite technology to enable comprehensive observation of global—including oceanic—behavior has been available for the past several decades.
Chart 2 provides satellite-based data on global hurricane frequency from Colorado State University since 1980.
As it illustrates, over the past four decades, there has been no clear global long-term trend in either the number of total hurricanes (maximum sustained winds of 64 knots or greater) or major hurricanes (Category 3+).
During the 21st century, Isabel in 2003; Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne in 2004; and Dennis, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma in 2005 all made landfall. The year 2005 holds the record for five Category 4 and four Category 5 storms.
At the time, some speculated this would be the new norm for the Atlantic hurricane season due to climate change. The National Academies of Sciences in the United States and the Royal Society in the United Kingdom were just two among many scientific organizations issuing statements about human-caused warming. The devastating 2005 hurricane season hardly seemed coincidental.
However, after the active 2005 season and before the landfall of two major storms on the U.S. in 2017, the U.S. went 4,324 days (just short of 12 years) without a major hurricane landfall, exceeding the prior record eight-year lull in the 1860s.
Obviously, no one ever wants to deal with hurricanes or extreme weather. The reality is, however, such events are inevitable, and we need to be able to adapt to them.
But instead of advocating for damage-mitigation funds for a nonexistent increase in hurricanes, lawmakers should seek to promote, and not stifle, economic growth to enable Americans to have higher incomes.
These types of positive efforts will be the best way to equip people to deal with these and other adverse events that may come their way.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/12/19/are-hurricanes-really-getting-worse-or-is-that-really-just-climate-alarmists-hot-air/
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Crooked Greenie scientist
The University of Western Australia scientist found by the Federal Court to have “lied” when preparing a report that helped block Santos’s $5bn Barossa gas project had earlier been compelled to make multiple corrections to another disputed piece of work.
But oil and gas giant Woodside Energy says it will not be carrying out any review of the work done by Mick O’Leary that found the undersea pipeline at Woodside’s contentious $US12bn Scarborough LNG project would have little to no impact on archaeological heritage values in the rock art-rich Burrup region.
The findings delivered this week by Federal Court Justice Natalie Charlesworth savaged Dr O’Leary’s research into the potential impact of Santos’s Barossa pipeline on underwater cultural heritage sites and sacred dreaming places of Tiwi Islanders.
In handing down her decision dismissing the Tiwi Islanders’ legal challenge to Barossa, Justice Charlesworth was scathing of Dr O’Leary’s conduct while carrying out cultural mapping.
“Dr O’Leary’s admission was freely volunteered, such that he did not lie to the court. But he did lie to the Tiwi Islanders, and I find that he did so because he wanted his ‘cultural mapping’ exercise to be used in a way that would stop the pipeline,” she said.
“It is conduct far flung from proper scientific method and falls short of an expert’s obligation to this court.”
The court’s findings cast new light on the stoush that has played out inside UWA in recent years, with Dr O’Leary’s colleagues having previously raised issues with some of his methods.
UWA researchers led by geoarchaeologist Ingrid Ward and her husband Piers Larcombe in 2022 wrote a paper that was highly critical of the findings made by Dr O’Leary and others in their research into Indigenous artefacts on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula.
Dr O’Leary and his colleagues fired back with a retort describing the critique as a “wet straw man”. The response dismissed “armchair critics ignorant of recent developments in the field” and said “their critique is detrimental to the development of this entire field of archaeology, as well as damaging to the rights and interests of coastal Indigenous communities throughout Australia”.
But Dr O’Leary also went on to publish in June 2023 a correction to his original report, making multiple revisions to his original text. Those corrections included addressing errors in three statistical analyses and “additional discussion of interpretations”.
That original report was prepared by a group called Deep History of Sea Country, a collection of academics from various Australian universities and which has won more than $2m in funding from the Australian Research Council since 2017.
The group’s project with the biggest ARC grant – worth just over $1.1m – began on July 1 last year, just a fortnight before the corrections to the original report were formally published.
Despite Dr O’Leary’s corrections, in December Dr Ward and Dr Larcombe’s paper was retracted. The journal Geoarchaelogy said the retraction was the result of “evidence confirming that the required university approvals were not sought prior to the research being conducted”.
Dr Larcombe, who had earlier questioned whether Dr O’Leary should maintain his position at UWA in the wake of the Federal Court’s findings, said he still stood by the scientific content of the criticism. The retraction, he said, was “not about the quality of the science” and that the process that led to retraction was still under review.
Woodside, meanwhile, confirmed that it would not be re-examining the work Dr O’Leary did for the company when it was assessing the cultural impact of its proposed Scarborough pipeline.
Dr O’Leary in 2021 helped design a research project to assess areas of archaeological prospectivity along the pipeline route within the proposed development area. Sea level changes since the last ice age mean some artefact-rich and heritage-rich areas of the Burrup Peninsula are now underwater, and Dr O’Leary’s research helped establish that the Scarborough pipeline plans would not damage potentially undiscovered rock art examples. The Scarborough project has attracted opposition from some Indigenous groups, with one of those – Save Our Songlines – last year securing a court injunction against Scarborough’s seismic testing program.
“Woodside does not intend to reassess an earlier scope of work undertaken by Dr O’Leary between 2020 – 2021, which was also subject to independent expert review. Dr O’Leary was one of several contributors to a suite of work relating to the identification of submerged cultural heritage, which also included close consultation with Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation,” a spokesman for the company said.
“Woodside considers Dr O’Leary’s contribution was within his area of expertise and exceeded baseline industry standards.”
The Federal Court’s findings have also sparked scrutiny of the potential conflicts that can arise when academics are commissioned to consult on projects.
Professor Peter Ridd, a physicist who was sacked from his role at James Cook University after he flagged concerns over some of the university’s climate change research, told The Weekend Australian that Santos should consider taking legal action against UWA in the wake of the court’s findings.
He said it would take such a legal challenge for universities to increase the intellectual rigour and scrutiny applied to consultancy work. “If Santos actually takes UWA to court, it will start to concentrate the minds of universities to actually do the job they’re supposed to do,” he said, adding: “UWA should carry a significant fraction of the responsibility for what happened.”
Santos declined to comment on whether it was considering any further legal options.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/earlier-red-flags-for-scientist-at-centre-of-barossa-debacle/news-story/1ced4f7236e30a96d2a52da5efec1ce2
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Thursday, January 18, 2024
Carbon Tariff Coalition Letter
Dear Members of Congress:
As the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is reportedly going to mark-up the PROVE IT Act (S. 1863) this week, the undersigned organizations want to express strong opposition to carbon tariffs and the PROVE IT Act. This legislation is a gateway for a carbon tax on imported goods and a domestic carbon tax.
It is shocking that legislators would contemplate advancing policy that would increase taxes, drive up prices for American families, harm workers and those on fixed incomes, and punish energy use.
Yet this is precisely what a carbon tariff does. A carbon tariff is two taxes in one. First, a carbon tariff is a tax on imported goods, borne by American consumers, workers, and businesses. Once the structure for imposing a carbon tariff has been established, it can then be used to impose a domestic carbon tax.
To think that the government would develop the administrative infrastructure to impose a domestic carbon tax without following through is naïve, at best. If the United States were to impose a tax on imports based on their carbon intensity, then there would be an expectation that domestic goods would be subjected to a comparable tax-based scheme. In fact, a domestic carbon tax might be required to meet international trade obligations.
The PROVE IT Act is not a benign government measurement scheme that will exist for knowledge purposes. It would create a detailed carbon-emissions measuring system for domestic and foreign goods, putting into place exactly what is needed to implement a carbon tariff and a domestic carbon tax.
Some proponents assert that the PROVE IT Act will help respond to the European Union’s (EU) carbon tax, otherwise identified as a carbon border adjustment mechanism. The United States should push back against the EU’s extreme green policies and not, under any circumstances, accept their disastrous environmental and energy policies.
The EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism and carbon tariffs are a way to impose extraterritorial regulations. Recently, we have seen these types of regulations domestically, as American farmers know all too well. Some states have imposed barriers to selling goods, such as eggs and pork, based not on the nature of the goods but due to moral and ethical preferences on how food should be produced.
Just imagine foreign countries trying to impose their moral preferences on Americans by using tariffs as leverage over how the U.S. uses energy or how American farmers produce food. Carbon tariffs and the PROVE IT Act will help establish this precedent.
Maybe even worse than the imposition of all these new taxes is the purpose of the taxes. They are taxes to punish energy use. Since more than 80 percent of the world’s energy comes from coal, natural gas, and oil, which produce carbon dioxide emissions, a carbon tariff is a tax on the energy that makes modern life possible.
It would make medical care, housing, communications, food, and transportation less affordable, especially for people who already struggle to pay their bills. It would have a disproportionate impact on the poor and hurt those on fixed incomes, the elderly, and local institutions like hospitals, libraries, and schools.
The PROVE IT Act and carbon tariffs are not just bad policy, but bad politics. After all, supporting new taxes and opposing affordable and reliable energy is a toxic concoction.
A new survey sponsored by the American Energy Alliance and the Committee to Unleash Prosperity found that most Americans opposed a carbon tariff on imported goods, with 63 percent of Republicans opposed.
This opposition to paying carbon or energy taxes becomes even clearer when respondents were asked what they are willing to pay each year to address climate change. The median response was just $10, and 35 percent (including 17 percent of Democrats) said they are unwilling to pay anything. American Energy Alliance president Thomas Pyle captured the results very well:
The results reconfirm what we already knew: voters are not willing to pay any tax associated with carbon dioxide or energy – including a carbon dioxide or energy tax on imported goods. Those who believe in limited government and free energy markets continue to be allied with the vast majority of voters concerning the destructive and pointless nature of carbon dioxide taxes and on the fundamentals of the climate change issue.
As the markup of the PROVE IT Act approaches, there may be disingenuous gimmicks such as amending the bill to say it may not be used to impose a carbon tariff. Such a provision does not change the fact that the foundation would have been created to impose a carbon tariff and domestic carbon tax. Any new legislation could easily get rid of such a prohibition, and that is exactly what would happen.
The PROVE IT Act and other carbon tariffs efforts show a complete disregard for what matters to Americans. They want affordable, reliable energy to power their homes and lives, not government meddling that drives up their household bills. They don’t want federal schemes that treat energy use as a sin.
We strongly urge legislators to oppose the PROVE IT Act and any other legislation dealing with carbon tariffs.
Sincerely,
Daren Bakst
Director, Center for Energy and Environment
Competitive Enterprise Institute
https://cei.org/coalition_letters/carbon-tariff-coalition-letter/
************************************************Electric Vehicle Mandates Are Coming, but Are EVs Even Practical in Cold-Weather States?
In the lot of Eau Claire, Wisconsin’s, local Ford dealership, dominated by an impressive lineup of F-150 pickup trucks and SUVs, I asked the salesman, Joe, about buying an electric vehicle. It turns out that not many EVs are sold in Eau Claire.
Joe told me that he typically sells about one or two electric vehicles for every 100 gasoline-powered cars. Since there were only a couple EVs he could point to on the lot, we went inside to see an electric sedan, a 2023 Ford Mach E.
It was far more than I could afford, but I inquired about how it performs. Joe said it can take over 40 hours to charge with a standard 120V three-prong wall outlet. Upgrading to a faster charger, the 240V outlet, is costly and requires new electrical wiring to the garage in most cases. This can be difficult or impossible for people who have old homes, rent their homes, or simply can’t afford it.
The car’s advertised range of just 250 miles doesn’t account for driving with the heat on, which reduces the range. While the Midwest had a mild start to the winter season, evading the cold altogether is an elusive endeavor in Eau Claire. Temperatures are expected to struggle to rise above zero degrees Fahrenheit this week, and battery-powered vehicles lose up to 40% of their range in the cold. When the wind chill is 30 degrees below zero, you can bet every car has the heat on as hot as it goes. It’s no surprise that Joe hardly sells any EVs.
When deciding on a vehicle to purchase, Joe suggested considering the environmental implications of driving the vehicle. It’s overly optimistic to assume that the environmental advantages of electric vehicles will outweigh their practical drawbacks. Driving an EV instead of a gasoline-powered car has no discernible effect on the climate.
While electric vehicles do not emit carbon dioxide during operation, they depend on fossil fuels for the electricity needed to charge their batteries, particularly in Wisconsin. With an average of barely three hours of direct sunlight per day in winter, solar power plummets to a third of the summertime capacity (and that’s when the panels aren’t covered in snow).
Additionally, manufacturing an EV emits nearly twice the amount of carbon dioxide compared to manufacturing a gasoline vehicle, and mining for battery components has other environmentally damaging effects.
All of the car, truck, train, and plane emissions in America account for about 3.9% of global carbon emissions. Even if America abandoned all fossil fuels overnight, it would hardly affect our climate.
Kevin Dayaratna, chief statistician at The Heritage Foundation, used government models to show that completely eliminating all fossil fuels from the United States would yield less than a 0.2 degree Celsius reduction in temperature by the year 2100. There may be reasons to purchase an EV, but saving the environment is not a good one. (The Daily Signal is the media outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)
While China’s carbon emissions are more than double those in America, President Joe Biden wants Americans to foot the bill for reducing the world’s carbon. Going all-in on electric vehicles means our capacity to supply electricity must necessarily skyrocket.
In return, Americans will get higher electricity bills, a further reliance on China, and no environmental benefits. Biden’s goal of mandating that 60% of new vehicles are electric by 2030 will increase the cost of energy—disproportionately hurting the poor. According to last month’s special report from The Heritage Foundation on affordable and reliable energy, access to affordable energy directly influences access to safe water, health care, food, and cleaner environments.
Biden should leave car-purchasing decisions to individuals and not force them to buy EVs. If electric vehicles surpass gasoline vehicles in functionality or affordability, government subsidies and tax incentives would be unnecessary. People didn’t need tax credits for kerosene when they transitioned from using whale oil for lamps. They bought it because it was more efficient and it burned brighter.
While my trip to the dealership did not end with my joining the 0.1% of Wisconsinites who own an electric vehicle, maybe I’ll consider one when they can outperform gasoline-powered SUVs during a subzero January in Wisconsin.
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UK: Green Tories facing general election wipeout
The Conservatives are heading for an electoral wipeout on the scale of their 1997 defeat by Labour, the most authoritative opinion poll in five years has predicted.
The YouGov survey of 14,000 people forecasts that the Tories will retain just 169 seats, while Labour will sweep to power with 385 – giving Sir Keir Starmer a 120-seat majority.
Every Red Wall seat won from Labour by Boris Johnson in 2019 will be lost, the poll indicates, and the Chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, will be one of 11 Cabinet ministers to lose their seats.
The Tories will win 196 fewer seats than in 2019, more than the 178 Sir John Major lost in 1997.
The poll exposes the huge influence that Reform UK is set to have on the election result. The Right-wing party would not win any seats, but support for it would be the decisive factor in 96 Tory losses – the difference between a Labour majority and a hung Parliament.
The result would be the biggest collapse in support for a governing party since 1906, with an 11.5 per cent swing to Labour. …
Writing for The Telegraph, Lord Frost, the Conservative peer, described the poll’s findings as “stunningly awful” for the party, saying it was facing “a 1997-style wipeout – if we are lucky”.
He said a combination of tactical voting and any decision by Nigel Farage to return to front-line politics could leave the Conservatives facing “an extinction event”.
Lord Frost added that the only way to avoid the likely defeat was “to be as tough as it takes on immigration, reverse the debilitating increases in tax, end the renewables tax on energy costs – and much more”.
James Johnson, a former Number 10 pollster, said the figures suggested any possible path to victory for the Conservatives had “all but vanished”.
He said the data showed the Tories were haemorrhaging the votes of Leave supporters who backed them in 2019 and would be punished by those voters “if they do not get tough on migration – fast”.
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A French-led energy insurrection against renewables
The final days of 2023 were marked by what could end up being a turning point for Europe’s energy and climate policy.
On 19 December, 11 EU countries issued a joint statement urging the EU to take full account of nuclear power – not just renewable energies – when elaborating future policies that will determine how the EU achieves its greenhouse gas reduction targets for 2040 and 2050.
“Nuclear power is indisputably a sustainable and equally valid technology to achieve these objectives for member states that opted to resort to its use,” said the joint declaration led by France and signed by Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Finland, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Sweden.
Shaping the EU’s 2040 climate policy. The joint declaration from the French-led Nuclear Alliance comes weeks before the Commission publishes its 2040 climate proposal, due out on 6 February. It also comes amid ongoing discussions on the EU’s “strategic agenda 2024-2029”, which will be adopted by EU leaders following the June European elections.
“Looking forward to the future and our collective 2040 and 2050 climate-energy targets, we strongly encourage the European Commission to propose a regulatory architecture that facilitates for member states to achieve carbon neutrality by encompassing our energy diversity,” the declaration adds.
A “low-carbon” target for 2040? If the eleven countries get their way – and they already have a blocking minority in the Council of EU member states – this could mark a paradigm shift for EU policy.
Until now, only renewable energies and energy efficiency have been subject to binding quantified targets to meet the EU’s climate objectives.
“However, we must collectively recognise that these two dimensions are not enough to encompass the diversity of solutions and industrial capabilities across the member states,” the joint declaration insists, saying nuclear power must be considered as well.
So what does the 11-country alliance actually want?
That was spelt out by an official in the cabinet of Agnès Pannier-Runacher, France’s now former energy minister: “We have now reached an impasse,” the official said in reference to the EU’s renewables target for 2030, which was hiked to 42.5% of the EU’s final energy consumption. “If we want to go further in renewable energies, we are going to hit the low-carbon base of certain member states” – something that won’t be acceptable for France.
“So we need to turn the tables and stop thinking about elaborating a fourth renewable directive … but perhaps the first low-carbon directive.”
French rebellion against EU renewables target. The joint statement by the French-led Nuclear Alliance also insists on one crucial point: The choice of energy mix is a matter of national sovereignty under EU treaties – a principle they believe must be upheld.
France pushed this reasoning to the maximum in a draft law on “energy sovereignty,” presented in January, which promotes nuclear power as a way of ditching fossil fuels, ignoring the EU’s 2030 renewable energy goals.
The bill is consistent with France’s draft National Energy and Climate Plan (NECP), presented in December, which had already ignored the EU’s a renewable energy target for 2030.
And it goes even further by scrapping the existing renewable energy goals for 2030, which are a legal requirement under the EU renewables directive.
What now? With its draft “energy sovereignty” bill, France is deliberately putting itself on a collision course with EU-agreed targets. This could be a step too far for pro-renewable countries like Austria, which called on the European Commission to ensure EU law is enforced.
But Paris seems intent on pursuing this policy. When a government reshuffle was announced on 11 January, the energy portfolio was scrapped and moved under the responsibility of the Energy Ministry, suggesting a shift in energy policy primarily focused on the relaunch of France’s nuclear industry.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/a-french-led-energy-insurrection/
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Nuclear Phaseouts Strike Again
One of the pivotal issues of last year’s Spanish election was whether the country would continue on course to phase out their nuclear fleet by 2035.
The 2023 election was not a clear-cut victory for any party. Both the country’s left- and right-wing parties were unable to immediately form a government. There were multiple attempts by the right-wing Popular Party, which won the most votes, to form a coalition, but they each failed.
Before the July 2023 election, leader of the Popular Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo promised to reverse the country’s nuclear phaseout policy, stating that, “It will be a policy of my government to reverse the planned decommissioning and extend the life of our nuclear power plants.” Feijóo has acknowledged the difficulty of losing more than one fifth of the country’s generation capacity, and the electricity price impacts that such a change would be likely to create.
Following the failure of the Popular Party to form a coalition, Pedro Sánchez of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, who was Prime Minister in 2019 when the nuclear phaseout initially passed, was able to successfully form a government on November 16th.
The Sánchez government has acted quickly to reaffirm its commitment to closing the country’s seven nuclear reactors.
On December 26th, the Council of Ministers (the main decision-making body of the Spanish government), approved the Seventh General Plan for Radioactive Waste. This plan contained the final schedule for the decommissioning process of the country’s reactors. The first closure will occur in 2027, with the final closure slated for 2035.
That same week, the Ministry for Ecological Transition announced 150 million euros in subsidies for 904 Megawatts (MW) of energy storage projects, which will be co-located at solar and wind facilities. This announcement is part of a broader commitment to build renewables and storage.
Closing nuclear plants and attempting to replace them with wind, solar, and storage is no way to run a grid, as Germany recently showed the world.
Germany’s nuclear phaseout has resulted in more expensive electricity. This gave pause to many countries planning phaseouts of their own, so why are Spanish leaders refusing to learn from the mistakes of their neighbor? The lesson of Germany’s nuclear phaseout is one that the Spanish government refuses to learn.
Spain must either maintain (and possibly expand) its electrical output or commit to a lower quality of life for its citizens. Spanish electricity consumption is expected to grow slightly in the coming years. Closing its nuclear power plants will result in rising prices, increased grid vulnerability, and the risk of blackouts.
Policymakers in the United States and globally should certainly not follow the Spanish example.
https://catalyst.independent.org/2024/01/15/nuclear-phaseouts-strike-again/
**************************************************Britain's Net Zero Disaster & The Wind Power Scam
Net zero was sold to Parliament and the British people on claims that wind-power costs were low and falling. This was untrue: Wind-power costs are high and have been rising. In the net-zero version of “crypto will make you rich,” official analyses produced by the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility rely on the falsehood that wind power is cheap, that net zero would have minimal costs, and that it could boost productivity and economic growth. None of these has any basis in reality.
The push for net zero began in 2019, when the UK’s Climate Change Committee produced a report urging the government to adopt the policy. Part of the justification was historic climate guilt. In the words of committee chair Lord Deben, Britain had been “one of the largest historical contributors to climate change.” But the key economic justification for raising Britain’s decarbonization from 80 percent to 100 percent by 2050—i.e., net zero—was “rapid cost reductions during mass deployment for key technologies,” notably in offshore wind. These illusory cost reductions, the committee claimed, “have made tighter emission reduction targets achievable at the same costs as previous looser targets.” It was green snake oil.
During the subsequent 88-minute debate in the House of Commons to write net zero into law, the clean-energy minister, Chris Skidmore, also asserted that net zero’s cost would be the same as the previous 80 percent target, which Parliament had approved in 2008. Challenged by a Labour MP on the absence of a regulatory-impact assessment, Mr. Skidmore misled Parliament, saying that there had been no regulatory-impact assessment in respect of raising the initial 60 percent target to 80 percent.
The regulatory-impact assessment that Mr. Skidmore says doesn’t exist gave a range of £324 billion (about $412 billion) to £404 billion when the target was raised to 80 percent—an estimate that excluded transitional costs—and cautioned that costs could exceed this range. Unlike today’s political pronouncements, the assessment was honest about the consequences of Britain acting if the rest of the world didn't. “The economic case for the UK continuing to act alone where global action cannot be achieved would be weak,” it warned.
The Climate Change Act was passed to show Britain’s climate leadership and inspire the rest of the world to follow its example. How did that work out? In the 11 years that transpired from passing the Act to legislating net zero in 2019, Britain’s fossil fuel emissions fell by 180 million metric tons—a 33 percent reduction. Over the same period, the rest of the world’s emissions increased by 5,177 million metric tons—a rise of 16 percent. Put another way, 11 years of British emissions reduction were wiped out in about 140 days by increased emissions from the rest of the world.
Someone who claims that he’s a leader but who has no followers is typically regarded as a fool. It’s different with climate. Politicians parade their green virtue—Mr. Skidmore is to quit the House of Commons, and he teaches net-zero studies at Harvard’s Kennedy School—while voters get mugged with higher energy bills. Analysis of Britain’s Big Six energy companies’ regulatory filings reveals that fuel-input costs for gas- and coal-fired power stations were flat from 2009 to 2020. Still, the average price per kilowatt hour (kWh) of electricity paid by households rose 67 percent, driven by high environmental levies to subsidize renewable-energy investors. Yet, supposedly, the cost of renewable energy has plummeted.
During Prime Minister’s Questions earlier this year, Rishi Sunak claimed that the cost of offshore wind had fallen from £140 per megawatt hour (MWh) to £40 per MWh, numbers assiduously propagated by the wind lobby and the Climate Change Committee. His claim is flat-out false. The prime minister has been suckered by falling per MWh price bids made by wind investors in successive allocation-round bids for offshore wind subsidies.
The explanation for this is to be found not in falling costs but in a flawed bidding process that rewards opportunistic bidding by wind investors. The government was giving away valuable options that commit the government to honor the prices paid for winning bids but commit investors to nothing. Because investors don’t pay anything for these options, the only way they can get them is by cutting the price they offer—but aren't obliged to take—for their electricity unless they choose to exercise their options much later in the process.
Falling prices in successive allocation rounds are thus an artifact of moral hazard hardwired into the allocation mechanism; they reveal nothing about the trend in the costs of offshore wind. Analysis of audited financial data of wind farm companies undertaken by a handful of independent researchers comprehensively debunks the falling wind costs claim. The unavoidable move to deeper waters offset any cost reductions and operating costs per MWh of electricity for new offshore wind projects; the prices for the move are about double those assumed in the subsidy bids.
Preeminent among these researchers is Gordon Hughes, a former economics professor at the University of Edinburgh and adviser to the World Bank on power plant economics. Mr. Hughes’s analysis shows that by the 12th year of operation, rising per-MWh operating costs of deep-water wind turbines exceed their government-guaranteed prices, squeezing out their capacity to repay their capital and financing costs
The intermittency and variability of wind and solar led the government to create a capacity market to pay for standby generation. In any economic appraisal of renewables, the costs of running the capacity market should be allocated to wind and solar as their intermittency and variability create the need for it. Electricity procured from the capacity market isn't cheap. In 2020, German-owned Uniper’s thermal power stations obtained an average price of £224 per MWh, about four times the typical wholesale price.
Confirmation that offshore wind has huge, likely insuperable, cost and operating difficulties came in June, when Siemens Energy issued a shock profits warning and saw its shares plunge by 37 percent, in part because of higher-than-anticipated turbine failure rates. According to Mr. Hughes, the implication is that future wind operating costs will be higher, and output significantly lower, shortening the turbines’ economic lives. His conclusion is crushing:
“The whole justification for the falling costs of wind generation rested on the assumption that much bigger wind turbines would produce more output at lower capex cost per megawatt, without the large costs of generational change. Now we have confirmation that such optimism is entirely unjustified. ... It follows that current energy policies in the UK, Europe, and the United States are based on foundations of sand—naive optimism reinforced by enthusiastic lobbying divorced from engineering reality.”
The British government has been conned into placing a massive bet on offshore wind and is forcing electricity consumers to spend billions of pounds on a dead-end technology.
The falling cost of wind deception contaminates official assessments of the macroeconomic consequences of net zero. The Office for Budget Responsibility claims that the cost of low-carbon generation has fallen so fast that it's now cheaper than fossil fuel generation. Similarly, the Treasury erroneously took falling prices in wind subsidy allocation rounds as an indication of falling wind costs. Both see the economy riddled with multiple layers of market failures, while not recognizing the real danger of government policy being captured by vested interests, as, indeed, it has been. Taken to its logical conclusion, theirs is an argument for switching to central planning and a command-and-control economy.
The Treasury argues that “other things being equal,” the added investment required by renewable energy “will translate into additional GDP growth.” Other things, of course, aren't equal. As recent history shows, there’s a world of difference between investors and politicians making capital-allocation decisions. The centrally planned economies of the former communist bloc squandered colossal amounts of capital, immiserating their populations. Few now believe that investment in those economies boosted growth.
We don’t need to hypothesize. Government data disprove the Treasury’s contention and demonstrate that increasing deployment of renewable capacity reduces the productivity of Britain’s grid. In 2009, 87.3 gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity, including only 5.1 percent of wind and solar, generated 376.8 terrawatt hours (TWh) of electricity. In 2020, 100.9 GW of generating capacity, with wind and solar accounting for 37.6 percent of capacity, produced 312.3 TWh of electricity. Thanks to renewables, 13.6 GW (15.6 percent) more generating capacity produced 64.5 TWh (17.1 percent) less electricity.
Those numbers are damning for renewables and demonstrate why they make electricity more expensive and people poorer. Before mass deployment of renewables, 1 MW of capacity in 2009 produced 4,312 MWh of electricity. In 2020, 1 MW of capacity generated 3,094 MWh, a decline of 28.3 percent. It’s as clear as can be: Investment in renewables shrinks the economy’s productive potential. This is confirmed by the International Energy Agency’s net-zero modeling. Its net-zero pathway sees the global energy sector in 2030 employing nearly 25 million more people, using $16.5 trillion more capital, and taking an additional land area the combined size of California and Texas for wind and solar farms and the combined size of Mexico and France for bioenergy—all to produce 7 percent less energy.
Britain’s energy-policy disaster has lessons for the United States. The physics and economics of wind power aren't magically transformed when they cross the Atlantic. Whenever a politician or wind lobbyist touts wind as low-cost or says net zero will boost growth, they become accessories to the wind power scam. The data lead ineluctably to a decisive conclusion: Net zero is anti-growth. It's a formula for prolonged economic stagnation. Anyone who wants the truth about renewables should look at Britain and the sorry state of its economy. For the past decade and a half, it has been going through its worst period of growth since 1780.
Unlike in business and finance, there are no criminal or civil penalties for those who promote policies based on fraud and misrepresentation. Rather, net zero is similar to communism. Like net zero, communism was based on a lie: that it would outproduce capitalism. But it failed to produce, and belief in communism evaporated. When the collapse came, it was sudden and rapid. The truth couldn't be hidden. A similar fate awaits net zero.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/britains-net-zero-disaster-wind-power-scam
***********************************************************As Wind and Solar Power Falter, U.N. Climate Agreement Becomes Wishful Thinking
Despite the lip service that governments, nongovernmental organizations and the media continue to pay to wind and solar power, most notably at the recent U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai—where some 200 countries signed a nonbinding agreement pledging their support for “transitioning away from fossil fuels”—some global leaders realize that wind and solar energy won’t do the trick and that fossil fuels will be here for a long, long time.
Sweden, for example, recently announced a major bet on nuclear energy and the United States and others have pledged to triple nuclear capacity by 2050.
Meanwhile, in the third quarter of 2023 alone, China permitted more coal-fired power plants than in all of 2021. Scores of solar and wind energy projects and investments have been canceled or put on hold as costs begin to catch up with reality, and production seems nowhere near where it should be to meet humanity’s needs.
Accepting reality has nothing to do with denying climate change or even that human activity plays a role alongside the natural climate cycle. It’s simply a question of understanding that political decrees and propaganda eventually collide with truth.
The truth is that (1) producing a unit of wind or solar energy requires a significant amount of energy, which defeats the purpose and makes for highly inefficient results, and (2) the declining cost of wind and solar power over the last decade was a function of artificially low interest rates and an abundance of cheap fossil fuels, thanks to the “fracking” revolution.
Regarding truth No. 1, to produce a unit of power output, wind requires three times as much and solar six times as much traditional energy as a combined-cycle natural gas plant. That’s because solar panels and wind turbines require lots of raw materials that depend on fossil fuels.
Regarding truth No. 2, green energy’s low-cost boom appears to be over. Clean energy is getting more expensive. Until recently, wind and solar advocates were touting the dramatic decline since 2010 in the cost of renewables, as measured in dollars per megawatt-hour. But that was a function of cheap capital and cheap energy.
The shale revolution that began 15 years ago turned the world’s biggest energy consumer, the United States, into its biggest energy producer, dramatically lowering energy prices. For example, North Dakota’s Bakken field increased its production sevenfold in the years leading up to 2020.
Other fields, including the Permian basin in west Texas and the Marcellus field in the Appalachian basin (Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York), experienced similar growth.
Unsurprisingly, the price of oil [West Texas Intermediate] declined from $196 per barrel in June 2008 to $73 per barrel in early 2020, pre-pandemic, while the price of natural gas [Henry Hub] fell from $18 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) to $2 per MMBtu.
Given that the wind and solar industries need energy-intensive materials such as steel, concrete and copper, the low price of oil and natural gas kept their production costs down. But that has changed, helping to drive up the cost of solar energy by 60% since 2021 and the cost of wind power by 30%.
Capital was also cheap. The Federal Reserve slashed the federal funds effective rate from 5.26% in mid-2007 to essentially 0% by the end of 2008 and basically kept it there until 2016, when it began to rise slightly, reaching 2.4% in 2019, well below its mid-2007 level, when it began to fall again. The fight against inflation brought things back to reality. The current rate is about 5.33%.
The double whammy of higher energy and borrowing costs that have hit renewables is unlikely to go away in the near future—though one should never underestimate the ability (and willingness) of politicians to do the same stupid thing again and again. Nevertheless, it seems improbable we’ll see trillions of dollars of zero-interest debt again anytime soon.
Given the decline of the shale fields’ output (with the exception of the Permian basin, but that too seems close to its peak) and the scant investment in traditional energy because of the environmental, social and governance-driven political environment, the dynamics of supply and demand do not point to a sustained return of the low energy prices that renewables ironically depend on.
That’s why we will see more green projects canceled, more countries betting on nuclear energy (forgetting their knee-jerk reactions to the Fukushima, Japan, reactor accident in 2011), and oil, natural gas and coal continuing to enjoy a long life.
According to the International Energy Agency, trillions of dollars have been invested in wind and solar power. This year alone, the figure is about $600 billion. Yet wind and solar represent only about 12% of total electricity generation.
Imagine what would have happened had they not benefited from ultra-cheap capital and energy, not to mention the generous taxpayer subsidies many governments provided. A sober rethinking is long overdue.
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14776&omhide=true&trk=title
********************************************************Australia: Charity warns vulnerable households bearing brunt of green energy schemes
A leading charity has called for a major shake-up of green scheme costs and tariffs in the power market, saying they were currently disadvantaging poorer and vulnerable households.
St Vincent de Paul, in its latest report into the residential electricity market, found prices for both power and gas rocketed on average last year as part of the hangover from the energy crisis in 2022.
The report found costs across the board rose as turmoil in the wholesale markets collided with increased interest rates for poles-and-wires companies.
It also found that green scheme costs to encourage the uptake of clean energy were rising quickly as governments tried to fast-track the transition.
They now accounted for between nine and 12 per cent of a typical household energy bill, the charity found, and were highest in Victoria at $188 a year for a customer using 6,000-kilowatt hours.
Among the schemes were the federal government's large- and small-scale renewable energy targets, while Vinnies noted each state had its own policies that contributed to costs.
Central to the charity's concerns was the way the costs were recovered.
Costs not shared equitably
Vinnies manager of policy and research Gavin Dufty said these costs were typically moved on to the consumption charges of all customers.
Mr Dufty said variable consumption charges were still the main way power retailers recovered their costs, with fixed supply charges making up a much smaller portion of a household's bill.
He said households which were able to afford and install clean technology such as solar panels, batteries and heat pumps were able to avoid many of these charges by generating and storing much of their own electricity.
However, he said many other households, especially poorer and tenanted ones, did not have the same flexibility.
"I think it's the legacy of the old market," Mr Dufty said.
"We had an old vertically integrated market where households didn't have new technologies that they could bolt onto their homes like batteries and solar.
"So the costs were sort of shared evenly – if you consumed a little bit more, well you paid a little bit more.
"But now that households, through the types of appliances they have, can sort of make significant changes to their consumption, it does become quite regressive.
"The costs aren't shared."
According to Vinnies, the disparity in how green scheme costs were shared was a problem that "warrants a debate around how governments pass on the cost" of the policies.
The group said consolidated revenue and taxation would be more equitable but noted public balance sheets were already overstretched.
Another option, it said, would be "to only apply green scheme costs to usage above a set threshold".
Green gulf to get worse
Regardless, it said urgent changes were needed because the inequity would only get worse as more and more households that were able to added clean technology.
"We're not saying we shouldn't do that," Mr Dufty said of pursuing green energy schemes. "It's about how we allocate those costs."
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My other blogs. Main ones below
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Jim Hansen and his twin
