Newest drought scare just another climate scam

Federal bureaucrats are propagating another climate scare this week, claiming their new study shows global warming is causing drought and will soon result in “unprecedented drying.” The underlying data, however, show the bureaucrats are misrepresenting the results of their study.

Headlined by workers at NASA’s Goddard Institute and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the authors acknowledge, “The most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report indicates only low confidence in attributing changes in drought” to global warming. The authors then set about to try to change that assessment.

The authors utilized soil moisture measurements and computer models in an attempt to discern connection and causation between global warming and drought. The authors reported drought increased during the early 20th century, some 100 years of global warming ago.

Noting, however, that “a negative trend indicates that the data and [warming] fingerprint are increasingly dissimilar,” the authors acknowledged that “In the middle of the twentieth century, these trends become negative.”

From 1981 through the present, the authors reported, “the signal of greenhouse gas forcing is present but not yet detectable at high confidence.” The signals were so small, the authors acknowledged, that they “are not detectable at the likely level over background noise.”

In summary, the authors found that between 1950 and 1980, the signal was the opposite of what one would expect if global warming causes drought. From 1981 through the present, there was a signal so small that it was indistinguishable from background noise. The only detectable signal connecting warming temperatures and drought was during a period 100 years ago, when temperatures were cooler than today. The warming since then has not caused any detectable drought.

The findings strike a hammer blow against the notion that global warming causes alarming levels of drought, or even any detectable drought at all. People who work at climate change departments for the federal government, however, must keep the notion of a climate crisis alive to preserve their apparent importance and their jobs. So here are a few snippets of how the authors spun the story, according to USA Today:

“’The big thing we learned is that climate change started affecting global patterns of drought in the early 20th century,’” said study co-author Benjamin Cook of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. ‘We expect this pattern to keep emerging as climate change continues.’”

“Lead author Kate Marvel, a climate modeler at Goddard and Columbia University, said, ‘It’s mind boggling. There is a really clear signal of the effects of human greenhouse gases on the hydroclimate.’”

“‘All the models are projecting that you should see unprecedented drying soon, in a lot of places,’” Marvel said.

Actually, we are only seeing unprecedented alarmism, everywhere taxpayer dollars are to be had.

SOURCE 




White House hardens attack on climate hoax

President Trump has rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, brushed aside dire predictions about the effects of climate change, and turned the term "global warming" into a punch line rather than a prognosis.

Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault.

In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Trump's hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqu‚ to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.

And, in what could be Trump's most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the  science on which climate change policy rests.

As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the Earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.

The administration's prime target has been the National Climate Assessment, produced by an interagency task force roughly every four years since 2000. Government scientists used computer-generated models in their most recent report to project that if fossil fuel emissions continue unchecked, the Earth's atmosphere could warm by as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That would lead to drastically higher sea levels, more devastating storms and droughts, crop failures, food losses, and severe health consequences.

Work on the next report, which is expected to be released in 2021 or 2022, has already begun. But from now on, officials said, such worst-case scenario projections will not automatically be included in the National Climate Assessment or in some other scientific reports produced by the government.

"What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science - to push the science in a direction that's consistent with their politics," said Philip Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government's most recent National Climate Assessment. "It reminds me of the Soviet Union."

In an e-mail, James Hewitt, spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency, defended the proposed changes.

"The previous use of inaccurate modeling that focuses on worst-case emissions scenarios, that does not reflect real-world conditions, needs to be thoroughly reexamined and tested if such information is going to serve as the scientific foundation of nationwide decision-making now and in the future," Hewitt said.

However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment's methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by William Happer, a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide.

“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies, said in 2014 in an interview with CNBC.

Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition.

Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer.

Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials — including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser — have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.

Even Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House strategist who views Mr. Happer as “the climate hustler’s worst nightmare — a world-class physicist from the nation’s leading institution of advanced learning, who does not suffer fools gladly,” is apprehensive about what Mr. Happer is trying to do.

“The very idea will start a holy war on cable before 2020,” he said. “Better to win now and introduce the study in the second inaugural address.”

But at a White House meeting on May 1, at which the skeptical advisers made their case, Mr. Trump appeared unpersuaded, people familiar with the meeting said. Mr. Happer, they said, is optimistic that the panel will go forward.

More HERE 





NY’s green new dud

New York produced less electricity from renewable sources in 2018 than it did the year before despite significant intervention by state government.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Public Service Commission (PSC) in August 2016 ordered utilities and large electricity customers to subsidize new renewable projects by purchasing credits, with an eye toward having half the state’s electricity come from renewables by 2030. Cuomo has recently touted the policy as part of his version of a “Green New Deal,” and hiked the 2030 renewable target to 70 percent.

The PSC doesn’t calculate the total cost of its renewable mandate and utilities are prohibited from showing ratepayers the impact on their bills. But based on the number of RECs utilities must buy and the price at which they were being sold by the state Energy Research & Development Authority (NYSERDA), the mandate will cost about $50 million this year and rise to more than $100 million by 2021.

The New York Independent System Operator, which oversees the wholesale electricity market,  detailed 2018 generation in its annual Power Trends report this month, and it calls into question what New Yorkers are getting for their generosity.

The data show renewable energy generators, including hydroelectric, wind, solar and others, together produced 35,808 gigawatt hours of electricity last year. That amounted to a 2.5 percent drop from 2017. All told, 26.4 percent of generation last year came from renewables, down from 28.0 percent the year before. The numbers don’t reflect the state’s efforts promoting behind-the-meter renewable, such as most solar panel deployments, which reduce demand for power from the grid and aren’t easily quantified. That said, New York customers used more electricity from the grid in 2018 than in 2016 or 2017.

As shown below, the state does not appear to be on the path to reaching Cuomo’s initial 50 percent goal, let alone his more recent 70 percent target. In fact, the state has yet to hit the 30-percent target state regulators set in 2010—hoping to hit it by 2015.

Most of the renewable energy came from the state Power Authority’s Niagara Falls and Massena dams, where annual outputs fluctuate based on weather factors and operational decisions. But when all hydroelectric power is excluded, it reveals less renewable energy (6,763 GWh) was sold on the grid in 2018 than in 2015 (7,064 GWh), before the Clean Energy Standard was adopted.

How could that be? For one thing, the electric grid hasn’t been able to deliver it. NYISO warned state regulators in 2010 that transmission would be an issue if the state wanted to promote wind development, and roughly 70 GWh of wind energy last year had to be “curtailed” because the grid couldn’t move it from its upstate source to where demand was higher.

Still other projects have been stuck on the drawing board because proposals to build solar panel and wind turbine depots in rural upstate regions have met local opposition. The state has taken the unconventional step of using state resources to help renewable-friendly local officials change municipal codes and smooth the way for private developers.

The state’s ham-handed approach to subsidies failed to initially account for the many smaller renewable generators getting state support under a Pataki-era program. One biomass generator went out of business at the end of 2017 because state officials couldn’t, in the interceding 16 months, fold them into the new subsidy regime.

Even when issues with transmission and existing facilities are worked out, the state faces additional headwinds.

New York’s program has relied on a pair of lucrative federal incentives that are now being phased out. Wind projects that break ground after December 31 will no longer be eligible for the Production Tax Credit (PTC), which pays owners a subsidy for each kilowatt-hour generated. The Investment Tax Credit (ITC) that benefits larger solar projects will pay out 30 percent of capital costs on projects built this year before unwinding down to 10 percent in 2021.

Meanwhile, close to two-thirds of the current wind energy capacity (1,162 MW of 1,739 MW) came online prior to 2009. Assuming a 20-year project life expectancy, some facilities will likely need to be replaced before 2030.

All told, New York’s renewable energy policies have never been poised for success.

First, the Cuomo administration has been more interested in tactics–such as building more renewables—than the actual goal of lowering carbon dioxide emissions.

And even that tactic was over-constrained: the PSC explicitly disqualified most hydroelectric power from state subsidies in no small part because it might make greater economic sense to finance a new dam in Quebec than to deploy solar panels in places like snowy Oswego County.

To cite one hypothetical alternative, if the state imposed a broad carbon tax, people and businesses (and perhaps even governments) would have found efficiencies and reduce emissions at the lowest cost. But Cuomo’s “Green New Deal” has never been about any sort of environmental outcomes. That became clear when the Cuomo administration last year took steps to steer construction work on renewable energy projects to building trade unions.

The anemic growth of land-based wind and other renewables will increase pressure on the administration to go big and further subsidize construction of larger wind turbines off Long Island. Unfortunately for ratepayers, offshore wind is the single most expensive type of renewable energy, and the Cuomo administration has already signaled most of the necessary billions will come from electricity customers north of New York City.

SOURCE 





Rejecting Wind and Solar: Deep Green Resistance

Solar panels and wind turbines aren’t made out of nothing. They are made out of metals, plastics, and chemicals. These products have been mined out of the ground, transported, processed, manufactured. Each stage leaves behind a trail of devastation: habitat destruction, water contamination, colonization, toxic waste, slave labor, greenhouse gas emissions, wars, and corporate profits.

Yesterday’s post shared with readers the scary premises and means of the Deep Green Resistance, now the Progressive/Left option to the Green New Deal.

Today’s post shares the DGR’s views on renewables, which this group correctly sees as invasive to the natural world. One wishes that mainstream, Washington, DC-centric environmentalists would wake up to the fact that wind power and solar panels are very invasive to the natural world relative to dense, mineral energies.

Here is the DGR’s views verbatim.

Will Green Technology Save the Planet?

No. Wind turbines, solar PV panels, and the grid itself are all manufactured using cheap energy from fossil fuels. When fossil fuel costs begin to rise such highly manufactured items will simply cease to be feasible.

Solar panels and wind turbines aren’t made out of nothing. They are made out of metals, plastics, and chemicals. These products have been mined out of the ground, transported, processed, manufactured. Each stage leaves behind a trail of devastation: habitat destruction, water contamination, colonization, toxic waste, slave labor, greenhouse gas emissions, wars, and corporate profits.

The basic ingredients for renewables are the same materials that are ubiquitous in industrial products, like cement and aluminum. No one is going to make cement in any quantity without using the energy of fossil fuels. And aluminum? The mining itself is a destructive and toxic nightmare from which riparian communities will not awaken in anything but geologic time.

From beginning to end, so called “renewable energy” and other “green technologies” lead to the destruction of the planet. These technologies are rooted in the same industrial extraction and production processes that have rampaged across the world for the last 150 years.

We are not concerned with slightly reducing the harm caused by industrial civilization; we are interested in stopping that harm completely. Doing so will require dismantling the global industrial economy, which will render impossible the creation of these technologies.


Aren’t renewable energies like solar, wind, and geothermal good for the environment?


No. The majority of electricity that is generated by renewables is used in manufacturing, mining, and other industries that are destroying the planet. Even if the generation of electricity were harmless, the consumption certainly isn’t. Every electrical device, in the process of production, leaves behind the same trail of devastation. Living communities — forests, rivers, oceans — become dead commodities.

The emissions reductions that renewables intend to achieve could be easily accomplished by improving the efficiency of existing coal plants, businesses, and homes, at a much lower cost. Within the context of industrial civilization, this approach makes more sense both economically and environmentally.

That this approach is not being taken shows that the whole renewables industry is nothing but profiteering. It benefits no one other than the investors.


OK, renewable technologies have some impacts, but they’re still better than fossil fuels, right?


Renewable energy technologies are better than fossil fuels in the same sense that a single bullet wound is “better” than two bullet wounds. Both are grievous injuries.

Do you want to shoot the planet once or twice?

The only way out of a double bind is to smash it: to refuse both choices and craft a completely different path. We support neither fossil fuels nor renewable tech.

Even this bullet analogy isn’t completely accurate, since renewable technologies, in some cases, have a worse environmental impact than fossil fuels.

More renewables doesn’t mean less fossil fuel power, or less carbon emissions. The amount of energy generated by renewables has been increasing, but so has the amount generated by fossil fuels. No coal or gas plants have been taken offline as a result of renewables.

Only about 25% of global energy use is in the form of electricity that flows through wires or batteries.  The rest is oil, gas, and other fossil fuel derivatives. Even if all the world’s electricity could be produced without carbon emissions, it would only reduce total emissions by about 25%. And even that would have little meaning, as the amount of energy being used is increasing rapidly.

It’s debatable whether some “renewables” even produce net energy.  The amount of energy used in the mining, manufacturing, research and development, transport, installation, maintenance, grid connection, and disposal of wind turbines and solar panels may be more than they ever produce; claims to the contrary often do not take all the energy inputs into account.  Renewables have been described as a laundering scheme: dirty energy goes in, clean energy comes out.

SOURCE 





Is the Long Renewables Honeymoon Over?

The European renewables industry press, which is usually unequivocally upbeat in its assessments, is currently reporting a broad spectrum of substantial problems in the sector, ranging from bankruptcies and technical problems to tepid policy support and increasing public resistance.

In a fundamentally viable energy generation sector such stories could be regarded as minor perturbations, but in one that has been for decades all but completely insulated from risk by subsidy and other non-market support, it suggests deep-seated structuro-physical weakness.

The German wind turbine manufacturer Senvion S.A., formerly trading under the name of RePower, is currently in financial difficulties. This Hamburg-based firm, which has installed over 1,000 wind turbines in the UK alone, applied to commence self-administered insolvency proceedings in mid-April this year, and is at present sustained by a EUR 100m loan agreement with its lenders and main bond holders. Senvion has delayed both its AGM, which was due to take place on the 23 May, and also the publication of its recent financial results. At the time of writing the company had not yet announced a new timetable.

For nearly eight years, from 2007 to 2015, Senvion was owned by the Indian wind turbine manufacturer, Suzlon, and is now the property of the private equity firm, Centerbridge Partners. It is currently rumoured in the industry press that Centerbridge may now be compelled to cut its losses by making a distressed sale to Asian, probably Chinese, companies seeking a cheap way of acquiring a wind power market toehold in Europe. Western companies are thought to be unlikely to have the appetite for such a purchase, and their reluctance is entirely understandable: as Ed Hoskyns shows in a recent note for GWPF using EurObservER data, the annual installation rates for wind and solar have halved in the EU28 since 2010. Senvion may be the first major company to feel the effects of this downturn, and is certainly large enough for its difficulties to have wide ramifications, with two of its suppliers, FrancEole, which makes towers, and the US company TPI Composites, which makes blades, both being hurt by reduced revenues. Indeed, FrancEole was already in a poor way, and is now reported as being on the verge of liquidation.

Projects that were being supplied by Senvion are also affected, with the building of one, Borkum West 2.2, a 200 MW offshore wind farm, being suspended mid-construction since components due from Senvion have not been delivered on schedule. This delay, which has been front-page news in some circles, must be causing considerable headaches for Borkum West’s developer, Trianel GmbH, which is apparently now seeking to establish direct links with Senvion’s suppliers so that they can complete the project.

Elsewhere in the offshore wind universe, two large and relatively new projects are in the midst of what must be costly repairs involving significant downtime. Having received regulatory approval, the Danish mega-developer Orsted is about to start removing and renovating all 324 blades on the 108-turbine, 389 MW, Duddon Sands wind farm in the UK part of the Irish Sea, a year after problems first became apparent. The machines used, the Siemens 3.6–120, have suffered leading edge erosion, a problem that affects perhaps some 500 turbines in Europe (See “Type Failure or Wear and Tear in European Offshore Wind?”), and requiring the application of a remedial covering to each blade.

Less can be read in the public domain about the repairs about to restart at the gigantic, EU-funded Bard Offshore 1, which is owned by Ocean Breeze Energy GmbH & Co. KG. The project, which commissioned in 2013, has eighty 5 MW turbines, with a total capacity of 400 MW. Bard had already suffered a well-known series of cable failures, and it now transpires that both nacelles and rotors have been undergoing replacement for about two years, though Ocean Breeze is, according to industry press reports, apparently declining to confirm how many turbines are affected. The company’s website gives no information in either German or English that I could find.

There would, then, appear to be a great deal of work in servicing offshore wind installations, but this has not been enough to prevent Offshore Marine Management Ltd (OMM), a UK-based offshore wind contractor, entering into voluntary liquidation after several years of losses. Interestingly, OMM, a relatively small company though prominent in the UK, cited the increasingly “competitive nature” of the sector as a factor underlying its failure, and it seems likely that it was unable to survive the efforts of developers determined to reduce both capital and operational and maintenance costs to the bone (and judging from the failures reported, perhaps into the bone itself). With margins pared thin, costly local suppliers may quite simply be forced out of the market, and regardless of their other merits. Related evidence of this phenomenon, which is clearly global, can be found in the fact that the Danish mega-developer Orsted is now grumbling that the Taiwanese government’s insistence of a high level of local content for its projected 900 MW Changua 1 & 2a offshore wind farms will double the capital cost from approximately £1.6m/MW to about £3m/MW.

One wonders whether this underlying reality was discussed at the recent and apparently robust meeting between the Scottish Government and the offshore wind industry, convened because the Scottish metal manufacturing firm BiFab had not been commissioned to make equipment for the 950 MW Moray East wind farm, a wind farm that has one of the much over-hyped Contracts for Difference at £57.50/MWh. The supply deals had instead been awarded to Lamprell, which is based in the UAE. The Scottish Energy Minister, Paul Wheelhouse, MSP, used the meeting to express “significant frustration” that local firms had been involved to such a small degree hitherto, in spite of repeated promises.

Did Benji Sykes of the Offshore Wind Industry Council, present at the meeting, cite the Taiwanese case and explain to Mr Wheelhouse that something very similar would apply in Scotland, and that if local content was insisted upon, then construction costs would increase substantially and subsidies would also have to be increased to pay for it? Did he explain that there is genuine doubt whether Moray East can be viable at £57.50/MWh, even with low-cost international suppliers, and that local content would certainly not improve that situation? It would seem not. However, he did promise to “work closely” with the Scottish government to “ensure that communities up and down the country reap the economic benefits offshore wind offers”. Mr Wheelhouse has probably heard that before. How much longer will he go on believing it?

So much for the action in the foreground. The backdrop is also sombre. The Crown Estate, which in effect controls offshore wind development in UK territorial waters, has delayed pre-qualification for Round 4 projects until after the summer of 2019, and the German maritime agency, the BSH, has disappointed developers by not assigning new development zones as had been requested. In delay is danger, and the offshore wind industry in general will be deeply concerned at the loss of momentum that may result from these decisions.

Onshore wind is doing no better. The most recent auction for wind contracts in Germany took place in February and was radically undersubscribed, with only 476 MW of a possible 700 MW being awarded, the underlying causes being, it is reported, less favourable planning consent regulations and less generous price support. Senvion itself is described in some reports as being one of the supply chain casualties, alongside the German tower and foundation maker, Ambau GmbH, which has already filed for bankruptcy.

One wonders why these companies were not better prepared. Reductions in subsidy in Germany were inevitable, and the tightening of planning regulations is long overdue and unsurprising. Indeed, it is remarkable that the German public has tolerated for so long such intense development in close proximity to domestic housing. However, some German states are now considering an exclusion zone of 1 km from the nearest turbine, which is still extremely close for structures in excess of 100m, and now heading, believe it or not, to over 200m in overall height. The German people have been patient, but the mood is clearly changing; indeed, the premier manufacturer and developer Enercon has recently been compelled by court order to suspend construction of its 30 MW Wulfershausen wind farm because it had, apparently, breached the local authorities’ requirement that no dwelling should be within a distance ten times tip height.

This less favourable atmosphere is contributing to a general sense that existing onshore wind farms in Germany will not be repowered in great numbers at the end of their lives. About 15 GW of Germany’s onshore wind is now over fifteen years old and the end of the economic lifetime is in sight. But industry sources quoted in the subscription only press suggest that less than a third of this will actually be repowered, much less than had been expected only a few years back. The reasons given for this sudden change in prospects include declining public acceptance, reflected in tougher planning conditions, and falling subsidies.

Meanwhile, in Norway and in its home territory Sweden, Statkraft, Europe’s largest generator of renewable energy, has suspended further onshore wind construction because it would be “very challenging” to develop profitable projects in these areas. They are concentrating on other less resistant markets, such as the United Kingdom, where it has acquired a 250 MW portfolio of projects from Element Power.

But as it happens, things in the UK may prove to be no more promising. It has just dawned on the wind industry that government is actually acting on Amber Rudd’s landmark energy reset speech when Secretary of State for the Department of Energy & Climate Change in November 2015. In that speech Rudd remarked that “we also want intermittent generators to be responsible for the pressures they add to the system”. That of course was only right, but perhaps the industry hoped the intention would never materialise. If that was their expectation they were gravely mistaken. Aurora Energy Research has now released analysis of the regulator, Ofgem’s proposal to reform network charges, the “Targeted Charging Review”, and believes that the proposed changes “could set back subsidy-free renewables by up to five years”. When “unspun” this actually means is that if the regulator removes the hidden subsidy of avoided system costs, imposed by renewables but socialised over all generators, then more of the true cost of renewables will be revealed to the market, making it much less likely that even the most greenwash-thirsty corporate, NGO, or governmental body will sign an extravagant long-term Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with a wind or solar farm. In other words, far from hindering the emergence of subsidy-free renewables, Ofgem’s reforms threaten to give the lie to the subsidy-free claim and show that it was never anything more than an empty PR gambit.

In spite of all this, it is doubtless too soon to say that the game is up for renewables. The industries concerned will fight back, and beg further direct and indirect public assistance while threatening politicians and civil servants with missed climate targets if that support is not forthcoming. In all likelihood they will be to some degree successful. But this will only delay the inevitable. As the depressing news stories summarised above suggest, after decades of public support and de-risking there are still fundamental weaknesses in the renewables industry that go well beyond teething troubles and localised management failure. One explanation, the sole necessary one in my view, is that the physics is against this industry, and that the physics is beginning to tell. It remains only to say that this blog is not licensed to give investment or financial advice.

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